SEC, ETFs, BlackRock, Meta AI — the week it all moved — Sun 27 Sep

This may have been the most far-reaching week we have covered this year. Not in headlines. There have been bigger scandals, larger losses, sharper drawdowns and records that drew more attention. Little of that changes what the digital money and capital markets will look like. This week did: agencies opened a path without Congress, capital came back, funds went onchain, banks and private issuers built their own money, and an AI agent walked into commerce.

That is a bold claim, and we stand by it. What we cover — the future of money, payments, trade and investing in an open internet — is being rebuilt in public, and this week several parts of it moved within the same five days.

Four of this week's threads have their own episode of Kaupr Weekly, recorded before the week made them concrete. We have pointed to three of them below, and to this week's episode at the end. Each one goes further than a summary can.

— Morten

The SEC opened a path without Congress. On Monday the SEC granted tokenised securities venues a five-year exemption from exchange registration, letting them trade tokenised US stocks through permissioned automated market makers. Volume and the number of stocks are capped, and issuers can object to third-party tokens.

The CFTC went the same way. It sent its own crypto market rules to the White House for review, and separately gave relief to passive software such as wallet interfaces. Neither agency waited for the Clarity Act, which the Senate blocked the week before.

A timetable followed. An SEC Crypto Task Force counsel said the first venues could file notices as early as next quarter, and Commissioner Hester Peirce said the caps are high enough to leave room for viable businesses.

Nothing here is permanent law. It is enough for companies to build on, and that is what the rest of the week was.

The vote turned out not to matter much. Crypto stocks recovered the losses from the blocked Clarity Act within days. Michael Saylor called the defeat a positive inflection point, arguing a statute would have made restrictions as durable as rights.

Bitcoin broke out. It reached $86,000 on Monday, an eight-month high, after clearing a level that had capped it since August. Around $750 million in short positions were liquidated and futures open interest rose by $2 billion. Strategy resumed buying after three weeks.

The ETFs took it in. US spot bitcoin ETFs drew $998.95 million in a single day, their strongest since October 2025, against $6.2 million for the whole week before. Ether ETFs logged three consecutive days of inflows, Solana ETFs a twelfth straight week, and 21Shares listed Europe's first Zcash ETP.

Tom Lee dates the bull market to June; traders point to squeezed shorts and fresh leverage. Both read the same flows.

Securitize closed at a record. The shares rose 24 per cent to an all-time high after the exemption. Goldman and Citizens named Coinbase, Robinhood and Circle as the early winners, and saw little volume leaving Nasdaq and ICE for now.

NYSE signed Blockchain.com. The memorandum would give 44 million accounts access to tokenised US stocks and ETFs on the exchange's planned digital venue. NYSE has also spent a year testing Avalanche, its president said, without naming a chain.

Then the funds followed. Ondo launched seven tokenised model portfolios, three of them tracking BlackRock strategies, and ARK put its venture fund onchain through Securitize, giving token holders exposure to OpenAI and Anthropic. Deutsche Bank put the market at $39 billion today and $3–4 trillion by 2035.

Stocks and bonds have been underway for a while. This week the funds joined them.

🎧 More on this: Kaupr Weekly Episode 7 — The Everything Exchanges: Crypto, Wall Street and the Rebuilding of the Market

Central bank money went onchain. Pontes opened on Monday, settling tokenised securities in central bank money across the euro area. Days later, Lloyds, NatWest and Barclays completed two mortgage transactions using tokenised deposits, the first interbank transfers of their kind, while a group including HSBC ran a simulated purchase where programmable deposits held the money until delivery.

Private money went to customers. SoFi is moving its entire card programme, more than $25 billion a year, to settle in a stablecoin it issues itself. NBX signed Tieto for cards that spend stablecoins without selling them first. Danske Bank said no single bank can build a euro stablecoin alone, and pointed to the 37-bank Qivalis consortium.

The rules are still being written. The ECB and the national central banks asked the Commission to drop the requirement that issuers hold 30 per cent of reserves as bank deposits, while keeping the line against multi-issuance. A Visa survey found more than half of respondents had never heard of stablecoins.

Two kinds of digital money, with different jobs: deposits between institutions, stablecoins out towards customers.

🎧 More on this: Kaupr Weekly Episode 1 — The Payments Stack Is Being Rebuilt

The agent reached consumers. Meta's Muse became the most downloaded free iOS app in the US, ahead of ChatGPT, with 2.5 million downloads by Monday. At Connect, Zuckerberg gave it an avatar, the AI glasses, control of a Mac and its own email address, and said Meta will take a small fee on transactions.

Shopify opened, Amazon shut. Shopify made its catalogue available to the agent through Shop Pay, Lync and PayPal. Amazon blocked it the day before, saying the agent breaches its terms of use and never asked for access.

A separate argument about onchain. BlackRock published a report arguing that AI adoption will create demand for stablecoins, blockchains and tokenised assets, and that compute could become an investable asset class. Atum raised $13.5 million to build routing between stablecoin payments.

Two separate things happened. An AI agent found its users, and the largest asset manager said where AI and onchain finance will meet.

🎧 More on this: Kaupr Weekly Episode 3 — The Rise of the Agency Economy: Why AI Agents Need Crypto

Coinmotion picked K33 to execute its larger institutional orders, keeping the client relationship while borrowing the trading capacity.

Safello is piloting crypto checkout, letting companies without their own licence sell crypto inside their own services.

Lovable passed $600 million in annualised revenue, with two thirds of Fortune 500 companies using the Swedish platform.

Last Sunday's episode asked whether finance is finally going onchain. The week that followed answered most of it. Eleven minutes on DTCC, DNB, Arc, the SEC's five-year test, Centiglobe and NBX.

Also on Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Kaupr has launched Kaupr Events, a short newsletter about events in onchain finance: our own live events, curated picks across the Nordics and Baltics, and full recordings of what you missed. It replaces our Luma calendar as the place our events live.

First up: How to invest in the tokenization trends, a joint event by Kaupr and Virtune on Wednesday 7 October, 11:00–12:30 CET, live online. Christopher Kock, CEO and co-founder of Virtune, and Andreas Severin, Chief Sales Officer, on what is driving tokenization, which platforms the financial industry is building on, and how investors can gain exposure through regulated ETPs. Moderated by Morten Myrstad.

Read the first issue → · Register for the event →

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Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor