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Bitcoin rises as China talks, Fed cut trigger risk appetite

Uptober is back on for bitcoin.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Bitcoin reclaimed $115,000 over the weekend and is up 1% in the past 24 hours as optimism over trade talks with China and the impending Fed rate cut decision on Wednesday are buoying market risk appetite.

Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, wrote in a note that the bitcoin-gold ratio is rising, a positive sign, and said that ETF rotation back into bitcoin would further solidify bitcoin’s trajectory. 

“Wed-Fri last week saw more than USD2bn leave US gold ETFs. It would be confirmation of a more positive bitcoin backdrop if we had half of that re-enter Bitcoin ETFs Mon-Wed this week,” he wrote.

According to Farzam Ehsani, cofounder and CEO of crypto exchange VALR, the next technical milestone to overcome sits at the $116,000 to $117,000 range, with potential upside targets in the $126,000 to $130,000 range by year-end. 

“However, without the broader participation of retail buyers and a resurgence in ETF inflows, the current rally may remain structurally dependent on whales and institutional desks — leaving it vulnerable to sudden profit-taking if the macro narrative falters,” he said.

Timothy Misir, head of research at Blockhead Research Network, echoed the sentiment, saying that while macro headlines did the heavy lifting, “the market’s reaction function is now very headline-dependent: good news sparks outsized squeezes; any backtracking could provoke sharp reversals.”

Misir said in a Monday note that a bull trigger would be sustained ETF inflows, while a bear trigger would be a reversal in US-China headlines or a hawkish Fed surprise. As for technical triggers, losing the $108,500 to $110,000 support band with widening liquidations would open a path to the next structural supports near $104,000 to $100,000.

Bitcoin ETFs registered $446.36 million in inflows last week, according to SoSoValue.

In other bitcoin news:

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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