Bitcoin had a quite positive trading week in which it gained over six grand and skyrocketed to its highest price tag in almost a month of over $67,000.

Most altcoins also followed suit, with SOL, AVAX, BCH, LINK, and many others registering double-digit gains.

BTC Calms at $67K

Bitcoin had retraced to just over $60,000 last Friday, but the bulls managed to defend that psychological support level during the weekend. Moreover, the asset started to climb on Monday and jumped to just over $63,000. It failed there and retraced to $61,200 on Tuesday, ahead of the US CPI announcement for April, but shot up once those numbers came out.

More precisely, the cryptocurrency gained several grand and skyrocketed to over $66,500 for the first time since mid-April. Another brief retracement followed, but the bulls went on the attack once again in the past couple of days.

This time, they pushed the largest digital asset to almost $67,500. Despite retracing slightly since then, BTC still trades around $67,000 now. Its market capitalization remains at $1.320 trillion, while its dominance over the alts is at 51.7% on CG.

SOL Leads the Way

Since the past 24 hours have been quite dull in terms of price movements in the crypto space, we will focus on the weekly scale in which SOL and LINK have stolen the show. The former has soared by 17.5% and trades at a multi-week high of over $170, while LINK is up by 22% and stands close to $16.5.

Next on the weekly top gainers’ list are Avalanche (14%), Bitcoin Cash (13%), UNI (13%), IMX (10%), GRT (12%), NEAR (9%), and ICP (10%).

In contrast, TON has declined the most from the larger-cap alts, having lost over 9% of value in the past seven days. BNB and TRX are also slightly in the red.

The total crypto market cap is up to $2.550 trillion on CG, which means that it has gained over $150 billion on a weekly scale.

By examining the processing speed of the largest blockchain networks in terms of total value locked on DeFiLlama, CoinGecko outlined the fastest based on the actual and realized transactions-per-speed (TPS) metric.

The report concluded that Solana leads the way, followed by Sui and the Binance Smart Chain. Interestingly, Ethereum and Bitcoin are not even in the top 15.

Solana’s World

Despite its several outages in the past few years, the Solana blockchain has emerged as the fastest on CoinGecko’s list. The average daily TPS stands at 1,053.7, while the network marked a record on April 6 at just over 1,500.

According to the report, this makes Solana “46 times faster than Ethereum, and more than 5 times faster than Polygon, which has the highest TPS among Ethereum scaling solutions.”

Still, CoinGecko said that Solana’s average TPS is still far away from the theoretical maximum speed claimed by the developers of 65,000 TPS.

1/ Which blockchains are the fastest?

Our study shows that @solana has proven to be the fastest blockchain, with its actual daily average transactions per second (TPS) reaching a record high of 1,504 on April 6.

Read the full study: https://t.co/YNXbOBmsz7 pic.twitter.com/h7HXBbZavu

— CoinGecko (@coingecko) May 17, 2024

Perhaps due to its speed and the relatively low transaction fees, Solana became the home to numerous meme coins that popped up during this cycle, such as WIF, BONK, BOME, POPCAT, MEW, and others.

CoinGecko’s top 3 list is concluded by two other non-EVM networks – Sui and BSC. The paper said non-EVM blockchains are, on average, 4x faster than their EVM counterparts.

Polygon 8x Faster Than Ethereum

Ethereum transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake in late 2022 but it still cannot find a place within the top 15 on CoinGecko’s list. It takes the 17th spot with an average TPS of 22.7. In contrast, Polygon, the largest layer 2 network on Ethereum, posted 190 TPS.

“Polygon is therefore currently the fastest among the largest Ethereum scaling solutions and 8.4 times faster than Ethereum itself, even as Polygon lags further behind the top 3 fastest blockchains.”

Bitcoin, being among the few networks still on proof of work, is expectedly not in the top positions, either. The world’s largest blockchain’s average TPS was at 10.73, according to CoinGecko, which placed it at the 20th spot. Interestingly, though, Blast, Merlin, Mode, zkLink Nova, and Thorchain ranked behind Bitcoin.

Bitcoin keeps touching new levels of adoption in the real world, with traditional finance (TradFi) firms embracing the digital asset at a remarkable pace. The significant investment in spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) signifies growing institutional interest in crypto assets.

Last quarter, a staggering number of U.S. banks, investment managers, hedge funds, and professional firms bought spot Bitcoin ETFs, as seen in their 13F filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A tweet by the digital assets investment analysis platform K33 Research revealed that 937 professional firms in the U.S. were invested in the spot Bitcoin ETF market as of March 31. Hence, it may be difficult to know and list every TradFi firm that jumped on the Bitcoin ETF bandwagon in the first three months of the year.

TradFi Giants Jump on BTC Bandwagon

Some of the largest Bitcoin ETF investments came from Millennium Management, a heavyweight hedge fund, and Susquehanna International Group (SIG), a global quantitative trading firm. The firms reported investments of $2 billion and $1 billion in the Bitcoin products, respectively.

Millennium Management and SIG’s investments were followed by Bracebridge Capital, a Boston-based hedge fund that manages money for top universities like Yale and Princeton, and Boothbay Fund, another fund manager based in New York. The entities purchased ETFs worth $434 million and $377 million, respectively.

Substantial ETF disclosures also came from top U.S. banking firm Morgan Stanley and advisory company Pine Ridge Advisers, with investments totaling $269 million and $205.8 million, respectively.

In addition, alternative asset manager Aristeia Capital, investment firm Graham Capital, and hedge fund manager Crcm LP reported significant exposures of $163.4 million, $102.6 million, and $96.6 million, respectively, to the Bitcoin ETFs.

States to Follow?

Many other professional firms disclosed smaller investments in the Bitcoin ETF market. Some of them include Hightower Advisors with $68 million exposure, Fortress Investment Group with $53.6 million, Cambridge Investment Research with $40 million, Sequoia Financial Advisors with $12 million, Integrated Advisors with $11 billion, and Brown Advisory with $4 million.

Noteworthily, major banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo invested even smaller amounts, totaling $760,000 and $143,000, respectively, in the Bitcoin ETF market.

It is also worth mentioning that most of these firms spread their investments across several ETFs, with Grayscale’s GBTC, BlackRock’s IBIT, Fidelity’s FBTC, and Ark Invest’s ARKB seeing the largest allocations.

Meanwhile, the digital asset market may soon witness an influx of investments from state-owned professional firms. The State of Wisconsin Investment Board has already set the pace with a $163 million exposure to Bitcoin ETFs.