Welcome to the institutional newsletter, crypto long and short. This week:
- Coindesk Indeks’ Andy Baehr provides a “vibe check,” which tells the story of two markets – the fast money and the slow money.
- Coindesk’s Sam Ewen said it’s no surprise that Internet-native communities want native Internet currencies, and that’s why stablecoins are the logical bridge. .
- In “Chart of the Week,” we examine Athena’s USDE collapse and what caused the decline.
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Check out the vibe
Fast money, slow money
– Neither Andy Baehr, CFA, Head of product and research, Coindesk indexes
The fast money has kept its distance from him lately. Two months ago on a Sunday afternoon eastern time, a whale dumped 24,000 bitcoins in thin liquidity, screwing up the market and sending prices lower. The all-time high of $4,955 is only hours away. The broad six-month rally that pushed the Coindesk 20 Index to its own all-time high of 4,493 has ended. Sol tried to carry the baton with another leg, but the market did not comply.
The Fed’s September 17 rate cut – a quarter point and two more signed – failed to reignite momentum. Geopolitical tensions and tariffs have weighed heavily on risk appetite. DATs corrected from high sugar levels. When Bitcoin logged a new all-time high in early October, the coast looked clear. Then came October 10: President Trump’s announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese imports triggered the worst liquidation event in crypto history. Questions about market structure and destruction are growing louder. Folks ai’d”Auto deleveraging. “The continued government shutdown didn’t help the mood, even though gold, which has defied gravity all year, fell 5.7% from its peak last week, the biggest one-day drop in more than 10 years. My YouTube feed showed Moses the jeweler taking an iced-out audemars piguet to the melter, harvesting gold. If that’s not a peak, what is?
Top names and benchmark indices have had a rough ride in the last two months
Source: Coindesk indexes
The slow moneyhowever, did not stop.
The M&A keeps rolling: Coinbase acquired Echo for $375 million. Falconx bought 21shares. Ripple has completed a $1.25 billion acquisition of the hidden road, rebranding it Ripple Prime.
Regulation Advanced: The SEC approved the Generic listing standards on September 17, cutting Crypto ETF review times from 240 days to 75. The SEC also approved GDLC, the first crypto ETF in the US to track a market index, Coindesk 5.
Accelerating integration: JPMorgan will accept bitcoin and ether as collateral for institutional loans. Jamie Dimon’s “Pet Rock” has now backed a loan from the world’s largest bank.
The asset class continues to build, consolidate and mature – even as prices test faith. Today, Bitcoin sits where it was two months ago, before the whale blew up. ETH and SOL have regained key levels and have room to run. Fast money may come back, but slow money is not left behind.
Expert views
StableCoins and Internet-native currency
– Neither Sam OwenHead of Social Media, Multimedia and Media Innovation, Coindesk
Vice is 31 years old.
Sims is 25.
Facebook is 21.
Roblox is 19.
Minecraft is 16.
Instagram is 15.
All but two of those existed before Bitcoin.
The rise of crypto didn’t just create a new form of money – it came of age alongside an entire generation that grew up living within digital economies. Social media players and participants – the true internet generation – built, exchanged, collected and socialized in virtual worlds long before “Web3” had a name. Now they are mature with spending power, an investment thesis and a deep intuition for how value moves online.
It’s no wonder that Internet-native communities want native currency. StableCoins are the logical bridge – the technology best positioned to capture this structure and behavior.
If you were 30 in the year 2000, typing your credit card into a website felt risky. Now, it’s over $16 billion is spent every day on e-commerce. Trust develops with time and experience. The same will happen with digital currency. Age Matters – and younger consumers, entrepreneurs and investors are native to digital value.
Now zoom out. Between 75-888% of the world still falls under the so-called Global South: Those who live outside the first world, called ‘western’ countries. Places where Traditional banking infrastructure is behind the connection. An example is Sub-Saharan Africa where, as recently as chainylsis reported” Combine the need with a population that is becoming more digitally fluent by the day and the transfer of money at the speed of light, and the stablecoin thesis is impossible to ignore.
In the past month, I’ve been on the ground in Rio, Seoul and Singapore. Three wildly different cities—yet the same conversation is everywhere: StableCoins and cross-border payments.
Make no mistake: the digitization of money is accelerating, and the traditional gatekeepers have officially taken notice. Evolve – or be disrupted. Leading that disruption? Blockchain and StableCoins.
Chart of the week
Let’s look at Athena’s USDE, which recently dropped from $14 billion to $10 billion in the past 30 days. This decline stems directly from the compression in the USDE yield, driven by BTC and ETH’s perpetual funding rates. The blended rate recently dipped into negative territory on several occasions but has now recovered to a more favorable 2-4% range. This major funding recovery will quickly restore USDE’s yield proposition, thereby encouraging capital to flow back into StableCoin and reversing the recent downward trend in its market capitalization.
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