Energy Supply Worries, Treasury Yields, & SpaceX Debt

This Week at Arch: Your Bitcoin plan now includes what comes next

Most people who borrow against Bitcoin are thinking in decades. They hold for the long term and borrow instead of selling. Now that plan can include what happens next.

Arch borrowers can now name a successor for their account with beneficiary planning. If the borrower passes away or becomes incapacitated, the successor can request to take over the loans and keep them running, subject to identity verification and Arch's consent.

A one-time $1,000 fee covers every loan on the account, now and in the future, including refinances and rollovers. Setup is a 15-minute call, a card payment, and one short addendum to sign. And everything else - loan terms, rate, LTV thresholds, margin call rules - all stay the same.

Beneficiary planning isn't a substitute for a will or trust. Consult a qualified professional about your estate plan.

See how beneficiary planning works →

This Week in Crypto

Some choppy price movement this week:

• Bitcoin fell to around $80,400 on Thursday following hawkish Fed minutes, rising yields, and oil above $100 - all colliding with a very crowded long trade.

• The pile-up was messy: $1.14B in leveraged positions were erased in 24 hours, the biggest daily liquidation total since August.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $484.9M in outflows on Wednesday, the largest daily outflow since June, and another $244.1M on Thursday.

• The Fed minutes signaled that most officials judged another quarter-point hike by year-end likely appropriate, and futures now price an 85% chance of a December hike.

• BTC recovered to the low $83,000s by the weekend, then slid toward $81,000 early Tuesday before bouncing back, likely on energy supply worries and more hawkish signals.

At TOKEN2049 on Wednesday, BitMine chairman Tom Lee said the firm will stop accumulating ETH once it holds 5% of circulating supply.

• It already holds more than 6M ETH, about 4.9% of supply and worth near $15B, so it needs only around 100,000 more.

• The timing was not ideal - Ether ETFs had shed about $506M over five sessions, extending their losing streak to seven in a row.

This Week in TradFi

On Wednesday, the 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.36%, its highest level since April 2002.

• The Treasury sold $39B of 10-year notes at 5.300%, up from 4.834% last month.

Equities spent the early part of the week near records until Thursday, when the Nasdaq fell 1.25% after the Financial Times reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue was approaching $50B at the end of September - about $20B below the $70B figure that had been widely reported.

• Part of the gap is a counting dispute: the earlier figure was built to compare against Anthropic’s, which includes sales through cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI excludes them.

• Nvidia fell 2.94%, and Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta all dropped more than 1%.

Oil is still above $100:

• On Thursday, WTI rose 3.6% and Brent rose 4.1% on attacks on shipping near the Strait of Hormuz and a hurricane-driven cut in U.S. output, and U.S. crude is now up more than 60% this year.

• By Friday, Brent was bouncing between $102.50 and $105.

And it’s bank earnings season:

• On Tuesday, JPMorgan earned $5.57 per share against the $5.90 expected, on revenue of $50.91B versus $51.22B.

• Goldman Sachs posted earnings of $17.01 per share against a consensus of about $13.65, with $5.29B in profit as volatility tied to the Middle East conflict boosted equities trading.

This Week in Tech

SpaceX wants $40 billion in debt to buy Nvidia chips:

• On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that SpaceX is seeking $40B in financing, led by Apollo, with roughly $10B in bank loans and $30B in investment-grade debt.

• Apollo is also one of the six firms Nvidia partnered with in August on financing platforms meant to mobilize more than $500B for AI infrastructure.

Speaking of Nvidia, Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Ultra, built on Nvidia’s RTX Spark and starting at $2,599, with configurations climbing to $5,899.

• It’s designed to run advanced AI models locally, with up to 128GB of unified memory, and ships with Microsoft Execution Containers, a security system meant to keep AI agents from accessing unauthorized data.

• But then on Monday, CNBC reported that Microsoft will rely more on homegrown AI chips, reducing its dependence on Nvidia, as Microsoft announced its Maia 300 accelerator.

And some ChatGPT updates:

• On Wednesday, OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 in ChatGPT alongside “Intelligent UI,” which puts interactive charts, buttons, forms, and task-specific tools directly into replies.

• So, for example, instead of explaining how to split a dinner bill, it can build you a bill splitter, or a savings calculator, or a game to play in the chat.

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.