Weekly Recap: Washington's Rally

gm, Defiers!

Bitcoin gained 22.6% this week, its largest weekly move since Trump won the 2024 elections.

The trigger came out of Washington's debt management office. The Treasury said it would at least double its buybacks of long-dated debt, lifting the maximum operation size in the 10-to-30-year sectors to $4 billion. The 30-year yield fell to 5.21% from Monday's close, and about $3 billion of liquidations followed the break, more than 90% of them shorts.

Washington supplied the rest. Trump pressed the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, with cloture on H.R. 3633 ripening Sept. 15, and said CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid onshore, a venue that geoblocks Americans while clearing $6.19 billion of perps a day. The SEC proposed a token-offering framework that lets an issuer certify its way out of securities law.

Stripe agreed to pay more than $7 billion for AI gateway OpenRouter, a company that reached 200 trillion monthly tokens without touching the stablecoin issuer, the wallets or the settlement chain Stripe already owns.

Enjoy!

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Top Stories This Week

Bitcoin Posts Its Biggest Week Since the 2024 Election

Bitcoin traded at $76,977 on Friday, up 6.4% in a day and 22.6% over seven days, its largest weekly gain since the week to Nov. 12, 2024. The move broke a $59,000-to-$67,000 range that had held for seven weeks. Ether added 28.8%, XRP 36.7% and Solana 21.5%. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $606.3 million on Thursday, $503 million of it into BlackRock's IBIT. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index read 72, against 29 a week earlier.

Trump Says the CFTC Is Working to Onshore Hyperliquid

Trump said Wednesday that CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working to bring Hyperliquid into the US “in a fully compliant and legal fashion,” speaking beside SEC Chair Paul Atkins, ICE's Jeffrey Sprecher and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong. The exchange geoblocks US and Ontario users while clearing $6.19 billion of perps volume over 24 hours and holding $11.72 billion of open interest. HYPE rose about 19% to $69.56. CME Group and Cboe closed down 1.7% and 3.5%.

The SEC Proposes Token Rules With a $75 Million Exemption

The SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets on Aug. 18, with a startup exemption of $5 million raised over as long as four years and a Tier 2 fundraising exemption of $75 million per 12 months against audited financials. The safe harbor strips the investment-contract label once an issuer finishes or permanently abandons the managerial efforts it sold, certified in a public filing. Decentralization appears nowhere in the conditions. Comments close 60 days after Federal Register publication.

Stripe's Reported $7 Billion OpenRouter Deal Skips the Blockchain

Stripe agreed to buy AI model gateway OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, Bloomberg reported Sunday, three months after a CapitalG-led Series B valued it at $1.3 billion. OpenRouter earns on balance top-ups, 5% in USDC and 5.5% through Stripe cards, against the 200 trillion monthly tokens its homepage advertises. Stripe already owns the stablecoin issuer, the wallets and Tempo, the machine-payments chain that cleared 80,388 transactions and $5.34 in fees over 24 hours.

Solana Cuts Its Slot Time for the First Time

Solana activated 350-millisecond slots on mainnet, down from 400, the first slot-time reduction since the network launched. SIMD-0525 went live at slot 440,208,000 in epoch 1019. Each further 50-millisecond step needs its own feature gate in a later epoch, and the Solana Foundation says it will hold the network where it is if block skip rates climb too high. Jacob Creech of the foundation put 300 milliseconds next. Solana's own docs still describe slots as 400 milliseconds.

Other Stories

Optimism Redirects $49.7 Million Airdrop Reserve After Late Deciding Vote — Core dev team Test in Prod cast 8.486 million OP with 16 minutes 52 seconds left, lifting support from 45.77% to 61.84% and moving 546.9 million OP out of the future-airdrop reserve into a foundation-controlled fund.

HSBC and Standard Chartered Complete First Live Transaction on Swift Blockchain Ledger — Each bank recorded its obligation on its own tokenized-deposit platform while Swift's ledger matched and netted them, with final settlement running through existing systems. Value, currencies and corridor were withheld.

Circle Targets Sept. 16 for Arc Public Mainnet Launch — Anyone can use the chain at launch while block production stays with Circle and 11 founding validators, among them BlackRock, DTCC, ICE, Mastercard and Visa.

Gnosis Chain to Abandon Its Validator Set and Settle to Ethereum — GnosisDAO approved GIP-153 with 123,158 GNO in favor and 115 against, retiring a validator set that ran above 100,000 at the 2022 merge and unlocking roughly 350,000 GNO.

MANTRA Halts Chain, Blames Cosmos EVM Module — The chain went down late Thursday and stayed down Friday in its second Cosmos EVM security event in seven months, with the token printing a record low $0.0041 about an hour before the halt was disclosed.

Neynar Seeks a New Owner for Farcaster Seven Months After Buying It — Protocol fees fell from $35.43 million in the first quarter to $376,740 since July 1, CLANKER buybacks stopped, and Neynar will return most of its balance sheet as its staff disperses.

Judge Keeps Sun's World Liberty Claims In Court — Judge James Donato refused to route the whole dispute into arbitration, leaving in open court a fight over the blacklist function used to freeze the 600 million tokens that had just unlocked for Justin Sun.

Trending on The Defiant

• Solana Activates 350-Millisecond Slots on Mainnet
• Bitcoin Posts Biggest Week Since 2024 as Trump Pushes Senate on CLARITY Act
• MANTRA Halts Chain, Blames Cosmos EVM Module
• Judge Keeps Sun's World Liberty Claims In Court
• Illuvium Team Cuts Wages To Extend Runway

That's it for today — have a great weekend! If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends!