ICE Goes Onchain, Coinbase Clears Its Own Trades, and the SEC Moves Where the Senate Stalled

The Senate could not get the Clarity Act over the line last month, and last week showed what happens to market structure when a bill stalls: regulators and incumbents fill the gap. The SEC proposed a custody framework for advisers and funds, the NYSE's parent company moved to list tokenized stocks with OKX, Coinbase finished assembling a fully licensed derivatives stack, and the ECB set out three ways to put central bank money onchain. Prices held near multi-month highs on soft US jobs data, but the more consequential decisions were made by rule writers and exchange operators.

Welcome to a new week in crypto.

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Weak payrolls, a $2.65 billion ETF month, and a push toward $87,000

Bitcoin traded near $85,700 on Monday and Ether near $2,710, roughly flat on the week after Bitcoin briefly topped $87,000 on Friday, its highest level since January. September closed with Bitcoin up 6.4%. The move through $85,000 cleared a major wall: Glassnode said sellers partly filled and then pulled their asks there, leaving the next large sell cluster near $87,000 with roughly half the volume. Bitcoin is up about 14.6% from its September 15 low of $74,968.

The catalyst was macro. US nonfarm payrolls rose by only 29,000 in September against forecasts of 84,000 to 93,000, and unemployment ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1%, reducing the odds of an October Fed rate hike. That followed a softer August PCE reading, with core PCE up 0.2% on the month and 3.0% on the year. "Weak is not automatically bullish," Sygnum Bank's Fabian Dori said, pointing to liquidity as the real driver.

Institutional demand held up underneath, with a pause in the middle. US spot bitcoin ETFs drew $2.65 billion in September, the second-largest monthly total since October 2025 behind August's $3.52 billion, though a nine-day, $3.1 billion inflow streak ended Wednesday with $148.7 million of outflows. The funds hold over $100 billion in assets and are up $970 million year to date. Ether ETFs took in $832 million for the month, down from $1.85 billion in August. QCP Capital marked $87,400 as the "gateway to $90,000," and the next labor-market read arrives with the October 8 jobless claims report.

OKX and NYSE parent ICE move to list tokenized US stocks

OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, notified the SEC on Monday of plans to launch a venue for tokenized US-listed stocks. It would operate under the SEC's innovation exemption, issued in September, which allows qualifying venues to trade tokenized equities without registering as an exchange. The permissioned, onchain venue would run on X Layer and cover more than 60 US companies, among them Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Coinbase, Robinhood and Circle. Issuers have 30 days to opt out.

OKXICE cochair Andrew Cuomo called it "a landmark step toward a truly global, 24/7 Wall Street." OKX CEO Star Xu said full shareholder rights are what make onchain ownership real.

The exemption has limits. Robinhood's crypto chief Johann Kerbrat said the order caps trading volume and the types of assets that can be tokenized, and that Robinhood's offshore stock-token volume is already approaching some of those limits. Robinhood sells stock tokens in more than 120 countries but not to US users, and plans to add in-kind redemption and voting rights. Kerbrat called the SEC's stance a positive signal, saying it wants to work toward tokenization.

Coinbase completes its derivatives stack with a CFTC clearing license

The CFTC approved Coinbase Clearing LLC as a derivatives clearing organization on September 28, adding a clearinghouse to the exchange's existing futures commission merchant and designated contract market registrations. The USDC-native clearinghouse can clear fully collateralized futures, options on futures and swaps. Leveraged products, including Coinbase's margined derivatives business and its planned single-stock perpetuals, will continue to use outside clearing partners.

Coinbase said it can now create and settle fully collateralized contracts directly, which it expects to speed product development and make operations more efficient.

The consolidation drew a warning from BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, who said the Clarity Act's failure left US capital markets exposed as crypto firms combine exchange, brokerage and custody functions. Exchanges, he said, have never held custody of assets before, and he compared the counterparty risk to Lehman's 2008 collapse, but with a major exchange at the center.

SEC proposes a custody path for advisers and funds

On Thursday the SEC unveiled a proposal on crypto custody for investment advisers and regulated funds. It would permit self-custody in limited cases where no qualified custodian exists and allow state trust companies to hold client and fund crypto assets. The comment period runs 60 days.

The proposal follows the Senate's failed Clarity vote and the SEC's earlier innovation exemption, and it fits a pattern of the agency building the rulebook itself. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said more regulatory proposals are on the horizon. Commissioner Hester Peirce said true self-custody is not for everyone, but that many crypto owners value controlling their assets directly.

The Senate rejected a motion to advance Clarity 49 to 50 on September 15, and Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan argued in a memo that the failure produced better rules, faster. Stablecoin rewards stayed intact, established exchanges avoided a new national licensing path for rivals, and the SEC issued its five-year tokenization exemption within days. The risk, he wrote, is that a future administration could change course where Congress has not fixed the rules in law.

The ECB sets out three ways to put central bank money onchain

ECB Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel presented the framework Thursday at the Bank of England's Future of Money conference in London. The first model has the ECB issue reserves directly on a programmable platform. The second keeps the existing real-time gross settlement system and links it to DLT platforms through an interoperability layer, with reserves remaining untokenized. The third has tokenized reserves held at the central bank back settlement tokens that function as private claims.

Schnabel said tokenization makes transactions "more programmable and atomic," allowing assets and payments to move at the same moment. Two ECB projects sit behind the framework: Pontes, launched in September to provide tokenized central bank money for DLT transactions, and Appia, which is studying unified ledgers, interconnected networks and multiple shared ledgers. Separately, Lloyds' annual survey found 71% of senior decision-makers at UK financial institutions expect tokenization to reshape financial services.

Circle and Hyperliquid press Brussels in the MiCA review, and the FCA opens its door

The MiCA consultation closed September 30 after an extension from August 31, and two of the loudest filings came from Circle and the Hyperliquid Policy Center. Circle targeted the stablecoin reserve rules, noting that only 3 of the top 25 global stablecoins are MiCA-regulated and arguing the gap is not a shortage of regulated issuers. It wants the mandatory 30% to 60% bank deposit floors removed along with caps on sovereign debt and single-bank exposure, a position that echoes the ECB's own call to scrap deposit minimums. Hyperliquid's group, led by CEO Jake Chervinsky, argued that perpetual futures belong under MiFID II rather than MiCA. Deutsche Börse proposed a separate category for settlement e-money tokens.

Across the Channel, the UK FCA began accepting crypto authorization applications on September 30. The deadline is February 28, 2027, ahead of the new regime taking effect October 25, 2027. Existing Money Laundering Regulations registrations will not convert automatically, and the FCA stressed approval is not guaranteed. Reserve composition and settlement design are the questions now shaping how euro and dollar stablecoins reach institutions, the flow Finery Markets builds for.

Citi and Lloyds put stablecoin settlement into bank workflows

Citigroup and Coinbase expanded the partnership they announced in October 2025 with two US products. Coinbase Virtual Accounts, built on Citi's Virtual Account Wallet, lets customers accept, hold and pay in fiat with automatic conversion to stablecoins. Spring by Citi lets the bank's institutional clients accept stablecoin payments, with Coinbase handling the rails and converting to fiat for settlement. Neither requires merchants to manage digital assets directly.

In the UK, Lloyds Banking Group and Visa settled $750,000 in USDC over a seven-day live cross-border pilot, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour including over weekends. The USDC was bought through UK-regulated exchange Archax and booked through Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey. Lloyds ran its own node on Canton Network while Visa used a separate public blockchain. Lloyds' head of digital assets, Peter Left, said the trial moved the work "beyond theory."

A Senate report puts Tether's USDT at the center of Iranian finance

A 28-page report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released by its top Democrat Richard Blumenthal, analyzed 846 sanctioned crypto wallets tied to Iran. It found that 87% of 757 wallets involved in Iranian terrorism financing predominantly used USDT, and alleged Tether repeatedly failed to freeze wallets despite evidence of Iranian links and weak anti-money-laundering enforcement. Blumenthal said Tether had become central to Iran's shadow banking system.

Tether said it helped freeze $550 million of USDT linked to Iran over the past year. CEO Paolo Ardoino argued that public blockchains give authorities a view of fund movements that does not exist with cash.

Treasury companies keep buying, selling and building balance sheets

Strategy bought 334 BTC for about $28.7 million between September 28 and October 4 at an average of $85,838.80, lifting holdings to a record 848,000 BTC, more than 4% of supply, bought at an average of $75,440.70. It also repurchased 1.77 million STRC preferred shares for about $176.3 million, and ended the week with a $4.88 billion USD reserve. Strategy shares fell 7.1% last week to $160.01.

Metaplanet sold 10,000 BTC for $790 million in the third quarter and bought back 11,000 BTC for $950 million, ending at 44,000 BTC, to "demonstrate liquidity" ahead of plans to seek a credit rating. It now targets 10% to 15% of assets in strategic investments, including income-generating securities, and said its options-income business has fallen short of initial expectations. Bitmine added 15,112 ETH to reach 6,016,414 ETH, or 4.9% of supply, with 84% staked. Chairman Tom Lee said ether outperformed the S&P 500 by 6,832 basis points in the third quarter.

Evernorth shareholders approved a $1 billion XRP treasury deal on October 1, with closing expected October 7 and a Nasdaq debut under XRPN on October 8. It holds about 347 million XRP and expects roughly 473 million at closing.

Bitwise lists the first US spot NEAR ETF, with staking

Bitwise launched its NEAR ETF on NYSE Arca on September 29 under the ticker NRR, the first US spot NEAR product. It charges a 0.75% management fee and stakes its NEAR in-house, with rewards flowing to shareholders through NAV. NEAR traded near $4.93 with a market capitalization of about $6.5 billion at launch.

Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley pitched NEAR as infrastructure for an economy in which autonomous agents transact. The fund joins Bitwise's single-asset lineup covering bitcoin, ether, Solana, XRP and Hyperliquid. Injective's CEO, Eric Chen, said at Korea Blockchain Week on Monday that US INJ ETFs should arrive well before 2027, with 21Shares and Canary applications both amended in September.

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