Guigs

Daily Market Report #819 It is Wednesday. CLARITY is dead. The Senate voted 49-50 on cloture, 11 short of the 60 it needed. Susan Collins voted no. Lummis said before the vote that if it failed, we’re done, it’s over, after giving Democrats 126 changes and over a year of work. The Senate calendar after this is midterms, appropriations, and the debt ceiling, so realistically, this is 2027 at the earliest, more likely 2028. I have written about this bill being 3 weeks away for 4 months. It was never 3 weeks away. The reactions are the interesting part. Armstrong says crypto cannot wait on Congress and “clarity is coming regardless.” CZ says the silver lining is that stablecoins keep offering yield. Ripple calls it a tremendous missed opportunity but says XRP stands on settled ground. And the regulators already did most of the work anyway. The SEC and CFTC classified 16 tokens as commodities back in March. The difference is that a statute survives an election, and agency guidance does not. XRP took the hit, down 7.9% to $1.30, the biggest loser among the majors. It was the token most tied to this bill passing. Bitcoin is at $75,803, down 2.3%. ETH is at $2,404, down 3.5%. SOL is at $97.23, down 4%. Fear & Greed dropped to 51 from 69 yesterday. TVL is down 2-3% across Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, and Base in a day. And the Fed decides today. 94% odds of a hike. 19 of 22 major Wall Street firms expect one, and most are forecasting 50 basis points, not 25. The first hike of this whole cycle, the thing Warsh has telegraphed since June, lands the day after CLARITY died. The 10-year is at 4.97%, its highest since 2007, and the 30-year is at 5.35%. Those are pre-2008 levels, and the hiking has not even started. Oil is over $100 now, with WTI at $100.03 and Brent at $108. Saudi Arabia shut a key pipeline that bypasses Hormuz, a supertanker was struck by mines, and the Houthis are hitting Saudi Arabia while the UN Security Council calls an emergency meeting on Bab al-Mandeb. US gas is up 52% this year, and diesel topped $6 for the first time ever. The House voted 220-204 to end the Iran war for the third time, with more Republicans joining. Gold is at $4,321 and silver at $64.54. Two things in my universe went the other way. ARB ripped 15.6% to $0.1534, the best in the top 100, on a day when everything else bled, and its own $14.1M unlock lands today. Robinhood Chain is the reason. Etherscan launched an explorer for it, and the on-chain growth keeps posting. The other side of that story: two Robinhood engineers were charged with using confidential company information to trade perps on Hyperliquid. ZEC is at $1,149, up 0.4%, holding above $1,100 while the market sold off. A month ago, it was under $500. Grayscale says Zcash mining rewards are now 2x Bitcoin’s. Ironwood shipped, the Orchard bug got fixed, and the market has repriced the whole thing since. It is the best trade in my universe this year, and it took months of looking wrong first. Monero is at $507. HYPE is at $77.21, down 2.8%. LINK is at $10.84, down 5.3%. TAO is at $218, down 6.3%, the worst of mine. Revolut. Hackers breached an Italian government email account, posed as police, and used it to pull data on 680 crypto whale customers. Revolut says funds are unaffected. Funds unaffected means nothing when someone now has a list of who holds what and where they live. Tomorrow, someone comes to your door. This is the third customer data leak at a crypto-adjacent company in 6 weeks after Trezor and SafePal, and it is the one that scares me most because the data came through an actual government channel. CoinEx is shutting down all operations. Another centralized exchange gone after BitMEX, BitMart, and Poolin. The DEXes are winning on every front, and the CEX list keeps getting shorter. Balancer has a wind-down proposal on the table as revenue stalls. Pixelmon discontinued all game development. Ethiopia cut power to Bitcoin miners by 75% because El Niño drained its hydro dams. Strategy bought $139M of STRC, still buying its own preferred instead of Bitcoin. Strive added $37M in BTC. Trump has made more trades than every member of Congress combined since returning to office. 18 state attorneys general and the largest US public union both came out against CLARITY on the morning of the vote. The build kept going. X launched a Cashtag Partner Program, letting users trade through Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini directly from tickers. Solana tokenized stock volume beat Nasdaq and NYSE combined. Aave proposed institutional lending against assets held in Anchorage custody. Kalshi launched gold and silver perps in the US. Kraken added DeFi yield to tokenized stocks. The UAE is putting Avalanche into its national digital ID for 12 million people. Bitcoin’s post-quantum roadmap is forming around BIP-360. AI is having its own political crisis. Amodei called for slowing frontier AI development, Elon and Altman backed him, and then Trump called AI fears the next hoax after climate change and brought Jensen on stage, who said he is not going to let a slowdown happen and called doomer predictions “made up.” China rejected slowdown calls too. Schumer wants a classified Senate briefing. A DeepMind researcher quit, saying AI “could kill us all.” Microsoft says AI is getting dangerous and published a code of conduct. An Anthropic co-founder called for a kill switch. In a simulated experiment, AI agents lied, stole, and voted to kill one of their own. Anthropic also disclosed that Iran used Claude to surveil thousands of people, Chinese labs trained on millions of Claude chats, and China used it for PLA weapons work. Palantir and Nvidia are now restricting Anthropic and OpenAI models. OpenAI is raising at over $1.2T, and its rogue agent tried to hack another company back in May. Anthropic will not delay its 2026 IPO, picked Nasdaq, and is planning $518B in compute deals. The two men who run the biggest AI labs are asking to slow down, and the President and the biggest chip company are telling them no. I have never seen an industry argue against its own product like this. CLARITY died at 49-50, and the market barely moved on it. That tells you how little anyone believed in it by the end. What are you watching?