Crypto Didn't Get CLARITY, But it Can Still Get Clarity

gm, Defiers!

These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:

• The Senate blocked the CLARITY Act 49-50 with no Democratic votes
• CoinEx is closing after nine years, with withdrawals ending Dec. 22
• 0x says 54% of Uniswap v4 hooks are malicious; Hayden Adams says skill issue
• An MEV bot front-ran a $7.8 million rsETH exploit and kept the proceeds
• Bitcoin fell below $76,000 while options traders kept volatility cheap
• Oasis Vault is giving away CryptoPunk 909 (Partner)

Four hours before the Senate blocked the CLARITY Act, Anchorage Digital's head of policy explained what the industry would do without it.

"Clarity would be really nice to have. It's the big, beautiful present with a bow on top of it," Kevin Wysocki said on The Defiant's livestream Tuesday morning. "But there's a lot of stocking stuffers that are out there too."

The OCC's chief counsel said roughly five years ago that custody of digital assets is effectively the same as traditional asset custody. No law was needed. The five stablecoins Anchorage issues today are issued under that guidance, not under the GENIUS Act, which does not take effect until January. Charter applications are the federal pathway that exists right now, and Wysocki expects more of them, plus more broker-dealer registrations under structures already on the books.

Summer Mersinger, who held a CFTC seat until May 2025 and now runs the Blockchain Association, made the same argument from the legislative side. CLARITY is not the first crypto market structure bill. FIT21 passed the House in May 2024 and died in the Senate. "It's not like this is just going to go away if this vote isn't successful," she said.

Polymarket priced CLARITY becoming law this year at 6.5% after the vote, down from 29.5% Monday. Bitcoin fell 4.1% to $75,901. The Senate has under three weeks of scheduled session before the midterm recess.

The odds that the CLARITY bill passes are low. But the industry has a plan B, and it can still get the regulatory clarity it deserves.

Read more below!

PARTNER

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BTC $75,804 ▼ 3.88%	ETH $2,400 ▼ 5.95%	SOL $97.08 ▼ 6.33%	XRP $1.29 ▼ 10.84%	BNB $714 ▼ 1.41%
Prices & 24h change as of 21:19 09/15/2026 UTC · Full list

WATCH

Will Crypto Get Clarity? The Senate Voted Today

Camila Russo went live through the vote with Summer Mersinger of the Blockchain Association and Kevin Wysocki of Anchorage Digital, from the last hours of whipping to the 49-50 result: what was in the final text, what the seven Democrats still wanted, and what happens to the motion Tillis moved to reconsider. Watch the full stream.

REGULATION

Senate Blocks CLARITY Act 49-50 With No Democratic Votes to Proceed

Cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 needed sixty votes under the unanimous consent agreement entered Aug. 8. Voting opened at 2:18 p.m. and the result was announced at 3:00 p.m. at 49-50, with Chris Coons not voting. The House passed H.R. 3633 by 294-134 in July 2025; the Senate text that failed Tuesday was an amendment in the nature of a substitute. The seven Democrats who negotiated the bill for a year said in July that the Republican text "falls short" and put ethics first on the list, and none of them withdrew that statement. A counterproposal they sent out of Chuck Schumer's office on Monday night has not been published. Cynthia Lummis said the final release carried "substantially all" of the Tillis-Gallego ethics proposal: "Democrats got what they wanted; now they need to take yes for an answer."

Senate Blocks CLARITY Act 49-50 With No Democratic Votes to Proceed

The Senate voted 49-50 against taking up the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Sept. 15, 2026. No Democrat voted to proceed and four Republicans voted no. Thom Tillis filed a motion to reconsider.

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Why this matters: Tillis kept a second cloture vote available on the same motion, and the Senate calendar leaves under three weeks of scheduled session to bring it back before the recess.

CEFI

CoinEx to Close Exchange on Ninth Anniversary

CoinEx will stop spot trading on Sept. 29 and close on Dec. 22, nine years to the day after it launched. Founder Haipo Yang wrote that the exchange never became a leading venue while security and compliance risk got harder to contain: "Carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice." Arkham labels 3.2 million addresses to CoinEx holding $422.7 million, including $144.7 million of bitcoin. CoinEx says its reserve ratio exceeds 100%, and its public proof-of-reserves page showed no date after "Latest Audition" and an empty reserve table when reviewed. Tokens without external liquidity lose wallet maintenance on Sept. 29, and unwithdrawn USDT after Dec. 22 moves into custody at a monthly fee of 5% of the balance.

Why this matters: Anyone who wants their tokens in original form has until Sept. 29, three months before the December withdrawal deadline the shutdown notice leads with.

DEFI

0x Says Uniswap v4 Hooks Were A Mistake, Hayden Adams Says "Skill Issue"

0x analyzed 84,163 v4 hooks across six chains and classified 54.2% as malicious and 26.4% as likely malicious, with trades routed through them delivering as much as 50% less at execution than the quoted amount. One live hook on Base charged fees on 60.6% of its fills at a median 18%, collecting $143,037. Hayden Adams did not dispute the figures. He called the post a waste of time, said routers should vet which hooks they send orders to, and compared the complaint to saying Ethereum is bad because malicious contracts exist. Paradigm's Dan Robinson said the post "should be titled '0x routing made a mistake'" and pointed to Uniswap's hook allowlist. 0x engineer Duncan Townsend said 0x already uses that list, that at least one malicious hook sits on it, and that simulation fails because hooks detect it and hide.

Why this matters: Whoever picks the route eats the loss when a pool quotes one price and settles another, and both sides of this argument are assigning that job to the other.

HACKS

MEV Bot Front-Runs $7.8 Million rsETH Exploit on Ethereum

An MEV bot called Yoink took position zero in Ethereum block 25980525 at 12:38 a.m. ET, and the attack transaction it beat into the block reverted. Yoink received 2,900 rsETH and sent 2,882.37 of it to a single address, routed 17.63 rsETH through Uniswap's v4 Pool Manager, and forwarded 18.93 ETH to the block builder. BlockSec traced the exploit to a flawed authorization check in an executor contract behind an enabled Safe module, which let attacker-controlled calls run through the trusted executor. Blockaid said the attacker used a public keeper multicall to steer a custom v4 liquidity module into a hooked pool that unwrapped aEthrsETH into rsETH. PeckShield put the size at $7.81 million.

Why this matters: The Safe lost the same amount either way, and the 2,882.37 rsETH now sits at an address that owes its owner no disclosure and no return.

MARKETS

Bitcoin Falls Below $76,000 as Traders Cut CLARITY Act Odds Hours Before Senate Vote

Bitcoin traded at $76,018 at midday, down 3.1% over 24 hours, with Coinbase recording a 5.1% peak-to-trough range and 95 of the 124 largest non-stablecoin tokens falling. Options carried none of that repricing. Block Scholes analyst Thahbib Rahman wrote that all bitcoin options were trading at 38-39% implied volatility with skew close to neutral, across tenors covering both the cloture vote and Wednesday's Fed decision. The 10-year par yield touched 5.00% after Monday's 4.97% close, the highest close of 2026 and the first at or above 5.00% since July 2007. U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $159.9 million on Monday, after $462.7 million of outflows across the four sessions before it.

Why this matters: Polymarket prices a quarter-point increase Wednesday at 86.5%, and options traders went into that meeting and the Senate vote pricing neither as unusual.

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Standard Chartered Sets $10 Arbitrum Target on Robinhood and Tokenization Growth — Geoff Kendrick's note calls Arbitrum "the blockchain for TradFi" and puts ARB at roughly 70 times its current price by the end of the decade, resting on the 10% cut Arbitrum takes from chains built on its stack. Robinhood Chain, the first of those, has fallen 93% from its peak in ten days.

Bitget Wallet Adds Reality's Tokenized U.S. Stocks Alongside Ondo And xStocks — The self-custodial wallet lists Reality's rTokens on Arbitrum and Morph from Sept. 15, putting a third tokenized-equity issuer in front of its users alongside Ondo and xStocks. Reality is part of the Bitget ecosystem.

Kamino Names Michael Weisz CEO for US and Institutional Expansion — Weisz takes over a Solana lender with $1.35 billion of TVL and $1.02 billion of active loans on DefiLlama, hired to run institutional growth and a U.S. expansion.

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