Good morning everybody.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Friday, September 25th, 2026. My name is Matt.
First, I need to correct something.
Scotto wrote in and basically said, “Hey bro, you keep talking about when Circle goes public. Didn’t that already happen?”
Yes.
Yes, it did.
Circle went public last year at $31 a share. I literally covered the IPO on this show, and somehow my brain decided to delete that information. Circle is trading around $93 now after getting as high as roughly $160.
So I apologize for the brain fart. I appreciate when you guys call me on my bullshit because I’m going to make mistakes.
The funny part is that my broader point that Circle had substantial upside wasn’t exactly wrong.
I was just about a year late on remembering that you could already buy the damn thing.
Now let’s get into the news.
Bitcoin Has ETF Buyers, but the Macro Environment Keeps Getting Worse
Bitcoin is sitting around $84,000 this morning.
That’s holding up surprisingly well considering what’s happening around it.
The 10-year Treasury yield is around 5.2%. Long-term Treasury yields are pushing levels we haven’t seen in years. Brent crude is back above $100. And Fed funds futures are putting substantial odds on another rate increase at the next meeting.
That’s not exactly the environment you’d design if you wanted Bitcoin to rip.
The positive side is that the ETF buyers are still there.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded another $190.7 million in net inflows, with BlackRock accounting for roughly $162 million.
And remember what net means.
There can be a shit ton of money going in and a shit ton going out. What we’re talking about is what’s left after those flows offset each other.
We’re now at six consecutive days of positive flows, totaling roughly $2.84 billion.
That’s significant.
Bitcoin has fallen from roughly $87,000, Treasury yields have moved higher, oil has moved higher, and the market is pricing a more aggressive Fed.
Yet we’re still sitting around $84,000.
The question remains whether the $80,000 to $82,000 range can become the floor if the macro environment continues getting worse.
ARK Just Put a $1.3 Billion Venture Fund Onchain
This is exactly the kind of story we’ve been talking about all week.
ARK Invest is tokenizing its $1.3 billion ARK Venture Fund through Securitize.
This isn’t a theoretical fund filled with crypto projects. The portfolio includes stakes in companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks, along with other private and public technology companies.
Eligible investors will be able to access the tokenized version on Ethereum.
Think about where we’ve gone in just the last few days.
We’ve talked about the New York Stock Exchange developing infrastructure for tokenized equities.
We’ve talked about banks experimenting with tokenized deposits.
We’ve talked about stablecoins becoming settlement infrastructure.
Now Cathie Wood is putting a $1.3 billion venture fund containing some of the most important private technology companies in the world on Ethereum infrastructure.
The underlying investment doesn’t change.
OpenAI doesn’t suddenly become a crypto company because a fund owning OpenAI shares is tokenized.
What changes is the infrastructure used to issue, own and potentially transfer the investment.
That’s the important part.
HiFi also raised $37 million to expand its tokenized capital-markets infrastructure. The company says it processes more than $7 billion in annualized volume across 87 countries.
IBM is connecting its digital-asset infrastructure with SWIFT for tokenized-deposit transactions.
This keeps happening.
Tokenization isn’t one story anymore. It’s becoming a category.
The Fed Starts Implementing the GENIUS Act
This is the other big story today.
The Federal Reserve has proposed two major rule packages for payment stablecoins under the GENIUS Act.
The first would require Fed-supervised payment stablecoin issuers to fully back their coins with approved reserve assets, including short-term Treasury bills and other highly liquid assets.
It also establishes capital requirements, risk-management standards and rules for institutions holding stablecoin reserves.
The second proposal creates a formal application process for Fed-supervised banks that want to issue payment stablecoins.
There it is.
We’ve been talking about this for months.
Banks are going to issue stablecoins.
Why wouldn’t they?
Stablecoins are potentially enormously profitable.
If somebody gives you a dollar for your stablecoin and you can hold the reserve in a Treasury yielding around 4%, you’re earning money on the reserve assets while the customer holds the token.
And that gets us directly into the stablecoin-yield fight.
Fed Governor Michael Barr supported moving forward with the framework but raised questions about redemption rights, interest-rate risk, foreign-currency risk and anti-money-laundering controls.
Those are legitimate regulatory questions.
But the economic question underneath all of this is enormous:
Who gets the yield?
Stablecoin Holders Could Be Giving Up About $12 Billion a Year
Let’s do some simple math.
If the stablecoin market is around $300 billion and the reserve assets are earning roughly 4%, that’s approximately:
$12 billion a year.
That’s $12 billion of potential reserve income.
Who gets it?
The issuer?
The bank?
Coinbase?
Circle?
The customer?
That’s why the fight over stablecoin yield matters so much.
And here’s another way to look at it.
Every additional quarter-point increase in interest rates potentially represents roughly another $750 million annually on $300 billion of reserve assets.
So when we’re arguing over whether stablecoin companies should be allowed to pass yield through to users, we’re not arguing about some little crypto feature.
We’re arguing over billions of dollars.
My view is pretty simple.
The banks want that money.
The stablecoin companies want that money.
And I don’t think either group is particularly excited about giving it to you.
That’s why I expect this to remain one of the biggest fights as stablecoins move into mainstream finance.
CFTC Expands the Framework for Tokenized Assets
The CFTC is also continuing its push toward onchain finance.
The agency has updated its guidance to clarify how regulated firms can hold tokenized versions of permitted investments as customer funds.
It also clarified how blockchain-based systems can satisfy certain regulatory recordkeeping requirements.
Again, look at the pattern.
The Federal Reserve is writing stablecoin rules.
The CFTC is establishing rules around tokenized assets.
The SEC is moving on tokenized securities.
The NYSE is developing digital-market infrastructure.
Traditional asset managers are tokenizing funds.
Banks are experimenting with tokenized deposits.
We’re moving beyond the question of whether traditional finance will “adopt crypto.”
They’re taking the pieces of crypto infrastructure they find useful and integrating them directly into the financial system.
Bitget Gets Hit for $351.6 Million
Now we have a giant security story.
Bitget says approximately $351.6 million in assets were affected by unauthorized transfers from portions of its hot- and warm-wallet infrastructure.
The exchange says its cold wallets were not compromised and that investigators have ruled out stolen private keys as the cause.
Instead, according to Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, the attacker appears to have compromised backend wallet infrastructure, altered transaction data and generated fraudulent transfer requests that triggered Bitget’s authorization systems.
That distinction matters.
The cryptographic keys weren’t necessarily broken.
The system surrounding them was manipulated.
And that is something we need to remember when talking about crypto security.
You can have fantastic cryptography and still have shitty software.
You can have secure private keys and vulnerable backend infrastructure.
You can have hardware security and still have people or systems authorize something they shouldn’t.
Security is the entire stack.
Bitget says its User Protection Fund contains more than $460 million, enough to cover the estimated losses.
Good.
Seriously.
That’s exactly what these companies should be doing.
If you’re operating a crypto exchange and you’re custodying billions of dollars in customer assets, hacks aren’t some unimaginable black-swan event.
You know you’re a target.
Build reserves.
Build insurance.
Build protection funds.
If your infrastructure gets compromised, customers shouldn’t wake up and discover their money disappeared because you didn’t prepare for the possibility.
The investigation is still ongoing, so we’re going to learn considerably more about exactly how the attackers got inside.
Researchers Want to Give Bitcoin Zcash-Style Privacy
Here’s an interesting Bitcoin technology story.
Researchers have proposed a concept called Shielded Bitcoin, which would attempt to hide transaction senders, receivers and amounts.
That should sound familiar.
Those are some of the privacy characteristics associated with Zcash.
The idea isn’t to replace Bitcoin’s base layer with Zcash or fundamentally redesign Bitcoin itself.
Instead, the proposed system would operate around Bitcoin and use cryptographic techniques to create shielded transactions.
The unresolved issue is how Bitcoin moves safely into and out of that shielded environment.
That’s the hard part.
Bitcoin privacy has always been weird because people sometimes talk about Bitcoin as though it’s anonymous.
It isn’t.
Bitcoin is pseudonymous.
The blockchain is public.
Once somebody connects an address with your identity, they can potentially follow a tremendous amount of activity.
Adding stronger privacy while preserving Bitcoin’s security model would be a meaningful development.
Whether Bitcoin users and developers ultimately accept a system like this is another question entirely.
AI Agents Could Become Crypto Users
BlackRock is now talking about another theme we’ve been following closely:
AI agents as financial actors.
Think about why crypto keeps appearing in these conversations.
An autonomous AI agent doesn’t necessarily have a driver’s license.
It doesn’t have a conventional identity.
It doesn’t walk into Chase and open a checking account.
But software can control a cryptographic wallet.
It can receive a stablecoin.
It can make a blockchain transaction.
It can pay another agent.
It can purchase computing resources.
It can execute financial instructions.
That doesn’t mean we’re about to hand every AI bot a pile of Bitcoin and tell it to go have fun.
But machine-to-machine payments are one of the areas where blockchain architecture makes intuitive sense.
And if AI agents eventually conduct meaningful economic activity autonomously, somebody has to build the payment rails they use.
Crypto wants to be those rails.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting almost exactly at $84,000, basically flat over 24 hours.
Ethereum is around $2,695, up approximately 1%.
BNB is approximately $774.
XRP is having a good day, up roughly 5.5% at $1.58.
Solana is around $119.46, up approximately 3.8%.
TRON is around $0.337.
Zcash has bounced back to roughly $1,600, up about 5.5%.
Hyperliquid is around $92.52, basically flat.
Chainlink is up roughly 12.5%.
NEAR Protocol is also up approximately 12.5%.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.9 trillion, up 1.2%.
Fear & Greed: 73, Greed.
My Take
This week has increasingly become one giant story about the financial system moving onchain.
That’s more interesting to me than whether Bitcoin is $83,000 or $85,000 on any particular morning.
Look at what we’ve covered.
Stablecoin issuers becoming major Treasury buyers.
The U.S. government exploring stablecoins as part of the dollar’s international infrastructure.
SoFi using stablecoins to settle a card program processing tens of billions of dollars.
Banks experimenting with tokenized deposits.
The NYSE moving toward tokenized securities and 24/7 markets.
ARK putting a $1.3 billion venture fund on Ethereum infrastructure.
IBM connecting tokenized deposits with SWIFT.
The Fed implementing stablecoin rules.
The CFTC building rules around tokenized collateral and blockchain recordkeeping.
These aren’t isolated crypto experiments anymore.
The financial system is figuring out which parts of blockchain technology are actually useful and beginning to integrate them.
And the stablecoin-yield fight might become one of the most important parts of that transition.
If this market eventually becomes $1 trillion, we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars in annual reserve income at today’s interest rates.
Everybody is going to want a piece of that.
Banks.
Stablecoin companies.
Exchanges.
Asset managers.
Consumers.
And the government wants the Treasury demand.
That’s why these regulatory fights matter.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is doing something pretty impressive in the background.
Treasury yields are rising.
Oil is above $100.
Markets are pricing additional Fed tightening.
Bitcoin just came down from $87,000.
And it’s still sitting around $84,000 while ETF buyers continue putting money into the market.
I still want to see $80K to $82K hold if we retest it.
But so far, Bitcoin is taking a pretty ugly macro environment surprisingly well.
And Scotto, thank you for reminding me that Circle already went public.
Please continue calling me on my bullshit.
That’s how this show gets better.
Make sure you subscribe at dailycryptonews.net if you want the morning newsletter, nightly roundup, Craig Cobb on Mondays, The Factory and everything else we’re putting together.
I’ll see you next time.