Friday, September 11th

• Mining hashrate falls off its peak as AI eats the grid

• Stablecoins go institutional

• Miners power cheap power sites back on

• The CLARITY Act hits the Senate floor Tuesday

• Sentiment flips to Greed as ETF flows cool

Market Prices

Markets: BTC sits at $78,309 (Sept 10), +1.41% on the week, still short of $80K resistance. The move is macro, not crypto-specific: Treasury yields near 4.8-4.85%, strong jobs data, and oil above $100/barrel on the Iran conflict are all cutting the odds of near-term Fed easing ahead of next week's meeting.

Market Updates

US Bitcoin mining hashrate has fallen 15-21% from its peak as miners pivot to AI

US hashrate peaked above 1.14 ZH/s and now sits between 868-900 EH/s, with capacity increasingly leased out to AI/HPC data centers instead of mining.

• Public miners have signed $70-90B in AI/HPC hosting contracts combined, though only about 25% of that leased capacity has actually been delivered so far

• US miners still control over 27 GW of planned power capacity; this is a revenue-mix pivot, not miners abandoning Bitcoin

Stablecoins are becoming financial infrastructure

Tether and Fasanara Capital launched StableFund, a $400M fund targeting up to $3B to push USDT-linked lending into SME and consumer credit across 60+ countries.

• U.S. Bank ran a live USBDC pilot on Stellar for cross-border payments between its North America and Europe entities

• Separately, a 37-bank European consortium, Qivalis, is targeting a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin on Ethereum by H2 2026, pending Dutch regulatory approval

Some miners are making the opposite bet: turning cheap-power sites back on

American Bitcoin (Hut 8/ABTC) reactivated its Drumheller, Alberta site after a two-year shutdown, energizing 11,298 new rigs across 42 MW for an added 3.05 EH/s.

• Company's stated strategy is still "acquiring Bitcoin at below spot prices through disciplined, cost-efficient mining," the direct opposite bet from miners converting sites to AI hosting

• That's the real split in mining right now: AI conversion vs cheap-power BTC accumulation

Why It Matters

Sentiment is greedy (Fear & Greed at 69) and price is calm, but the biggest near-term catalyst isn't price, it's whether the Senate gets 60 votes on Tuesday. A cloture win reopens the floor for the CLARITY Act. A cloture loss pushes the conversation to the midterms. Everything else this week is trading around that one vote.

By The Numbers

69

The Fear & Greed Index has climbed from 29 to 69 in a month, moving from Fear to Greed even as price itself stayed range-bound. Sentiment is running well ahead of price action right now.

$39.63/PH/s/day

Hashprice has jumped 22% in the past month, climbing from $32.42 to $39.63 per PH/s/day as BTC's price gains outpaced a nearly flat difficulty. It's the sharpest improvement in miner economics so far this year, after months of margin squeeze.

-$27.7B

Grayscale's GBTC has now shed $27.7 billion cumulatively since the spot ETF era began, even as BlackRock's IBIT keeps pulling in fresh capital. The flow story isn't Bitcoin ETFs losing favor, it's a rotation from the legacy high-fee product into cheaper ones.

The Deep Dive

The CLARITY Act Hits the Senate Floor

The Signal

Senate Republicans released a revised, 630-page CLARITY Act text on Sept. 10. A cloture vote is scheduled for Sept. 15, with 60 votes needed to advance the bill to floor debate.

The Numbers

Good catch, I stripped them by accident. Here it is with the links intact:

What Changed

• Non-decentralized DeFi protocols where people "act in concert" to control or materially alter the protocol would face CFTC registration

• DeFi provisions were narrowed to spot and cash digital commodity transactions

• New language clarifies how credit unions can engage in digital asset activity

• The ethics provision restricting officials and their families from issuing or sponsoring digital assets remains largely unchanged

The Read

• CLARITY would establish clearer SEC and CFTC jurisdiction over digital assets, replacing years of regulatory ambiguity with defined statutory frameworks.

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has compared its potential impact to the GENIUS Act, arguing that regulatory clarity could accelerate institutional adoption and tokenized assets.

• If it passes, exchanges and issuers get clearer registration and disclosure frameworks, and non-decentralized DeFi protocols fall under CFTC registration requirements.

• If it doesn't, there's no immediate cliff, but the core jurisdictional ambiguity remains, and the next meaningful legislative window could depend heavily on the November midterms.

Watch Next

• The Sept. 15 cloture vote itself

• Whether Treasury Secretary Bessent and White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt's pressure moves any Democratic votes

• How BTC price and ETF flows react around the vote

Maestro Updates

The Full Mezzamine Docs Are Live

We published the full Mezzamine docs: facilities, collateral, hedging, and yield, in BTC, end to end.

The Bitcoin UTXO Indexer Is Live

First of three. The infrastructure behind our Developer API is now open source, same code, battle-tested across billions of requests. Apache 2.0, self-host it, build on it.

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