CLARITY Clears a Major Hurdle

Plus: 💵 Coinbase swallows a stablecoin rival | 📊 JPMorgan’s brutal verdict for altcoins

Author

Aakash Girimath
May 15, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🏛️ The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act after a last-minute deal flipped key opposition votes. Now, the bill heads to a high-stakes floor test with critical provisions still hanging in the balance.

  • 💵 Coinbase is taking over as the official treasury deployer for Hyperliquid as the network's native stablecoin winds down, consolidating its grip on the ecosystem's expanding liquidity.

  • 📊 JPMorgan analysts warn that the massive performance gap between Bitcoin and altcoins is structural, even as the market flashes green following Washington's regulatory breakthrough.

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CLARITY Act Clears Senate Banking Committee in Bipartisan 15-9 Vote

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act Thursday in a 15-9 bipartisan vote, the most significant milestone yet for crypto market structure legislation in the U.S.

Democrats Ruben Gallego (AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (MD) joined all 13 Republicans to advance the bill after Chairman Tim Scott (R-SC) reinstated several previously blocked amendments, including a DeFi compromise from Senator Cynthia Lummis that passed 18-6. A separate AI sandbox amendment from Senator Mike Rounds passed 15-9 with bipartisan support.

Senator Elizabeth Warren led the opposition, calling it "a bill written by the crypto industry for the crypto industry." The bill now heads to a merger with the Agriculture Committee's version and a 60-vote Senate floor test, with ethics provisions still unresolved.

Coinbase Becomes Hyperliquid's Official USDC Deployer as USDH Sunsets

Coinbase became Hyperliquid's official treasury deployer for USDC on Thursday, taking control of stablecoin liquidity on one of crypto's fastest-growing trading networks.

As part of the deal, Native Markets, the developer of Hyperliquid's native stablecoin USDH, agreed to grant Coinbase the right to purchase the USDH brand assets. USDH will remain redeemable for USDC or fiat with no fees during the transition period before it sunsets.

The economics tell the story: USDC supply on Hyperliquid has doubled year over year to roughly $5 billion, while USDH supply stalled at around $100 million. Under the upgraded AQAv2 framework, Coinbase will share the vast majority of USDC reserve yields with the protocol.

Bitcoin Reclaims $81,000 After CLARITY Vote as JPMorgan Says It's Winning the Institutional Race

Bitcoin reclaimed $81,000 Friday morning after the CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee, with XRP and DOGE each surging roughly 5%. The move reversed Wednesday's drop below $80,000.

The headwind remains interest rates, which could remain unchanged this year. U.S. two-year and 10-year Treasury yields hit 12-month highs Thursday on hotter-than-expected inflation data, and the 200-day moving average near $82,000 has rejected bitcoin four times in two weeks.

Separately, JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said bitcoin continues to outperform ether and altcoins across nearly every institutional metric and called the divergence "unlikely to change" without meaningful improvement in DeFi and real-world applications.

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  • 🏛️ President Trump's latest financial disclosure revealed purchases of Coinbase, Strategy, and MARA shares during Q1, alongside Block, Robinhood, and SoFi in a 113-page filing covering 3,642 securities transactions. The largest crypto-related buy was a Feb. 10 Coinbase purchase valued between $100,001 and $250,000, while Strategy saw eight buy-and-sell transactions across the quarter.

  • 🔗 Kraken will replace LayerZero with Chainlink CCIP as the exclusive cross-chain infrastructure for kBTC and all future Kraken Wrapped Assets, becoming the fourth major protocol to migrate after the $292 million Kelp DAO exploit. The move pushes total Chainlink CCIP migration inflows past $3 billion in TVL, following Kelp DAO, Solv Protocol, and Re's earlier departures from LayerZero.

  • 📈 Gemini shares surged as much as 30% after-hours after reporting 42% YoY revenue growth to $50.3 million and disclosing its first prediction market metrics — 100 million contracts traded across 20,000 users since the December launch. The Winklevoss twins also announced a $100 million strategic investment at $14/share paid in bitcoin, while credit card revenue jumped 300% to $14.7 million.

  • ⚖️ Attorney Charles Gerstein is now targeting Tether for $344 million in frozen USDT tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, asking a Manhattan federal judge to order Tether to reissue the tokens to terrorism judgment creditors. The case extends the same legal strategy Gerstein used in the Arbitrum ETH seizure fight, arguing that because Tether already froze the OFAC-designated Tron wallets, it can redirect the funds.

  • 🔓 Upshift rolled out a new vault platform providing bridging capital for instant RWA redemptions, complementing the growing infrastructure for tokenized fund liquidity.

  • 🏦 Grove launched Basin, a $1 billion daily liquidity facility providing instant stablecoin redemptions for BlackRock's $2.2 billion BUIDL and Janus Henderson's $1.1 billion JTRSY tokenized Treasury funds. Partners include Securitize, Centrifuge, Anchorage Digital, Galaxy Digital, and FalconX, addressing a key bottleneck in the $15 billion tokenized Treasury market.

  • 📊 CME Group will launch Nasdaq-backed crypto index futures on June 8 covering seven digital assets in its first market-cap-weighted contract, pending regulatory approval. The product targets the $85 trillion digital asset market and marks CME's deepest push into diversified crypto derivatives.

  • 🇰🇷 Hana Bank acquired a 6.55% stake in Upbit parent Dunamu for ₩1.033 trillion ($670 million) from Kakao Investment, marking the largest single investment by a South Korean bank in a digital asset firm. The deal makes Hana the fourth-largest Dunamu shareholder and includes plans to jointly develop stablecoin and blockchain-based remittance services.

  • 🎯 Interactive Brokers launched a unified prediction markets platform combining access to Kalshi, CME Group, and ForecastEx in a single interface for its brokerage clients.

  • 🌍 Fasset raised $51 million in a Series B backed by Japan's SBI Group, Investcorp, and Turkey's Arz Portföy to scale its stablecoin-powered neobank across emerging markets. The LA-based platform processes over $32 billion in annualized volume across 50+ payment corridors serving 1,000+ SMEs in 125 countries.

  • 🧵 Stitch raised $25 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to build infrastructure connecting traditional finance and onchain systems.

  • 🔑 Onramp raised a Series A at a $135 million valuation led by Early Riders to expand its financial platform built on multi-institution custody infrastructure.

  • 🔐 Turnkey raised $12.5 million in a strategic round backed by Circle Ventures and Sequoia Capital to develop its Verifiable Cloud secure computing product for digital assets, bringing total funding past $65 million.