Crypto Wobbles Amidst Strong GDP Data

Daily Updates:

• Chainlink’s native LINK token and Pyth Network’s PYTH token surged yesterday amidst news that the US Department of Commerce had begun to distribute macroeconomic data on public blockchains — another sign of Trump’s administration championing the crypto industry. 
• Both Chainlink and Pyth are decentralised oracles networks designed to bring real-world data on-chain. 

• According to a blog from Chainlink, macro data such as GDP and PCE inflation will be delivered on-chain via Chainlink Data Feeds which “unlocks innovative use cases for blockchain markets, such as automated trading strategies, increased composability of tokenized assets, the issuance of new types of digital assets, inflation-linked products, perpetual futures markets, real-time prediction markets for crowdsourced intelligence, transparent dashboards powered by immutable data, and DeFi protocol risk management based on macroeconomic factors.”
• Initially, the data will be made available on ten different blockchains, including Ethereum and a number of its layer 2 blockchains such as Arbitrum and Base. 
• Separately, Pyth Network announced that through its collaboration with the Department of Commerce, it will “initially offer quarterly releases of the GDP going back 5 years, and the Pyth Contributors anticipate expanding this initiative to support a broader range of economic datasets.” 

• While LINK’s token surged from just under $24 to $25.8, a 7.7% gain within an hour of the announcement, the PYTH token made a significantly stronger move. It initially rose from $0.12 to $0.18, an over 50% surge in under an hour, massively outperforming the gains in LINK. However, while LINK sold off following its rally along with the rest of the crypto market, PYTH continued to trade higher, eventually touching $0.24 — bringing its 24 hour performance to 75%. 

• The broader crypto market struggled once more yesterday and into today. We covered BTC’s failure to recover back to its pre-Jackson Hole levels earlier in the week. Yesterday it was able to reclaim the $112K level it was trading at before Powell’s speech, however failed to hold at that level for long and has since dropped back to $110K.
• ETH has fallen nearly 5% in the last 24 hours too, mirroring a similar move in BTC and dropping from $4.6K to slightly below $4.4K currently. 
• Indeed, traders in perpetual futures appear to be expecting further bearish price action in ETH. 8-hourly funding rates fell to -0.02% earlier today — the lowest level of funding rates since Apr 10, 2025, only a day after ETH fell to its lowest level all year amidst President Trump’s reciprocal tariff announcement. 
• Spot Ethereum ETFs are, in any case, continuing to ‘buy the dip’. Yesterday the ETF products purchased $39.1M tokens, and while that is far lower than some of the figures recorded earlier this month (for example the $1.01B purchased on Aug 11, 2025), it marks the sixth consecutive day of inflows. 
• BTC Spot ETFs reversed a recent trend of underperformance relative to the ETH ETFs, purchasing $178.9M worth of bitcoins yesterday — the fourth straight day of inflows. 

• The term structure of volatility for ETH is now normalising, after a number of inversions and compressions earlier in August. Options markets are now also pricing in similar downside expectations as traders in perpetual futures are. The 25-delta put-call skews for options maturing in less than 30 days are all slightly skewed towards OTM puts, with 14 day options the most bearish (put-call skew of -3.6%). That marks a stark turnaround from yesterday afternoon when calls traded with a 2 vol point premium over puts. 

• On Wall St, US equities rose to new all-time highs, with the S&P 500 closing 0.32% higher and above 6,500. That was partly driven by a stronger than expected revision to Q2 GDP in the US. 
• Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, GDP, or the total value of goods and services produced by the US economy in Q2, increased at an annualised pace of 3.3% — exceeding the initial 3.0% estimate. 
• That was driven by an increase in business investment which expanded at a 5.7% pace vs the initially reported 1.9%, and overall the report marks a turnaround from the contraction in GDP in Q1 this year — which was the first quarterly contraction in GDP since 2022. Consumer spending, which makes up ⅔ of the US economy, advanced at a pace of 1.6% annualised, also above the initially reported 1.4%.  

• Bitcoin mining company, American Bitcoin, backed by Donald Trump’s sons, has secured investors for a merger with publicly traded Gryphon Digital Mining that will enable it to begin trading on Nasdaq. 
• Post-merger, the new entity is proposed to start trading in early September. Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Hut 8 will control 98% of the new entity, which will trade under the ticker ABTC.

• 21Shares has filed to launch a spot SEI ETF with the SEC, adding to the similar SEI ETF filing from Canary Capital in April. The proposed fund will include staking if permitted.

• Medical device and pharmaceutical packaging company, Sharps Technology has closed a private placement of stock and warrants raising over $400M which will be used to create a Solana based digital asset treasury strategy while also allocating capital to working needs and corporate purposes. 
• Sharps Technology has signed a non-binding letter of intent with the Solana Foundation to purchase $50M worth of SOL at a 15% discount relative to the 30-day time-weighted average price at the time of purchase.
• There is the possibility that Sharps Technology can receive a further $600M, making the total possible funding $1B, if investors choose to exercise their warrants in future which gives them the right to buy more shares at $6.50.

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