The rise of Robinhood Chain

Every week, Amdax summarizes what’s happening in the crypto market for you. Want to dive deeper? Click on the links (if available) in this article for more insights.

Market update

Stay informed in three steps:

1. A quiet week across the wider markets
The bitcoin price has been moving sideways all week. It stood around 78,500 dollar seven days ago and is still there, with Thursday the only real outlier. That day it climbed more than 5 percent to above 82,000 dollar, its highest since May, after a comment from the Fed about rates. The gain then came off step by step: about 2 percent on Friday, the rest over the weekend and early this week. The rest of the market did little different. Ether sits near 2,500 dollar, swings in the broader altcoin space ran a bit wider and gold trades around 4,400 dollar an ounce. There too, Thursday accounted for the only real move of the week.

2. Rate decision nears after surprise jobs report
The Fed decides on rates next week, and markets changed their mind about the outcome twice in two days. Fed governor Christopher Waller said on Thursday that he would rather leave rates alone unless the inflation figures surprise him. Within a day the priced-in chance of a hike this month fell from 63 percent to 50 percent and riskier assets moved up. On Friday the jobs report turned that expectation around. The US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, where economists expected 53,000. That made it the strongest month since March, and unemployment held at 4.1 percent. Hike odds are back near 60 percent. The inflation figures follow this week, with producer prices on Wednesday and consumer prices on Friday.

3. Robinhood Chain has everyone’s attention
Robinhood launched its own network on July 1, and two months later it is in the full glare of attention. What stands out is what runs side by side on it. Robinhood built it for tokenized stocks that trade around the clock, and those are there, from Nvidia to Apple. It has also become the busiest place for memecoins, which is where most of the volume comes from. Robinhood’s crypto chief describes the approach as feeding two wolves. That combination delivers heavy volumes and setups you see nowhere else: memecoins that trade against a stock token instead of a stablecoin, so their price moves with Nvidia or whichever equity backs the pool. Whether both wolves keep eating or this fades out soon remains to be seen.

Ries’ take

Prices stood still this week and hung on next week’s rate decision, just like gold and stocks. It still did not feel like a quiet week, and that is down to what is happening on-chain. For the first time in a long while there is real life there. The Robinhood Chain surge is what drives it: a network only two months old now draws more trading than almost any other, with new applications arriving every week. That this energy comes out of a trading app rather than from crypto itself makes it all the more striking. Whether it holds up once rates take over the headlines again is the open question. For now the market is moving, even when the price is not.