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first_img Analysis: Cryptocurrency market makers profit from basis trading during the Bitcoin rebound, rather than betting on direction

According to CoinDesk, as Bitcoin surged from about $62,000 to over $77,000 last week, liquidating approximately $3 billion in leveraged short positions, major crypto market makers such as Abraxas Capital, Fasanara Capital, and Wintermute quietly established short positions in perpetual contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars on Hyperliquid.Lookonchain data shows that the three institutions collectively hold short positions of 138,569 ETH (approximately $338 million) and 3,425 BTC (approximately $265 million); meanwhile, Abraxas Capital withdrew 73,872 ETH (approximately $173 million) from Binance in the past four days.This strategy is known as cash arbitrage or basis trading: traders hold spot positions while shorting an equivalent amount of assets through perpetual contracts to hedge against price volatility risks, primarily earning the funding rates paid by longs to shorts. In previous months, funding rates were long suppressed or even turned negative, but this month's rebound has quickly turned funding rates positive, reopening the arbitrage window. Aegis data shows that the 30-day average funding rate for Bitcoin perpetual contracts on August 24 reached an annualized 6.7%, with a 7-day average of 8.7%; 21shares capital markets noted that basis trading for mainstream assets like Solana is also becoming lucrative.This trading has extended to regulated markets: Glassnode data shows that CME Bitcoin futures open interest has risen from about 87,000 BTC to 122,000 BTC.

first_img Ethena expands basis trading to stock perpetual contracts, expecting that RWA perpetuals will surpass crypto derivatives within 12-24 months

The cryptocurrency protocol Ethena, which issued $4 billion in synthetic US dollars (USDe), announced plans to expand its basis trading strategy to stock perpetual contracts. According to Ethena's data, the open interest in stock perpetual contracts has grown tenfold to $6.2 billion since March. Over the past few months, the funding rates on Hyperliquid and Binance averaged approximately 14% and 17.5%, respectively, while the Bitcoin funding rate during the same period was only in the low single digits.Ethena pointed out that the average Bitcoin funding rate was 11% in 2024, 4.9% in 2025, and has dropped to 2.2% as of August 11 this year. In contrast, stock perpetual contracts had positive funding rates on 94% of trading days on Hyperliquid and 97% on Binance, with a median funding rate of 13.9%, while Bitcoin's was 3.9%. Co-founder Guy Young stated that stocks tend to rise in the long term, creating a continuous demand for leveraged longs to pay fees, and that the funding rate for stocks has almost no correlation with Bitcoin, providing USDe with a revenue source that relies less on the crypto market.The global stock market had a market capitalization of approximately $166.5 trillion in July, far exceeding the crypto market's approximately $2.2 trillion. This expansion is one of Ethena's initiatives to seek new revenue sources after the supply of USDe fell from a peak of about $15 billion to below $5 billion. Last week, it also announced a $1 billion financing arrangement with FalconX.

first_img Pakistan established a cryptocurrency regulatory framework with only 8% of the budget, revealed the minister at Bitcoin Asia

Bilal Bin Saqib, the Minister of State for Pakistan and Chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA), revealed at the Bitcoin Asia conference that the country completed the establishment of its virtual asset regulatory system in less than six months, using only about 8% of the approved budget, which is approximately $200,000, with about 92% of the budget remaining unused. Saqib stated that the government should not measure success by how much money is spent, but rather by the actual delivery of results. The regulatory framework covers activities such as exchanges, custody, brokerage, asset management, lending, and settlement, and introduces requirements regarding governance, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing, customer asset protection, cybersecurity, and market conduct. Saqib emphasized that Pakistan's regulatory ambitions extend beyond the current digital asset market, with future focus on the tokenization market, programmable payments, stablecoins, machine-to-machine transactions, and the AI agent economy, noting the need to establish corresponding regulatory rules for agent payments and the agent economy. Saqib stated that emerging markets do not need to spend a decade catching up; they can build on the frontier. With a population of over 240 million, Pakistan is a potentially significant market for emerging financial technologies. The rapid transition from legislation to licensing in the country is being used as a demonstration case for the government's response to next-generation financial infrastructure.

The Ethena Foundation announced four major adjustments to the ecosystem: repurchasing ENA and canceling monthly VC unlocks

According to official news, the Ethena Foundation announced four adjustments to the Ethena ecosystem, including repurchasing locked tokens held by early investors, further aligning the value of tokens with equity, launching a governance proposal for income to repurchase ENA, and canceling future monthly unlocks for VC investors.The Ethena Foundation stated that it has completed the acquisition of all locked ENA tokens from some major seed round investors who had sold ENA in the past 9 months. Regarding the alignment of token and equity value, the Ethena Foundation and Ethena Labs have reached a "Master Framework Agreement," which stipulates that the intellectual property and value generated by the agreement will exclusively belong to the foundation and be governed by ENA holders, while equity investors in Labs entities will no longer enjoy residual cash flow.In addition, the governance proposal for income to repurchase ENA has been launched. According to the proposal, the net income generated by all business lines under the Ethena brand will be used for programmatic repurchase of ENA, and the proposal has been approved by the Risk Committee. The Ethena Foundation also stated that it has reached an agreement with major investors to eliminate the selling pressure caused by future monthly unlocks for VC investors by releasing unallocated tokens. Team tokens will still remain locked according to the original allocation plan.

first_img HashKey released its mid-term performance for 2026, with revenue increasing by 20.6% year-on-year

HashKey Holdings Limited announced its unaudited consolidated interim results for the six months ended June 30, 2026, on August 27. During the reporting period, revenue was HKD 342.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 20.6%; gross profit was HKD 207.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 12.5%; gross margin improved from 51.0% in the second half of 2025 to 60.6%; adjusted losses narrowed by 21.0% to HKD 314.8 million.Revenue from transaction facilitation services was HKD 267.9 million, a year-on-year increase of 38.6%. Platform transaction volume reached HKD 2,822 billion, a year-on-year increase of 31.8%, of which institutional transaction volume was HKD 2,315 billion, a year-on-year increase of 58.8%, accounting for 82.0% of total transaction volume. The on-chain RWA TVL reached HKD 2,678.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 167.8%, and completed Hong Kong's first real estate RWA project and the first regulated silver RWA token. The asset management scale was HKD 5,941.2 million, with segment revenue of HKD 38.84 million, launching stablecoin and Bitcoin financial products as well as the industry's first Bitcoin mining power fund.HashKey was established in 2018 and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 17, 2025. Its business covers transaction facilitation, on-chain services, and asset management. During the period, its wholly-owned subsidiary signed a framework agreement for the acquisition of Singapore's Asia Pacific Exchange, HashKey Capital made a strategic investment in Vietnam's CAEX and led the B+ round of SignalPlus, while deepening cooperation with JPMorgan, DBS, and others.

first_img SenseTime recorded its first IFRS net profit in the first half of the year, with revenue increasing by 23.4% year-on-year

SenseTime Group (0020.HK / 80020.HK) announced its unaudited interim results for the six months ended June 30, 2026. During the period, revenue was approximately 2.911 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 23.4%; gross profit was approximately 1.206 billion RMB, with a gross margin of 41.4%, an increase of 2.9 percentage points year-on-year; profit for the period was approximately 617 million RMB, marking the first time a net profit was recorded according to IFRS standards, compared to a loss of approximately 848 million RMB in the same period last year. EBITDA was approximately 1.388 billion RMB, with an adjusted net loss of approximately 386 million RMB, narrowing by 67.3% year-on-year.By business segment, revenue from generative AI was approximately 2.327 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 79.9%; revenue from visual AI was approximately 497 million RMB, a year-on-year increase of 13.9%; overseas business revenue increased by 127.0% year-on-year. Recurring revenue was approximately 1.145 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 124.4%, accounting for 39.3% of the group's revenue. The company stated that in the first half of the year, it advanced system-level AI capabilities around "one model, one Token factory, and one intelligent agent control system," continuously iterating the daily updated SenseNova multimodal large model, and promoted the strategy from providing models and computing power to scaling the delivery of reliable multimodal intelligent agent capabilities.
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