US stocks, cryptocurrencies tumble on disappointing jobs report
Friday’s report from the Labor Department coincides with disappointing tech earnings to add additional headwinds
Solana’s boogeyman is re-emerging from under the bed.
ORE, the Solana-based proof-of-work currency that pushed the network to its limits in early April before pausing operations, is expected to resume mining sometime around Sunday, its founder told Lightspeed exclusively. With delays, the launch could be pushed to early next week.
Solana and ORE have taken measures to keep the network from being overburdened a second time, but these are all yet to be tested in the wild.
ORE launched in early April as part of — and eventually grand champion of — Colosseum’s Solana accelerator-hackathon program. It’s an experiment in bringing proof-of-work, which is the mechanism used to secure and mine new bitcoin, to the higher-throughput Solana blockchain. In simple terms: It’s bitcoin on Solana. It was fair-launch, meaning insiders didn’t get privileged access to the tokens, and ORE is meant to be mined on a computer or phone — unlike bitcoin, which requires expensive and cumbersome ASICs.
(As an aside, I asked Hardhat Chad how investors like Colosseum would see returns if they don’t receive token allocations, and he said the investment would go to his new company, Regolith Labs, which will hopefully create money-making products in the ORE ecosystem.)
The program was popular at launch and was widely thought to be the culprit behind Solana’s network congestion issues in early April — when users found it difficult to land transactions on the network. After just two weeks, the currency’s pseudonymous creator Hardhat Chad announced that the project would be suspending all mining activities until it was ready to roll out a more efficient v2.
Regarding v2’s launch, the founder thinks he’s gotten v1’s kinks worked out.
"I can’t guarantee new issues won’t arise," Hardhat Chad laughed in an interview, "but I don’t suspect the same issues will occur."
For starters, Solana developers rolled out an upgrade to help ease the blockchain’s congestion at around the same time ORE paused mining. Solana also rolled out a new central scheduler in the interim, which could make the block creation process more efficient.
On ORE’s end, v2 implements an anti-sybil (which is one person pretending to be several people, burdening the network) measure where miners who submit hashes more frequently than once a minute — which is how often new ORE is mined — will run into errors and increased fees.
However, Hardhat Chad did say that ORE implemented a new hash function — which is how a block’s data is stored in proof-of-work — which is meant to make it easier for phone-based miners, for instance, to compete with ASICs while mining ORE. The hash function is called DrillX and uses some code that was originally written for Tor’s privacy-focused Onion Browser, Hardhat Chad told me.
The new hash function uses more Compute Units (CUs, which can be thought of like Ethereum gas) than the old one, which could create miner demand for Solana to increase its block size from the current 48 million CU limit, Hardhat Chad said. He added that he would support the network increasing its block size.
Hardhat Chad said ORE’s mission is partly to make mining a consumer experience that could bring new users into crypto — unlike bitcoin mining, which is currently run mainly by large companies.
"If we can create that fun consumer gamified experience that anyone can do from any laptop or phone, my thesis is that we can just get tokens into the hands of tens of millions of people," he said.
Job growth slowed and unemployment ticked higher than expected in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, sending US equities tumbling and increasing odds of a September interest rate cut.
Unemployment increased by 0.2% from June to 4.3% in July, marking the highest reading since October 2021. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 114,000 last month, missing analysts’ expectations of 185,000.
Stocks initially fell sharply, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite indexes losing 2.4% and 3.1%, respectively, over the day an hour after the report was released. Both indexes posted modest recoveries later in the session. The S&P 500 was trading 2.1% lower and the Nasdaq Composite was down 2.5% at time of publication.
Cryptocurrencies also saw steep declines Friday morning. Bitcoin lost more than 4%, and ether slid close to 6% in the 90 minutes following the report’s publication.
Similar to stocks, both cryptocurrencies also pared losses slightly, with bitcoin recovering to around $63,500 at time of publication. It’s still around 2.8% lower than its intraday high but up about 1% over 24 hours. Ether hovered around $3,000 at time of publication, about 1.7% higher than its intraday low.
Read more: On the Margin Newsletter: Behind the most important economic paper of the year
Friday’s report coincides with a particularly tumultuous time for US stocks, Steve Clayton, head of equity finds at Hargreaves Lansdown, said. This creates further headwinds for markets.
“The US jobs release came after sharp falls in tech stocks, a 6% drop in the Japanese market and mounting concerns over the underlying strength of the US economy,” Clayton said. “Today was not the day for more bad news to arrive, but arrive it did.”
The unemployment rate now sits above where Federal Open Market Committee members projected. In June, central bankers expected unemployment to sit between 4% and 4.1% by the end of 2024.
Read more: On the Margin Newsletter: What to make of the latest FOMC statement
The Sahm rule recession indicator is now flashing red. Established by Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist, the Sahm rule states that the US economy is headed for a downturn when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate is higher than the lowest three-month moving average in the past year, by 0.5 or more. As of Friday, the figure sits at 0.53.
Sahm herself did caution on Friday that the rule may not be reliable in this post-pandemic economic environment, given that data is still being skewed by supply chain disruptions and government stimulus.
Plus, as she told Bloomberg Television Friday morning, unemployment figures could be influenced by increased immigration.
“Factors like increased labor force participation, particularly among immigrants, and the ongoing mismatch between job seekers and available positions have also contributed to the unemployment situation,” Jag Kooner, head of derivatives at Bitfinex, said. “These complexities, combined with an inverted yield curve — another recessionary signal — have created an atmosphere of uncertainty.”
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