TLDR Crypto 2026-09-18

The House Financial Services Committee advanced the American Reserve Modernization Act, which would direct Treasury to maintain a "secure Bitcoin storage facility" and codify Trump's 2025 executive order creating a strategic bitcoin reserve. Reps. Nick Begich and Sen. Cynthia Lummis introduced the bill over a year ago as the BITCOIN Act, and it includes language for acquiring more bitcoin over five years using "budget-neutral strategies" plus a separate digital asset stockpile. Rep. Bill Foster opposed it, arguing bitcoin's riskiness and volatility make it a poor reserve asset and that "no one believes bitcoin is critical to the US economy." A companion bill has not yet passed in the Senate.

The SEC granted a 5-year Innovation Exemption for Tokenized Securities Venues (TSVs), opening a compliant pathway for blockchain platforms to list and trade tokenized equities in the US. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce's accompanying comment letter clarified that permissionless, autonomous protocols like standard Uniswap fall outside securities regulatory scope and need no exemption. The exemption covers Uniswap v4's permissioned pools, providing a framework for compliant on-chain tokenized equity trading for regulated assets and users. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams flagged the Peirce letter as the more consequential development and announced Uniswap will submit a comment letter with proposed improvements to help shape the final rule.

Payward, Kraken's parent company, will deploy as a regulated HIP-3 operator on Hyperliquid's L1, giving US retail customers their first access to Hyperliquid perp markets through a supervised, compliant entity. HIP-3 lets regulated third parties run perp markets on Hyperliquid's chain, and Payward's recently secured US derivatives approvals qualified it to operate under this framework. The arrangement opens Hyperliquid's high-performance L1 to US retail order flow and establishes a template for other offshore DeFi venues to enter the US market through regulated operator layers.

Column announced stablecoins, full-stack card issuing, and global banking products aimed squarely at Erebor, with Column valued around $6 billion and reportedly raising capital. Erebor is closing a raise at roughly $8 billion, nearly 30% higher than Column despite launching far more recently, and has grown deposits to $4.6 billion in under a year from $1 billion early on. Column holds about $1.5 billion in deposits after five years but already has a card business Erebor lacks.

In analyzing 34 non-USD stablecoins across 189 chain deployments and found contract counts, supply, and transfer volume, we see three different stories. Ethereum holds 25% of contracts but 48% of supply, with supply per contract around $16 million versus $300,000 on BSC, while top tokens each concentrate trading on one or two chains regardless of where they're deployed: EURC moves 85% of its volume on Base, EURe holds two-thirds of both supply and volume on Gnosis, and ruble-pegged A7A5 carries $461 million in supply, 99% on Tron. Chain selection tracks an issuer's first customers and regional ties rather than fees or throughput, and that contract counts alone overstate how "multi-chain" a stablecoin really is.

Allium's September 2026 stablecoin report, timed to the CLARITY Act Senate vote, puts total supply at $303 billion while payment volumes reached $401-$527 billion through August, up 42-63% year-over-year against supply's 6% gain. B2B settlement leads all payment lanes at $137-$153 billion, with payroll ($43B) and supplier payments ($28B) indicating real-economy use beyond trading, which accounts for 69% of adjusted transfer volume. Reserve backing now drives an estimated $170 billion in new US Treasury demand, a figure poised to surface in Senate floor debate. Cross-border stablecoin transfers grew 64% versus 9% for fiat rails, with Thailand ($10.8B), Turkey ($7.8B), and Indonesia ($6.3B) as the top recipient markets.

Nexo's custodial card, which offers Credit Mode spending against crypto without selling it and Debit Mode spending from a Savings Wallet with up to 2% cashback in NEXO or BTC, was compared against Tria's self-custodial card supporting 1,000-plus assets with cashback scaling from 1.5% on Virtual to 6% on Premium tiers. Nexo keeps funds on a custodial platform with credit lines from 1.9% interest and tiered free ATM withdrawals, while Tria retains user custody, charges 0% of its own FX fee (Visa's 1% still applies), and offers up to $100,000 in daily spending limits plus purchase and price protection on higher tiers.

Circle's Arc blockchain, originally conceived as a stablecoin-native chain, drew criticism from crypto commentator Abbas Khan after pivoting toward meme culture in an apparent attempt to replicate Robinhood Chain's retail positioning. Khan argues the shift created a brand identity void, leaving Arc without a clear audience in an already competitive layer-1 market. The strategy appears to have been driven top-down without understanding why meme-chain positioning works for Robinhood, whose retail trading brand equity is distinct from Circle's corporate stablecoin identity. As a public company, Circle faces traction pressure, and Khan gives Arc less than a year before a potential shutdown if it cannot establish product-market fit.

EtherFi Cash users in markets where the new cashback system launched last Friday can now claim their ETHFI rewards.

Coinbase lowered the Advanced tier entry threshold from $25K to $10K in monthly volume and now counts both spot and derivatives volume together toward tier qualification.

Henley & Partners' Crypto Wealth Report 2026 estimates that 290 people globally hold at least $100 million in crypto, alongside 135,694 crypto millionaires, of whom 92,272 hold at least $1 million in bitcoin.

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has hired Jacob Horne, former CEO of Zora, to lead DeFi product development as the platform publicly acknowledges its onchain experience degraded during scaling.