SEC, CFTC Say They'll Write the Crypto Rulebook Without Congress
Atkins and Selig posted within two hours of each other. The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023 and bitcoin round-tripped it.
gm, Defiers!
These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:
- The SEC and CFTC chairmen said they will write crypto rules without the CLARITY Act
- Bitcoin round-tripped the first Fed rate increase since 2023 as Zcash ran to $1,383
- Circle opened Arc's mainnet with BlackRock, DTCC and Visa producing blocks
- Kraken's parent wants permissioned Hyperliquid perps for U.S. traders
- Aave Labs plans a tokenized-asset credit market on Avalanche with Tether's USA₮
The CFTC chairman posted his statement at 10:35 a.m. ET on Wednesday. The SEC chairman followed at 12:11 p.m. Michael Selig said the CFTC is "locked in and ready to ship its rules for the new frontier of finance." Paul Atkins said he had "been unequivocal: with or without legislation, we will act decisively within the SEC's statutory authority."
It’s the optimistic view many in the industry have tried taking after the Senate setback: Crypto can still get a regulatory framework in the U.S. without the bill. The SEC put Regulation Crypto Assets in the Federal Register on Aug. 21 with comments closing Oct. 20. Separately, Atkins named a transfer agent rule and a custody proposal. Meanwhile, the CFTC has sent 18 proposals to the Register since January, and the crypto market structure rule Selig has now described twice is absent from that list. And the question that clouds the picture is that the rules one agency chair writes can be unwritten by the next one.
Read more below!
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Will Crypto Get Clarity?
Camila Russo went live through Tuesday's cloture vote with Summer Mersinger of the Blockchain Association and Kevin Wysocki of Anchorage Digital. They spent the hour before the 49-50 result laying out which rules the agencies can write with the authority they already hold, which is the case Atkins and Selig made in public on Wednesday. Watch the full stream.
SEC and CFTC Chairmen Say They Will Write Crypto Rules Without CLARITY Act
Selig's statement landed roughly 19 hours after cloture failed. "President Trump promised to deliver a future-proof crypto asset regulatory market structure one way or the other, and we will help him get the job done using our existing statutory authorities," he wrote. Atkins thanked "everyone who put so much effort into the CLARITY Act" and signed off with "Stay tuned." The SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets proposal would create two Securities Act exemptions, up to $5 million over four years and up to $75 million in any 12 months, plus a conditional safe harbor under which a crypto asset would be deemed outside the investment contract analysis. The CFTC's crypto work in 2026 has run through staff advisories and no-action letters, including a March 17 no-action position for a self-custodial wallet software provider. Polymarket priced CLARITY becoming law this year at 6.6% on Wednesday afternoon, flat over 24 hours, against 19.5% on Tuesday morning.
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.
Bitcoin Round-Trips the First Fed Rate Increase Since 2023 as Zcash Runs to $1,383
The FOMC lifted the target range a quarter point to 3.75%-4.00% on a 12-0 vote, its first increase since July 2023, and the median projection now puts the rate at 4.1% at the end of 2026 against 3.8% in June. Bitcoin was at $75,688.82 when the statement landed, reached $76,499.99 in the five minutes to 2:10 p.m. ET, set a session low of $74,911.53 at 2:35 p.m. and last traded at $75,937. The S&P 500 closed 0.4% lower and gold settled down 0.7%, both giving back the same move. The 10-year par yield closed at 5.01%, its highest close since July 2007. Crypto went the other way into the evening: breadth widened from 39 gainers at 3 p.m. to 87, Zcash reached $1,383.30 with no announcement from the project and closed up 18.9%, and Arbitrum added 7.7%.
Circle Launches Arc Mainnet With BlackRock, DTCC and Visa Producing Blocks
Fees on Arc are paid in USDC, with a base fee target near $0.01 and no volatile gas token. Consensus is proof-of-authority over a permissioned set running Tendermint BFT through Circle's Malachite implementation, with deterministic finality under a second. BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo, Visa and Worldpay produce blocks alongside Circle, and more than 100 applications went live on day one, with Aave deploying a V4 market and Morpho supplying credit. Circle completed a genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens in the United States this week and calls it a technical milestone, with no commitment to launch the token publicly. It presold $222 million of ARC at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation in May. CRCL closed at $86.30 on Tuesday, down 11.4% on the day.
Kraken Parent Plans Permissioned Hyperliquid Perps for US Traders
Payward said on its verified X account that it is building permissioned Hyperliquid HIP-3 markets for U.S. clients. Bitnomial, its CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, would be the HIP-3 deployer, creating, owning and administering the market and clearing and settling the contracts. NinjaTrader Clearing, Payward's CFTC-registered futures commission merchant, would carry customer accounts, and only accounts on both NinjaTrader's and Bitnomial's allowlists could trade. HIP-3 ordinarily lets any qualifying builder deploy a perpetual futures venue on Hyperliquid with its own margining, order book and oracle settings; Payward keeps that structure and puts a dual allowlist in front of it. Trades would match and record on Hyperliquid's public chain. Any listing stays subject to regulatory approval.
Aave Labs Plans A Tokenized-Asset Credit Market On Avalanche With Tether's USA₮
The RWA Hub would run on Aave V4's hub-and-spoke design, where a liquidity hub grants each spoke a credit line and each spoke keeps its own oracles, risk parameters and emergency stops. USA₮, the dollar token Anchorage Digital Bank issues and Tether brands and distributes, would be the first asset institutions could borrow against tokenized collateral, and both the hub and the USA₮ listing go to an Aave DAO vote that has not been posted. Aave V4 on Avalanche holds $15.9 million in deposits net of borrowing and $6.8 million borrowed, out of $448 million across every V4 deployment, DefiLlama data shows. USA₮ has 184.3 million tokens circulating on Ethereum and Celo, and Avalanche would be its third chain.
Other Stories Worth Your Time
Crypto Industry Points to SEC and CFTC After CLARITY Setback — Trade groups and executives answered the 49-50 vote by pointing at agency rulemaking, and kept returning to durability: the next chair can rewrite a rule, while repealing a statute takes another act of Congress. Mark Warner put the president's ability to profit from crypto at the center of his no vote, and Thom Tillis filed a motion to reconsider a minute after the result.
Ondo's Oasis Pro Markets Joins DTCC's Fund/SERV Processing Network — Ondo's broker-dealer subsidiary is the first tokenization company on a network that carries more than 85% of U.S. mutual fund transaction activity, replacing fund-by-fund integrations with one standardized connection. The joint release named no Ondo product, no distributor and no go-live date.
The Next Bull Run Could Be One Big Airdrop Away — Eleven airdrops worth $500 million or more have landed since UNI, and the ones that arrived before a rally had runway to recycle. The pipeline now runs through Polymarket's confirmed POLY token, the Base token Coinbase has been exploring since last year, and a tokenless perp-DEX cohort that includes Variational, Extended and Paradex.
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