Hi all, happy Tuesday! BTC held firm despite renewed geopolitical risk and rising oil prices, while Strategy returned as a buyer after a 10-week pause. Today, we also examine Derive’s record in August, including XAUT’s early traction and the improving economics of its options business. 

Crypto held firm through the renewed geopolitical conflict in the Middle East over the weekend. WTI rose 2.83% to $85.76 on Monday and the S&P 500 fell 0.3%, yet BTC gained 1.1% during regular US trading hours and remained above $78,000. That resilience stood out against BTC’s underperformance this year. It entered the week down 11.3% YTD, compared with gains of 15.1% for the Nasdaq and 11.6% for the S&P 500, after trailing both by more than 30% earlier in the year. 

BTC’s relative strength also coincided with Strategy returning as a buyer after a 10-week pause. A Monday 8-K disclosed the purchase of 4,603 BTC for $369.7M, or an average of $80,318 per BTC. The acquisition was funded through $602.8M of ATM share sales. However, Strategy’s return did not lift the broader treasury-company complex. PURR (-4.9%), BTBT (-4.2%), UPXI (-2.2%) and STKE (-1.9%) traded lower, while MSTR (0.3%), BMNR (0.6%) and SBET (0.2%) finished roughly flat.

At the end of August, 21 of 29 tracked names still traded below the value of their holdings. MSTR’s NAV multiple improved from 0.65 to 0.84 during the month but remained at an approximately 16% discount despite resuming purchases. If crypto prices continue to push upward, a narrowing of those discounts could become the next catalyst for the group. A move above NAV across more companies could restart the accretive issuance cycle that funded additional crypto purchases and supported the sector’s previous advance. 

Institutional demand is also beginning to extend beyond BTC. SOL ETFs attracted $155M in August, with more than $110M arriving during the final four reported sessions. Thursday’s $54.8M inflow alone exceeded five of this year’s eight monthly totals. The institutional flow that supported BTC through August may be extending further down the risk curve. 

Friday’s jobs report will shape rate expectations ahead of the Fed’s Sept. 16 decision, while the CLARITY Act faces a cloture vote the day before. Continued ETF inflows through those events, alongside narrowing treasury company NAV discounts, could signal growing confidence among the broader investor base. 

— Joe

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Derive’s Record Month

Derive closed August with record options notional volume of $1.92B. Including perps, total volume reached $2.43B, trailing only March 2026. The month reinforced Derive’s position as the leading venue for onchain options, with activity driven primarily by systematic yield and risk-management strategies rather than one-off directional trades.

BTC remained the largest options market, accounting for 60% of August volume, followed by ETH at 23% and HYPE at 13%. Despite this concentration, broader asset coverage continued to prove a key differentiator for Derive. XAUT, introduced in late July, became the platform’s fourth-largest options market in its first full month live.

As we noted in our March report, new listings can generate standalone volume while attracting new users who may later trade established markets such as BTC. HYPE demonstrated this dynamic, growing into a $350M-plus monthly market within six months. XAUT’s early trajectory is even stronger. It generated $24M in its first 30 days, 2.5x HYPE’s total, and $40M in its first full calendar month, 4x HYPE’s comparable result. This traction suggests Derive’s expansion into RWAs could become a meaningful new growth channel.

Options are also consolidating their role as Derive’s core, higher-margin business, while perps remain complementary by supporting hedging, cross-margin utility, and broader exchange activity. Options maker rebates fell from 28% of gross fees a year ago to 7.5% in August, while perp rebates remained above 50%.

Improving options unit economics helped make August Derive’s strongest month for net revenue in 2026. Fees net of rebates reached $276k, with options contributing $234k (85% of the total), while accounting for 79% of volume.

DRV ended August at 43x trailing P/S and 64x FDV-to-sales. Despite last month’s rally, valuation multiples remained broadly sideways as net revenue grew alongside price. With buybacks continuing to absorb staking emissions, the structural setup looks attractive. Further upside depends primarily on gaining share in BTC options while broadening asset coverage, building on HYPE’s success and XAUT’s early traction.

— Carlos

Social Trading and The Garden of Eden

Ryan Watkins from Syncracy argues that social trading could become crypto’s breakout consumer application, combining transparent onchain activity with social feeds, copy trading, creator monetization, and increasingly personalized recommendation systems. Platforms like Fomo and Pump are already turning trading into content, creating a flywheel where activity generates attention and attention drives more trading, while Hyperliquid and Solana provide the underlying rails.

The long-term thesis is that the winning product could become the “TikTok of finance”, using AI to personalize financial opportunities and turning trading into a kind of financialized MMORPG where reputation, PnL, and distribution all have economic value. The open question is whether these apps can move beyond their speculative origins and eventually cross-sell users into broader financial products like tokenized securities, savings, credit, and onchain investing.

2006: Facebook | 2026: fomo

Se from Fomo compares the platform’s evolution to Facebook’s 2006 News Feed launch, arguing that both turned information that was already technically public into something continuously and algorithmically surfaced. Facebook initially faced backlash because users felt surveilled, but the News Feed ultimately became foundational to social media.

The author argues Fomo is doing something similar for onchain activity, replacing the “practical obscurity” of wallet sleuthing with a feed that makes traders and their actions easier to discover. Although the piece was written in March, it feels especially relevant today given Fomo’s recent traction, as the platform increasingly tests whether this shift from pull to push can make onchain activity more social and accessible to a much larger audience.