UBS and Eight Other Swiss Financial Firms Began Testing a Swiss Franc Stablecoin

Blockstream recovered 3,400 BTC, about 85% of what was withdrawn from Liquid, after the purported white-hat attacker waited for the Elements bug to be patched; the attacker still holds around 598.5 BTC worth $47.3M and Liquid's bridge and SideSwap operations remain paused. Brent trades at $99 after the largest tanker exchange yet between the US and Iran and reported Houthi strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities, with BTC once more falling back from $80K. Friday's CPI is the week's key release, and the ECB is widely expected to hike on Thursday.

Crypto

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Macro

In Today's Note

Blockstream recovered 3,400 BTC, about 85% of what was withdrawn from Liquid, after the purported white-hat attacker waited for the Elements software bug to be patched. The attacker still holds around 598.5 BTC worth $47.3M, and Liquid's bridge and SideSwap operations remain paused.
Brent trades at $99 after the largest tanker exchange yet between the US and Iran and reported Houthi strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities, and BTC once more fell back from $80K. Friday's CPI is the week's key release, with the ECB widely expected to hike on Thursday.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

Brent crude has continued to rise amidst mixed headlines in the US-Iran conflict, while US equity and treasury markets were closed yesterday for the Labour Day holiday.
Brent crude currently trades at $99 a barrel after the largest tit-for-tat exchange of tanker attacks yet between Iran and the US.
That weighed on risk assets with BTC once more falling from $80K and US equity futures all trading lower on the day.

Iran said it hit three US-linked ships that were travelling an unauthorised route through the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for American attacks on three Iranian tankers over the weekend.
The US military claimed it struck those Iranian crude tankers in response to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps attacking two US Navy warships earlier.
Iran also claimed that an accord with Oman is in its final stages and will provide a temporary safe route through the key waterway.
There are also currently risks of the conflict escalating further out in the region after reports that Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthis attacked energy facilities and cities in Saudi Arabia, including Saudi Aramco oil facilities near the Red Sea.

In foreign exchange markets, the yen strengthened to its highest level since February this year, surpassing the peak it reached after the US-Japan joint July intervention.
USD/JPY broke through 155 per dollar with the yen rallying close to 3% over the past five days.
The yen had begun rallying earlier in the month after growing expectations that the BoJ could raise interest rates faster than expected.

Looking to the rest of the week ahead, the most important macro release for the week will be the Friday CPI report, currently viewed by markets as the key report that could determine the direction of Fed policy in the upcoming September meeting.
Ahead of the report, the European Central Bank is widely expected to hike interest rates amidst high energy-driven inflation.
Beyond economic data, other catalysts for US equities include earnings reports from Oracle Corp. and Adobe Inc. which will give markets a fresh read on AI infrastructure demand and the threat the technology poses to software makers.

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto

Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain developed by Blockstream, recovered 3,400 BTC, or about 85% of the roughly 4,000 BTC withdrawn, after the purported white-hat attacker waited for Blockstream to patch the software bug used in the incident.
The vulnerability allowed 4,000 LBTC to be improperly created through a bug in the Elements software and then exchanged through SideSwap’s legitimate peg-out process for 3,996 BTC, while SideSwap said its systems and authorization key were not compromised.
The attacker still holds about 598.5 BTC worth $47.3M, while Liquid’s bridge operations and SideSwap’s swaps, deposits and withdrawals remain paused until the network resumes.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the country’s financial regulator, is reportedly considering whether to ease its 2019 ban on retail access to financial prediction markets, after holding discussions with trading platforms as services such as Polymarket and Kalshi gain popularity.
The FCA currently treats financial prediction contracts with yes-or-no payouts as binary options, which retail investors cannot buy because of concerns over their speculative nature and potential consumer losses. Sports and political prediction markets, however, generally fall under UK gambling regulation rather than the FCA.
No change has been approved yet: the FCA is reviewing whether further work on retail access is appropriate, and platforms would still need to meet relevant UK financial or gambling rules before legally offering these markets to consumers.

Capital B, a French bitcoin treasury company, purchased 376 BTC for €25.3M ($29.4M), its largest bitcoin acquisition since September 2025, bringing its total holdings to 3,521 BTC.
The company has spent a total of €309.4M ($359.3M) on its bitcoin holdings, at an average acquisition price of about $102,058 per BTC.
The latest purchase was funded by recent capital raises, including a €28.7M ($33.3M) private placement, which included an additional $8.8M investment from Blockstream CEO Adam Back, increasing his stake in Capital B to 17.64%.

UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, BCV, SIX, TWINT and Swiss Stablecoin AG have begun testing CHFD, a stablecoin designed to maintain a 1:1 value with the Swiss franc, in a controlled live environment, with the pilot running through the end of 2026.
The nine Swiss firms are testing uses including automated payments between financial institutions, settlement of tokenized assets and programmable payments, with the pilot intended to assess the technical, operational and regulatory requirements for a potential future Swiss franc stablecoin.

DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, and Citi, a major U.S. bank, completed what they described as their first cross-border U.S. dollar payment between Singapore and the U.S. to be executed on a weekend using tokenized bank deposits, through Swift’s Digital Ledger.
The Sept. 5 transaction between DBS and Citi’s New York office settled within minutes, compared with the up to two business days that traditional cross-border payments can take.

The Ethereum Foundation has named EIP-7805 (FOCIL) and EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) as the two “must ship” proposals for Hegotá, meaning developers consider them the defining features of the upgrade.
FOCIL is designed to make transaction inclusion more censorship-resistant by giving users a path to get eligible transactions into Ethereum blocks without depending on centralized block builders, while Frame Transactions introduces native account abstraction that separates transaction authorization, fee payment and execution.
Frame Transactions could therefore allow another account or application to pay gas on a user’s behalf, enabling experiences where users effectively pay transaction costs with stablecoins such as USDC rather than needing to hold ETH themselves, although validators would still ultimately receive protocol fees in ETH.

This Week's Calendar

This week's macro and crypto calendar, part 1.

This week's macro and crypto calendar, part 2.

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.