Coin Market

Bad news Bitcoin bulls, the long-hoped-for retail is already here: CryptoQuant

Published

2 weeks ago

March 21, 2025

Bitcoin bulls who still think the cycle peak has yet to come as retail investors haven’t piled in yet might be using an outdated playbook, according to a crypto executive.

“The idea that the cycle isn’t over just because onchain retail activity is absent needs reconsideration,” CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju said in a March 19 X post.

Ju said that those tracking retail movements using only onchain metrics will not have seen the full picture.

“Retail is likely entering through ETFs — the paper Bitcoin layer — which doesn’t show up onchain,” Ju said.

“This keeps the realized cap lower than if the funds were flowing directly to exchange deposit wallets,” he added, noting that 80% of spot Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows come from retail investors — a trend that Binance analysts already once observed in October last year.

Since the launch of spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, inflows have totaled around $35.88 billion. Source: Farside

At the time, the analysts said most of the ETF buying likely came from retail investors moving their holdings from wallets and exchanges into funds with more regulatory protection.

Ju was responding to counter-arguments over his earlier prediction on X that the “Bitcoin bull cycle is over” on March 17.

“I’ve been calling for a bull market over the past two years, even when indicators were borderline. Sorry to change my view, but it now looks pretty clear that we’re entering a bear market,” he said.

Ju explained that certain indicators are showing a lack of new liquidity, which is likely being driven by macro factors.

He also clarified when he said the bull cycle was over, he meant Bitcoin could take “6-12 months” to break its all-time high, not that it’s about to crash.

Traders often look at retail investor activity to spot signs of exhaustion or as a signal to start selling when the market appears overheated.

There are several sentiment indicators which help market participants understand the level of retail interest in the market. One of these is the Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which measures overall crypto market sentiment, reading a “Fear” score of 31, down 18 points from its “Neutral” score of 49 yesterday.

Other common signals used to track the level of retail interest in the crypto market include Google search trends for “crypto” and related keywords and the popularity of crypto applications in major app stores worldwide.

While the Google search score for “crypto” worldwide was at a score of 100 during the week of Jan. 19 – 25, when Bitcoin reached its all-time high of $109,000 and US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has since declined by almost 62%.

The amount of searches on Google for “crypto” has declined almost 62% since the end of January. Source: Google Trends

At the time of publication, the Google search score for “crypto” stands at 38, with Bitcoin trading 22% below its January all-time high.

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This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Coin Market

Gutter Cat Gang token sale marred by ‘technical issues,’ reportedly low interest

Published

8 minutes ago

April 1, 2025

Non-fungible token (NFT) project Gutter Cat Gang (GCG) saw a rocky token launch of its GANG token on Apechain on March 31, attributed to a “technical issue” by a third party, though others pointed to reportedly low interest in the token.

While GCG didn’t confirm these figures, it did state in a March 31 Discord post that no GANG tokens were distributed due to it encountering a “technical issue” by a third party.

“Bad news,” the chief architect of GCG, “Yugen,” wrote on GCG’s Discord channel. “The contract is stopping us from the 100% liquidity claim day 1,” which Yugen said is preventing participants from cashing in and out.

“We’ve tried to fix it for at least an hour and no success,” said Yugen, who added:

“You will, be getting your $GANG. But not today. I will come back with a new exact date and time.”

Source: GCG/ Discord

The token sale was described as a “fumble” by X user and NFT enthusiast “Easy,” who pointed out that the team locked up 100% of the token supply in the vesting contract — running contrary to the GCG’s tokenomics plan.

Under that plan, 12.5% of GCG NFTs and 15% of Seed Round allocations were meant to unlock instantly, with the rest of the tokens scheduled to vest daily over the next 18 months.

GCG’s goal was to sell 12% of the total supply at $0.0089 per token — targeting a raise of around $1.08 million, which would’ve given it an implied market cap of $9 million.

The GCG team marketed the “useless” GANG tokens as “just vibes” with “no promises” and “no roadmaps.”

Reports on X suggest GANG failed to garner significant interest

Several X users claimed that GCG only raised 3.66 Ether (ETH) worth roughly $6,800 from the GANG token community sale — falling far short of the $1 million target that it supposedly set. However, GCG hasn’t confirmed or addressed these figures.

GCG launched on June 8, 2021, starting off as a collection of 3000 unique NFT avatars with a backstory around the post-apocalyptic shatters of society.

GCG’s NFT floor price used to be 8.5 ETH — worth $15,240 — in September 2022 but has since fallen to 0.19 ETH at current prices, NFT Price Floor data shows.

Source: GCG NFTs listed on NFT marketplace OpenSea. Source: OpenSea

The NFT firm was acquired by X user and NFT enthusiast “Mauloadream” who also goes by Noah, in October 2023 for an undisclosed amount.

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Coin Market

SpaceX flight bankrolled by crypto investor launches first manned polar orbit

Published

8 minutes ago

April 1, 2025

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has sent a crew of four private astronauts on the first manned space flight to orbit the Earth’s poles, in a mission bankrolled and led by a wealthy crypto investor.

Chun Wang, the Chinese-born Maltese entrepreneur who founded the Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool F2Pool, paid for and is leading SpaceX’s “Fram2” mission, which is named after a 19th-century Norwegian Arctic exploration ship.

Wang and three others blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 1:46 am UTC on April 1, on a three- to five-day orbit that will be the first human space mission to fly over the North and South poles.

Liftoff of Fram2 and the @framonauts! pic.twitter.com/XBL5juCnHQ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 1, 2025

Wang hasn’t disclosed how much he paid SpaceX for the flight, but he brought along German polar scientist Rabea Rogge, Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen and Australian Arctic adventurer Eric Philips.

SpaceX said the crew will also carry out 22 experiments — including taking the first X-ray in space and growing mushrooms — which are designed to inform on human health in space and the effects of long-duration space flight.

Chun Wang (right) onboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule with Jannicke Mikkelsen (center-right), Rabea Rogge (center-left) and Eric Philips (left). Source: SpaceX

Wang was born in China but said in 2023 that he became a citizen of Malta. He founded F2Pool in 2013, which was one of China’s first Bitcoin mining pools and is currently the fourth-largest with a market share of just under 10%, according to mempool.space.

He went on to create the Ethereum staking pool provider Stakefish in 2018, which beaconchain data shows is currently the eighth largest pool, boasting around 2,025 validators.

After blasting off from Florida, it took Wang and his crew less than 30 minutes to reach the South Pole flying around 265 miles (430 kilometers) above the Earth. They’re expected to completely circle the globe about every one and a half hours.

The SpaceX Dragon capsule will splash down off the coast of California after the mission ends, which will be the first for the company.

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Coin Market

OpenAI to release its first ‘open’ language model since GPT-2 in 2019

Published

8 minutes ago

April 1, 2025

OpenAI is set to launch an “open” version of its language model this year, allowing developers to run the model on their own hardware.

In an update posted to X on March 31, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the artificial intelligence firm would release the powerful “new open-weight language model with the reasoning” in the coming months but first wanted to gather feedback about “how to make it maximally useful.”

“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities have taken precedence. Now it feels important to do,” he said, adding it was the first “open-weight” model since GPT-2 in 2019.

Adding that: “We still have some decisions to make, so we are hosting developer events to gather feedback and later play with early prototypes.”

Source: Sam Altman

An open-weight language model is publicly available for anyone to use, download, modify or deploy for their own purposes. It’s not as open as an open-source model, but it would be a change from GPT-3 and GPT-4, which were fully closed.

Altman said developer events for GPT-2 will start in San Francisco, California — where OpenAI is headquartered — in the next few weeks, followed by sessions in Europe and the Asia–Pacific region, according to Altman.

Source: Steven Heidel

“We’re excited to see what developers build and how large companies and governments use it where they prefer to run a model themselves,” Altman said.

“We will do extra work given that we know this model will be modified post-release.”

OpenAI’s first “open” model” since GPT-2 in 2019

OpenAI’s open-weight language model GPT-2 was partially released in February 2019, followed by a full release in November of the same year.

Altman also said on Feb. 12 his firm wants to ship GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 in the coming weeks or months.

The AI arms race has been heating up with the launch of rival DeepSeek, which functions similarly to ChatGPT but was reportedly created at a fraction of the cost and time.

Alibaba Group launched its new open-source AI model for cost-effective AI agents on March 26, while Google introduced Gemini 2.5, its latest experimental artificial intelligence model, on March 25.

Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a March 19 Threads post that the firm’s AI model family, Llama, released in February 2023, had hit 1 billion downloads.

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