By: Christopher Terrigno
29 September, 2026
Two things happened this week that touched crypto directly: the CLARITY Act failed in the Senate, and the Fed raised rates for the first time in three years. Neither is a small event on its own. Together, they raise a question worth sitting with rather than rushing to answer: Is digital currency actually working its way into mainstream asset management, or is it still waiting on a green light from Washington that may or may not come?
A Vote That Fell Short
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, legislation meant to draw a clear jurisdictional line between the SEC and CFTC over digital assets, already passed the House in 2025. This week was the Senate's turn, and the bill fell short of the 60 votes needed for cloture, landing at 49. For now, that leaves the regulatory question the bill was meant to settle unresolved. XRP, which tends to trade as a bellwether for U.S. regulatory sentiment given Ripple's history with the SEC, dropped about 10% on the news.
Rates Up, First Time Since 2023
The next day, the FOMC voted 12-0 to raise the federal funds rate by a quarter point, to a target range of 3.75%–4.00%. It's the Committee's first hike since July 26, 2023—more than three years that included a long hold and then a string of cuts through 2024 and 2025. Higher rates typically raise the opportunity cost of holding assets that don't produce yield, which is part of why the move is relevant to crypto even though it isn't a crypto-specific policy.
Where XRP Stands Today
XRP is trading around $1.30, making it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap at roughly $81.6 billion. Technically, the XRP Ledger settles transactions in a matter of seconds for a fee of about 0.00001 XRP, a fraction of a cent, which is the basis for Ripple's long-running pitch of XRP as settlement infrastructure rather than a purely speculative asset. On the institutional side, spot XRP ETFs from Franklin Templeton, Bitwise, and Grayscale are already trading and have continued to see inflows even after this week's regulatory setback, a detail worth tracking regardless of where the CLARITY Act ends up, since it suggests institutional access to XRP isn't strictly dependent on it.
The YieldMax Angle: Income Funds Built on a Bitcoin Proxy
A separate trend worth watching is the growth of options-income ETFs tied to Strategy Inc. (the company formerly known as MicroStrategy), which holds the largest corporate Bitcoin treasury in the world. MSTY, the YieldMax MSTR Option Income Strategy ETF, writes call spreads against MSTR to generate weekly distributions, currently running at an annualized rate of 85.44%, most of it return of capital rather than new income, against a gross expense ratio a little over 1%. In theory, that payout could be redirected into other crypto-adjacent positions without touching the original principal.
It's also worth being specific about which fund does what. WNTR, the YieldMax MSTR Short Option Income Strategy ETF, is often mentioned in the same breath as MSTY, but it runs the opposite trade: a put-spread strategy built for inverse exposure to MSTR. It's designed to gain when MSTR falls, not to generate income to fund further crypto exposure. Anyone looking at this category for an accumulation strategy should know the difference before choosing between them.
Where This Leaves Asset Management
Nothing this week changes the fact that crypto remains a comparatively new, thinly regulated asset class, and a failed Senate vote alongside the first rate hike in three years are two real headwinds to weigh. But the presence of live spot ETFs, a settlement layer fast and cheap enough to interest institutions, and a growing set of income-generating products built around crypto-adjacent holdings all point to an asset-management industry that is building infrastructure around digital assets in parallel with, rather than strictly after, the regulatory process.
That's the debate this series will pick back up in Part Two.
The main edits were tiny: capitalizing “Is” after the colon, changing “raise...a quarter point” → “raise...by a quarter point,” cleaning up the rate range formatting, fixing the run-on around the three-year timeline, adding “making it” before “the fifth-largest,” and separating the final Part Two sentence for a cleaner ending.
Before RSJ publishes this one, though, I strongly recommend we fact-check it. It contains a lot more specific, current claims than the average article—Senate vote totals, a Fed decision, XRP price/market cap, ETF inflows, and an 85.44% distribution rate. I wouldn’t change any of those during a grammar edit, but they’re exactly the kinds of numbers we should verify separately.