Weekly Market Outlook | September 28 - October 4, 2026

Executive Summary

  • Eleven disclosed rounds raised $180.6M, led by Jeeves's $110M Series C for stablecoin corporate banking. SBI completed its $295M purchase of Bitbank, Evernorth's $1B XRP treasury cleared its shareholder vote for a Nasdaq listing, and Kalshi is in talks to raise $1B at $40B.
  • Aerodrome and Velodrome are merging into one seven-chain exchange on October 21, Hyperliquid received its first $14.6M of USDC reserve yield for HYPE buybacks, Coinbase added HYPE and ZEC as loan collateral, and Franklin Templeton's tokenised fund shares became Bybit collateral. Jumper ran its first token sale and Saturn and Kinetiq set token events.
  • Robinhood began rolling out crypto perpetual futures to U.S. customers through its own regulated broker, with 10x leverage and a one-basis-point fee, and Coinbase won approval for its own clearinghouse. Lighter's token fell 22% as the brokerage product bypassed the DEX that runs perps in Robinhood Wallet.
  • Stripe's Open USD launched as a stablecoin owned by its distributors: Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa hold equal stakes, 200+ partners share nearly all reserve income and can earn equity by driving supply, and Uniswap and Aave integrated on day one. Banks launched their own tokens the same week, from HSBC's RedCoin to Fiserv's Roughrider.

Venture Capital & M&A Pulse

Eleven disclosed rounds raised $180.6M, led by Jeeves's $110M Series C; SBI's $295M Bitbank purchase closed and Evernorth's $1B XRP treasury listing was approved

Top Raises

  • Jeeves ($110M Series C) – Stablecoin-native corporate spend and banking platform; led by CoinFund with a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures and AllianceBernstein.
  • Uorm ($7.5M Pre-Seed) – Gamified social rewards app; Marqel Capital.
  • PERPTools ($5M Seed) – AI-agent perpetuals trading platform from the DEXTools team, at an $80M valuation with a Q4 token planned; Big Brain Holdings, NEAR, Animoca Brands.
  • Walapay ($4.6M Seed) – Stablecoin payout and account rails for local markets; led by Generative Ventures with Commerce Ventures and Polygon Labs.
  • Raven (Strategic, $90M valuation) – Market maker for prediction markets; Coinbase Ventures and CMCC Global, amount undisclosed.
  • Grass (Undisclosed) – Bandwidth network feeding AI data retrieval; Multicoin Capital via its hedge and venture funds.

M&A Highlights

Emerging Themes

  • Stablecoin banking took the biggest cheque for a second week: Jeeves's $110M and Walapay's seed both fund rails for moving business dollars.
  • Prediction markets are attracting infrastructure money, not just venue money: Raven's market-making round and Kalshi's $40B talks.
  • Established financial groups keep buying licensed exchanges outright, with SBI closing Bitbank after Payward's Bitnomial and MoonPay's North Capital deals.

DeFi Launch Radar

Protocol & Chain Releases

  • Aerodrome and Velodrome | Merging into Aero - One cross-chain exchange launching October 21 on seven chains including Base, Ethereum, Arc and Robinhood Chain, with all revenue routed to sAERO stakers.
  • Base | Cobalt Upgrade - Adds conditional transactions and new asset functions, including a seize function for compliant tokens.
  • Chainlink | CCIP 2.0 and Fulcrum - CCIP 2.0 adds custom verifiers and faster transfers; Fulcrum is a cross-chain repo product for institutions.
  • Reya | V2 Private Beta - Perps venue opened its V2 private beta on September 28 with a short Season 2 incentive programme.

New Feature Rollout

Ecosystem Expansions

Token Launches & Airdrops

Token Launches

Airdrops

Last Week Highlights

U.S. Perpetual Futures Arrive Inside Regulated Brokers

Robinhood Switches On Perps for American Customers

Robinhood began rolling out crypto perpetual futures to U.S. customers on September 29. Perpetuals are futures with no expiry date: a trader holds a leveraged long or short for as long as they like and pays or receives a small funding payment to keep the contract's price near spot. Until now they were an offshore product. Robinhood is offering them through its own CFTC-registered futures broker and Bitstamp, on eight assets: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE, with 10x leverage on BTC and ETH, 3x on the rest, and a fee of one basis point per trade until year-end. The same day Coinbase won CFTC registration for its own clearinghouse.

What Coinbase's Clearing Licence Adds

Coinbase Clearing can now clear fully collateralised futures, options and swaps, settling in USDC around the clock. Fully collateralised means every obligation is funded up front, so there is no margin call and no default fund. Coinbase will keep Nodal Clear for its existing margined perpetual-style futures and for the single-stock perpetuals it has filed for. With a broker, an exchange and now a clearinghouse, Coinbase owns the full U.S. derivatives stack; Robinhood owns the broker and relies on Bitstamp for the rest.

Who Loses the Flow

Lighter's token fell 22% in a week. The DEX runs the perps inside Robinhood Wallet on Robinhood Chain, quoted in USDG and settled onchain, and that instance handles about a quarter of Lighter's volume: $622M of $2.49B in a day, with $226M of open interest and a 50/50 revenue split with Robinhood. The new product runs through the brokerage app on a separate rail and does not mention Lighter, Robinhood Chain or tokenised stocks. Robinhood is still an investor in Lighter and in Arcus, which this week became a routing venue for Robinhood Wallet stock-token swaps, so the wallet remains a distribution channel. The brokerage product is simply the bigger one.

The Rest of the Onshore Picture

Robinhood also announced AI trading agents, a prediction-market tab after trading more than 50 billion event contracts, and 24/7 stock trading pending regulatory review. Kalshi is in talks to raise $1B at $40B and has filed for equity perpetuals that trade overnight but compute funding only during the cash session. Hyperliquid, the largest offshore venue, received its first $14.6M of USDC reserve yield for HYPE buybacks and now holds more USDC than Solana, while the House Oversight Committee widened its prediction-market inquiry to include it.

What It Means for Market Structure

U.S. retail leverage on crypto will increasingly sit inside FCMs and clearinghouses, where funding payments and benchmark prices are supervised. The CFTC's May policy statement flagged the central design question: without expiry, the contract's integrity rests on the reference price every funding period, not just at settlement. In our view, onshore perps will take volume from offshore venues over time, but at 1 basis point and 10x leverage they are priced to capture retail flow first. The open question is whether Robinhood routes the brokerage product onto its own chain later, which would decide whether the onchain venues it has backed share in the growth.

Stripe's Open USD Launches as a Stablecoin Owned by Its Distributors

A Dollar Token Built by a Consortium

Open USD went live on September 30 on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Stripe's Tempo chain, and became the default stablecoin across Stripe's payments, treasury, payouts and card products. It is issued by Bridge, the company Stripe bought for about $1.1 billion, with reserves held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY and attested monthly. Businesses reach it through four routes: Stripe, Mastercard's BVNK, Visa's stablecoin platform in limited beta, and Coinbase from October 1, each converting dollars to OUSD one-for-one at no cost. Bridge's dashboard showed $477M in circulation at launch, with Uniswap, Kraken and Coinbase providing secondary trading.

Who Owns It and Who Gets Paid

Open Standard, the company behind the token, has five founding partners with equal equity stakes: Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, who together committed more than $1 billion of liquidity. Its wider network has grown from 140 partners at the June unveiling to more than 200, including BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, UBS, SBI, Google, Aave and MetaMask. The economics differ from USDC in two ways:

  • Nearly all interest earned on reserves flows to the partners that distribute the token, in proportion to the supply and activity they generate, after a management fee. Circle keeps most USDC reserve income and shares it through negotiated deals such as its Coinbase and Binance agreements.
  • Partners can also earn equity in Open Standard based on the supply and activity they drive, so distribution is paid in ownership as well as revenue. Founding partners get no special profit share under those rules.

Minting and redemption are free; Open Standard charges developers a small per-transaction fee instead.

Why the Design Fits the New Rules

Last week the Fed proposed to presume that a stablecoin issuer breaches the GENIUS Act's interest ban when it pays a partner who then rewards customers for holding the coin. Open Standard's model pays businesses for distributing and using the token, not holders for holding it, and it pays in reserve revenue and equity rather than yield passed through to balances. That keeps the incentive where the law allows it. Whether partners then pass value to their own customers through pricing or cashback is a question each distributor will have to answer under the same rules.

DeFi Integrates on Day One

Uniswap listed OUSD across its protocol, app and API and is building a v4 hook with Open Standard that pays OUSD rewards directly to liquidity providers, with the design still to be published. Aave proposed onboarding OUSD to V3 and V4. Chainlink was named the official data oracle, which points toward onchain proof of reserves rather than monthly attestations alone. For DeFi, a stablecoin whose issuer wants to share reserve income with the venues that create demand is a new kind of counterparty.

Banks Are Launching Their Own Dollars at the Same Time

The same week, Citi tapped Coinbase to let corporate clients accept stablecoin payments, Lloyds and Visa settled $750,000 of real obligations in USDC in under an hour including over a weekend, HSBC named its Hong Kong dollar token RedCoin for a second-half launch to 3.3 million PayMe users, Fiserv put Bank of North Dakota's bank-only deposit token live on Solana for 90 institutions, and Morgan Stanley set up a lab to test stablecoins and DeFi. Visa said stablecoin-linked card volume grew almost 200% year on year across 160 programmes. The San Francisco Fed estimated that stablecoin issuers added about $200 billion of Treasury-related holdings in five years, more than 40% of the decline in China's holdings.

What We Take From It

Stablecoin issuance is becoming a utility owned by the companies that move money, rather than a standalone business that pays them rent. In our view the equity-for-distribution model is the first credible challenge to Circle's position with payment companies, because Stripe, Shopify, Visa and Mastercard already sit in front of the merchants who will hold balances. Two things to watch: whether OUSD supply grows beyond the founders' own $1 billion seed, and whether the 21-bank consortium stablecoin due in the first half of 2027 adopts the same ownership structure or competes with it.

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