Germany’s Centre Right Alliance (CDU/CSU) managed to secure the most seats in the country’s parliamentary election on Sunday, suggesting a more innovation-friendly environment awaits.

Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU secured 28.52% of the vote while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured 20.8% of the vote. There are 733 seats in the German Bundestag and no party secured a majority, so a coalition will be formed.

Mark Foster, European Union policy lead at the Crypto Council for Innovation, expects that the Centre Right Alliance will likely support the European Union’s approach to digital innovation, he told CoinDesk in an interview ahead of the election.

«So I don’t expect a massive change overnight from the previous government to the new government in terms of either digital assets policy or digital euro, but perhaps an openness and a willingness to think about how these solutions can possibly help improve the competitiveness of the German and the European economy and bring in some jobs and growth in competition, which is clearly the overarching principle at the moment and priority for the European Commission,» Foster said.

Germany’s election so far has had little impact on crypto. The country, which is the European Union’s largest economy, called an early election after its coalition between the Social Democrats (SDP), Free Democratic party (FDP) and Greens collapsed in November.

Though the country was late in passing legislation to enforce the European Union’s bespoke Markets in Crypto Assets legislation — passing legislation days before the mandated implementation date in December — it still managed to process MiCA licenses over the past couple of weeks. And Foster doesn’t expect there to be «any impact in terms of the day to day implementation of existing EU law,» moving forward.

Next the freshly elected members of parliament will need to vote for the country’s new chancellor and head of the federal government.

Solana-based token issuance platform Pump.Fun may soon be launching its own automated market maker (AMM), according to a URL connected to the site. However, there has been no public announcement yet.

AMM is a exchange system in crypto markets that makes trading easy by using a liquidity pool of usually, and at least, two tokens. Instead of matching buyers and sellers like a traditional exchange, smart contracts set the prices based on supply and demand and allow trades to be processed without a counterparty.

The “amm.pump.fun” shows a swap product in the making with a sell and buy option alongside a deposit and withdrawal function. That’s a first for Pump.Fun, which lets anyone issue a token for less than $2 in capital, after which they choose the number of tokens, theme, and meme picture to accompany it.

When the market capitalization of any token reaches $69,000, a portion of liquidity is deposited to the Solana-based exchange Raydium and burned (or when tokens are taken out of supply permanently).

Pump.Fun’s own AMM would mean tokens are no longer migrated to Raydium, or at least that’s what the market thinks, dampening sentiment for the latter’s RAY tokens. RAY is down 25% in the past 24 hours on the apparent development.

“It seems they are planning to have pump tokens graduate to their own pools instead of Raydium,” trader @trenchdiver101, who first flagged the development, said. “They can either extract more fees on Solana or have some mechanism to reward token holders.”

Though a part of Raydium’s total trading activity is derived from Pump.Fun tokens, the exchange supports several other top markets — such as Solana (SOL) to stablecoins and others — contributing to its $500 million in average daily trading volumes.

As such, the product could further bump the revenues and profits of Pump.Fun, which has no token but is among the most profitable crypto applications in the past year — a rare feat in a market where businesses heavily rely on token sales to generate income.

Pump.Fun has pocketed over $550 million in total fees since Mar.2024, data shows, with $2.4 billion in trading volumes over just the past two weeks. Over 8 million tokens have been issued on the platform since its 2024 launch, with a few, such as fartcoin (FART), reaching billions of dollars in market capitalization.

Deribit’s options market for Solana’s SOL token has become active, with whales engaging in bearish bets as the token’s price continues to decline ahead of an impending multi-billion dollar unlock.

Last week, SOL block trades totaling $32.39 million in notional value crossed the tape on Deribit, representing nearly 25% of the total options activity of $130.74 million. The remainder of the activity comprised screen trades, according to Amberdata. That’s the second-highest proportion of block trades to total activity on record.

A «block trade» in options refers to a significant, privately negotiated options transaction between two parties involving a large number of contracts. Such trades, typically associated with whale activity, are executed over-the-counter and outside the regular order book and then booked on the exchange, allowing for a minimal impact on the market prices.

Options are derivative contracts that give the purchaser the right but not the obligation to buy or sell the underlying asset, in this case, SOL, at a preset price on or before a specific date. A call option gives the right to buy, while a put option provides the right to sell. On Deribit, which accounts for over 85% of the global crypto options activity, one options contract represents 1 SOL.

Last week’s spike in SOL block trades featured a preference for put options, which traders use to hedge against or profit from a potential price slide.

«Nearly 80% of the block-trade volume was concentrated in put contracts. Compared to only 40% puts for BTC and 37.5% puts for ETH during the same timeframe,» Greg Magadini, director of derivatives at Amberdata, said.

The whale demand for put options comes as SOL’s outlook appears grim following the 46% price slide to $160 in just over five weeks. The activity on the Solana blockchain, which became a go-to-place for memecoin traders last year, peaked with the launch of the TRUMP token on Jan. 17, three days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the President of the U.S.

Since then, the number of daily transactions on Solana and the cumulative daily volume on the Solana-based decentralized exchanges has declined significantly, according to data source Artemis. That has weakened the bullish case for SOL.

Plus, the impending SOL token unlock on Jan. 1 presents a significant headwind, per Deribit’s Asia Business Development Head Lin Chen.

«Solana (SOL) will have a major token unlock event on March 1, releasing 11.2 million SOL tokens, valued at approximately $2.07 billion. This represents 2.29% of the total supply. A significant portion of the unlock comes from the FTX estate and a foundation sale,» Chen said.

Chen explained that the large unlock could breed market volatility as it accounts for nearly 59% of SOL’s daily spot trading volume. Hence, its natural to see a lot of hedging flow in put options in anticipation of a potential extended SOL price slide.

«Many traders would also take this opportunity to long Vol[atility] to generate good yield,» Chen noted.