OK dear reader, after a year of basically “what the heck is going on with our markets” this month brought another bevy of surprises. But in contrast to the first 7 months of 2026, which brought us generally a bunch of not-so-good-news, this month’s surprises were the kind of surprises we like. We came out of the gate with a few events that could ultimately be interpreted by the markets as “good news” or “bad news” depending on how they landed. Specifically, we were hoping for a much-beleaguered CLARITY bill to pass and crossing our fingers for rates to be held steady. Neither of these things happened, yet the crypto markets shrugged off this negativity and ETFs had their best week in a year. Let’s see why.
No Clarity, No Problem
As noted last month, CLARITY did not pass in August. Even so there were high hopes, and I use the word hope very specifically here, that a September 15th floor vote would have moved this legislation forward. It didn’t. The act, which needed 60 Senators to agree to move forward, stalled basically along party lines, and was defeated 49-50. Not because the guidelines couldn’t be established. But because it seems it was a chance to punish President Trump. I guess I don’t blame the Democrats for taking advantage of a political opportunity, but what I don’t like is that in the process they were either blind to the fact, or simply didn’t care, that this action actually threatens to punish the American people. How so? Well, with no regulatory legislation innovators are less inclined to innovate in the United States. And, let’s be clear. Nearly every other financial power has moved forward with regulation. England. Russia. The EU. Singapore. Korea. The UAE. I mean, c’mon. Innovators go where it’s safe to innovate, and there are other places on this globe that are friendlier. Ultimately Elizabeth Warren led the defeating charge, clearly stating this was about President Trump and stopping his grift. I think that stance misses the point and potentially hurts everyone else for an agenda. CLARITY is about having clear and understood guardrails in place to support those who want to participate in this new technology. Full Stop. Do I like Trump’s profiteering? No. But do I want to keep the lights off for everyone else in the process? Also no. With midterms so close, it is no surprise that the rest of the Democrats voted safely so as not to appear to cross lines. It’s frustrating so here’s my political rant: I really believe that at some point each party, and I’m looking at both the red and the blue here, needs to stop holding the country hostage so they can punch their “opponents” in the face. We used to be a country that reached across the aisle. Now, it’s tactics that remind me of high school cliques. This makes it hard to advance anything. We’re better than this. *sigh*. Ok rant over.
Now, all is not lost as on Sept 16th seven Democrats who worked on the text (incl. Senators Gallego, Gillibrand and Warner) called it “a setback, but not the end.” And Senator Tillis, a Republican who voted no entered a motion to reconsider (which can only be done by someone on the prevailing side, so his no seems to have been procedural to allow a reconsideration.) With all of this, it’s technically not dead, but it’s hard to say when we’ll get CLARITY.
Having said all of that, let’s recall that in August when CLARITY was first stalled, the SEC and CFTC made statements that they would respond with rulemaking in case of such an event. With the vote failure on Sept 15th these regulating bodies moved forward swiftly and decisively. On the 17th the SEC issued the “Innovation Exemption” (Press Release 2026-90), a five-year conditional exemption letting qualifying venues trade certain tokenized stocks on-chain and a step toward 24/7 markets. This is in addition to the SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets proposed Aug 18 which is open for comment until Oct 20.
Not to be outdone, the CFTC sent its crypto market rulemaking to the White House (OIRA) for review. To be fair, these are not laws so could be overturned by a regulatory body with different views in the future. Consider them placeholders then until we get through this election cycle and revisit the legislation properly when political risk is seemingly minimized. It seemed good enough for the markets, which shrugged off the legislative miss, and while we don’t have a law yet, we do have rules. So then, for the time being, the law of rules will have to guide us.
Rate Hike, Market Run!
As if this wasn’t enough, on September 16th the FOMC voted unanimously to raise rates 25 bp to 3.75%–4.00%, the first hike since July 2023. While supposedly a death knell, this clearly was largely priced in, as Polymarket showed an 83% chance of a hike before the decision. This, combined with the CLARITY miss, had our markets dip a bit, but the bears didn’t get to enjoy it for long as two days later on Sept 18th bitcoin ran up to $81K with roughly $183M of leveraged shorts liquidated inside of one hour. And it kept running.
The driver for this? I can only opine, but it’s hard not to consider Wall Street’s bullishness. Spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $2.4 billion in the week ending September 25, their best week since October 2025, and this turn seemed to begin on the 17th when the regulatory bodies stepped in with their perspectives. Importantly, this influx of capital flipped 2026 flows positive to +$934M, which is a huge swing from mid-July which saw ETFs as standing at roughly negative $5.8B. It wasn’t just Bitcoin either, as Solana and Ethereum ETFs posted positive numbers as well. Saylor then jumped on the bandwagon, as only Saylor can do, and his Strategy bought 2,615 BTC (appx $218M) in the back half of September after a three-week pause, bringing Strategy’s holdings to 847,666 BTC. Strategy, which many thought was going to be the death knell of the industry and collapse under its own weight, is sitting on paper gains of approximately $8.4B. Not too shabby, Michael. Not too shabby at all.
One possible interpretation of all of this is that Wall Street believes the floor is in. I can say that I do, and my opinion is that we’re poised for the next run. Can I guarantee that? No. Will there be more downdrafts? Almost undoubtedly. But the fact is that bitcoin has shrugged off two events that should really have sent it plummeting and instead ended the month at roughly $84,000. That’s still about 4% below the start of the year, but it’s really quite impressive in my opinion considering how this year has unfolded.
Ok enough market commentary. Generally at this point in this missive I’d jump into the areas where we see blockchain technology continuing to proliferate, however I’m going to take a related tangent here and jump right into blockchain’s brother, AI.
BlockchAIn
September may well have brought us the most important set of events in AI EVER. In fact, September may go down in history as the month when we saved all of humanity. I’m not using hyperbole here.
It began on September 8, a day that seemingly started much like any other day. People ate breakfast, went to work, and in some circles I suspect pontificated whether or not AI would be our downfall. Anthropic employee and AI researcher Jacob Coxon, however, was not pontificating. After three years of working at both OpenAI and Anthropic, Jacob resigned with a post on X stating “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.” He continued with “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Yow. His post drew 90M+ views in 24 hours. That may have been shrugged off as one opinion from one doomer but, as an exclamation point, Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger publicly agreed and posted “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is > 10% within the next decade.”
Not. Good.
In fact, that’s a bit much for a Tuesday afternoon. If this didn’t get your attention then, I hope it does now. These are not grandstanders looking for clicks, or pontificators pontificating over a bottle of Bordeaux. These were industry professionals sharing a view that many have feared may be far too close to reality. I mean, we’ve all seen Terminator and The Matrix. The AIs in those films are NOT on team Humanity and, I don’t know about you, but a greater than 1 in 10 chance of annihilation within a decade does not give me comfort.
The good news (wait, there’s good news here?) is that apparently it didn’t comfort the leaders of the AI cabal either. Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO and author of the optimistic “Machines of Loving Grace” in 2024, which details how superintelligence could radically accelerate medicine, eliminate disease, solve climate change and really improve the world, followed up four days later with “We Must Pace the Frontier”. In this essay he urged the powers that be to slow down frontier model development to allow for a safer future. Importantly, he immediately noted that Anthropic was going to adopt a radical new practice allowing outside evaluators to have “employee-like” access to Anthropic systems so they can monitor their work and ensure that, well, AI isn’t on track to wipe us out. His words resonated. OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” and then pledged to provide the same evaluator access. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind then jumped in as well, stating that this is “the right path forward” and subsequently proposed an industry-wide standards body. Even the mighty Elon Musk chimed in with the simple, “Dario is right.”
This. Is. A. Big. Deal.
This is an example of four capitalist competitors pumping the brakes and as such I applaud Dario’s efforts. It is a noted shift away from the “profits at all cost” credo that seems to drive so many modern CEOs. It’s especially poignant given Anthropic is preparing for perhaps the biggest IPO in history. Rather than shame, vilify or discredit Coxon (which is far too often the norm for folks that aren’t playing company ball) he instead embraced the message, potentially putting his company at risk of losing ground to competitors by immediately adopting voluntary safeguards that certainly will add expense, pressure, and likely slow progress. Say what you will, but to me that is true leadership and a real example of doing the right thing. More importantly he rallied support from his peers. This is the shift that we needed.
Not long after, on September 23rd at the UN, both Amodei and Altman called for shared testing standards and international incident reporting. Amodei stated, “We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe,” while Altman noted that this moment “calls for extreme care.”
In true capitalistic fashion, unfortunately in my view, White House Science Advisor Michael Kratsios stated in the same meeting that, “The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control of superintelligence.” Michael. Michael, Michael, Michael. I think you’re missing the point. Frankly, I kind of trust the guys building the bots over an administration that certainly seems to be putting profits over people. My dad told me once, as I was working way-too-many-hours as a young consultant while ignoring a flu with a terrible cough, “Money’s no good if you’re dead, Jim.” True that. Mr. Kratsios, I say the same here to you. Nevertheless, all was not lost and some of the messaging seemingly got through to the White House as, during the Trump-Xi summit in late September, the US and China agreed to establish an AI safety channel, including an incident hotline, and continue bilateral talks and also to create a protocol for joint crisis management (which my goodness I hope we’ll never need).
Bottom line here folks. This was a watershed moment. I do think that on the pace we were on AI could very well wipe us out. And, according to the Anthropic employees that stood up, it could do so with greater odds than drawing blackjack in Vegas. Think about that for a second. Blackjack happens. In response Dario, a CEO who could well be on his way to becoming one of the most financially successful people on the planet, asked for us to take a breath and slow down. We often talk a lot about how humanity must prevail over profits. I honestly don’t see it that much in the world of capitalism, so I want to shine a big bright light on this. We will need more of this. And we can get there. We just need to do exactly what Dario just displayed on a much larger scale. It’s an example worth following, and one that may well have saved the human race.
Now, coming back to the world of blockchain and crypto, recall that I see crypto and AI as harmonious technologies. Blockchain will allow us to channel check AI authenticity, and certainly crypto payment will allow any “machines of loving grace” to transact and conduct business. But the fact is this is all moot if we’re not here.
In Closing
Yes, that was a little heady and not my normal discourse, but I honestly think we’re not in normal times. I love blockchain. I love crypto. I love the difference it will make on the planet. I also love capitalism and the ability for us to strive forward. But, not at the expense of our humanity. Not at the expense of our lives. So, yes, let’s keep moving forward with regulation, let’s participate in the markets and look, let’s all make a buck. But also, let’s remember the words of my dad: “Money’s no good if you’re dead.”
That’s all for now! Until next time be well, take care, and I’ll keep Decrypting Crypto for you!