Nasdaq’s Crypto Indexes Ended August Deep in the Red

Nasdaq’s August 31, 2024 performance report recorded steep monthly losses across its cryptocurrency benchmarks, establishing a clear divide between digital assets and the equity market at the end of a volatile month.

The Nasdaq Bitcoin Settlement Price Index fell 9.8% during August. The corresponding Ethereum index lost 23.0%, while the broader Nasdaq Crypto Settlement Price Index declined 13.9%. By comparison, Nasdaq’s report put the Nasdaq-100 up 1.1% and the Nasdaq Composite up 0.6% for the same one-month reporting period.

That divergence mattered because it showed that improving expectations for U.S. monetary policy had not produced a uniform risk-asset rally. Cryptocurrency benchmarks remained substantially below their July endpoints even as large-cap equities recovered from the market disruption early in August.

Ethereum carried the larger loss

The 13.2-percentage-point gap between Nasdaq’s Bitcoin and Ethereum index returns is a Coinburn calculation based on the reported losses of 9.8% and 23.0%. It documents materially weaker monthly performance for ether without establishing why every trade occurred or predicting whether that relative weakness would continue.

Nasdaq also reported annualized volatility of 51.8% for its Bitcoin index and 58.0% for its Ethereum index. Those figures describe the indexes under Nasdaq’s methodology; they are not the assets’ August price ranges and should not be interpreted as probabilities of future gains or losses.

The broad crypto index’s 13.9% decline likewise did not mean that every constituent fell by the same amount. A multi-asset benchmark reflects its eligibility rules, constituent weights and settlement methodology. It is evidence of the direction and scale of the indexed market segment, not a complete census of all tokens or trading venues.

A month shaped by a global risk shock

August’s deepest disruption arrived on August 5 as investors reacted to concerns about economic growth and the unwinding of leveraged yen-funded positions. Nasdaq’s contemporaneous market summary described that episode as a difficult start to the month and noted an exceptional intraday spike in equity volatility.

Crypto trades continuously, so the selloff extended beyond the operating hours of conventional exchanges. Coinbase’s official historical-candle documentation defines daily buckets as 86,400-second intervals and warns that historical data can be incomplete where no trades occurred. Other providers use different venue sets, currencies and cutoff times. Consequently, a crypto “monthly close” is always conditional on the selected benchmark and clock.

This reconstruction therefore uses Nasdaq’s published one-month index returns rather than combining unmatched spot candles. A separate Coinbase-originated series distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis records observations at 5 p.m. Pacific, illustrating why apparently comparable closing values can differ.

Rate-cut expectations did not erase crypto’s losses

On August 23, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the direction of monetary-policy travel was clear and that the timing and pace of rate cuts would depend on incoming data and the balance of risks. That statement strengthened expectations that restrictive policy would begin to ease, but it was not a rate cut and supplied no guaranteed path for asset prices.

Nasdaq’s month-end results show the limitation of treating monetary-policy expectations as a sufficient explanation for cryptocurrency performance. The Nasdaq-100 and Composite finished August higher under Nasdaq’s reporting window, while all three principal crypto benchmarks in the scorecard remained lower.

The defensible event-day conclusion is narrow: by August 31, Nasdaq’s institutional settlement indexes documented a poor month for cryptocurrency markets, with ether underperforming bitcoin and both trailing major equity benchmarks. The report measured realized index performance. It did not establish a universal crypto closing price, identify a single cause for the losses or indicate what markets would do in September.