Bitcoin Climbs Past $64K as Oil Rally Eases and US-Iran Talks Continue

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In Today's Note

• Risk sentiment bounced higher as the oil rally eased and the US and Iran signalled they would continue peace talks. The Nasdaq-100 rose 1.62%, BTC pushed past $64K and ETH held just below $1,800.
• UK Labour MPs proposed banning political donations paid in crypto, and North Carolina named the CFTC sole regulator of prediction markets. Polymarket filed with the NFA to re-enter the US, and the Ethereum Foundation began running AI agents to find protocol bugs.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

• Risk sentiment bounced higher over the past 24 hours as the rally in oil prices eased slightly and a US official reported that Washington and Tehran are still committed to peace talks.
• BTC moved up past $64K dragging the rest of the crypto market with it, with ETH currently trading just below $1,800.
• On Wall Street, the Nasdaq-100 extended its rebound closing up 1.62%, while the S&P 500 which fell in the mid-week session rose 0.81%.
• Semiconductor and chipmaker stocks led the gains, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gaining 3.06%, while big names such as AMD, Micron, Broadcom and Intel all rallied.
• Micron Technology announced plans to accelerate its planned spending on semiconductor fabrication plants and other technology investments to more than $250B through 2035, in order to meet surging demand for memory amidst the artificial-intelligence boom.
• Brent crude price fell from $80 per barrel and currently trades around $76.
• Sentiment in BTC perp markets is supportive of the move higher in spot price. 8-hour funding rates rose to 0.015%, their highest level since May 29, 2026, indicating some preference for leveraged upside exposure.
• In options markets, volatility smiles remain skewed towards put options, with 25-delta 7-day skew at -5% for BTC and -3% for ETH, though that marks a strong turnaround from the -18-19% skew seen in late June.
• Citing an American official, Bloomberg reported that the US and Iran aim to continue peace talks, despite two days of conflict and President Trump declaring the ceasefire “over”.
• The official said that the US is still committed to finding a diplomatic solution with Iran and described the ongoing discussions as technical talks.
• Earlier in the week the US launched strikes on Iranian military targets in retaliation to Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran then responded back by hitting US military bases in the region, including in Kuwait and Bahrain.
• NY Fed President John Williams said yesterday that he does not expect a sustained increase in energy prices, even as US-Iran hostilities have resumed.
• Speaking at a conference, Williams claimed "The markets still expect oil prices to come down over the next six to 12 months. I think that's a pretty reasonable baseline. I still feel, kind of, the fundamentals are that energy prices are likely to be around their peak and then to come down over time."
• Williams also said that the meeting minutes from the June FOMC meeting revealed the “richness” of possible paths ahead depending on how entrenched inflation is in the US economy, "There are certain parts of the inflation outlook that are probably maybe a little bit more benign, say on the tariffs, maybe on the energy prices, depending how that plays out” but there are "other scenarios where inflation is more persistent and stays higher, which would ... call for tighter monetary policy.”
• One of the main drivers of inflation the NY Fed President said he is focused on is AI-driven demand.
• According to Williams, investment tied towards artificial intelligence infrastructure could bring lower price pressures in the future, but for now, it is helping fuel inflation that is already above target. If that stays persistent, it could force the Fed into raising interest rates.
• Williams said, "If this creates a sustained impulse to demand relative to supply in the inflation ... I do think that's the kind of situation where you don't look through this. You basically say you need to have a monetary policy positioned ... to offset the inflationary impulse from that."

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto

• UK Labour MPs have proposed amendments to the Representation of the People Bill that would permanently ban political parties and candidates from accepting crypto-asset donations.
• The amendments, led by Liam Byrne, a Labour MP and former Treasury minister, are aimed at reducing the risk of anonymous or impermissible donations and are set to be considered as the bill reaches its report stage in the House of Commons next Tuesday.
• The push follows scrutiny of Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader and former MP for Clacton, over crypto-linked donations, including a reported £5M gift from Thailand-based British crypto investor Christopher Harborne that Farage says was not political.
• North Carolina has enacted legislation recognizing the CFTC, the federal commodities regulator, as having exclusive federal authority over prediction markets registered under the Commodity Exchange Act.
• The law allows CFTC-registered platforms such as Kalshi, a federally regulated prediction market exchange, and Polymarket, a crypto prediction market platform, to operate lawfully in North Carolina while several other states continue trying to regulate sports-event contracts under gambling laws.
• The bill also imposes a 6% tax on prediction market platforms’ net trading fee revenue from North Carolina residents starting Jan. 1, 2027, compared with the state’s higher 23% tax on sports betting operators’ gross wagering revenue.
• Polymarket has filed with the National Futures Association, the U.S. derivatives industry’s self-regulatory body, to offer regulated margin trading in the U.S.
• The filings were submitted through PM Derivatives LLC, tied to Polymarket affiliate Coming Home GBA LLC, but the platform would still need CFTC approval before offering leveraged event trading to U.S. users.
• Ethereum Foundation said its Protocol Security team is running coordinated AI agents against real Ethereum-related codebases to find vulnerabilities.
• The team said the main challenge is not generating bug reports but sorting and prioritising them, because AI agents often produce confident-looking false positives, duplicates or unreachable attack paths that only count if they can be reproduced against real code.
• Ethereum Foundation said every candidate finding must include a reachable target, clear invariant, attack mechanism and self-contained reproducer, with humans making the final call on whether a bug is real, already known or worth disclosing.

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