(39/52) Weekly Market Insight | October Week 2 | Back to All-Time-High

Headline News: Back to All-Time-High

• The fourth quarter began on a strong footing for Bitcoin, which posted a 10% gain last week. The rally appeared after a series of liquidation events that reset market leverage, and investors brushing aside concerns related to the US government shutdown. Bitcoin established a new all-time high of $125,700 and is creating a favourable environment for altcoins to follow. Bitcoin spot ETFs attracted $3.24 billion in net inflows last week, marking their second-best week on record.

Macro-Outlook: Road to the Second-Longest Shutdown

• Due to the US government shutdown, non-farm payroll and unemployment rate were not available last week. However, ADP showed a loss of 32K jobs in September, significantly lower than the market expectations of 50K job gain. Meanwhile, JOLTs job openings increased to 7.227 million in August, in line with market expectations.
• The US ISM manufacturing PMI increased to 49.1 in September, slightly above market expectations of 49. The ISM services PMI decreased to 50 in September, below the market expectations of 51.7. Both manufacturing and services sectors showed signs of a contracting economy.
• According to prediction markets, the market is expecting the government shutdown to last approximately 21 days.

The upcoming Economic Calendar includes,

• Thursday, October 9, 3:00am: September FOMC Minutes
• Friday, October 10, 10:00pm: Preliminary Michigan Consumer Sentiment in October

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: The ETF Turning Point or Another Delay

• The SEC missed the deadline for Canary Capital’s spot Litecoin ETF amid government shutdown. The Bloomberg analyst stated that the SEC likely wants the pending crypto applications to be filed under the new Generic Listing standard. The upcoming SOL ETFs deadline might experience a similar situation.
• Kazakhstan launched its first national crypto reserve, Alem Crypto Fund, and acquired BNB as its first investment in the fund.
• Binance announced a Crypto-as-a-Service solution for institutional clients across services such as trading, custody, compliance, on/off-ramps and market access.
• Swift announced a new blockchain-based ledger with 30+ banks to enable instant and 24/7 cross-border payments.
• CME Group plans to launch 24/7 cryptocurrency futures and options market in early 2026.
• VanEck filed for a Lido Staked Ethereum ETF with the SEC.
• Walmart’s fintech arm, OnePay, launched cryptocurrency trading on its platform, enabling crypto payment for Walmart purchases and card debt repayment.
• Stripe launched Open Issuance, helping businesses to create their own stablecoins that are issued by Bridge. Phantom is among the first to use Open Issuance to launch its stablecoin CASH, similar to MetaMask’s mUSD and Hyperliquid’s USDH.
• Coinbase partnered with Samsung to offer Coinbase One access directly within the Samsung Wallet app on Galaxy devices in the US.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Starknet launched Bitcoin staking on its mainnet, receiving a fixed 25% share of network emissions. Endur Finance offers the first liquid staking BTC on Starknet, supporting WBTC, tBTC, LBTC and solvBTC.
• Sui partnered with Ethena to launch suiUSDe and USDi, which is a delta-neutral yield stablecoin and a BlackRock BUIDL fund-backed stablecoin respectively. Both stablecoins aim to go live within 2025.
• EigenLayer launched EigenCompute and EigenAI on EigenCloud, providing verifiable computation and verifiable inference to run trustless decentralised AI models.
• OKX founder revealed X Layer future roadmap, including USDG stablecoin, integration of Aave, Uniswap, Balancer and Chainlink, and a $100 million Vision Fund.
• Celo launched Nightfall testnet, a Layer-3 built by EY for on-chain payment privacy, aiming to onboard institutions that are underserved by banks.
• Psy Protocol, a new scalable Layer-1 that utilises Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) to validate transactions, launched its testnet.
• BOB and LayerZero launched a 1-click native BTC and wBTC.OFT swap across 11 blockchains.
• Neura launched its public testnet for its sovereign stablecoin blockchain, featuring its own physical hardware across the globe, private fiber networks, gasless stablecoin transfers, compliance by design, in-built yield capture that is recycled back to stakeholders. ANKR is used for staking and as an alternative gas token on the network.
• DoubleZero, the super-fast highway for blockchain communication, launched its mainnet and its native token 2Z. 2Z token is used for payment, incentives and network security.

Dapps

• Coinbase integrated 1inch Swap API into its platform. 1inch also rebranded its logo last week.
• The leading intent-based aggregator on Ethereum, CoW Swap, launched on BNB Chain with gasless trading and MEV-shielded transfers.
• Tether plans to launch USAT through the crypto wallet of the video platform, Rumble. Tether owns a 48% stake in Rumble.
• PancakeSwap added another 3 tokenised stocks on its Stock Perps, totalling 6 assets with up to 25x leverage to be traded on the platform. PancakeSwap also launched a fee-earning feature whenever users’ limit orders are filled.
• SG Forge, Societe Generale’s digital arm, launched MiCA-compliant lending and borrowing for EURCV and USDCV using Morpho vault.
• Aragon introduced Guardian V2, allowing depositors to have veto rights to vault curators’ actions, and participate in governance while receiving DeFi yield in Morpho Vaults V2.
• Sky Protocol introduced Keel, an on-chain capital allocator similar to Spark Finance on Solana.
• Ethena’s ENA and USDe went live on OKX’s X Layer.
• Injective announced the launching of pre-IPO perpetual trading with 5x leverage, starting with OpenAI shares.
• The universal ZK verifier, zkVerify, launched its mainnet and VFY token. The protocol can provide ZK proofs from any system on any blockchain.
• Recall, an AI agent marketplace protocol backed by Multicoin and Coinbase, introduced its RECALL token.
• NFTStrategy.fun’s total market cap grew to over $180 million in less than a month, introducing innovative NFT strategies that use accumulated trading fees to acquire NFTs and sell them for additional 20% profit, which then uses the profit to burn the NFT strategy tokens.
• Cypher, a crypto card issuer, launched its CYPR token on Base. CYPR stakers will be eligible to vote for brands to earn boosted rewards when spending.
• Infinex, a crypto super app, launched Hyperliquid perpetual trading frontend on its platform.
• The CF Large Cap Index DTF powered by Reserve was listed on Kraken exchange.
• Solstice, a delta-neutral stablecoin (USX) issuer, launched natively on Solana.
• BounceBit announced V3, Big Bank, introducing rebasing the BB-token standard for assets such as BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB and USDT, to provide liquidity for BounceBit Perps on BounceBit Chain. BLP represents diverse asset vault that serve a similar purpose.
• The highly anticipated decentralised perpetual exchange, Lighter, launched its public mainnet as a Ethereum Layer-2 with custom ZK circuits for verifiable matching and liquidations.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• Plasma will launch its Basis Trade Vault with Aave, Ethena and Pendle soon.
• World Liberty Financial announced that its team is planning to tokenise Trump’s family real estate on blockchain.
• Mantle is expected to launch its neobank, UR, on October 7, providing seamless crypto saving and spending.
• The USDe powered spot and perpetual exchange, Ethereal, announced mainnet alpha on October 20.
• The Solana leading DEX, Meteora, is expected to launch its MET token on October 23, and 3% airdrop is allocated to JUP stakers. Prediction market, PMX, also launched on Solana by using Meteora to seed liquidity.
• Morpho proposed to deploy MORPHO token and provide full Morpho frontend support on HyperEVM.
• Yearn Finance outlined 3 phases of establishing guidelines and accountability for DAO operation, simplify YFI staking, and efficient treasury management programs.
• The full-suite DEX founded by Sonic co-founder Andre Cronje, Flying Tulip, raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation and aims to raise another $800 million through public sales in October. The sales will be perpetual put, where investors can burn FT tokens any time to redeem up to their original principal.
• MetaMask introduced the “Ways to Earn” campaign, where users earn points based on both spot and perpetual trading volume. Activities conducted on Linea network will be entitled double points.
• Spark announced its latest roadmap including Saving V2 launch in October, institutional lending using Morpho V2, stablecoin liquidity as a service, expansion of its automated trading operations and more.

Token Unlock

• JTO token unlocked on October 7, amount representing 2.96% of the token supply.
• AVNT token unlocked on October 9, amount representing 4.64% of the token supply.
• LINEA token unlocked on October 10, amount representing 6.59% of the token supply.
• BABY token unlocked on October 10, amount representing 4.57% of the token supply.
• HOME token unlocked on October 10, amount representing 12% of the token supply.
• PUMP token unlocked on October 14, amount representing 2.83% of the token supply.
• STRK token unlocked on October 15, amount representing 2.95% of the token supply.
• ZKC token unlocked on October 15, amount representing 7.46% of the token supply.
• STBL token unlocked on October 16, amount representing 46.2% of the token supply.
• DBR token unlocked on October 17, amount representing 16.8% of the token supply.
• ASTER token unlocked on October 17, amount representing 9.7% of the token supply.
• ZRO token unlocked on October 20, amount representing 10.3% of the token supply.
• KAITO token unlocked on October 20, amount representing 3.46% of the token supply.
• SCR token unlocked on October 22, amount representing 64.5% of the token supply.