Last week in the news
Increased geopolitical tensions in the Middle-East impact some volatility on financial markets, as they represent concerning events for investors around the globe. The US equity markets finished the week in green supported by the US economic data. Treasuries have eased due to the same reason, while the crypto market continues with its side trading. Bitcoin ended the week above 26K, while Ether is still holding above 1.5K.
The FOMC meeting Minutes were released during the previous week. Question whether interest rates should be further increased was sort of conflicting for FOMC members, but the unique opinion was that they should stay elevated until Fed officials are convinced that the inflation is clearly on its way to reach 2%. The FOMC members also noted the resiliency of the US economy, still, citing several risks, including the slowdown in growth and potential short-time inflation reversal.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held a meeting during the previous week in Morocco. Few conclusions from this meeting were related to the world economic outlook, which has been revised from 3.5% to 3% for this year and 2.9% for 2024. They are also expecting for global inflation to slow down to 5.8%, where central bankers around the world expressed readiness to end further increase of their reference interest rates. As the main challenges for global growth in the coming year, the IMF and the WB officials see higher policy rates, strong US dollar and geopolitical issues.
The car company Ferrari announced last week that it will start accepting crypto currencies from its customers for luxury car payments. This service will initially be available for clients in the US, but the plan is to extend this service also to EU clients. The rationale for such a decision, Ferrari officials are noting that a significant number of their clients have invested into crypto currencies, and the company is willing to provide them an option to purchase their favorite cars through payments in crypto currencies. At the initial stage, Ferrari will accept bitcoin, ether and USDC, and will not charge any additional fees for payments in crypto currencies. Through the company Bitpay, coins will immediately be transferred into traditional currency, in which way, Ferrari will not carry any risk originating from coins volatility.
The crypto market nervousness regarding the first BTC ETF is heating up. News regarding SEC moves around potential approval or disapproval of fillings for both BTC and ETH ETF funds is closely watched by the market, and impact significantly BTC`s price. During the previous week, BTC sharply reacted to news that the SEC will not react to the court's reversal of SEC`s decision by which SEC did not approve company Grayscale to convert its trust funds into an exchange traded fund, as reported by the Condesk. The deadline for SEC`s appeal was until the end of Friday.
Crypto market cap
The latest information provided by the Fed officials from September`s FOMC meeting seems finally fully priced by financial markets. At the same time, the released inflation rate for the US for September showed modest movement to the upside of 0.1% on a yearly basis, to the level of 3.7%. While the US equity market showed some positive sentiment during the previous week, and Treasuries relaxed yields, still, the crypto market remained on its old course of side trading. What the market is expecting for some time is the resolution of several fillings for the first spot BTC exchange traded fund, where even big players like BlackRock filed for. The time for SEC`s response was postponed till the end of October, which should occur within the next week or two. Until its final resolution, the crypto market might continue with side trading. Total crypto market capitalization decreased by $ 41B during the previous week, which is a total drop of 3.8%. Daily trading volumes remained relatively flat compared to the week before, moving around $ 43B on a daily basis. Total crypto market capitalization increase since the beginning of this year currently stands at 36%, where it has added total 275B to the market cap.
Major coins on the market were the ones that made a negative impact of $ 41B drop in total market capitalization, although the majority of altcoins finished the week in red. Bitcoin made a significant drop of 21B or 3.85% of its value compared to the end of the previous week. ETH was following BTC on its negative path with a loss of $ 10B or 5.05% in value. XRP was another major coin which made a higher loss in value of almost $ 2B or 6.8% in value on a weekly basis. BNB made a lower loss of 0.89B or 2.7% of its value. Among altcoins with a higher loss in relative terms were Polygon, which dropped by 8.7%, Polkadot was down by almost 8%, Bitcoin Cash was down by 6.2% and ZCash dropped by 6.8%. As for coins in circulation, there have been changes with several coins which added around 0.1%, except for Filecoin, which added 0.6% of new coins in circulation, while Solana added 0.5% of new coins. Algorand and Polkadot increased their circulating coins by 0.2% both.
Crypto futures market
Crypto futures for both BTC and ETH were following developments on the spot market during the previous week, dragging prices of both long and short futures further to the downside.
BTC short term futures ended the week around 4% lower from the week before, with December 2023 ending the week at level of $27.435 or 3.72% lower from the week before. Longer term futures were last traded around 3% lower. Futures maturing in December 2024 were traded again a bit below 30K for the first time after two weeks holding above 30K. December 2024 ended the week at a price of $29.295 or 2.95% lower from the week before.
ETH futures were also trading in red compared to the week before, but with some interesting developments. Namely, futures from October till December this year ended the week at the same price of $1.555. Never before had there been such developments on the ETH futures market, which points to investors' current insecurity regarding the future course of ETH`s price. At the same time, almost all maturities were traded between 5% to 6% lower from the week before. Futures maturing in December next year ended the week below 1.7K level, at price $1.642 or 5.41% lower from the week before.