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SEC’s Crypto Task Force rapidly checking off boxes to end former cases — first Coinbase, now Robinhood

The news underscores a strong change in the new administration’s approach to regulating the crypto industry.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Robinhood announced the SEC had dropped its investigation into Robinhood Crypto and does not intend to “move forward with an enforcement action.” (Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.) The move comes a few days after the SEC dropped its case against Coinbase, the largest US crypto platform. 

This latest development underscores a major shift from the “regulation by enforcement” approach the former administration (and former SEC Chair Gary Gensler) took with the crypto industry. Earlier this month, current head of the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, Hester Peirce, wrote about the “crypto road trip” the agency has embarked on, and followed it on February 21 with a post likening the past regulatory environment to an escape room and that it was now “time to help open the door.

In the announcement, Dan Gallagher, chief legal, compliance, and corporate affairs officer at Robinhood Markets, said:

“We applaud the staff’s decision to close this investigation with no action. Let me be crystal clear — this investigation never should have been opened. Robinhood Crypto always has and will always respect federal securities laws and never allowed transactions in securities.”

Last May, the SEC sent the company a Wells notice, which is “a notification from a regulator that it intends to recommend that enforcement proceedings be commenced against the prospective respondent,” as SEC Law explains.

The company said at the time that it had received subpoenas regarding its crypto listings, custody of crypto, and platform operations, regulatory filings showed.

For Patrick Gerhart, president of banking operations for Telcoin, this was a case in point of the SEC’s overreach in the crypto sector. 

“The SEC closing the report on Robinhood is long overdue,” he said. “Hopefully, the SEC will now focus on clear and concise regulatory insight for the industry. Thus bringing in more transparency to the crypto realm. We are more than willing to work with the regulators hand in hand moving forward.”


Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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