$BTC (-0,05 %) has barely budged for most of this week, showing remarkable discipline. Market participants remain in defensive positions, funding rates have fallen, and ahead of the U.S. elections, investors seem increasingly unwilling to take on additional risk. Nevertheless, $BTC (-0,05 %) held up better than large swaths of the crypto market and many assets that are more sensitive to market volatility. This speaks less to a renewed sense of optimism than to a market that is becoming increasingly selective about the risks it is willing to take.
One development this week deserves more attention than it has received so far: tradeXYZ and ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, plan to offer perpetual futures based on the $HYPE (+0,44 %)—subject to approval by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). For #hyperliquid this is a significant vote of confidence. The move suggests that the technology is outgrowing the experimental realm of the crypto world and finding its way into the infrastructure of regulated financial markets. This is precisely the convergence we expected with the continued development of tokenization and round-the-clock trading.
The market is waiting—for the elections, for the next inflation figure, for the Fed, and perhaps for someone else to blink first on the geopolitical front. #bitcoin It hasn’t broken out to the upside, but despite expectations of tighter interest rates, volatile stock markets, and heightened geopolitical risks, it hasn’t been ready to break out to the downside either.
(Text by CoinShares’ Head of Research, James Butterfill)
