Markets are balancing hawkish signals from the Fed with strong inflows driven by AI demand and regulated crypto access.

In his Jackson Hole keynote, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh framed price stability as the central objective, citing 12-month PCE inflation around 3.7% and hotter recent momentum. He argued that forward guidance has overstayed its welcome and should be reserved for genuine crises, while describing broad financial conditions as not restrictive despite strains in housing and agriculture.

With futures still pricing a December rate move, the hawkish framing adds uncertainty for rate-sensitive assets as equities and crypto markets contend with the policy backdrop.

The SEC has sent a crypto custody proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review, targeting investment advisers and firms holding client digital assets. The plan aims to clarify how institutions can custody crypto without triggering outdated requirements and would move beyond ETF wrappers toward a formal custody framework.

Bitcoin rose above $80,000 as US spot Bitcoin ETF inflows extended to eight straight sessions, totaling about $2.8 billion and helping August inflows top $3 billion. The move mirrors the growing role of regulated wrappers in channeling institutional demand, even as much of the net asset gain reflects price appreciation.

At Bitcoin Asia 2026, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao argued that diversification across blockchains makes Bitcoin bigger, not smaller, framing the ecosystem as non-zero-sum with faster chains serving as a research layer for potential future use by Bitcoin.

Nvidia topped expectations across revenue, data center sales and earnings, and guided third-quarter revenue to $108 billion, well above the $103.9 billion consensus. The company also signaled a sequential gross margin of 74%, down from 75%, marking the first margin decline of the current cycle due to higher memory, financing and infrastructure costs. The outlook reinforces the idea that AI compute demand supports crypto miners shifting toward AI workloads, though a Q1 price uptick highlights rising input costs for GPU cloud providers.