Weekly Market Insights: US Election: Risk Aversion or Seeking Fortune in Danger

Hot News

• Last week, the price of Bitcoin surpassed $73,500, and the market share reached more than 60%, the highest level since March 2021. Bitcoin ETFs had a net inflow of $5.348 billion in October, just $685 million lower than the record in February. Market sentiment seems to be reflecting Trump's possible victory in the upcoming election. However, as uncertainty in swing states increases, the probability of Trump's victory has dropped from 67% to 54%. Last week, Bitcoin's weekly gains narrowed to 1.17%.

Macro Outlook

• The annual growth rate of US GDP in the third quarter was 2.8%, lower than the market expectation of 3%. The ISM manufacturing PMI in October fell to 46.5, lower than the forecast of 47.6.
• The core PCE price index rose 0.3% in September, slightly higher than the market expectation of 0.2%. The overall PCE price index rose 2.1% year-on-year in September, in line with market expectations.
• Due to the Boeing strike and the impact of hurricanes, non-farm payrolls increased by 12,000 in October, which was far below the forecast of 113,000 increase in employment. The unemployment rate remained at 4.1% in October, the same as in September, in line with market expectations.

The upcoming economic calendar includes:

• Tuesday, November 5, 11:00 pm: US October ISM Services PMI
• Tuesday-Wednesday: US presidential election
• Friday, November 8 3:00 AM: FOMC meeting
• Friday, November 8, 11:00 PM: Preliminary November U-M Consumer Confidence Index

Cryptocurrency Market Quick Facts

• Microstrategy announced that it will launch a $42 billion capital plan to purchase Bitcoin.
• Mt Gox moved 500 BTC to an unknown address on November 1.
• BIS launched Project Mandala, run by BISIH, RBA, BOK, BNM and MAS, to explore the feasibility of encoding jurisdiction-specific policies and regulatory requirements to address cross-border use cases such as foreign direct investment, lending and payments.
• Switzerland’s largest bank, UBS, plans to launch the UBS USD Money Market Investment Fund Token (uMINT) on Ethereum.
• Franklin Templeton’s tokenized fund platform BENJI is live on the Base network.
• Coinbase has partnered with Visa to enable real-time deposits of funds to eligible Visa debit cards.
• American convenience store chain Sheetz announced that it will accept BTC, ETH, LTC and USDC as payment methods.
• IMX received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging securities violations.
• 21Shares has submitted an ETF application for 21Shares Core XRP TRUST to the SEC.
• Canary Capital submitted an application for a Solana ETF.

Layer 1 and Layer 2 Public Chains

• During Gateway 2024, TON announced the launch of the Tether Dirham stablecoin on TON and the launch of trustless wrapped Bitcoin tgBTC on the testnet, as well as new mini-app features, a social DAO (new governance model), and a Swiss compliant bank account through SafePal.
• After Calvin Liu resigned as chief strategy officer of the Eigen Foundation in September, Ethereum researchers Dankard Feist and Justin Drake announced they were giving up their advisory positions.
• Base launched Based Agent, enabling developers to build AI agents with autonomous on-chain transaction capabilities. In addition, Base’s fault proofs are now live on the mainnet.
• Alchemy Pay announced plans to launch a layer network, Alchemy Chain, using the SVM architecture to better support its payment business operations.
• Bitcoin's second-layer network Build-on-Bob announced that it would join OP Superchain. Swell also announced that it would join Superchain.
• Stacks’ Nakamoto upgrade finally goes live, matching Bitcoin’s finality and laying the foundation for sBTC.
• Eclipse has launched a unified ETH re-collateralization token, tETH. In addition, Orca is now live on Eclipse.
• Starknet has launched its official bridge, StarkGate v2.0 Beta, which is compatible with EVM wallets.
• Astrio, a decentralized ordering layer, has launched its mainnet.
• Native USDT is officially launched on the Aptos mainnet.

Dapps

• Fluid launched Fluid DEX, which enables users to use trading liquidity for lending and borrowing, and use it as debt. This feature enables lenders to earn LP rewards on top of lending rewards, while borrowers can enjoy borrowing discounts from the yield generated by LP.
• EtherVista launched EtherFun (its version of Pump.fun) with a bonding curve target of 1.5 ETH. After the curve is exited, the liquidity pool will be formed on EtherVista and permanently locked. The initial 2% transaction fee will be used to buy back and destroy VISTA. After the curve is exited, the creator will receive 2% of the pool reward and $5 per transaction.
• WalletConnect has launched an incentive program to reward node operators, wallets, and SDKs, and issue WCT, which is WalletConnect’s native token used to participate in governance, node staking, and share part of the protocol fees in the future.
• Chainlink launched data streaming on Solana. Chainlink also introduced the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), a more modular architecture that allows dapps to integrate Chainlink without having to use Chainlink specific code in their dapps.
• World Liberty Finance, which is reportedly planning to launch its own version of a stablecoin, has scaled back its funding target from $300 million to $30 million.
• Ondo Finance announced a partnership with Wellington Management to provide intraday redemption services for tokenized treasury bond funds.
• io.net announced a partnership with GPU tokenization protocol GAIB, which became io.net’s GPU supplier.
• Synthetix launches zero-interest, multi-collateral asset USDx on Arbitrum’s Kwenta.
• Jito launched its (re)collateralized deposits and has since reached its deposit cap of $25 million.
• The first phase of the Exilir mainnet is now live, run by a group of institutional validators.
• Nillion, a “blind” computing protocol, has raised $50 million, led by Hack VC.
• Virtual Protocol launched Fun.Virtual, an AI agent startup platform on Base.

Governance/Project Updates

• Peaq Network, a layer 1 network focused on DePIN, is expected to launch on November 12.
• Maple announced that the SYRUP token will be launched on November 13. SYRUP will be convertible with MPL at a 1:1 ratio and will accrue fee income generated from Maple and Syrup protocols.
• HKEX is expected to launch the HKEX Virtual Asset Index Series on November 15, providing reference prices for BTC and ETH, calculated by CCData (owned by CoinDesk).
• LFJ announced that Token Mill (its Pump.fun version) will be launched soon.
• Unichain has announced that it will soon launch its validation network.
• Chainlink announced that it will integrate payment abstraction into CCIP and data flow to simplify the revenue generated by products and convert it into LINK to repay service providers. Payment abstraction will undergo a competitive audit on December 6.
• Pudgy Penguins and Mythical Games, a layer one network focused on gaming on Polkadot, announced that they will launch a mobile battle royale game called Pudgy Party in 2025.

Token Unlock

• APT tokens will be unlocked on November 12th, accounting for 2.19% of the total token supply.
• STRK tokens will be unlocked on November 15th, representing 3.02% of the total token supply.
• CYBER tokens will be unlocked on November 15th, representing 14.2% of the total token supply.
• ARB tokens will be unlocked on November 16th, accounting for 2.32% of the total token supply.
• APE tokens will be unlocked on November 17th, accounting for 2.09% of the total token supply.
• MERL tokens will unlock on November 19th, representing 5.76% of the total token supply.
• WELL tokens will be unlocked on November 23rd, accounting for 1.25% of the total token supply.
• IMX tokens will be unlocked on November 29th, representing 1.46% of the total token supply.
• OP tokens will be unlocked on November 30th, representing 2.56% of the total token supply.