$250,000. Per violation. Per day. That’s the fine in the new Clarity Act draft for any exchange that keeps trading a token issued by a sitting federal official, the President included. The official himself has to hand the profits back. Trump agreed to it.
On Monday I wrote that one clause decides crypto’s decade: the presidential ethics provision was the biggest thing standing between the bill and 60 votes.
On Wednesday the Senate released a draft with that clause written in. By Thursday, Goldman’s CEO was publicly backing the bill:
"I'm very supportive of moving the CLARITY Act forward, so we can get some market structure in place and start to move the innovation process along."
— David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, to Politico
enjoy this weeks issue! – Marc & the 51 team,
This week’s signals at a glance:
Washington wrote crypto’s ethics clause
PayPal rebuffed $53 billion
Telegram puts a wallet in a billion pockets
BNY is killing the weekend
BlackRock, Coinbase, Fidelity and Strategy pledged $15M to prepare Bitcoin for quantum threats
And 12+ more signals below.
This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.
The 51 Signal
The war on the weekend.
Market hours are a leftover from the era when settlement meant moving paper between buildings in lower Manhattan.
The paper is gone. The hours survived, because everything downstream, collateral calls, margin models, FX cutoffs, was built around them. Nobody wanted to break the convention alone.
This week, six players broke it at once. BNY set a 2027 target for round-the-clock Treasury settlement. Kraken’s parent is taking its tokenized stocks, $37B traded so far, to Hong Kong. Arcus put 24/7 US stocks on Robinhood Chain. Bybit shipped its own version. Base is about to. OKX built its board pitch around 24/7 trading.
The logic is simple. Money goes where it can move. Cash that sits still from Friday to Monday earns nothing and helps no one. Once the world’s biggest custodian stops taking weekends off, a closed market stops looking normal. It starts looking slow.
Whoever runs markets while the NYSE sleeps sets the price when it wakes up.
From our partner: Bron Wallet
Institutions quietly moved away from private keys years ago. The infrastructure they use MPC security, full asset recovery, built-in duress protection — was never meant for retail.
Copper founder Dmitry Tokarev built Bron to change that. Self-custody without the seed phrase risk. Recovery without trusting an exchange. Inheritance built in from day one.
He walks through all of it on 51 Insights.
Top Boardroom Reads & Data
Dollarisation and Monetary Control: What Lessons for the Rise of Stablecoins? (BIS, July 2026).
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? (Stratechery, July 2026). Thompson’s case that the answer to Chinese open models is American open models.
There’s One Way to Win the AI Race (Forbes, July 2026). Catalini on why the big labs are lobbying against the openness that would win.
Paradigm’s Comment Letter on the NCUA’s GENIUS Rulemaking (Paradigm, July 2026). Argues the yield ban overreaches GENIUS; reserve risk sits in the asset, not the ledger.
Stablecoins, Digital Payments, and the International Role of the U.S. Dollar (Federal Reserve, July 2026). A Fed conference note highlights research finding dollar stablecoin volumes now past Bitcoin’s.
Ways to Think About Token Pricing (Benedict Evans, July 2026). Pegs inference gross margins at 40-50% and asks who keeps pricing power.
Washington wrote crypto’s ethics clause
What happened: Senate Republicans re-released the Clarity Act on July 22 with a new ethics section banning federal officials, the President and VP included, from issuing or sponsoring a digital asset for consideration. Officials would disgorge the profits plus a penalty; exchanges that knowingly keep listing a covered token face DOJ civil fines up to $250,000 per violation per day. Trump signed off on the language, which sunsets January 20, 2029. A day later, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon publicly backed the bill, breaking with the bank lobby. Ten Democratic votes are still needed.
51 View: For a year the bill’s problem wasn’t securities law. It was one man’s balance sheet. Democrats wouldn’t vote for market structure while the President ran a token business, and Republicans wouldn’t write a rule against their own President. Look at the sunset date: January 20, 2029, the day this presidency ends. That’s a ceasefire priced to one administration, and it only has to hold long enough to pass the bill. Two voting windows remain before recess. If it slips, the next real shot is 2028. We’d take better odds than the 43% prediction markets are giving it.
The new dollar banks
What happened: Augustus raised a $180M Series B at a $1B valuation on July 21, led by Tiger Global, with the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle and Deel participating. The four-year-old startup is building a clearing bank for the stablecoin era: direct dollar accounts for fintechs and banks in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, moving money over Swift, ACH, SEPA and stablecoins. It won conditional OCC approval for a national bank charter in May and already processes billions for clients like Kraken.
“We started Augustus with a simple thesis: the Dollar is the greatest product in the world but its distribution is fundamentally broken.”
— Ferdinand Dabitz, CEO of Augustus, in the funding announcement
51 View: Since 2010, the OCC has approved eight brand-new national banks. Two of the newest were built for crypto. Erebor got its charter in February. Its deposits nearly quadrupled to $4B in one quarter, and it’s now raising at $8B. Augustus is worth $1B before its charter is even final. Here’s the interesting part: they don’t compete. Erebor banks American tech and crypto firms at home. Augustus sells dollar accounts to fintechs in the markets big banks walked away from. Correspondent banks spent a decade cutting those ties. Stablecoins proved the demand never left. Anyone can move dollars on a blockchain now. Almost nobody can clear them at the Fed. That’s the business both of them are really in.
Telegram puts a wallet in a billion pockets
What happened: Pavel Durov announced on July 21 that Telegram will embed a native, non-custodial Gram wallet in every Telegram app this summer, calling it the largest rollout of a non-custodial wallet in history. It targets Telegram’s 1B+ monthly users with instant, zero-fee transfers. Telegram hasn’t said how it will coexist with the custodial @wallet bot. Gram (rebranded from Toncoin in June) jumped about 7% on the news.
51 View: The biggest exchanges spent a decade and billions of dollars on user acquisition to reach roughly 100 million customers. Durov just scheduled a bigger rollout than all of them combined, as a software update. Most of those billion people will ignore it. But if 2% transact, that’s 20 million new self-custody users, more than most chains have onboarded in their lifetime. Distribution has always been crypto’s missing piece, and the fix may arrive as a default setting in a messaging app. Watch the regulators: a non-custodial default at this scale has no precedent to point at.
BNY is killing the weekend
What happened: BNY, the world’s largest custodian bank, is pushing toward 24/7 US Treasury settlement with a 2027 target. In a letter to clients signed by four senior executives, the bank described its ambition for an “always-on” Treasury market, after an after-hours test that moved Treasury collateral using Ripple’s RLUSD and OpenEden’s USDO reserves. It plans tokenized Treasuries on blockchain rails by end-2026.
51 View: The weekend is a settlement convention, and conventions die when the biggest player stops observing them. Stablecoins move 24/7 while the reserves behind them settle on business days. That mismatch is where the risk actually lives, and BNY is the first tier-1 custodian to tackle this challenge.
Be Smart: Ask your custodian what its weekend plan for collateral is. If the answer is “Monday,” you’re pricing risk on a clock your counterparties may stop using soon.
This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.
News Flash
Infrastructure and Markets
Mubadala Capital put a private-markets fund on-chain via KAIO across Solana, Sui and Base, with Coinbase taking balance-sheet exposure.
HSBC became the first firm through Gate 2 of the Bank of England’s Digital Securities Sandbox, then signed an MOU with LSEG to deliver the UK’s first digital gilt by Q1 2027, the first blockchain-native sovereign debt from a G7 nation.
Kraken’s parent Payward is expanding xStocks to Hong Kong equities first, with UK and Korean listings to follow pending approvals, after $37B in lifetime tokenized volume.
BlackRock, Coinbase, Fidelity and Strategy pledged $15M to prepare Bitcoin for quantum threats, with roughly $460B sitting in exposed addresses.
Regulation and Policy
The SEC settled the FOIA suit over Gensler’s deleted texts, paying $150K in legal fees, releasing two withheld Ethereum-investigation documents and reviewing its record-preservation practices.
US regulators missed the GENIUS Act’s one-year rulemaking deadline on July 18; a stack of proposals issued, none final, with the January 18, 2027 effective date unchanged.
Banking and Payments
Bank of America named Sonali Theisen head of its global digital-assets platform, spanning tokenized deposits, stablecoins, settlement and custody.
Kakao signed an MOU with Circle to explore won-stablecoin payment infrastructure across Kakao Pay and KakaoBank.
Funds, Deals and Others
Digital Asset added Shinhan and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures to its oversubscribed $355M round; check sizes undisclosed.
Augustus raised a $180M Series B at a $1B valuation led by Tiger Global to give international banks dollar access.
S&P Dow Jones Indices launched a digital asset index with Pantera, limited to tokens and companies with real revenue.
Strategy lifted cash reserves to $3.2B and skipped a third straight week of bitcoin buying, its longest pause since 2020.
The AI Layer
New: one filtered AI judgment per week. Only what a digital asset executive actually needs.
OpenAI paused the unreleased model behind its Erdős result after repeated sandbox escapes, once opening a GitHub PR against instructions; limited access is back under new safeguards.
Alphabet raised 2026 AI capex to $195-205B; the market cut GOOGL 7% and TSLA 13% the next day.
The open-models fight went mainstream: Jensen Huang, Ben Thompson and Christian Catalini published the same argument days apart: the answer to Chinese open models is American open models.
51 View: The big labs trained on the open internet, and now lobby to make sure nobody distills from them the way they distilled from everyone else. China went the other way: Qwen and Kimi ship open weights, and each release moves the floor the closed labs have to price against. Two smart people reaching the same conclusion in one week is worth noting when one of them helped build Libra. The commodity layer is chosen by whoever gives it away.
That’s all for now, folks.
– Marc & Team
