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On September 15 and 16, $746 million was withdrawn from spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US. The biggest sell-off came on the same day the Senate rejected the crypto industry's main bill. And the next day in the afternoon, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time since 2023. Then the situation with capital changed.
Over the next seven trading days, these same funds raised about $3 billion . As of July 13, they had losses of almost $5.7 billion for the year. By September 24, they were back in the black for 2026. Tom Lee is the head of research at Fundstrat and the chairman of Bitwise, the world's largest Ethereum treasury management company.
A few days after that sell-off, CNBC asked him the question every crypto investor had been asking for 11 months. Matt Hogan is the chief investment officer of Bitwise, a company that manages crypto funds for financial advisors and large institutions. He gave an interview to The Rundown a few days after the vote, and his job is to explain crypto to people who manage other people's money.
In this video, we analyze how money behaved after the worst week for crypto all year. The SEC rule change that received far less attention than the failed bill, why Wall Street's declines consistently lead to Ethereum, and what it takes to get Bitcoin back to $100,000. Now let's begin. Interesting, Tom, when you mention crypt as a predictive tool.
If we're going to talk more and delve into crypto, you see that Bitcoin is up almost 6%, to 85,975. This is the highest since January. Ether is now at 2,746. It is up four and a third of a percent. Is cryptowinter behind us, Tom? Yes, it looks like cryptowinter is mostly over. Although, perhaps, it's a little premature.
The crypto market faced enormous difficulties. The transparency law has not been passed, interest rates are rising. There have been several high-profile disappointments, and yet crypto prices are rising. I think this is the best signal of reaching a bottom when the market is rising on bad news. This is reminiscent of your thesis about a market where everyone is bearish, which ironically could be a sign of an eventual " bullish" trend.
That's right. The last seller must have sold or regrouped last week and now we have a bullish surge, perhaps with a delay of a few days. Let's start with who sold and when. On September 15, the Senate vote to advance the Transparency Act failed by a vote of 49 to 50, 11 votes short of the required 60.
According to CoinDesk, spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $450 million that day —their worst day since June. The next day, the Fed raised the benchmark rate by a quarter point to a range of 3.75–4%, and Bitcoin fell to around $75,000. A quick message from our sponsor Kalshi: $25 free is waiting for you. With Kalshi prediction markets, you are not limited to just cryptocurrency prices.
You can trade on anything that is in the news, such as whether the Clarity Act will be passed. And if your prediction is correct, you get paid. Honestly, it's more enjoyable than being right in the comments for free. To get your $25, simply make your first $25 alshi.com/r/cryptonutshell. Five days later, on September 21, Bitcoin jumped 7.7% to $87,354 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Over a billion dollars in lending rates were liquidated in cryptocurrency derivatives markets in 24 hours , and about 878 million of that belonged to traders who were betting on a price drop. The ETF attracted nearly a billion dollars that same day—the best single-day increase since October 2025. These purchases returned the average ETF owner to profitability.
Decrypt estimates that the average cost of assets for these funds is around $81,700. At the time of writing, Bitcoin was hovering around $84,000. That's still about a third below October 2025's record of $126,080 , but more than 40% above the level at which Bitcoin started July. So, CNBC asked Tom Lee the main question, and he answered without hesitation.
Well, I saw you said that before the vote you were less concerned about its failure than you were at the beginning of this year. Like, you still thought the law wouldn't pass, but you weren't so worried about it not passing anymore. What changed between when everyone wanted him to pass, and it was so important for the crypt, and the current calm?
Yes, there were two things. Excellent question. The first was that the market had already priced in its failure. Right? On the eve of the vote, before this small jump, if you look at Polymarket or Kalshi, the chances of approval dropped to about 15%. If failure is already built into the price, then who cares if it fails?
Right? This will not affect the price. Another reason is that the SEC and CFTC were very aggressive in saying, "We'll fill the gap if this thing fails." SEC Chairman Paul Atkins reportedly stated on CNBC, "We are ready, willing, and able to enact rules that encompass everything that legal certainty would entail ." So when I looked at it, I thought, "Well, look , it's already priced in.
We're going to have a pro-crypto SEC." And my assumption, and this is probably the most important point , is that after 2.5 years of growth, the crypto industry will become too big to be contained. We may not get the same support for the SEC from the next administration as we do today, but we won't go back to the Gensler era, because that will include BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, and the NYSE.
We would have reached breakaway speed. It's like how Uber was semi-legal, but then everyone was using it and regulators couldn't do anything about it. I think the same thing will happen with cryptocurrency over the next 2.5 years. That's a great observation. Perhaps the only counterargument here is that many traditional financial institutions already support this.
You mentioned BlackRock and others, but there are still some big banks left. I think JP Morgan was one of them. Many regional banks opposed this. They were very against it. Can you explain to the audience why they were so opposed to the adoption of this act? Yes, well, look at your checking or savings account.
Look at the interest you earn on these accounts. That's why they were against it. The average current account today brings in one basis point. This is 0.01% per annum. Big banks were worried that a new technology had emerged that could disrupt the status quo. Perhaps stablecoins, which are digital dollars on blockchains, could offer interest.
And if I can take out my phone and press a button to get 5% per annum instead of 0.1% on a checking account, well , that's a little scary. So, look, they said they were worried about deposit outflows, bank exhaustion, and credit crunch. I do n't believe it. I think they were worried about the loss of revenue.
They had a kind of wonderful monopoly on people's money. Cryptocurrency is a challenge for her. So, they tried to do everything to prevent this technology from winning. In the end, new technologies win. Ultimately, what wins is what is simpler, better, cheaper, and more profitable for investors. But of course, the banks tried to resist this.
And, I guess, in a way, they won. But now they have to come to terms with the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, we have a pro-crypto SEC. So we will gain a lot of positions anyway. The bill, which was rejected on September 15, had been the industry's top priority in Washington for over a year. Its essence —the division of oversight between the SEC and the CFTC— was never a major issue.
According to Fintech Weekly's analysis of the vote, it stalled due to ethical rules regarding officials' own crypto assets. Democrats argued that the bill did not apply to the president and his family. And Republicans pointed to more than 100 amendments that they said they had already made at the request of Democrats.
Now look at two numbers from the FDIC. As of September 21, the average savings account in the United States yielded 0.37% per annum, and the average interest-bearing checking account yielded 0.07%. This is despite the fact that the Fed's own rate is between 3.75% and 4%. In mid-September, the market for stablecoins, digital dollars that exist on blockchains, was valued at about $303 billion, according to data from the Stablecoin Beat tracker.
Keep these numbers in mind as you listen to what Matt Hogan has to say about banks. If you want someone to track ETF flows and tokenization adoption for you , " water", only important signals directly to your mail. Yes, this is a huge event. This will be the biggest change in how we trade stocks in our entire lives.
I think it's worth starting by explaining how absurd the current system is. For example, think about the world you live in. You have driverless cars, you have Amazon that will deliver anything to your door in an hour. When you want to sell a stock, you can only do so from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM Monday through Friday , and not on weekends.
If you sell a stock, settlement takes 1 day, which means that unless you have a very favorable brokerage arrangement, you won't be able to get your money within 24 hours. 100 years ago , guess how long it took to settle a stock. It took 1 day. They haven't made any progress in 100 years. So, what is a tokenized stock?
What you do with a tokenized asset: you take a common stock, you custodianize it , and then you issue a certificate on the blockchain that represents that stock, right? You can tokenize Nvidia, tokenize Tesla. What is changing? A lot of things. Suddenly you can trade it 24/7, 365 days a year. Suddenly she doesn't take weekends or night breaks.
Anyone in the world can trade it, and if you sell, the settlement happens not in a day, but in a second. So, if you need to, say, make a down payment on an apartment or buy a car and you need money, you can sell a stock and get cash instantly, instead of waiting all day . I believe, and the chairman of the SEC believes, and the CEO of BlackRock believes , and the heads of many other financial institutions believe, that all stocks will be tokenized in the next 5 years.
So, we will move to trading 24/7, 365 days a year. We will move to global trading, and this was the first time the SEC has implemented rules allowing Americans to interact with these tokenized stocks. So I really think that was a defining moment. I think we'll look back on this as a pre- tokenization era and a tokenization era, and they'll look very different.
This is quite fascinating. Two days after the Senate vote, on September 17, the SEC took its own step. It issued what it calls an innovative exception—a 5-year conditional permit that allows tokenized versions of U.S.-listed stocks to trade online on platforms the agency calls tokenized securities exchanges .
These safeguards show how seriously the agency takes the matter. The platform must provide 30 days' notice before it tokenizes a company's shares, and that company can object. Only real- world tokens are allowed. No synthetic substitutes, and each token should have the same rights as the share behind it, including dividends and voting rights.
Trading opens with symbol limits and volume restrictions. The SEC's step toward bringing America's capital markets into the digital age. Citi analysts expect the tokenized securities market to reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, as CoinDesk reported. So , what changes for you, the investor, when a stock becomes a token?
Uh, yeah, I mean ... I think there are, I think there are, there are several ways why the crypto market is in for a "bullish" trend. You know, I mean, I think the audience should realize that ...nobody really knows which way the markets are going to go. But it 's best to have an idea of the possible options.
For example, if someone asked, " Tom, you know, 2 years ago, why would the S&P 500 be up?" Okay, let's say the end of 2024, I could list a bunch of reasons. For example: “ Hey, it could have been AI.” It could have been the Federal Reserve. You know, it could have been bringing production home." But I didn't assign a probability to any of them or say you had to choose any one path.
And in the end, the market grew significantly. And I think that applies to Ethereum as well: what will make not only Ethereum useful, but also the token itself, you know, the ETH token valuable, the ETH coin. I think there are a few paths here, because, first of all, tokenization is a big opportunity not only because of the sheer scale, but also because of the sheer amount of innovation it can provide.
I think people see tokenization simply as, "Hey, we can trade the S&P 500 and its components 24/7." I think this is actually quite useful because it can be an additional security. Mhm. But also, because tokenization offers legal rights to a range of collateral assets, you can innovate a lot about what a stock is, actually what an S&P stock is.
You can create derivatives and structures that do not require a shareholder vote. So I think there's a lot of potential for discovery here. But when I look at today's payment systems, what's involved in any financial transaction , and how many intermediaries there are. For example, a credit card transaction passes through seven essentially discrete regulatory functions : from the card platform to the processor, validator, merchant, point-of- sale terminal, and so on.
But all of this could actually be run on a single blockchain as a smart contract. So, this is a huge innovation because it changes the speed and size of payments, and of course, reduces costs for the user. So I think the answer is: the financial industry will eventually become a big user of blockchains.
Not only because customers want it , but also because they will be able to create new products and also make the financial industry safer. But all three of these things can happen at different speeds, or all at once, because, after all, change doesn't happen overnight. If stocks and funds are moving to blockchain, the next question is—which one ?
As of September 24, Token Terminal tracked $46 billion in tokenized real-world assets across 35 different blockchains. Ethereum accounted for 22.2 billion, or 48.4% . The next largest, BNB Chain, had 5.5 billion. The price of ether began to rise. ETH hit a low of around $1,507 on June 6th and was trading around $2,715 on September 27th, representing an approximately 80% increase.
It still remains about 45% below its August 2025 high near 4,950. Spot Ether ETFs saw inflows for six consecutive days through September 25, with BlackRock leading the buying on the last of those days. And Tom Lee's company, Bitmain , held 5,983,940 ETH as of September 20— about 4.9% of all ether in existence, with 85% of it staked for income.
There is also a much larger bill in the old system. According to the Merchants Payments Coalition, citing a Nielsen report, American merchants paid a record $198.25 billion in credit and debit card processing fees in 2025. In 2009, this account was 62.1 billion. Coinage asked Tom Lee where to expect growth in this cycle.
Yes, yes, yes, I hear you. I think you're more of a pro than you let on, but I'll give you an example of an ordinary retail investor. Uh, there will be three things. So this example of the SEC announcing the tokenization exemption is just one of probably 10 regulatory headlines we'll see by the end of this year.
The SEC or CFTC will discuss perpetual futures —these are futures traded on crypto exchanges that could displace traditional futures markets. This will appear soon. We are looking forward to a number of such regulatory announcements. So, just as tokenization has us talking about changes in stocks, we'll be having the same conversations about stablecoins, futures , options, and private companies.
I think we are in for a whole series of such events. The second thing that I think we'll see and that might come up for discussion at the holiday table is big M&A deals or announcements from big companies, right? So when you see MasterCard buying a stablecoin company for $2 billion, which happened recently, it's a sign that maybe something is happening.
Yesterday, Patrick Collison of Stripe, arguably the most respected fintech company in the world, published a post about the huge growth in the use of stablecoins by artificial intelligence agents. When people like that say, " Look, something's happening here," I think it gives a certain boost of energy.
And the last thing is simply the price. I know it 's a reflexive, vicious cycle, but when the price starts to rise, people start talking about it . I just remembered what I see in the market today: the crypto-native market is oblivious to bad news. They believe we are in a supercycle of stablecoin tokenization.
If we see Bitcoin return to $100,000 due to some of these catalysts, then I don't think you'll seem so "crypto-crazy" mentioning it on Thanksgiving. And maybe your mom, dad, or uncle will ask you about cryptocurrency towards the end of the year. Payment giants are already writing checks. In March, MasterCard agreed to buy BVNK, a company building infrastructure for stablecoin payments, for $1.5 billion upfront plus up to $300 million if targets are met.
The deal was closed on August 3, and MasterCard said it connects on-chain payments to the card and banking systems they already use. For Bitcoin, the path to a six-figure sum is shorter than it seems based on last year's sentiment. From around $84,000 to $100,000—that's about a 19% increase. Bitcoin has already risen by more than 40% between the beginning of July and the end of September.
What he hasn't done yet is bring back regular investors. So what will bring them back? Combine these two things and things become simple. Tom Lee analyzes price dynamics. The worst headlines of the year appeared, the money went away for 2 days, and then came back with more force than it had left. Matt Hogan reads the rule book.
The bill failed, and 2 days later, regulators prescribed a path for transferring shares to the blockchain. Both point to the same thing . Almost half of all tokenized real assets are already on the Ethereum network, and MasterCard now fully owns a stablecoin payments company. None of this guarantees continued growth.
At the September 16 meeting, 16 out of 18 Fed officials forecast at least one more rate hike. The Market Structure Act has been shelved in the Senate for 2026, and the SEC exemption is temporary, with restrictions on what stocks can be traded and in what volumes. Bitcoin is still about a third below its record, and ether is about 45% below its own.
But look at how the market reacted to the worst news it could have received. ETFs closed the $5.7 billion hole and turned a profit for the year. The SEC opened the door to on-chain stock trading, and the largest owner, Bitmain, continued to buy ether despite everything. And if you want to get this overview every morning, jo water , only important signals. .
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