First Mover Americas: Bitcoin to Post Sixth Straight September Loss, but LINK and UNI Manage Gains

    Price Point: September has been a historically bad month for bitcoin, which posted losses for the last five years. Is October's record better?
    Market Moves: Bitcoin's bullish seasonality might be muddled by the continued slide in the USD Liquidity Index.
    Chart of the Day: Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase's stock (COIN) debuted on Nasdaq in April 2021. Since then, the share price has been in a steady downtrend.

This article originally appeared in First Mover, CoinDesk’s daily newsletter putting the latest moves in crypto markets in context. Subscribe to get it in your inbox every day.
Price Point

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading flat on the day after a choppy week of price movement. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value has traded in a range of $18,500-$20,380 over the week. After a painful week for both equities and government bonds, both markets posted modest gains.

Historically, September has been a bad month for bitcoin, with the crypto showing negative returns in each of the last five years. The string continued in 2022, with bitcoin lower by 2.95% for the month at press time. October, however, has a better historical record, with bitcoin posting gains in seven of the last nine years.
CoinDesk - Unknown

(Bitcoin monthly returns via Crypto Finance AG)

Ether (ETH) was also trading flat on Friday at around $1,337 and has lost 13% over the month.

Managing gains in September were the token of decentralized oracle network Chainlink (LINK), which advanced 17%, and Uniswap’s UNI which was up 6%.

“For Chainlink, the narrative that’s driving price performance is the partnership with SWIFT on a cross-chain interoperability protocol,” said Nauman Sheikh, head of treasury management and derivatives at Wave Financial, in an interview with CoinDesk.

“For UNI, it’s the continued growth in market share and volume along with being regarded as a long-term deep value play,” said Sheikh.

Caution is warranted, though, suggested Sheikh. “Given the macro environment, we can expect these outperforming tokens to quickly succumb to profit-taking, especially if bitcoin and ethereum begin to sell off more aggressively,” he said.

CoinDesk’s Omkar Godbole reported XRP and MKR, (the governance token of the peer-to-peer lending platform Maker), are rallying in an otherwise quiet crypto sector as markets await the release of the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of U.S. inflation: the core personal consumption expenditure index (PCE).

In other news, Spain’s largest telecom company, Telefónica, invested in local crypto exchange Bit2Me and will begin accepting crypto for payments.

Meanwhile, a study by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finds the world's largest banks are exposed to about 9.4 billion euros (US$9 billion) of crypto assets.