GSR Weekly - September 8, 2026

Overview

• BTC finished the week flat at $79k after a round trip through $81k, as Thursday's relief rally was reversed by Friday's blowout jobs report, and alts gained ~5% with 83 of the top 100 beating Bitcoin.
• August payrolls came in at 162k against a 53k consensus, pushing CME FedWatch odds of a hike at next week's FOMC to 58%.
• The Market Pulse board cooled as funding fell from +7.3% to +2.3% annualized after two rounds of liquidations, while ETF flows (+$1.2B) and stablecoin issuance (+$1.4B) held near one-year highs.
• Robinhood Chain generated $5.44M in revenue on Thursday, roughly $2.0B annualized against Robinhood's $1.31B in total Q2 net revenue.
• All eyes are on Friday's CPI, the last inflation gauge before the September 15-16 FOMC, with the Treasury's enlarged long-end buybacks starting Wednesday and PPI and the ECB decision on Thursday.

The Week in Review

The week ended close to where it started, with the sharp moves in between driven by rate expectations. BTC and ETH drifted lower on Wednesday before Thursday's rally, when market-implied odds of a September hike fell from 67% on Wednesday to around 50% as Treasury yields dropped and the dollar weakened against a stronger yen, sending BTC up more than 5% to $81k and liquidating roughly $140M in shorts within an hour. Friday's jobs report reversed the surge however, as payrolls rose 162k against a 53k consensus with unemployment steady at 4.1%, CME FedWatch odds of a hike at the September 15-16 meeting rose to 58%, the dollar rebounded, and BTC fell back below $80k with roughly $200M in longs liquidated. Altcoins rallied through the weekend while the majors sat still. BTC and ETH finished the week roughly flat, alts are up ~5%, gold ~1% higher, and the S&P modestly above as well. 

 

Market Pulse

Funding fell from +7.3% to +2.3% annualized, back to neutral, as Thursday's short squeeze and Friday's long liquidations cleared leveraged positioning on both sides, while open interest held at 2.6% of total market cap. ETF flows came in at +$1.2B, a third consecutive positive week, and stablecoin issuance rose from +$1.1B to +$1.4B. Onchain yield ticked up from 3.3% to 3.6% after three weeks unchanged. Breadth flipped from one extreme to the other, with 83 of the top 100 altcoins beating Bitcoin. After two weeks in which majors led altcoins, fueled in part by ETF inflows, the script flipped this week as capital rotated into altcoins.

 

Chart of the Week: Robinhood Chain Goes Vertical

Robinhood Chain went from $180k in daily revenue on August 27 to $5.44M last Thursday, a 30x move in a week that put it above Solana, Ethereum, and Tron on DefiLlama's daily revenue leaderboard. If annualized, Thursday's figure would mean roughly $2.0B in added revenue for Robinhood. For scale, Robinhood reported $4.47B in total net revenue in 2025, with crypto contributing roughly $901M. It has been repeatedly highlighted that Robinhood Chain revenue, if sustained for a year, would be nearly four times its equities trading revenue, and close to 40% of the entire company's run rate. While some of the revenue is shared and incentivized, as Arbitrum takes 10% of net sequencer revenue under its Orbit program (roughly $377k on September 1 alone), and Robinhood is sponsoring gas for Robinhood Wallet users for 90 days, the company’s Q3 earnings in late October may give us the first insight into how much of the revenue they are actually capturing. Additionally, the memecoin volume paired against tokenized equities is likely unsustainable, as we’ve already seen a slight cooling in the record daily volumes we covered last week. 

Sector Breakdown

All 15 sectors closed green this week: privacy led again at +23.8% as ZEC (+36%) crossed $1,000 roughly two weeks after Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF on NYSE Arca, with $34.5M in shorts liquidated on the way through and the sector now up +92% on the month. L2 rose +15.3% on ARB (+57%), which rallied on Arbitrum's 10% share of Robinhood Chain sequencer revenue, and DEX (+6.4%) rode UNI (+21%) as Uniswap's weekly burn rose 65% to $4.9M.

At the bottom, L1 (+0.9%) lagged as BTC sat flat while BNB (+9%) did the work, and Social (+2.0%) barely participated with PUMP (-2%) still digesting its August run. Perps (+3.3%) and DeFi (+3.2%) were held back by HYPE, which closed the week flat through Sunday's roughly $800M Core Contributors unlock, even as LIT (+30%) extended Lighter's run to +106% on the month. Infra (+10.5%), DePIN (+9.4%), and CEX (+7.8%) filled out the middle of the board on LINK (+9%), TAO (+12%), and BNB.

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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