Bitcoin Runs to $81,000 and NEAR Adds 32%

gm, Defiers!

These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:

Bitcoin reached $81,000 on Friday and last changed hands at $80,829, up 5.8% over 24 hours and its best level since Sept. 4. NEAR Protocol added 32%, Starknet 27%, Arbitrum 26% and Uniswap 20%. Of the 125 largest non-stablecoin tokens, 111 rose, 13 fell and one was unchanged. The S&P 500 sat 0.1% below Thursday's close.

The tokens that ran hardest are the ones tied to trading securities onchain, a day after the SEC issued its five-year exemption for tokenized NMS stock. Total crypto market value reached $2.8 trillion on $110 billion of volume, bitcoin dominance climbed to 59% from 57%, and DeFi total value locked rose 3.2% to $89.9 billion. UNI's high came in the hour beginning 10 a.m. UTC, 21% above the day's open, on $2.2 billion of turnover against a $5.4 billion market value.

Kaiko's Andrew Yang puts tokenized equity volume on Uniswap near $800 million a day and doubts how much of it would clear the SEC's rights-parity condition. Block Scholes' Andrew Melville reads seven-day volatility smiles skewed toward call options after the week's macro events passed. And the Bank of Japan raised its call rate guideline to around 1.25% on a 7-2 vote, with Polymarket now pricing a second Fed increase on Oct. 27-28 at 56.5%, up ten points on the day.