Clarity Act Vote, August CPI, & Anthropic Profits

View from the Arch #149

September 15, 2026

All eyes are on the Fed meeting tomorrow…

This Week at Arch: Buy the property, keep the Bitcoin

A down payment can force a difficult choice for someone whose wealth is held in Bitcoin. Sell part of the position, or wait for another way to fund the purchase.

Bitcoin-backed financing gives you a third path. Use BTC as collateral and direct the loan proceeds toward the property, while the Bitcoin stays in your portfolio.

That separates two goals that are often made to compete with each other. The property can become the thing you buy, while Bitcoin remains the asset you continue to hold.

For anyone who has the Bitcoin but needs dollars for a real-estate purchase, the benefit is direct: turn a digital asset into a down payment without making a permanent sale.

This Week in Crypto

After topping out near $81,427 in late August, BTC skidded down toward $76,000 as hotter-than-expected August CPI reignited Fed hike anxiety and sent Treasury yields higher.

  • Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded four straight days of outflows totaling roughly $462M for the week.

  • Meanwhile Ether ETFs had their best week in a month, pulling in $216M on Friday alone and closing a fourth consecutive week of inflows.

The Senate holds its cloture vote on the CLARITY Act at 2:15pm ET today, the procedural test that decides whether the bill lives to see a floor debate or dies quietly until 2027 at the earliest.

  • Polymarket's odds of the bill becoming law in 2026 have collapsed from 82% back in February to somewhere around 10-16% now.

Nasdaq’s venture arm has agreed to put $100M into Payward, Kraken’s parent company, valuing the crypto exchange at $21B.

  • Kraken will now run Nasdaq's market surveillance tech across its trading venues.

This Week in TradFi

Wall Street was up and down this week:

  • The Dow fell 1.6% and the S&P 500 declined 0.8% through Thursday, before the S&P 500 climbed 0.9% Friday to break a four-day losing streak.

    • Stocks then finished lower Monday as a sharp selloff in AI-related semiconductor stocks, surging oil prices, and a move higher in the 10-year Treasury yield gave investors reasons to reduce risk ahead of the Fed meeting.

  • Fed-funds futures indicated roughly an 86%-90% probability of a quarter-point rate increase at Wednesday’s meeting - which would be the Fed’s first hike in more than three years.

Brent crude rose toward $108/barrel, a four-month high, after Saudi Arabia shut a major crude pipeline following drone attacks.

  • This continues to fuel a pretty worrying feedback loop: oil spikes on Middle East chaos, which spikes inflation expectations, which spikes rate-hike odds.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that AI labs should deliberately slow the rate at which they improve model capabilities.

  • Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis all publicly agreed with him.

  • Markets took this pretty seriously: Nvidia fell 3.4%, the Philadelphia semiconductor index sank almost 6% in its worst day since early July, Intel dropped close to 6%, Micron declined around 5%, SoftBank dropped more than 13%, and SK Hynix and Samsung also fell sharply in Asia.

And finally, August CPI rose 0.4% for the month, putting the annual rate at 3.4%, with core CPI up 0.3% monthly and 2.4% annually.

This Week in Tech

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has engaged CITIC Securities to prepare for an IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market, alongside a pre-IPO funding round that could value the company at roughly $75B.

  • That's a serious jump from the $50B+ valuation DeepSeek carried after raising $7.4B back in June.

  • Founder Liang Wenfeng has reportedly been personally screening potential investors to preserve control of the company ahead of the listing.

Nvidia is reportedly considering an anchor investment of up to $10B in Anthropic's planned IPO, which is aiming to raise as much as $100B at a valuation near $2T.

  • This would be the largest IPO in history if it lands.

  • Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate has gone from around $9B at the end of 2025 to over $65B by the end of July, with internal projections putting 2028 revenue somewhere between $190-$200B.

And speaking of Anthropic:

  • The Financial Times reported this week that Anthropic hit profitability on an adjusted operating income basis for a second straight quarter, with Q2 2026 revenue reportedly north of $11.5B.

  • The catch, as MarketWatch flagged, is that "adjusted" excludes stock-based compensation and doesn't fully capture some of the most brutal costs in frontier AI: training runs, cloud rent, and revenue-sharing deals with infrastructure partners.

  • And a widely-circulated piece from tech critic Ed Zitron argued the profitability claim leans heavily on a compute deal with SpaceX that happens to carry a discounted rate for exactly the months being used to claim profitability.

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.