ETFs take in $987 million

Welcome back to The Warmup.

Happy Monday. Labor Day weekend left crypto open and U.S. cash equities shut.

Here’s what we’re watching:

• Market Snapshot

• ETFs take in $987M

• BTC Breakout Watch

• Hyperliquid knocks on the U.S. door

Market: Risk-off, with equities down and gold up.

ETFs take in $987 million

What’s going on:

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $986.9M last week, the third green week in a row.

BlackRock's IBIT did $691.5M of that. Ether funds added $218.4M. The three-week bitcoin haul is now about $3.8B.

Price still cannot sit comfortably above $80,000. Bitcoin spiked through $82,000 midweek, then slipped back to about $79,500 after Friday's 162,000 payroll print.

What it means:

The tape and the flows are telling different stories.

Institutions are buying the product. Traders are selling the bounce into a Fed week. Volume in the funds also cooled, from about $19B to $14.5B.

Watch Friday CPI before you treat $80,000 as a floor. Flows can keep the range intact. One hot inflation print can still shove the whole tape lower.

Hyperliquid knocks on the U.S. door

What’s going on:

Hyperliquid is in talks with Kraken parent Payward to reach U.S. traders through Bitnomial, a CFTC-licensed venue.

Americans would not get the full offshore book. They would get a regulated subset of perps tied to Hyperliquid's markets.

Payward has already walked the structure over to the CFTC.

At the same time, UBS, Jane Street, BMO, and Brevan Howard showed up in the first Hyperliquid ETF ownership filings. Disclosed holdings across 30 firms totaled about $75M.

What it means:

This is the distribution fight.

A licensed U.S. wrapper is how perps stop being an offshore-only product. The risk is obvious: talks are not approval, the menu will be thinner than the global book, and no fee split back to HYPE buybacks has been disclosed.

If the path clears, HYPE stops being only a DEX token and starts looking like infrastructure Wall Street can put in a fund.

Key Events this Week

Major token unlocks:

• Rain (RAIN): $594M unlock on Sep 10 (3.1% of supply)

• ADI (ADI): $56M unlock on Sep 9

• Pump.fun (PUMP): $29M unlock on Sep 11 (0.8% of supply)

Macroeconomic data calendar:

U.S. cash markets are closed Monday for Labor Day. The week is built around inflation prints into the Sep 16 FOMC.

Tue (Sep 8):

• NFIB Small Business Optimism (Aug)

• Consumer Credit (Jul)

Wed (Sep 9):

• Light U.S. data day

• Solana Transaction V1 targeted for mainnet (max tx size 1,232 → 4,096 bytes)

Thu (Sep 10):

• August PPI. First inflation read of the week. Hot print keeps hike odds bid.

• Initial jobless claims

• August Existing Home Sales

• ECB rate decision

Fri (Sep 11):

• August CPI. The print that matters. Consensus is ~3.4% YoY, core ~2.4%. This is the swing factor for Sep 16 FOMC.

• University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment (Sep preliminary)

• Monthly Treasury Statement (Aug)

Major Earnings Releases:

• Tue (Sep 8): Casey's, ServiceTitan, GameStop

• Wed (Sep 9): Chewy, Cooper Companies

• Thu (Sep 10): Oracle, Adobe, Copart, RH

• Fri (Sep 11): Kroger

• Liquid Network attacker says they will return most of 4,000 BTC after bug fix

• DBS, Citi say they completed first weekend USD payment between Singapore and US via tokenized deposits

• South Korea's Hanwha develops tokenized securities platform on Avalanche as local regulation takes shape

The market is doing two things at once. Spot bitcoin funds just posted a $987 million week. Price is still stuck under $80,000 on a holiday Monday.

This is how this cycle has been paying people: the product bid shows up first, the candle lags, and everyone in the middle gets bored enough to sell the range.

Friday's jobs number did real work. 162,000 payrolls against a 50,000-ish guess pushed September hike odds back toward 60%.

Oil is holding near $91 after another week of Hormuz and Aramco headlines. That pairing is the risk into Thursday PPI and Friday CPI.

We keep coming back to the same list.

• ETF demand is rebuilding.

• Strategy bought bitcoin again.

• Hyperliquid is trying to enter the country through a licensed door.

Those are slow facts. CPI is a fast one. The edge this week is still being invested when the print is forgotten.

— The Warmup Team

Always do your own research. This newsletter is supplemental material to help educate readers as they make their own decisions. Projects mentioned here are provided to give a potential early-mover advantage.