Coinbase Lists S&P 500 Perps, and Ethereum Scraps Eight Years of Work

A shipping lane carrying a fifth of the world’s oil went quiet, and crude didn’t care. A regulated US venue now offers leveraged S&P exposure with no expiry. And Ethereum walked away from its own hash function.

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Market-Moving News

Three things opened the week. A ceasefire expired with the two sides not even agreeing that a ceasefire existed, and the market’s reaction was a shrug worth paying attention to.

Coinbase lists S&P 500 perpetual futures on a CFTC-regulated venue today. And Ethereum’s researchers threw out a piece of cryptography they’d spent eight years building.

None of those moves prices this afternoon. All three tell you something about the months ahead.

Corporates

BitMine Nears 5% of Ethereum With $11B Treasury

BitMine has pushed its Ethereum holdings to 5.82 million ETH after adding another 9,926 tokens over the past week. The position is worth roughly $11 billion and represents about 4.8% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. 

BitMine is now 96% of the way toward its stated goal of owning 5% of all ETH. More than 5.06 million ETH, roughly 87% of the treasury, is already staked.

One Company Holds Nearly 1 in 20 ETH

The latest purchase is small compared with BitMine’s existing position, but the concentration milestone is not. Reaching 5% would mean one public company controls roughly one out of every 20 ETH in circulation. 

BitMine has accumulated consistently since launching its Ethereum treasury strategy in 2025. That concentration ties the company increasingly closely to Ethereum’s price, liquidity, and network economics.

Staking Turns Holdings Into Revenue

BitMine is not leaving most of its ETH idle. The company estimates its current staking position can generate around $250 million in annualized revenue. It also repurchased another 1.7 million BMNR shares last week, bringing total buybacks since July 1 to 20.8 million shares.

Large staking exposure creates income, but it also deepens dependence on Ethereum and adds validator, liquidity, and market risk.

Take: Corporate crypto treasuries enter different territory when their holdings start representing measurable percentages of an entire network.

If BitMine crosses 5%, you will have one public company combining enormous ETH concentration with billions of dollars committed to staking.

Mining

HIVE Locks In $350M AI Cloud Contract

HIVE Digital has signed a five-year AI cloud-services agreement worth approximately $350 million, giving its BUZZ HPC division another major source of contracted revenue outside Bitcoin mining.

The deal covers 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs deployed through GB300 NVL72 systems at the Bell AI Fabric facility in British Columbia.

HIVE expects the contract to add roughly $70 million in annualized revenue once the cluster becomes operational in the fourth quarter.

AI Revenue Starts Getting Real

The new agreement follows a separate $220 million AI cloud contract signed in June. Together, those deals are pushing BUZZ HPC toward roughly $180 million in annualized revenue, although much of that figure remains contracted rather than currently earned.

HIVE expects approximately $185 million in deployment costs. The unnamed investment-grade customer will provide a $35 million upfront deposit, equal to 10% of the contract value.

Mining Infrastructure Finds Another Buyer

Bitcoin miners already own the power connections, data centers, and technical teams needed to operate computing infrastructure at scale. HIVE is increasingly using those assets for GPUs instead of relying entirely on ASIC mining economics.

Once the new cluster is running, the company expects its AI and HPC business to generate roughly $500,000 per day.

Execution remains the hurdle. Hardware deployment, financing, customer concentration, and service performance all determine whether contracted revenue becomes cash flow.

Take: HIVE is turning mining infrastructure into a second business with customers willing to sign multiyear contracts.

The number to watch is how quickly $350 million of contracted demand gives you revenue that no longer rises and falls with Bitcoin mining economics.

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TradFi

Alpaca Opens Prediction-Market Path to 10M Accounts

Alpaca Derivatives has registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a Futures Commission Merchant and joined the National Futures Association, clearing a regulatory hurdle for its planned prediction-market business.

The registration gives Alpaca a path to offer event contracts through the same brokerage infrastructure already used by fintechs and financial platforms.

Alpaca says its technology supports more than 10 million brokerage accounts across hundreds of institutions and fintech companies in more than 40 countries.

Prediction Markets Move Into Brokerage APIs

Alpaca is not building another standalone destination like Kalshi or Polymarket.

Its model would let financial apps integrate event contracts through existing APIs, placing prediction markets beside other investment products without requiring customers to open a separate account elsewhere.

That distribution layer could matter as event-contract trading expands beyond dedicated prediction platforms.

Registration Comes Before Trading

The FCM registration does not mean prediction markets are already live through Alpaca.

The company still needs to complete its operational rollout and connect the infrastructure required to offer contracts. Alpaca also plans to expand into additional futures products, subject to regulatory requirements.

The bigger shift is where prediction markets may appear next. Instead of asking customers to find specialized platforms, financial apps could eventually place event contracts directly inside existing brokerage interfaces.

Take: Prediction markets become harder to treat as a niche crypto product once brokerage infrastructure starts absorbing them.

The real test comes when apps serving millions of accounts decide whether giving you event contracts actually creates lasting trading demand.

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Future Forward

A thin regulatory calendar after last week’s cancellation, which leaves macro and one launch carrying the week.

On the Radar:

📊 FOMC minutes this week, the nearest thing to a rate signal before September

🛢️ Whether crude finally responds to Hormuz, having ignored it so far

🏛️ A replacement SEC date for its crypto rulemaking, still unannounced

Coming Up:

📅 Coinfest Asia this week in Bali

📅 ETH Belgrade and Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong before month-end

Crypto Know-How: How Perpetual Futures Stay Tethered to Anything

Coinbase lists S&P 500 perps today, so it’s worth understanding what keeps a contract with no expiry date behaving itself.

An ordinary futures contract has a settlement date. On that date, it converges with the underlying asset because it has to, since one turns into the other. That convergence is what keeps futures honest. Drift too far from spot and arbitrageurs collect free money closing the gap.

A perpetual has no settlement date at all. Nothing forces convergence, so in principle the contract could float away from the index it tracks and never return. The mechanism that prevents this is the funding rate.

Every few hours, traders on one side pay traders on the other. When the perpetual sits above the underlying, longs pay shorts. That does two jobs simultaneously.

Holding a long gets expensive, which discourages more buying, while shorts get paid to take the other side. Both pressures shove the contract back toward the index. Below the underlying, it runs in reverse and shorts pay longs.

So alignment isn’t enforced by a deadline. It’s enforced by a rolling fee that charges whichever side is crowded.

The consequence is that perpetuals cost money to hold in a way expiring futures don’t. In quiet markets, the funding is negligible. In a strong trend, the crowded side can pay meaningful sums every few hours just to keep the position open.

Before holding one for more than a few days, check the funding rate, because a correct call on direction still loses if the carry eats it.

Everything Else

• An AI engine ranks the top 10 stocks out of 357 every morning processing the same SEC filings, fundamentals, and money flow data that hedge fund analysts spend millions to access.

• Bitcoin ETFs opened August strongly, then recorded consecutive outflows last week, a quiet reversal that has drawn less attention than the price action holding steady around $63,500. 

• Binance has overtaken CME Group in Bitcoin futures open interest for the first time since late 2023, a reversal tied to the collapse of the basis trade that had pulled institutional money onto the regulated venue.

• Cboe BZX has filed with the SEC to list the first triple-leveraged Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in the US, targeting three times daily returns through CME futures contracts. 

• Ethereum’s staking ratio has hit an all-time high above thirty-four percent, locking more than forty million ETH into consensus and pulling supply off exchanges, while concentrating influence among a handful of large staking providers. CoinMarketCap

• Goldman Sachs now calls a September rate increase very unlikely after a run of soft economic data, which removes one of the larger overhangs that had been sitting on risk assets through the summer.