Bitcoin is holding near $64,700 Friday, barely changed over the last 24-hour period, while the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index is down 0.2% over the period.

Brent crude has meanwhile moved to over $83 a barrel after Yemen’s Iran-linked Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia, further escalating tensions in the Middle East.

Treasury yields have seen a slight correction, but remain at 4.67% for the 10-year note, a level Fidelity’s Director of Global Macro Jurrien Timmer said “history suggests that nothing good happens.”

Higher oil could add to inflation pressure if sustained, while elevated Treasury yields tighten financial conditions. Together, they could limit expectations for near-term rate cuts and weigh on bitcoin and other risk assets.

Gold has meanwhile maintained its recovery, moving up 1.5% to now trade at $4,300 per ounce as investors move toward safety in the face of uncertainty.

Derivatives positioning

• Long-short taker ratio: The crypto futures market’s long-short taker ratio has returned to neutral after leaning bullish on Thursday, suggesting traders may be adopting a more cautious stance ahead of the U.S. payrolls report.
• CC token leads OI growth: Canton Network’s CC token is down 13% in 24 hours, yet its futures open interest (OI) has surged over 5%. The combination is said to validate the downtrend, especially as the 24-hour OI-adjusted cumulative volume delta remains negative, indicating sellers are more aggressive by shorting futures via market orders rather than passive limit orders.
• Open Interest Movers: DOGE, XRP, and SUI are open interest gainers, while SHIB has seen a drop.
• CVD Indicator: The CVD indicator paints a bearish picture for the market, as most majors (excluding ADA, HBAR, and ETH) show negative CVD readings.
• Volatility Indexes: The BVIV index, representing BTC’s annualized 30-day implied volatility, remains near a long-held floor of 36%, showing little signs of stress despite the Clarity Act delay and the impending U.S. jobs report. The same holds true for ether’s volatility index (EVIV).
• Options Activity: In Deribit-listed options, puts (bearish bets) at the $60,000 and $62,000 strikes dominate the 24-hour volume rankings for BTC, while the $2,000 call is the most popular for ETH.

Token Talk

• Sui is adding quantum-resistant security to its accounts, integrating two post-quantum signature schemes approved by the U.S. standards body NIST, per The Block. The upgrade lets users optionally adopt quantum-safe keys derived from their existing recovery phrases, so nobody has to generate a new seed or move funds to a new address to be protected.
• The threat it’s guarding against is specific to crypto. In most systems an attacker has to break in before they can go after a key. Onchain, the public key is exposed permanently the moment an account transacts, which opens the door to “harvest-now, forge-later,” where attackers collect exposed keys today and crack them once quantum computers are capable enough to run Shor’s algorithm, the technique that could break the elliptic-curve cryptography securing most wallets. No quantum hardware is needed to start collecting.
• Sui is using two schemes for two risk levels. ML-DSA-65 covers everyday accounts at the protocol level, and the hash-based SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s runs inside Move smart contracts for high-value vaults. The two rest on different math, so a weakness in one doesn’t compromise the other. Sui went with a higher security tier after a July incident where an AI model halved the effective strength of a different post-quantum candidate, a reason to carry margin rather than pick the cheapest option.
• It’s a feature add, not a rebuild. Sui says it was built for “cryptographic agility,” meaning new signature schemes slot in without touching consensus or existing balances, so this ships as a routine protocol update. That contrasts with bitcoin and ethereum, where quantum-proofing is a heavier lift, and lands the same month Strategy and BlackRock formed a consortium to prepare bitcoin for the same threat. SUI traded around [X], per CoinDesk data.

Spot bitcoin ETFs are yet to see outflows this month, bringing in $754 million in the first week of August. Yet, bitcoin remains steady at $64,700, while options flow favors protection at $62,000 and $63,000.

The opposing signals point to a market with a spot bid but limited conviction. ETF demand has seemingly returned, but derivatives traders are guarding against a retreat ahead of today’s U.S. jobs report.

The options market adds another layer. Put options, giving holders the right but not the obligation to sell, accounted for 53.8% of bitcoin options volume over the past 24 hours, and three of the four most-traded contracts were puts at $62,000 or $63,000 expiring Aug. 10, Aug. 14 and Aug. 28, CoinGlass data shows.

Calls still represent 60.7% of total open interest, showing that the broader options market remains tilted toward calls even as recent trading focuses on downside puts.

Protection is also cheap. Deribit’s DVOL index, which tracks bitcoin’s expected 30-day volatility, is near 35, down from a high of 90 earlier this year. That implied volatility tracks the market’s pricing of future movements, implying not much is expected to happen in the near future.

Rodolfo Novak (NVK), co-founder of Coldcard maker Coinkite, is deleting posts from his social media. Some people think Coinkite has also deleted recently content from its website.

The apparent elimination of these historical artifacts is concerning amid the ongoing theft of BTC from Coldcard customers. 

For over five years, Coldcard hardware wallets generated private keys for customers with insufficient entropy. Since hackers discovered and began exploiting that vulnerability last week, they’ve drained over $130 million from victims.

The thefts continue as they crack insecure private keys using brute force computation.

For whatever reason, NVK has decided to remove certain pieces of content that he published over those five years.

Take, for example, in November 2024, when NVK wrote that a knockoff of his company’s Blockclock might be “a back door into peoples home network.” That post now resolves to an X error page. It went dark this week.

Bitcoin developer Peter Todd caught that deletion. On August 5, Todd posted the screenshot of the original post. “Deleted recently enough it seems it was still in my phone’s cache,” Todd explained.

The U.S. labor market showed weakness for the second consecutive month in July, possibly giving the Federal Reserve room to hold rates in place despite high inflation.

According to the government’s Nonfarm Payrolls Report released Friday morning, the U.S. lost 23,000 jobs last month. That was far below the consensus expectation of a gain of 80,000 jobs, and down from June’s add of 20,000 (revised down from an originally reported 57,000).

The last negative jobs print was in February, when the U.S. lost 156,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate dipped to 4.1%, compared with the expected 4.2% and June’s 4.2%.

Market reaction is swift, with U.S. stock index futures gaining and interest rates dipping. There’s little action in crypto, with bitcoin remaining modestly higher on the session at $65,000.

Ahead of this morning’s data, markets were split on whether the Fed would hike rates at its next policy meeting in September. According to CME FedWatch, interest rate traders were pricing in a 55% chance the U.S. central bank would tighten next month. In the immediate aftermath of the print, that number has slipped back to 46%.