Anthropic’s IPO Filing Revived the AI Trade, Sending the S&P 500 Up 0.7% and Chipmakers Up Close to 3%

In Today's Note

• Equities rose on Monday, S&P 500 +0.70%, Nasdaq-100 +1.09%, as Anthropic's IPO filing and Meta's plan to raise up to $97.5B revived the AI trade, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor index up close to 3% and Korea's Kospi up more than 3%, while BTC consolidated between $79K and $81K and ETH held around $2,300.
• Bitmine added 10,452 ETH to take its holdings to 6.05M ETH, while Strategy paused its BTC purchases after five consecutive weeks of buying and Hyperliquid plans to make Kraken parent Payward its first CFTC-regulated HIP-3 market operator.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

• The AI-trade recouped some of its losses over the past month after Anthropic PBC publicly filed for its long-awaited IPO yesterday, a landmark moment for the artificial-intelligence industry and an IPO that could help gauge how strong investor demand is for new equity tied to the AI trade.
• According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Anthropic, the firm behind Claude, expects to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT.

• Tech fundraising in general has been at the centre of headlines over the past 24 hours. Just two hours before Anthropic’s filing, Meta Platforms Inc. said it is looking to raise as much as $97.5B from selling common and preferred stock in one of the largest equity offerings in history.
• Additionally, Broadcom Inc. arranged a $63B deal to finance the purchase of chips and SpaceX signed a $40B equipment-finance lease deal.

• Together, that helped ease investor worries in risk-on US equity markets, with the S&P 500 halting back-to-back losses to end the day up 0.70%, while a number of the largest AI-chipmakers rallied.
• That sent the Philadelphia Semiconductor sector index up close to 3%, Additionally, the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 rose 1.09%.
• Anthropic’s IPO filing revived sentiment for the AI trade across Asia also, with shares of SK Hynix Inc climbing more than 4% and shares of Samsung Electronics Co. up close to 2%, that helped push Korea’s equity benchmark Kospi up more than 3%.
• Nonetheless, markets will still be keeping a close eye on earnings reports from major AI spenders including Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. later in the week.

• Moves in the crypto market were more muted, BTC continued to consolidate between $79K and $81K, with spot Bitcoin ETFs seeing inflows of $110.3M, while ETH remains compressed around $2,300. Spot Ethereum ETFs saw outflows of $88.6M in trading yesterday.
• In options markets, as has been the case for almost all of October, demand for downside protection trades at a premium.
• BTC’s 7-day 25-delta risk reversal trades at -3.1 vol points, a slight recovery from the mid-month low of -5.7 vol points, but still a sign of traders preferring put options over calls.
• ETH's options markets are more bearish, 7-day 25-delta put premium is currently at 5.4 vol points, while 7-day ATM vol is up from 42% to 53% since last Friday.

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto

• Bitmine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum treasury company, acquired another 10,452 ETH, bringing its holdings to 6,051,933 ETH, worth approximately $14.3B and representing 4.95% of Ethereum's circulating supply.
• The company has staked 5,227,037 ETH, roughly 86% of its holdings, generating projected annualized staking revenue of $318M, potentially rising to $368M if fully staked.
• Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee maintained that the "crypto bull market is underway," arguing that Ethereum's 13% decline from its recent peak compares favourably with a 20% drop in US semiconductor stocks over the same period.

• Strategy, the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder, paused its BTC purchases after five consecutive weeks of buying, leaving its treasury unchanged at 848,517 BTC, worth approximately $67.9B.
• Instead, the company repurchased 2.07M STRC preferred shares for $204.9M, using its cash reserves. The pause comes as MSCI considers excluding "non-operating" companies from its indexes, potentially affecting Strategy's access to capital for future Bitcoin acquisitions.

• Strive, a Bitcoin treasury company, purchased 6,182 BTC for approximately $511M between October 17 and 23, increasing its total holdings to 43,000 BTC and becoming the fourth-largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder.
• The company now trails Strategy's 848,517 BTC, Metaplanet's 44,000 BTC and Twenty One's 43,514 BTC.
• Strive also established a $1B preferred stock offering program and raised approximately $630M through the sale of 7M SATS preferred shares carrying a 15% annual dividend, while reporting $504.4M in cash and 505,000 Strategy STRC shares valued at $50.2M.

• Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives trading platform, plans to make Payward, Kraken's parent company, its first CFTC-regulated HIP-3 market operator, potentially enabling US traders to access perpetual futures through permissioned markets with onchain access controls.
• Payward's CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, Bitnomial, would deploy, clear and settle the contracts, while NinjaTrader Clearing would manage customer accounts, although the integration remains in testing and requires regulatory approval.

• BlackRock, a global asset manager, has partnered with SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial services group, and Startale, a blockchain infrastructure company, to explore integrating tokenized money market funds with JPYSC, SBI's Japanese yen-backed stablecoin.
• The collaboration will assess blockchain infrastructure, distribution models and regulatory requirements, potentially enabling tokenized investment funds and yen-denominated stablecoins to operate within connected financial systems.

• Aviva Investors, the asset management arm of UK insurer Aviva, has partnered with Ripple to launch a tokenized share class of its £22B ($29.4B) Sterling Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, investing £50M ($66.7M) in the new offering.
• The fund continues to operate offchain while investors' ownership is recorded onchain, bringing Aviva's total investment across its two tokenized money market fund offerings to more than £86M ($114.8M).

• CoinDCX, an Indian cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed that attackers stole 15.99M USDT through the same Tron-based wallets compromised during its earlier $44M hack in July 2025.
• An automated wallet-sweeping system had stopped transferring incoming deposits from old addresses to the exchange's active wallets, leaving funds accessible to attackers who transferred approximately 15.99M USDT and 5,783.81 TRX to a single Tron address before routing the proceeds through Binance, OKX and Gate deposit addresses.
• CEO Sumit Gupta initially called the incident a "false alarm," but CoinDCX subsequently acknowledged the theft, confirmed it would absorb the $16M loss, and stated that customer balances and normal trading operations remained unaffected.

This Week's Calendar

Charts of the Day

Figure 1. Block Scholes BTC Risk-Appetite Index (white, left-hand axis) and BTC spot price (orange, right-hand axis).

Figure 2. Block Scholes ETH Risk-Appetite Index (white, left-hand axis) and ETH spot price (purple, right-hand axis).

Figure 3. BTC at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 4. ETH at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 5. BTC 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 6. ETH 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Block Scholes is an FCA-regulated institutional crypto derivatives analytics platform. Live data, IV surfaces, and backtesting available via blockscholes.com.

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