Jobs Report, U.S.-Canada Tensions, & Navier-Stokes Drama

Luckily we wrote all about this - scroll to the end for a full recap!

This Week at Arch: Know your rate before you borrow

Crypto prices can move every day. Your borrowing cost should not. With Arch, the interest rate is fixed for the life of your loan term, so the number you agree to is the number you can plan around.

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That makes the decision easier to evaluate. You know what the loan costs, how long it runs, and what your payments look like before you send collateral.

Bitcoin may keep moving, but with Arch your rate stays put.

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This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin was so close to hitting $82K this week, but unfortunately just couldn’t get there.

• It touched an intraday high above $81K on September 4, before fresh U.S.-Iran military exchanges over the weekend pushed oil back toward $100/barrel, rate-hike odds climbed, and as a result, BTC slid to the high $77,000s.

The weird part is that flows don’t agree with the price chart:

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in nearly $1B for the week ending September 4th, the strongest since mid-January, including a single $730M day on September 3rd.

Zcash had an absolutely mental rally, breaking above $900 then $1000 then peaking nearly $1250 on September 6 - its highest price since 2016.

• This comes after Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into a spot ETF - since pulling in over $460M.

And another no-news Clarity Act update for you:

• The cloture on the motion to proceed is set for September 15 at 2:15pm ET.

• It needs 60 votes, and Polymarket currently has odds of bill passage at 16-18%.

• Three fights currently blocking the bill:

  • An ethics provision aimed at President Trump’s personal crypto income

  • DeFi developer liability language

  • A stablecoin-yield rule

This Week in TradFi

Friday’s August nonfarm payrolls report added 162,000 jobs against a Wall Street consensus of about 56,000 - nearly three times expectations.

• Unemployment held at 4.1%, and wages grew 3.1% YoY.

• July’s 23,000 job loss got revised up to a 21,000 gain, and June had a similar upward revision.

• Odds of a rate hike jumped immediately after the print, and now sit around 57-60%, up from roughly 52% a month ago.

• Stocks fell Friday on the strong data, because nothing sums up 2026 markets quite like "the economy is doing well" being a sell signal.

The weekend also brought the first fresh U.S.-Iran military exchanges since July.

• As a result, oil is pushing back towards $100/barrel.

And the Canada-U.S. trade war continues:

• Trade talks between the U.S. and Canada collapsed at the end of August after both sides accused each other of last-minute demands, and the U.S. slapped 50% tariffs on a batch of Canadian exports as a result.

• Canada's retaliation landed Monday night: $20B of U.S. goods now face duties from 15%-50%, hitting steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics.

Upcoming data to keep an eye on:

• PPI drops Thursday

• CPI drops Friday

• And the Fed decides on the 15th and 16th

This Week in Tech

OpenAI has declared the AGI era:

• OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3rd, with President Greg Brockman calling it the arrival of the "AGI era" and OpenAI touting it as the first model to hit a "Critical" cybersecurity capability threshold.

• How does it actually perform? On Artificial Analysis's broader Intelligence Index, Fable 5.1 scores 66 against Astra's 61, and on the Coding Agent Index, Fable 5.1 leads 70 to 67.

  • Artificial Analysis recorded a drop of roughly 80 Elo points on GDPval-AA v2, a benchmark covering economically valuable tasks across 44 occupations.

And some crazy drama in the math + AI world:

• Some quick background: the Millennium Prize Problems are seven of the hardest unsolved questions in math, each worth $1 million from the Clay Institute. Only one has ever been solved, back in 2003.

• Navier-Stokes is one of the remaining six. It's the math describing how liquids and gases move.

  • Not totally important but just in case you’re curious: what's never been proven is that it always works. Nobody has ruled out that the equations produce an infinite, physically impossible answer under some starting condition.

• This week, NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and Anthropic's Levent Alpöge proved that kind of blowup happens for the Euler equations - Navier-Stokes without friction. It's published and Lean-verified, meaning a proof-checking program confirmed the logic step-by-step.

• But here’s the drama: Buckmaster says that right after his breakthrough, OpenAI got in touch and claimed an internal model had independently produced its own ~100-page proof - for the actual Navier-Stokes equations, the Millennium Prize version - using, he alleges, the same technique he and Alpöge had developed.

  • OpenAI denies copying the approach, announced the result publicly anyway, and says it's also Lean-verified.

  • Buckmaster says OpenAI offered him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes writeup if he'd credit their model and drop Alpöge, citing Alpöge's Anthropic employment as a conflict.

  • He also asked point-blank whether OpenAI's model had access to his and Alpöge's private prompts in Codex, which they'd been using throughout the project. Bubeck said no - but reportedly wouldn't confirm whether the model's training data included user sessions that might have included theirs.

• In summation, the girls are fighting!

And speaking of fighting and tech…

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.