Good morning everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Monday, September 28th, 2026. My name is Matt
First, congratulations to the Cleveland Guardians. We clinched the division. We’re going to the playoffs, we’re skipping the Wild Card round, and our pitchers get some rest.
Send us your good vibes.
Also, quick PSA. I listened back to some of last week’s episodes and the audio quality sucked on a couple of them. I was recording in an echoey room and using an audio filter that apparently did not export correctly every time. Friday’s episode was bad enough that I re-uploaded it, so depending on when you listened, you may have gotten the good version or the shitty version.
I apologize. I’ll check the finished export before uploading from now on.
Now let’s talk about Bitcoin because we’re still sitting in the same basic range.
Bitcoin Is Going Sideways, and That’s Not Necessarily Bad
Bitcoin is around $83,300 this morning.
Brent crude has been bouncing right around $100 a barrel, while Treasury yields remain elevated. The 2-year is around 4.87%, the 5-year is above 5%, and the 10-year is around 5.23%.
Everybody keeps pointing at the 10-year being above 5% as a major threat to risk assets.
I’m not entirely convinced.
Obviously, a 5% Treasury yield matters. But it matters differently when inflation is elevated.
If inflation were sitting around 2% and I could lock in more than 5% risk-free, that’s a pretty compelling real return. But when inflation is higher, that spread isn’t nearly as exciting.
Meanwhile, equities, AI stocks and other growth assets have continued performing despite a long list of red flags.
Could investors rotate heavily into Treasuries for safety? Sure.
I just don’t think a 5% yield automatically causes everyone to abandon growth assets.
For Bitcoin specifically, I think the more important story right now is leverage.
Bitcoin futures open interest has fallen to approximately 652,000 BTC, one of the lowest readings of 2026 after reaching around 800,000 earlier in the year.
That’s a substantial leverage flush.
And after everything that’s happened, Bitcoin is still sitting above $83,000.
So my framework hasn’t changed.
$82K is the first important floor.
If we lose $82K, then I’m watching $80K.
If we lose $80K decisively, then we’re back into different territory and I start looking toward the upper $70Ks.
On the other side, Bitcoin needs to clear $87K and start moving toward $90K before I’m willing to say we have another meaningful leg higher.
Right now?
We’re going sideways between roughly $82K and $87K.
That’s the market.
Solana ETFs Just Had Their Best Week Ever
Institutional demand isn’t limited to Bitcoin anymore.
U.S. spot Solana ETFs brought in a record $188 million in net inflows last week.
Bitwise’s BSOL accounted for approximately $128 million, or about 68% of the weekly total.
Even more interesting, all seven Solana funds tracked recorded positive inflows.
That’s important because it shows institutional crypto demand broadening beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Solana is also getting increasingly interesting because the institutional investment story and the technology story are developing simultaneously.
We’ve already talked about Alpenglow and Solana’s attempt to dramatically reduce transaction finality.
Now you’ve got record ETF inflows arriving at the same time.
That’s worth watching.
Tokenized Money-Market Funds Are Becoming Collateral
Franklin Templeton is also bringing tokenized money-market assets into Bybit’s institutional collateral system.
Eligible users can pledge shares of tokenized money-market funds as collateral for USDT and USDC trading credit lines.
And here’s the interesting part.
The underlying assets don’t need to leave regulated custody.
Their value can be represented inside Bybit’s trading environment while the underlying money-market position continues earning yield.
The tokenized funds involved represent roughly $686 million in net assets, with the underlying money-market yield currently around 3.7% annualized.
Think about what that does.
Traditionally, if you’re holding an asset and want liquidity, you may have to sell it.
Now we’re moving toward a financial system where you can potentially leave an asset sitting where it is, continue earning its underlying return and simultaneously use its tokenized representation as collateral somewhere else.
That’s a much more interesting application of tokenization than just taking something that already exists and putting the word “blockchain” on it.
You’re making assets more usable.
The SEC Just Raised a Bigger Question About What Token Holders Actually Own
This is the story I really wanted to talk about today.
On Friday, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued new staff guidance dealing with crypto assets and investment contracts.
One section specifically addresses token buybacks.
The SEC staff says that when a crypto system is already functional, an issuer announcing a buyback of a non-security crypto asset does not, by itself, create the kind of managerial promise necessary to turn that token into an investment contract.
Those buybacks could be used for treasury management, reducing supply, protocol-funded burns or rebalancing.
The situation can be different when the network isn’t functional and the issuer promotes a buyback as something intended to generate yield or investment returns.
And there’s an important caveat here.
This is staff guidance from the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance. It isn’t an SEC rule, the Commission hasn’t approved or disapproved it, and the SEC explicitly says the guidance has no independent legal force.
But it got me thinking about something bigger.
What exactly do you own when you buy a token connected to a company?
Let’s use Ripple and XRP simply as an example of the kind of relationship I’m talking about.
A company can have equity.
That equity represents ownership in the company and comes with whatever rights attach to those shares.
Separately, there can be a token associated with a network or ecosystem.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
If a company buys tokens from the market and reduces circulating supply, the token’s price could potentially rise because supply has been reduced. It isn’t guaranteed, but the economics are obvious.
Now flip it around.
What happens if management changes direction?
What happens if the company stops supporting a product?
What happens if it stops buying tokens?
What happens if it pivots its business entirely?
What happens if the token collapses as a result?
If you’re a shareholder, corporate and securities law provide an established framework around your ownership rights.
If you’re holding a non-security token, you should not automatically assume you have those same shareholder-style protections.
And that’s the part that makes me increasingly cautious.
A Token Is Not Necessarily Equity
Crypto spent years fighting the idea that every token should be treated as a security.
There were legitimate reasons for that fight.
But there’s another side to it.
If the token isn’t a security, then you can’t simultaneously assume that holding the token gives you all of the protections associated with holding a security.
You don’t necessarily own part of the company.
Management doesn’t necessarily owe you the same obligations it owes shareholders.
A company’s business decisions can affect the economic value of your token without turning you into an equity owner.
That’s becoming more important because crypto is changing.
We’re seeing tokenized stocks.
We’re seeing tokenized money-market funds.
We’re seeing banks experimenting with tokenized deposits.
We’re seeing traditional asset managers moving regulated financial products onchain.
Those products may have clearly defined legal rights attached to them.
That makes me ask a pretty uncomfortable question about some traditional crypto tokens:
Why would I take the additional legal and counterparty uncertainty if I increasingly have access to regulated tokenized assets with clearly defined ownership rights?
I’m not saying every token has this problem.
I’m saying investors need to understand what they’re actually buying.
The token’s price going up doesn’t make it stock.
A company being associated with the token doesn’t make you a shareholder.
And a token having traded for ten years doesn’t necessarily give its holder the legal protections that come with equity ownership.
That’s something I think the crypto market needs to think about much more seriously.
California Bans Public Officials From Issuing Meme Coins
California has also moved on political meme coins.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation prohibiting California public officials from issuing certain meme coins tied to themselves.
I understand the basic concern.
A public official creating a speculative token based on his or her political identity creates obvious questions about conflicts of interest, corruption and monetizing public office.
Where I have more questions is how broadly restrictions involving third parties and a public official’s likeness can be applied.
Political satire, parody and commentary routinely use the names and images of public officials commercially. Newspapers sell subscriptions while publishing caricatures. Comedians sell tickets. People sell political merchandise.
So while I understand restrictions on an official issuing or financially benefiting from his own token, broader restrictions involving third-party political expression raise different questions.
That’s a distinction worth watching as these laws get implemented.
The Bitget Hacker Is Moving Stolen XRP
We’re also getting more information about the recent Bitget breach.
The attacker moved approximately $83 million worth of stolen XRP out of three wallets over the weekend, while roughly $75 million remained in the original wallets at the latest tracking point.
And this illustrates something important about XRP.
An exchange can freeze or restrict an account under its control.
Ripple cannot simply freeze XRP sitting in a self-custodied wallet at the protocol level.
That distinction gets lost sometimes when people talk about centralized companies and blockchain networks as though they’re the same thing.
They’re not.
A company can control its own infrastructure.
An exchange can control its accounts.
But self-custodied blockchain assets operate differently.
Vitalik Buterin Is Thinking About a Very Different Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin is laying out a vision in which Ethereum by 2030 could operate very differently from the conventional blockchain model.
The basic idea is that much more computation happens away from Ethereum’s main network and is then verified using cryptographic proofs.
Instead of forcing every node to repeat every computation, nodes can verify proofs that the computation was performed correctly.
That matters for scalability.
But Vitalik is also putting greater emphasis on privacy, including privacy around payments, wallets and balances.
That’s another theme we’ve been seeing across multiple chains.
Bitcoin researchers are thinking about stronger privacy.
Ethereum is thinking about stronger privacy.
Zcash has been demonstrating that there is still a market for privacy-focused crypto.
And as blockchain moves deeper into conventional financial infrastructure, privacy becomes a much bigger issue.
People don’t want their entire financial lives sitting on a public ledger for everybody to inspect.
Bitcoin’s Quantum Problem Is Really a Migration Problem
Bitcoin researchers also continue working on defenses against cryptographically relevant quantum computers.
And again, there is no known quantum computer capable of breaking Bitcoin signatures today.
The interesting problem is timing.
You don’t want to begin solving this problem after somebody builds a machine capable of attacking the existing cryptography.
You need the migration path before that happens.
That means figuring out new signature schemes, how users move existing Bitcoin into quantum-resistant addresses, what happens to dormant coins, and what happens to coins whose public keys are already exposed.
That’s why I recommend reading Jameson Lopp’s work on this.
He’s been writing extensively about Bitcoin and quantum computing, and if you actually want to understand the technical arguments instead of reading another headline screaming that quantum computers are going to destroy Bitcoin tomorrow, that’s where I’d start.
The immediate threat isn’t that somebody turns on a quantum computer tomorrow morning and empties Bitcoin.
The difficult problem is coordinating a secure migration before the technology eventually becomes capable enough to matter.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $83,300, down approximately 2% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is around $2,674, down approximately 1.5%.
USDT remains number three.
BNB is approximately $767, down around 1.9%.
XRP is around $1.51, down approximately 2%.
USDC remains number six.
Solana is approximately $119, down around 3.8%.
TRON is around $0.334, basically flat.
Zcash is approximately $1,586, down almost 5%.
Hyperliquid is around $89.86, down almost 4%.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.87 trillion, down 1.6%.
Fear & Greed: 70, Greed.
My Take
The SEC token guidance is what I’m going to keep thinking about.
For years, crypto’s regulatory argument focused heavily on getting tokens classified as something other than securities.
Fine.
But that has consequences.
If something isn’t a security, don’t assume you have the protections of a security.
That’s particularly important when a token remains closely associated with an identifiable company, foundation or management team.
If I buy stock, I understand what I’m buying.
If I buy a tokenized version of regulated stock, there should still be a legal claim tied back to that underlying security.
If I own a tokenized money-market fund, there is an underlying regulated asset.
But if I buy a crypto token associated with a company, what exactly does that company owe me?
Maybe very little.
That doesn’t automatically make the token bad.
Bitcoin doesn’t give me shareholder rights either, but there’s no Bitcoin CEO making corporate decisions about Bitcoin’s business model.
The relationship gets much more complicated when there’s an actual company making decisions that can materially affect a token’s value while token holders don’t necessarily have the rights shareholders would have.
And as legitimate tokenized securities and regulated onchain assets become easier to access, I think crypto investors are going to start asking that question much more often.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, remains boring.
And right now boring is fine.
We’re between approximately $82K and $87K.
Below $82K, I start paying closer attention.
Below $80K, I get more concerned about the structure.
Above $87K, we can start talking about $90K again.
Until then, we’re sideways.
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Craig Cobb is on holiday with his kids. He may send something over today or tomorrow. Otherwise, he’ll be back next week.
Hopefully the audio sounds good this time.