JPMD Canton Plans Announced

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Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• After a series of gains in the first three trading sessions of 2026, US equities had their first negative day of the year, as market participants parsed mixed macro economic data. 
• BTC also fell lower throughout the course of yesterday, from $93K to $90K and currently changes hands just below the $90K level. 
• In options markets, after trading close to neutral levels earlier in the day yesterday, short-dated BTC skew has dropped significantly over the past 24 hours and with OTM put contracts trading at a 4.7 vol point premium to out-the-money calls. A similar skew towards put options is also seen in ETH (-4%), compared to only two days ago when 7D ETH calls traded with a nearly 2 percentage point premium over puts. 

• The S&P 500 slid 0.34% after reaching its second intraday high of 2026 yesterday, and the Nasdaq-100 eked out a modest gain. 
• The rally in precious metals also came to a halt yesterday, with prices currently falling still —  silver prices briefly fell to $75 per ounce, while gold retreated to $4,400 an ounce and copper prices fell after reaching a record-high. 

• The mixed macroeconomic data came in the form of the ISM’s Services PMI report and the BLS’s JOLTS report. The former showed that US services activity grew in December with the ISM’s Services Index rising 1.8 percentage points to 54.4 — the highest level since October 2024 and above 50, indicating an expansion in the services sector. That figure also exceeded all estimates in Bloomberg’s survey of economists. 
• The services sector accounts for two-thirds of US economic activity and therefore the report showed signs of strong momentum in the services sector heading into the new year. A measure of services employment (the Employment Index) also rebounded to 52.0 after six consecutive months of contraction.

• The strong services report was however countered by a weaker-than-expected JOLTS report. That showed that US job openings in November fell to a 14-month low — the number of available positions in the economy fell by 303,000 to 7.15M in November from a downwardly revised 7.45M in the prior month. That compared to the median estimate in Bloomberg’s survey of economists of 7.6M vacancies.
• Still, despite a larger-than-expected decline in job openings, the report did however continue to show the “low hiring, low firing” dynamic that has characterised the US labour market, with employers somewhat hesitant to conduct any mass job layoffs. The layoff rate dropped from 1.2% to 1.1%, while the quits rate, a measure of worker confidence to find another job, rose slightly from 1.9% in October to 2.0%, still a historically low level. 

• As we head towards the end of the week, the main two macro focal points for the market will be Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report, as well as the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legality of President Trump’s tariffs. 

• Trump affiliated DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, announced that WLTC Holdings LLC, the entity representing its banking and custody operations, has submitted an application for a national trust bank charter, which would allow it to formally issue and custody USD1 stablecoins under U.S. regulatory oversight.

• Digital Asset and Kinexys by J.P. Morgan have announced plans to deploy the bank-issued, USD-denominated deposit token, JPM Coin (JPMD), on the Canton Network, enabling institutional payments on a public ledger. 
• The integration will be introduced in phases through 2026, beginning with the technical and operational setup required for on-chain issuance, transfer, and redemption of JPMD. The partners will also explore adding other Kinexys digital payments offerings, including J.P. Morgan’s Blockchain Deposit Accounts.

• Polymarket and Dow Jones & Company have created a partnership to integrate real-time prediction market data, including odds on economic, political, and cultural events, across Dow Jones digital media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Investor’s Business Daily.

• Babylon, a decentralized protocol focused on Bitcoin-native staking and lending, has raised $15M through the sale of its BABY tokens, which is up 8.5% over the past 24hrs, to a16z Crypto. The funding will be used to advance Babylon’s infrastructure. 

This Week’s Calendar:

Charts of the Day: