Bitcoin climbed back above $80,000 on Friday morning, its first time above that level in over a week, while Solana and Hyperliquid each gained roughly 10% to lead the major tokens higher. The move came as federal regulators pushed ahead with crypto rulemaking despite the CLARITY Act stalling in the Senate, and it closed a week that had started with two pieces of bad news landing within hours of each other.
Bitcoin had spent recent weeks consolidating between $75,000 and $78,000. The range formed after the Federal Reserve delivered its first rate hike since 2023 on Wednesday and the Senate failed the next day to advance the CLARITY Act, the bill that would have split digital asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. The cloture vote on September 15 fell 49 to 50, short of both the 60 votes needed and even a simple majority. US spot bitcoin ETFs shed $450 million the following session, their largest outflow since June.
Friday’s recovery above $80,000 marked a 5% jump from the lows of that range and put the largest cryptocurrency back where it traded before the double blow.
Regulators fill the gap left by Congress
The rally landed on a busy day in Washington. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed its crypto asset rulemaking package with the White House for review on Friday morning, pressing ahead with market structure rules without a congressional framework. That came one day after the Securities and Exchange Commission released its long-awaited innovation exemption, which gives tokenized stock venues a five-year pass from exchange registration and allows onchain trading of tokenized US equities through permissioned AMM pools.
A House committee also voted earlier this week to advance the American Reserve Modernization Act, which would direct the Treasury Department to maintain a secure Bitcoin storage facility, a formalized statutory version of the strategic reserve concept the administration created by executive order.
“The industry doesn’t need Congress,” Dan Morehead, founder and managing partner of Pantera Capital, told CNBC. “The SEC and CFTC are enacting all of the things that would have been in Clarity anyway.”
Morehead also pointed to monetary policy as a driver. People remain bullish on bitcoin, he said, because the Fed is “still way behind on inflation” and rates should be higher than they are today, a view that treats the current hike cycle as lagging rather than restrictive.
Solana and Hyperliquid out front
Among the ten largest cryptocurrencies, Solana and Hyperliquid led gains with roughly 10% advances each. Solana traded near $102, building on momentum from its protocol-side news this week: the network activated 250-millisecond slots at epoch 1037 on Friday, the fourth step of the SIMD-0525 performance roadmap.
Hyperliquid’s HYPE token pushed to a record above $90, trading near $91.60 at publication time. The protocol also launched manual borrows, a feature that lets users supply HYPE and BTC as collateral to borrow stablecoins such as USDC and USDT directly against their holdings. HYPE has now rebounded from the $75 to $77 region earlier in the week, and Hyperliquid remains one of the largest onchain perpetual futures venues by volume.
Morehead said Pantera is “much more bullish” on Solana than on Ethereum, though he called both “valid” and expects dozens of important blockchains to emerge over the long term. Ether gained about 1% on the day to trade near $2,500, lagging the altcoin leaders.
Traders look past the Fed
Sentiment has shifted quickly since Wednesday. Fed chair Warsh delivered the hike and the dot plot removed expected easing through 2027, yet risk assets have absorbed both. “Markets are trading suspiciously well after the double whammy of Clarity Act failure and Warsh’s hawkish hike on Wednesday,” said Jeff Anderson, head of US at STS Digital. “USD yields are lower, BTC is marginally higher while altcoins outperform, and the Nasdaq rips back to recent highs. Warsh is now perceived to be a bump in the road, so traders are happy to see the back of him without too much damage being done.”
Kevin O’Leary told The Starting Block he is buying new crypto positions again and is watching for a major stock exchange to adopt a blockchain, calling exchange adoption the watershed moment for the sector. His comment landed the same day Ava Labs president Charley Cooper said the NYSE has spent a year testing Avalanche technology as its parent ICE builds a tokenized securities platform, though no chain has been picked.
Not everyone reads the rally as confirmation that the rough patch is over. CoinShares’ weekly market update argued the outlook has become more challenging, with the CLARITY setback and a more hawkish Fed both delaying the return of the liquidity conditions bitcoin typically responds to. The firm noted bitcoin is relatively insulated because its regulatory status is already clearer, while Ethereum and other altcoins carry more exposure given how much stablecoin payment infrastructure sits on those networks.
JPMorgan analysts made a related point Thursday: heavy short interest and hedging around BlackRock’s IBIT ETF show investors remain more cautious on bitcoin than on gold. Gold ETFs have recovered all of their 2026 outflows while bitcoin funds have recovered only half. If that hedging eases, the bank argued, it could give bitcoin additional support relative to the metal.
Bitcoin traded near $80,200 in afternoon dealing, with ether around $2,500, XRP at $1.40 and Solana near $102. Attention now turns to whether the SEC and CFTC can hold their regulatory pace, and whether the CLARITY Act’s ethics provisions, the sticking point in the Senate, can be reworked before year end.