CLARITY Act Movement, Iran Volatility, & Sora Shutdown

Our cofounders Dhruv and Himanshu sat down with Andrew Durgee, Co-CEO of Republic, and Vlad Uchenik, CEO of INX, to talk about the future of tokenization and real-world assets. You can check out the full podcast below!

This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin price varied in the $68K-$72K range all week:

• Bitcoin fell below $69,000 in the earlier part of the week as conflict in the Middle East sent oil prices surging.

• BTC briefly reclaimed $72K mid-week after Trump proposed a framework to end the Iran conflict, but the move looked more like a short squeeze - open interest rose faster than price, and the rally faded.

• Today also marks a $13.5B crypto options expiry on Deribit - the quarterly expiry - with positioning pointing to elevated demand for volatility strategies rather than strong directional bets. 

While Bitcoin was pulling back, Ethereum’s accumulation story continued.

• Bitmine Immersion Technologies disclosed it purchased 65,341 ETH - worth roughly $138M - between March 15 and 22, pushing its total holdings to 4.66M tokens.

  • That's the largest single-week accumulation by a publicly traded company in recent memory.

On the regulatory side, the big story this week was real movement on the CLARITY Act (the market structure bill that has been grinding through Congress since last summer). 

• Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks reached a deal on stablecoin yield: passive yield (earned just for holding a stablecoin) is banned, but activity-based rewards tied to payments, transactions, or platform use are permitted.

  • Circle lost $5.6 billion in market cap in a single session after the draft text dropped.

• Senate Republicans are discussing attaching community bank deregulation to the bill as part of a broader legislative trade, which makes the bill significantly more complicated. 

• If the bill doesn’t hit the Senate floor by May, it’s unlikely to see movement until after the midterms.

This Week in TradFi

The through-line for every market this week was the same: Iran.

• Brent crude hit $119/barrel at one point.

• The Fed, ECB, and Bank of England all held rates steady, and expectations for rate cuts in 2026 essentially evaporated, with Europe now pricing in the possibility of multiple hikes. 

• Equities spent the week whipsawing on every headline.

  • Stocks jumped Wednesday after Trump suggested the U.S. and Iran were “in negotiations”, only for Iran to deny any talks were happening.

  • By Friday, the Nasdaq had entered correction territory, down more than 10% from its October record - and the Dow was within striking distance of correction as well, down nearly 9% from its all-time high. 

• Bond ETFs took hits as the oil spike sent yields higher and hawkish central bank commentary pushed investors to reassess the rate outlook. 

• Institutional investors rushed into money market funds.

This Week in Tech

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it’s shutting down Sora, the standalone video generation app it launched last September.

• The company cited compute costs and a need to focus on “other priorities” - specifically robotics and world simulation research.

• Estimated inference cost for Sora was roughly $15M per day. Meanwhile, total lifetime in-app revenue was just $2.1M. 

• Downloads peaked in November at 3.3M and had fallen 66% by February. 

• Disney, which had announced in December a $1B investment in OpenAI and a deal to license its characters for Sora, has now exited the partnership entirely.

On the other side, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Lex Fridman this week that AGI is here now, which he defined as AI systems capable of autonomously running billion-dollar companies.

• Completely normal and not at all self-serving definition from the man whose chips power those systems.

• Meanwhile, a Google research paper appeared to lower AI memory demand requirements, triggering a selloff in memory stocks including Micron, SK Hynix, and Western Digital.

As usual, below are some fundraising announcements, M&A, and tech personnel changes that caught our eye:

• Deccan AI, a startup supplying post-training data and evaluation work, has raised $25M in its first major funding round. 

• Granola has raised $125M, hitting a $1.5B valuation, as it expands from meeting notetaker to enterprise AI app.

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.