The Sept. 10 to Sept. 11 news cycle brought a dense mix of crypto financing, regulation, product launches and macro signals. People familiar with the matter said Nasdaq Inc. is investing $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, valuing the company at $21 billion and deepening a partnership announced in March. In Washington, U.S. Senate Republicans released a 630-page revised version of the Clarity Act ahead of a Sept. 15 procedural vote, including a requirement that non-decentralized DeFi protocols register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Elsewhere, Coinbase struck a deal with payments infrastructure provider Moov to bring stablecoin acceptance, settlement and real-time money movement to more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions. Binance Alpha opened the third round of its Block Street airdrop, Spark said it will shut SparkLend on Gnosis Chain on Sept. 14, and Liquid Network said block production has resumed after a hack-related disruption, though transactions remain paused. Markets were also driven by macro data. U.S. producer prices rose 5.4% year over year in August, above expectations, while CME-based pricing showed the probability of a September Fed rate increase rising to 71.3%. Analysts and market commentators tied the inflation print and higher bond yields to pressure across risk assets, with bitcoin repeatedly discussed around support near $75,000 and resistance in the $83,000 to $85,000 range.

Bonk Guy said in a post on X that after revisiting USELESS and its relative performance against major meme coins, he found the token trading at historical highs against PEPE, DOGE, PENGU, WIF, FARTCOIN, BONK, SPX and SOL. He said nearly every observable indicator points to USELESS potentially becoming the leading meme coin of the current market cycle, with a market capitalization that could reach several billion dollars. He also noted that USELESS has continued to attract a large number of new holders during the latest market pullback. In his view, as long as the price stays within the current range before the fourth quarter arrives, any pullback in USELESS is worth buying aggressively.

Venice’s VVV token surged after a public dispute involving OpenAI and an NYU mathematician put fresh attention on a question the project has been pushing since early 2025: whether private exchanges with AI systems could end up informing someone else’s work. Decrypt’s Morning Minute said VVV climbed 40% to $27 and also noted a 34% move to $24.77 on Tuesday as trading volume jumped sharply. The report framed Venice as an AI platform built around local privacy. Founded by ShapeShift creator Erik Voorhees, the project says prompts stay on a user’s device instead of company servers. It uses open-source models, has no content filters, and does not require an account. VVV is used as an access key tied to API inference capacity, while DIEM is minted by locking staked VVV and grants $1 in daily API credit in perpetuity. Decrypt’s newsletter also ran through a broad market snapshot: BTC rose 2% to $79.5k, ETH gained 2% to $2,510, SOL added 2% to $104, and ZEC climbed 9% to $1,264. The piece also covered ETF outflows, Strategy’s $176.3 million STRC buyback, Bitmine’s larger ETH position, rising Stonkfun revenue, Circle’s planned $400 million stock deal for Tazapay, and mostly flat NFT blue chips.

Bitcoin slipped 0.72% to $78,524 on Tuesday after a 20% rally, while U.S. stocks also weakened as oil prices moved toward $100 a barrel following renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments, and higher energy costs are feeding fresh inflation concerns ahead of the Federal Reserve’s September meeting. Markets are pricing about a 57% chance of a 25-basis-point rate hike at the Fed’s September 15-16 meeting. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 614.88 points, or 1.15%, to 52,799.37, while the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.19% to 26,457.73. The S&P 500 was down 0.37% at 7,689.80 and remains close to its August 13 record close of 7,798.99. HSBC raised its year-end S&P 500 target to 8,100. Bitcoin’s technical setup remains broadly bullish. Its key retracement zone sits between $73,986 and $75,569, while RSI is 60.4 and ADX is 47.2. The EMA50 remains below the EMA200, though a golden cross could emerge if momentum holds. On Myriad, traders put a 78.4% chance on Bitcoin reaching $84,000 before falling to $55,000, little changed from 77% a week earlier.

Decrypt’s latest Morning Minute said on-chain trading terminals handled $6.35 billion in volume last week, marking their biggest week since the TRUMP launch in January 2025. Fomo processed $2.38 billion and gmgn’s trading bot handled $2.07 billion, meaning the two apps made up roughly 70% of total flow. Pump.fun’s app posted $489.5 million, while basedbot logged $450.5 million. The newsletter tied the spike to a run in meme coins and infrastructure tokens such as ZCAT, Stonk, MEME, and Marscoin, with PONS rising past a $600 million valuation and leading activity in the Robinhood Chain ecosystem. At the same time, the author argued broader DEX data does not yet confirm a local market top: DeFiLlama-tracked DEX volume reached $9.18 billion on the day and $217.33 billion over 30 days, up 1.81% on the week, but still around 20% of the highs seen in early 2025. The piece also covered macro and market moves, including Bitcoin’s 90-day correlation with gold rising to 0.56, the highest since tracking began in 2017, and Friday net inflows of $175 million into spot Bitcoin ETFs and $26 million into Ether ETFs. Other items included Solana’s upcoming transaction-size increase, progress on Ethereum proposal EIP-8141, the planned LAPTOP token launch on Base by Hunter Biden, and weekend moves across meme coins, protocol revenue rankings, and NFTs.

Christopher Waller said Thursday he would be inclined to support holding rates steady if inflation data keeps improving, and crypto markets reacted fast. Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000 and briefly topped $81,100, while the Dow added 453 points and more than 119,000 traders were liquidated for over $500 million. Spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $731 million, their largest net inflow since January, and ether funds added $141 million. Altcoins moved sharply higher too, with XRP up 7.8%, BNB and Solana each rising about 5%, Ether gaining 4.7% to $2,497 and Zcash jumping 18% to a new all-time high above $1,000. Riskier names were even wilder: PONS surged 56%, Lighter gained 16.8%, Ethena rose 13.6%, Arbitrum added 12% and SPX6900 climbed 13.2%. The report also noted fresh product and policy developments, including Polymarket Perps, Coinbase’s SEC filings for single-stock perpetual futures, Standard Chartered’s institutional spot crypto trading in Dubai, and a SoFi-Kraken deal linking dollar settlement and crypto order flow.

Strategy CEO Phong Le said the company was right to sell Bitcoin near $62,200 and later buy back at $80,318, arguing the trades were driven by financing conditions rather than price alone. According to Decrypt’s Morning Minute newsletter, Strategy sold 6,916 BTC in four tranches from late June through mid-August, then bought 4,603 BTC last week. Le said the sale helped fund STRC dividends at a time when issuing equity had become expensive, while renewed purchases made sense once MSTR traded at a premium again. During the roughly two-month pause, the company raised assets to $72 billion, built about $7 billion in dollar reserves, and reduced net debt from around $7 billion to zero. The report also said Strategy now holds 845,050 BTC worth about $65.4 billion. Elsewhere, Bitcoin ETFs posted $101 million in net inflows on Wednesday, Ethereum ETFs saw $48 million in net outflows, Kraken parent Payward pushed its IPO timeline to no earlier than Q2 2027, and Binance recorded more than $1 billion in August stablecoin inflows.

Bitcoin opened September on weaker footing after posting a 25% gain in August, its strongest monthly rise since November 2024 and its best August performance since 2017, according to Decrypt’s Morning Minute newsletter by Tyler Warner. The piece says BTC fell below $77,000 as broader risk markets softened, with oil prices and sovereign bond yields climbing. Warner notes that September has historically been Bitcoin’s weakest month on average since 2013, though the last three Septembers have still finished in positive territory. The newsletter ties current pressure to macro developments. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh emphasized elevated inflation in his Jackson Hole speech on Friday, while the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.784% and markets priced in a 66% chance of a 25-basis-point hike at the September 16 meeting. WTI crude also moved to $88 a barrel, up 2% on the day and its highest level since late July, after continued U.S. strikes against Iran. Beyond Bitcoin, the update covers $237 million in net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs on Tuesday versus $8.6 million in inflows to Ethereum ETFs, an SEC proposal that would let blockchains function as official ownership records for transfer agents, plans by 21 banks and asset managers to form a stablecoin company in 2026, and fresh activity across Robinhood Chain, meme coins, token launches, and NFTs.