Happy Monday. Every major benchmark closed the week lower as hot core CPI and $100 oil pushed the odds of a hike at this week's Fed meeting to 87%, Trump signed off on an ethics provision that gives the Clarity Act its best odds since July, and on Solana a launchpad that matched Pump.fun's revenue in a week got its best features copied the next week. 

In today's edition, we discuss the sell-off into the Fed decision and the fight between StonkFun and Pump.fun.

All four major benchmarks finished the week in the red. The S&P 500 fell 1.4%, while the Nasdaq and gold both declined 2.4%. BTC was the weakest performer, ending the week down 4.5%.

As covered in Friday’s edition, the sell-off has been driven by rising expectations for further rate hikes. Core CPI increased 0.3% MoM, above expectations, while WTI continues to trade around $100. Markets now price an 86.7% chance of a hike at this week’s Fed meeting and a 25% chance of three hikes by the end of 2026.

The major crypto news this morning is that Trump has agreed to a new bipartisan ethics provision in the proposed Clarity Act, which is heading for a key vote this week. The revised rules would allow state attorneys general to enforce restrictions preventing federal officials from issuing, sponsoring or holding significant interests in digital assets. They could also act against exchanges that list assets in violation of those restrictions.

The development has pushed the odds of the Clarity Act becoming law in 2026 to 32%, their highest level since late July. For anyone wondering what the bill could mean for the digital asset industry, I could not recommend this read more.

The weakness extended across crypto, with every sector we track finishing the week deep in the red except Gaming, which ended roughly flat.

Where the market goes next will largely depend on this week’s Fed decision and the guidance Kevin Warsh provides afterward. ETF flows reflect the same caution. BTC ETFs recorded two consecutive days of outflows totaling $380M. These flows will likely need to turn positive again for BTC to break above $82K and carry the wider market with it.

Elsewhere, the much-anticipated Arc Chain launches on Wednesday. We will be watching closely for the first projects and opportunities to emerge.

 — Kunal

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Stonk Fun vs Pump

Following Pons' success on Robinhood, StonkFun has emerged as the community launchpad play on Solana. Where Pump.fun coins historically had to be paired with SOL, Stonk lets creators pick the quote asset. It launched July 23 with its own token, STONK, paired against Backed's tokenized S&P 500, and moved new launches onto Raydium's LaunchLab on September 6. Three things set it apart from Pump.fun:

• Any quote asset. 465 approved tokens: xStocks, Backpack's Sunrise stocks, pre-IPO tokens such as ANTHROPIC and OPENAI, currencies, and custom tokens including ZEC, WBTC and HYPE.

• Raydium is the venue. Pump.fun graduates into its own AMM, PumpSwap. StonkFun graduates into Raydium pools whose LP it keeps.

• Holders get paid in the quote asset. A launch can carry a 1% or 3% transfer tax paid to holders in the paired token.

The economics are 50 bps on every trade on the bonding curve, and because StonkFun owns no DEX but keeps the LP of every pool its tokens graduate into, the same 50 bps after graduation. The result, with 60% of revenue going to buybacks: $12.4M of revenue since launch, $8.2M of it from September 7 to 12 alone, level with Pump.fun over the same days, and $7.4M of STONK bought and burned, 15% of supply.

Pump.fun had strong incentives to compete. The team has aggressively expanded its monetization from the launchpad to the DEX and now the frontend, making clear it would not give up its core business without a fight. As expected only a week after StonkFun success Pump reacted. This came in two stages:

• Custom Pairs, September 9. New tokens can be priced in 93 assets from the same two issuers StonkFun uses, Backed's xStocks and Backpack's Sunrise stocks, plus WBTC, WETH and metals, with half of the revenue going to the PUMP buyback-and-burn contract.

• Holder Rewards, September 12. A token's trading fees are paid to its holders in the quote asset several times an hour, matching StonkFun's reward mode.

Pump has already fought off Bonk and Believe. StonkFun now tests whether sentiment has turned against Pump.fun enough for its monopoly to slip.

While Custom Pairs did not hold, with Pump at 10-30% of custom-pair bonding-curve volume for two days, adding Holder Rewards did. Since September 12, Pump has held about two-thirds of that volume, 57.8% at the last read.

Despite this, the strong launches Stonk already has keep it dominant on the DEX side: Pump has 30.6% of the two platforms' combined AMM volume on these pairs but only 2.4% of the fees. Stonk's pools charge 1.25% on every trade and it keeps collecting on the locked LP, while those two shares imply PumpSwap earns roughly 7 bps on the same pairs, so a dollar traded on Stonk is worth about eighteen traded on Pump.

The next test is whether Pump’s distribution can pull liquidity onto PumpSwap, or whether StonkFun’s stronger post-graduation economics are enough to protect its lead once tokens reach the DEX. 

— Shaunda

The UNIverse Expands

Blockworks Research argues that Robinhood Chain has put Uniswap back at the center of onchain speculation, accounting for 22% of its August volume while Uniswap captured 92% of DEX activity on the chain. The fee switch burned $9.3M of UNI during the month without materially weakening liquidity or execution. Meanwhile, v4 now handles 54% of Uniswap’s Ethereum volume and gives developers the tools to build new markets through hooks, permissioned pools and correlated asset pairs. In the short term, UNI remains tied to speculative activity on Robinhood. Its longer-term opportunity is turning those users and liquidity toward more durable tokenized asset markets.

How We Made $10M+ Running an Equity Perps Arbitrage Bot

The article recounts how CBB made $10M arbitraging equity perps between Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 markets and Interactive Brokers. Despite having no prior experience trading stocks or futures, they built a bot that compared prices across both venues and hedged positions whenever discrepancies appeared. Volatility across metals, oil and semiconductors helped them generate $32B in combined volume over ten months and returns of roughly 35% to 45% APY. The run was not without risk: stale IBKR data once left them accidentally short $120M of gold, costing $1.1M. Returns are now compressing as institutions enter, showing how profitable early market inefficiencies can be and how quickly they disappear.