Bitcoin jumped above $68,000 Wednesday for the first time since early June, up about 6% in a day.
Washington helped supply the push.
The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed its first permanent rulebook for crypto assets Tuesday. The framework, called Regulation Crypto Assets, is open for public comment for the next 60 days.
Crypto executives are at the White House today. President Trump is expected to join, alongside the heads of the SEC and the CFTC, its commodities counterpart. The guest list spans a leading US crypto exchange, a popular retail brokerage app, Ripple, and Gemini, plus executives from Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.
The Senate votes September 15 on advancing the CLARITY Act, the bill that would settle which regulator oversees which digital assets.
Two stocks sit closest to that outcome. One of them has held up far better than the other this year.
A retail brokerage holds the product under debate in Washington
The CEO of one popular retail brokerage app wants US regulators to approve tokenized stocks: ordinary shares wrapped in a digital token so they can trade on a blockchain. He made the case in a post Tuesday and again on CNBC Wednesday morning, arguing tokenized stocks give investors real-time settlement, around-the-clock trading, and more control over their assets. "American investors should benefit from this innovation, too," he wrote.
This brokerage already sells more than 2,000 tokenized stocks to customers in Europe today, and its CEO argues the US risks handing the market to overseas exchanges if it waits.
Its second-quarter revenue reached a record $1.31 billion, up 32% from a year ago.
Thirteen of its business lines now generate $100 million or more in revenue at an annual pace, and crypto trading is just one of them.
Prediction markets are proving to be another lucrative revenue model that simply didn't exist a few years ago.
Web visits to the brokerage are up 4% from a year ago, a base that held while crypto prices spent much of the year falling.
A pure-play crypto exchange rallies alongside bitcoin
Shares of one large US crypto exchange jumped about 10% Wednesday as bitcoin ran toward $70,000. Crypto-adjacent stocks tend to rally alongside the coin.
But our demand data tells a more complicated story about the long-term setup here.
Consumers who want bitcoin have more places than ever to hold it: brokerage apps, funds inside ordinary retirement accounts, or wallets they control themselves.
The exchange's own traffic says the crowd went elsewhere.
Web visits are down 52% from a year ago, and the series has yet to find a floor.
That traffic loss is in the results already: revenue fell 19% last quarter, and the company has lost money three quarters in a row.
One of these names rallies with crypto but isn't a one-legged stool. The other needs coin prices to do the work its own traffic has stopped doing.
Washington's next move comes September 15 in the Senate
Today traders are betting Washington finishes the job. The SEC's comment window runs into October; the Senate votes before it closes.
The retail brokerage does not need the vote to go its way. Customers handed it a record $22 billion in net deposits last quarter, and a US green light on tokenized stocks would give that European business a home market.
The pure-play exchange needs coin prices to do the work its own traffic has stopped doing.
Bottom Line
Bitcoin interest is heating back up. Gemini cofounder Cameron Winklevoss argued this week that the AI boom built a "time machine": investors spent the year chasing AI stocks while bitcoin sat near $65,000, a price he calls a chance to buy the past.
We've made that case repeatedly over the past year as bitcoin lagged. Today, the market started to agree.
One of these two crypto-adjacent stocks is already a Core Conviction position in our portfolio — and our demand data makes clear which one we think wins the next leg of this cycle.
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