Bitcoin's Biggest Week Since the 2024 Election

gm, Defiers!

These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:

Bitcoin gained 22.6% in seven days. The last time it moved that fast was the week after the 2024 election.

Bitcoin changed hands at $76,977 on Friday, up 6.4% over 24 hours, after a three-day rally broke the $59,000-to-$67,000 range it had held for seven weeks. Ether added 28.8% on the week, XRP 36.7% and Solana 21.5%. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $606.3 million on Thursday, the largest daily intake since May 1, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for $503 million of it.

Perpetual funding stayed close to zero the whole way up: OKX's BTC-USDT swap paid 0.0100% on Friday with the perpetual trading below index. Nobody bid up the cost of long exposure. Shorts closing out and spot fund buying carried the move, which is what the roughly $3 billion of liquidations around Wednesday's break, more than 90% of them shorts, describes.

Read more below!

MARKETS

Bitcoin Posts Biggest Week Since 2024 as Trump Pushes Senate on CLARITY Act

Bitcoin reached its highest level in three months on Friday, capping a three-day rally that lifted every major token after President Donald Trump pressed the Senate to pass the CLARITY Act at a White House meeting with crypto executives on Wednesday. Cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 ripens Tuesday, Sept. 15 at 2:15 p.m., and the bill needs 60 votes; traders had pushed the odds of passage into 2027 earlier this month after Majority Leader John Thune skipped an earlier cloture filing. Bitcoin's 22.6% week is its largest since the week to Nov. 12, 2024, and no rolling seven-day window in between produced more than 15.1%. Ether's 28.8% is its strongest since August 2025 and XRP's 36.7% its largest since January 2025. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index read 72 on Friday against 29 a week earlier.

	TICKER	VALUE	24H
	Bitcoin Posts Biggest Week Since 2024 as Trump Pushes Senate on CLARITY Act Bitcoin gained 22.6% over seven days, its largest advance over any seven-day window since November 2024, after Trump told crypto executives at the White House that Congress needs to pass market structure legislation. thedefiant.io

Why this matters: Funding rates never left zero, so the move came from shorts covering and spot ETF flows. Bitcoin is still 38.9% below its October 2025 record.

BLOCKCHAINS

Solana Activates 350-Millisecond Slots on Mainnet

Solana cut its target slot time to 350 milliseconds from 400, the first slot-time reduction since the network launched. The explorer lists SIMD-0525 as active on Mainnet Beta at slot 440,208,000 in epoch 1019. Each further 50-millisecond step — 300, then 250, then 200 — activates through its own feature gate in a later epoch, and the Solana Foundation says the network holds where it is if block skip rates climb too high. Shorter slots compress the time a leader has to finish a block, the next leader has to receive transactions through Gulf Stream, and other validators have to replay and vote on it; Solana credits Turbine and Replay work in the validator clients. Ticks per slot, the four-slot leader span and slots per epoch all stay put, so epochs simply elapse faster. Jacob Creech of the Solana Foundation said 300 milliseconds is the next target.

Why this matters: Solana calls this a breaking change and says the required indexing work is still to be determined. Its own documentation still describes slots as 400 milliseconds.

BLOCKCHAINS

MANTRA Halts Chain, Blames Cosmos EVM Module

MANTRA halted its Layer 1 late Thursday after an incident in the chain's Cosmos EVM module and said Friday morning it had found the root cause and contained the threat. The network is still down. The team says the incident touched two MANTRA-managed wallets and that no user funds were exploited, and has not published an amount, named the flaw, or said whether assets left those wallets. The freeze stops settlement on a chain built to hold regulated real-world assets, where Securitize sits in the active validator set and mantraUSD is backed by short-term US Treasuries. It is the second Cosmos EVM security event to catch MANTRA in seven months, after January's $7 million ICS20 precompile drain on Saga. The MANTRA token touched a record low of $0.0041 about an hour before the halt was disclosed. Inveniam Capital Partners is still working to close its acquisition of the company.

Why this matters: A chain running regulated assets under a Dubai VASP licence has been frozen for a day with no figure published, no flaw named and no restart time committed.

DEFI

Judge Keeps Sun's World Liberty Claims In Court

A federal judge in San Francisco kept Justin Sun's individual claims against World Liberty Financial in open court on Thursday, turning down the Trump family venture's request to route the whole dispute into private arbitration. Judge James Donato also rejected the position that every claim brought by Sun's two British Virgin Islands entities belonged in arbitration, and told the parties to work out which claims stay. Sun described the ruling in a post on X; no written order had been entered on the docket as of Thursday afternoon. The case turns on the blacklist function World Liberty added to the WLFI contract in August 2025 and used days later to freeze the 600 million tokens it had just unlocked for him. Sun paid $45 million for 3 billion WLFI and received another billion as advisor compensation. World Liberty is separately suing him for defamation in Miami-Dade County.

Why this matters: Arbitration under the AAA rules those contracts invoke is confidential and a district court docket is public. The forum decides how much of the token freeze becomes visible.

BLOCKCHAINS

Circle Targets Sept. 16 for Arc Public Mainnet Launch

Circle says Arc is on track for a Sept. 16 public mainnet launch that opens the chain to any user or application while block production stays inside a permissioned validator set. Circle plus 11 founding validators are named: BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa. Arc runs permissioned proof-of-authority consensus, where a rotating proposer needs more than two-thirds of validators to commit a block. Fees are denominated in USDC and the chain is compatible with Ethereum's application environment. Circle counts more than half a billion testnet transactions, nearly 3 million wallets and more than 100 partners on private mainnet; the public testnet explorer showed 671.5 million transactions. Uniswap says it is ready on day one.

Why this matters: Developers deploy without approval while validators need an invitation. Arc's testnet counts measure activity without real assets, so Sept. 16 is the first read on live performance.