Good morning everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Wednesday, September 23rd, 2026.
The Cleveland Guardians won yesterday. Bitcoin is still hanging around the mid-$80,000s. ETF money continues pouring in. Stablecoins are moving deeper into actual payment infrastructure. And Solana is testing a major speed upgrade.
But that’s not where I want to start.
I want to start with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. government debt, stablecoins and a theory that could explain a much larger part of America’s stablecoin strategy.
This comes from Bravo’s Research, one of my favorite YouTube channels for discussions about crypto, monetary policy and macroeconomics. Their analysis helped frame this section, and I highly recommend watching the original video. matt-take-02 (2)
Watch Bravo’s Research’s original analysis on YouTube
And I want to make something clear before getting into it: this is a theory about how these pieces may fit together. It is not an announced Scott Bessent or Treasury plan.
What makes it interesting is that several of the underlying pieces are real.
The Three-Step Treasury-to-Stablecoin Theory
Here’s the basic problem.
The United States needs to borrow an enormous amount of money.
But long-term Treasury yields have become expensive. When investors buy a 10-year, 20-year or 30-year Treasury, they’re taking substantial duration risk. If they become more concerned about inflation, deficits or America’s fiscal position, they can demand higher yields.
Treasury has already become more aggressive with long-duration buybacks. Earlier this month it increased the maximum size of a buyback targeting 10-to-20-year securities from $2 billion to $6 billion, ultimately purchasing about $5.2 billion. The stated purpose of Treasury’s buyback program is improving liquidity and cash management, not implementing the three-step strategy described here. Reuters
That’s an important distinction.
Bravo’s theory connects that policy with two other developments.
Step One: Reduce Pressure in Long-Duration Treasuries
Long-term bond investors have more ability to impose discipline on government borrowing through yields.
If investors demand 5%, 6% or more to hold long-term U.S. debt, that eventually flows into government financing costs, mortgages and the rest of the economy.
The first piece of the theory is therefore that Treasury would prefer to reduce some of its dependence on those long-duration buyers.
Not eliminate long-term bonds.
Not magically erase the existing debt.
But shift the marginal financing mix.
Step Two: Issue More Short-Term Treasury Bills
This is where the second piece becomes interesting.
Wall Street banks expect roughly $1 trillion in additional Treasury bill issuance over the coming year, according to recent estimates reported by the Financial Times. Bills could grow to more than 24% of marketable Treasury debt by September 2027. Financial Times
Short-term Treasury rates are much more closely connected to Federal Reserve policy than 20- or 30-year yields.
So instead of relying as heavily on long-term investors who determine what yield they require to lend the government money for decades, Treasury can finance more of its borrowing at the front end of the curve.
But that creates another question.
Who’s going to buy all those T-bills?
And that’s where crypto enters this theory.
Step Three: Stablecoins Become a Giant Structural Buyer of T-Bills
The GENIUS Act created reserve requirements for regulated payment stablecoins. Stablecoin issuers need highly liquid reserve assets, and short-term Treasuries are an obvious fit.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent himself has explicitly connected stablecoin growth with demand for Treasury bills.
Last year he said stablecoins could strengthen the dollar’s global reserve-currency role while producing a surge in Treasury demand. More recently, Bessent said Treasury is monitoring stablecoins specifically because they are large investors in Treasury bills and suggested the stablecoin market could grow roughly tenfold by the end of the decade. U.S. Department of the Treasury
That part isn’t speculation.
Bessent is openly talking about it.
Now connect the pieces.
Treasury needs enormous amounts of financing.
Long-duration yields are expensive.
Treasury issuance increasingly shifts toward short-term bills.
Stablecoin issuers need short-duration, highly liquid reserve assets.
Stablecoins grow internationally.
And every additional dollar sitting inside a properly reserved dollar stablecoin can potentially translate into additional demand for dollars and short-term U.S. government debt.
That’s the Bravo’s Research thesis that caught my attention.
Exporting the Dollar Through Stablecoins
This gets even more interesting when you stop thinking about stablecoins as a crypto product and start thinking about them as a global dollar-distribution system.
Imagine you’re living somewhere with a weak currency and persistent inflation.
You don’t necessarily want Bitcoin.
You don’t necessarily want to speculate.
You just want dollars.
Historically, accessing and moving dollars could require banks, foreign-exchange markets and other financial infrastructure.
A dollar stablecoin puts a digital representation of the dollar on your phone.
If stablecoin adoption continues spreading through countries where people prefer holding dollars to their domestic currencies, the United States effectively gets another mechanism for exporting dollar demand around the world.
The stablecoin issuer receives those dollars.
The issuer needs reserves.
Some of those reserves go into Treasury bills.
Treasury gets another recurring buyer of U.S. government debt.
That creates a pretty remarkable potential loop:
Global demand for dollars → stablecoin demand → T-bill demand → financing for the U.S. government → stronger digital-dollar infrastructure → more global dollar demand.
Again, I’m not saying Treasury secretly announced this three-step master plan.
It didn’t.
But Bessent has explicitly said stablecoin growth can increase demand for Treasuries and reinforce dollar supremacy. That makes the broader thesis worth taking seriously. U.S. Department of the Treasury
And it makes today’s other stablecoin stories much more interesting.
SoFi Moves a $25 Billion Card Program Onto Stablecoin Settlement
This is one of the biggest real-world stablecoin stories I’ve seen.
SoFi Bank has begun settling debit and credit card transactions on Mastercard’s network using SoFiUSD.
And this isn’t some tiny pilot.
SoFi says it is migrating its entire card program, expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume, to blockchain-based settlement using SoFiUSD. The transactions are already live. SoFi
Here’s the important part.
The consumer doesn’t have to care.
The merchant doesn’t have to put a sign in the window saying, “We accept stablecoins.”
You can still use the card.
The merchant still gets paid.
Stablecoins are changing the settlement layer underneath the payment.
That’s much more important to me than convincing somebody to buy coffee directly with USDC.
The technology starts disappearing into the plumbing.
That’s adoption.
Canada’s Biggest Banks Are Building Tokenized Deposits
Six major Canadian banks are now jointly exploring a Canadian-dollar tokenized-deposit system.
We’re talking about BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD.
The first phase is focused on moving tokenized deposits efficiently between financial institutions. Longer term, the banks say they’re looking at faster and more programmable payments while preserving existing deposit protections and regulatory oversight. TD Stories
I don’t love the word programmable.
That’s my personal reaction, particularly when we’re talking about bank money.
But technologically, this is another example of the same transformation.
Stablecoins.
Tokenized bank deposits.
Tokenized securities.
Blockchain settlement.
Traditional finance and crypto aren’t developing as two separate financial systems anymore.
They’re starting to merge.
Bitcoin ETF Demand Remains Extremely Strong
Now let’s get back to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin got up around $87,000 before pulling back into the mid-$85,000 range while I was recording.
The important thing is that ETF demand hasn’t disappeared.
According to the figures I was working with this morning, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded approximately $714 million in additional inflows Tuesday, following Monday’s roughly $999 million. BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for approximately $350 million of Tuesday’s total. matt-take-02 (2)
That’s what we wanted to see after the short squeeze.
The initial breakout was helped enormously by shorts getting liquidated.
Eventually you run out of shorts.
Then you need buyers.
We’re getting buyers.
My bullish case remains straightforward: $85,000 starts becoming the floor.
Frankly, I’ll still take $82,000 as support.
My cautious case is that we need more time before declaring the entire market regime changed.
Bitcoin moved extremely quickly.
ETF demand is strong, but markets don’t go vertically forever.
Oil has fallen substantially from its recent highs, which is helping risk assets, although I’m still trying to make sense of the geopolitical picture and the divergence between crude and what people are seeing at the gas pump.
For now, Bitcoin appears to be trying to establish a new range.
Let’s see whether it can keep it.
Coinbase Adds Fixed-Rate Loans Against Bitcoin
Coinbase users can now borrow USDC against Bitcoin at a fixed interest rate and fixed maturity date through Morpho Midnight.
That’s different from the variable-rate crypto lending most people are accustomed to.
The rate and repayment date are established when the borrower takes the loan. Coinbase handles the user experience, Morpho provides the credit infrastructure and Base handles settlement. Coinbase’s existing variable-rate Morpho lending operation already has more than $1.4 billion in active loans backed by roughly $3 billion in collateral. Morpho
That’s another example of DeFi becoming less weird.
Fixed rates.
Defined maturity.
Collateralized lending.
That’s starting to look a lot more like conventional credit markets, except the infrastructure underneath it is onchain.
And yes, yesterday I joked about borrowing against my house to buy Bitcoin.
Somebody named Chris the Beast wrote in saying if I do it, he’ll do it.
This is how we end up living together underneath a bridge.
I’m still thinking about it.
That is not financial advice.
CFTC Targets Manipulation in “Mention Markets”
This is a perfect follow-up to our prediction-market conversations.
The CFTC issued an advisory yesterday dealing specifically with what it calls “mention markets.”
These are contracts based on whether a particular person says certain words, attends an event, appears somewhere or interacts with another person.
The CFTC’s concern is straightforward: the person whose behavior determines the outcome, or somebody with advance knowledge of that behavior, may have the ability to influence the contract.
The agency says these contracts carry a heightened manipulation risk and reminded exchanges that event contracts cannot be “readily susceptible to manipulation.” It did not announce a blanket ban. CFTC
That’s exactly the kind of issue we’ve been discussing.
Prediction markets become much more complicated when somebody can influence the event they’re supposedly predicting.
Solana Wants to Cut Finality From 12.8 Seconds to 150 Milliseconds
Now for the tech story.
Solana is working on Alpenglow, a replacement for its existing TowerBFT consensus mechanism.
Current finality takes roughly 12.8 seconds.
Alpenglow’s target?
Approximately 150 milliseconds. Solana
That’s not a small optimization.
That’s roughly a 99% reduction in finality time.
And finality matters because it’s the point at which exchanges, merchants, bridges and applications can treat a transaction as effectively irreversible.
If Solana can reliably get that down to around 150 milliseconds, you’re getting much closer to an experience where blockchain settlement feels instantaneous to a human being.
That’s the kind of infrastructure improvement that matters if we’re actually serious about moving payments and financial markets onchain.
CME Keeps Expanding Regulated Crypto Markets
CME Group also announced that it plans to launch Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap futures on October 19, pending regulatory review.
Both will have standard and Micro contracts.
CME says its crypto futures and options business averaged about 279,800 contracts per day during the first half of 2026, representing roughly $8.3 billion in daily notional volume. CME Group
Again, look at the pattern.
Crypto isn’t sitting outside the financial system asking permission to come inside anymore.
The infrastructure is being incorporated into the financial system.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $85,501, down slightly while I was recording but still holding onto most of this week’s move.
Ethereum is approximately $2,720, down around 1% over 24 hours.
BNB is around $781.
XRP is one of the stronger large caps today, up approximately 2% at $1.57.
USDC’s market cap is approximately $75.1 billion.
Solana is around $116.
TRON is approximately $0.342.
Zcash continues ripping at around $1,616, up approximately 6.3% over 24 hours.
Hyperliquid is around $95.07.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.91 trillion.
Fear & Greed: 76, Greed. matt-take-02 (2)
My Take
The Bravo’s Research argument is the part of today’s show I’m going to keep thinking about.
We’ve talked about stablecoins as payment technology.
We’ve talked about stablecoins as crypto infrastructure.
We’ve talked about stablecoins as competition for banks.
But there’s another way to think about them.
Stablecoins may also become part of America’s sovereign-debt infrastructure.
That doesn’t require a secret conspiracy or a hidden government plan.
Bessent is publicly saying stablecoin growth should increase demand for Treasury bills and strengthen the dollar’s international position. Treasury is issuing enormous quantities of debt. The GENIUS Act creates a regulated framework around dollar stablecoins. And global consumers already have an economic incentive to hold dollars when their domestic currencies are unstable. U.S. Department of the Treasury
Bravo’s Research takes those individual facts and asks whether they fit together into a larger strategy.
I think that’s a worthwhile question.
And then look at today’s actual news.
SoFi is moving a $25 billion card program onto stablecoin settlement.
Canada’s biggest banks are experimenting with tokenized deposits.
Coinbase is putting traditional fixed-rate lending structures onchain.
Solana is trying to make transaction finality almost instantaneous.
CME keeps adding regulated crypto derivatives.
None of those stories by themselves changes global finance.
Taken together, though, they show the direction things are moving.
Crypto’s next phase may be considerably less about convincing everybody to “use crypto.”
People may not even know they’re using it.
They’ll swipe a card.
Borrow dollars.
Send money overseas.
Trade securities.
Run an AI agent.
And somewhere underneath all of it, blockchain infrastructure may simply be doing the settlement.
Credit again to Bravo’s Research for the framework behind today’s Treasury and stablecoin discussion.
Watch the full Bravo’s Research analysis on YouTube
If you want Craig Cobb’s videos, the morning news, Paul McNeil’s nightly roundup, The Factory and the rest of our work, head over to dailycryptonews.net.
And Danielle says she likes the podcast short and sweet with no videos.
Danielle has been listening forever, so apparently I should listen to her.
Unfortunately, I just wrote a really long episode about Treasury bills.
Sorry, Dani.