Hi! In today’s edition:
📈 Bitcoin's climb this week came at somebody else's expense
🏛️ Trump gathered crypto's biggest names and made one specific ask of Congress
⚡ One offhand line from the president sent an offshore exchange's token flying
⚖️ The CFTC closed the book on two FTX cooperators, and the number attached may surprise you
Today’s newsletter is brought to you by 1inch!
Your DeFi Liquidity Just Woke Up
If you've provided liquidity in DeFi, you know the structure. You deposit tokens into a pool, the pool holds them whether swaps come or not, and the risk stays yours either way.
1inch Aqua is built differently. It's a shared liquidity layer where tokens stay in your own wallet and one balance backs many positions across pairs and chains. Nothing is deposited. Tokens move only when a swap fills, and a swap your balance can't cover reverts. Aqua has been open to developers since November and audited by six independent firms.
Providing liquidity carries risk and fees are not guaranteed.
See how shared liquidity works at 1inch.com/aqua.
Bitcoin's Rally Runs Over the Bears
Bitcoin, in a move that kicked off Wednesday, has surged as high as $71,000 in its first run above $70,000 in two months, and the move has flattened anyone positioned against it. CoinGlass data shows over $2.89 billion in short positions liquidated in the past 24 hours, with bitcoin accounting for $1.57 billion and ether $1.14 billion. Ether jumped as much 20% to reclaim $2,000 for the first time since May.
The trigger came out of Washington. The Treasury said Wednesday morning it will at least double the size of its buyback operations for longer-dated Treasuries, lifting the cap from $2 billion to $4 billion per operation starting September 9. The SEC's crypto offering proposal Tuesday and Trump's White House meeting with crypto executives layered on more risk appetite.
Crypto equities followed. Fold Holdings rose nearly 20%, while Strategy and Bitmine each gained around 10%.
Trump Asks Congress for a 'Fair' Clarity Act
President Trump used a White House gathering of crypto and tech CEOs on Wednesday to press Congress on crypto market structure, calling for what he described as “a fair version” of the Clarity Act. He framed it as a competitive matter, saying the bill would keep the U.S. ahead of China.
The guest list was the industry's front row: Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, Ripple's Brad Garlinghouse, Robinhood's Vlad Tenev, Kraken's Arjun Sethi, Nasdaq's Adena Friedman, ICE's Jeffrey Sprecher, Chainlink's Sergey Nazarov, and the Winklevoss twins. SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC Chair Michael Selig attended.
Nobody offered a path to 60 votes. The bill returns to the Senate floor in September after lawmakers left for recess without a procedural vote, and Republicans still need roughly seven Democrats. Ethics language covering Trump's crypto businesses remains one of the sticking points.
Trump Says Hyperliquid Is Coming Onshore
Buried in Trump's White House remarks Wednesday was a line that moved a token: CFTC Chair Michael Selig, he said, “is working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion." HYPE has surged over 25% in the following 24 hours.
The move extended past the token. The 21Shares, Bitwise and Grayscale Hyperliquid funds each climbed close to 20% Wednesday, and Nasdaq-listed Hyperliquid Strategies gained 30.4%.
Trump gave no detail on what an onshore Hyperliquid would look like, and the CFTC has approved nothing.
Ellison and Wang Escape CFTC Penalties
The CFTC closed out its FTX cases Wednesday without asking either defendant for a dollar. Supplemental consent orders entered in the Southern District of New York gave former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison a five-year trading ban and a 10-year registration ban. Gary Wang, who co-founded both Alameda and FTX, got a five-year trading ban and an eight-year registration ban.
The clocks started on December 23, 2022, when the initial consent orders were entered, so both trading bans expire at the end of 2027.
The agency said it is not seeking restitution, disgorgement or civil monetary penalties at this time, citing their cooperation and the $11.020 billion forfeiture order in the criminal cases, “for which they are jointly and severally liable.”
🚨 DON’T MISS TODAY’S LIVESTREAMS 🚨
Arthur Hayes is out of retirement. He joins Laura to explain $FLOP, the token he says represents a unit of compute for AI agents, and why a fair launch with a Q4 airdrop beats a VC round. He also makes the case that the AI bubble is a credit story rather than an earnings one, walks through the yen trade, and explains why BitMEX is closing after eleven years. Today at 3pm ET.
Stripe just bought OpenRouter, the neutral router much of crypto-AI runs through.
Venice founder Erik Voorhees joins Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to unpack what it means when a payments giant owns the AI stack, why Venice raised equity while leaving its token untouched, and how it serves Chinese open models without your data ever leaving. Streams today, Thursday at 4pm ET.
📈 Coinbase added perpetual futures to the Base App through Hyperliquid on Wednesday, giving eligible users up to 50x leverage across more than 290 markets. The product is not available in the US, UK, Canada or other jurisdictions that restrict leveraged crypto derivatives.
🏦 Cantor Fitzgerald began arranging block trades in event contracts on Wednesday, acting as an introducing broker on Kalshi with Susquehanna Predictions supplying pricing and liquidity. It is one of the first full-service investment banks to broker prediction-market trades at institutional size on a CFTC-regulated exchange.
🏦 HSBC and Standard Chartered executed the first live bank-to-bank tokenized deposit transaction on Swift's blockchain-based ledger, the banks said Wednesday. Obligations were recorded on each bank's own tokenized deposit infrastructure, with Swift's ledger matching and netting them before settlement ran through existing systems.
⚖️ Injective registered with the SEC as a transfer agent through its Injective Institutional Services arm, letting it maintain official securities ownership records rather than only supplying tokenization technology.
🇨🇳 China has tripled its e-CNY bank roster this year, with the People's Bank of China adding eight lenders this week including Ping An Bank and Bank of Shanghai, taking the total to 30 from 10 in January. The new banks have connected to the central system but will not offer services until operational and technical work is finished.
🤖 OKX barred Hong Kong staff and employees traveling through China from using Anthropic's Claude after its corporate account was briefly suspended in early August, Bloomberg reported. The account has since been restored, and OKX said it will route affected employees' requests to other models.
💻 TikTok is building peer-to-peer money transfers inside direct messages, according to code in the current US iPhone app found by Bloomberg. A spokesperson said nothing is in testing in any market. Settlement would run through TikTok Pay, the wallet already operating in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand.
💰 Ripple closed an upsized $275 million private placement of senior unsecured notes on Aug. 18, issued by its non-bank prime brokerage Ripple Prime for working capital and general corporate purposes. KBRA rated the notes investment grade at BBB, and Piper Sandler acted as lead placement agent.
David Dong: 2026: The Year of Dataflow
Jesus Rodriguez: The RWA Is Not the Product. The DeFi Market Is
