Trick-or-Trade š
October 31, 2025
Pyth Network
Oct 31, 2025
Welcome back to The Epicenter. This week, the Fed shaved 25 bps off like it was giving the markets a Halloween treat, but Bitcoin still slipped to $111K, proving not even free money can scare up a rally.
Meanwhile, Trumpās family allegedly made $800M selling crypto this year, Cathie Wood dropped $31M on a Halloween gamble, and Circleās new Arc blockchain somehow got BlackRock, Visa, and Anthropic to RSVP.
Across the pond, France decided to rebel against Brussels by endorsing Bitcoin while telling the ECBās digital euro to take a hike (libertĆ©, Ć©galitĆ©, decentralitĆ©). And back in TradFi, IBM dusted off its blockchain ambitions, Citi and Coinbase teamed up, and Goldman and DBS pulled off the first interbank crypto options trade.
Itās spooky season, and everyoneās chasing yield like itās a king-sized Snickers bar.
Letās get into it š
āļø The Onchain Pulse: Whatās Happening on the Front Lines of Finance
This weekās biggest news in crypto and all things digital assets
According to insiders, Chinese and Russian intelligence are allegedly sending femme-fatale agents to Silicon Valley to seduce, marry, and even start families with tech workers to extract trade secrets
The Fed cut rates by 25bps for the first time in a year, but Bitcoin still slipped 3% to $111K as traders wait for Powellās next move
Trumpās family reportedly made over $800M from crypto sales in early 2025, with billions more in paper gains (much of that cash has come from foreign investors courted on their global roadshow)
Cathie Wood dropped $31M on crypto stocks ahead of Halloween, doubling down on her unshakeable belieft that Bitcoinās still headed for $1.5 million
Circle launched testing for its new Arc blockchain, attracting heavyweights like BlackRock, HSBC, Visa, AWS, and Anthropic to its public testnet
France just threw a monetary grenade at Europe, voting to back Bitcoin and euro-pegged stablecoins while rejecting the ECBās proposed digital euro altogether
Itās Solana season on Wall Street: Grayscaleās Solana Trust ETF (GSOL) launched on NYSE Arca a day after Bitwise rolled out its own SOL ETF on the NYSE
IBM is making its move onchain, launching a new digital assets platform to help banks, governments, and enterprises issue and manage crypto and tokenized assets
Citi and Coinbase are teaming up to build digital asset payment rails, bringing crypto settlement closer to the heart of traditional banking
DBS and Goldman Sachs just pulled off a first for TradFi, executing the first over-the-counter interbank crypto options trade
š£ļø Word on the Street: What the Experts are Saying
Stuff you should repost (or maybe even cough reword and take credit for)
Larry Fink says owning crypto just means you believe governments will keep nuking their currencies (translation: inflation is bullish, and Bitcoin is your doomsday hedge)
Zero Hedge shares that Jerome Powell insists AI isnāt the next dot-com bubble becauseāunlike the early 2000sāāthere are earningsā
Zohran Mamdani just referenced his Kalshi odds live on stage, officially making prediction markets part of the campaign trail and showing that Kalshi has gone mainstream
Not Jerome Powell summed up the U.S. economy in one line: itās just 7 companies wiring a trillion dollars back and forth to each other (hard to argue when the S&P looks more like a group chat between Apple, Amazon, and Nvidia as opposed to a diversified market)
Brian Armstrong headed to D.C. to push crypto market structure reform to the presidentās desk, saying bipartisan momentum is peakingāeven during a government shutdown
Wealthy investors are dusting off their quant playbooks by using options math to borrow cash at rock-bottom rates while the rest of us are still comparing APRs
Fintech is officially going interstellar: Charter Space is pitching spacecraft insurance thatās faster, cheaper, and smarter, because apparently underwriting satellites is the new DeFi yield farm
Western Union just joined the Solana party by rolling out a USD-backed stablecoin, proving to everyone that even 175-year-old dogs can learn new DeFi tricks
āConnected commerceā is the latest fintech buzzword; all you need to know is that itās basically just mashing up payments and banking into one control panel so businesses can feel like theyāre running their own mini Fed
Robinhood just expanded its empire overseas, launching futures trading in the UK (because nothing says ādemocratizing financeā like letting Londoners YOLO commodities before breakfast)
Closing Thoughts:
From Powellās ātrick-or-treatā rate cut to Franceās monetary revolution, the markets are officially moving outside of everyoneās comfort zones. Stay spooky, stay liquid, and donāt let your portfolio ghost you.
ā The Epicenter, powered by Pyth Network
https://pyth.substack.com/p/trick-or-trade