Q3 Crypto Market Review, Bitget/Near Exploits, and Privacy's Next Era

Lucas Chayen (0:09)

GMGM, welcome back to Galaxy Grid. I'm Lucas Chayen, joined today by Zach Pecorny and Thad Pinnikavich. Before we begin, I need to remind you to please refer to the link to the disclaimer in the show notes and note that none of the information in the show constitutes investment advice or an offer, recommendation, or solicitation by Galaxy or any of its affiliates to buy or sell any securities. All right, gents, what's up? We've got a three box today, first time. Our normal other panelists, Will, is at a quantum event today, Bitcoin quantum event. He's doing some really cool stuff on that side. But a lot to talk about, really important market closes this past week. It was both the monthly and the quarterly close. We're also reaching the official four-year cycle bottom.

I think that's on everyone's mind. Everyone's either expecting 50 percent drop in Bitcoin in the next day or two, or like an absolute ripper. Probably neither of those happens. Then we also have the 1010 anniversary coming up at the end of this week. A lot of interesting historical dates to be watching. But overall, crypto markets continue to be very resilient. Bitcoin closed Q3 up 43 percent. Pretty shocking to think that we started the quarter below 60K, and now we're trading above 80K.

This was Bitcoin's best quarter since the fourth quarter in 2024 ETH was up 71 percent on the quarter. It's best quarter ever since Q3.

It's a very interesting market because Bitcoin majors are very resilient. ETFs are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So they're taking, I think they took in around 6.5 billion Bitcoin ETFs this past quarter. That reversed the outflows that Bitcoin ETFs had in Q2. Sellers back in the market slowly buying. He announced a 334 Bitcoin buy this morning. You know, actually kind of not like massive in the scope of things, but I guess that's better than just like full porting and causing consternation that way.

But like the strength of Bitcoin and ETH, we've said this a lot. It's like it's also been matched in the altcoin space. And like what I would consider pretty quality coins with improving fundamentals or teams executing and pivoting, like just to give some like pretty astounding gains over the past few months. Pump was up 300 percent, ENA was up 275 percent, ZEC was up 250 percent, Uni was up 217 percent, Arb was up 160 percent, VVV 120, Lit 110 percent. So a lot of positive moves in the alt space. That's just a few of like many names that perform quite well. We also had like an on-chain cycle play out, largely catalyzed by the Robinhood chain. We've talked about that quite a bit, but definitely spread into Solaniland, really focused around this new primitive of tokenized stocks. Let's take a look at DEX volumes. The DEX volumes closed their quarter up for the first time this past quarter since Q3 2025 So we've been a downward trending volumes in terms of DEX volumes since Q3 2025 We just saw a 15% increase, just like looking at some of the indicators that I look at for the health of on-chain. If you look at Uniswap and Pump, both of them saw massive increases in fees over this past quarter. So there's a lot of activity brewing under the surface. And then we also had a lot of incredible regulatory news. Despite clarity failing, we had the CFTC and SEC providing new guidelines, tokenization adoption is soaring. I just saw an announcement this morning, that ICE and OKX are partnering to launch 24-7 tokenized equity trading on OKX's L2.

It's really hard to not be net positive here, as it feels like pieces across all the various different aspects of the crypto verticals are falling into place. Zach, maybe let's start with you.

How are you feeling on this glorious Monday?

Zach Pecorny (4:34)

We keep repeating ourselves each week. Everything still looks good. Bitcoin pressing up against that 87k, we're like 87.2k resistance, and it just keeps retesting it. I think it was like last Friday, we pressed right up against it. Obviously, it couldn't break through, but it's feeling and looking pretty similar to the way it was when we were a bit lower before the recent breakout. But yeah, I think you touched on all the big stuff, like the tokenization tailwinds and all the positive news can come out of that as people start actually tokenizing things and moving them on chain and the downstream impacts that it has on DeFi apps, maybe Aave and Uniswap and some others. But yeah, I think all that stuff is constructive and then we have some of the soft qualitative stuff like October and the four-year cycle bottom coming in a couple days.