Bitcoin Runs to $81,000 and NEAR Adds 32%
111 of the 125 largest tokens are up a day after the SEC cleared tokenized stocks — and Coinbase, Morpho and the CFTC all moved on the same trade
gm, Defiers!
These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:
- Bitcoin ran to $81,000 as NEAR added 32% and tokenization tokens led
- Coinbase asked the CFTC to approve U.S. single-stock perpetual futures
- Morpho opened borrowing against Coinbase's tokenized stocks on Base
- The CFTC sent a crypto market structure rulemaking to the White House
- Neutrl opened NUSD redemptions at 51 cents as Strata's junior tranche faces a wipeout
Bitcoin reached $81,000 on Friday and last changed hands at $80,829, up 5.8% over 24 hours and its best level since Sept. 4. NEAR Protocol added 32%, Starknet 27%, Arbitrum 26% and Uniswap 20%. Of the 125 largest non-stablecoin tokens, 111 rose, 13 fell and one was unchanged. The S&P 500 sat 0.1% below Thursday's close.
The tokens that ran hardest are the ones tied to trading securities onchain, a day after the SEC issued its five-year exemption for tokenized NMS stock. Total crypto market value reached $2.8 trillion on $110 billion of volume, bitcoin dominance climbed to 59% from 57%, and DeFi total value locked rose 3.2% to $89.9 billion. UNI's high came in the hour beginning 10 a.m. UTC, 21% above the day's open, on $2.2 billion of turnover against a $5.4 billion market value.
Kaiko's Andrew Yang puts tokenized equity volume on Uniswap near $800 million a day and doubts how much of it would clear the SEC's rights-parity condition. Block Scholes' Andrew Melville reads seven-day volatility smiles skewed toward call options after the week's macro events passed. And the Bank of Japan raised its call rate guideline to around 1.25% on a 7-2 vote, with Polymarket now pricing a second Fed increase on Oct. 27-28 at 56.5%, up ten points on the day.
Read more below!
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Solana's Historic Governance Vote — While Robinhood Invades Its Meme Coin Turf
Camila Russo sat down with Nick Almond, head of governance at the Jito Foundation, after Solana's first onchain vote, where any SOL holder could weigh in on the network's constitution, inflation and fees. Almond walks through the disinflation proposal decided with eight seconds left after Kraken flipped its vote, how JitoSOL swung its entire stake pool on a 13% quorum trigger, and why he thinks Solana can still win the apps Robinhood Chain is now chasing. Watch the full episode.
Bitcoin Runs to $81,000 and NEAR Adds 32% as Tokenization Tokens Lead
Bitcoin opened the UTC day at $76,349 on Coinbase and traded as high as $81,000, a 5.6% gain and the biggest single session on that series since Aug. 21. Ether was at $2,580, up 5% on the day and down 1.8% on the week. Among the 15 biggest tokens, Hyperliquid added 12% to $92.20, Solana 9.6% to $110, XRP 7.6% to $1.40 and BNB 4.7% to $759. NEAR was the largest gainer among the 150 biggest, up 61% since its Sept. 15 close, and turned over $2 billion against a $4.9 billion market value, a 40% ratio matched only by Uniswap. No dated NEAR announcement accompanied the move. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $159.5 million on Thursday, their first daily inflow since Monday, against a $426.9 million net outflow across the week. Brent crude fell 4.8% to $99.76, most of it six hours before bitcoin moved.
Join us Sept 24: The Current State of Blockchain, Crypto, and Fintech
Join Sophia Zhao, Partner at Alumni Ventures, and Camila Russo, Founder of The Defiant, for a fireside conversation on the current state of blockchain, crypto, and fintech venture — where capital is deploying across the space, what the next generation of on-chain and financial infrastructure companies are actually building, and how accredited investors can gain structured exposure to one of the most active corners of private markets.
Coinbase Seeks CFTC Approval for US Single-Stock Perpetual Futures
Coinbase Derivatives asked the CFTC to approve cash-settled perpetual futures on individual U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs, and the docket lists the Sept. 18 submission as "Approval Pending (45)." The contracts would carry no expiration, settle in dollars, and trade from 8 p.m. ET Sunday to 5 p.m. ET Friday against a Coinbase-calculated index spanning premarket, regular, after-hours and overnight sessions. An hourly funding payment, read every three minutes, smoothed against the prior hour and capped at 0.10%, would hold the future to the stock, and Nodal Clear would clear the trades. The representative Apple specification uses a contract size of 0.01 times the Apple index, about $2.25 notional with the stock near $225. The filing classifies the products as security futures under the joint CFTC-SEC framework and names no initial lineup; the Wall Street Journal reported roughly 50 to 60 contracts including Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia, figures absent from the public submission.
Morpho Opens Borrowing Against Coinbase's Tokenized Stocks
Five markets on Base let holders pledge Coinbase's stock tokens for USDC at variable or fixed rates: Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta and SpaceX, out of the ten tokens Base lists. Borrowers have pledged $104,401 and drawn $54,652 against $60,265 supplied. Steakhouse Financial curates all five, and its two High Yield USDC vaults supply 98.9% of the dollars in the Apple market. Liquidation loan-to-value is 62.5% on four markets and 77% on Alphabet, with a 12.67% penalty and no liquidation executed yet. Borrowing sat under $600 until Sept. 16, when it went from $503 to $42,105 in about two hours. The fixed-rate side is empty: Midnight runs 95 USDC markets against the five tokens, every one at zero. Coinbase issues the tokens through Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd under Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectuses and offers them only outside the U.S.
CFTC Files Crypto Market Rulemaking With White House at Prerule Stage
The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs received RIN 3038-AF80, "Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets," from the CFTC on Sept. 17, two days after the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act and the same day the agency's Market Participants Division issued its passive-software no-action letter. The entry carries no abstract, no text and no legal deadline, marks the action as not economically significant, and flags it as Dodd-Frank rulemaking. Executive Order 12866 gives OIRA 10 working days on preliminary actions against 90 for proposed and final rules, which runs the clock to Oct. 1. Selig told staff in January to draft rules on the actual-delivery exception for leveraged retail crypto and to explore a new contract-market registration category built for it. The SEC is further along, with Regulation Crypto Assets in the Federal Register and comments open until Oct. 20.
Neutrl Opens NUSD Redemptions at 51 Cents as Strata Junior Tranche Faces Wipeout
Neutrl's Ethereum redemption contract returns 510000000000000000 from redemptionRate(), an 18-decimal ratio equal to 0.51 USDC per NUSD and a 49% shortfall to the token's $1 reference. The rate tracks what the protocol disclosed on Aug. 28, when it put about $27 million of liquid assets behind 53.39 million NUSD in circulation, roughly 50.6%. Strata's scheduling transaction confirmed at 6:48 p.m. UTC on Sept. 17 with a 172,800-second delay, so the update can execute no earlier than 2:48 p.m. ET on Sept. 19; it would write jrNUSD to zero, set srNUSD/NUSD at 1.23971 and allocate the strategy contract's 1,569,767.9 sNUSD entirely to senior holders. OAK Research says accepting the program waives recourse against Neutrl across a holder's entire position, even on a partial redemption. The portal was region-blocked during reporting.
Other Stories Worth Your Time
WisdomTree Opens Tokenized Treasury Fund To MoonPay's 35 Million Accounts — MoonPay will build an access point for WTGXX and hold the tokenized money market fund against its stablecoin reserves. The fund runs $1.23 billion, fifth-largest in a $15.4 billion tokenized Treasury market.
Polygon Prepares Permissionless Burn of 100 Million POL — The first call would destroy about 83% of a 121 million-token base-fee collector, roughly 0.93% of supply, against ongoing emissions running at 2% a year. Contracts sit on testnet awaiting final Security Council signatures, and Sandeep Nailwal says later burns become community-callable each quarter.
Blockchain Dead Drop Attacks Jump 420% as State Hackers Expand — Chainalysis says North Korean operators run Tron, Aptos and BNB Smart Chain as redundant command paths, while suspected Iranian actors encode routing data inside Bitcoin transactions.
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