Up and Onwards – Week In Review
Bitcoin’s recovery is looking better against gold as well as dollars. Tuur Demeester highlighted a break above resistance at 18 ounces of gold. PlanB’s case for Uptober includes bitcoin trading above its $54,000 realized price and $66,000 200-week moving average, with 82% of addresses in profit. The monthly relative-strength index is turning upward too. Benjamin Cowen, following last week’s admission, says holding above $83,000 keeps his bear-market thesis on hold.
The macroeconomic questions remain familiar. Thirty-year Treasury yields reached 22-year highs, with Joseph Wang pointing to higher energy costs as a global driver. Callum Thomas raises the possibility that bonds might finally start working again, and Eric Balchunas reports outsized bond-ETF inflows over five days. On a humorous tangent, let’s hope the ribald photo of a key senior appointee at Treasury doesn’t give “an inside look at future Treasury strategy meetings.”
Stablecoins are now part of this macro discussion. Matt Hougan flagged the Fed’s work on their Treasury demand. The San Francisco Fed’s analysis puts issuers’ additional holdings over five years at roughly $200 billion, more than 40% of the decline in China’s holdings. In other stablecoin news, OUSD (yet another one) was announced to a reasonable amount of receptivity. But Lorenzo Valente is not convinced it’ll be able to dent the duopoly of USDT and USDC. History has shown that announcements with a ton of high-profile “partners” can mean there isn’t actually much commitment from any single company.
Oil offered a potential reprieve. Javier Blas, energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg, wrote in a column:
“If you ask me who’s prevailing in the battle over the Strait of Hormuz, it’s clear President Trump has the advantage.”
Reports of recovering Hormuz flows support this view, although others believe there’s “still nowhere near normal flow out of Hormuz+Red Sea.” Reuters’ preliminary export figures put the region substantially below pre-conflict levels.
As a result of these macroeconomic forces, equity performance was lackluster and market breadth continued to deteriorate. Stock-market breadth is now narrower than in the dot-com era. Can AI and its attendant industries keep the economy afloat?On the one hand, concerns that AI companies might be torching money are supported by news like Anthropic’s reported $42 billion loss in 2025, although only $8 billion was in operating losses. The bubble might burst soon. On the other hand, AI acceleration could cause the U.S. and China to decouple faster, which would ultimately pull reindustrialization forward. This could indicate that the bubble is much broader and deeper, and will last much longer. On the topic of decoupling, Brad Setser pointed out how aircraft parts have become a U.S. tool to counteract China’s rare-earth mineral advantage in the trade dispute.
The biggest news in crypto might be the fact that the market has been so resilient thus far. Post-CLARITY, the SEC and CFTC have stepped in, fueling a crypto rally. DonAlt expects a sharp repricing that forces sidelined traders back in, while Willy Woo calls the sell orders appearing above the market “fake scare walls” that disappear before execution. Fidelity’s Jurrien Timmer sees $300,000 by 2029.
Peter Brandt targets the same number before the next halving. Citi’s 12-month forecasts are $113,000 for BTC and $3,028 for ETH. The details differ, but the direction of travel is the same: up and onwards. It should be noted, though, that there is some resistance from actual sellers as profit-taking reached its highest level of 2026.
In politics/regulation, Hester Peirce announced her departure from the SEC, effective October 2, shortly after the surveillance speech discussed last week. In the Netherlands, the prospect of a 36% tax on unrealized crypto gains from 2028 circulated again. This stems from plans to overhaul “Box 3,” part of the Dutch income tax that covers savings and investments. All is not lost, the overhaul still awaits Senate approval and remains subject to revision.
On to the business of crypto. Robinhood is adding prediction markets for earnings in an increasingly competitive and crowded space. Robinhood also appears to be competing with its partner Lighter by offering perps in-app using Bitstamp. Coinbase is advertising loans of up to $100,000 against HYPE and ZEC and getting into collectible-card packs. Bitwise launched its NEAR ETF, NRR.
Bloomberg reported strain at several companies linked to Adam Back, with Laura Shin drawing attention to the reporting. The “strain” at these companies is of both the legal and financial variety.
Quite separately, Coinbase faced several eyebrow-raising allegations delivered on X. The first alleged Coinbase “stole $1,200,000”, but drew suspicion for engagement farming to promote a scam token. The second, lobbed out of left field by Ari Paul in the replies to the first, alleged that Coinbase had lost $25 million of his firm’s money. He later expanded on his accusation. These are unresolved allegations.
Another unpredictable X post came from Morpho, a decentralized, non-custodial lending protocol. A post from its own account suggested curator businesses weren’t sustainable on vault fees alone, prompting a bearish response from Aave’s Stani Kulechov. Morpho’s Paul Frambot said an AI marketing tool published the unauthorized post, but critically, he did not refute the claims made in the rogue post! Algod leveled a similar sustainability criticism at Venice AI due to VVV’s tokenomics.
Meanwhile, other verticals of crypto clearly make money. Unfortunately, many are extractive. Galaxy’s analysis of Polymarket’s international platform found 69.2% of roughly 2.9 million human-paced retail accounts below break-even, with aggregate losses of $338.9 million. Those are accounts in a defined sample, not necessarily distinct people.
You can’t mention extraction without memecoins. Hunter Biden acknowledged LAPTOP’s botched launch and promised an accounting. Caution in and around memecoins truly is paramount. Sophisticated scammers, perhaps drawn to memecoin’s scammy scent, continue to innovate. Fomo buyers reportedly suffered substantial MEV attacks, while easy-to-use bundling tools obscure coordinated memecoin activity.
Finally, security. NEAR’s Shield system blocked an attempted $50 million transfer linked to the Bitget hacker. Omid Malekan believes this can open up protocols to liability concerns. Once an operator can intervene, when might it be expected to? A clearer case of exposed liability is Thorchain, which is facing backlash from several centralized exchange leaders for not stopping the hacked Bitget funds, or Bybit’s before them, but which did stop when its own funds were at risk in May.
NEAR Intents subsequently reported its own security incident, which Mert Mumtaz characterized as limited. MetaMask also disclosed an infrastructure incident. MetaMask said it found no immediate threat to wallets and began precautionary staking-validator exits.
Zcash supplied a sunnier security story, awarding over $8 million in retroactive grants, including to researchers and developers who helped address the Orchard incident.
There’s nothing warm about the last story. A brutal wrench attack was covered by the BBC. It begins:
“A businessman was beaten with hammers by masked men who broke into his home and threatened to kill his heavily pregnant wife unless he transferred hundreds of thousands of pounds of cryptocurrency.”
£10,000 is being offered for information.
Stay safe out there.
-David Sencil
