CLARITY Stalls in the Senate, Aave Opens a New Route for Wall Street, and the Fed Decides Today

Crypto had one of those days where several stories landed at once, and the headlines only tell part of it.

A major development in Washington, a separate shift on the institutional side, and another event on the calendar could quickly change the market's tone. We’re breaking down what happened, what it changes, and what deserves your attention next.

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Market-Moving News

Three stories are setting the tone today, and they come from three very different parts of the market.

The details are more important than the headlines, so we’re breaking down what changed, what remains unresolved, and what the market is watching next.

Industry

Circle Takes Arc Live With BlackRock, Visa and 10B ARC Tokens

Circle has launched the public mainnet for Arc, its new Layer 1 blockchain built around stablecoins, payments, FX, credit, and tokenized assets.

More than 100 applications are available at launch, with BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, DTCC, ICE, Standard Chartered, SBI, and other major financial institutions involved across the network.

Circle has also completed the genesis mint of 10 billion ARC tokens, although the token is not yet publicly trading and Circle has not confirmed a public launch.

Circle Gets Its Own Settlement Layer

Arc lets Circle move beyond relying entirely on outside blockchains for USDC-based financial activity. Gas fees are paid in USDC, which has more than $74 billion in circulation, while the network targets sub-second finality. 

Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap are among the protocols available from launch, alongside tokenized assets such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and Circle’s USYC. More than 700 million transactions were completed during the testnet phase before today’s mainnet launch.

Wall Street Joins From Day One

Arc’s institutional lineup gives the network a very different starting point from most new blockchains. Eleven founding-validator institutions are involved in the rollout, while Circle and DTCC plan to support tokenization of DTC-custodied assets on Arc beginning in the second half of 2027.

Take: Circle now controls both a major stablecoin and the blockchain infrastructure designed to move it through institutional markets.

You can measure Arc’s real impact by whether those heavyweight financial partners turn participation into meaningful payments, credit, and tokenized-asset volume.

TradFi

Deutsche Bank Brings Bitcoin and Ether Custody to European Institutions

Deutsche Bank plans to launch regulated digital-asset custody for institutional and corporate clients across Europe this year, bringing Bitcoin, Ether, and selected stablecoins directly inside one of the region’s largest banks.

The initial lineup includes BTC, ETH, USDC, EURC, and EURAU. Deutsche Bank will manage client wallets and private keys itself, allowing institutions to hold and transfer digital assets without building their own custody infrastructure.

The target clients include asset managers, hedge funds, corporations, brokers, custodians, and sovereign institutions.

Private Keys Move Inside the Bank

The service takes Deutsche Bank beyond providing indirect crypto exposure or blockchain experiments. Institutional clients can rely on the bank for key generation, hardware-based protection, multi-person approvals, separate warm and cold storage environments, and backup and recovery systems.

That puts responsibility for one of crypto’s most sensitive operational tasks directly inside a regulated banking relationship.

Custody Opens the Next Door

Deutsche Bank also plans to expand the supported asset range over time, while tokenized financial instruments are already included on the product roadmap.

The service is not live yet, and its first client onboarding depends on completing the regulatory process. Timing, supported assets, and geographic availability can still change.

Take: Institutional crypto becomes easier to scale when custody sits inside the same banking relationships already used for traditional assets.

You no longer need every fund or corporation to build its own private-key operation before putting digital assets onto the balance sheet.

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Derivatives

Kraken Parent Takes Aim at $85T Perps Market With Hyperliquid U.S. Push

Kraken parent Payward plans to bring regulated perpetual futures onto Hyperliquid for U.S. clients, connecting one of crypto’s largest onchain derivatives venues with CFTC-supervised exchange and clearing infrastructure.

Bitnomial would create and clear the contracts, while NinjaTrader would carry eligible U.S. customer accounts. Hyperliquid’s onchain order book would handle trade matching and recording, putting regulated futures activity directly onto public blockchain infrastructure.

Global perpetual futures generated more than $85 trillion of trading volume in 2025.

Regulated Perps Move Onchain

Hyperliquid has processed more than $200 billion over the past 30 days and accounts for roughly 9% of global perpetual open interest.

Payward already owns much of the infrastructure needed to bridge that market into the U.S. It acquired Bitnomial for $550 million and NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion, while the broader group had about 6.6 million funded accounts at the end of June.

The proposed structure would use Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework to create dedicated regulated markets.

Two Trading Worlds Start Connecting

Instead of rebuilding crypto-style perpetual trading entirely inside a traditional exchange, Payward wants regulated institutions operating directly on existing onchain infrastructure.

Regulatory approval is still required, and no launch date has been announced. Existing Hyperliquid contracts also would not automatically become available to U.S. customers.

Take: Perpetual futures became huge by operating largely outside traditional U.S. market infrastructure.

Put regulated clearing, brokerage accounts, and Hyperliquid together, and you have a much more important test of whether onchain derivatives can move into mainstream finance without losing the structure that made them popular.

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Future Forward

The Senate vote has stalled the CLARITY Act for now. The Fed is next, while the SEC and new institutional infrastructure continue moving on separate tracks.

On the Radar:

📊 FOMC decision: 2 p.m. ET today

🎙️ Fed Chair Kevin Warsh press conference: 2:30 p.m. ET

⛓️ Circle Arc: mainnet is now live, with Aave, Morpho, and Uniswap among the launch participants.

📋 SEC Regulation Crypto Assets: public comments close October 20.

Coming Up:

📅 SEC comment period: October 20

📅 Avalanche Summit: New York

Crypto Know-How: Why Cloture Beat a Bill That Had Majority Support in the House

The CLARITY Act passed the House 294 to 134 on July 17, 2025, with 78 Democrats voting yes. It then reached the Senate and failed to get the votes needed to advance.

The difference is Senate procedure. A bill can pass the House with a simple majority. In the Senate, ending debate generally requires cloture, and cloture requires 60 votes.

That meant Republicans’ 53-seat majority was not enough. They needed at least seven Democrats to join them, turning the negotiations into a search for a bipartisan coalition rather than a straight party-line vote.

The final negotiations focused heavily on provisions involving presidential crypto holdings, stablecoin-related concerns and banking issues. The sponsors added 126 changes sought by Democrats, while the revised text included restrictions covering crypto holdings by certain officials.

Still, every Democrat who voted opposed the motion, along with four Republicans. Tillis later changed his vote to preserve a possible route for reconsideration.

So the bill did not lack a simple majority in the abstract. The procedural hurdle was 60 votes, and the coalition needed to reach that threshold was not there.

Everything Else

• Most investors find small-cap opportunities after the move has already started, and this guide exists to change that with a breakdown of the early signals that tend to form long before a name gets noticed

• Arc went live with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders participating at launch, including Aave, Morpho and Uniswap. Circle says users pay gas in USDC and the network offers sub-second finality.

• Bitcoin ETFs recorded roughly $450 million of net outflows on Tuesday, reversing the previous session’s inflow.

• Aave proposed its custodied-collateral structure with Anchorage, using Chainlink’s CustodySync system to represent and synchronize institutional BTC held with the custodian.

• The Fed concludes its September 15-16 meeting today, with the decision scheduled for 2 p.m. ET and the press conference at 2:30 p.m. ET.