4th September 2025 > > PayPal, Polymarket, & Astrology (!).

tl;dr

PayPal deepens its crypto involvement. Polymarket becomes legit in a win for commonsense over ideology. Astrologists claim top spot for foolishness, ahead of even the techies.

Market Snap 

Market Wrap

Perpetual futures funding rates are susceptible to a short squeeze, which would be highly entertaining right now.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – PayPal

PayPal is rolling out new functionality that materially extends its crypto footprint.

Pay with Crypto allows users to connect their own self-custodial wallet to pay for goods and services in over 100 different crypto coins. The merchant receives either USD or PYUSD, PayPal’s own stablecoin pegged to the dollar with cash or cash-like collateral (short-term treasuries).

From the seller’s perspective this is a major improvement – fees are lower (for now at least), and settlement is instantaneous rather than taking a day or more. Who doesn’t want their cash immediately?

Global adoption of cryptos continues to pick up pace.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Polymarket

I like Polymarket, an online crypto-based betting platform. It’s very simple and very intuitive. You can either buy or sell a real-world outcome based on hundreds of different scenarios. Let’s take one chosen completely at random to see how it works:

You can buy this event at 10c, or short it at 92c. In either case, if you are right, you receive 100c when the market settles or lose your stake if you are wrong. Polymarket takes 2c in this example, which is immediately obvious to anyone who has mastered basic addition.

There are political markets, sports markets, bets on tech (including whether Polymarket US will go live in 2025 – more on that shortly), culture (“When will Taylor Swift release The Life of a Showgirl?), and so on. The possibilities are endless.

As a peer-to-peer marketplace, prices are driven by the order book, and whether those orders are taken by buyers or sellers. Connect your wallet, use your dollar stablecoins, and away you go entirely anonymously if that is what you wish. I sadly note that as of today there are no markets concerning Watford F.C. so I must stick to Betfair to spend some of my entertainment dollars.

…

The CFTC has given the go-ahead for Polymarket to officially launch in the US. Given that US customers could simply use (and have been using) a VPN and a self-custodial wallet to get around any restrictions, this a decision steeped in practicality which recognises that it is better to regulate and tax such enterprises than drive them offshore. I struggle to understand how some people just don’t get that.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Astrology

Move over techies, there’s a bunch of even bigger fools in town:

https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/astrology-could-make-you-better-crypto-trader-heres-why/

An astrological crypto trader claimed that he predicted a recent BTC sell-off by tracking “transiting Saturn conjunctions in the Bitcoin natal chart”.

People will believe anything it seems.