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Overview
- BTC slipped ~1% in a choppy week to $78k, as Thursday's push toward the highs fully reversed after Fed Chair Warsh's hawkish first Jackson Hole keynote triggered roughly $488M in liquidations on Friday.
- July PCE printed slightly hot on Wednesday while Warsh noted that the Fed still has "work to do" on Friday, lifting September hike odds from roughly 35% to around 60%, as of writing,and knocking gold down more than 3%.
- The Market Pulse board cooled from green to neutral, with ETF flows still positive at +$1.8B while stablecoin issuance halved to +$1.1B. Only 18% of altcoins outperformed BTC, near a one-year low.
- Coinbase's newly launched Base stocks did $116M in their first four days alongside record Robinhood Chain activity.
- All eyes are on Friday's August jobs report, one of the last few major data points before the September 15-16 FOMC, and on Sunday's $807M HYPE unlock, the largest of September.
The Week in Review
After last week’s sharp rally, risk assets turned on two hawkish events. On Wednesday, July PCE printed 3.7% year-over-year, slightly above estimates, with core in line at 3.3% and Q2 core revised up to 3.6%. The higher impact factor came Friday morning, when Fed Chair Warsh used his first Jackson Hole keynote to stress that the Fed has "work to do" on inflation and stated that forward guidance had "overstayed its welcome". September hike odds on Polymarket jumped to the mid-50s, the dollar rallied, and the assets that led the prior week's debasement trade reversed hardest: gold fell more than 3% on the day, BTC slipped below $77k, and roughly $488M in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated. Prices stabilized over the weekend, leaving BTC down ~1% on the week at $78k, ETH ~3% lower, the alt basket between the two majors, gold down ~4%, and the S&P modestly higher.
Market Pulse
This week the board cooled from green to neutral. ETF flows came in at +$1.8B, down from +$2.5B but a second consecutive week near one-year highs, even with Friday's $202M BTC ETF outflow marking the first negative session since the rally began. Funding eased from +9.9% to +7.3% annualized, open interest ticked down from 2.7% to 2.6% of total market cap, and stablecoin issuance halved to +$1.1B. Breadth fell furthest: just 18 of the top 100 altcoins beat Bitcoin, down from 33 the week prior and near a one-year low. Two weeks of external inflows have now settled almost entirely in the majors, and Friday's move has deleveraged the market without reversing net flows.
Chart of the Week: Base Enters Tokenized Equities Race
On Monday Coinbase launched tokenized stocks on Base, debuting NVDAc, METAc, AAPLc, and GOOGLc under its B20 token standard, with Alpaca Securities holding the underlying shares 1:1 in a bankruptcy-remote structure and access restricted to non-U.S. users under Regulation S. Activity picked up quickly, as the tokens did $116.4M in DEX volume in their first four days, 57% of which was in NVDAc, with Base running $25-30M per day by the end of the week. Robinhood Chain, where Uniswap handles roughly 99% of tokenized stock liquidity across more than 190 listed names, closed the month with a record day above $190M, as a new trend of memecoin and tokenized equity pairings drove increased volumes to the corporate chain. Coinbase and Robinhood continue to converge in their product offerings, with both now supporting perps, prediction markets, Coinbase adding traditional stock trading, and each now listing tokenized equities on its own corporate chain. While they are arriving at the same product set from opposite directions, the crypto exchange and traditional brokerage are now competing for the same end user.
Sector Breakdown
Only four of the fifteen sectors we track closed green this week, each on an idiosyncratic catalyst rather than market beta. Privacy led at +7.8% on XMR (+23%), which traded above $500 after THORChain said it would add native XMR swap support, leaving the sector up +62% on the month. DeFi followed at +4.3% on RAIN (+21%), which hit an all-time high after the protocol burned 7.4B tokens (roughly $108M) on Tuesday to settle its first DAO credit refund vote. DEX (+1.8%) rode UNI (+16%) as Uniswap's tokenized stock volumes on Robinhood Chain set records, and Perps (+1.3%) closed barely positive with HYPE (+1%) flat ahead of Sunday's $807M unlock.
Social gave back the most at -9.5% as PUMP (-14%) cooled from its August run, though the sector remains up +77% on the month. POL (-23%) round-tripped nearly all of the prior week's breakout, falling back below $0.09 and dragging L2 to -3.4%, while L1 (-0.9%) held up best among the red sectors as SOL (+6%) offset BTC (-1%). The rest of the board fell 2-6%, with NFT (-6.3%), DePIN (-5.2%), Gaming (-5.1%), and Infra (-4.9%) clustered at the bottom.
Data appendix. Each Market Pulse tile shows where a gauge sits in its own trailing one-year range: the bar runs from the year's low to its high, the dark marker is this week's reading, and the colored span behind it is the week's move, green when the gauge climbed its range and red when it fell. Tags mark position in that range: HIGH above the 65th percentile, LOW below the 35th, NEUTRAL between, with the tag's color carrying the read. Funding is BTC perpetual funding, OI-weighted across major venues and annualized; onchain yield is Aave v3's USDC market on Ethereum; stablecoin flows is the 7-day net change in supply of all USD-pegged stablecoins across all chains per DeFiLlama; open interest sums futures in the twelve largest futures assets (roughly 95% of all crypto futures OI) against total crypto market cap; ETF flows combines US spot Bitcoin and Ethereum funds on a rolling 7 days; and altcoins is the share of the top 100, excluding stablecoins and wrappers, beating BTC over 7 days. Sector returns are cap-weighted CoinGecko categories, top ten constituents each. Sources: GSR Research, Glassnode, Deribit, CoinGecko, DeFiLlama, FRED, Tokenomist.
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