Bitcoin’s market share inched down again, with BTC dominance off 0.04% to 58.28%, while the Altcoin Index spiked to 57. That is a sharp climb, with the last cycle’s high at 87. If the index cracks 70 this time, expect the market to lean hard into altcoin season.
Stablecoins are already flooding in. On August 29, the basket saw $1.494B in inflows, broken down as $151M into USDT and a massive $1.304B into USDC.
That lifted the total circulating supply to $242.903B; one of the strongest inflow days this quarter.
ETF flows were mixed. On August 28, without BlackRock’s prints, BTC ETFs brought in $115M, while ETH ETFs lost $29M.
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Macro and policy
Equities closed green across the board, with the Dow up 0.16%, Nasdaq higher by 0.53%, and the S&P 500 up 0.32%. The 10-year Treasury yield dropped 0.78% to 4.21%, while the dollar index slipped 0.29% to 97.95. Gold climbed 0.52% to $3,412.50, brushing record territory.
In a first, the U.S. Commerce Department confirmed partnerships with Chainlink and Pyth to bring macroeconomic data onchain.
Pyth will initially supply five years of quarterly GDP data and later expand to other indicators, while Chainlink will stream real-time metrics including GDP, PCE, and private sales.
Officials described it as laying the groundwork for a “strategic relationship” between government data and blockchain rails.
Market movers and industry
JPMorgan analysts noted that Bitcoin volatility has fallen to historical lows, with its six-month rolling volatility dropping from nearly 60% at the start of 2025 to about 30% now.
That is only twice the volatility of gold, the lowest ratio ever recorded, making BTC increasingly attractive for institutional portfolios.
In Solana, a whale-institution staked 1.5M SOL (worth $318.77M), bringing its total to 2.5M SOL staked over the past eight days, worth about $505.8M.
The community is also voting on Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade, described as the most important consensus-layer change in its history.
Developed under ETH Zurich professor Roger Wattenhofer, it would slash transaction finality from 12.8 seconds to 100–150 milliseconds.
If approved, Alpenglow will go live on mainnet early next year, pushing Solana into true sub-second settlement.
Elsewhere, prediction markets are heating up alongside new alpha farming plays, and Backpack confirmed new anti-manipulation protections, including weighted external pricing and range-bound liquidation bands.
Alpha watch
The fourmeme presale has already raised $80M, with participation surging as early buyers farm for points.
Stable is drawing serious attention after Frax founder Sam Kazemian joined as CTO, while remaining CEO of Frax. Stable is building a new chain centered on USDT and its surrounding ecosystem.
Leaked contract data from the Linea airdrop suggests 177,809 eligible addresses with an average drop size of 492 tokens per wallet. Analysts caution that the distribution appears uneven, with larger early users likely to have captured outsized allocations.
