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Cryptocurrency markets are ending the week quietly, with BTC giving up part of its rebound and stocks largely flat ahead of next week’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting. Against this backdrop, Solana ecosystem tokens have shown remarkable relative strength.
BTC regained part of its recent rebound on Thursday, closing -1.38% lower, though it is still up roughly 10% from Monday’s intraday low of $84,000. As shown below, the S&P 500 and gold were flat on the day, while the NASDAQ fell -0.14%.
On the macro front, Kevin Hassett now appears to be the front-runner to head the Fed, with Polmarket estimating his candidacy at around 75%. The appointment of Hassett, currently director of the National Economic Council and a close Trump ally, represents a clear shift toward a tighter fit between Fed policy and the administration’s economic agenda. As for the current Fed, a December rate cut is almost certain to happen just five days before the last FOMC meeting of the year, with the CME FedWatch tool assigning an 87% chance of a 25 basis point cut.
In terms of performance across sectors, the only three crypto-related indices that were positive on the day were miners (+6.1%), Solana Eco (+1.8%), and cryptocurrency stocks (+0.9%). Even with Thursday’s bounce, the Miner Index is still down 28% over the past 30 days, making it the worst-performing index after Memecoins (-33%).
Looking at Solana ecosystem tokens, out of the top 10 components in our index, CLOUD (Sanctum) was the best performer yesterday (+13%). The move comes after Forward Industries launched its Sanctum-powered LST (fwdSOL) system earlier this week. Last May, DeFi Dev Corp. dfdvSOL, also using Sanctum infrastructure.
Instead of staking SOL locally and losing liquidity, LST Solana enables DATCOs to earn staking yield while distributing their liquidity to other DeFi applications to expand yield earnings. By working with Sanctum, DATCOs can easily design and deploy their own LSTs to deliver on their mandate of maximizing SOL per share. The Forward Industries team bootstrapped fwdSOL with approximately 25% of its SOL holdings (represented by over 1.7 million fwdSOL), resulting in an all-time high of 13.1 million SOL locked in Sanctum LSTs.
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