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Bitcoin Dips Below $98K While CoinDesk 20 Plunges 10% Amid Fed-Spurred Rout; SOL Surrenders Post-Election Rally

Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s hawkish comments Wednesday on rate cuts have rattled investors across asset classes.

Crypto asset prices slid on Thursday, building on Wednesday’s market-wide selloff spurred by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell disappointing investors with his comments on U.S. interest rate cut expectations for next year.

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Bitcoin’s (BTC) attempt to bounce back above $100,000 quickly faded earlier during the day and slid to the low-$97,000s during the U.S. day. Recently, it modestly recovered to around $98,000, but was still down 4.8% over the past 24 hours.

Altcoins fared much worse, with the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index diving more than 10% during the same period. Ethereum’s ether (ETH) dipped 10.8% to below $3,500, while Cardano’s ADA, Chainlink’s LINK, Aptos’ APT, Avalanche’s AVAX and Dogecoin’s DOGE all suffered 15%-20% losses. Notably, SOL sank to its weakest price since Nov. 7 — nearly erasing its post-election rally following a 26% plunge from its record high hit less than a month ago.

Over the past 24 hours — roughly since yesterday’s rate decision by Fed policy makers — nearly $1.2 billion worth of leveraged crypto derivatives trading positions have been liquidated across all assets, CoinGlass data shows. Over $1 billion of those were long positions, or bets that prices would rise.

In traditional markets, U.S. stock indexes slightly bounced from Wednesday’s lows but gave back part of the pre-market gains during the session. The S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq were 0.5% up from the Wednesday close.

Crypto prices rose almost vertically since Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in early November, buoyed by hopes of pro-crypto policies from his incoming administration. Wednesday’s Fed projection of a slower pace of rate cuts for next year and Powell’s hawkish tone on rising inflation expectations caught many investors offside, triggering a broad-market selloff across crypto, equities and even gold.

The U.S. dollar index (DXY), a key strength gauge against a basket of foreign currencies, surged above 108, its strongest level since November 2022, while 10-year U.S. Treasury yields also rose sharply above 4.6%, the highest since May.

“The crypto market has already been on pins and needles around the possibility for a correction following the record run in the price of bitcoin through $100,000,” Joel Kruger, market strategist at LMAX Group, said in a Thursday note. “We got that catalyst from the world of traditional markets. … Fallout from Wednesday’s Fed decision was simply too much to ignore.”

“When you zoom out and consider the year-over-year growth, a pullback like this feels healthy,” Azeem Khan, co-founder and COO of layer-2 network Morph, said in an email shared with CoinDesk.

“It’s also worth noting that, historically, year-end selloffs in securities can occur as investors offset losses against gains to lower their tax liabilities,” Khan added. “While it’s hard to say how much of this is driving the current trend, it could be a contributing factor.”

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Aptos Labs CEO Mo Shaikh Quits; Avery Ching to Take His Place

The Aptos co-founder is sticking around as a strategic adviser, though.

Mo Shaikh, co-founder of Aptos Labs, announced that he’s stepping down as CEO of the company.

Aptos is a layer-1 blockchain that claims to offer enhanced scalability, security and transaction speeds. The platform leverages a unique blockchain programming language called Move, which was originally created for Facebook’s shuttered “Diem” project.

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In a lengthy post on X, Shaikh, who co-founded Aptos with Avery Ching three years ago, expressed pride in the progress made by the company, which included raising a mammoth $400 million in venture capital funding and building “one of the most robust ecosystems, trusted by over a thousand builders and innovators around the globe.”

https://twitter.com/moshaikhs/status/1869851984129569194

Ching, Shaikh said, will assume the role of CEO and lead the company into its next phase of growth.

In his X post, Shaikh acknowledged the work of Aptos’ partners and investors, including firms like BlackRock, Google, Mastercard and PayPal.

“None of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of our incredible investors. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to Dragonfly, Blocktower, Haun Ventures, Hashed, IRONGREY, a16z, Apollo, Coinbase, Parafi, Scribble, PayPal, Franklin Templeton, and the amazing angels who believed in our vision,” he wrote.

Shaikh said he will remain with the company as a strategic adviser and plans to take time to reflect on the future of blockchain and financial systems. “I will always remain a champion of Aptos and its mission,” he wrote, adding that he will “look forward to continuing to help Aptos maintain its role as the world’s leading blockchain.”

Luuk Strijers: Pioneering Bitcoin Options

The CEO at Deribit, has shown years of transformative leadership in the crypto derivatives space.

In Prague, where Kafka once dreamed of metamorphosis, another transformation is taking shape. The city’s ancient stones whisper of bureaucratic labyrinths transcended, just as cryptocurrency now defies traditional financial boundaries.

Meeting Luuk Strijers in the VIP lounge of the Prague Congress Center, during The Block’s recent Emergence event, feels like stepping into this intersection of rebellion — where Kafka’s struggle against systemic constraints echoes in today’s digital asset revolution.

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Below, a city that birthed both surreal literature and crypto pioneers like SatoshiLabs stretches toward a horizon where Gothic spires mirror the ascending graphs of Bitcoin options. Hours earlier, the Czech Republic had passed legislation exempting digital asset profits from income tax if held over three years — another wall between old and new finance crumbling.

With two decades of experience in listed products, ETFs, warrants, equities, and derivatives, Strijers brought deep traditional finance expertise when he joined Deribit as Chief Commercial Officer in 2019. His previous role at the Singapore Exchange (SGX), where he oversaw listed products, gave him insight into both the limitations of traditional exchanges and the potential for innovation in crypto derivatives.

For his leadership in the crypto derivatives space, Strijers has earned a spot on CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 list.

Under Strijers, Deribit has solidified its position as the dominant force in crypto derivatives, commanding 80% of the global crypto options market. Daily volumes exceed $1.3 billion, dwarfing competitors like Binance, OKX and CME. Now, with Bitcoin touching $100,000 and institutional adoption surging, the platform’s specialization in options trading has proven prescient.

“Our infrastructure isn’t just about processing trades,” Strijers said. “When bitcoin moves, we’re updating hundreds of strikes across multiple expiries simultaneously. Traditional exchanges might update two quotes — we’re managing thousands of instruments in real-time.”

This complexity has kept many competitors at bay. Having worked at SGX since 2014, Strijers understands firsthand why traditional exchanges struggle to adapt. “In traditional finance, you have layers of intermediaries — brokers, clearing members, central counterparties. Changing that system to accommodate crypto assets isn’t just difficult; it’s nearly impossible without starting from scratch.”

2024 has been a watershed year for Deribit, with total trading volumes surpassing $1 trillion. The platform has expanded its collateral options, now accepting everything from Bitcoin to tokenized gold. This innovation in collateralization sets them apart from traditional venues that only accept fiat currency.

Looking ahead to 2025, Strijers is focused on regulatory expansion. With a VARA license in Dubai becoming active and MiFID approval pending in Europe, Deribit is building what he calls a “hub-and-spoke” model. “We’re creating a global network where clients can onboard locally but execute through regulated hubs,” he said. “It’s about making institutional access as seamless as possible.”

The return of Donald Trump to the White House could accelerate institutional adoption. “There’s a strong belief that the first 100 days of a Trump administration would bring crypto-friendly regulations,” Strijers says. “While this would primarily benefit the U.S. market, it would likely create a domino effect globally.”

New products are on the horizon too. While bitcoin and ethereum options dominate current volumes, Strijers hints at expansion into other assets. “We’re seeing growing interest in Solana and XRP derivatives. But we’re selective — we need to ensure sustainable liquidity, not just today but months into the future when those options mature.”

Drawing on his extensive background in exchange trading and corporate finance, Strijers has helped transform Deribit into an institutional cornerstone of the digital asset ecosystem. As trading volumes continue to surge and new institutional players enter the market, his vision of a mature, regulated crypto derivatives market is becoming reality.

Under his leadership, Deribit looks set to maintain its dominance in the crypto options space, continuing to bridge the gap between traditional finance and digital assets while fostering deeper liquidity and institutional participation in the years ahead.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

Michael Saylor: The Architect of MicroStrategy’s Huge Bitcoin Bet

Most companies were leery of Saylor’s strategy when he started amassing bitcoin back in 2020. Some are no longer skeptical.

Michael Saylor’s decades-old software development firm MicroStrategy blazed the path for corporate bitcoin purchases beginning in 2020. Through massive securities sales, he’s managed to fund the purchase of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin for his company. Tesla and Block dabbled in the strategy in years past. After the ugly crypto winter put a damper on that, in 2024, other publicly traded companies like Semler Scientific copied the idea. Is it a fad like adding “Blockchain” to corporate names in the 2010s to juice stock returns, or is hoarding bitcoin on balance sheets (including the U.S. government’s) something enduring? Saylor has bought the original crypto through thick and thin, so the test will be whether the trend persists beyond the current red-hot moment following Donald Trump’s election. But there’s no denying Saylor’s laser eyes sparked something.

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This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [ADD LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Mahesh Ramakrishnan: The DePIN Cheerleader

Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) took off bigtime this year, and EV3 Ventures’ Ramakrishnan was at the center of it all.

DePIN was one of the biggest stories in crypto in 2024. From telecoms and energy to mapping and weather data, DePINs sprang up to offer useful services to end-users powered by blockchains, tokens and smart contracts.

The “useful” bit here was key. DePIN offered products that consumers could use and understand, contrasting (critics said) with many crypto products that were difficult to use and understand. DePIN became the crypto version of the old “sharing economy,” except the sharing was arguably more real than it is with Uber or Airbnb, where profits tend to only flow to shareholders.

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The concept of a shared network orchestrated by tokens has been around since Helium set up a decentralized broadband network in 2016. But DePIN as an actual industry didn’t exist until Messari coined it after a public naming contest in 2022. DePIN’s collective market cap now stands in excess of $20 billion, and estimates from Messari for its economic impact run into the several trillions of dollars.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [UPDATE BEFORE PUBLISHING].

There are many in the world of DePIN who see these networks eventually replacing traditional centralized infrastructure, including the hub-and-spoke electric grid, and telecoms organized around single companies like Verizon or T-Mobile.

Ramakrishnan’s Influence

Among DePIN’s big thinkers, Mahesh Ramakrishnan stands out. Tall, angular and Indian-American, Ramakrishnan led investments in DePINthrough the VC firm he co-founded, EV3 Ventures, and also organized the lively DePIN Summit in New York last August. The young and passionate Ramakrishnan sees DePIN as one of the main ways crypto can make an on-the-ground difference in the world.

According to Ramakrishnan, there’s a confluence of factors working in DePIN’s favor. One is the huge need for new infrastructure that governments, traditional finance and traditional companies can’t keep up with. And two, DePIN networks have started to show they have superior economics and functionality compared to centralized systems, telecoms being one notable example. Graduating from Harvard in 2018, Ramakrishnan spent two years at Goldman Sachs before joining private equity giant Apollo where he says he got to do “all sorts of cowboy stuff.” He quit that job in 2022 and helped administer Helium’s early grant program where he saw “scrappy” people come into the program and began to see DePIN as something “worth taking a bet on.” “We were so sure from day one that it was always going to be DePIN,” he says now. Ramakrishnan views DePIN as part of a larger transformation of society away from traditional government structures following the 2008 financial crisis. DePINs have a fundamentally different design in which users share a service and are directly rewarded for their participation in the form of tokens. It is the sharing economy where incentives and rewards are shared widely.

What’s Next

Looking ahead to 2025, Ramakrishnan has three predictions for DePIN. One, governments at a state or local level will begin to deploy DePINs to manage and incentivize renewable energy production. Two, DePIN will begin to offer tiered rewards for participation, with the greater prizes going to those with better ratings and reputations.Three, he expects the developing world will lead decentralized infrastructure development, owing to both need and the “leapfrog” trend seen in other tech movements. Certainly, with hundreds of millions now being invested in DePIN across dozens of different industries, the future of the sector looks bright. As it does for Ramakrishnan.

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart: The Bloomberg ETF Bros

The two analysts had their fingers on the pulse of one of crypto’s biggest financial stories of 2024.

Eric Balchunas and James Seyffart sit on one of the most traditional finance (TradFi if you’re hip to the lingo) perches out there: Mike Bloomberg’s gazillion-dollar news, data and analysis business. Yet, as all of crypto anxiously awaited word in early 2024 on whether U.S. regulators would approve bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the Bloomberg analysts were must-listen-to experts in crypto.

Their day jobs entail examining all things ETF. For a few weeks or maybe months, there was no hotter story for them than bitcoin, and Balchunas and Seyffart were in the social media trenches, armed with de rigueur memes, telling degens and pros alike whether it was likely to be a “yay” or “nay” for the widely anticipated products. (They correctly leaned toward “yay.”)

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Balchunas caught a very early glimpse of how intense the buzz around bitcoin ETFs could get, tweeting way back in 2013: “Crazy: Just the mere reg filing of a bitcoin ETF has already gotten more press/tweets than the dozens of new & useful ETF launches combined.”

Robin Linus: Scaling Crypto’s Premier Network

The developer behind BitVM is facilitating the building of more and more applications atop Bitcoin.

Robin Linus shook up the crypto development landscape in October 2023 with a whitepaper presenting a theoretical method for making Bitcoin more programmable. “BitVM,” as it was known, was followed by a second iteration, “BitVM2”, in August 2024, revealing improvements that could bring the concept closer to implementation.

The introduction of BitVM by Linus, a core contributor at ZeroSync Association, a Swiss non-profit organization based in the canton of Zug, was hailed as a breakthrough because it didn’t require any changes to Bitcoin’s code. Just the publication of Linus’s original design for BitVM helped to inspire a fervor for building projects on Bitcoin.

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The aim of BitVM2 is to enable a rollup — essentially a separate auxiliary network built atop Bitcoin — that can handle faster and cheaper transactions, but without compromising the network’s security. This could then allow a bridge that could be used to securely transfer BTC to the rollup, and later bring the BTC back so that deposits can be withdrawn.

Linus’ work is providing the foundations for some of the most notable ventures in the Bitcoin development sector, such as Rootstock’s “BitVMX” project, and hybrid Bitcoin and Ethereum layer-2 BOB (“Build on Bitcoin”), which aims to make the original blockchain network the center of the DeFi universe.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [INSERT LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Sergio Demian Lerner: Making Bitcoin More Programmable

The founder of Rootstock is working to create a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and enabling the development of more sidechains and Layer 2s.

While the Bitcoin ecosystem has been enjoying a fresh wave of development and engagement over the last two years, some projects have been working to expand the utility of the original blockchain for far longer. One of these is sidechain Rootstock, which launched in 2018.

Founder Sergio Demian Lerner is a Buenos Aires-based programmer known for his early research on Satoshi Nakamoto’s mining activities and later for contributing to the development of Ethereum. Rootstock is now in the midst of its “BitVMX” project, designed to improve Bitcoin’s programmability by harnessing Robin Linus’ BitVM design that was unveiled in late 2023.

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“BitVMX framework provides the foundations to run any CPU on Bitcoin,” the project’s accompanying whitepaper says. BitVMX’s aim is to put the theory behind Linus’ BitVM paradigm into practice by creating a framework for running programs on Bitcoin and enabling the further development of sidechains and layer 2s.

Rootstock plans to complete the project by late Q1 2025, according to a roadmap on its website. “The BitVMX Bridge will revolutionize the bridging technology on Rootstock, by introducing a trust-minimized Bitcoin/Rootstock bridge. This will rely on the 1-of-n honest assumption, and will not require changes to the Bitcoin consensus protocol,” Rootstock explained in its roadmap.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here [INSERT LINK BEFORE PUBLISHING].

Ray Chan: Bridging Web2 and Web3 With Memes

The CEO of Memeland turned memes into cultural currency with 9GAG. Now, he’s using crypto to transform them into tools for engagement and community.

2024 has been the year of the memecoin supercycle, with demand for the tokens surging to unprecedented heights. Memes are now a $141 billion business, according to CoinGecko, making up around 11% of the entire crypto market (excluding bitcoin and ether).

Memeland CEO Ray Chan has become a prominent figure in the supercycle, leveraging his expertise to blend humor and culture with blockchain, bringing the culture of memes he helped create in Web2 over to Web3.

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In 2008, during the Web2 era, Chan founded 9GAG, where he curated the best online memes and made them the internet’s language of humor and identity.

This profile is part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024 package. For all of this year’s nominees, click here.

In 2024, Chan spun Memeland out of 9GAG and transformed it into a blueprint for how blockchain, culture and community could reshape the internet via NFTs and GameFi. While those two things aren’t anything new in Web3, Memeland has distinguished itself in a crowded field by emphasizing community and creativity over mere speculation.

Redefining the Fan-Creator Relationship

Chan’s strategy has focused on making blockchain technology accessible, fun and inherently social. In many ways, this is the bridge between Web2 and Web3, given that memes aren’t a complicated decentralized financial system like a new automated market maker created by PhDs — they’re silly pictures of dogs and cats.

Chan sees Web3 as a chance to redefine how fans and creators interact through its approach to “proof of fandom,” in which creators can interact with fans while also building an ownership layer, something that’s not possible in the Web2 world.

This synching of fans with ownership is what’s missing in Web3, and what Chan sees as bringing in the masses.

“We don’t need more investors in Web3. We need more customers,” is how he put it in a fireside chat at Taipei Blockchain Week in 2023.

David Tse: Bringing Staking to Bitcoin

It’s been a banner year for Babylon, the staking protocol co-founded by Tse.

David Tse is the co-founder of Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon, one of the foremost projects in the burgeoning sector of introducing utility to the world’s oldest blockchain that is commonplace in other networks. While the Bitcoin network itself does not allow staking (being a proof-of-work blockchain), Babylon’s protocol allows users to stake BTC to secure other chains, offering the security of the original cryptocurrency to the wider crypto world.

Babylon enjoyed a banner year in 2024, raising $70 million in a funding round in May and receiving a stunning response from stakers on its mainnet launch in August. For security purposes, the launch was capped at 1,000 BTC, a threshold that was reached after just an hour and change. The protocol was opened for a second round in October and drew 24,000 BTC in around one hour and 40 minutes.

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Tse, who also serves as an engineering professor at Stanford University, said that the inflows were “way beyond our expectations.” The sector could be primed for further growth throughout 2025 and beyond, given the consistent ascension of BTC dominance of the crypto market in the last 18 months. Therefore, expect to hear much from Tse and the rest of the team at Babylon as interest and development in Bitcoin staking grows.