Ether Outperforms Bitcoin as Token 2049 Concludes, Overall Crypto Market Stays Flat

• Monday marked a slow beginning to the Asia trading week with BTC up 1.2% and ETH up 2.6%.
• Solana memecoin MOTHER, the brainchild of music star Iggy Azalea, is up 4% after having a strong presence at Breakpoint in Singapore.

Ether {{ETH}} pushed past bitcoin {{BTC}} in daily gains as Token 2049, and Solana's Breakpoint, two of the largest conferences in crypto, wrapped up in Singapore, but both of these tokens are relatively flat as the market stays stagnant.

ETH is up 2.6%, trading above $2,600, according to CoinDesk Indices data, while BTC is trading above $63,700, up 1.2%. The CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a measure of the performance of the largest digital assets, is flat, up less than 1%.

Data from CoinGlass shows that in the last 12 hours, slightly more short positions than longs have been liquidated, with $64.23 million in short positions and $54.42 million in longs being liquidated.

Trading is likely light in the aftermath of last week's 50 basis points (bps) interest rate cut. BTC is up 9.5% in the last week while ETH is up over 16%. Polymarket bettors are confident that another rate cut is coming but are split as to the extent: 47% say it will be 50 bps, while 47% say it will be 25 bps.

Solana's {{SOL}}, which was the focus of the Breakpoint conference that took place immediately after Token 2049, is flat, trading above $145. During Breakpoint, many attendees were impressed with the announcements coming from the protocol, such as Jump Crypto's validator going live.

Hard to imagine anything gets close to Solana for at least the next decade.

At the rate at which Solana’s compounding in a technical, cultural and product level, I just don’t think it’s physically possible for any other system to compete.

This Breakpoint saw some new things,…

— seg | locked(in) (@segfaultdoctor) September 23, 2024

Pendle, a portfolio company of Arthur Hayes' fund Maelstrom, is down over 6.5%. Traders are likely spooked that Maelstrom has reduced its position in the project after Hayes spent a considerable amount of time promoting it on stage in Singapore.

For his part, Hayes said that they reduced their position in Pendle to get liquidity to fund "a special situation."

As you can see @MaelstromFund is reducing its $PENDLE position. Even after the reduction it is still one of our largest positions. We still fully believe that $PENDLE will be the leader in #crypto interest rate derivatives. And we plan to profit off of their success.

We have…

— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) September 21, 2024

"Those who monitor our wallets will get a glimpse as to what that is in the very near future," he wrote on X.

Pendle is up over 24% on-week according to CoinGecko data.

Meanwhile, MOTHER, a memecoin promoted by music star Iggy Azalea is up 4.5% after she announced that the project was building a companion casino called Motherland.

MOTHER is one of the few celebrity memecoins that has managed to maintain its value. The token, however, mostly trades on decentralized exchanges (DEX) and is not available on any well-known centralized platforms. An addition of an online casino is sure to complicate the listing process on major centralized exchanges because of regulatory complexities.