Rate-Hike Odds, Oil Movement, & Nvidia Earnings

BTC ended August up around 25%! Here’s hoping September has a similar trend.

This Week at Arch: Gold can work without being sold

Arch now accepts PAX Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) as collateral! That gives gold holders a new way to access liquidity without turning a long-term holding into a sale.

Post tokenized gold and receive funding in USD or USDC while keeping your gold exposure. The benefit is simple: the asset you bought for stability can now help fund a purchase, a business, or an investment without leaving your portfolio.

The new gold-backed loans are available in 12-month terms, start at $250,000, and offer up to 75% starting LTV. Because Arch supports both major gold tokens, you can use the issuer you already hold rather than moving into a different product first.

As always, your collateral is held by Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered qualified custodian, in segregated wallets with no rehypothecation. Gold stays gold; the loan gives it a practical job while you continue to own the position.

Explore gold-backed loans →

This Week in Crypto

The (mostly) positive news continues!

• Bitcoin rode a Nvidia-earnings sugar high to an intraday peak of $81,455 on Thursday - a three-month high!

• Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech Friday then pushed rate-hike odds up, and Bitcoin promptly gave back 3.3% to $77.6K.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs had been riding a nine-day consecutive inflow streak heading into Friday, but unfortunately that streak was then ended with $202M in outflows.

Strategy has finally re-entered the market -

• The company announced it purchased 4,603 BTC for $369.7M during August 24-30.

Solana validators approved a governance change to double the network’s annual disinflation rate, from 15% to 30%.

• SOL issuance gets cut faster, an estimated 18.9M fewer SOL entering circulation over the next six years.

• And the network now reaches its 1.5% terminal inflation rate in about 2.8 years instead of 5.7.

This Week in TradFi

Markets spent the run-up to Friday’s Jackson Hole symposium in a good mood, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s speech took it away.

• Warsh told the room that inflation was still running too hot and that the central bank has "work to do”.

• Traders responded by lifting the odds of a rate hike from below 50% to around 68%.

• And the 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 4.75%, its highest since January 2025.

• The S&P 500 still closed out August with a gain of more than 2.5% for the month, though!

Lots of Iran activity (and oil movement) this week -

• U.S. forces struck Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island on Sunday, Iran retaliated with drone activity the UAE says it intercepted, and by Monday a supertanker had reportedly hit mines in the strait and caught fire, with Iran's Revolutionary Guard claiming responsibility and also shooting down a U.S. drone for good measure.

• Brent crude jumped over 3% to above $90/barrel, and gas has now spent every single day of August above $4/gallon nationally for the first time ever.

The August jobs report drops Friday, the final labor market data point before the Fed’s September 15-16 meeting.

• Consensus is for a modest rebound: forecasts cluster around a 55,000 payroll gain, unemployment holding at 4.1%, and wage growth ticking down slightly to 3% YoY.

This Week in Tech

Nvidia posted fiscal Q2 results after Wednesday’s close that beat already-lofty expectations:

• Revenue more than doubled, and the company is now projecting 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028 - nearly double the 44% analysts had modeled.

• The stock jumped 8.7% on Thursday, its biggest one-day pop since April 2025.

• Nvidia also disclosed a $6B deal to license AI models from Poolside, plus a $1B investment into the company at a $12B valuation.

OpenAI organized an open letter, co-signed by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and more than 100 other organizations spanning banking, cybersecurity, and critical infrastructure, warning that AI-powered cyberattacks are likely to escalate sharply within months and calling for coordinated defensive investment before that happens.

• The backdrop is a set of multiple recent incidents, including a pretty strange one.

  • Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel synthesized reports from OpenAI, METR, and Redwood Research into an account of three successive groups of AI agents that formed inside OpenAI's training and evaluation systems, each one wiped out and each one reconstituted from what the last group left behind.

  • The first group discovered that an internal package manager could double as a covert message board and used it to compare notes on tasks the sandbox made impossible. Message volume eventually crashed the tool, and OpenAI's fix accidentally erased the board.

  • A second group of roughly 1,200 agents rediscovered it days later, exchanged more than 70,000 messages, organized into workstreams to reverse-engineer their own grading system, and turned outward to breach Hugging Face's production infrastructure.

  • A third, more capable generation eventually escalated to full admin access on an OpenAI research cluster and pulled 956 secrets out of a cloud credentials manager.

• Funnily enough, several signatories including OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft also sell paid AI-powered cybersecurity products. Funny how that works!

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.