Bitcoin tracks gold, whales sell, agents go shopping — Tue 8 Sep

Good morning. Gold is climbing into a week that could end with a US rate rise, and bitcoin is now moving with it rather than with tech stocks. The people who own bitcoin are splitting: the largest holders are selling, everyone else is borrowing against theirs instead.

💎 Bitcoin's link to gold is the strongest since 2020
💎 Every wallet cohort is a net seller for the first time since June
💎 Norges Bank names the twelve institutions it will explore tokenisation with
💎 BTC AB will buy back its own shares below what they are worth
💎 Anthropic gives online stores the code for shopping agents — but not the payment

Blockathon Stockholm is on its second and last build day, with Demo Day on Thursday.

There will be no edition tomorrow, Wednesday, the day of King Harald's funeral. We are back on Thursday.

— Morten

Gold climbs while the market waits for the inflation numbers

Spot gold rose to around $4,430 an ounce on Tuesday as the dollar slipped. Traders are waiting for two releases. Producer prices come on Thursday, consumer prices on Friday. Together they are the last full reading before the Federal Reserve meets on 16 September, where the market now prices a rate rise as more likely than not.

Why it matters: Gold usually suffers when rates rise, so buying it into a hawkish week says the fear of inflation outweighs the cost of holding it.

Source: Gold gains, dollar eases with US inflation data on radar — Reuters

Bitcoin barely flinches when Treasury yields move. Gold does

Rising bond yields normally hurt assets that pay no income, and both gold and bitcoin sit in that category. But the 90-day correlation between bitcoin and the US ten-year yield is close to zero. Gold's is meaningfully negative. On this measure, bitcoin is the less tethered of the two.

Why it matters: If bitcoin is genuinely less bound to the bond market than gold, the hard-asset argument for holding it stops resting on scarcity alone.

Source: Bitcoin blinks less than gold when Treasury yields move — CoinDesk

Bitcoin is tracking gold, and letting go of tech

The 90-day correlation between bitcoin and gold is at its highest since 2020. Over the same period its correlation with the Nasdaq has roughly halved. The shift began with the US Treasury's decision in mid-August to double its buybacks of long-dated government debt. Grayscale's head of research reads it as the debasement trade returning.

Why it matters: Investors are pricing bitcoin for its monetary properties rather than as a leveraged bet on technology stocks, which is a different asset in the same wrapper.

Source: Bitcoin's link to gold hits a 6-year high as tech correlation fades — CryptoPotato

Ripple's chief executive on the gold that never moved

The Dutch central bank shifted about 86 tonnes of gold to London between March and August. Most of it never travelled. It sold in New York and bought the same quantity back in London, so roughly seventy per cent was a paper exercise and only 27 tonnes crossed the Atlantic. Brad Garlinghouse says finance still moves value the way it did in the 1940s.

Why it matters: The comparison is self-serving, but the underlying point stands: the settlement layer beneath the world's oldest reserve asset is still paperwork and trust.

Source: Ripple CEO blasts $11 billion gold transfer — Yahoo Finance

Every investor group is now a net seller

Bitcoin has failed to break through the sell wall at $83,000 and has slipped back below $80,000. Glassnode's accumulation score shows all wallet cohorts distributing on aggregate for the first time since early June. The largest holders are leading it. They spent most of the summer buying while the price sat far lower.

Why it matters: The buyers who absorbed the summer are now the sellers, and that is a harder ceiling to break than any technical level.

Source: Bitcoin struggles at $83,000 sell wall as whales flip into net selling — CoinDesk

Holders are borrowing against their coins instead of selling them

Retail borrowers took 74 per cent more crypto-backed loans this year than last, according to CryptoQuant's reading of data from the lender CoinRabbit. Wealthy borrowers rose too, and repeat borrowing became more common across the board. What they pledge has changed as well: bitcoin's share of collateral among high-net-worth users almost halved, while Zcash went from absent to a quarter of it.

Why it matters: Borrowing against a holding rather than selling it is a bet that the price recovers, and it puts leverage in the market that a falling price can force out.

Source: Crypto holders turn to loans as markets cool in 2026 — CryptoPotato

Norges Bank names twelve partners for its tokenisation work

The central bank said on LinkedIn on Monday that it is exploring tokenisation with the financial industry. The partners are DNB Carnegie, DNB, Kommunalbanken, Citi, LOKALBANK, SpareBank 1, Bits, KLP, Eika, Euronext, Nordea and SEB. It still finds no basis for issuing central bank digital currency, but says the work continues to understand where the payment system is going. DNB is on the list, and remains the only large Nordic bank outside the Qivalis stablecoin consortium.

Why it matters: Norway has spent years saying it is not ready to decide, and has now named the twelve institutions that will help it work out what it is deciding about.

Source: Norges Bank names twelve. Valuno loses twice. Stack by me raises again. — Onchain Growth by Kaupr

Greenbridge takes the liquidity role in Centiglobe's network

Centiglobe Connect settles cross-border payments between banks and payment firms in tokenised deposits, which are bank deposits represented on a blockchain and tied to no single bank. Greenbridge Markets now stands on both sides of that exchange. Members can obtain the deposits when they need cover for outgoing payments, and convert back to ordinary money when they pay out locally.

Why it matters: Pre-funding is the cost that keeps banks out of these networks, and a counterparty that exchanges on demand removes the need to leave capital sitting idle.

Source: Swedish duo links tokenised deposits to ordinary money — Kaupr

BTC AB will buy back its own shares below what they are worth

The Swedish bitcoin treasury company is offering B shareholders voluntary redemption at a discount of 25 to 30 per cent to net asset value. It will pay from cash and sell no bitcoin. Because the share count falls by more than the value leaving the company, everyone who stays ends up with more bitcoin behind each share. Shareholders must indicate interest by Thursday.

Why it matters: A treasury company trading below the value of its own holdings can grow the holding per share by shrinking itself, which only works while the discount lasts.

Source: Swedish bitcoin firm to redeem shares at a discount — Kaupr

Anthropic hands retailers the code for their own shopping agents, in time for Christmas

The blueprint contains two agents. One meets the customer, searches the catalogue and builds the cart. The other handles inventory, pricing and marketing for the merchant. Visa, Mastercard and Accenture are bringing it to market. What is missing is the payment: no checkout, no protocol, nothing that routes a transaction through Anthropic.

Why it matters: The reasoning layer and the trust layer are being built by different companies, and it is still the card networks that own the part where money moves.

Source: Anthropic sends AI agents into online stores before Christmas — Kaupr

📅 Blockathon Stockholm: second build day

Teams are at Netlight on Regeringsgatan today for the last build day, working on problem statements from UNICEF, the Swedish Red Cross, the World Food Programme, Hundstallet and AI Institutet. Demo Day follows on Thursday, and the week closes on Friday with the AI x Blockchain Summit at KTH and the award ceremony.

Kaupr is media partner, and three of the problem statements are up as interviews.

▶️ Arun Maharajan, UNICEF: proof from the field ▶️ Melanie Rideout, Red Cross: three problems, one hackathon ▶️ Madina Saleh: when a creator's face can be generated without asking

Thank you for reading Kaupr Daily. If you find this briefing useful, please share it with a colleague or friend who should be following Nordic and European digital-finance news more closely.

Kaupr Today has its own home — read, listen, watch and explore at today.kaupr.io.

There is no edition tomorrow, Wednesday, the day of King Harald's funeral — we are back on Thursday morning.

Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor