(41/52) Weekly Market Insight | October Week 4 | Temporary Risk-Off Sentiment

Headline News: Temporary Risk-Off Sentiment

• Bitcoin slid by 5.5% last week, pushing the Crypto Fear & Greed Index down to 22, its lowest level since April 2025. This downturn mirrored anxieties in the broader market, where concerns over US banking risks caused the VIX to peak at 24 before retracing on Friday. Investors are maintaining a conservative posture amid persistent uncertainty, awaiting the FOMC meeting at the end of the month for an anticipated 25 bps rate cut and further details on Quantitative Tightening (QT).

Macro-Outlook: “Cockroach” Fears

• The trade tension between the US and China deescalated as President Trump stated 100% tariff on China will not stand and potentially meet with President Xi in 2 weeks.
• Regional bank stocks in the US faced significant sales pressure as Zions Bancorp and Western Alliance Bank reported $50 million charge-off and a credit fraud lawsuit respectively, signalling signs of potential cracks in the US credit market. Some experts suggested the banking risk will eventually be bailed out by the Fed if it becomes significant.
• The latest Fed’s Beige Book showed little change in employment levels with softer labor demand and consumer spending.
• The Japan central bank stated the board will continue raising interest rates if economic and price trends meet expectations, potentially reintroducing selling pressure on the US dollar.
• Kalshi’s market predicts the US government shutdown will last over 43 days, potentially affecting the jobs report in November.

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

• Friday, October 24, 8:30pm: The US Inflation Data in September

Weekly-Cryptos-Overview: The Return of ICO-Era

• The US Department of Justice seized 127,271 Bitcoin in the “Pig-Butchering” scheme orchestrated by Chen Zhi via a wallet key generation flaw. The US government now holds 316,760 Bitcoin in custody.
• Robinhood announced to launch 400+ tokenised stocks to EU users via Arbitrum One, there are over 80 equities tokenisation being deployed currently.
• Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA) plans allowing banks to hold digital assets and opening banks to register as “cryptocurrency exchange operators”.
• Major Japanese banks MUFG, Sumitomo Mitsui and Mizuho partnered to launch Japanese yen and US dollar stablecoins for cross-border settlements.
• The Bank of England reportedly plans to introduce stablecoin regulation by the end of 2026 with public consultation beginning on November 10.
• Major European bank ODDO BHF announced issuing MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin, EUROD.
• Connectia Trust, Sony Bank subsidiary, filed with the US OCC for a national crypto bank charter, joining the race to become a stablecoin issuer.

Layer 1 and Layer 2s

• Ripple announced acquiring corporate treasury management system operator, GTreasury, positioning Ripple to access corporates’ idle capital and cross-border payments.
• Jovay Network, backed by Ant Group, officially announced it will be deployed as Ethereum Layer-2 with focus on compliant RWA tokenisation.
• Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio launched JioCoin, its blockchain reward program, on Aptos.
• Bybit introduced Bybit Alpha, enabling users to trade on-chain assets directly from Bybit accounts similar to Binance Alpha.
• Berachain introduced BEND, an enshrined credit layer that forks from Morpho with users can now lend and borrow ETH, BTC, BERA and major stablecoins natively on Berachain.
• Chainlink launched the first native, real-time oracle on MegaEth execution environment, enabling smart contracts to read high-frequency prices natively.

Dapps

• As uncertainty surged in the broad market, gold prices crossed the $30 trillion market cap. The market enthusiasm caused PAX Gold’s price surged abnormally to $4790, approximately 10% above market price.
• Uniswap launched Solana token swap on its Uniswap Web App powered by Jupiter Finance.
• Tether released its open-source Wallet Development Kit (WDK), enabling developers to build a secure multi-chain self-custody wallet.
• Ondo Finance submitted an open letter to the SEC requesting more information about Depository Trust Company (DTC) handles tokenised settlement before reaching any final decision on Nasdaq’s tokenised securities trading proposal.
• INFINIT launched Strategies, an automated DeFi workflow, enabling seamless DeFi strategies such as delta-neutral position, airdrop farming and looping with 1-click.
• Jito raised a $50 million strategic investment from a16z.
• Superform launched the V2 Web App, providing a clean view of portfolios and access to high yield SuperVault.
• Yield Basis launched its YB token on major exchanges with approximately $300 million FDV. The YB stakers share 50% of the fees with ybBTC holders dynamically.
• Four Meme announced launching Token Name Protection, protecting the name of the token to be duplicated once the token gained over 100 holders during its bonding curve.
• ZXBT Labs introduced Zora Creator Index, a market cap-weighted index of the top 50 creator coins on Zora. The new index has a very high correlation to Zora’s price.
• Jupiter released Ultra V3, enhancing execution efficiency, predictive stimulation to minimise slippage and MEV, gasless transaction and more. Jupiter also introduced JupVM, aggregating decentralised identities, delegating signatures, creating omnichain ledger, app-specific sequencing and more.
• Aerodrome announced it completed the first programmatic buyback of $400K worth of AERO.
• Strata, protocol that splits USDe into senior and junior tranches, launched its mainnet.
• Tydro, a native Aave v3 instance on Ink Network, is now live.
• The Base app launched Zora’s creator coins directly in the app. Meanwhile, Zora announced a 20M ZORA Believe Fund helps grow potential creators.
• Safe wallet partnered with Circle to establish Safe as a premier institutional storage solution for USDC.
• S&P Global partnered with Chainlink to bring stablecoin ratings on-chain.
• Orderly, the perpetual swap liquidity layer, announced Orderly RWAs by introducing SPX500 and NAS100 with 20x leverage.
• YGG Play from Yield Guild Games released YGG Play Launchpad, a new platform for gamers to explore games, do quests and participate in new game token launches.

Governance and Upcoming Alpha

• The US Federal Reserve is holding the Federal Reserve Payments Conference on October 21 with representatives from Chainlink, Paxos, Circle and Coinbase.
• MegaETH announced a public offering soon on Sonar launchpad with KYC registration open from October 15 to October 27.
• Flying Tulip plans to raise another $800 million via public sales on Impossible Finance and Coinlist at $1 billion FDV. Full details of the open sales are expected to be announced by the end of October.
• OpenSea announced shifting from a “NFT marketplace” to a “trade everything” approach, launching of SEA token in Q1 2026 with 50% supply allocated to community and 50% of revenue will be used to buyback SEA token.
• Arbitrum passed the vote to deploy 8,500 Ethereum in the DAO treasury to various DeFi strategies.
• The fast growing lending protocol, Euler, is planning to release its own stablecoin with a fixed borrowing rate.

Token Unlock

• PLUME token unlocks on October 21, amount representing 3.25% of the token supply.
• SCR token unlocks on October 22, amount representing 64.50% of the token supply.
• HYPER token unlocks on October 22, amount representing 8.12% of the token supply.
• INIT token unlocks on October 24, amount representing 4.40% of the token supply.
• XPL token unlocks on October 25, amount representing 4.94% of the token supply.
• TAKE token unlocks on October 25, amount representing 10.1% of the token supply.
• RON token unlocks on October 27, amount representing 4.48% of the token supply.
• GRASS token unlocks on October 28, amount representing 58.60% of the token supply.
• ZORA token unlocks on October 30, amount representing 3.73% of the token supply.
• REZ token unlocks on October 31, amount representing 12.00% of the token supply.
• IO token unlocks on October 31, amount representing 6.09% of the token supply.
• KMNO token unlocks on October 31, amount representing 22.00% of the token supply.