Congress stayed stalled, but crypto’s regulated market kept expanding. The CFTC cleared a path for qualifying “passive software” providers and sent broader crypto-market rules to White House review, while the SEC’s temporary Innovation Exemption opened a guarded lane for tokenized U.S. stocks.

Capital followed the infrastructure. Coinbase opened IPO allocations to eligible U.S. retail users, Binance invested $100M in Circle under a new five-year USDC agreement, and NYSE began exploring 24/7 tokenized stocks with Blockchain.com. Meanwhile, spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $2.06B through September 23—their strongest weekly inflows since October 2025—as BTC returned to the $80,000s.

In this ep ...