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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expects US crypto regulation to move forward by mid-September, either through a Senate vote or new SEC and CFTC rules.

His comments came after a White House meeting with President Donald Trump and crypto executives, as lawmakers prepare to revisit the CLARITY Act.

Armstrong Lays Out Two Paths to Clarity

Armstrong posted on X on August 21 that “clarity is coming either way,” pointing to September 15 and September 16 as possible turning points. He expects more than 60 Senate votes for the CLARITY Act on September 15, or new rules from the CFTC and SEC the following day.

His post quoted CFTC Chairman Mike Selig, who had written hours earlier that his agency would not wait indefinitely on Congress if the CLARITY Act keeps stalling over what he called Democratic obstruction.

Selig said in a video shared with his post that “the CFTC will utilize its existing authorities to begin establishing a regime” for crypto markets, adding that the plan could let both registered firms and non-registered exchanges apply for a new designation permitting leveraged and margin crypto trading under CFTC oversight.

He also said he had directed staff to work with developers of on-chain finance protocols so they can offer their products legally in the US, and warned that if Democrats do not back a bipartisan version of CLARITY, he would move the CFTC’s own rules forward instead.

Armstrong, after Wednesday’s meeting with Trump and crypto executives, called the September 15 vote the thing that would make the administration’s crypto progress durable for decades to come. He credited the administration for the GENIUS Act, the strategic Bitcoin reserve, and, just days earlier, a new SEC proposal that would let crypto companies raise up to $5 million over four years or $75 million within 12 months. That new capital-raising proposal shows what agency-led rules might look like if the bill stalls again.

The Coinbase chief also pointed to hundreds of pages of changes contributed by Democratic senators, pushing back on the idea that support for the bill breaks cleanly along party lines.

Why the Senate Math Is Tight

Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed for cloture on CLARITY before the August recess, setting the September 15 vote in motion, but the bill still needs 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats or independents have to join them.

Galaxy Research recently cut its odds of passage this year from 50% to 30%, citing unresolved fights over ethics provisions, illicit finance rules, and language from the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan proposal from Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, which would tighten restrictions on public officials issuing their own cryptocurrencies and give state attorneys general a bigger enforcement role, has stalled after the White House did not respond to it in time.

The post Brian Armstrong: Crypto Regulatory Clarity Coming by Mid-September appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Reopening a settled provision four weeks before a vote would sink the bill, argues Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association.

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An investor can sell a share in Morgan Stanley’s new Ethereum Trust during market hours. The trust may need weeks, or months during a stressed queue, to free some of the Ether (ETH) behind it.

Why such a large timing gap? The crypto exchange-traded product, or ETP, holds ETH behind shares that trade on NYSE Arca. Under normal market conditions, 50% to 80% of that ETH is expected to sit in Ethereum’s validator system, earning rewards while exposed to protocol penalties and withdrawal delays. 

Morgan Stanley launched the trust, ticker MSSE, on July 28 alongside a Solana product. Its annual sponsor fee is 0.14%. Figment, Galaxy Blockchain Infrastructure and Coinbase Canada operate as staking providers. The custodians and staking providers are expected to receive 5% of gross staking rewards, leaving 95% in the trust.

The wrapper makes the investment easier to buy and hold. It also converts validator performance, key security and Ethereum’s withdrawal mechanics into fund-level financial risks. The useful question is therefore wider than the quoted APR. Which balance sheet stands between a protocol loss and the shareholder?

There is a legal distinction worth keeping in view. The offering is registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission under the Securities Act of 1933. The trust is not an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, and its investors do not receive the protections attached to funds governed by that law. “ETP” is the more precise label.

BeInCrypto spoke with Eva Lawrence, Head of Revenue at Figment; Nitin Gaur, Head of Institutions at Nethermind; Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, Founder and CEO of Cap; and Edward Wu, Head of BloFin Research, about how the risk moves through the structure.

When a Validator Error Hits the Share Price

Ethereum pays validators for checking the network and following its rules. It can destroy part of their staked Ether and force them out after certain violations, including signing conflicting messages. A correlation penalty raises the cost when many validators are slashed around the same period. One faulty process repeated across a large validator fleet can therefore be more damaging than a series of isolated mistakes.

Slashing remains rare compared with the size of Ethereum’s validator set. Its distribution through time still matters because the largest spikes have tended to come from shared operational failures.

For an ETP investor, the protocol does not send a separate bill. The trust holds less Ether and its net asset value reflects the loss. Eva Lawrence, Head of Revenue at Figment, explains:

“In an ETP structure, slashing penalties (for misbehavior, downtime or misconfiguring) would hit the fund’s asset base and reduce NAV. Investors see this as a share price impact rather than a direct asset loss. But slashing on institutional-grade validators is rare and for a provider like Figment, we have never had a double signing slashing event on Ethereum. The best staking providers also carry slashing coverage.”

Morgan Stanley’s custody arrangement limits one obvious danger. Its staking providers receive validator keys used to perform validation duties. The custodians retain the private keys that control the trust’s assets and withdrawal addresses. A validator operator cannot transfer the principal to another wallet.

That protection does not settle the economic liability. The trust can retain ownership of its ETH and still lose assets through a penalty caused by the operator. Its prospectus says compensation may be subject to conditions, exclusions and evidentiary requirements. It may exclude protocol-wide events or software failures and may arrive late, cover only part of the loss or never become available.

Nitin Gaur, Head of Institutions at Nethermind, puts the issue in financial terms:

“A staking ETP is a yield product inside a fund vehicle sitting on an operational risk the fund documents may not have priced. The questions worth asking are not about the protocol: who absorbs a slashing event, is the indemnity backed by a balance sheet that could pay it, and what happens when the exit queue is longer than the settlement cycle.”

The result is a loss waterfall. Protocol code acts first. The trust then looks to the relevant provider agreement, its liability limits and any available coverage. NAV carries whatever remains.

The Provider’s Balance Sheet Becomes Part of the Product

Staking providers are often assessed like technology vendors: uptime, security controls and commission rates. An ETP makes their contractual liability and financial capacity part of the investment structure.

Benjamin Sarquis Peillard, Founder and CEO of Cap, said:

“Asset managers should judge providers on incident history, key management architecture, and what the legal contract says happens in the worst case: who gets made whole first and who’s left holding the bag for the loss. These asset managers should be underwriting the provider almost like any other critical piece of financial infrastructure. A high advertised staking yield means very little if the provider doesn’t have the operational controls, security architecture, and financial capacity to manage an incident when something goes wrong.”

The same scrutiny applies to diversification. Three provider names do not necessarily create three independent risk pools. They may run the same validator client, depend on the same cloud region or use similar key-management processes.

Lawrence said:

“When all validators for a provider run on the same cloud region or software stack, a single outage affects the full position simultaneously. Operators with concentrated infrastructure can fail synchronously, while providers with multi-cloud, multi-geography architecture remain operational. Note that diversifying across multiple providers does not guarantee resiliency: if those providers rely on the same cloud vendors, client software, or geographic regions, they share the same failure points.”

This turns provider selection into a correlation exercise. An asset manager needs to map the underlying client software and hosting footprint, then test how key-management and anti-slashing systems behave during maintenance or failover.

Gaur argues that the apparent provider count can obscure a common dependency:

“Concentration, meaning their share of network stake and whether their infrastructure correlates with everyone else’s: if your provider and half the network sit in the same cloud region running the same client, you do not have independent risks, you have one. Key management and anti-slashing architecture, and whether your stake is segregated or commingled.”

The September 2025 SSV Labs post-mortem shows how this can happen. Two incidents affected one validator and then a cluster of 39. SSV said its protocol had not been compromised. The larger event came from a maintenance mistake that ran the same validator keys simultaneously in two infrastructures. The code behaved as designed; duplicated operations created the loss.

A Liquid Share Sits over a Withdrawal Queue

Staking changes the liquidity profile of the asset held by the trust. Ethereum limits how many validators can enter or leave over a given period. That protects network stability and prevents a large set of validators from moving at once.

For a fund, the constraint appears on both sides of the trade. Ether waiting to enter the validator set earns no staking rewards. Ether waiting to exit cannot be sold to meet redemptions. Morgan Stanley’s prospectus says unstaking may take days in quiet conditions and multiple weeks or months when exit demand rises.

The queue can move sharply. On July 6, the prospectus recorded roughly 2.71 million ETH waiting to enter and an estimated activation delay of 47 days. On August 21, Rated Network showed an activation queue of about 38 days, an exit queue below one hour and a withdrawal queue close to ten days. A liquidity policy built around one observation can age quickly.

Lawrence describes the issuer-level risk as follows:

“Staking may require assets to be locked for a period of time and in the case of Ethereum, queued for exit during an “unbonding” period, creating potential liquidity mismatches, particularly if redemptions exceed available unstaked assets.”

The trust manages that mismatch by leaving part of its ETH unstaked. More liquidity gives it a larger pool for redemptions. It also reduces the share of the portfolio earning rewards. The expected 50% to 80% staking range is therefore one of the product’s most important economic variables.

The Math Behind the 95% Reward Pass-Through

Morgan Stanley’s 0.14% sponsor fee sits below several large US crypto ETPs. The existing comparison is straightforward: investors can see the annual fee charged against NAV.

The staking charge uses another denominator. Custodians and staking providers receive 5% of gross staking rewards. They do not receive 5% of the trust’s assets. The trust retains 95% of rewards earned on the portion of ETH that is actually staked.

So, a 3% protocol yield does not create 3% of gross income across the trust when only 50% to 80% of its Ether is working. It creates a gross portfolio yield of 1.5% to 2.4% before the reward charge and sponsor fee.

The current network rate offers a useful illustration. Rated Network showed a 2.81% Ethereum network APR on August 21. Rounding that to 2.8%, a 50% staking allocation would produce gross rewards equal to 1.4% of NAV.

After the 5% staking charge and 0.14% sponsor fee, the estimated contribution falls to about 1.19%. At an 80% allocation, the equivalent estimate is about 1.99%.

These figures are illustrations, not forecasts. They assume a constant protocol APR and exclude activation delays, penalties, taxes and extraordinary expenses. They show why “95% of rewards” is incomplete without the staking ratio and the fixed fee.

The fixed sponsor fee also takes a larger share of income as protocol rewards fall. Scale matters because the issuer still has to pay for custody, monitoring and operational controls when the yield pool shrinks.

Sarquis Peillard sees an important commercial test here:

“A fee like a 0.14%-with-95%-pass-through only works at scale when the economics of the fee make sense; a smaller issuer copying that fee without the volume to cover secure custody and slashing coverage should raise some suspicion. That’s the part of the economics investors should pay attention to. Low fees and high reward pass-through look attractive, but staking still requires secure infrastructure, custody, monitoring, and risk management. If the economics don’t appear to pay for those things, investors should be asking what is actually being sacrificed to make the numbers work.”

Who Pays When Staking Goes Wrong?

Disclosure tells investors where a loss may land. A funded protection mechanism changes the order in which capital absorbs it.

Edward Wu, Head of BloFin Research, argues that regulated staking products could create a first-loss layer between provider failure and investor capital:

“Asset managers could require providers to post funded bonds, maintain dedicated slashing reserves, or contribute a portion of staking revenue to a pooled protection fund. These mechanisms would give regulated products a more explicit loss-absorption layer and reduce the immediate impact of smaller staking penalties on investors.”

That would make the promise measurable. A reserve has a disclosed size. A funded bond can be compared with the value at risk. Contractual compensation without ring-fenced capital depends on exclusions, the provider’s solvency and the time required to enforce a claim.

Legal design can fail independently of validator performance. In February 2023, Kraken agreed to end its US staking-as-a-service programme and pay $30 million to settle SEC charges. Its validators did not need to malfunction for the product to become unworkable. Regulatory treatment changed the business around them.

Staking ETPs give investors a listed share and familiar brokerage settlement. Their financial architecture sits in the staking ratio, exit policy, provider agreements and the balance sheets standing behind compensation promises. The APR can be compared in seconds. The loss waterfall still has to be read line by line.

The post Morgan Stanley Put Ethereum Yield in an ETP. Who Carries the Risk? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Bitcoin miner stocks have spent three weeks trading with a seller sitting on top of them. On Friday, Ken Griffin said that seller is nearly finished.

Griffin told Citadel clients the firm has unwound more than 80% of the risk it absorbed from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio. The filings behind that book show miner bets that grew in dollars while shrinking to under 10% of the portfolio. The fund was buying miners fast and memory chips faster.

The Seller Nobody Was Watching

Situational Awareness is the artificial intelligence (AI) fund run by former OpenAI researcher Aschenbrenner. It gained 439% in the first half of 2026. Then July arrived.

Leveraged four to one, the fund lost 67% in a single month and handed roughly $10 billion of stock to Citadel on July 30, as BeInCrypto reported when it lost its stock book.

Its last filing before that sale is the one that matters. The 13F, a quarterly holdings report large investors must file with regulators, covered the period to June 30 and was lodged on August 14. It listed a $20.24 billion portfolio across just 26 positions.

Bitcoin miners made up $1.99 billion of it. Core Scientific was the biggest at $666 million. Riot Platforms held $468 million, IREN $433 million and CleanSpark $179 million. A fresh $152 million stake sat in Keel Infrastructure, the company Bitfarms became after rebranding in April.

Those positions grew fast. Miner exposure climbed 79% in a single quarter. Riot alone jumped 229%.

Why the Whole Thing Broke

Aschenbrenner was never buying Bitcoin (BTC). He was buying megawatts. Miners already owned grid capacity, and AI data centers needed it.

The real danger sat elsewhere. In March, the fund held $8.5 billion of put options against Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom and other AI names. Those were its hedges.

By June 30, they had almost entirely gone. In their place stood $12.5 billion of outright long bets. Sandisk and Micron alone accounted for 55.6% of the whole book.

So the fund stopped hedging and doubled down instead. When chip stocks slid in July, nothing cushioned the fall. Miners were collateral damage in a memory-chip trade.

Griffin Cleared It in Three Weeks

Citadel moved quickly. It pushed through nearly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion, including the largest intraday blocks of the year in 10 separate names.

“Our ability to distribute this risk was central to our investment thesis,” Reuters reported, citing Ken Griffin in the letter.

Citadel bought the portfolio at a discount, and three Citadel funds gained sharply afterward.

What Changes for Miner Holders

A large seller with no reason to care about price is now mostly out. That hands the sector back to its own numbers, from hosting deals like Riot’s Anthropic lease to heavy quarterly mining losses.

The tape is helping too. Bitcoin’s 7% daily gain lifted BTC to about $77,309 and its market value to roughly $1.55 trillion.

One question remains. Aschenbrenner loaded up on miners because he believed hashrate was really a claim on power. Citadel has now sold most of it. Whoever bought those blocks made the same bet, quietly, at a lower price.

The post Bitcoin Miners Had a $2 Billion Ghost Seller, Citadel Just Cleared It appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Gold surged past $4,600 per ounce on Friday, touching its highest level in three months and putting the metal on track for a nearly 5% weekly gain.

A weaker dollar and fresh debt concerns are driving investors toward safety.

What is Driving the Gold Rally?

Spot gold traded between $4,580 and $4,600 on Friday, while futures approached $4,650, according to TradingView data. The rally stems from two converging forces:

• A weaker US dollar, renewed concern over soaring American debt, and the Treasury’s decision this week to double long-term bond buybacks all pushed investors toward non-yielding assets.
• That buyback move aimed to stabilize the bond market after the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since 2007. The announcement initially pushed yields lower and further weakened the dollar, adding fuel to gold’s advance.

Prominent market voices highlighted the significance of the move. Economist Mohamed El-Erian noted that gold ranked among the morning’s standout performers, topping $4,600 alongside Bitcoin’s rebound above $79,000.

Longtime gold advocate Peter Schiff pointed to the precious metal’s rally as evidence that the Federal Reserve has lost credibility on its inflation target.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.

Sentiment among professional investors has also shifted markedly. Bank of America’s latest Global Fund Manager Survey showed a net 16% of managers now view gold as undervalued, the highest reading since March 2023 and up sharply from just 6% in July.

Structural support also remains strong. Central banks continued aggressive buying, with second-quarter purchases hitting a quarterly record.

US federal debt recently surpassed $40 trillion, amplifying fiscal concerns that favor gold as a hedge against currency debasement.

Rising Treasury yields typically signal investor concern about long-term debt sustainability, and gold tends to benefit when both yields and the dollar soften.

Where Does the Gold Rally Go From Here?

Analysts remain genuinely divided on gold’s next move. Some see the breakout above the 200-day moving average as confirmation of renewed bullish momentum, with potential targets toward $5,000 if dollar weakness persists.

Others caution that higher oil prices and sticky inflation could reinstate pressure on yields, limiting further gains in the near term.

“…Gold continues its strong run higher, gaining 1.8% on the day and 5.1% on the week to trade at USD 4,600, well above the 200-day MA which was the technical trigger for fresh momentum buying and now also above the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement of the January to June correction at USD 4,574. Next level being the 0.5 retracement and May local high around USD 4,770…,” analyst Ole S Hansen said on X.

Silver’s parallel move near $70 reinforces the broader precious metals narrative. Investors appear to be rotating toward tangible assets as confidence in traditional monetary tools shows visible signs of strain.

For now, gold’s return above $4,600 underscores its role as a preferred safe haven amid fiscal uncertainty and shifting monetary expectations across global markets.

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The post Gold Price Hits 3-Month High Amid Bond Market Stress: Is $5,000 Next? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Oh, what a week it was in the cryptocurrency (and not only) markets. We will dig into all of that as finally, after weeks (and even months) of sideways action without any clear indication of a breakout, BTC skyrocketed to fresh peaks.

But before we go into details on that, let’s rewind the clock to last Friday, when the primary cryptocurrency was struggling a lot. Despite the positive US CPI data from a few days back, the asset slumped to $62,500 to mark a ten-day low. Again, little to no indication of what was about to happen soon.

The bulls tried to intervene and helped bitcoin recover to $63,000, where it spent the entire weekend with no actual volatility. The first minor signs of a bullish change came on Monday when BTC gradually increased to $64,000. It tapped $65,000 on Tuesday, but as it has frequently happened in the past few months, it was rejected and slipped back down to $64,000.

Then came Wednesday. Instead of another rejection, the bulls took the front seat. In fact, they took all seats, initiating a massive leg up that drove BTC to $70,000 within hours, liquidating over $1 billion in shorts in 60 minutes. After a brief correction to $68,000, bitcoin went on the offensive once again. This time, it flew to $72,000.

The scenario repeated a few more times, and the culmination, at least for now, took place earlier today. Bitcoin skyrocketed to almost $80,000 for the first time in over three months, gaining $15,000 in 48 hours.

Its massive run was finally halted, or at least paused, and BTC now sits at around $77,000. Nevertheless, the weekly gains are nothing short of mind-blowing, showing a 23.6% surge. Some altcoins have performed even better, with ETH touching $2.4K earlier today after a 30% pump. XRP stole the show as it rebounded from the $1.00 support with a spectacular 40% surge to $1.40.

Other massive gainers include SOL, HYPE, ZEC, DOGE, LINK, ADA, BCH, and many, many more. The chart below paints a very clear picture. After all, the total market cap has added more than $400 billion since Wednesday.

Market Data

Market Cap: $2.670T | 24H Vol: $350B | BTC Dominance: 57.9%

BTC: $77,300 (+23.6%) | ETH: $2,390 (+28%) | XRP: $1.40 (+40%)

This Week’s Crypto Headlines You Can’t Miss

Why Did the Bitcoin Price Suddenly Spike Toward $73K? Let’s begin with perhaps the most important question: why did BTC rally so hard? The most obvious answer came just minutes before the Wednesday explosion when the US Treasury Department announced it would double the maximum size of liquidity-support buybacks for long-dated government debt, raising them from $2 billion to at least $4 billion.

Bitcoin Back Above $100K? Scaramucci Says the 2028 Halving Holds the Key. Given the latest developments, making bold price predictions is back on the table. Anthony Scaramucci noted, even before BTC’s surge, that the asset is likely to return to a six-digit price territory by its next halving, which is scheduled to occur in H1 2028.

Strategy Stays Put on Bitcoin but Sells a Massive 3.46 Million Shares. More positive news this week came (or didn’t) from Strategy, as the firm refrained from selling more BTC. It didn’t buy any, either, but at least the company has paused its offloads, for now.

Ripple Whales Go Crazy as XRP Price Can’t Stop Surging. As mentioned above, XRP is among the top performers in the past few days. There were some indications of a big move in the making, mostly coming from whales. These large market participants went on an accumulation spree in the past week, scooping almost 400 million tokens in total.

Polymarket Hit With Access Block in South Korea Over Gambling Allegations. The leading predictions platform continues to hit roadblocks in numerous jurisdictions, and South Korea has emerged as the latest one. The local regulator blocked domestic access to Polymarket after determining that its services facilitated activities considered illegal gambling.

Trump Wants the US to Lead Crypto: Here Are the Biggest Takeaways From the White House Meeting. US President Trump hosted leaders of numerous cryptocurrency firms at the White House on Wednesday (yes, around the time of the price surges), pushing for approval of the highly anticipated CLARITY Act. He also said his administration mulled buying sizeable amounts of bitcoin and other digital assets.

Charts

This week, we have a chart analysis of Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, Binance Coin, and Hyperliquid – click here for the complete price analysis.

The post BTC Hit 3-Month High, ETH Topped $2.4K, XRP Soared 40% in 48 Hours: Weekly Crypto Recap appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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