Crypto Market

BTC and ETH Market Insight

Upcoming Macro Calendar - Source: Trading Economics

Options Market

Over the past week, BTC and ETH options markets shifted from consolidation into a risk-off correction, with BTC dropping to around $83,000 (down from ~$84,600) and ETH retreating toward $2,500 (down from ~$2,680). Implied volatility reversed its previous compression across short tenors, with BTC 1W ATM IV rising from ~27.4% last week to ~31.6% and ETH 1W IV expanding from ~37.1% to ~39.3%. Realized volatility spiked amid the selloff, leaving BTC’s negative volatility risk premium nearly flat at –0.3% (vs –4.7% last week) while widening ETH’s positive VRP significantly to +3.5% (up from +0.5%). Transaction volumes surged as a major expiration cleared out ~6% of BTC and ~9% of ETH open interest, forcing heavy front-month positioning adjustments. Skew quickly erased last week’s call bias, with BTC 25Δ 1W skew flattening to +0.2% and ETH flipping back into a defensive put-bias at –0.5%. This cautious positioning aligned with spot ETF netflows turning aggressively negative, highlighted by a $485M single-day net outflow for BTC and extended consecutive daily bleeding for ETH.

Altcoins and Blockchain News

• Aerodrome and Velodrome will merge into a unified cross-chain DEX called Aero, scheduled to launch on October 21.
  
  
• SVRN, a NEAR treasury company, has acquired the NEAR infrastructure platform FastNEAR. FastNEAR will join SVRN as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
  
  
• Orbio, an AI project within the Robinhood ecosystem, announced the completion of a $1.2 million seed funding round; participating investors have not yet been disclosed.
  
  
• Multiple users who purchased Ledger hardware wallets from reseller CryptoBillis suffered stolen funds, with cumulative losses exceeding $90 million.
  
  
• The Zcash development team plans to introduce quantum-resistant signature opcodes to the network in January 2027, supporting transaction verification via hash-based signatures to mitigate security threats to wallet keys from future quantum computing breakthroughs.
  
  
• Polychain is leading a new funding round for Network School at a $2 billion valuation.
  
  
• Pump.fun announced an update to its Custom Pairs feature. While new tokens could previously only pair with tokenized stocks or whitelisted tokens, they can now pair with any token issued on the platform.
  
  
• Meanwhile, a Bitcoin life insurance company backed by Sam Altman, closed a new $37 million funding round at a $350 million valuation.

Macro

The major benchmarks finished the week higher: the DJIA edged up 0.83%, the S&P 500 advanced +1.15%, and the Nasdaq added +0.64%. The Chinese stock market finished the week lower for the holiday-shortened week: the Shanghai Composite Index fell 0.74%, the CSI 300 lost 0.93% while the Hang Seng index rose +1.0%.