Trump Agrees To CLARITY Act Ethics Rules
Plus, Balancer proposes winding down and handing its $9 million treasury back to BAL holders
gm, Defiers!
These are the biggest stories in DeFi and crypto:
- Republicans posted the final CLARITY Act text with ethics terms Trump agreed to
- Balancer proposed shutting down and returning its treasury to BAL holders
- Robinhood says shares and votes are coming for its stock tokens
- Kraken launched vaults that borrow against tokenized equities
- Pump.fun dropped Cashback for new launches and added holder rewards
Ethics for elected officials was the first thing seven Senate Democrats said was missing when they walked away from the bill in July. On Monday evening, Republicans handed it to them, only one day before the vote that decides whether the bill gets debated at all.
The Jan. 20, 2029 sunset that would have ended the ban with Trump's term is gone. State attorneys general, barred from enforcement outright in July, can sue under the final text. Civil penalties went from 10% of the take or $500,000, whichever is less, to 20% or $500,000, whichever is greater. Cynthia Lummis says the language carries "substantially all" of the Tillis-Gallego proposal, and that Trump agreed to it voluntarily.
Cloture ripens at 2:15 p.m. Tuesday and needs sixty votes, which means seven Democrats. None of the seven has said a word about the text. Traders moved without them: Polymarket's odds of enactment this year went from 18% on Friday to 31% on Monday.
Read more below!
Will Crypto Get Clarity? The Senate Votes Tuesday
The procedural vote needs seven Democrats, and none of them has tipped a hand. Camila Russo goes live at 9 a.m. ET Tuesday with Summer Mersinger of the Blockchain Association and Kevin Wysocki of Anchorage Digital, through the vote itself: what is in the final text, what is still being negotiated, and which senators to watch. Set a reminder.
Republicans Post Final CLARITY Act Text With Trump-Backed Ethics Terms a Day Before Cloture Vote
Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman and Tim Scott released what they called the final text of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Monday, with ethics restrictions on the president, members of Congress, federal judges and their spouses. It runs 635 pages against 616 in July and lists 126 changes Democrats asked for, five of them in the ethics division. The Jan. 20, 2029 sunset is gone. State attorneys general get standing, though the action runs against the U.S. Attorney General for injunctive relief, and the states can sue an intermediary directly over the listing ban for up to $250,000 a day. A new $15,000 threshold makes holding a significant financial interest its own prohibition, cured by divestment or a qualified blind trust.
Oasis Vault bought CryptoPunk 909, and they're giving it away. Their case for why a wallet company buys a Punk: everything valuable about crypto is downstream from self-custody. Uncensorable money only works if you hold the keys, private money is impossible by definition if someone else has custody, and DeFi stops being DeFi the moment a company can freeze your position. NFTs made the point concrete — there is no Punks ETF, and you cannot park one at an exchange. You either hold the keys or you don't own it. Oasis Vault is a self-custody wallet built on a 2/3 multisig: you hold two keys, mobile and hardware, and Oasis holds the third as a recovery key it can never use on its own. Lose a key and they can help you recover it. Share one with a beneficiary and the same setup handles inheritance.
Raffle details:
- Open to anyone who signs up or upgrades to a paid plan
- Entry is capped at 500 participants and closes Oct. 31 at the latest
- Tickets per participant vary by plan and duration
- Drawn seven days after entry closes, with the Punk transferred to the winner the day after
See the full details and enter
Balancer Proposes Shutting Down and Returning Its $9 Million Treasury to BAL Holders
Balancer would stop operating and hand its treasury back to token holders under a proposal posted to the governance forum on Monday, which cancels the buyback holders approved in April. The managed treasury is at least $9 million; BAL's market capitalization is $7.71 million. Monthly burn runs about $150,000 against roughly $30,000 of protocol revenue in August, down from $97,000 in June. Pools that can be paused move to withdrawals-only on Oct. 30, and from end-May 2027 holders burn BAL for a pro-rata share of every treasury asset except BAL itself. A Snapshot vote runs Sept. 25–29. Author Marcus Hardt says contributors are working on a continuation he backs only as a fork: "I will not front a continuation plan, and nothing here funds one."
Robinhood Says Shares And Votes Are Coming For Stock Tokens
Crypto chief Johann Kerbrat wrote on Monday that in-kind redemption and voting are coming for Robinhood Stock Tokens, and Vlad Tenev reposted it two hours later. The base prospectus says something else: asked whether investors can physically receive the underlying at redemption, it answers "No," and settles every redemption in cash. On votes it is equally plain — holders "do not have shareholder rights." The final terms for the Apple series let the issuer lend the backing shares to a prime borrower who "retains all incidents of ownership," with the issuer waiving the votes for the length of the loan. Kerbrat put Stock Token value at $170 million and Robinhood Chain's decentralized exchange volume at nearly $50 billion.
Kraken Launches xStocks Vaults That Borrow Against Tokenized Equities
Kraken opened three vaults that pay a variable yield on tokenized SPY, QQQ and NVDA while the depositor keeps the xStock. Displayed rates are 2% for SPYx and QQQx and 1.8% for NVDAx, already net of a 25% performance fee. Underneath, the xStock lands in an embedded wallet on Ink, gets wrapped, and is bridged to Solana, where Sentora posts it as collateral in Kamino markets, borrows stablecoins against it and deploys them. Returns are swapped back into the same xStock. Kraken's own documentation lists smart contract, liquidity, bad-debt, liquidation and cross-chain execution risk, and says losses are shared proportionally and can cut into the deposit. Withdrawals take three days. The vaults are open in the European Economic Area and closed to the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and the UAE.
Pump.fun Drops Cashback for New Launches, Adds Holder Rewards
Pump.fun removed Cashback Mode from new token launches and replaced it with Holder Rewards, which routes fees to a distribution wallet and pays them out pro rata several times an hour. Wallets need more than $20 of the token to qualify, and larger balances take a larger share. Payments arrive in the token's quote asset and land automatically, where Cashback had to be claimed through the app or Terminal. The platform marketed it as "longer hold times, higher ceilings" and did not explain in the same post how holding time affects either. In February Pump.fun called the Cashback choice permanent; existing Cashback coins can now apply to switch, and that conversion cannot be reversed.
Other Stories Worth Your Time
S&P Global Leads Kaiko Funding Extension to $110 Million — the crypto data provider raised a $110 million extension led by S&P Global, four years after its $53 million Series B, and says the money goes into infrastructure for 24/7 tokenized markets.
Base-Ethereum Account Abstraction Collaboration Broke Down, Developer Says — a developer says the work on native smart accounts fell apart, leaving two draft proposals with different approaches and pushing cross-chain compatibility onto wallets and apps.
Pixelmon Ends Game Development After Publisher Test Falls Short — the NFT project gave notice to its gaming team and will take its titles offline after a publisher test fell short, while a smaller group looks for a business model outside games.
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