Weekly Market Outlook | September 21 - September 27, 2026

Executive Summary

  • Six venture rounds raised $80.2M, led by HIFI's $37M Series A, with stablecoin payment companies taking most of it. Binance bought a $100M stake in Circle with a five-year deal to push USDC, MoonPay bought a licensed U.S. broker, and CoinMarketCap bought CoinGlass.
  • Circle Mint clients can now borrow USDC against bitcoin through Morpho, Aave accepts Coinbase stock tokens as collateral, Kamino launched fixed rates on Solana and ARK tokenised its $1.3B venture fund. Variational and Jumper set Q4 token events.
  • With the CLARITY Act stalled, the Fed proposed the capital and reserve rules for stablecoin issuers, including a presumption against paying yield through distribution partners, and SEC staff said token buybacks on working networks do not make a token a security. None of it is yet law.
  • Ethena's USDe stands at $4.95B against a $14.8B peak, its backing has shifted from crypto funding trades to a credit portfolio and now tokenised stocks, and $784M is borrowed against it on Morpho at about 4.1%, a trade that pays roughly one point per turn from incentives. The ENA buyback only starts at $7.5B of supply, with a large investor unlock on October 5.

Venture Capital & M&A Pulse

Six venture rounds disclosed $80.2M; Binance's $100M Circle stake and MoonPay's $60M+ North Capital deal are under M&A

Top Raises

  • HIFI ($37M Series A) – Stablecoin settlement rails for payments and tokenised markets; led by Left Lane Capital.
  • NG.CASH ($15M Strategic) – Brazilian neobank for young adults adding crypto and credit; led by Blockchain Capital.
  • Atum ($13.5M Seed) – Open payments network for moving stablecoins between companies; Variant, PayPal Ventures, Abstract Ventures.
  • MeshWallet ($10M Private Round) – Payment infrastructure; investors not disclosed in Cointelegraph's weekly tally.
  • infiniFi ($3M+ Seed) – Onchain dollar-yield protocol with a Q4 token launch; Electric Capital, New Form Capital, Fasanara Capital.
  • functionSPACE ($1.7M Pre-Seed) – Prediction markets for numerical outcomes rather than yes/no events; Maven 11 Capital, Blockwall, Smape Capital.
  • XStable (Undisclosed) – Onchain gold and FX trading venue; YZi Labs, Sui Foundation, Taisu Ventures.

M&A Highlights

Emerging Themes

  • Stablecoin payment companies raised the most: HIFI, Atum, MeshWallet and NG.CASH all build rails for moving digital dollars, and payment deals were $60.5M of the week's total.
  • Large players bought rather than built: Binance took a stake in Circle, CoinMarketCap bought a data provider, MoonPay bought a licensed broker.
  • DeFi protocol rounds stayed at $1.7M to $3M while the larger cheques went to regulated fintech.

DeFi Launch Radar

Protocol & Chain Releases

New Feature Rollout

Ecosystem Expansions

Token Launches & Airdrops

Token Launches

Airdrops

Last Week Highlights

Regulators Are Writing the Crypto Rulebook Without Congress

Two Agencies Moved in One Week

The CLARITY Act, the bill meant to set the rules for crypto, fell one vote short in the Senate on September 15. Within ten days two regulators filled the gap. The Federal Reserve published the rules stablecoin issuers under its watch will follow, and SEC staff answered the question every token project has been asking: does buying back your own token make it a security?

What a Stablecoin Issuer Will Have to Do

The Fed's proposal turns the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law passed last year, into a checklist. For issuers supervised by the Fed, which means subsidiaries of state-chartered member banks, the rules are:

  • Hold at least one dollar of safe assets for every dollar of stablecoin, at all times, kept separate from the issuer's other money.
  • Safe assets means cash, deposits at the Fed or insured banks, Treasury bills maturing within 93 days, overnight repo backed by Treasuries, and funds that hold only those things. Tokenised versions of these assets count.
  • Give customers their dollars back within two business days of a redemption request.
  • Hold extra capital as a cushion against operational failure: 2% of the first $20B of coins outstanding, 1.5% of the next $30B and 1% above $50B. For a $50B issuer that is about $850M.
  • Add a further cushion equal to a quarter of the issuer's average annual revenue from anything other than its reserves, and 2% of any reserves held as uninsured deposits.
  • Banks that want to launch an issuer apply to the Fed, which has 120 days to decide; silence counts as approval.

The cost lands hardest on small issuers, which favours scale and bank ownership. Comments are open for 60 days, and the law takes effect by January 18, 2027 at the latest.

Paying People to Hold a Stablecoin Is the Sensitive Part

The GENIUS Act bans issuers from paying interest to holders. The Fed's proposal closes the obvious workaround: if an issuer pays an exchange, wallet or white-label partner, and that partner then rewards customers for holding the coin, the Fed will presume the ban has been broken unless the issuer can show otherwise. Ordinary merchant discounts and profit-sharing with independent partners remain allowed. The clause describes deals signed this week: Circle agreed to pay Binance a monthly fee tied to USDC balances on its platform, and Binance Wallet started paying USDe holders up to 4.75%. Neither issuer is Fed-supervised today, but the rule sets the standard such programmes will be measured against.

The SEC Says Buybacks Are Fine on Networks That Work

In simple terms, the SEC staff said that a project which uses its revenue to buy back its own token, the way a company buys back shares, is not turning that token into a security, provided the network is already running. The reasoning is the Howey test, the legal test for a security, which asks whether buyers rely on a manager's efforts to make them money. The staff's answers:

  • On a working network, announcing a buyback is not that kind of promise.
  • On a network that is not yet live, it can be, if the buyback is sold as a way to earn a return.
  • Maintaining or upgrading a working network, including funding developers, does not make the token a security.
  • Tokens received for staking through a service are not securities, as long as the service cannot lend out or pledge the deposit.

This gives cover to the buyback programmes now common in DeFi, from Ethena's planned fee switch to Derive's 84-week programme. These are staff views with no legal force, not a rule.

What This Means for Investors

Institutions now have workable guidance without waiting for Congress: the cost of issuing a stablecoin has a formula, and token buybacks have a green light. In our view that favours the largest issuers and exchange-owned distribution, because scale spreads the capital cost and partners can be paid within the rules. The risk is durability. Proposals can change after the comment period, the FDIC's April version sets capital differently, staff guidance can be withdrawn, and the SEC's most crypto-friendly commissioner leaves on October 2. Until Congress legislates, the rulebook is written in pencil.

Ethena Rebuilds USDe From a Funding Trade Into a Managed Credit Portfolio

Supply Is a Third of Its Peak and Recovering

USDe supply stood at $4.95B on September 28, against a peak of $14.8B on October 4, 2025 and a low of $3.88B on August 1. It has added about $1B since September 1, while ENA rose 64% over 30 days to $0.27. Staked supply has fallen faster: sUSDe holds $1.30B against $5.86B in October 2025, so fewer holders are collecting the yield. The recovery coincides with promotional rewards rather than a higher underlying rate.

The Backing No Longer Looks Like a Basis Trade

Ethena's April overhaul cut the crypto funding trade, in which USDe holds ether or bitcoin and shorts the matching futures to collect the funding paid by leveraged traders, to 11% of backing and added lending and real-world assets. By early July, governance data cited by Crypto.news put that trade at roughly $39M, or 1% of backing, with DeFi lending at 46%, ordinary stablecoins at 35%, tokenised bonds and bills at 11.2% and loans to institutions at 6.9%, including a $1B credit line with FalconX. The trade was cut because its income collapsed: bitcoin funding paid 11.0% a year in 2024, 4.9% in 2025 and 2.2% in 2026 through August 11, on Ethena's data. Funding has since recovered to about 5.7% for BTC and 4.8% for ETH on Binance in September, but USDe is now a managed portfolio of loans and bonds with a yield set by lending markets.

Equities Are the New Funding Source

On September 25 Ethena began running the same trade on stocks: it holds Binance's tokenised shares, bStocks, and shorts the matching Binance equity futures, collecting the funding without a view on the stock price. Binance has more than $2.9B of open interest in these contracts, but the return is unstable: Ethena quotes a 3.56% average over six months, while its risk adviser Kairos measured about 18% in late July and 7% by August 26, with two stocks paying negative. Only stocks with at least $25M of open interest over 14 days, 30 days of funding history and a matching token on the same venue qualify; 17 passed on Binance, three on OKX and none on Bybit or Kraken. Two risks stand out:

  • Binance can still close Ethena's short in a market stress. Its lower auto-deleveraging priority is a place further back in the queue, not an exemption.
  • bStocks are certificates issued by a Binance affiliate, not shares. Until a side letter is signed, Kairos says the stock leg is an unsecured claim on Binance.

Spot, hedge and issuer all sit inside one company.

Where the Leverage Sits and What It Costs

The leverage on USDe is concentrated on Morpho. Its API shows $784M borrowed against USDe collateral, led by USDe/USDC on Base ($351M at 4.13%) and USDe/USDG on Robinhood Chain ($303M at 4.06%), two of the three largest markets on the protocol, plus sUSDe/PYUSD on Ethereum ($92M at 4.06%). All three allow borrowing up to 91.5% of collateral value and run near 90% utilisation, so a borrower can lever roughly ten times and pays about 4.1% per turn. On Aave V3 Ethereum, USDC borrows at 4.41% and USDT at 5.03% against sUSDe paying 5.09%.

The Loop Is Paid by Incentives

Most of that borrowing is looped: USDe posted as collateral, stablecoins borrowed and swapped back into USDe. Unstaked USDe pays nothing, so the return comes from a 5% reward paid through Merkl to USDe deposited on those markets. Net of the 4.1% borrow cost that is about one point per turn, or roughly 9% at maximum leverage, and every point of it is an incentive. The staked route is no better: sUSDe at 5.09% against a 4.41% USDC borrow on Aave leaves 0.7 points. Ethena has said the token incentives that funded USDe growth end this month. If the Merkl rewards follow, the loop stops paying.

The Token: Buyback Armed at $7.5B, Unlock on October 5

ENA holders approved a plan on September 2 to spend 95% of Ethena's net revenue buying back ENA, but it only switches on once USDe supply reaches $7.5B, which needs another 52% of growth from today; Ethena's own illustration puts the first-year buyback at $22.5M. Before that, all remaining early-investor tokens unlock in a single release on October 5, estimated by Tokenomist at about 1.41B ENA, roughly 14% of circulating supply and $374M at current prices, while team and foundation tokens keep vesting monthly until 2028. ENA has risen 240% in 60 days on a buyback that does not yet exist. The October 5 release and the pace of USDe growth toward $7.5B will decide whether the re-rating holds.

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