🏴 Sunlight for DeFi Vaults

Summary

Let's unpack what Peirce said and what it means for DeFi's yield machines, catch up below!

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1. 🤖 Coinbase advanced toward the agentic economy today, shipping updates [ that let businesses accept USDC from AI agents, users set plain-English conditional trades via agents, and devs bolt x402 payments onto any API. 2. 💸 BitMEX, the exchange that invented the 100x perpetual swap back in the day, is shutting down for good [ on September 23rd after +11 years and zero funds lost to hacks.

For going on two years now, the SEC has been thawing toward crypto in ways that would've seemed fantastical not long ago.

In January 2025, the agency stood up its Crypto Task Force [ under Commissioner Hester Peirce, with a mandate to draw lines between securities and non-securities instead of litigating the question one enforcement action at a time. By mid-2025, Chairman Paul Atkins was pushing Project Crypto [ a broader initiative to make the U.S. a hub for onchain builders.

The capstone landed this March, when the Commission published its big crypto interpretive release [ i.e. formal Commission-level guidance (not a new rule, but a framework the agency will administer the law through). Among its moves.