The bear steepening continues to weight in last week as US 10-year treasury yield increased 23bps, holding BTC price muted within the range between $27K to $28.6K (closed -0.27%). The situation arises from bond investors’ rising concern around surge in US government deficit spending (which contributed to Fitch’s downgrade), Fed chair Powell responded the same in previous FOMC conference, increase of capital market yield likely contributed by excess supply of debt in the market. Meanwhile, the money market fund saw $43.15B in inflows, the highest since April according to LSEG data.

 

- US demonstrated resilience labor market with 9610K JOLTS job opening in August, exceed expectation 8815K. US non-farm payrolls in September was 336K, exceed expectation of 170K, marked the strongest job gain in 8 months. Upward revision of August and July payrolls and September payrolls signal the reversal of stagnant labor market. The job gains achieved without pushing the average hourly earnings, month-to-month increased to 0.2% in September from 0.3% previously. The unemployment rate in September was 3.8% slightly above the estimation of 3.7%.

- US ISM manufacturing PMI in September was 49 beating expectation of 47.8, while service PMI matched with expectation, 53.6.

- Israel declared war to Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza, pushed US crude oil price 2.74% above Friday closed price on Monday opening. Oil supply is expected to have insignificant impact if the war contained within the region. However, the key backer of the Hamas group, Iran (responsible to 4% of global oil production) remain to be the big wildcard if the situation escalates further. Persistently, high oil prices over an extended period are likely to exert upward pressure on core inflation in the long run.

- A strong labor market gives the Fed the ability to raise the interest rate higher or longer, potentially causing the market into recession. The release of Q3 earnings reports starting this week would provide insight into current economic strength. The market anticipates 65% chance rate remains unchanged in 2023.

 

Upcoming Economic Calendar including,

- BTC long term holders, particularly 2 to 3 years of age band continue to hit new session high.

- Six Ethereum-related ETFs by ProShares, Bitwise and VanEck debated last Monday, closed their first day with combined trading volume of approximately $2M. ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which launched in October 2021, did roughly $950M in trading volume on its first day.

- Grayscale and NYSE Arca jointly applied for SEC approval to convert its Ethereum Trust into spot Ethereum ETF.

- SEC’s motion for certification of interlocutory appeal against Ripple was denied.

- UBS launched tokenised money market fund on Ethereum under the watch of Monetary Authority of Singapore, marked a key milestone in the RWA sector.

- Active developers building publicly in crypto space in September have fallen to a new low since 2020.

 

- 19.6M SOL were unstaked in Epoch 512, majority of the unstaked amount belongs to a16z and Alameda. Most of the tokens are in locked state and expected to be unlocked linearly every month. 7.5M SOL (that is supposed to be unlocked in 2025) from Alameda had re-delegated to another validator. Solana also announced “Confidential Transfer” in v1.16, which enables user to transfer SPL token without revealing detail of the transaction such as transfer amount.

- Conflux partners with LayerZero to develop a blockchain-based SIM card capable of transferring assets and messages using LayerZero.

- Starkware delayed its first unlock of STRK token to 15th April 2024.

- Optimism fault proof system is live on testnet. The system is a modular design which can include multiple-proof dispute systems such as ZK.

 

- FTX exploiter had funnelled out 48% of stolen funds from Ethereum to Bitcoin through several protocols, including Thorchain and Threshold. Both protocols surged in trading activities.

- Avalanche Friendtech fork, Stars Arena, was hacked for approximately $3M as the result of reentrancy issues introduced by new unverified codes, wiped the entire TVL. Daily transactions in Avalanche dropped from 576K to 251K in 3 days, according to Artemis.

- Frax Finance introduced FRAX V3, more than 100% collateralisation, USD pegging regardless of other stablecoins, IORB Oracle Integration to rebalance the AMO strategies between real-world yield and on-chain yield, sFRAX, FXB (Frax Bond) and more. V3 deployment will be a gradual and iterative process over a number of weeks.

- Arbitrum STIP Round 1 voting is live, GMX, Camelot, JonesDAO, Pendle, Abracadabra, Dopex, Frax Finance and Socket have passed.

- PirexETH by RedactedCartel is live on Ethereum testnet.

- TProtocol introduced new tokenomics which consists of USTP (standard stablecoin), rUSTP (rebasing yield), and iUSTP (yield-bearing).

- Composable Finance Ethereum IBC connection is live on testnet, validators are able to share 20% of the bridging revenue. Reported testnet bridging between Ethereum and Cosmos took approximately 2 minutes.

- Osmosis announced nBTC, native Bitcoin issued by Nomic chain, users are able to deposit and withdraw BTC directly in Osmosis Zone apps.

- After Balancer, Galxe faced DNS hijacking and $270K was stolen. The team is working on a recovery plan.

 

- DYDX V4 is expected to be launched in October.

- Synthtix Perps V3 and Base launch is expected in October.

- Binance v SEC hearing on 12th October.

- Radiant’s Ethereum launch was rescheduled to 15th October.

- Yearn, veYFI will be launched on 19th October.

- APT Token Unlocked on 12th October, amount representing 1.9% of the token supply.

- CYBER Token Unlocked on 15th October, amount representing 11.43% of the token supply.

- APE Token Unlocked on 17th October, amount representing 4.23% of the token supply.