Weekly Top Stories - 10/10/25

In this week's newsletter, Will Owens considers the all-time highs achieved by bitcoin and gold; Marc Hochstein examines the fine print of ICE’s blockbuster $2 billion investment in Polymarket; and Lucas Tcheyan previews the imminent debut of Solana ETFs.

Bitcoin and Gold Hit Record Highs

Bitcoin broke above $126,000 this week, setting a new all-time high alongside gold, which crossed $4,000 per ounce. The dual rally in hard assets underscores how investors are simultaneously chasing returns and seeking refuge from inflation. The ongoing U.S. government shutdown appears to have pushed investors toward perceived “safer” assets, while silver has been flirting with $50 per ounce. According to Glassnode, nearly 97% of BTC's circulating supply is now in profit. The cluster of BTC purchased around $117,000 has flipped into key support, something Galaxy’s Alex Thorn has tweeted about recently. Some whales, including one who sold 3,000 BTC on Hyperliquid this week, are taking profits, but small and mid-sized holders continue to accumulate. That both bitcoin and gold set fresh all-time highs in the same week says more about the macro regime than “crypto euphoria.” Bitcoin’s rally reflects a broader institutional repricing of digital scarcity. Gold now trades above $4,000 per ounce, silver has tested $50, and yet market sentiment remains muted (CoinMarketCap’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index remains only at neutral), far below the retail-driven mania of 2021.

OUR TAKE:

Unlike the euphoric frenzy of 2021, this is an institutional repricing of scarcity. Bitcoiners have been preaching this since the Genesis Block. This “debasement trade” doesn’t just randomly end, because governments do not stop debasing their currencies.

The question on everyone’s mind in crypto now is whether the four-year cycle still applies, or if this cycle marks a structural shift. At Galaxy Research, we believe this one is different due to a softening regulatory environment, stronger institutional flows, and broader mainstream adoption.

A pullback into the $117k support zone here would be entirely healthy and not bearish. For now, Bitcoiners are looking to see if returns can catch up to what gold has done this year. Gold has already been pricing the cost of trust for centuries.

I liked investor Jeff Park’s description this week: Bitcoin as a “purification trade” rather than a “debasement trade.” Capital is migrating toward what’s scarce, permanent, and incorruptible. The system isn't collapsing. It’s refining itself.

Or as the cinematic Donnie Darko reminds us: “Destruction is a form of creation.” – Will Owens

ICE’s $2b Bet on Polymarket — and on the Value of Prediction Data

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Polymarket, the companies announced Tuesday. The deal is the seventh-largest equity investment in a crypto company and the largest private investment by a traditional Wall Street firm, according to Messari data, and values the blockchain-based prediction market platform at $8 billion. That’s up nearly 7x the valuation in Polymarket’s most recent funding round this year and up 22x from a round before the November 2024 election. In addition to the nice chunk of change, ICE said it plans to "become a global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data, providing customers with sentiment indicators on topics of market relevance.” The two companies will also work together on tokenization initiatives, according to ICE. Meanwhile, Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan hinted that a POLY token may be in the works, and MetaMask announced a plan to integrate Polymarket into its wallet (along with perpetual futures trading).

OUR TAKE:

The investment and imprimatur of an iconic Wall Street institution are a part of a remarkable reversal of fortune for Polymarket and its 27-year-old founder, Shayne Coplan, whom Bloomberg has dubbed the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Nearly a year ago, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the FBI raided Coplan’s home as part of an investigation into whether Polymarket was allowing U.S. users to access the platform in violation of an earlier settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Under the Trump administration, however, the feds dropped the investigation, and Polymarket acquired QCX, a CFTC-licensed exchange, paving the way for the platform to return to the U.S. market. A pariah no more, Coplan was invited to industry roundtables at the White House and a joint SEC-CFTC event. Donald Trump, Jr., whose firm participated in an earlier funding round, joined Polymarket as an advisor.

Beyond the eye-popping valuation and Coplan’s comeback, we wonder what exactly ICE plans to do with Polymarket’s data. That information is already publicly available onchain, and the odds are published on Polymarket's website and updated (apparently) in real time. On the other hand, market data services are a major business line for ICE, one that brought in about $1.84 billion of revenue last year, around 15% of the company's total. ICE may believe it can package Polymarket’s data in a way that adds value for TradFi clients, perhaps by delivering it instantly to the same trading screens these institutions already use in a format they’re used to. If so, and if ICE charged for this service and gave Polymarket a cut, it might help solve a longstanding challenge for the latter company, which does not charge trading commissions: finding a sustained revenue model.

Zooming out, one could argue that the true product of a prediction market platform is not the bets themselves, but the informational signal these markets generate. If a platform could find a way to monetize the signal, it might, conceivably, be able to make money without charging commissions. Prediction markets aggregate dispersed information into price signals. Each contract price can be interpreted as the crowd’s implied probability of an outcome. Across many markets and over time, this creates a dataset of probabilistic forecasts—essentially a continuously updated model of collective expectations. In economic terms, the bets are inputs, not outputs. The valuable output is the information produced by the interaction of those bets. From this perspective, it’s not outlandish to imagine Polymarket’s unsung advantage lies in its potential to capture and standardize this data at scale, creating a high-frequency feed of real-world sentiment and prediction.

Traditional exchanges monetize trading activity through fees, but those fees introduce friction that distorts price formation. Participants adjust bids and offers to account for costs, meaning market prices deviate slightly from “true” collective probabilities. If Polymarket can instead find some way to monetize the data layer, it could continue to avoid that friction. A zero-commission structure should yield more efficient markets and, by extension, a cleaner, higher-quality informational product. The quality of the data improves precisely because users are not paying to provide it.

So, we can envision Polymarket positioning itself less as a betting venue and more as an information infrastructure provider. The markets are the mechanism through which it crowdsources forecasts; the business, in this scenario, is the commercialization of those forecasts. Natural customers for such a product might include financial institutions, hedge funds, news organizations, and AI developers seeking real-time, market-derived indicators of future events.

Meanwhile, the possible POLY token teased by Coplan could, depending on how it is designed, address another big challenge for Polymarket: maintaining trust in its contract resolutions. More than a year ago, tech news site The Information, citing unnamed sources, reported that Polymarket was considering issuing its own token "as a way for users to validate the outcome of real-world events." To those reading between the lines, that sounded like a shot across the bow for UMA Protocol, the oracle service Polymarket uses to resolve markets and adjudicate disputes via community votes. A common complaint about UMA is that large holders of its token can collude to resolve markets in a way that enriches them, regardless of the actual outcome.

Polymarket has already taken steps this year to rely less on UMA by using Chainlink to resolve markets on asset price movements. When that tie-up was announced, the companies said they were “exploring methodologies to expand the use of Chainlink to settle prediction markets involving more subjective questions, thereby reducing reliance on social voting mechanisms and further minimizing resolution risk.” (Emphasis added.) So perhaps Polymarket is still thinking of POLY as part of the solution to its resolution problem.

Finally, we are intrigued by ICE's fleeting mention of a joint tokenization effort with Polymarket. As Coplan noted in a brief interview on the TBPN podcast, Polymarket has experience in this area – every “yes” or “no” share traded on the platform is a blockchain token tied to a real-world outcome. So, enlisting its help to tokenize the real-world assets listed on ICE’s exchanges doesn’t seem like a stretch. We look forward to hearing more details about this surprise alliance between a TradFi Goliath and a degen David on ICE’s quarterly earnings call Oct. 30. – Marc Hochstein

License to Stake: The New ETF Era

The next wave of crypto ETF launches is expected imminently as final deadlines for approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approach. In addition to increasing accessibility to a wider range of crypto assets beyond the existing bitcoin and ether offerings, recently updated Solana ETF filings, as well as commentary from leading ETF analysts like Bloomberg’s James Seyffart, indicate that the newest approvals are likely to include staking as a part of their offering. Heightened expectations follow the SEC’s approval of Generic Listing Standards for ETFs in September (see Galaxy Research’s coverage here). Previously, every new crypto ETF required a separate 19b-4 filing, often triggering up to 240 days of review. The new framework removes that bottleneck, replacing it with minimum eligibility criteria that allow qualifying ETFs to list automatically. According to Galaxy Research's internal analysis, crypto assets that meet that criteria include DOGE, BCH, LTC, LINK, XLM, AVAX, SHIB, DOT, SOL, HBAR, ADA, and XRP. Issuers pursuing ETFs tied to these tokens have been asked to withdraw their pending 19b-4s, as they are now covered under the new standards. With this infrastructure in place, the pipeline for altcoin ETFs is set to accelerate, and more spot crypto products are expected to launch in the coming months. Several exchange-traded products in the U.S. already offer staking exposure. This week, Grayscale launched the first spot crypto ETPs in the United States to incorporate staking rewards, allowing investors to earn yield from ETH and SOL held by the funds. Other vehicles issued under the Securities Act of 1933, including VanEck’s Solana Strategy ETF (SSK), are already trading and include staking. These vehicles, which sit outside the stricter Investment Company Act of 1940 framework that governs traditional ETFs, provide futures exposure to assets such as Solana and have built hundreds of millions of dollars in AUM. While Solana ETF launches were previously expected as early as this week, the government shutdown has introduced delays because formal S-1 approvals (still required under the General Listing Standards framework) must wait for the SEC to return to work. At this point, however, it’s a question of when, not if.

OUR TAKE:

As a new set of crypto ETFs comes online, attention will now shift to flows. Bitcoin ETFs have been among the most successful ETF launches in history, attracting nearly $170 billion in inflows. Ethereum ETFs, while slower to start, have since gained momentum with roughly $31 billion in holdings. But those two assets are the largest and most widely understood in crypto. The next slate of ETFs targets assets that are far less familiar to traditional allocators. In a crowded market, they will need not only a strong narrative but also the fundamentals to justify inclusion in investment portfolios.

There are some available proxies for demand. Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs hold between 6% to 7% of the total supply of their underlying asset. If Solana matched that ratio, for example, it would translate to $8 billion to $9 billion in potential flows over the next two years. This is a highly optimistic scenario that overlooks material differences in perception and use case. Ethereum is increasingly viewed as a global settlement layer for stablecoins and DeFi. Solana, by contrast, is still seen primarily as a consumer chain where activity is driven by speculation. Reflecting that difference, a note published by J.P. Morgan analysts Thursday forecasted $1.5 billion in first-year flows for Solana ETFs, based on comparisons between early inflows to SSK and Ethereum’s ETFs, as well as citing Solana’s heavy reliance on memecoin trading. Moreover, the fact that BlackRock, the largest BTC and ETH ETF issuer, has yet to file or indicate interest in launching additional single-name ETF products may further hamper interest.

The inclusion of staking, however, removes a key structural headwind. With SOL staking yields above 6% APY, staking makes ETF exposure more attractive and neutralizes one of the biggest drawbacks of ETF structures – dilution from un-staked holdings. The rise of digital asset treasury companies, which offer both a form of leverage as well as staking yields, further raises the bar for ETFs to compete on structure and performance. Early indications from filers like Bitwise point toward low long-term fees of 0.2% and no fees for the first three months and the first $1 billion in AUM.

Perhaps most interesting is the convergence and emerging competition, now underway between traditional finance and crypto. As ETF issuance expands beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, the SEC is simultaneously accelerating approvals and guidance necessary for tokenized versions of traditional assets to trade on-chain. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has previously said that tokenization is the next step for improving market efficiency, and this week said the SEC is looking to formalize an “innovation exemption,” enabling companies to build on crypto rails as early as the end of this year (note: the government shutdown could delay this timeline).

The real competition isn’t between ETFs — it’s between systems. Will Wall Street absorb crypto faster than crypto absorbs Wall Street? The answer will decide which rails the next era of finance runs on. – Lucas Tcheyan

Chart of the Week

Hyperliquid’s builder program turns distribution into a partner channel. Apps and wallets that integrate Hyperliquid and route user flow receive a share of trading fees, which gives them a direct incentive to promote onchain perpetual futures inside the interfaces people already use. The thesis is that revenue sharing can scale adoption faster and more efficiently than direct user acquisition by the venue.

Fees tied to builder activity have compounded from about $8 million in early June to just over $30 million by early October, with momentum clearly picking up in late August and through September. A few big partners still anchor the base, but the growing layers from smaller contributors signal a widening long tail. The story is not only larger totals, but also broader participation that makes the network harder to dislodge and less dependent on any single outlet.

Revenue and participation are rising in tandem. Fee income from builders and referrals climbs from roughly $20 million to more than $50 million over the period, while the count of active builders advances from about 200-350. That pairing tells a bigger story than growth alone. As more partners plug in and earn, the model scales without relying on a single channel, strengthens liquidity through added flow, and deepens alignment with integrators who now share in the upside.

The data points to a distribution flywheel. Each new builder adds a motivated marketing surface inside wallets and apps, which brings incremental order flow, which deepens liquidity and improves execution, which in turn lifts fees and makes the program more attractive to the next builder. The broadening long tail reduces dependency on any single partner and makes volumes more resilient.

For integrators, the program converts product traffic into a recurring revenue line without standing up a full exchange. That revenue line raises switching costs and tightens alignment with Hyperliquid. For the venue, customer acquisition costs shift to partners, coverage inside consumer interfaces expands, and the brand competes less on direct traffic and more as a reliable backend utility.

If the trend holds, this model will pressure centralized exchanges and rival perps chains that rely on captive front ends, because wallets can become the default brokerage layer while the exchange recedes into infrastructure. Potential risks remain, including concentration in a few top builders and sensitivity of partner engagement to payout terms, but the trajectory in dollars and active builders suggests real network effects are forming. — Christopher Rosa

Other News

• 🗽 Coinbase Launches Crypto Staking in New York State 

• 🚀 Plume Token Surges After SEC Approval 

• 📈 ZCash Surges More Than 140% Driven by Institutional Access 

• 🤖 QumulusAI Secures $500M for AI Compute Infrastructure 

• ₿ Square Introduces Bitcoin Payment Solution for Merchants 

• 🇯🇵 Softbank’s PayPay (Not Pepe) Acquires Stake in Binance Japan 

• 🏛️ Crypto Bill Progresses in Senate Amid Government Shutdown 

• 🏦 Citi Joins Visa in Supporting BVNK for Stablecoin Payments 

• 📊 S&P Introduces Crypto and Stock Index