Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

Today's top news:

• Crypto majors mostly red, HYPE leads; BTC at $63.4k
• Bitcoin spot trading volume falls to 7-year low
• Goldman Sachs buys a BTC income ETF with $2.25B NEOS deal
• Solana came close to going down after routing bug
• Hyperliquid adds new function to handle tokenized stock functions like splits, dividends

The SEC Moves to Bless the Onchain Stock Market Without Congress

The SEC is preparing to do on its own what Congress couldn't. Per Bloomberg, the regulator will roll out two crypto initiatives in the coming days while the CLARITY Act — the market-structure bill that would split crypto oversight between the SEC and CFTC — sits stalled until at least September.

The first is a Friday open meeting to propose "Regulation Crypto," a framework letting projects raise capital through token sales without full securities registration. The second — and bigger for onchain markets — is an "innovation exemption" for tokenized stocks, with details possibly dropping Friday. Like any SEC proposal, both would still face a public comment period before final rules take effect.

The exemption would let tokenized versions of stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia trade on blockchains around the clock, in fractional sizes, with near-instant settlement — a sharp break from conventional US equities, which trade during exchange hours and settle on the T+1 cycle in place since May 2024. The tokens typically track a stock's economic exposure but carry no voting or dividend rights (though some protocols are working on solving the voting and dividend rights), which is what justifies the lighter regulatory treatment. It is the core of Chair Paul Atkins' "Project Crypto" agenda.

The move lands squarely on the year's biggest onchain growth story. Tokenized stocks have been the engine behind Robinhood Chain, whose RWA volume jumped fivefold this summer, and a major push across Solana and Base, where Kraken's xStocks line, built with Backed Finance, lists tokenized equities. The NYSE is building its own onchain settlement platform, BlackRock launched tokenized funds on Solana and Ethereum, and Circle's Arc lined up BlackRock, Visa, and Mastercard as validators. All of it has run in a regulatory gray zone, much of it routed to non-US users. A formal SEC exemption would hand that entire movement the legal clarity it's been missing, potentially opening US retail access to the products these chains were built for.

Warner wrote that if the exemption comes through as expected, it could be one of the more bullish crypto news events in years, giving the RWA sector a full green light and amplifying tokenized asset growth targets — while expressing hope that the outcome is not a letdown.

Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are mostly red with HYPE leading: BTC -1% at $63.4k; ETH -1% at $1,880; SOL -1% at $75.60; HYPE +4% at $57.30
• Top alt movers include OKB (+7%), MNT (+6%) and Virtual (+5%)
• Oil -2% at $81; Gold -0.5% at $4,450
• Stock futures are slightly green; DOW even, Nasdaq +0.5%
• Bitcoin spot volume fell to its lowest since 2019, per WuBlockchain, as the market sits between key cost-basis levels with seller exhaustion building but spot demand still weak
• A routing bug took Solana 86% of the way to losing finality, after one hosting provider's misconfigured route knocked 28.83% of staked SOL offline, leaving the chain 4.51 points from the 33.34% freeze threshold
• Goldman Sachs closed a $2.25 billion NEOS deal, acquiring the covered-call fund BTCI and NEOS's roughly $30 billion in options-based products
• Bitwise cut 14% of staff as the crypto slump reached ETF issuers, trimming headcount to about 155 from 180
• After Coldcard was hacked, $15 billion in Bitcoin moved to safety, as 233,000 BTC left long-term-holder wallets in the days around the breach
• An XRP Ledger bridge was drained after its software treated fake deposits as real, with an attacker minting unbacked balances and pulling nearly 200,000 XRP (~$202,000) from the Tx bridge through a flaw that passed multiple audits

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• Bitcoin ETFs saw $61M in net outflows on Wednesday; ETH ETFs saw $7.4M in inflows, per Eric Balchunas

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mostly red: DOGE -3%, SHIB -1%, PEPE -5%, PENGU -1%, TRUMP -6%, BONK +2%

Robinhood Chain was led by Pack (+90%), Yolo (+60%) and Frong (+30%); Stonkbrokers saw its biggest selloff to date (-27%)

Solana leaders included Ava (+40%), momota (+180%) and XST (+33%)

Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Hyperliquid is adding a "scaleWei" function that could let tokenized stocks handle corporate actions onchain — stock splits, dividends, and spin-offs — by atomically redistributing token balances
• Hyperliquid also opened its low-latency data nodes for under $1,000 a month, dropping a prior 10,000-HYPE staking requirement to widen access to its real-time trading data

What is happening in NFTs?

NFT leaders were flat: Punks even at 31.7 ETH, BAYC even at 8.17 ETH, Pudgy even at 3.92 ETH; Stonkbrokers -20% to 10 ETH

Good Vibes Club (+32%) and The Saudis (+650%) led top movers

NFT microcaps had big runs including RH Machines (+400%), Robinhood Kitties (+400%) and fuwa (+240%)