Monthly Crypto Roundup by CoinsDo: September 2026

On 15 September the Senate voted 49 to 50 on whether to begin debating the CLARITY Act. The next afternoon the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time since July 2023. Bitcoin dipped below $75,000 across those two days.

It still finished September up roughly 7%, its best September on record.

The recovery came from ETF buying, not from Washington. Washington was busy elsewhere. In the fifteen days after the vote, the SEC exempted tokenised stock venues from exchange registration, the CFTC cleared tokenised collateral, the Fed proposed reserve and capital rules for stablecoin issuers, Treasury issued its first GENIUS Act rule and the OCC approved three crypto trust banks.

Much of what the bill was meant to settle arrived anyway, one agency document at a time. That route is faster and much easier to reverse than legislation.

Market Performance

Bitcoin

Bitcoin opened the month at $78,559 and spent the first half going down. On the day of the Senate vote it fell about 4% to roughly $76,000, with the US 10-year Treasury yield at 5.041%, its highest since 2007. After the Fed decision it traded between $75,000 and $76,500.

ETF buying turned it. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $999.0 million on 21 September, the largest single day of 2026, and $714.7 million the next day. Bitcoin hit an eight-month high near $87,400 on the 21st, and $647.9 million of the $746.6 million liquidated in the following 24 hours was short positions.

Leverage arrived after the spot money. Futures open interest reached roughly $160 billion by 23 September, the highest since October 2025. Inflows thinned through the final week and turned into a $148.7 million outflow on 30 September. Bitcoin closed the month near $83,000, roughly 34% below its $126,080 all-time high.

For the month, spot bitcoin ETFs took in a net $2.65 billion, the second-largest month since October 2025, with assets near $108 billion in the last week of September.

Ethereum

Ether did slightly better, up about 8.9% from $2,467 to roughly $2,677. Its low, near $2,376, came on the afternoon of the rate hike. Spot ether ETFs took in a net $832.4 million, less than half of August's total, which makes ether's outperformance harder to credit to the ETFs.

Points of Interest

The CLARITY Act Failed Its First Senate Vote

Roll call vote 234 was cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. It needed 60 and got 49. No Democrat voted yes. Four Republicans voted no: Collins, Hawley, Moran and Tillis. Coons did not vote.

Tillis's no was tactical. Voting with the majority lets him enter a motion to reconsider, which keeps another vote possible before the Senate breaks in early October for the midterms. Republicans had released a 635-page amended text two days before the vote, rewriting the ethics provision and the software developer protections and adding a "regulatory circuit breaker" to the stablecoin yield ban. The American Bankers Association objected that the breaker only trips after deposits have already left the banks.

Unless the motion to reconsider produces a vote before the October recess, anyone waiting on a statute before committing to a US structure is waiting until after the midterms.

The Agencies Wrote the Rules Anyway

Two days after the vote, the SEC issued an Innovation Exemption for tokenised stocks. The five-year conditional order lets "Tokenized Securities Venues" trade tokenised NMS stocks through automated market maker pools without registering as exchanges, and exempts their liquidity providers from dealer registration. According to the fact sheet, smart contracts must be "auditable, public, and deployed on a public, permissionless distributed ledger," tokens must carry the same rights as the underlying share, and issuers can object to third-party tokenised versions of their stock. Chair Paul Atkins said it "is designed to resolve challenges that have prevented responsible innovation from taking root in the United States."

On 25 September Corporation Finance staff published eleven FAQs on crypto assets. One answers a question listing teams ask often: announcing a buyback of a non-security crypto asset "would not constitute a representation or promise to undertake essential managerial efforts." Another says a trading platform is a promoter only if it meets the Rule 405 definition.

The CFTC moved the same week. Staff FAQs updated on 24 September let futures commission merchants and clearing houses invest customer funds in tokenised forms of permitted investments and keep required records on a blockchain.

The GENIUS Act Rules Arrived Alongside Bank Stablecoins

On 24 September the Federal Reserve proposed two GENIUS Act rules: one setting reserve, capital, liquidity and redemption requirements for the stablecoin issuers it supervises, the other an application process for banks that want to issue. "Stablecoins will only be stable if they can be reliably and promptly redeemed at par in a range of conditions," Michael Barr said in a statement. Comments run 60 days from Federal Register publication on 29 September.

On 30 September Treasury issued its first interim final rule, setting out how a state regime gets certified to supervise issuers with not more than $10 billion outstanding. That figure is now the practical line between a state licence and a federal one. Earlier, on 18 September, the OCC conditionally approved three national trust bank charters: Bastion, converting from a New York trust company; Catena Trust Bank, backed by Circle co-founder Sean Neville; and Agora, which plans to bring AUSD issuance onshore.

The banks did not wait for final rules. On 1 September, 21 banks and asset managers including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, UBS and MUFG formed a company to issue a shared dollar token, targeting the first half of 2027. On 9 September U.S. Bank ran a live pilot of USBDC, its own stablecoin, on Stellar between its North American and European entities. On 30 September Open USD went live, issued by Stripe's Bridge with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Shopify behind it, and HSBC unveiled RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin for person-to-person and merchant payments.

Circle spent the month buying distribution: a $400 million all-stock deal for Tazapay, a Singapore payments firm, on 8 September, and a $100 million investment from Binance on 22 September alongside a five-year renewal of their USDC agreement.

Supply barely moved. Total stablecoins stood at $306.7 billion on 30 September, with USDT at $183.8 billion and USDC at $75.5 billion, up 0.9% over 30 days. The number of issuers grew faster than the dollars they issue.

September Was 2026's Worst Month for Theft

CertiK counted $766.4 million lost to hacks and exploits, the highest monthly total and the highest incident count this year, with $270.6 million returned or frozen. Two incidents made up more than 92% of it.

On 6 September an attacker used a flaw in the range-proof caching of Elements, the software that validates Blockstream's Liquid sidechain, to get an invalid transaction accepted. Roughly $319 million of unbacked L-BTC was created. The attackers called themselves white hats and returned about 3,400 BTC, keeping roughly 598.5. Peg-outs were paused.

On 24 September Bitget lost $387.5 million from a limited number of hot wallets. According to Tech Times, the attacker exploited "a vulnerability in a third-party security product to obtain high-level internal credentials," then used them "to spoof transaction data and trigger Bitget's own authorization process to issue fraudulent withdrawal commands, as if a legitimate operator were moving funds." About $183 million was swapped into ETH, and THORChain declined to freeze the attacker's addresses. Elliptic called a North Korean link "highly likely." There has been no official attribution. Bitget's protection fund is covering the loss.

By that account, the attacker never needed a private key. The signing system did what Bitget's own approval process told it to do, and the approval process accepted an instruction from credentials that looked internal. For anyone running withdrawals at volume, the control that failed sits upstream of the signer: which requests it will act on, and from whom.

Licensing Deadlines Outside the US Got Dates

The UK's FCA opened its authorisation gateway for crypto firms on 30 September. Applications close on 28 February 2027 and the regime takes effect on 25 October 2027; firms that apply in time can keep operating while the FCA decides. On 16 September it had published perimeter guidance covering stablecoin issuance, trading platforms, dealing, safeguarding and staking.

Australia's deadline fell the same day. Firms relying on ASIC's no-action position had to apply for or vary a licence by 30 September. From 1 October, unlicensed firms face penalties of up to 10% of annual turnover.

ESMA sent the European Commission its recommendations for the MiCA review on 30 September, including powers to freeze crypto assets in market abuse or terrorist financing cases, closer oversight of third-country firms soliciting EU clients, and a new regulated service for access to DeFi protocols. Singapore's MAS opened a consultation on 1 September to write its stablecoin framework into the Payment Services Act, including a power to restrict circulation of any coin it designates as systemic. Thailand's SEC issued a travel rule on 2 September that requires operators to verify ownership or control of self-hosted wallets, effective 27 February 2027.

Macro Backdrop

The FOMC raised the target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00% on 16 September, 12 to 0. The statement kept its reasoning short: "Inflation remains elevated. Today's policy action will support a timelier return to the Committee's 2 percent goal." At the press conference, Chair Kevin Warsh said, "I would be hard pressed to describe broad financial conditions as restrictive," and described the decision as removing "a dose of accommodation."

The data behind it landed on 11 September. August CPI rose 0.4% on the month and 3.4% on the year. Core rose 2.4%. Energy was up 16.3% and gasoline 27.4%, which accounts for most of the gap between the two.

Trade moved the other way. Presidents Trump and Xi met in Washington on 25 September and extended their tariff truce to 10 January 2027. Both governments then published lists of goods for tariff cuts covering about $60 billion of trade, which US Trade Representative Greer said would "improve market access for about 30 percent of US exports to China."

Bitcoin's low came on the day of the hike. Its high came five days later, at the same rate.

Final Thoughts

Count the documents. Between 15 September, when the Senate declined to start debate on a market structure law, and 30 September, the SEC issued an exemptive order and a set of staff FAQs, the CFTC updated its staff FAQs, the Fed proposed two rules, Treasury issued an interim final rule and the OCC approved three charters. Each one does part of what the CLARITY Act was supposed to do, using authority the agency already had.

For a business deciding where to build, that is a weaker foundation than a statute. An exemptive order can be amended or withdrawn by the commission that granted it. Staff FAQs bind no one. The Fed's GENIUS rules are proposals with a 60-day comment period ahead of them. A US structure built on September's paperwork can change without a single vote in Congress.

The banks read the same month and moved anyway: a 21-bank consortium, U.S. Bank's pilot, Open USD, HSBC's RedCoin. They have balance sheets that can absorb a rule change. A smaller operator building on the same documents has less room.

Meanwhile the month's largest loss left through a withdrawal request that Bitget's own systems accepted as genuine. Regulators spent September deciding who may issue a dollar on-chain. The most expensive question of the month was who may ask to move one.