The CFTC Approved Coinbase to Clear Fully Collateralised Futures, Options and Swaps Through Its Own Clearinghouse

In Today's Note

• The Conference Board's US consumer confidence index fell 6.7 points to 81.9 in September, its lowest since 2014, while job openings dropped by 256,000 to a five-month low of 7.1M in August.
• HSBC named its planned Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HSBC RedCoin, with an initial rollout focused on transfers between individuals and merchant payments through PayMe and HSBC's mobile banking services.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

• Despite a retreat in Brent crude oil back below $100 a barrel, for the second consecutive session, both US equities and long-end Treasuries sold off together, sending the 30-year Treasury yield to its highest level since 2002.
• The S&P 500 posted back-to-back losses, closing down 0.17% in Tuesday’s session while BTC once more lingered in the tight range of $82K and $84K.

• Brent crude oil currently trades around $96 a barrel as signs of improving energy flows from the Middle East and another major release of emergency reserves in the US helped to ease concerns around supply.
• The US government announced that it will loan 40 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to energy companies, according to a statement from the Department of Energy and urged European partners to do the same.
• Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that some countries in Europe have lagged behind the US and Japan when it comes to contributing to the effort, “Several European member countries have released only a fraction of the crude oil and petroleum products they pledged. We urge every member country to fulfill its commitments.”

• The selloff at the long-end of the US Treasury curve has shown no signs of easing, as the 30-year bond, the Treasury's longest-dated bond, rose for a sixth straight day.
• The 30-year rate broke past 5.6% on Tuesday, a level it last traded at in 2002, in the wake of the dot-com bubble.
• The shorter-dated two-year yield on the other hand has fallen over the past 24 hours by around 10bps to 4.87% following comments from New York Fed President John Williams, who suggested the Fed is in no rush to hike interest rates as aggressively as markets have priced in.

• According to the NY Fed President, "With the policy action we took at our September meeting, there is no need for urgency” and that incoming data "should provide greater clarity" on the next move.
• Williams added that "If the economy evolves in a manner broadly consistent with my forecast, one further upward adjustment of the federal funds target range may be appropriate late this year to support a timelier return of inflation to target”. Given that there is only an October and December meeting left for the year, Williams’ comments may indicate his preference for a pause in the October meeting and a potential hike in December.
• Fed funds futures now price a 44.8% probability for a 25bps increase in October, down from 70.9% at the beginning of the week.

• On the state of the US economy, Williams noted that the risk to maximum employment had receded, while the risk to the inflation mandate remains the priority. Specifically, he pointed out that "the inflationary impact of the AI-related demand shock is increasingly salient, and I now expect somewhat larger and longer-lasting effects from energy prices on inflation."
• He also acknowledged that while monetary policy cannot solve the supply shock stemming from the US-Iran conflict, the FOMC can “diminish the risk that these supply shocks spill over into broader and more persistent inflation” by ensuring “adverse inflationary disturbances do not become entrenched and that any second-round effects on inflation remain muted”.

• In economic news, according to the Conference Board, its consumer confidence index fell to 81.9 in September, down 6.7 points from August.
• That marked the lowest level for the metric since 2014 when consumer sentiment was rebounding from a low point of below 30 during the Great Financial Crisis.
• Chief Economist at the Conference Board, Dana Peterson, said in a statement that “Over the next six months, consumers expected both business conditions and the labor market to weaken."

• Meanwhile, job openings in the US fell in August to a five-month low according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report.
• Available positions fell by 256,000 from 7.3M in July to 7.1M in August, below all expectations in Bloomberg’s survey of economists, though data for July was revised higher to show 7.34M vacancies over the previously reported 7.27M.
• Layoffs fell to their lowest level since March 2025, while the quits-rate, a measure of the percentage of people voluntarily leaving their jobs each month, held at 1.9%, with the figures overall consistent with the low-hiring, low-firing description of the US labour market.

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto

• The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has approved Coinbase Clearing LLC as a derivatives clearing organization, giving Coinbase the ability to clear certain fully collateralized futures, options on futures and swaps through its own regulated clearinghouse.
• Coinbase already operates a designated contract market and futures commission merchant, so the new approval means it can now list, broker and clear fully funded derivatives within its own regulated structure rather than relying entirely on outside clearing firms.
• The approval does not cover leveraged or margined derivatives, which Coinbase said will continue to use external clearing partners, including for products such as its planned single-stock perpetual futures.

• U.S. bank Citi and Coinbase, a U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, expanded their partnership to connect bank payments with stablecoins, with Coinbase using Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet so businesses can receive and send traditional currencies while converting incoming funds into stablecoins.
• Spring by Citi, Citi’s institutional payments platform, will also let companies accept stablecoin payments through Coinbase, with the stablecoins converted into traditional currency before settlement so the recipient does not need to hold or manage the digital assets.

• U.S. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has asked Crypto.com, Hyperliquid and PredictIt for records on how they verify users, detect trades that may rely on nonpublic information, and report suspicious activity to regulators or law enforcement, expanding an investigation into insider-information risks on prediction markets.
• The Crypto.com request focuses on whether employees traded contracts linked to nonpublic corporate decisions such as token listings or custody changes, while the PredictIt request seeks information about trades connected to elections, nominations and other government actions involving current or former officials.
• The Hyperliquid request focuses on a large leveraged short placed before a major U.S. tariff announcement last October, and asks how the platform identifies account holders and what procedures it uses to refer potentially suspicious trades to U.S. authorities.

• Bitwise, a U.S. crypto asset manager, launched the Bitwise NEAR ETF (NRR) on NYSE Arca, giving investors direct exposure to NEAR, the native token of the NEAR Protocol, with a 0.75% management fee.
• Bitwise plans to stake the fund’s NEAR holdings in-house, with staking rewards reflected in the fund’s net asset value for shareholders.

• HSBC, Hong Kong’s largest bank, has named its planned Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HSBC RedCoin, with an initial rollout focused on transfers between individuals and merchant payments through PayMe and HSBC’s mobile banking services.
• RedCoin is expected to maintain a one-to-one value with the Hong Kong dollar through reserve assets, but HSBC has not yet disclosed the exact composition of those reserves, such as whether they will consist of bank deposits, short-term government debt or a combination of assets; Hong Kong’s stablecoin framework requires licensed issuers to maintain full reserve backing and provide redemption mechanisms.

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). Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

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

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.

Recent Research from Block Scholes

• Volatility Report: July 2026
• Is Bitcoin showing greater sensitivity to US CPI releases again?
• Are ETFs and Treasuries Selling ETH's Volatility?
• Block Scholes x Castle Labs: The Renaissance of Onchain Options
• How On-Chain Markets Have Priced Recent IPOs
• From Aggregation to Execution: The Next Layer of Onchain Trading Infrastructure
• Tokenised Markets on Bitget UEX: Liquidity Conditions in Bitget’s Real World Asset Perpetual Markets