Hold My Beer

Despite a whole slew of negative news, crypto and the wider markets have shrugged off the headlines and continued to show strength. Today’s forward guidance assesses all the hits markets took over the course of an eventful week and looks at what comes next when it comes to interest rates.

As far as crypto was concerned, the failure of the Clarity Act to pass its Senate cloture vote was the biggest blow to market morale. However, while the industry’s disappointment is palpable, the door is still just about open for Clarity to sneak through and besides, in the absence of a legislative green light, the regulators are stepping in to lead the way. Who would have thought just a few years ago that crypto would be looking to the SEC for comfort? Full story below.

🩸Retire Your Bloodline 🩸

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You can watch that video here.

📈 Crypto Market Forecast 📈

The week delivered everything the market was dreading and yet prices refused to behave as expected. On Tuesday, the Clarity Act cloture vote failed 49-50. The Fed hiked 25 basis points on Wednesday in a unanimous vote, taking rates to 3.75%-4%. And then the Bank of Japan raised its rate to 1.25%, the highest level since 1995. Bitcoin shrugged off all three and is sitting at $81k at the time of writing.

The resilience is worth examining carefully. The Fed hike was unanimously expected and the Clarity Act failure was widely anticipated after it became clear that Democrats were not going to budge when it came to the ethics provisions. Meanwhile, the BOJ move had been flagged at an 80%+ probability for weeks. So, none of these were surprises. What the market had really feared though was a hawkish Warsh press conference that signalled more hikes were coming. Instead, the language was data-dependent enough to leave the November decision genuinely open-ended. Markets seemed to read that as the end of the tightening cycle being in sight, not the beginning of a new one.

On the technical side of things, BTC has reclaimed the 50-week SMA - the level that capped the late August rally for weeks. A sustained weekly close above this threshold would be the clearest confirmation yet that the recovery from June's low is intact and not a failed breakout. The next meaningful resistance is $84,000, which sits at the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement of the full ATH-to-low move, and coincides with the same ratio on the broader cycle chart. A Golden Cross (50-day SMA crossing the 200-day) formed this week - a historically bullish signal that, while not infallible, has preceded sustained upward moves in four of the last five instances.

This is where things get interesting, because the BOJ decision introduces a dynamic that could either accelerate or disrupt the crypto recovery. The Bank of Japan hiked into yen weakness - the yen actually fell after the decision, which is counterintuitive. This happened because the vote was 7-2 (two dissenters), signalling that the pace of future normalisation is uncertain. Bloomberg's survey of BOJ watchers now sees a follow-up hike by January 2027. When the BOJ and the Fed are both hiking simultaneously, the carry trade - borrowing cheaply in yen to buy risk assets - partially unwinds. That dynamic caused the August 2024 global sell-off. It has not triggered the same severity this time, but it is worth tracking. If the yen strengthens sharply against the dollar in the coming weeks as rate differentials narrow, expect volatility to spike.

For those coming weeks, the primary catalysts shift from central bank decisions to data. The PCE price index and consumer spending data come later in September and will be the first read on whether the Fed's aggressive posture is actually eating into demand. If the PCE comes in cooler than expected, it strengthens the case for a hold in November and removes the next hike risk from the picture. If it comes in hot, a hike at the November meeting becomes a thing again.

In sum then, the week produced an improbably constructive outcome for Bitcoin. Three major macro events were resolved and risk assets absorbed all of them. The technical picture has improved materially with the 50-week SMA reclaimed. The macro tail risks have not disappeared - the BOJ carry trade, elevated yields, and the energy situation in the Middle East are all alive and kicking. But the base case for the coming weeks is that Bitcoin holds above $80k and targets $84k-$87k if the PCE data cooperates. The structural bottom confirmed in June has not yet been challenged. The grind higher continues.

😥 No Clarity? 😥

It's been a rough old week for crypto lobbyists in Washington.

On Tuesday, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act failed a Senate cloture vote 49-50, well short of the 60 votes it needed to reach the floor. This comes just a year after the House passed the same bill 294-134 with more than 70 Democrats on board.

This time around, in addition to every Democrat voting no, we saw four Republicans do the same: Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis. While three of those Republican ‘No’ votes were on merits, Tillis's no was procedural.

You see, under Senate rules, only a senator who voted with the prevailing side (or did not vote) can immediately enter a motion to reconsider. Tillis switched his vote at the last moment so that, as a member of the winning side, he could file a motion to reconsider and keep a path back to the floor open.

The result left many industry participants visibly disappointed. After all, the crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this bill over the past few years. Lead Republican negotiator Cynthia Lummis even made one final pitch on the floor, arguing the final text was the product of “good faith” and “compromise” containing more than 120 Democrat-requested changes after a year of talks. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to move a single Democrat senator.

So, how did a bill with this much momentum fall apart in the last leg of the race? Well, the dispute that ultimately sank Clarity was only partly about market structure. Negotiators had hashed out more than 600 pages of text, and the core idea of splitting oversight between the SEC and the CFTC had broad support across both parties.

However, the one area they could not meet eye-to-eye was ethics. Democrats wanted binding language prohibiting the president and senior officials from profiting from crypto while drafting the legislation that governs it. Notably, this demand hardened after president Trump disclosed that he and his family earned $1.4 billion from crypto ventures last year.

To their credit, over the weekend before the vote, Republicans had offered new language in the bill that effectively prevented federally-elected officials and their spouses from issuing their own cryptocurrencies. It also forced them to divest significant crypto stakes. However, critics argued that the divestment language was loose enough for the president to sidestep it, and Democrats objected to handing enforcement to a Justice Department currently led by Trump's former personal attorney.

That said, while the ethics battle was the proximate blocker, it wasn't the only one. Notably, Republicans had rejected a Democratic counteroffer the night before the vote that also sought changes to the bill's DeFi provisions and protections tied to tribal gaming law. This gave fence sitters a reason to vote no.

And the main reason a few Republicans had voted no was due to the bill’s stablecoin yield language. For context, both the GENIUS Act and Clarity expressly prohibited issuers and platforms from offering yield on idle stablecoin holdings. However, Clarity contained language that allowed platforms to offer “rewards” linked to stablecoins as long as they were explicitly “activity based.” Examples cited include rewards tied to user activity such as loyalty, transactions, payments-linked incentives and subscription programs, provided they don't resemble interest.

The banking lobby claimed this was a problem. Notably, in July, the ABA, ICBA and 76 state banking associations sent a letter warning that loopholes in Section 404 could let stablecoin rewards programmes pull deposits away from community banks. Republicans Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran admitted that this was the reason they rejected the bill.

Not to mention, the vote came about seven weeks before the 2026 midterms. Voting yes would have given the White House a signature win while Democrats were campaigning against Trump’s crypto profits. It would have been a politically expensive move for the Democrats.

That said, the bill’s failure at the cloture vote seems to have had a bigger negative impact on the stocks of digital asset businesses than the digital asset market itself. Notably, while Bitcoin briefly slipped below $75,000 - a roughly 5% dip before recovering most of it - the stocks of companies like Coinbase and Circle fell by roughly 10%, with Robinhood, Strategy, Galaxy and the miners all following them lower.

To be fair, this shouldn’t be that surprising. After all, the bill hardly changes the legal stance on BTC. Companies like Coinbase and Circle, on the other hand, depend on regulatory permission in the US to conduct their business.

On the bright side, setbacks to getting crypto legislation passed are not new to any of us. After all, even the GENIUS Act failed its first cloture vote 48-49 in May 2025, before clearing a second one 66-32 just eleven days later.

And on that note, Clarity remains on the Senate calendar, while Tillis's motion to reconsider means Majority Leader John Thune can bring the same cloture question back without restarting the process. For what it’s worth, seven of the Democrats who had spent months negotiating Clarity, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Mark Warner and Ruben Gallego, released a statement on Wednesday calling the vote a setback and saying they remain committed to getting the legislation passed.

That said, this comeback is on a deadline. The Senate is set to break for recess in early October and the lame-duck session after the 3rd November midterms will be crowded with spending bills. In other words, if nothing passes before the new Congress is seated in January, the bill starts from scratch. Most see this as a very narrow window, with Polymarket pricing Clarity becoming law this year at around 8%.

As it stands now, the situation is bleak, although it isn’t a complete dead end just yet. Beyond the halls of Congress, both the SEC and CFTC seem to be moving forward with their own guidance on digital assets. Just a day after the vote, SEC Chair Paul Atkins posted that the Commission would act decisively within its statutory authority "with or without legislation."

Roughly 24 hours later, the SEC issued its long-awaited Innovation Exemption. To give you the quick TLDR, the order exempts “Tokenised Securities Venues (TSV)” from registering as exchanges, letting them trade tokenised versions of US-listed stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools. Liquidity providers in those pools also get relief from dealer registration.

Though these exemptions come with their own set of conditions. Notably, TSVs trade in two tiers, capped at 75 symbols and 0.25% of the prior month's average daily volume at the lower one, rising to 250 symbols and 2.5% at the higher. Every token has to carry the same rights as the underlying share, and before listing a stock tokenised by an unaffiliated third party, a venue must give the issuer written notice and a 30-day window to object. As some of you may know, this ties directly to the recent objection we saw from AMC’s CEO.

It also requires smart contracts to be publicly auditable and deployed on permissionless ledgers. And in the event of a trading halt on the primary exchange due to a market-wide circuit breaker, a news-pending halt or an SEC suspension, the TVS must also stop trading the related tokenised equity. The exemption runs for five years and comes with a request for public comment. While the guardrails may seem restrictive at first glance, many see it as a welcome move, since it opens up an onshore path for tokenised equities.

CFTC Chair Michael Selig also echoed a similar message to Atkins, stating that the agency is "locked in and ready to ship" its rules for crypto markets. That said, Selig is currently the only sitting commissioner on a body designed to have five, effectively placing the entire burden on one man.

At the end of the day, the fact remains that agency rulemaking is a temporary solution. After all, a future Commission can amend or repeal its own rules and courts can strike them down. Atkins himself has conceded that the SEC's crypto rules won't be durable without a law underpinning them. Exemptive orders and interpretive guidance also sit on shakier legal ground since Loper Bright, with courts no longer deferring to an agency's own reading of an ambiguous statute. For now, the immediate concern is to see if we can get the bill passed without starting from scratch. Until a statute exists, every rule the SEC and CFTC ship this year are nothing more than temporary placeholders.

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🏆 What's New at CoinBureau.com This Week? 🏆

* CoinTracking Review 2026: Pricing, Accuracy, Features & Verdict
* Cryptocurrency vs Gold: Is Bitcoin or Gold the Better Investment in 2026?
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* Best Binance Alternatives in 2026: Top Options for Replacing Binance
* 7 Best Crypto Chart Apps for 2026: Free & Pro Chart Apps  
* Edge Wallet Review 2026: Is It Safe and Worth Using?

📖 Quote of the Week 📖

Given the failure of the Clarity Act this week, we thought we would leave you with one of our favourite quotes:

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts" - Winston Churchill

Team Coin Bureau

Disclosure: Authors may own cryptoassets named in this newsletter. These are unqualified opinions, and a Coin Bureau newsletter, is meant for informational purposes only. It is not meant to serve as investment advice. Please consult with your investment, tax, or legal advisor.