Hi all, happy Tuesday. Markets had a fantastic start to the week, with bitcoin, gold, and US equities closing at record highs on Monday. On the crypto side, MNT and BNB have shown remarkable relative strength, with both assets benefiting from their positioning as utility coins for Bybit and Binance, respectively. Meanwhile, it seems everyone now loves futarchy, with MetaDAO in the spotlight as the Umbra ICO takes place.  

— Carlos

Crypto markets had a green start to the week, with BTC closing Monday (12 am UTC) at ~$124.8k (+1.02% daily performance) after setting an all-time high of $126k earlier in the day. Meanwhile, gold reached yet another all-time high, with gold futures (COMEX) briefly topping $4,000 per ounce on Monday night as global demand for the safe-haven asset rose amidst various political crises. Gold is up ~51% year-to-date (vs. ~33% for BTC), with the asset poised to register its best yearly performance since 1979. The big question for Bitcoin bulls is whether BTC will continue to lag behind gold or catch up to its performance in Q4.

As seen in the chart below, BTC and gold outperformed US equities on Monday’s session. That said, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also registered all-time daily closing highs, boosted by a multi-billion dollar chip supply deal between AMD and OpenAI, with AMD shares rising 23.7% as of Monday’s close. While US equities remain constructive, the Senate on Monday again rejected Democratic and Republican proposals to fund the government and end the shutdown, which is extending into its seventh day today. 

Back on the crypto side, the L2 (+13%) and AI (+9.5%) sectors were the clear outliers on Monday (as of the UTC daily close). Starknet (STRK) and Mantle (MNT), which rose 20% and 16%, respectively, drove the majority of the L2 sector's gains. Mantle's outperformance in recent months has been due to its close alignment and deep integration with Bybit, positioning the L2 token as a utility coin for the exchange, analogous to BNB and Binance. Regarding the AI sector, TAO (+10%) and IP (+9%) were the best-performing assets in the index.

Last week, US crypto spot ETFs registered their second-highest weekly inflows ever ($4.57 billion), only behind the week of July 14-20 ($4.59 billion). BTC was responsible for the majority of inflows, with $3.24 billion, the highest weekly print of 2025 and second-highest since the ETFs began trading in January 2024. However, on a flows-to-market cap basis, ETH ETF inflows were almost two times larger than BTC’s last week (0.25% vs. 0.14%), with ETH registering $1.3 billion in inflows. 

As it relates to DATCOs, Tom Lee is back in the order books. BitMine (BMNR) disclosed on Monday that it now holds 2,830,151 ETH. The firm added 179,251 ETH last week, increasing its holdings by about $840 million. BMNR now owns 2.34% of ETH's supply, with Ethereum DATCOs in aggregate owning 3.74%.

Outside BTC and ETH, SOL is becoming the third major cryptoasset with a structural funnel to TradFi flows. Solana Company (HSDT), the DATCO led by Pantera and Summer Capital, announced on Monday that it now holds over 2.2 million SOL, and upwards of $15 million of cash, which it intends to use to acquire more of the underlying asset. HSNT added 1.44 million SOL last week, increasing its holdings by about $330 million. To note, Forward Industries (FORD), led by Multicoin, Galaxy, and Jump, is still the largest SOL-focused DATCO, with $1.56 billion in SOL holdings.

Regarding SOL ETFs, Rex-Osprey SOL Staking ETF (SSK) remains the only actively traded SOL ETF in the US as of today, with just over $400 million in AUM, a significant figure considering it went live in July 2025. Note that SSK is structured under the Investment Company Act of 1940 using a C-corporation format, which means that staking distributions to investors are taxed inside the fund before being distributed as dividends.

Following the SEC’s adoption of generic listing standards for commodity-based crypto ETPs, SOL ETFs under the '33 Act are expected to go live later this month pending S-1 effectiveness. As we have noted before, we believe these ETFs can realistically attract many multiples more than SSK, which saw $35 million in inflows last week. ETFs under the ‘33 Act will be (1) more tax-efficient, (2) have better distribution (from Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Bitwise, VanEck, etc.) than Rex-Osprey, and (3) likely include in-kind creations & redemptions, as well as support for staking.

While BTC, ETH and SOL compete for TradFi flows in the US, Asian “exchange” coins remain unbothered and on their lane, outperforming the broader crypto market. As shown in the chart below, BNB (associated with Binance) and MNT (associated with Bybit) have shown remarkable relative strength versus Bitcoin since early September. With yesterday’s move, MNT now has a higher year-to-date performance than HYPE, up 48% year-to-date against BTC despite being down as much as 60% in early July.  

— Carlos 

Crypto is changing TradFi derivatives as we know them. 

DAS: London will feature all the builders driving this change. 

Get your ticket today with promo code: 0X100 for £100 off.

📅 October 13-15 | London

MetaDAO’s Unruggable ICOs

MetaDAO has stolen the spotlight in the past week, with its governance token META up almost 250% since we released our report September 24. For readers unfamiliar with MetaDAO, the protocol launched in November 2023 as a platform for DAOs to engage in futarchy, using conditional markets and profit-seeking incentives to guide decision-making. In the past year, MetaDAO pivoted to a crowdsale platform for “unruggable ICOs,” using futarchy as a capital formation mechanism. MetaDAO’s value proposition is enabling high-quality founders to raise money by sending a credible signal to markets around enforceable tokenholder rights.

The sudden increase in attention over the past week was partly driven by various upcoming ICOs, including the Umbra raise, which is taking place from October 6 to 10. Umbra is a privacy wallet leveraging Arcium's confidential computing network, which uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to process encrypted transactions. Umbra encrypts transaction data on a user’s device before posting the relevant information to Solana, allowing the user to keep data and transactions private. Umbra has three co-founders, who came together for the Colosseum Breakout Hackathon in July 2025. It was designed from the ground up to be verifiable, trustless, and private while maintaining regulatory compliance.

The Umbra team is now composed of six people. The team mentioned that private transfers are live on Solana Devnet and that they are now focused on enabling private swaps. The team had a minimum raise target of $750k, which was reached minutes after the ICO four-day period began. Less than one day into launch, over 4,000 contributors have committed $8.5 million to the sale. To underscore how impressive this is, the Omnipair (OMFG) fundraise (MetaDAO's last ICO) launched on July 21 and ran for seven days until July 28, 2025. In total, only 321 wallets participated, contributing $1.12 million to the project. Umbra has seen 12 times more participants and more than 7 times the capital raised in less than a day since its launch.

As a reminder of MetaDAO's ICO mechanics, anyone can contribute USDC to the sale over the four days. There is no cap once the minimum viable funding is reached, which means that the Umbra sale is likely to raise more than $10 million. Importantly, at the end of the four-day period, the team can decide not to keep all funds raised. For instance, let's say a founder raises $2 million, but they only want to keep $1 million, then everyone gets 50% back in USDC. The Umbra team confirmed they will cap the raise in this manner, but they won't reveal the cap amount until the last day.

From a game theory perspective, the optimal strategy for an investor looking to allocate into a MetaDAO ICO is to wait until the last minute since everyone gets the same terms and price regardless. We have observed this behavior play out on both the mtnCapital and Omnipair ICOs, with 50% of deposits coming in at the last hour. 

Regarding tokenholder protections, MetaDAO’s ICOs offer two key differentiating factors vs. normal ICOs:

1. Mechanistic protection against treasury rugs: Instead of funds going directly to the team, they’re stored in an onchain treasury with futarchy oversight.

2. Legal protection against revenue rugs: The founder assigns the Intellectual Property of the project (domain names, software, social media accounts, etc.) to a legal entity that recognizes the futarchy governance mechanism as the ultimate decider.

This mechanistic and legal design decreases the risk that the team will walk off with investors’ money, and in turn enables founders to raise more and from higher-quality investors than they otherwise would be able to. 

As a final note, I’m very excited about the Umbra token launch, but for very different reasons than most. MetaDAO will debut its own “Futarchy AMM” when the Umbra sale is completed, giving rise to MetaDAO’s monetization era. The Futarchy AMM will charge 25 bps on volume. Per the protocol mechanics, after an ICO is completed, 2M tokens will be paired with 20% of funds raised (USDC) and sent to this Futarchy AMM to provide initial liquidity. The AMM will be integrated with Jupiter and will also contain conditional markets.

Most of the people arguing that MetaDAO is currently overvalued at $100 million market cap are probably unaware of this AMM, which could be a significant revenue generator for the protocol, especially now that attention is high and trading volumes are likely to follow.

— Carlos

Privy CEO: Why Did Stripe Acquire Privy? | Henri Stern

• Henri Stern joined Jack Kubinec on Lightspeed to discuss why Stripe acquired the wallet infrastructure company Privy. They deep dive into Stripe's crypto strategy, crypto payments, Henri's Solana thesis, the business behind crypto wallets, and what crypto needs to improve. 

Mantle  -  0 To 1

• Kyle from DeFiance Capital published an investment thesis on Mantle (MNT), arguing the asset is at a “0-to-1” inflection, shifting from a loosely attached exchange token to embedded utility via Bybit’s roadmap. He highlights Bybit’s planned integrations, spanning payments, trading,and  loyalty, at a scale he claims exceeds Binance’s early BNB activation, creating asymmetric upside through distribution and product opportunities. Recent network upgrades (OP Succinct/ZK transition) and rising TVL reinforce the setup, with Bybit campaigns expected to accelerate adoption and liquidity for Mantle’s DeFi ecosystem.

Markets Will Save The World

• Michael Rinko from Colosseum published a research report when he was at Delphi arguing that prediction markets and futarchy can harness the “general intelligence” of markets to make better collective decisions. The piece explains how market-based votes translate beliefs into prices, outlines design considerations for governance, and previews real-world implementations like MetaDAO’s futarchy model. The outlook is that wider deployment of prediction markets could improve policy and protocol decision-making as tooling matures and adoption spreads across crypto governance.