9 entries tagged crypto regulation. All writing.
SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 The Great Power That Can't Use SWIFT "Our country can either be a great power, or it will not exist at all," Dmitry Medvedev told regional party officials on September 16. That's the Kremlin's own case for why the war continues — existential, civilizational, not up for negotiation. I wanted to know what that case looks like from the inside, and once I went looking, I found something more concrete than rhetoric sitting right next to it: $300 billion frozen, a payments system Russia no longer trusts, and a very specific, very measurable pivot toward crypto rails that started well before this month's headlines. SEPTEMBER 30, 2026 Two-Tenths of a Percent, If Illinois Can See You Illinois just became the first state to tax Bitcoin transactions directly — a 0.2% Digital Asset Tax Act taking effect January 1, 2027. I went looking for what it actually reaches, using two Kankakee residents as the test case: one who owns a Bitcoin ETF inside an ordinary brokerage account, and one who wants to buy coffee with sats over the Lightning Network. The tax lands hard on one of them, barely touches the other, and can't see the actual coffee purchase at all — and the reason why says a lot about how a state can tax a ledger it doesn't control. SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 The Fed Wrote the House Rules. Nobody Lives There Yet. On September 24 the Federal Reserve proposed its rulebook for the stablecoin issuers it will supervise under the GENIUS Act — Treasury bills of 93 days or less, a two-business-day redemption promise, a capital charge that starts at two percent, and an automatic wind-down for anyone who falls short. The headlines say the Fed is telling stablecoins what to hold. Mostly Congress already did that. What the Fed actually decided is more interesting, and the list of issuers it applies to today is empty. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Reserved for Future Use The same friend who has kept this week's entries honest sent two more texts tonight — three Ripple links, a line about how "AI and crypto will merge," and a theory involving Elon Musk's favorite letter and a 2 percent stake Stripe took in 2014. I read all three announcements. He's right that the pipeline is full. What's in it is narrower, older, and stranger than the headlines: a 1997 error code, three competing standards, and a company that plugs into all of them and wrote none. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Same Price, Same Coin Count A post went around this week saying Zcash at $1,200 is Bitcoin at $1,200 — study 2017. The arithmetic behind it is genuinely correct, which is the most interesting thing about it and the reason it's worth taking apart. Here is what the post is actually claiming, why the supply math works, why the conclusion doesn't follow, why my broker won't list the coin but will list the ETF, and what kind of future I think a "Bitcoin plus privacy" actually has. Shorter than the pitch: real, bounded, and not the apex of anything. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Ten Conditions and a Footnote The same morning the SEC gave tokenized stocks a five-year exemption, the CFTC's staff quietly did something with a longer shelf life and a smaller signature: a seven-page letter saying any app that routes orders to a registered exchange, holds none of the money, and takes a cut of every trade doesn't have to register as a broker. My friend sent the link with no caption. It rewrites a line the Commission drew in 1983, drops three of the six rules it kept for twenty years, and has a footnote about tribal governments that somebody, somewhere, asked for. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Genie Gets a Five-Year Lease Yesterday I wrote that the SEC and CFTC would build crypto rules without Congress. This morning the same friend who started that conversation texted me the SEC's "Innovation Exemption" with two words of commentary — "the genie" — and a five-year number. He's right about the number. Here's what the order actually does, the caps nobody is quoting, and the other thing the SEC did in the same building on the same day that matters more than the order. SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 After Clarity Failed, What Selig and Atkins Can Still Do Without It A friend forwarded me a tweet the morning after the CLARITY Act's cloture vote failed — a former CFTC chairman saying the current SEC and CFTC chiefs will build crypto rules with or without Congress. It reads like a hypothetical. It isn't. Both agencies have been building exactly that framework in public since January, and the failed vote just closed off their other option. SEPTEMBER 15, 2026 Eleven Votes Short of Clarity The Senate held a cloture vote today on the CLARITY Act, the bill meant to finally tell crypto exchanges which regulator they answer to. Forty-nine senators voted yes, fifty voted no, and the rule requires sixty. Bitcoin slid through the session as the vote failed. Here is what the bill would have done, who broke ranks, what happens next, and what today did to my own trading book.