🌡️ Lukewarm ball of money

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The current vibe in one word: anticipation.

Maybe it’s the Thursday of it all, but even with the flood of positive news, I can’t help but feel like something is missing.

Where’s the hot ball of money?

👀 Searching for Solanaman

Around this time last month, it was clear that, at least for the moment, ETH was poised to set the tempo for the rest of the bull run.

ETH had just set a new all-time high for the first time in nearly four years as Tom Lee was turning megabull, pledging to buy up 5% of the total ETH supply.

BitMine Innovations, the ETH treasury vehicle Lee spearheads, had acquired $7 billion ETH between the start of July and the end of August, per Blockworks Research data.

BitMine’s buys have since slowed down, alongside the price of ETH, but the flows are still respectable, clocking nearly $1.6 billion so far this month. 

Sharplink, the Joseph Lubin-led ETH treasury stock, followed the same trajectory — spending close to $2.9 billion between the start of June and the end of August but has only accumulated on one day this month — September 2, when it added around 39,500 ETH for $172 million.

ETH returning to all-time highs was largely necessary for the sanity of Crypto Twitter, but in retrospect it has put a lot of pressure on SOL to do even better.

We often speak of a hot ball of money that bounces between corners of crypto as things heat up. Some might call it rotation: When one side of the market is falling, another seems to be rallying hard. 

For example, memecoin-related tokens like memecore, PUMP and PENGU are up more than 10% in the past week, while more serious projects like ethena and worldcoin are down. For no real reason other than in the absence of truly market-moving news, the market makes its own moves that don’t require any real explanation.

Perhaps the hot ball of money is hiding in Hyperliquid perps. After all, there’s almost record open interest on Hyperliquid, more than $14.3 billion (HYPE has also just set a new price high above $59, up 33% in the past month).

And if you zoom into what makes up that open interest, you’ll see that while ETH (light grey on the chart) made up more than one-third of the total at the end of August, that number has since fallen to about 24%. 

Whales are now collectively lining up billions to direct at a fresh batch of SOL treasury companies, such as Helius and Forward Industries. Which makes SOL the most obvious spot for the hot ball of money to bounce to next.

SOL open interest has so far seen a small jump in the past month, from 7% of the Hyperliquid total to 11%. That’s a lukewarm ball of money at best.

Interestingly, open interest on much smaller tokens is seeing the biggest growth right now, going from around 12% of the total now to over 20%. 

Let’s hope those positions pay off. If SOL is indeed tasked with carrying the vibes for all of crypto from for the foreseeable future, it can use all the help it can get.

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Katana was built by answering a core question: What if a chain contributed revenue back into the ecosystem to drive growth and yield?

We direct revenue back to DeFi participants for consistently higher yields.

Katana is pioneering concepts like Productive TVL (the portion of assets are actually doing work), Chain Owned Liquidity (permanent liquidity owned by Katana to maintain stability), and VaultBridge (putting bridged assets to work generating extra yield for active participants).

• Bullish has reported its first quarterly revenue since going public: $57 million in Q2, down from $60.7 million in the same quarter last year.

• A 12-foot golden statue of President Trump holding a bitcoin has appeared outside the US Capitol, apparently part of a pump.fun livestream stunt.

• CME Group is launching options on SOL and XRP futures starting in October.

It’s the summer of DATs and the party is going strong. 

But when October rolls around, everyone will be looking to DAS: London to hear from these meta-defining voices on where things stand and where they’re headed.

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📅 October 13-15 | London