Fed Meeting, Meta Earnings, & Cybersecurity Galore

This Week at Arch: Your Bitcoin can help fund what’s next

For many business owners, Bitcoin is the strongest asset on the balance sheet. It is also the one they least want to sell. An Arch loan lets that position help fund the business while you keep holding it.

You post BTC as collateral and receive USD or USDC, typically the same business day once your collateral is confirmed. Interest accrues until maturity, so there are no monthly payments competing with payroll or inventory, and you can repay early with no penalty. Collateral is held at Anchorage Digital, a federally chartered bank, and is never rehypothecated.

Where business owners are putting it to work:

• Expansion. Fund a new location, equipment or a key hire without giving up equity or selling Bitcoin you plan to hold for years.

• Cash flow. Cover the gap between paying suppliers and getting paid by customers, or build a reserve ahead of a slow season.

• Refinancing. Replace higher-rate debt with Bitcoin-backed credit. PowerCompute did this in August, refinancing $18 million at an initial rate of about 2%.

• Opportunities that won't wait. Close on an acquisition, an inventory buy or a property when the timing is right, not when it is convenient to sell.

Selling Bitcoin to raise capital can create a taxable gain and gives up any future upside. Borrowing against it keeps the position intact. Loan availability for businesses varies by state, and tax treatment depends on your situation, so review your plans with your tax professional.

See how Arch loans work →

This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin continues to sit right around $80,000 (boring!):

• BTC rose to a weekly high of just over $84K on Wednesday, after results from SpaceX and Super Micro sparked a short squeeze.

• It then slid to about $79,100 by Saturday and now sits just under $80K as the Fed convenes.

• ETF is down about 4% over the past week at $2,324, and SOL is down about 3% at $100.

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed a combined $773.5M on October 22 and 23, then took in $110.3M on Monday, all of it into IBIT.

On Wednesday, the OCC issued its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act.

• It covers reserves, redemption, risk management, custody and capital, taking effect January 18, 2027.

• It sets a $5M capital floor for issuers, and the final version loosened the proposal’s restrictions on yield and rewards arrangements.

The OCC had a busy week! They also granted final approval Ripple National Trust Bank, ten months after the conditional approval that began in December 2025.

• The bank will manage RLUSD’s segregated reserves, act as collateral trustee, and offer institutional custody.

• It cannot take deposits or offer FDIC-insured accounts.

This Week in TradFi

Meta earnings were this week:

• Meta’s quarterly capex of $34.9B exceeded its operating cash flow of $32.8B, pushing free cash flow negative for the first time in more than a decade.

• It also raised the floor of its 2026 capex range to $135B-$145B, and announced a new class of nonvoting stock to help fund the buildout.

• The stock fell 7% on the news, and the Nasdaq dropped 2.6% on Thursday, its worst day since early June.

And news for the SpaceX holders:

• SpaceX reported Tuesday after the close that revenue grew 161% to $14.58B.

• It’s the company’s first quarterly profit since going public, driven by deals to rent out computing power to AI firms.

• Elon Musk has also said that SpaceX and Tesla have each formed special committees to discuss a merger (is that just… Musk discussing with himself?).

U.S. oil prices topped $100/barrel on Friday, a result of renewed fears about the U.S.-Iran conflict growing.

• By Tuesday, Brent was at $116.07 and WTI near $102.

The Fed meets today and tomorrow and is expected to hold at 3.75%-4.00%, after September’s quarter-point hike.

• In a Reuters poll, 94 of 100 economists expect a hold, and all 100 expect a December hike.

This Week in Tech

This week’s biggest news: Black October:

• On Wednesday, PHP shipped emergency fixes for two critical flaws, nicknamed php2shell, that let an unauthenticated attacker run code on a server.

• Why does this matter? What does this even mean? Well, PHP runs nearly 70% of websites with a known server-side language.

• Amazon said suspected hackers tried to exploit the flaw days before it was public. Cloudflare counted thousands of attempts in the 10 hours before the announcement, and the count reached millions within hours of it.

• And of course, AI made all this much scarier: OpenAI says the research firm Calif identified one of the critical flaws using an AI system, and Wiz independently found both.

And separately in the cybersecurity world:

• This week’s most ridiculous story comes from eMudhra, an Indian certificate authority trusted by Google, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla.

• It generated the private keys for eight of its signing certificates so badly that each was a number below 256, and one was literally 4.

  • For context, a properly generated key of this type is a random number about 115 digits long.

• The risk was that anyone with those keys could forge trusted HTTPS certificates to impersonate any website.

• eMudhra says none of the affected CAs issued end-user certificates, and no exploitation has been confirmed.

And in long-awaited news, Anthropic has filed to go public:

• On Monday, Anthropic filed its S-1 to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with the price range left blank.

• It reported $16.29B in first-half revenue against $1.16B a year earlier and an $80.75B net loss, mostly from a $72.39B fair-value adjustment on financing instruments.

• Stocks closed higher, with the S&P 500 up 0.7% and the Nasdaq up 0.82%, and the Kospi gained 3.09% Tuesday on chip strength.

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.