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Crypto markets end the week on a subdued note, with BTC giving up some of its rally and stocks largely flat ahead of next week’s FOMC meeting. In this context, tokens in the Solana ecosystem have demonstrated remarkable relative strength.
BTC retraced some of its recent rebound on Thursday, closing down -1.38%, although it remains up almost 10% from Monday’s intraday low of $84,000. As seen below, the S&P 500 and gold were flat on the day, while the Nasdaq slipped -0.14%.
Macroeconomically, Kevin Hassett now appears to be the favorite for Fed chairman, with Polymarket pricing his nomination at around 75%. Currently director of the National Economic Council and a close Trump ally, Hassett’s appointment would mark a clear shift toward tighter alignment between Fed policy and the administration’s economic agenda. As for the current Fed, a December rate cut is almost certain with just five days until the final FOMC meeting of the year, with the CME FedWatch tool assigning an 87% probability to a 25 basis point cut.
Regarding cross-sector performance, the only three crypto-related indices that were positive on the day were Miners (+6.1%), Solana Eco (+1.8%), and Crypto Equities (+0.9%). Even with Thursday’s rebound, the Miners index is still down 28% over the last 30 days, making it the worst performing index after Memecoins (-33%).
When it comes to tokens in the Solana ecosystem, among the top 10 components of our index, CLOUD (Sanctum) was the best performer yesterday (+13%). The move comes after Forward Industries launched its own LST (fwdSOL) powered by Sanctum earlier this week. Last May, DeFi Dev Corp. launched dfdvSOL, also using Sanctum infrastructure.
Instead of natively staking on SOL and losing liquidity, an LST allows Solana DATCOs to earn staking yield while distributing their liquidity into other DeFi applications to increase revenue. By working with Sanctum, DATCOs can easily design and deploy their own LSTs to fulfill their mandate of increasing SOL per share. The Forward Industries team started fwdSOL with approximately 25% of its SOL holdings (represented by over 1.7 million fwdSOL), leading to an all-time high of 13.1 million SOL locked in Sanctum LSTs.
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