Hike or Hold?

The big day is almost upon us: this week, the Federal Reserve’s governors will meet to make the call on interest rates, and it really could go either way. The data suggests hiking may be the best option, but the decision looks set to be one of the trickiest in recent memory. Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market remain in limbo as the FOMC approaches.

Meanwhile, following the success of Robinhood Chain, could the next so-called ‘corpo chain’ be the place to go for mad gains? Kraken’s Ink seems to have a lot going for it and it’s not like crypto’s resident degens are averse to the idea of flocking to what they reckon might be the next big thing. But is liquidity ready to spill over onto Ink, or is the chain in danger of running dry? Our deep dive below has the answers.

⛓️ Moving On-Chain ⛓️

For years, the story has been that Wall Street would eventually absorb crypto. Instead, traditional finance is now moving the US dollar directly onto crypto's blockchain infrastructure. Driven by US stablecoin regulations like the GENIUS Act, global financial institutions are rushing to launch regulated dollar stablecoins and operate validation networks. Crypto, it seems, is winning.

But is crypto actually conquering global finance, or is Washington just leveraging its tech to reinforce dollar dominance worldwide? In today’s video, we dig into the nitty gritty of it all. We look at how the big beasts of Wall Street are aligning behind crypto, who the major players are in this push, and what it means for the future of finance. And we reveal how ultimately, crypto is becoming the core infrastructure powering the world's reserve currency.

You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

This week delivered a string of data points that all said essentially the same thing: inflation is not going away, the Fed is going to act, and Bitcoin just has to suck it all up. August CPI came in at +0.4% month-on-month - the sharpest monthly gain since April, driven almost entirely by energy. The annual rate is running at 3.4%, in line with expectations but miles above the Fed's 2% target.

With the August jobs print having already come in at 162k - well above consensus - the case for a September hike is looking stronger by the day. Prediction markets are now pricing a 25bp hike at the FOMC meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday as the consensus outcome, not an upside risk.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin at $77k is sitting in familiar territory. The pattern of the past month is unchanged: every rally toward $80,000-$81,000 runs into resistance, and every macro headwind pushes it back into the $77,000-$79,000 range. The 50-week SMA at $81k continues to act as the ceiling. Fed rate hike odds passed 60% earlier this week, which weighed on sentiment and kept buyers cautious. ETF inflows have been consistent, suggesting the demand is still there, but the rate environment is not cooperating.

The week also brought a significant security event that deserves attention. On 6th September, a vulnerability in the open-source Elements software underlying the Liquid Network was exploited, resulting in the creation of approximately 4,000 counterfeit LBTC - worth around $320 million at current prices. The network halted new transactions as a precaution. The purported exploiters have claimed to be white-hat researchers and made a conditional offer to return the funds. The incident is a reminder that Bitcoin's security model is not the same as the security model of every application built on top of it.

There’s just one thing that matters in the coming days though, and that’s the aforementioned  FOMC decision. The data has now delivered everything Warsh needs to justify a hike: NFP at 162k, CPI at +0.4% MoM, services inflation still sticky and energy prices rising on the renewed Iran tensions. The question is no longer whether the data justifies a hike because, well… it does. The question now is whether Warsh will act on it or use the data as justification for holding rates this month while signalling more clearly that October or December are likely to see hikes. Either way, the press conference language will move markets.

In sum then, Bitcoin is caught between two forces that are operating simultaneously. The demand is still there - ETF flows are positive, long-term holders are still accumulating and the on-chain bottom indicators that blinked on in June remain relevant. But the rate environment is the most hawkish it has been since Warsh took over, and that environment tends to suppress risk asset prices regardless of the underlying demand. A 25bp hike on Wednesday that’s accompanied by a neutral-to-dovish press conference would likely produce a relief rally toward $82,000-$84,000. A hike plus a hawkish statement would test the $74,000-$75,000 support. The base case for the coming week is that Bitcoin remains range-bound until the decision is announced.

🤔 Could Ink Rival Robinhood? 🤔

Tis the season of corpo chains.

For the uncs in the chat, ‘corpo chain’ is crypto slang for a blockchain launched and largely controlled by a big corporation. Think Coinbase’s Base, Robinhood Chain, or Stripe’s Tempo.

With Robinhood Chain having had a monumental run over the past few weeks and Circle’s upcoming launch of its Arc receiving a good amount of attention, there’s been some speculation that Kraken’s Ink could be next in line – especially due to the tokenized stock frenzy on Robinhood Chain.

The idea is that some of this volume and interest could spill over to Ink, whose corporate counterpart (Kraken) owns one of the biggest tokenised stock issuers in the market. At first glance, that makes perfect logical sense.

After all, just a couple of days ago, Nasdaq announced a $100M investment into Kraken’s parent company Payward. That deal values Payward at $21B and leans heavily on xStocks, the tokenised equities framework Kraken picked up when it acquired Backed. It also expands a partnership built around Nasdaq Equity Tokens that the pair expect to launch in the second quarter of 2027. Data from rwa.xyz also shows that the onchain market cap of Kraken’s xStocks is almost four times bigger than Robinhood’s Stock tokens. Not to mention, xStocks ranks third by market cap among all issuers of tokenised equities.

Surely then, it’s only a matter of time before degens start pushing stock memecoins on Ink? Well, we took a closer look at the onchain data and found a couple of serious flaws with that line of thinking.

The first is that xStocks' dominance depends on how you measure it. Kraken says xStocks has cleared more than $25B in total transaction volume, but only around $4B of that settled onchain. CoinMarketCap's research shows most xStocks trading is matched on Kraken and Bybit order books, and as of late June, Ondo's cumulative onchain DEX flow was roughly 2.5 times larger.

Also, while xStocks may be larger than Robinhood Stock tokens in onchain market cap, a CoinDesk research report shows that Robinhood Stock Tokens account for nearly 53% of on-chain tokenised-equity volume by issuer. xStocks on the other hand seem to account for less than 5% of onchain tokenised volume.

While you might think this would change once attention shifts to Ink, our next finding says otherwise.

You see, Kraken is building xStocks as neutral infrastructure that goes wherever liquidity already lives. That's also the premise of the Nasdaq partnership, where the xStocks framework is meant to power the permissionless side of Nasdaq's tokenised equities across open blockchain networks. Making Ink the exclusive home for xStocks would undercut this. In fact, data from Dune shows that almost 85% of xStocks’ total AUM lives on Solana and Ethereum. Ink, on the other hand, accounts for less than 1% of this AUM. Compared to Coinbase and Robinhood, both of whom have largely tied their tokenised equities to their own networks, Kraken has chosen to spread xStocks across as many venues as possible.

Tokenised equities aside, Ink’s mainnet has already been live for almost two years now. In all this time, the chain has failed to sustainably hold user interest. In fact, Ink spent most of its first year with plenty of transactions but very little capital. Its onchain TVL sat under $10M for quite a while before the Ink Foundation introduced Tydro, a white-label version of Aave, in October 2025. To its credit, Tydro single-handedly pushed the chain's TVL from about $6M to nearly $249M in under two weeks. At the same time, Kraken began routing its exchange users into the chain through DeFi Earn, a product that parks their USDC in lending vaults on Ink without asking them to touch a wallet. All of this saw Ink’s onchain TVL push past the $500M mark in Jan 2026.

However, fast forward to today, almost all of that momentum has faded. Data from Defillama puts Ink's TVL at $155.8M today, roughly 70% below where it stood in January. At the same time, daily active addresses have slipped to around 26,000 from a peak of just over 157,000 in early 2025. This is due in part to a couple of setbacks that the chain experienced earlier this year. Notably, Ink was among the chains hit hardest by withdrawals after the KelpDAO rsETH exploit in April. It also suffered a chain-wide outage in June that the team blamed on its infrastructure provider, Gelato.

The chain’s only saving grace is Nado, its flagship orderbook exchange that supports xStocks for spot trading and as margin for perpetual futures. Data shows that Nado does far more volume than anything else on the chain. According to Defillama, Nado has done nearly $311M in perpetual futures volume over the past 24 hours, $7.8B over the past 30 days and $83.6B since launch. For context, that daily figure is about 63% of the $493M in perps volume recorded on Robinhood Chain over the same period. Though, when it comes to spot trading, Ink trails Robinhood Chain by a factor of several hundred. Impressive numbers nevertheless. So, what explains it?

Well, the answer seems to be airdrop farming. Notably, Nado's open interest sits at just $80.1M, putting its daily volume at four times that. Nado also collected $1.46M in fees over those 30 days, less than two basis points on its volume. That kind of churn at thin fees usually points to incentive-driven trading, and it lines up with Nado's points programme feeding into the upcoming INK airdrop. Nado's protocol revenue has also been sliding all year, from $8.93 million in Q1 to $4.43 million in Q2 and $2.32 million so far in Q3.

In other words, the real test for whether Nado can single-handedly bootstrap attention for Ink comes after the INK token launch. To Ink’s credit, the team seems aware of this problem. They’ve been trying to incentivise more teams to build on the chain. Though, whether a breakout app can emerge from these incentives is something only time can tell.

As it stands now, Ink is unlikely to take Robinhood Chain's mindshare. The more realistic path for Ink is to become the infrastructure behind Kraken's derivatives and yield products, with Nado as the main draw for traders. Though, that second part depends on how much of Nado's volume survives once the INK token is live and the airdrop incentive is gone.

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🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* What Is WalletConnect? How It Works, Safety, WCT and WalletConnect Pay
* Centralized And Decentralized Crypto Exchanges Compared
* What Is Spot Trading in Crypto? How It Works, Costs and Risks

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

"Having a long-term view is essential, but it isn't enough. You have to be able to survive the short term" - Howard Marks

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.