Performances are scattered this week. The Bitcoin price performance is flat. Ether is quoting at 2,337 US dollars, losing nearly 1.6%.
Solana’s SOL is up nearly 3%, and XRP is down nearly 3.5%. Toncoin is the best performer in the top 10: gaining more than 10%. Other notable performances this week:
AAVE’s price is at 151 US dollars. It reached this week the highest level since May 2022. Its price is 60% in one month and almost tripled in 1 year.
This graph shows the year-to-date performance of AAVE against major cryptocurrencies.
AAVE is up 38% year-to-date, which makes it one of the best performers, outperforming Bitcoin, SOL and Ether. We can also see on this graph that Ether went into negative territory this week, on September 6th.
The ETF flow has been disappointing, missing all expectations. We have net outflows of half a billion since inception. But it is still too early to determine whether the endeavor is a complete failure.
More recently, DV chain pointed out that Ether’s performance would be more linked to Trump’s election than its counterparts. It’s become a “Trump Trade”. In other words, à trump win should completely relieve Ethereum from any regulatory risk in the US, and boost institutional adoption.
Looking at Polymarket, we can see that Harris’ odds to win the election are between 49.4 and 49.5. Donal Trump’s odds are now between 48.9 and 49. Trump’s chance to win the election lost nearly 3 points overnight. So the overnight move aligns with the “Trump trade” theory.
Regarding Polymarket, it is one of the most successful projects on Polygon, and Decrypt published an article 3 days ago laying out the reasons why the platform could launch and airdrop a token soon. This kind of token generation event is used to reward users. Polymaket raised 70 million US dollars in May, but it might need more funding for growth.
Since the raise in May, we can see here the project’s exponential growth, with a total value locked that is now close to 120 million US dollars. The rumor would have speculators use the platform just to profit from a potential airdrop.
So the summer is over, we are now in September, which is statistically the worst month of the year for the crypto market. But all eyes are of course on the US macro data. As mentioned in previous weeks, employment figures are blowing hot and cold on financial markets.
On Friday, the nonfarm payrolls for the month of August came out lower than expected. This is an indicator of job creation: 142,000 jobs were created in August against an expectation at 164,000. The unemployment rate is slightly down at 4.2%, against 4.3% in July. Finally the average hourly earnings are better: this is the price of labor.
So numbers were clearly mitigated, but the labor market slowdown is under control.
Nevertheless, the uncertainty drove the S&P 500 down on Friday: the index lost nearly 1.6%. Most major cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Solana, Ether also reached a 30-day low that day. Bitcoin traded at 52,550 US dollars on Binance.
After this call, an hour from now, we’re having the CPI release for the month of august. The market is expecting a drop from 2.9% to 2.5%, very well on target.
If this drop is realized, combined with the bad nonfarm payroll metric, the market would expect an interest rate cut of 50bps on Wednesday next week with higher probability. The rate cut expectation has been swinging between 25 and 50ps.
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