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Altcoins have given back the majority of their gains since the Iran war began

While crypto altcoins outperformed for a long stretch after the outbreak of the US war with Iran, the asset class has retraced this past week.

XRP, solana, and Ethereum have each dropped more than 6% in the past seven days as the total market capitalization for all of crypto (including bitcoin) has shed roughly $44 billion in the period, per CoinGecko.

Ethereum ETFs have also registered daily consecutive outflows for the past seven days, totaling more than $392.1 million. The last time these investment vehicles had such a streak was in December when ethereum decreased from $3,221 to $2,995, data from SoSoValue shows. 

The Iran war was at first a positioning shock that saw crypto thrive, in part because the asset class was “lightly owned,” according to Fredrick Collins, CEO of crypto analytics platform Velo.xyz

“Now as more concrete and persistent concerns about economic impacts have materialized, it’s not surprising to see crypto struggling as well,” Collins told Sherwood News. “In the face of cyclical (rather than transient) worries for risk assets in general, it’s not realistic to expect crypto to remain unscathed. And so we’ve unfortunately just not seen that initial relative strength in crypto continue to play out.”

Meanwhile, traders are expecting the price of ethereum to decline further this year. Prediction market-implied odds of the cryptocurrency sliding below $1,750 are at 81%, while the probability of the token tumbling under $1,500 stands at 68%, an increase from 52% on Monday. 

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

A drop to $1,457 would liquidate about 162,870 ethereum tokens’ worth of leveraged long positions, worth $323.3 million on Hyperliquid, per CoinGlass.

Slater Santer, a research analyst at trading firm GSR said, "Short term, the market likely remains flow-driven and headline-sensitive. Without a stabilization in ETF flows, a cooling in oil, or a renewed bid in equities, it's hard to argue for a sustained bounce in alts."

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Slater Santer, a research analyst at trading firm GSR said, "Short term, the market likely remains flow-driven and headline-sensitive. Without a stabilization in ETF flows, a cooling in oil, or a renewed bid in equities, it's hard to argue for a sustained bounce in alts."

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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