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!

WATCH

How Maple Finance Became the #2 Crypto Lender Behind Tether

Sid Powell walks through the Robinhood Earn plumbing behind Maple's roughly $4.6 billion in assets, with deposits routed through a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse into syrupUSDG, plus DAO-only governance, the token buyback and why he thinks the competition is Blackstone and Ares.

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.