Weekly Recap: Congress Said No, The Agencies Said Yes
The Senate killed CLARITY 49-50, the Fed raised rates, the SEC cleared tokenized stocks onchain two days later, and bitcoin finished the week at $81,000
gm, Defiers!
The Senate rejected cloture on the CLARITY Act 49-50 on Tuesday, 11 votes short of 60. Every yes came from a Republican. Thom Tillis voted no in order to file a motion to reconsider, and entered it a minute after the result.
The FOMC raised its target range a quarter point to 3.75%-4% on Wednesday, its first increase since July 2023. Bitcoin touched $76,500 in the five minutes after the statement and gave it all back within half an hour. The 10-year closed at 5.01%, its highest since July 2007. Zcash ran to $1,383.
Paul Atkins and Michael Selig said on Wednesday they would write crypto rules without the bill. On Thursday the SEC issued a five-year exemption letting tokenized NMS stock trade onchain through permissioned pools, capped at 75 Tier 1 symbols, with issuers holding a 30-day veto over third-party listings. CFTC staff opened introducing-broker relief to any passive software provider the same morning, and the agency sent a market structure rulemaking to the White House at the prerule stage.
Circle opened Arc's mainnet with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa and eight other institutions producing blocks. Coinbase filed for U.S. single-stock perpetual futures. X put a Trade button on cashtags routing to Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini. S&P Global agreed to buy OpenZeppelin.
Bitcoin finished the week at $81,000, up 5.8% on Friday alone. NEAR added 32%, Starknet 27%, Arbitrum 26% and Uniswap 20%. Of the 125 largest non-stablecoin tokens, 111 rose.
Enjoy!
Top Stories This Week
The Senate Blocked The CLARITY Act 49-50
Cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 failed 49-50 on Tuesday, 11 votes short of the 60 required, with Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis the four Republicans voting no and no Democrat or independent voting to proceed. Republicans had posted final text a day earlier with an ethics division they said reflected substantially all of the Tillis-Gallego proposal. Mark Warner, one of seven Democrats who negotiated the bill for a year, said the president's ability to profit from crypto made it impossible for him to vote yes. Trade groups and executives answered by pointing at agency rulemaking, and kept returning to durability: a future chair can rewrite a rule, while repealing a statute takes another act of Congress. Tillis entered his motion to reconsider a minute after the result, which keeps a second cloture vote available without a new filing.
The SEC Cleared Tokenized Stocks To Trade Onchain
Two days after the vote, the SEC issued a five-year conditional exemption from the exchange definition for a category it calls a Tokenized Securities Venue, letting tokenized National Market System stock trade through permissioned liquidity pools. A venue may list 75 Tier 1 symbols and trade up to 0.25% of each stock's prior-month average daily volume; Tier 2 runs to 250 symbols at 2.5%, and breaching a cap pauses that security for three months. Tokenized shares must carry the same dividend rights, voting rights and residual claim as the underlying, and a written issuer objection inside 30 days bars a third-party listing outright. Hester Peirce wrote that the order "is not about decentralized finance." CFTC staff opened introducing-broker relief to any passive software provider the same morning, and the agency sent RIN 3038-AF80 to the White House at the prerule stage on Sept. 17.
The Fed Raised Rates And Bitcoin Round-Tripped It
The FOMC lifted its target range a quarter point to 3.75%-4% on a 12-0 vote on Wednesday, its first increase since July 2023, with the median projection now at 4.1% for the end of 2026 against 3.8% in June. Bitcoin sat at $75,688.82 when the statement landed, reached $76,499.99 within five minutes and set a session low of $74,911.53 at 2:35 p.m. ET. 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 since July 2007. Crypto went the other way into the evening: breadth widened from 39 gainers at 3 p.m. to 87, and Zcash reached $1,383.30 with no announcement from the project. Traders had already cut CLARITY odds to 19.5% hours before the Senate vote.
Bitcoin Ran To $81,000 As Tokenization Tokens Led
Crypto rallied through Asia and Europe on Friday and extended at the U.S. open. Bitcoin traded as high as $81,000, up 5.8% over 24 hours and its best level since Sept. 4, on the biggest single session in that series since Aug. 21. NEAR Protocol added 32%, Starknet 27%, Arbitrum 26% and Uniswap 20%, and 111 of the 125 largest non-stablecoin tokens rose. Total crypto market value reached $2.8 trillion on $110 billion of volume, with bitcoin dominance at 59%. Kaiko's Andrew Yang put tokenized equity volume on Uniswap near $800 million a day and questioned how much of it would clear the SEC's rights-parity condition. Equities sat it out, with the S&P 500 closing 0.1% below Thursday. The Bank of Japan raised its overnight call rate guideline to around 1.25% on a 7-2 vote, and Polymarket lifted the odds of a second Fed increase on Oct. 27-28 to 56.5% from 46.5%.
Circle Opened Arc 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, and consensus is proof-of-authority over a permissioned set running Tendermint BFT 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 in the United States this week and calls it a technical milestone, with no commitment to launch the token publicly; it presold $222 million at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation in May. Block production stays with 11 named institutions plus Circle, and the whitepaper's 60% ecosystem bucket is the only public route to wider ARC distribution.
Other Stories
Coinbase Seeks CFTC Approval for US Single-Stock Perpetual Futures — the cash-settled contracts would carry no expiration, trade 8 p.m. ET Sunday to 5 p.m. ET Friday against a Coinbase-calculated index, and clear through Nodal Clear, with hourly funding capped at 0.10%. The docket lists Thursday's filing as approval pending.
X Adds US 'Trade' Button to Cashtags With Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini — tapping a cashtag routes users to Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Interactive Brokers or Moomoo, which handle account access and the trade itself. Gemini's connection covers stocks plus ZEC, HYPE, BTC, ETH and SOL; Kraken says any crypto cashtag lands on its catalog.
S&P Global to Acquire OpenZeppelin in Onchain Risk Push — the audit firm keeps its name, its team and its open-source libraries, with CEO Demian Brener reporting to the president of S&P Global Ratings. Terms were not disclosed, and the client list runs to Uniswap, Aave, Coinbase and DTCC.
Morpho Opens Borrowing Against Coinbase's Tokenized Stocks — five Steakhouse-curated markets on Base take Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta and SpaceX tokens as collateral for USDC. Borrowers have pledged $104,401 and drawn $54,652, and every one of the 95 fixed-rate markets sits at zero.
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, with USA₮ the first asset institutions could borrow against tokenized collateral. Both the hub and the listing go to a DAO vote that has not been posted.
Balancer Proposes Shutting Down and Returning Its $9 Million Treasury to BAL Holders — holders would burn BAL for a pro-rata share of the treasury starting May 2027, and pools move to withdrawals-only on Oct. 30. BAL's market cap is $7.7 million.
Neutrl Opens NUSD Redemptions at 51 Cents as Strata Junior Tranche Faces Wipeout — the redemption contract pays 0.51 USDC per NUSD, a 49% shortfall to the token's $1 reference, and a Strata update scheduled for Sept. 19 would write jrNUSD to zero. Withdrawals would settle in sNUSD at revised share values.
Trending on The Defiant
Kraken Parent Plans Permissioned Hyperliquid Perps for US Traders · DEFI
Polymarket Hires Ex-Zora CEO for Onchain Product Push · DEFI
WisdomTree Opens Tokenized Treasury Fund To MoonPay's 35 Million Accounts · TRADFI
0x Says Uniswap v4 Hooks Were A Mistake, Hayden Adams Says "Skill Issue" · DEFI
Blockworks Lets Exchanges Take Compliance Alerts Straight From AI Agents · INFRASTRUCTURE
That's it for this week — have a great weekend! If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends!
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