“AI chips booming to start 2025, cryptocurrencies revive after year-end correction, quantum computing revolutionises innovation.”
TradFi & Global Market News
Global Market: S&P 500 & NASDAQ
The Santa Claus rally was heavily muted during this festive period as the S&P500 struggled during the holiday break until the new year, ending Jan 2 at a monthly low of around 5850, but it has since risen past the 6000 price point. A similar pattern was observed in the NASDAQ with a low of 19117 on Jan 2 but has recovered strongly to the 19850 price point. Analysts have explained that volatility is expected after overbuying in stellar market performances towards the tail end of 2024.
Chip stocks have kept markets tethered with strong performances throughout this volatility, validated by Foxconn’s recent earnings report. The company has grown 15% since 2023, reaching revenue of $63.9 billion from its cloud computing products and related network electronics. These results have brought a great spark into the semiconductor ecosystem, as Foxconn’s AI server designer, Nvidia, also received a 3% stock price rise. At the same time, other US chip firms like Qualcomm and Broadcom have also seen moderate rises.
Another significant driver in recent times is what is now revealed to be a false leak about Trump’s plans to consider narrower tariff policies limited to specific critical sectors. Earlier this morning, Trump clarified these reports are untrue; however, this has not dampened stock performances but has lowered the US dollar index.
Global Market: FTSE100
Despite a problematic early 2024, the UK has been poised by analysts to have more vigorous growth in the new year, and that has looked positive so far, with the FTSE100 hovering around the 8240 price line as they responded to the false Trump tariff strategy. However, its performance has been dampened by the consumer sector as analysts continue to worry about low consumer spending plaguing the UK for the entire year.
Following Starmer’s election promises, analysts expect UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves to announce tax increases soon to fund the suggested policies. While improved internal political stability should encourage UK business, these conflicting policy needs mean policymakers must look towards FDI-aided growth to make up the numbers.
Innovation News: Quantum Computing
While AI has turned from a fad to a genuinely economic and business driver over the last two years, an innovation that has come back into the spotlight in quantum computing, the theoretics behind quantum computing have been around for years; the AI boom has shifted a lot of funding towards capital-intensive research for this field since December 2024. Quantum computing uses quantum bits based on physics theories to compute more information simultaneously, allowing exponentially quicker computations than traditional circuitry. With high demands for large language models and more complex data in the AI boom, investors’ interest has been in the development of quantum computers to meet this processing demand. Stocks like D-wave and QUBIT have been up over 1000% across the last two months; however, unless a sustained rollout of breakthroughs in such deep tech technologies is unlikely, we should expect stagnation in the field again.
DeFi & Digital Assets News
Cryptocurrency Market: Bitcoin & Ethereum
Bitcoin opened the year with a correction as $2.6 billion option contracts expired. This led to short-term price actions to favour a profit-maximising price point for the institutional investors that owned most of these contracts, leading to a net week outflow of $75 million. This has already been offset in the first 3 days of 2025 as exchange-traded products have received around $585 million in inflows globally. Superstar investor Ray Dalio is predicting a significant debt money problem to occur under Trump’s regime and has called for a diversification of assets away from bonds towards “hard money” assets like gold or Bitcoin as the value of the USD will plummet under such circumstances. Coupled with Trump’s inauguration on Jan 20, many investors are expecting the announcement of more crypto-friendly policies that will only bolster the bullish momentum of Bitcoin.
Additionally, altcoins like Solana and Ethereum have seen a total increase in the stablecoin supply on their networks by $1.31 billion, of which over 85% is on Ethereum. Additionally, Ripple has seen a 2000% increase in its stablecoin product; however, over 96% comes from a few whales. Nevertheless, a combination of financial movements and blockchain usage means that Bitcoin climbed back past the 100,000 price line while ETH climbed close to 3700.
Blockchain News: Sui
Sui is a product that skyrocketed in the opening week of 2025, a Layer 1 blockchain built by ex-Meta engineers working on the company’s now-defunct blockchain project. It uses parallel transaction execution to enable a swifter and more scalable transaction solution, supporting as many as 125,000 transactions per second across DeFi, NFT, or gaming projects. On Jan 4, SUI traded 20% higher throughout the day and witnessed a 150% increase in trading volume.
Sui blockchain’s growth strategy has been openly discussed during an event hosted by exchange platform Bybit, where developers have shared their vision and strategy to create more innovative tools to lower barriers to innovations with a focus on the development experience while seeking further institutional engagements to legitimise their product. A recent partnership with Arkham Intelligence suggests that the team is willing to put their money where their mouth is as they are working closely with the blockchain analytics firms to develop their Walrus Protocol, a data storage product to support the storage of more extensive data files like audio and videos. Investors should watch for the mass adoption of this unique blockchain infrastructure in the next few years as they continue to enhance their products.
Security News: Solana
With 2025 becoming even more significant on AI than ever, how do Web 3.0 and blockchain fit into the value chain? For starters, decentralised AI ecosystems are significantly cheaper than traditional counterparts as they do not have to rely on large, expensive, centralised servers. This could be a game-changer for payments as decentralised AI could operate autonomously on the chain to process settlements securely and cheaply.
The rise of quantum computing to the forefront of investors’ minds does challenge Web 3.0 developers’ axioms about the strength of cryptocurrency encryptions; hence, a developer at Solana has developed quantum-proof vaults to protect transactions. In its earliest iterations, the Solana Winternitz Vault was designed to create a new cryptographic key for every transaction divided into various accounts in the vault. While this practice is not standard and has a high barrier to entry due to additional technical steps to be done in the transaction, it is a good start to future-proof cryptocurrencies for an even more technologically advanced world.
In Other News…
Short Updates:
DeepMind – As Google bets on a trajectory towards AI Superintelligence, it must overcome the challenges of “peak data,” which is the lack of high-quality data left on the internet to be mined for AI model training data. This slows AI advancements. Google’s proposed solution, “test-time compute,” breaks down complex queries into constituent prompts that generate new outputs. However, there remain questions about its ability to handle more creative tasks.
Xenea – The Layer 1 blockchain Xenea is preparing its Proof of Democracy infrastructure for integration with future technologies like AGI and virtual environments by seamlessly integrating Decentralised Autonomous Storage to file AI-generated data from its unique ecosystem. PoD uses approved voting nodes to validate the transaction in a democratic, secure, and energy-efficient manner through collaborative voting mechanisms.
Opportunity Spotlight
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