Final FOMC Meeting of the Year

Find out our latest reports, listed below:

• DeepBook - “The Backbone of Sui DeFi Liquidity”

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• Premia x Block Scholes: Introducing Kyan

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• Bybit x Block Scholes Quarterly Report: Rise of Perp DEXs — and how to catch the opportunity

• How did options markets react to the crypto selloff?

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Daily Updates:

• Ahead of the final FOMC meeting of the year, where a 25bps rate cut appears to be the most likely outcome, traders on Wall Street appeared unwilling to take any major bets. US equities were almost unchanged from the beginning of the week — the S&P 500 paused a four-day advance and ended the day flat, while the Nasdaq-100 eked out a small 0.2% gain. 

• In crypto markets however, we saw anything but modest bets. Intraday, BTC rose more than 5% from $89K to a high of $94.5K, while ETH has soared more than 6% over the past 24 hours from $3.1K to $3.4K. 
• That was also supported by strong inflows into both asset’s Spot ETF funds. BTC ETFs saw their largest inflow since Nov 21, 2025 yesterday, and purchased $151.9M of bitcoins, while Spot ETH ETFs had their best day since late October 2025, seeing inflows of $177.7M and exceeding even the flows into BTC. 
• The spot market rally has had an impact on derivatives markets with varying degrees. For ETH, perpetual swap funding rates modestly ticked higher from their neutral levels earlier this week, while short-dated ETH futures prices shot up and no longer trade at a discount to spot prices. There has not been much discernible change in options markets however, vol smiles are still firmly skewed towards downside protection and 7D BTC and ETH skew currently trades at -4.4% and -5.3%, respectively. 

• We covered in our AMA with Bybit yesterday how important the market’s implied odds of a rate cut in the December meeting has been for the reaction function of BTC and the recent recovery in crypto spot prices. 
• Now, given the high likelihood of a cut, the focus on today’s FOMC meeting will be less on the decision itself, but more on Chair Powell’s press conference and the Summary of Economic Projections, where members will outline their views for 2026 and beyond. 
• Kevin Hassett, the current frontrunner as next chair, once more emphasised his view on the ability to cut rates in the foreseeable future during the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit yesterday. Hassett said “If the data suggests that we could do it, then, like right now, I think there’s plenty of room to do it”. Asked whether that meant more than 25 basis points, he replied, “correct.”
• When asked about the independence of the Fed, Hassett said “I think the most important job that the Fed chair has is to be looking at the economic data and to avoid being part of politics”. 

• Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins has signalled a sharp pivot in US crypto policy, telling industry participants,

"You ain't seen nothing yet"

• as he prepares to advance a series of digital asset initiatives in early 2026. Speaking at the Blockchain Association Policy Summit in Washington, DC, he said, "As far as next year, all the seeds that we've planted will be able to start seeding and sprouting."
• His programme includes a proposed "token taxonomy" to clarify which cryptocurrencies are securities, an internal initiative "Project Crypto" to update SEC rules for digital assets, and an "innovation exemption" intended to fast-track new crypto products through conditional, time-limited regulatory relief.
• He confirmed that one of his first priorities will be the "innovation exemption" and said,

"I hope in about a month or so, towards the end of January, we'll be able to get that out"

• while noting that broader categorisation work will depend on ongoing legislation to divide responsibilities between the SEC and CFTC.

• In macro data, the BLS published the most recent JOLTs report which showed US job openings rose to their highest level in five months. However, that was also counteracted by less hiring and more layoffs, overall pointing to the '”curious kind of balance” Chair Powell has previously described the US labour market to be in. 
• The number of available positions in the US economy rose to 7.67M in October from 7.66M in the prior month, above the 7.12M median expectation from Bloomberg’s survey of economists. 
• At the same time, the number of layoffs in October rose to 1.85M, the highest since the start of 2023, while hiring declined by 218,000 from September 5.15M.
• Further evidence of the curious balance was seen in the Quits rate, a measure of the percentage of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs each month. It fell to its lowest level since May 2020, indicating less confidence among workers to leave their jobs and find other positions.

• The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has, for the first time, formally authorised nationally chartered banks to provide crypto transaction services for their clients.
• Under the approved “risk-free principal” model, banks may act as intermediaries in cryptocurrency trades without holding digital assets on their own balance sheets, effectively matching client orders and settling transactions through regulated infrastructure.
• In practice, this opens the door for US customers to buy and sell crypto directly via their banks rather than exclusively through exchanges, and gives financial institutions a clear green light to roll out in-house crypto brokerage and execution services.
• This action reduces legal and operational uncertainty that had previously kept many banks on the sidelines of crypto trading, and is intended to lower client risk by shifting settlement and counterparty exposure into a supervisory framework familiar to traditional finance.

• Tempo, the Stripe- and Paradigm-backed layer-1 blockchain for stablecoin payments, launched its public testnet on Dec 10, 2025, allowing anyone to run a node, sync the chain and test core features such as dedicated payment lanes, stablecoin-native gas and fast deterministic finality designed for instant, low-fee settlement.
• The milestone, seen as a key step toward mainnet, follows Tempo’s $500M raise at a $5B valuation and comes as design partners including OpenAI, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, Shopify, Mastercard, UBS, Kalshi and Klarna, which has already issued a USD-pegged stablecoin on Tempo – begin trialling the network.

• An official Trump-themed mobile game, Trump Billionaires Club, has been announced which will incorporate $TRUMP Coin as the currency for gameplay features and will launch on the OpenLoot platform. The announcement also states that those who sign up for the waitlist could be eligible to share in $1M worth of $TRUMP Coin rewards.

This Week’s Calendar:

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Charts of the Day:

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