Green October, September Jobs, & GPT-6.1 Astra Shelved

This Week at Arch: A Bitcoin rally changes your loan before it changes your plan

Bitcoin moved from roughly $65,000 to $85,000 in a matter of weeks. For anyone borrowing against BTC, that move changes more than just the chart.

When collateral value rises, loan balance stays the same and LTV falls, creating room inside an existing loan.

Eligible Arch borrowers can then use that room to draw additional cash against the same position, request a portion of collateral back, or keep the lower LTV as a buffer. An upsize uses the original maturity date, and the origination fee applies only to the incremental amount.

See how loan adjustments work →

This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin spent the week getting so close to $87,000 but never quite hitting it.

• It sealed its highest weekly close since late January at roughly $86,500, then made its fourth attempt at higher ground since September 21 - but unfortunately couldn’t quite hit that $87K milestone.

• The wall overhead is the 2026 yearly open at $87,570, so the bulls are currently fighting to get back to where the year started.

• October is at least a friendly month: BTC is up 2.7% so far, and there have been only three red Octobers in 13 years.

ETF flows cooled a bit after last week’s party.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $241M for a third straight inflow week, a pretty long way from the $2.39B the week before.

• BlackRock's IBIT carried it with $450M while Fidelity's FBTC lost $168M.

• Ether ETFs flipped to $138M in outflows.

Open USD (OUSD), a partner-governed U.S. dollar stablecoin, went live on September 30, built by Open Standard, a company founded by Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa.

• It's issued by Stripe-owned Bridge and launched on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, and it opened with roughly $468M in market cap.

• So it seems like the companies that take a cut of every card swipe have concluded that the future of money is a token they also take a cut of.

This Week in TradFi

Stocks pushed higher to end the week:

• The Nasdaq closed at a record 27,477 on Monday, with the S&P 500 at 7,774 and the Dow at 51,268.

• Tech did the heavy lifting, as usual, and PTC jumped roughly 35% after Schneider Electric agreed to buy it for $22.6B in cash.

• And a record 60% of S&P 500 stocks now carry a Buy rating from analysts.

And the September jobs report is in:

• September payrolls rose by just 29,000 vs. roughly 90,000 economists expected, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.2%.

• July and August were revised down by a combined 60,000 jobs, with July now showing a loss of 10,000.

• Wages grew just 3% from a year ago, below August's 3.4% CPI reading.

• CME FedWatch put the odds of an October hike at about 17%, down from roughly 69% a week earlier.

Treasury yields hit levels last seen in the Bush administration:

• The bond market apparently did not get the memo that the Fed is backing off.

• The 10-year closed Monday near 5.31%, its highest closing level since April 2002. And the 30-year rose to about 5.66%, a 24-year high.

And some oil news:

• On October 2, G7 leaders agreed to a coordinated release of 100M barrels of oil and petroleum products, with a significant share of the diesel hitting the market in the first 20 days.

• Brent fell about 3% to roughly $99 and finished the week down about 4.7%.

• The relief may be brief. Barclays raised its fourth-quarter forecast to $115/barrel, and Washington and Tehran are far from a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz fully.

This Week in Tech

All we’ve got for you this week is AI news and more AI news:

• President Trump signed an executive order telling the executive branch to use the terms "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in place of AI.

  • The same day, leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary safety accord at the White House, which Trump called "morally binding" even though it isn't actually regulation.

  • One day later, the FTC confirmed an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI and other labs, the first official U.S. regulatory action on rogue AI agents.

• Meanwhile, OpenAI canceled GPT-6.1 Astra after deeming it unreliable and finding it frequently ignored instructions.

  • In its place, it launched GPT-6.1 Sol, priced at one-fifth the cost of Astra.

  • And the agent saga keeps expanding: OpenAI has now notified more than 100 organizations about unauthorized activity tied to its agents.

• The AI boom’s financing is getting creative: Anthropic’s supplier, landlord, and lender are now the same company.

  • Anthropic's IPO prospectus (from a draft seen by Reuters) shows Broadcom lending up to $42B in convertible notes, covering about a third of a $125.2B TPU compute commitment, and the filing itself flags "potential conflicts of interest" because Broadcom is its chip supplier, lessor, and now lender.

  • Elsewhere in the creative-financing aisle, Amazon is exploring moving roughly $8B of Nvidia chips to outside investors through a special-purpose vehicle and leasing them back to keep using them.

• And Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, but the initial rollout is limited to trusted cybersecurity defenders through its Fairwind Program.

  • Google says the model can autonomously find, validate and fix critical vulnerabilities, and the same skill set in the wrong hands is the reason for the velvet rope.

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.