GSR Weekly - November 2, 2026

Overview

• BTC fell ~4% to $77k after dropping below $77,000 on Thursday's Binance hack, with ETH ~2% lower, the alt basket down ~4%, gold ~2% lower, and 12 of 15 sectors closing red.
• There were several notable exploits over the past week: Binance lost about $6.3B from its hot wallets on Thursday in the largest crypto theft on record, alongside a $2.7M Polymarket drain, a suspected $106M theft from an EU entity's exchange accounts, and a $40M Mercado Bitcoin hack.
• The Fed held rates at 3.75-4.00% in a 10-2 vote with two dissents in favor of a hike, while Q3 GDP grew 3.4% against a 3.2% consensus and September PCE rose to 3.6% year-over-year.
• Funding rose from +5.5% to +9.4% annualized, while stablecoin net supply change fell to -$4.6B in a fourth straight week of net contraction and only 33 of the top 100 alts beat Bitcoin.
• All eyes are on Tuesday's U.S. midterm elections and Friday's October payrolls, with Wednesday's ISM services survey and Treasury refunding announcement in between.

The Week in Review

On Thursday, Polymarket halted trading on its international exchange for about an hour after a compromised third-party monitoring script drained roughly $2.7M from 726 trader wallets, its second breach of 2026 after a $3.1M attack in June, with the company pledging to reimburse affected users. Just hours later, an attacker submitted unauthorized withdrawals from Binance’s hot wallets, moving about $6.3B across 10 blockchains in what is by most estimates the largest crypto theft on record, more than four times the $1.5B Bybit hack. Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals and said it will cover all losses, while about $3B of the stolen assets have been frozen. The attack has widely been attributed to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus. Preliminary investigations suggest that the attacker used a compromised Binance engineer's laptop to facilitate the attack. BTC fell to a six-week low below $76,500 overnight as roughly $1.5B of positions were liquidated, and BNB fell as much as 8%. Two more incidents followed, as an unidentified EU entity appears to have lost more than $106M from accounts at multiple centralized exchanges on Sunday, and Brazil's Mercado Bitcoin halted deposits and withdrawals on Monday after more than $40M was drained from its hot wallets across at least 10 chains, a loss it said it will absorb.

Tech stocks added to the pressure. Alphabet fell 12.6% on Thursday, its worst single-day drop since its 2004 listing, after missing revenue and earnings estimates as AI-related spending accelerated its cash burn, which revived concerns over debt-financed AI buildouts and weighed on the broader Nasdaq. The Magnificent 7 fell about 2.2% on the week for a third straight weekly decline, and the risk-off tone appears to have spilled over into crypto, where AI-linked tokens fell furthest.

Elsewhere, Wednesday's FOMC held rates at 3.75-4.00% in a 10-2 vote, with Governor Cook and Cleveland Fed President Hammack dissenting in favor of a hike. Fed Chair Warsh declined to offer forward guidance on the path of rates and announced the Fed will hold fewer rate-setting meetings starting next fall. Thursday's data ran hot, as Q3 GDP grew at its fastest pace in a year and September PCE inflation reached its highest since May, with core at 3.1%. The ECB held its deposit rate at 2.5% the same day, and on Friday the Bank of Japan held at 1.25% in an 8-1 vote, with Governor Ueda saying he will weigh a hike at every meeting, including the next one. BTC finished down ~4% at $77k, ETH ~2% lower, the alt basket down ~4%, gold ~2% lower, and the S&P 0.8% lower.

Market Pulse

With the aggravated selloff caused by numerous exploits, leverage gauges rose this week while flow gauges fell. Funding rose from +5.5% to +9.4% annualized, near the top of its one-year range, and open interest rose from 2.5% to 2.6% of total market cap, moving from the low range into the high range. Stablecoin Supply change fell further from -$2.2B to -$4.6B, a fourth straight week of net contraction that leaves it near its one-year low, and ETF flows turned negative again, falling from +$0.1B to -$0.3B. 33 of the top 100 altcoins beat Bitcoin, down from 45 the week prior, returning to the low range.

Chart of the Week: NYSE Owner ICE Backs Trade.xyz to Bring Hyperliquid Perps Onshore

Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the NYSE, signed a definitive agreement with Trade.xyz on Thursday to bring Trade.xyz's perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid onshore in the U.S., subject to regulatory approval. ICE will be the exclusive operator of the new market and build dedicated exchange and clearing infrastructure for it, while Trade.xyz will design the contracts across equities, indices, commodities, currencies, and crypto, with Hyperliquid supplying the underlying technology through its HIP-3 framework. ICE also announced that it would be taking a strategic stake in Trade.xyz. Trade.xyz now accounts for about a quarter of all Hyperliquid perp volume, up from under 4% in early January, after peaking near 40% in early August, while its markets have cleared more than $650B of volume in just over a year.

The growth in Trade.xyz’s share of Hyperliquid perp volume reflects demand for round-the-clock exposure to traditional assets while their home exchanges are closed, the same demand that let Trade.xyz’s EWZ perpetual price Brazil's election before Monday's open, as covered last week. However, Hyperliquid remains geofenced from U.S. users, and the onshore market still needs CFTC approval, with no launch date set.

Sector Breakdown

12 of 15 sectors closed red this week, as Perps led at +5.8% on HYPE (+9%), which rose after NYSE owner ICE agreed to bring Trade.xyz's Hyperliquid-based perpetuals onshore. The Perps sector is still down -6% on the month. DEX (+4.2%) followed on the same move, and Gaming (+2.5%) rose on BEAM (+41%). Privacy (-0.3%) held near flat on ZEC (-1%), and DeFi (-0.7%) held near flat despite HYPE (+9%).

AI fell furthest at -11.7% on NEAR (-13%), and DePIN (-9.5%) followed TAO (-11%). Social (-5.9%) tracked PUMP (-6%), CEX (-4.6%) fell with BNB (-6%) after the Binance hack, and NFT (-4.2%) carried RENDER (-12%). The rest of the board fell 1.2% to 3.8%, with Infra (-3.8%) and RWA (-1.2%) on LINK (-3%), Meme (-3.6%) on DOGE (-4%), L1 (-3.5%) on BTC (-4%), and L2 (-3.3%) on MNT (-7%).

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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