CCM Blockchain Newsletter (March 24, 2025)

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome back to this week’s market newsletter. Please see below this week’s market data.

CCM Digital Weekly Market Update (2025.03.21)

Bitcoin Market Update and News

• Bitcoin gains for the second week in a row : Bitcoin rose again last week, peaking above $86,000 on Wednesday before settling back to $85,000. At the time of writing, bitcoin is up 3% over the last 24 hours at ~$88,000.
• Trump emphasizes stablecoins as a pillar of dollar dominance: In a remote address to Blockwork’s Digital Asset Summit last week, President Trump extolled stablecoins, particularly highlighting their importance for dollar dominance in the digital age. “I’ve also called on Congress to pass landmark legislation creating simple, common sense rules for stablecoins and market structure…with the dollar-backed stablecoins, you’ll help expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar and for many, many years to come it will be at the top, and that’s where we want to keep it–we only want to keep it at the top, always.” The top two stablecoins, Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, respectively held $113 billion and $48 billion in U.S. Treasuries, according to Tether’s latest attestation and based on USDC’s current $59.7 billion market cap (Circle claims it holds 80% of its cash and equivalents in treasuries).?
• Sol Strategies Announces Successful Completion of Laine Validator Acquisition: Publicly traded Sol Strategies, a Canadian company building software and services for Solana, has finalized the acquisition of three Solana network validators. As with Ethereum, Solana’s proof-of-stake blockchain uses validators instead of miners to process transactions, order blocks in the digital ledger, and mint new tokens. Sol Strategies will use its acquisition of Laine validator to augment its staking validating service and the acquisition of stakewiz.com to integrate its validator dashboard and analytics for its staking delegators.

Interesting Reads and Videos

• Watch Trump’s address to Blockwork’s Digital Asset Summit
• As Binance works toward redemption, CEO says Trump has been ‘fantastic’ for crypto
• Gov’t can realize gains on gold certificates to buy Bitcoin: Bo Hines

?Bitcoin Mining Market News and Trends

• Bitdeer Launches A2 ASIC Miner as Competition With Bitmain Stiffens: Publicly traded Bitdeer has officially released its anticipated Sealminer A2, the second series in its ASIC miner line as founder Jihan Wu seeks to challenge his former company and ASIC miner frontrunner Bitmain. The A2 will come in air-cooled and hydro models, respectively running at 255-270 TH/s at 14.9 J/TH and 500-530 TH/s at 14.9 J/TH. Bitdeer expects to complete manufacturing for 35 EH/s of A2s in October; it will reserve the majority of this model for its own operations and sell 7 EH/s to other miners.
• Pakistan Considers Bitcoin Mining to Help Offset Surplus Power Supply: The government of Pakistan could adopt bitcoin mining as a strategy to soak up surplus electricity in the country. The Ministry of Energy is reportedly weighing a special power rate for bitcoin miners and is in talks with stakeholders about the plan. Pakistan generates the majority of its electricity from natural gas (32%) and hydro (24%).
• Stratum V2 Pool DMND Launches, Announces Raise: A new bitcoin mining pool, DMND, has entered the market with a mission to disrupt the current bitcoin mining pool model by giving individual miners more control over the transaction selection process. DMND is based on Stratum V2, the latest Stratum protocol from bitcoin mining software and services company Braiins (Stratum is a protocol that allows individual miners to submit computations to a mining pool to mine blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain). Currently, all major mining pools use the Stratum V1 protocol to pool hashrate from their participants to mine blocks; once a pool wins a block, it decides which transactions to include in it, and then it splits block rewards among pool participants proportionally according to how much hashrate they produce. Stratum V2 would give miners some degree of control over which transactions a pool includes in the blocks it mines, something the older version of Stratum does not allow. Proponents of Stratum V2 argue that giving miners a say in transaction selection could help decentralize the bitcoin mining pool landscape. Currently, the two largest pools, Antpool and Foundry, have captured over 60% of Bitcoin’s hashrate.?

Market Overview

• Stocks gain modestly following weeks of decline: The big three indices stanched their year-to-date losses marginally last week, a reprieve from the weeks-long sell-off that plunged the S&P 500 and Nasdaq into an official correction. These two indices were essentially flat last week, while the Dow led the recovery by gaining just over a percentage point. Conversely, small caps suffered still last week as evidenced by the Russell 2000’s decline.S&P 500: 5,667.56 (+0.5%)Dow: 41,985.35 (+1.2%)Nasdaq: 17,784.05 (+0.2%)?Russell 2000: 2,056.98? (-1.2%)?
• European equities continue to outperform U.S. market: While the U.S. stock market has floundered in 2025, European stocks have largely flourished. The Euro Stoxx 50 index is up 10.3% on the year and the DAX is up 14.3%, versus the S&P 500 which is down 3.4%. Investors appear to be rebalancing portfolios into the Eurozone as the European Central Bank lowers rates, Germany and other countries pledge to boost fiscal and defense spending, and markets remain jittery in the United States amid economic and political uncertainty.

• Fixed income has offered better returns than equities in 2025: Fixed income investments are giving investors greater returns than U.S. stocks – modest returns, but returns nonetheless. With the Federal Reserve signaling at least one or two rate cuts later this year, treasury and bond yields have been falling, driving up bond prices as a result. U.S. investment-grade bonds are up 2.7% year-to-date, while U.S. high-yield bonds are up 1.6%.

• Oil gains for second consecutive week:U.S. oil prices rose for the second week in a row last week. WTI closed last Friday at $68.28/barrel, a 1.6% rise.
• Retail sales for food, drink plummet in February amid general retail decline: As I’ve touched on in prior newsletters, consumer confidence is dwindling in tandem with small business optimism, and these two qualitative indicators, now converging, are reflected quantitatively. Sales growth for retail food service and drinking places contracted by nearly 0.8% in February, the largest drop in over a year. Relatedly, the CPI print for February saw food away from home rising 3.7% year-over-year and 0.4% month-over-month.?Looking at retail sales more broadly, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that retail sales rose modestly by 0.2% in February, a far cry from the 0.7% expectation, while January figures were revised down to -1.2%, the largest decline since July 2021.
• Stock buybacks hit record high in 2024, nearly top $1 trillion: U.S. companies went on an unprecedented shopping spree for their own equity last year. According to S&P Dow Jones Indices, U.S. companies spent a record $942.5 billion on stock buybacks in 2024, up 18.5% from 2023. A quarter of this buying came in Q4, some $243.2 billion, 7% more than Q3. Three tech companies accounted for more than a fifth of total buyback spends: Apple ($104.2 billion), Alphabet ($62.2 billion), and Nvidia ($40.6 billion).
• Fed keeps interest rates steady, lowers economic outlook: At the conclusion of last week’s policy meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee stayed the course on its interest rate policy, leaving the Fed's fund rate unchanged and reiterating its determination to only lower rates twice this year. The Fed also lowered its 2025 GDP estimate from 2.1% to 1.7%, and it raised its inflation expectations for 2025 from 2.5% to 2.8%. The central bank also said that, starting in April, it will significantly slow down its balance sheet reduction, revising the monthly cap on U.S. Treasury runoff from $25 billion down to $5 billion.

The week ahead in data:

• Chicago Fed National Activity Index (Monday)
• Case-Shiller Home Price Index (Tuesday)
• FHFA Home Price Index (Tuesday)
• U.S. Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index (Tuesday)
• U.S. Census Bureau New Homes Sales report (Tuesday)
• Richmond Fed Manufacturing Index (Tuesday)
• U.S. Census Bureau Durable Goods report (Wednesday)
• U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis second Q4 GDP estimate (Thursday)
• U.S. Department of Labor weekly unemployment claims (Thursday)
• U.S. Census Bureau International Trade in Goods report (Thursday)
• National Association of Realtors Pending Homes Sales report (Thursday)
• U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Personal Income and Outlays (Friday)
• University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (Friday)

Notable corporate earnings this week:

• Oklo (Monday)
• KB Homes (Monday)?
• Gamestop (Tuesday)
• McCormick & Co. (Tuesday)
• Dollar Tree (Wednesday)
• Chewy Inc. (Wednesday)
• Clintas Corp. (Wednesday)
• JinkoSolar Holdings (Wednesday)
• Lululemon Athletica (Thursday)
• Winnebago Industries (Thursday)

Thank you for reading, and please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Christian Lopez