Crypto
How months of work on the crypto Clarity Act all fell apart
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act was always doomed to fail.
The bill faced an uphill battle from launch; numerous political, policy and social factors would have needed to fall into place for it to succeed. In the end, a variety of issues combined to continually decrease the odds of its passage over the past year. Ultimately, the bill saw bipartisan opposition when it hit the Senate floor for a key make-or-break procedural vote earlier this month, and its future is now in limbo.
There had been warning signs for months.
According to interviews conducted with more than a dozen industry participants and legislative aides over the past 10 days — some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity so they could talk candidly about this fraught process — a confluence of factors killed the Clarity Act.
The Senate ignored the House of Representatives’ own Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which had passed with a massive bipartisan vote; the Senate version was constructed in a piecemeal fashion; U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House complicated the negotiations; the crypto industry conducted a scattershot engagement with lawmakers throughout the process; Democrats rejected an ethics deal they felt fell short of their demands; and time was not on lawmakers’ side as they headed into a midterm election.
The result is that, despite a massive campaign and lobbying operation that resulted in “the most pro-crypto Congress in history” after the 2024 election and the passage of a key stablecoin bill last year, the crypto industry’s top priority for legislation — market structure reform — remains out of reach.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act was aimed at clearly defining how the industry’s two main regulators, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, would oversee the roughly $3 trillion and growing crypto sector. While last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS) outlined how federal regulators should oversee stablecoins specifically, this broader market structure bill has long been desired by the industry for a few reasons.
For one thing, crypto spot markets currently exist in a sort of federal regulatory gray zone. The CFTC does not have spot market authority over these markets outside of outright fraud and related derivatives products. For another, the SEC had never previously issued formal rulemakings outlining how it would oversee crypto-related securities products, and many leaders in the sector were panicked by former Chair Gary Gensler’s effort to corral crypto spot trading platforms into an existing securities regulation framework. There is also no explicit authority delineating where the SEC’s authority ends and the CFTC’s authority begins.
In the absence of this legislation, the agencies began to lay out how they view the crypto markets in joint advisories published earlier this year, but a crypto market structure bill could sort out all of these issues in a much more legally tangible — not to mention durable — way.
The ethics provision
It’s difficult to say whether the Clarity Act vote failed solely due to the controversial section that sought to limit senior government officials — namely, Trump — from personal crypto ties, but ethics concerns hung over the bill throughout its conception and development and remain one of the dominant talking points around this entire debate.
Democrat concerns about President Donald Trump’s crypto business ties stretch back to 2025. In May of last year, Sen. Ruben Gallego and eight other Democrats said they would not vote for the GENIUS Act because of how Trump was profiting off the sector. Ultimately, those lawmakers did vote for the bill with marginal changes, but it was always clear that the Trump family’s crypto dealings — which include World Liberty Financial, the $TRUMP memecoin and mining firm American Bitcoin — would weigh on future market structure discussions. At the time, Trump told “Meet the Press” that he was “not profiting from anything … I want crypto because a lot of people, you know millions of people want it.” More recently, in his June financial disclosure, he admitted to making $1.4 billion from his various crypto ventures during his first year back in office — more than half of the $2.2 billion total he raked in in 2025.
The goal for Democrats was to restrain Trump from so blatantly profiting off of the crypto sector, which had in turn poured millions into the president’s 2024 campaign, inaugural balls, a ballroom to replace the demolished White House East Wing, a military parade and his political action committee.
While the goal of the ethics provision has been described as generically applying to all present and future presidents and senior government officials, it’s specifically Trump’s crypto business ties that have alarmed Democrats. These concerns have been consistent since Trump’s return to office last year, multiple people said, with one person saying the Democrats writ large “actually care about this stuff.”
The crypto industry should not have been surprised by the conviction Democrats had on the ethics piece, this person said.
In May, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a longtime crypto champion who has cosponsored multiple bills addressing the sector, told CoinDesk’s Consensus 2026 attendees that the bill would not advance without an ethics provision. Similarly, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, who voted for the bill during a hearing in the Senate Banking Committee, said at the time that she would not vote for further advancement without additional work.
Even industry participants expected a clear deal on the ethics provision before a floor vote — so-called because it takes place on the Senate floor, with all 100 senators expected to participate. Cody Carbone, head of the Digital Chamber, told reporters after the Banking Committee advanced the bill in May that he expected “the deal will be completed before this goes to the floor, because they’ll want to only bring it to the floor if they feel confident they’ve got 60” votes.
Lawmakers from the two parties ultimately did not agree to any such deal. The White House and Senate Republicans published a few proposals; Senate Democrats sent counteroffers; and Sens. Thom Tillis and Gallego even pitched a bipartisan counterproposal earlier in the year. The three parties were unable to reach a consensus agreement prior to this month’s floor vote.
Multiple people pointed to Trump’s June financial disclosure as the event that really supercharged these concerns by giving politicians an easy-to-grasp headline figure in their push to force Trump to sell off his crypto holdings.
Those concerns only strengthened as the November election drew nearer.
“I think politics was very clearly elevated over policy,” said Stu Alderoty, the chief legal officer at Ripple Labs. “It was good policy, and the industry needs to get better at politics.”
Ron Hammond, the head of policy and advocacy at Wintermute, pointed to the fact that both Gallego and Alsobrooks ultimately voted against the bill on the floor as a sign of just how near the election is, and how that’s overshadowing everything else. Still others noted that Gillibrand, likewise, had voted against the procedural motion. Even sympathetic Democrats couldn’t risk being seen as soft on Trump’s corruption with an election around the corner.
Speaking at CoinDesk’s Policy & Regulation event last week, Rep. Ritchie Torres put the blame on Trump’s crypto activity.
“My personal opinion … even though the failure of Clarity had multiple causes, I am convinced that if it were not for Donald Trump, we likely could have seen both Democrats and Republicans get to yes,” he said. “Once the president issued his personal memecoin, that created a political problem for Democrats.”
Coinbase and the January delay
The industry’s involvement in the legislative process has also been under scrutiny. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that industry insiders laid some portion of the blame for the failed vote on Coinbase and its CEO Brian Armstrong, after Armstrong publicly withdrew support for the Senate Banking Committee’s version of the bill ahead of a key vote in January.
One of the key issues, Armstrong said, was that the version of the bill was problematic with how it treated stablecoin yield and rewards. The delay kicked off a months-long fight between the crypto and banking industries, while lawmakers sought to find a compromise. It’s not clear that other outstanding issues were debated much during the yield fight.
Industry figures and Sen. Cynthia Lummis rallied to Coinbase’s defense after the Journal’s report came out, but industry participants told CoinDesk they saw Armstrong’s tweet and the subsequent months-long fight over stablecoin yield and rewards as being harmful to the overall cause of getting Clarity passed.
One individual involved in crypto lobbying said if the ethics proposal released earlier this month had come out in the spring, it would have likely raised the odds of a successful vote.
Alderoty, the Ripple CLO, said in a phone call that there was “an opportunity in January” without the midterms to make further progress.
“The January timeframe would have given more airspace for negotiations without the midterms breathing down their necks,” Alderoty said.
Charley Cooper, the president and COO at Ava Labs, similarly told CoinDesk that the fact that the floor vote was held less than two months prior to election day made it difficult to see success.
The crypto industry felt a renewed sense of optimism after an ethics proposal was published earlier this month, which raised hopes that the overall bill could pass, he said. But, “we’re six weeks before election day in a heated midterm with a very divided electorate, very partisan fighting going on.”
To be clear: Nobody guaranteed that an earlier vote would have been successful. Many of the individuals who spoke to CoinDesk praised Armstrong and Coinbase generally for their involvement in the bill’s development. And, despite industry claims that the banking industry should have negotiated stablecoin yield issues during the GENIUS Act passage, one individual said that the Senate Banking Committee’s July 2025 discussion draft for market structure invited the debate by asking, “How should legislation address interest or yield-bearing digital assets, including stablecoins.”
If the ethics proposal released by Senate Republicans in early September had instead been released in the spring, the back-and-forth over the details may have been more fruitful, three people said, though others weren’t so sure, suggesting the political weight of the ethics debate was destined to hang over everything else — including the stablecoin yield question, disagreements over the risks of decentralized finance and others.
But the timing was bad.
Right after the Senate Banking Committee postponed its initial January hearing, the U.S. started its conflict with Iran, which caused fuel prices to spike and fanned the flames of an increasingly wonky global financial situation. Americans’ frustration over Trump’s foreign policy and the economy has seen Trump’s poll numbers sliding downward over the last few months. Meanwhile, progressive challengers won primary contests in Democrat elections, and the Democratic party as a whole is more afraid of alienating its base than the possible political fallout from voting for a crypto bill, multiple people said.
“Neither side was going to take a leap and do something big that could be claimed as a victory for the other side,” Cooper said. “So it doesn’t surprise me at all that it failed.”
The House bill
The timing problem is a byproduct of another thing multiple people took issue with: The fact that the Senate was working on its own homegrown bill to begin with. The House of Representatives passed its version of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act with a massive 294-134 vote in July 2025; 78 Democrats supported the bill. The Senate largely ignored it to work on its own bill, originally named the Responsible Financial Innovation Act. (The Senate adopted the Clarity Act moniker later in the process.)
The Senate did something similar with the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act — while the House had a bill, the Senate started its own version of the legislation, and that is the text that ultimately became law. Congressmen expressed their desire to see the Senate take up their version of the Clarity Act over the past year, but that didn’t happen.
“Clarity’s chances really faced an uphill battle when it came to the Senate decision not to take up the Clarity Act that passed the House as-is and [instead] just worked on their own,” Wintermute’s Hammond said.
A lot of the issues that bogged down the Senate bill in recent months just weren’t major considerations last year, he told CoinDesk in a phone call. The banking industry was not lobbying on stablecoin yield issues in the same way it had through most of 2026; political concerns were not as strong, and many of the interest groups had not had time to mobilize last fall.
Two other individuals said the House likely never expected the Senate to take up its bill, but the House had to pass it anyway. And when it drew more than two thirds support in the House, it showed the Senate there was plenty of bipartisan energy.
Rep. French Hill, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, told CoinDesk in April that the Senate version of the bill did adapt some of the work the House did on its version of the Clarity Act and its predecessor, the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act.
Still, a further risk with the Senate launching its own version of Clarity is that the bill would have to go back to the House after successful Senate passage, and it’s unclear what would have happened at that point.
The House announced it would leave almost immediately after the Senate returned earlier this month, meaning that even if there had been a successful series of votes on Clarity, the House wouldn’t have voted on it until the lame duck session after the election. And even then, the House wouldn’t necessarily vote on the Senate bill as-is, one former House aide told CoinDesk.
Tim Ryan, a former Congressman who now advises a number of crypto companies, told CoinDesk through a spokesperson that the House would first need to understand how the Senate bill would impact its own version.
“A strong Senate agreement could have created real momentum for the House to act,” he said. “The deciding factors would have been the substance and whether House leaders could assemble the votes. The goal should be a workable law that gives people the confidence to build here.”
Negotiating tactics
Several individuals took issue with the negotiating process itself. While in years past, legislation may have been written by legislative staffers from both parties cramming into a room, this did not seem to happen.
Industry sources told CoinDesk that instead, Republican legislative staffers would draft something and share it with their Democrat counterparts. The Democrats would then share feedback, which could get incorporated into the next Republican draft. This would then be presented as a bipartisan effort.
But sometimes Republicans would include concessions on their own in the hopes of getting Democrats to say yes, two industry sources said, pointing to changes to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act as one example.
A Democrat aide said that at times, negotiators would agree to some provisions, but their Republican counterparts would later backpedal.
And earlier this year, after Senate Republicans and the White House agreed to the first draft of an ethics provision, negotiators briefed the crypto industry on the details and began aggressively selling the language before sharing the proposal with Senate Democrats.
“I think Republican staffers f***** up the negotiation by not including Democratic staffers in the process,” one person said, adding that it gave Democrats leverage in the negotiations. “If you don’t say ‘we agree to this concession’ then you have the power in negotiations.”
Another person pointed to the announcement of the revised ethics proposal, which came from Sen. Lummis’s office, as a second example, saying it was “odd” that the press release was only signed by Republicans if it was meant to champion a bipartisan effort.
Punchbowl News reported details about the negotiations last week.
Multiple people also pointed to White House adviser Patrick Witt, who they all said seemed to want the bill to pass but didn’t necessarily have the experience needed to coordinate a bill as complex as Clarity. One person said Witt’s posts on X, suggesting breakthroughs or successful passage, were unhelpful, as they may have changed industry expectations. Witt declined to speak with CoinDesk at a Georgetown event last week.
Two legislative aides and an industry participant told CoinDesk that a final, last-ditch negotiation spearheaded by Sen. Tillis, as the procedural vote began on Sept. 15 led to the idea of allowing the entire Senate to vote on the Tillis-Gallego ethics proposal as an amendment to the bill. One Democrat aide said the party was at the “one-yard line” on a successful procedural vote when the negotiation was shut down.
It was abruptly ended by a staffer for Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, several people told CoinDesk. Sens. Gallego and Chuck Schumer said in press statements that there was a bipartisan deal in the works but it was “killed.”
Crypto in America’s Eleanor Terrett first reported that a staffer for Scott ended negotiations.
A source familiar with the discussions told CoinDesk that the staffer had specifically told his own team to leave the negotiation, and the White House and Senate Agriculture Committee Republican staff were not present at this meeting. Republicans had already rejected the previous counterproposal sent by Senate Democrats late the night before, and formal talks had already ended. The staffer didn’t see the talking as an active negotiation because the process had already been closed, and he disputed that he halted progress at that point, the source said.
An industry participant said during the vote that Tillis and the Republican staffers negotiating were doing so without the support of their leadership. Another person, the Democrat aide, said Republican leadership had undermined Tillis and Lummis after the two had essentially secured a deal. The industry participant said that the parties had reached an agreement on some provisions but needed details on paper.
The industry’s own approach to negotiations likewise drew scrutiny; one person said the Clarity fight did eventually see the majority of the crypto industry align on at least the crypto-specific portions of the bill. But there were steps the overall industry could have taken that would have better served its cause, another person said, such as getting better at providing real-world use cases for merchants or other constituents. The industry just focused on hypotheticals, at least in Washington.
Industry leaders could have done more to encourage bipartisan negotiations, one aide said.
The upcoming midterm
2026 is a midterm election. Earlier this year, the general consensus was that the House of Representatives would likely flip control from Republicans to Democrats, while the Senate would remain under Republican control.
Many people said this means Democrats could not give Trump “a win” ahead of the election, particularly when, as noted, progressives tend not to vote for crypto.
Sen. Bill Hagerty told audiences at a Georgetown University event last Wednesday that he had warned his colleagues that the closer the negotiations got to Nov. 3, the lower the chances of any sort of passage, though he said the Senate could take up the legislation again after the election.
“It’s sad, but it’s the political reality,” he said. He told CoinDesk that there may be room for continuing negotiations on some of the provisions.
“My Democratic colleagues, this close to the election, couldn’t resist playing politics,” he said. “Is there room to do more fine-tuning? Perhaps.”
The future of Fairshake
One major question raised by the failure of the vote: What will happen to the crypto political action committees? Fairshake, the biggest crypto super PAC, has already announced a $30 million spend against former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is challenging Ohio Sen. John Husted in a bid to return to the Senate. Brown, who chaired the Senate Banking Committee when he was last in the Senate, had criticized the crypto sector and opposed bringing any legislation for a committee hearing when he was in office, but hadn’t said much about crypto during this most recent campaign.
Neither party saw much political risk in failing to pass Clarity, said Wisdomtree Chief Legal Officer Ryan Louvar.
Whether Fairshake or the other PACs can even affect the overall trajectory of the 2026 election is a mystery. Recent polls suggest that Democrats will pick up a number of seats in the House of Representatives, and several Senate races are likewise competitive. The PACs throwing in with the Republican party exclusively, were that to happen, would reflect badly on the crypto industry if Democrats do regain power in at least one chamber of Congress, or if they win the presidency in 2028.
Fairshake was not built for a “wave” election, one person said. And the PAC has already had two high-profile misfires. Fairshake opposed Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton’s Senate bid to the tune of $10 million; Stratton won anyway and is almost certainly going to win the general election.
And the PACs have to maintain a delicate balance, this person said. They cannot risk a complete break from Democrats.
Another person said it was unclear whether the threat of Fairshake was ineffective in getting Clarity done or if Democrats just chose to run out the clock on 2026 in a strategic effort to avoid facing multimillion-dollar ad spends against them.
The elusive crypto voter
A Democrat aide said the crypto industry cannot just assume that a future administration or legislature would be fully bipartisan and on board with crypto bills, rather than the political pendulum swinging away from complete Republican control following the current term. For the PACs to essentially do what Republicans hope and direct funds against Democrats because of this month’s vote would risk alienating necessary political allies.
Another issue with the PACs like Fairshake is the lack of supporting infrastructure in Washington, D.C., a former legislative staffer said.
The industry can tell lawmakers that tens of millions of Americans own crypto, but without constituents demonstrating why this matters for them, elected officials won’t care, this person said. Even worse, lawmakers may question these claims if they go back to their home districts and don’t hear any of their constituents discuss crypto.
Alderoty, who also heads up the Ripple-backed National Cryptocurrency Association, said the organization estimated that some 67 million Americans held crypto, but his organization could not convince any senators to sit down with holders to talk about their use cases.
And it’s true that crypto just isn’t a major issue for voters. In a CoinDesk-commissioned survey of 1,000 registered voters across the country, just 1% described crypto as a top concern. The cost of living, jobs, the economy, Social Security and Medicare were all more important issues, respondents said.
And Democrat voters — both those who described themselves as leaning Democrat or as being strongly Democrat — had a more unfavorable view of crypto than a favorable one, further disincentivizing senators from acting on crypto. Independent voters also had a more unfavorable view of the sector.
Also, 62% of respondents said they did not trust Trump’s administration to oversee crypto.
Lessons
The future of the Clarity Act is unclear. Several individuals said that there are hopes of reviving the bill before the end of the year; however the election goes, a new Congress will be sworn into office in January, and any legislative process will have to start anew.
One industry participant said that it’s likely Democrats will come up with their own version of a crypto market structure bill, which will, at least, give the party a starting point to work from, even if that bill does not go anywhere on its own.
WisdomTree’s Louvar said it is helpful that crypto products are continuing to become more tangible. What’s even more helpful are tokenization or other blockchain-based products that aren’t strictly crypto. Even if lawmakers have a negative perception about cryptocurrencies, divorcing crypto from the underlying blockchain technology could demonstrate its use, he said.
In the absence of legislation, the SEC and CFTC are pushing out guidance and taking steps to try and fill in what gaps they can. However, the SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said repeatedly that a market structure bill is still needed to ensure that any missing authorities are granted.
“The crypto bill transformed into an ethics bill, and that was really unfortunate,” Ripple’s Alderoty said. “We lost a really good opportunity.”
“There’s a convergence now that you’re seeing between traditional market participants and digital asset market participants as well,” Lynq CEO Jerald David said in an interview with CoinDesk TV.
For firms using Lynq, FTIXX gives them somewhere to put cash between trades rather than leaving it sitting around. They can earn yield on the money and pull it out when they need it again.
That was a product Lynq’s clients had been asking for, David said. The network works with firms including B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy ·, FalconX, Crypto.com and Fireblocks, whose businesses can require moving large amounts of money between trades. They wanted another option for putting that cash to work in the meantime.
“We needed to demonstrate that there was client demand,” David said. “Our clients were looking for a treasury asset on the platform that may have had a different yield profile than the other instrument that’s on there right now.”
Getting FTIXX onto the network required some work. Lynq had to modify its technology, restrict access to U.S. clients and integrate with Mosaic, he said. Customers also need a relationship with tZERO Securities and must meet the required onboarding and eligibility checks.
Lynq itself runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche (AVAX) Layer 1 blockchain. Its network has more than 30 institutional digital-asset firms onboarded and more than $89 million in assets, according to the company.
Crypto
Crypto’s Widening Net: From Fed Bets to Blackjack Tables, Digital Assets Keep Blurring Old Boundaries
If there is one throughline in this week’s crop of crypto headlines, it is that the industry has stopped pretending it is only about buying and holding coins. Across a handful of stories making the rounds, digital assets are shown pushing into territory once reserved for central bankers, casino floors, brokerage accounts and pre-IPO investors alike — a reminder that “crypto news” increasingly means finance news, gambling news and macro news rolled into one.
Take the growing chatter around prediction markets and Federal Reserve policy. Traders have been flocking to on-chain betting platforms to price the odds of late-2026 rate decisions, effectively turning monetary policy into a tradable asset class alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. That such markets exist at all is notable: a decade ago, speculating on FOMC outcomes required options contracts or futures desks.
Now it can happen peer-to-peer on a blockchain, with odds shifting in real time as economic data lands. The rise of these markets suggests crypto infrastructure is becoming a genuine alternative venue for hedging and speculating on the traditional economy, not just a parallel casino for digital tokens.
Speaking of casinos, the sector itself continues to evolve in ways that mirror shifts in consumer taste rather than technology alone. Reports on crypto gambling lobbies note that live-dealer blackjack tables are increasingly outnumbering roulette wheels—a seemingly small detail that says more about what crypto-native gamblers want.
Live blackjack offers a sense of skill and control that pure-chance games like roulette can’t match, and operators appear to be responding by stacking their lobbies accordingly. It’s a small but telling sign that crypto casinos are maturing into product-driven businesses competing on experience, not just novelty.
Meanwhile, the boundary between crypto trading and traditional equities markets keeps eroding. New developments around Aave’s lending protocol reportedly let users borrow stablecoins against tokenized versions of tech stocks issued through Coinbase and built on the Base network.
If that model gains traction, it would mark a significant step in bringing real-world assets fully into DeFi’s collateral system — letting someone hold a tokenized slice of a Nasdaq darling and borrow against it the same way they might borrow against ETH or Bitcoin today. It’s the kind of integration that regulators, banks and crypto-native builders have all been circling for years, and its practical rollout matters more than the concept alone.
On the trading-platform side, perpetual futures exchanges continue to expand what counts as a “market.” One report describes a platform offering more than 120 perpetual contracts spanning everything from Bitcoin to pre-IPO robotics companies, letting traders apply leverage to assets that, in many cases, aren’t even publicly listed yet.
This kind of expansion into speculative, illiquid corners of the private market — wrapped in crypto’s leverage-friendly perpetual format — raises real questions about price discovery and risk, even as it satisfies demand from traders hungry for exposure beyond the usual crypto majors.
Finally, there’s the steady drumbeat of token listings that keeps the broader ecosystem churning. A gambling-focused token tied to the Dexsport platform recently landed on the MEXC exchange, a move that typically brings a token more liquidity and visibility, if not necessarily more fundamental value. Listings like these remain a bread-and-butter event in crypto markets — routine, but still closely watched by holders hoping for a price bump and a wider trading audience.
Individually, none of these developments is likely to reshape the industry overnight. But together they sketch a familiar pattern in crypto’s ongoing evolution: infrastructure built for speculative tokens is steadily being repurposed for macro bets, tokenized equities, private-company exposure and gambling products alike.
The technology is proving flexible enough to wrap around almost anything with a price — which is exactly why regulators, investors and casual observers alike keep struggling to say where “crypto” ends and the rest of finance begins.
Perplexity AI predicts that if a full-blown bull market returns in Q4, Bitcoin could reach $180,000 before January 1, 2027. The bullish range is estimated at $140,000 to $180,000, with a potential late-cycle surge that could push Bitcoin beyond $200,000.
Currently priced around $83,000, this would represent a gain of about 115% to reach $180,000. What’s noteworthy is that Bitcoin has already corrected significantly from its previous cycle high of about $126,200 on October 6, 2025, followed by a sharp decline during 2026.
Bitcoin has a history of producing substantial gains during strong market cycles. According to historical annual data, BTC gained approximately 154% in 2023 and 110% in 2024. If the current predictions hold true, we may see a similar increase on the horizon.
Perplexity AI Predicts Bitcoin to $180,000 if Bullish Catalysts Align: Does the Technical Analysis Back it Up?
Bitcoin recently broke out of a pattern of lower highs that had developed since May, reclaiming several key moving averages. According to Reuters’ technical analysis, $81,781 is considered important support, while $86,500 is a significant resistance level. Above that, the next technical targets are around $90,000 and $97,867.
CryptoQuant has noted a similar trend, calling $81,700 a key level because it aligns with Bitcoin’s 365-day moving average. Resistance levels above this are near $86,600 and $88,700.
Bitcoin’s first major test is surpassing the $85,000 level, followed by the $86,000 to $88,000 range. Bitcoin has pushed through this area, which matters because a sustained breakout would remove one of the largest technical obstacles between its current price and the $100,000 level.
The next major milestone is approximately $98,000. Beyond that, the market will be approaching the all-time high of $126,200, where it gets particularly interesting.
Once Bitcoin decisively breaks beyond $126,000, it will enter a phase of genuine price discovery. Historical resistance above that level is very limited. At that point, psychological targets such as $130,000, $140,000, and $150,000 could attract momentum traders and institutional investors.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Bitcoin Drops Dangerously Close to $80,000
A -2.5% daily drop is not too much to worry about for whales and those already heavily positioned at a much lower price. However, for those who bought over $80,000, things could be getting uncomfortable, which is why presale opportunities prove so popular.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning itself as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with full SVM integration. It boasts smart contract execution built for speed that outpaces Solana itself, while settling back to Bitcoin’s base-layer security.
As of today, the presale has raised more than $33.1M at a current token price of just $0.0136864, with staking rewards live at launch at a huge 35% APY.
The pitch: solve Bitcoin’s slow transactions, high fees, and lack of programmability without abandoning what makes BTC trusted in the first place. A Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles BTC transfers natively.
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Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Perplexity AI Predicts a Big Move for BTC in 2026 Even With Recent Dip appeared first on Cryptonews.
XRP lost its $1.50 price pivot today, sliding to $1.47 after a daily decline of about 3%. The break forces a binary question onto the chart: does the selling pressure showing up in spot-market volume resolve into a quick reclaim, or does it open the door to a deeper slide toward $1.40-$1.42?
The 200-day EMA is near $1.37, the level that would flip the medium-term structure from bullish to neutral. The token has been printing lower highs since a local peak near $1.63 on September 23, and a second attempt to clear $1.60 on September 25 failed as well. Since then, the decline has been slow and orderly: $1.55, then $1.52, then $1.50, and now $1.47.
There was no single dramatic session driving the move. Instead, the pattern reads as buyers simply not showing up, with every small bounce getting sold rather than extended. After the sharp rally in early September, that kind of cooling was overdue, but the open question is whether $1.50 was ever real support or just a round number the market is now testing.
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ETF Accumulation Narrative or Technical Pullback?
The chart itself frames this as a cooling-off period following the rally that carried the XRP price up nearly 50% from its August low near $1.00. RSI sits at a neutral 54, with no overbought or oversold readings to lean on. Price levels, not oscillators, are setting the tone for this week.
Separately, market data has pointed to sustained spot XRP ETF inflows running into the hundreds of millions of dollars over recent weeks, a trend some trackers frame as ongoing institutional accumulation beneath the price action. That flow data is useful context, but it is not confirmed as the driver of Monday’s drop, as the pullback below $1.50 traces cleanly to failed resistance tests and fading bid support.
The medium-term structure remains intact for now. XRP sits above its 200-day EMA at $1.37, which is curling upward for the first time since spring. This is a sign the longer trend has not broken, even as the shorter-term chart bleeds lower. A descending trendline from the late-August spike to $1.70 was cleared in mid-September, and that breakout is what fueled the run to $1.67 in the first place.
A second descending trendline, drawn from the September 23 high, is now the line bulls need to clear in October; left alone, it points toward $1.20 by mid-November. The levels on both sides of the current price are well defined.
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Reclaim $1.50 or Risk $1.37: XRP Price Next Move
The first job for bulls is straightforward: close a daily candle back above $1.50. Do that, and Monday’s drop reads as a fakeout rather than a breakdown, with $1.55 as the next confirmation level and $1.60-$1.63 as the target that would put the September 23 high back in play.
Fail to reclaim $1.50 in the next day or two, and $1.40-$1.42 becomes the level to watch, with the 200-day EMA at $1.37 as the line that actually matters for the medium-term outlook. A close below it would shift Ripple’s native asset from a bullish structure to a neutral one, opening room toward $1.30 and, in a broader crypto market sell-off scenario, $1.20.
$XRP just printed it's 6th weekly close beneath the 50 week EMA. The bears contInue to hold their defence line, with the bulls support below at $1.31 as a guardrail. (20 week EMA. For the time being, we remain compressed. https://t.co/7j6d2KB27L pic.twitter.com/r9kwHDmf2R
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ChartNerd
(@ChartNerdTA) September 28, 2026
For this week, the range is $1.37 to $1.60, with $1.50 sitting as the pivot in between. On technical analysis grounds, the base case is a dip toward $1.40-$1.42 that gets bought, followed by another attempt at reclaiming $1.50. A pattern consistent with pullbacks inside an uptrend rather than the start of a new downtrend.
The $1.80-$2.00 zone remains the valid medium-term target as long as $1.37 holds; lose it, and that target moves out of reach for the immediate term.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
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Crypto
Crypto’s New Playground: Casinos, Fed Bets, and Tokenized Stocks Blur the Line Between Trading and Gambling
The crypto industry has always had a talent for reinventing itself, but the latest wave of product launches suggests the industry is heading somewhere new: a place where trading, betting, and borrowing are becoming almost indistinguishable from one another. A cluster of recent developments — spanning live-dealer casino games, a new token listing tied to decentralized betting platforms, prediction markets built around Federal Reserve policy, sprawling perpetual futures exchanges, and DeFi protocols that let users borrow against tokenized shares of tech companies — paints a picture of an ecosystem racing to fuse speculation of every stripe into a single, crypto-native experience.
Take the world of crypto casinos, where live blackjack tables have reportedly begun to crowd out roulette wheels in lobby rankings. The dynamics driving that shift echo something familiar from traditional gambling: player preference for games that reward skill and pacing over pure chance. Blackjack lets players make decisions — when to hit, stand, split, or double down — giving a sense of agency that a spinning roulette wheel simply can’t replicate. In an industry built around instant, low-friction transactions using digital assets, that appeal seems to translate directly into engagement, with live-streamed dealers adding a layer of social, real-time theater that slot-style games lack.
That same appetite for interactive, decision-driven products is showing up elsewhere. Dexsport, a decentralized betting and casino platform, recently saw its native token, DESU, listed on the exchange MEXC — a milestone that matters less for the listing itself than for what it signals about the sector’s maturation. Token listings on major exchanges typically bring liquidity, visibility, and a degree of legitimacy that smaller platforms struggle to achieve on their own. For everyday users, a listing like this often translates into easier on-ramps, more trading pairs, and a stronger case that the underlying platform is being taken seriously by the broader market rather than treated as a niche experiment.
Meanwhile, speculation is moving well beyond games of chance and into the realm of macroeconomic policy. Prediction markets tracking the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions have become one of the more closely watched corners of crypto-adjacent finance heading into the back half of 2026. Traders on these platforms are effectively placing wagers on central bank behavior, turning monetary policy announcements into tradeable events. The appeal is straightforward: instead of relying solely on bond markets or futures tied to traditional finance, participants can now stake positions directly on whether the Fed will hold, cut, or raise rates, often with faster settlement and more granular contract structures than legacy markets offer. It’s a sign that prediction markets, once dismissed as a curiosity, are increasingly viewed as a legitimate barometer of trader sentiment on issues far removed from crypto prices themselves.
The appetite for exotic exposure is also evident in the perpetual futures space, where platforms like ApeX Omni have expanded their offerings well past the usual roster of Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts. With well over 120 perpetual markets now available, traders can reportedly take leveraged positions not just on major cryptocurrencies but on themes as far-flung as pre-IPO robotics companies. This kind of expansion reflects a broader trend of crypto exchanges positioning themselves as all-purpose speculation venues, offering leverage on virtually any asset class that generates enough trader interest — blurring the boundary between crypto trading and speculative bets on private, pre-public companies that would otherwise be inaccessible to retail investors.
Perhaps the clearest example of crypto finance colliding with traditional markets comes from Aave’s newest iteration. The protocol’s fourth version reportedly allows users to borrow USDC stablecoins against tokenized versions of Coinbase-linked tech stocks on the Base network. In practice, that means holders of tokenized equity exposure can unlock liquidity without selling their underlying positions — a mechanic long familiar to DeFi users who collateralize crypto assets, now extended to tokenized real-world securities. It’s a small but telling step toward a future where the wall between “crypto” and “traditional markets” continues to erode, with stocks, bonds, and other conventional assets increasingly represented on-chain and woven into the same lending and borrowing infrastructure that powers decentralized finance.
Taken together, these developments underscore a consistent theme: crypto platforms are no longer content to simply trade digital coins. They are building out entire ecosystems of speculation — casino games, prediction markets, leveraged derivatives, and collateralized lending — all designed to keep users engaged, liquid, and constantly exposed to new forms of risk and reward. Whether this convergence produces a more mature, diversified financial ecosystem or simply amplifies the volatility and risk-taking crypto is already known for remains an open question. What’s clear is that the industry’s appetite for expansion shows no signs of slowing down.
If there was a single theme running through the crypto world’s headlines this spring and summer, it was this: the industry that once promised to reinvent money has increasingly fused itself to the industry promising to reinvent everything else — artificial intelligence.
The result, according to a string of reports and commentary tracked by researcher-journalist Molly White and blogger David Gerard, is a landscape where political money, security failures and marketing absurdity are all converging in ways that ought to worry anyone paying attention.
Start with the money in politics. In a recent interview, White — who has spent years cataloguing where crypto industry cash flows in Washington — turned her attention to a new wrinkle: artificial intelligence companies adopting the same political playbook that crypto firms pioneered.
According to the discussion, OpenAI and Anthropic are now effectively running competing pro-AI super-PACs, pouring money into races much the way crypto-aligned PACs like Fairshake have done in recent election cycles. White reportedly highlighted a botched intervention in New York’s 12th congressional district as an example of the sums involved and the risk of these efforts backfiring.
The parallel is not incidental. Crypto’s political spending playbook — deploy industry money to shape friendly regulation and punish critics — was built over several election cycles and proved remarkably effective at getting crypto-friendly candidates elected and skeptics sidelined.
Watchers like White argue that AI companies, facing their own looming questions about regulation, safety and liability, are now borrowing that same toolkit almost wholesale. Whether AI’s political spending proves as consequential as crypto’s remains to be seen, but the early signs suggest deep-pocketed AI labs are not content to leave the lobbying playing field to blockchain interests alone.
Money and politics aside, the more immediate crypto news has been considerably more chaotic on the technical side. A case in point: an unofficial crypto wallet built on top of Elon Musk’s Grok AI was reportedly compromised through a combination of an NFT and a prompt injection attack — a technique in which malicious instructions are hidden inside content an AI model processes, tricking it into taking unauthorized actions.
The episode is being cited by critics as a vivid illustration of what happens when experimental AI agents are given direct access to cryptocurrency funds without adequate safeguards. As one commentator put it, the incident underscores a blunt truth: the push toward “agentic commerce,” in which AI systems autonomously manage transactions and wallets on a user’s behalf, currently looks a lot like an open invitation to fraud.
That warning fits a broader pattern. Crypto’s history is littered with hacks and exploits that followed hard on the heels of new technical hype cycles — DeFi protocols, bridges, NFT marketplaces — and the addition of AI agents with wallet access appears to be simply the latest frontier for attackers to probe.
Security researchers have long cautioned that combining large language models, which can be manipulated through carefully crafted inputs, with systems that move real money is a combination that demands far more rigorous testing than the industry has so far shown appetite for.
Then there is the sheer commercial strangeness of the AI-crypto convergence. Among the products making the rounds is “Gudtrip,” described in coverage as an AI agent vape pen built with blockchain technology — a mash-up that manages to combine three separate hype cycles (AI, crypto, and vaping) into a single device.
It’s the kind of product that invites eye-rolls even from people steeped in the industry, and it has become something of a symbol for critics who argue that “blockchain” and “AI agent” are increasingly being slapped onto unrelated consumer goods simply because the buzzwords still move product.
Labor practices are also getting the AI-crypto treatment. Reports have surfaced of AI companies experimenting with paying staff in AI-linked tokens rather than conventional money — an arrangement that echoes crypto’s long history of compensating workers and contractors in volatile, illiquid tokens instead of cash. Critics have been quick to note the obvious problem: a token’s value depends entirely on continued enthusiasm for the company issuing it, leaving employees exposed to exactly the kind of speculative risk that traditional salaries are designed to avoid. The practice, if it spreads, would import one of crypto’s more employee-unfriendly habits directly into the AI industry’s compensation structures.
Not everyone covering this convergence is doing so with a straight face. A satirical piece making the rounds — structured as a twist on the old “two cows” economics joke — skewered the fintech, AI, blockchain and crypto sectors in one go, imagining a “crypto” cow story where two digital cows produce “milk tokens” tradeable for millions but drinkable only by avatars in the metaverse, and a “hedge fund” version featuring robotic cows that befriend real cows just to steal their milk.
Silly as the format is, the satire lands because it captures something real: a sense among observers that these overlapping industries have become adept at generating elaborate financial and technical narratives that produce headlines and valuations long before they produce anything resembling durable value.
Taken together, these threads — political spending mirroring crypto’s playbook, an AI wallet hacked via prompt injection, blockchain-branded vape pens, token-based salaries, and no shortage of pointed satire — paint a picture of an industry moment defined less by a single breakthrough than by rapid, sometimes reckless, cross-pollination.
Crypto spent the better part of a decade building the infrastructure, the political machinery and the marketing instincts for turning speculative technology into cultural and financial weight. Now AI companies appear to be absorbing many of the same instincts, for better or worse, at a pace that leaves regulators, security researchers and workers alike scrambling to keep up.
Editor’s note: Much of the reporting referenced above originates from commentary and short-form blog coverage rather than in-depth investigative reporting, and some details — such as the specific financial scale of AI super-PAC spending or the full technical mechanics of the Grok wallet exploit — were not independently verifiable from the available material. Readers should treat figures and claims here as preliminary pending fuller reporting.
U.S. oil drilling site.
David McNew | Getty Images
Nearly half of the stocks in the S&P 500 are moving against the index with a negative beta, an unusual divergence that is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
About 45% of S&P 500 stocks have a negative three-month beta, according to a recent note from Goldman Sachs. The data closely aligns with CNBC’s finding that nearly 40% of S&P 500 stocks had a negative three-month beta versus the index, while 17% have a negative one-year beta, based on weekly returns.
Beta measures how a stock moves relative to the rest of the market. A negative beta means an individual stock’s returns moved in the opposite direction of the S&P 500 over the measured period.
The surge in stocks with a negative beta dovetails with other unusual market signals. The S&P rallied 1.5% last Monday. The same day 30 stocks touched a 52-week low while just 7 scored a new high. The last time the S&P 500 gained at least 1% while sitting within 1% of a new 52-week high and new lows outnumbered new highs was in December 1999, right before the very top of the dot-com boom, according to Jason Goepfert, founder of SentimenTrader.
The two indicators show that market indexes can remain at or close to records despite wide divergences among individual stocks.
Widening divide
The yawning gap largely reflects how concentrated the S&P 500 has become, according to Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial.
Mega-cap technology companies carry an outsized weight in the benchmark, meaning a strong performance from a small number of stocks can drive the index even when many others are moving the other way.
“It only takes a few of those mega caps names to work, and a lot of the smaller weighted stocks don’t need to work,” Turnquist told CNBC, pointing to unusually low correlations among S&P 500 stocks.
The same dynamic explains why the broader index can look relatively calm even when individual stocks are making large moves, said Bradley Krom, director of investing strategy at WisdomTree.
“Beta is a function of correlation and volatility,” Krom said. When stocks experience large moves at different times and for different reasons, those moves can largely offset one another at the index level.
In July this year, Alliance Bernstein, using one-year trailing returns, found an unprecedented share of U.S. stocks displaying negative beta as AI winners powered market gains.
Semiconductor makers, hardware companies and other AI infrastructure beneficiaries have benefited from enormous capital spending, while companies outside the AI trade have struggled to keep up.
“But a narrow market can also distort the signal investors receive from index returns. When a handful of companies dominate performance, many financially sound businesses may lag or even decline, simply because they aren’t tied directly to the most powerful market narrative,” wrote Kurt Feuerman, chief investment officer of Select U.S. Equity Portfolios at AllianceBernstein.
Negative energy
Energy stocks with negative beta are being driven by different forces.
“Another part of the other story is energy. That’s been pronounced this year: higher oil prices, higher energy stocks and then the rest of the market trades lower,” said Turnquist, seeing energy as an important part of the negative-beta story, alongside more defensive sectors.
Earlier this month, Evercore ISI used a six-month measure to call out 115 S&P 500 stocks with negative beta, a list skewed toward energy, utilities and consumer staples. The investment bank called the energy sector a “synthetic S&P 500 put option” because of the way it has reacted to geopolitical pressure.
If market leadership broadens out, Turnquist believes the number of negative-beta stocks could decline. But he expects dispersion to remain elevated as investors become remain selective toward beneficiaries of AI spending and seek returns there.
Krom at WisdomTree expects the recent extreme readings to eventually revert to the mean. Similar spikes appeared around the 1999-2000 dot-com bubble, he said, when market concentration and large moves in a narrow group of stocks also triggered unusual divergences.
Turnquist pushed back on comparing today with the dot-com era, leading tech companies now are more mature businesses with established revenue and products. Krom is on the same page. He said the individual pieces driving returns don’t have the same historical relationship they’ve had in the past.
“It is not the same market environment now versus 2000,” Krom said. The negative betas seen today boil “down to the amount of market concentration.”
Cryptocurrency no longer lives only in trading app screenshots and speculative headlines. A cluster of recent coverage suggests digital assets have settled into three very different corners of everyday life at once: the boardrooms of family offices moving nine-figure sums, the phones of ordinary Britons paying for a night out, and a growing ecosystem of explainer sites trying to make sense of it all for newcomers. Taken together, they paint a picture of an asset class that has stopped trying to prove itself and started simply getting used.
At the top end of the market, the mechanics of moving serious money in crypto increasingly mirror what has long happened on Wall Street. Selling a large position on the open market is a blunt instrument — dump a $20 million order into a standard exchange and the price can slide five to ten percent against you before the trade even completes, as algorithms and bots react to the visible order book.
High-net-worth investors and family offices have borrowed a page from traditional equities to avoid that problem, leaning on block trades negotiated privately between two parties and reported only after execution, dark pools where institutional orders are matched away from public view, and OTC desks that lock in a price before a trade ever touches the open market.
None of these tools are new in spirit — block trading dates back to the 1960s, and banks such as Credit Suisse pioneered dark-pool venues in the mid-2000s — but their extension into crypto shows how thoroughly digital assets have been absorbed into the plumbing of institutional finance, complete with all its discretion and negotiated pricing.
Further down the market, the story is less about avoiding slippage and more about convenience. A growing share of everyday spenders now treat crypto the way they treat a contactless card — something to tap and forget.
Much of that shift traces back to apps like Revolut, which began as a travel card and has since folded budgeting tools, instant transfers and built-in crypto purchases into a single interface. For users already comfortable buying fractions of Bitcoin or Ethereum on their phone, spending a small slice of a holding online no longer feels like a leap. Recent Pew Research figures cited in industry coverage suggest roughly one in five adults have used cryptocurrency in some form, evidence of just how far the technology has travelled from niche forums into ordinary financial habits. Faster networks and pound- or dollar-pegged stablecoins have also softened the volatility fears that once made spending crypto feel reckless.
That spending habit has, in turn, fed into digital entertainment, where a wave of offshore-licensed sites — often based in Malta, Curaçao or Gibraltar — have built their appeal specifically around crypto and app-based payments such as Revolut, alongside larger game libraries and bigger sign-up bonuses.
These platforms sit outside the UK’s domestic licensing system, which is precisely the draw for some users, including those who have self-excluded through Gamstop. The logic mirrors a broader pattern researchers have tracked in crypto adoption more generally: users start on a single centralised platform for convenience, then gradually spread activity across multiple services and self-custodied wallets as they grow more comfortable, seeking flexibility rather than a single gatekeeper. It’s worth being clear-eyed about what this means in practice — these offshore sites operate under lighter regulatory oversight than UK-licensed operators, and readers weighing them should treat player-protection tools and responsible-gambling warnings as essential reading, not fine print to skip.
Feeding all of this is a parallel boom in explainer content trying to translate crypto’s jargon — DeFi, staking, tokenomics, smart contracts — into plain English. Sites such as RobTheCoins.com have positioned themselves as educational hubs rather than exchanges or wallets, publishing guides on blockchain business models, crypto tax tools and the overlap between gaming and crypto economies.
That distinction matters, because the line between “content that explains crypto” and “a product that handles your money” is not always obvious to a casual reader, and confusing the two is exactly the kind of mistake that has burned newcomers before.
None of this amounts to a single dramatic headline. There is no exchange collapse or regulatory crackdown driving this particular news cycle. Instead, what emerges is a quieter, arguably more consequential trend: crypto is being absorbed into the ordinary architecture of modern finance and leisure, from the trading desks of the ultra-wealthy down to a tap-to-pay night out.
Whether that mainstreaming is entirely healthy is a separate question. Institutional tools like dark pools and OTC desks still lack the transparency of public markets, offshore gambling platforms carry real consumer-protection gaps, and no amount of friendly explainer content changes the fact that crypto remains a volatile, largely unregulated asset in most jurisdictions.
Readers tempted by any part of this ecosystem — whether it’s a block-trading conversation or a crypto-funded casino account — would do well to verify claims independently, check who is actually regulated, and remember that accessibility is not the same thing as same thing as safety.
A 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal was arrested in the Netherlands on September 16 on suspicion of aiding crypto hacking collective ShinyHunters.
Krebsonsecurity reports that Pepijn van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities for questioning in relation to ShinyHunters.
Police claim he’ll appear in the Rotterdam District Court on September 29, while local news reports the United States is also involved in his case.
Over three years ago, van der Stap carried out multiple acts of data theft and extortion under the moniker “Umbreon.”
Read more: Crypto hacking group ShinyHunters says it stole data of 5,000 FBI agents
Van der Stap was eventually arrested, convicted, and handed a four-year suspended sentence. He was released in December 2025.
While carrying out his criminal activities, he worked at cybersecurity startup Hadrian and volunteered at the nonprofit Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure.
He’s currently the offensive security lead at Neo Security, and described himself to Krebsonsecurity as a reformed convict.
ShinyHunters attacked FBI days after van der Stap’s arrest
Just six days after van der Stap’s arrest, ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for hacking and stealing the data of 5,000 FBI agents.
This attack also manipulated the FBI’s job page to display a picture of the Pokémon Umbreon.
Krebsonsecurity reports that the attack represented a shift in ShinyHunters’ usual attacks while the group is under the leadership of a teenager based in Amman, Jordan, who goes by the nickname “Rey.”
Rey reportedly merged the group with fellow hacking groups Scattered Spider and LAPSUS$ to become ScatteredLapsussHunters.
Read more: Crypto hackers target Hinge and Match Group in data leak
Sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation told the publication that Rey had “ongoing beef” with van der Stap, and that Umbreon’s inclusion was possibly an attempt by Rey to shift blame towards van der Stap.
ShinyHunters has also been linked to the hacking of the Netherlands telecommunications provider Odido last February.
Personal data, including bank account and passport numbers, of six million Odido customers were leaked.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Strategy has acquired another 1,665 BTC for approximately $142.7 million while spending $151.7 million to repurchase STRC preferred shares during the week ended Sept. 27.
Summary
- Strategy bought 1,665 BTC for $142.7 million, lifting total Bitcoin holdings to 847,666 coins overall.
- Strategy repurchased 1,534,530 STRC shares for $151.7 million during the September 21 to 27 period.
- MSTR sales generated $246.2 million net proceeds, with no preferred shares issued during the week.
- Strategy held $5.02 billion in USD Reserve and $1.00 billion in deployable USD Cash overall.
- Bitcoin holdings cost $63.95 billion in aggregate, averaging $75,437 per coin including fees and expenses.
Strategy disclosed the transactions in a Sept. 28 Form 8-K, showing that the company paid an average of $85,681 per BTC, including fees and expenses, between Sept. 21 and Sept. 27. The purchase lifted its Bitcoin holdings to 847,666 BTC.
During the same period, Strategy sold 1,469,165 MSTR shares through its at-the-market program, generating $246.2 million in net proceeds. Of that amount, $142.7 million funded the Bitcoin purchases and $103.5 million went toward STRC repurchases.
The company issued no STRF, STRC, STRK or STRD preferred shares through its ATM programs during the week.
Strategy Bitcoin holdings reach 847,666 BTC
Following the latest purchase, Strategy held 847,666 BTC acquired for an aggregate $63.95 billion. Its average acquisition cost stood at $75,437 per BTC, including fees and expenses.
The latest addition follows Strategy’s 950 BTC purchase after a two-week buying pause reported for the previous week. The company spent $75.7 million on that acquisition at an average price of $79,670 per BTC, increasing holdings at the time to 846,000 BTC.
Strategy’s new $85,681 average purchase price for the Sept. 21-27 period was above Bitcoin’s latest market price. CoinGecko shows BTC trading near $83,401 at the latest reading, around 2.7% below Strategy’s average price for the latest purchase.
At that market price, Strategy’s 847,666 BTC position would be worth roughly $70.7 billion. The calculation uses a live market price and therefore differs from the company’s recorded acquisition cost.
STRC repurchases reach another $151.7 million
Alongside the Bitcoin acquisition, Strategy repurchased 1,534,530 shares of its Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, or STRC, for approximately $151.7 million.
The latest transaction continues a repurchase program that Strategy began earlier in 2026. After the latest week, $723.5 million of authorization remained under its digital credit securities repurchase program, according to the filing.
Strategy’s previous $174 million STRC repurchase came during the Sept. 14-20 period, when the company spent more on preferred-stock repurchases than on its $75.7 million Bitcoin purchase.
Earlier in September, Strategy doubled its digital credit securities repurchase authorization to $2 billion after spending $176.3 million on STRC during a week when it bought no Bitcoin.
Strategy said in July that it intends to repurchase STRC while the preferred stock trades below its $100 stated amount, subject to market conditions, liquidity and other capital priorities.
MSTR sales funded both transactions
Strategy financed the latest Bitcoin purchase and part of the STRC repurchase through MSTR common-stock sales.
The company raised $246.2 million in net proceeds by selling 1,469,165 MSTR shares between Sept. 21 and Sept. 27. The filing assigns $142.7 million of those proceeds to Bitcoin purchases and $103.5 million to STRC buybacks.
A further $48.1 million of the STRC repurchase came from Strategy’s USD Cash balance. Over the same period, the company used $22.1 million from its separate USD Reserve to pay preferred-stock dividends.
Strategy reported $18.84 billion of additional MSTR issuance capacity under its ATM program as of Sept. 27. No preferred shares were sold during the latest reporting period.
The latest funding structure differs from the previous week, when Strategy made no ATM stock sales and used existing cash to fund its Bitcoin purchase and STRC repurchases.
Strategy keeps $6.02 billion in dollar assets
Strategy ended Sept. 27 with a $5.02 billion USD Reserve and $1.00 billion in USD Cash, giving the company a combined $6.02 billion across the two balances.
The company defines the USD Reserve as capital designated to support preferred-stock dividends and interest payments on outstanding debt. USD Cash is maintained separately for Bitcoin purchases, reserve additions, capital management and other treasury uses.
The cash framework has changed materially since July, when Strategy built a $3.75 billion reserve while Bitcoin buying remained paused.
Strategy’s board expanded its STRC repurchase program during September while continuing to manage Bitcoin purchases, common-stock issuance and preferred-stock obligations through separate pools of capital.
As of Sept. 27, the company still had $723.5 million available under its digital credit securities repurchase authorization and $1 billion available under its separate MSTR common-stock repurchase program.
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