Hi everyone – welcome back to Evolve’s Bitcoin Monthly newsletter. We hope our views on Bitcoin adoption and market conditions prove useful for investors considering Bitcoin as an investment, or for those managing an existing Bitcoin position.

We ended August with a checklist: hold the mid-$70,000s on retests, keep the ETF bid alive, and eventually break and hold the low-$80,000s. September ticked all three boxes – and it did so in about the least helpful environment we could have drawn up. In the space of two days, the Senate killed the CLARITY Act¹ and the Federal Reserve raised rates for the first time in three years.² Per Forbes, Bitcoin’s low of the month, below $75,000, came on the day of the vote.³ Less than a week later, 24/7 Wall St. clocked it at $87,397, its highest level since January.⁴ It closed the month 6.33% higher per FXStreet,⁵ after about a 44% third quarter – CoinDesk’s live coverage flagged it as the best quarterly result since Q1 2024.⁶

That makes four green Septembers in a row for what has historically been Bitcoin’s weakest month.⁵ More telling, by CoinDesk’s count, every positive August since 2013 had been followed by a negative September – until this one.⁷ Calendar statistics are trivia; the shape of the month is not. The two headline risks holders were told to fear both arrived, and the bid showed up anyway. A market that only works when Washington is helpful does not behave like that.

Washington Said No. Bitcoin Didn’t Need It.

On September 15 the Senate fell short on cloture for the CLARITY Act, 49–50 – eleven votes shy of the 60 required to open debate. Newsweek’s roll call shows no Democrat voted to proceed, and four Republicans, including Thom Tillis, voted no; Tillis switched in order to preserve a motion to reconsider, saying “this is not the end for the Clarity Act.”¹ The ethics question that has dogged the bill since spring did the damage. In the floor dispute reported by CoinDesk, Senator Mark Warner, who helped negotiate the text, said the president “should not be able to use the power and influence of his office to benefit his own crypto holdings…”⁸ Senator Cynthia Lummis, the bill’s most persistent champion, was blunter in comments reported by Fox News: “I think we’re done. It’s over.”⁹

We have carried CLARITY as an open file since April, and we said repeatedly that we had been burned on its timelines. This time the file closed – at least for now – the wrong way. But watch what happened next. Two days later the SEC announced a temporary, conditional “Innovation Exemption” (Press Release 2026-90) creating a conditional pathway for on-chain trading of tokenized NMS stocks via automated market makers and liquidity pools, effective immediately.¹⁰ In his accompanying statement, Chair Paul Atkins framed it as a bridge toward durable rulemaking, undertaken “within [the SEC’s] statutory authority.”¹⁰ Regulators will keep building rules where Congress won’t write law. That route tends to be faster, though it may prove less durable – exemptions can generally be revisited by a future commission more readily than statutes can be repealed by a future Congress.

For Bitcoin specifically, the distinction cuts in its favour. A statute would have been cleaner, and we wanted it. But Bitcoin already has what the bill was mostly trying to build for everything else: a commodity classification in practice, a regulated futures market, and a spot ETF wrapper. Bitwise’s Matt Hougan, who had called CLARITY a must-have, revised his view within a day in remarks to The Block: “If the bull market depended on Clarity’s passage, you would have expected falling odds to mean falling prices. We got the opposite.”¹¹ By month-end, in his weekly Bitwise CIO memo, Hougan called the failure “a blessing in disguise” – crypto “sacrificed long-term certainty and got better rules, faster.”¹²

Two Clocks

The more important story was the contest we flagged in August: Treasury and the Fed pulling in opposite directions. On September 9, per Treasury’s own announcement, its enlarged long-end buyback program went live. The first operation came in at up to $6 billion of longer-dated debt – triple the usual size, Reuters reported – and the program runs through November 4.^13,14 One week later, on September 16, Chair Kevin Warsh delivered the hike Jackson Hole had telegraphed: a unanimous quarter point, to 3.75–4.00%.² “The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” he said at the FOMC press conference, adding that the Fed had “removed a dose of accommodation.”² The committee’s median projection implies another hike before year-end.²

So: the fiscal authority buying duration to cap the government’s borrowing costs, and the monetary authority tightening the front end to fight inflation. The long end, notably, did not obey either of them – by month-end the 10-year Treasury yield rose to 5.30%, CoinDesk tracked.⁶ Bitcoin, a non-yielding asset, rallied through a rate hike and a rising long bond. That is not supposed to happen in the textbook. It is exactly what you would expect if investors believe the deficit, not the policy rate, is the variable that matters.

Lyn Alden put it best the weekend after the hike, in commentary via Doug Eberhardt: “The fact that people still care about 25 basis points is evidence that they don’t yet appreciate the depth of the fiscal dominance we are in.”¹⁵ Anthony Scaramucci made the same point from the market’s side in a 24/7 Wall St. piece, arguing that the real catalyst was Treasury stepping in at “the ten or the 30 year” and that allocators heard it as “nothing’s going to stop this train.”¹⁶ This is the first assumption of our framework, restated monthly because it keeps being true: governments will continue to overspend, and the arithmetic of financing that spending eventually bends policy around it.

An Open File, Still Open

We committed last month to reporting the Strait of Hormuz plainly, so here it is: there is still no deal. Per Al Jazeera, Iran submitted a seven-day framework during UNGA week; indirect talks through Qatari mediators continued in New York at month-end, with U.S. officials calling them “positive and constructive” while insisting there would be no deal unless Iran’s nuclear programme is addressed.¹⁷ The strait remains disrupted, and Brent crude finished September back above $100, per Fortune’s end-of-month update.¹⁸ We will not call this file resolved until there is a signed agreement and ships are moving. For investors, the point from August stands: Bitcoin has now rallied for two straight months through a supply shock and an oil-driven inflation impulse. That is how a hedge behaves, not a risk proxy.

Under the Hood

The regulated wrapper did the heavy lifting – and crucially, it did it after the bad headlines, not before. Per BeInCrypto’s post-vote tally, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $450.33 million on the day of the CLARITY vote, their worst session since June.¹⁹ Then came the repair: a nine-session inflow streak, per FXStreet, that included $999 million on September 21, the largest single day of 2026, and a $2.4 billion week – the biggest since October 2025, The Block reported.^5,20 For the month, The Block tallied net inflows of $2.65 billion.²¹ More symbolically, 2026 flows have now turned positive year-to-date, at +$934 million, with assets of $108.4 billion.²⁰ In July the year was more than $5 billion in the hole. In August we said the year had been “repaired, not erased.” September erased it.

Underneath the flows, the institutional base looks sturdier than the drawdown suggested. A Bitwise survey of 15 large institutions, reported by Blockhead, found that none had cut its crypto allocation through the roughly 50% peak-to-trough decline, that most hold 1–2%, and among market-cap-weighted allocators, roughly 80% of crypto exposure sits in Bitcoin.²² One endowment described Bitcoin as increasingly used as “a fiat debasement trade along with gold.”²² Career risk, as we argued back in December, has flipped – and the investors who made that call did not abandon it at the bottom.

On the technical side, Fidelity’s Jurrien Timmer, in comments picked up by Benzinga, declared the bull market back and set a $300,000 target for 2029: “In his “Depth of Field” note via Advisor Analyst, he also flagged that the Z-score of Bitcoin relative to gold had turned positive after being deeply negative – historically, in his words, “confirmation of a bottom” – and tied it to the macro regime: a higher cost of capital, to which governments will respond with “that oldest trick in the book: financial repression.”²⁴ Per Cointribune’s coverage of his analysis, his trigger for confirming a double bottom was a break above $80,554.²⁵ Bitcoin closed the month above it.

One last observation, from StoneX: gold and Bitcoin both rallied on the August buyback announcement, but in September only Bitcoin kept running.²⁶ We do not read that as a contest – gold remains a companion in the debasement trade. It is simply evidence that the two take turns leading, which is precisely the diversification benefit of holding both.

Looking Ahead

October has historically been kinder to Bitcoin than September, but we would not lean on that. The near-term risks are clear enough. The Fed has signalled another hike, and Warsh has shown he will not soothe markets in advance. The long end is still rising through the buyback window, which closes in early November – if yields keep climbing anyway, the debasement trade gets a harder test, and a cleaner one.

What September settled is the question we have been asking all year: does this recovery need help? It got a failed statute and a rate hike instead, and it finished the quarter up about 44%. Bitcoin still sits about a third below its October 2025 high, which means the repair is well along but the euphoria has not arrived – and, for a strategic holder, that remains a comfortable neighbourhood. The legislative catalyst is spent. The structural one – a fiscal regime that needs scarce collateral – is still unpaid.

We remain constructive Bitcoin investors, and we look forward to what October brings.

 

Sources

¹ Newsweek, “Crypto Clarity Act Fails in Senate: List of Republicans Voting With Democrats,” September 15, 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/crypto-clarity-act-fails-senate-republicans-vote-with-democrats-12447024

² Federal Reserve, “Transcript of Chair Warsh’s Press Conference,” September 16, 2026. https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCpresconf20260916.pdf

³ Forbes, “Bitcoin Falls Below $75,000 Before Clarity Act Stumbles,” September 15, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/09/15/bitcoin-falls-below-75000-before-clarity-act-stumbles/

⁴ 24/7 Wall St., “Bitcoin hit an eight-month high above $87,000 on September 21 and is back under $85,000,” September 26, 2026. https://247wallst.com/investing/cryptocurrency/2026/09/26/bitcoin-hit-an-eight-month-high-above-87000-on-september-21-and-is-back-under-85000-was-that-the-weeks-top-or-the-quarters/

⁵ FXStreet, “Bitcoin beats September’s curse: Is there enough demand for October?,” October 1, 2026. https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/bitcoin-beats-septembers-curse-is-there-enough-demand-for-october-202610011246

⁶ CoinDesk, “Live updates: Bitcoin below $84,000 ahead of PCE inflation data, Micron earnings,” September 30, 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/30/live-updates-bitcoin-below-usd84-000-ahead-of-pce-inflation-data-micron-earnings

⁷ CoinDesk, “Bitcoin is on track to shatter a major decade-long streak as September gains surge,” September 29, 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/09/29/bitcoin-is-on-track-to-shatter-a-major-decade-long-streak-as-september-gains-surge

⁸ CoinDesk, “Inside the last-minute political breakdown that doomed the Clarity Act vote,” September 15, 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/news-analysis/2026/09/15/there-were-many-conductors-in-the-derailment-of-the-crypto-industry-s-clarity-act

⁹ Fox News, “Trump-backed crypto bill fails to launch as Dems, Republicans unite to block it,” September 15, 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-backed-crypto-bill-fails-launch-dems-republicans-unite-block

¹⁰ U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “SEC Issues Innovation Exemption to Facilitate Trading of Tokenized NMS Stock,” Press Release 2026-90, September 17, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026-90-sec-issues-innovation-exemption-facilitate-trading-tokenized-nms-stock-request-comment

¹¹ The Block, “Bitwise CIO Hougan revises Clarity Act outlook, says crypto bull market may continue without legislation,” September 17, 2026. https://www.theblock.co/news/markets/2026-09-17-bitwise-cio-hougan-revises-clarity-act-outlook-says-crypto-bull-market-may-continue-without-legislation-415339

¹² Bitwise, “Why Crypto Rallied When Clarity Failed,” Matt Hougan CIO Memo, September 30, 2026. https://experts.bitwiseinvestments.com/cio-memos/why-crypto-rallied-when-clarity-failed

¹³ U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Announces Increased Sizes of Nominal Long-End Liquidity Support Buybacks Beginning September 9,” August 19, 2026. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0607

Reuters via Zawya, “Edgy bond investors unconsoled by Bessent’s big buyback,” September 11, 2026. https://www.zawya.com/en/insights/bonds/edgy-bond-investors-unconsoled-by-bessents-big-buyback-560118

¹⁵ Doug Eberhardt, “Is the Fed Still Relevant?” (quoting Lyn Alden), September 19, 2026. https://buygoldandsilversafely.com/gold/is-the-fed-still-relevant/

¹⁶ 24/7 Wall St., “Scaramucci Says Bitcoin Doesn’t Need the Clarity Act. He Says Bessent’s Bond Move Is What’s Really Driving the Rally,” September 22, 2026. https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/09/22/scaramucci-says-bitcoin-doesnt-need-the-clarity-act-he-says-bessents-bond-move-is-whats-really-driving-the-rally/

¹⁷ Al Jazeera, “Iran’s Araghchi meets Qatari mediators as US insists on nuclear talks,” September 29, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/29/irans-araghchi-meets-qatari-mediators-as-us-insists-on-nuclear-talks

¹⁸ Fortune, “Current price of oil as of Sept. 30, 2026.” https://fortune.com/article/price-of-oil-09-30-2026/

¹⁹ BeInCrypto, “Bitcoin, Ethereum ETFs Bleed $592 Million as Clarity Act Fails in Senate,” September 16, 2026. https://beincrypto.com/bitcoin-ethereum-etf-outflows-september-2026/

²⁰ The Block, “Bitcoin ETFs turn positive for 2026 with $2.4 billion weekly inflow, their largest since October,” September 26, 2026. https://www.theblock.co/news/markets/2026-09-26-bitcoin-etfs-turn-positive-for-2026-with-2-4-billion-weekly-inflow-their-largest-since-october-416944

²¹ The Block, “Spot bitcoin ETFs log $2.7 billion in September inflows as institutional demand holds,” October 2, 2026. https://theblock.co/news/markets/2026-10-02-spot-bitcoin-etfs-september-inflows-417547

²² Blockhead, “No institution cut its crypto allocation through the 50% drawdown, Bitwise survey finds,” September 25, 2026. https://www.blockhead.co/2026/09/25/no-institution-cut-its-crypto-allocation-through-the-50-drawdown-bitwise-survey-finds/

²³ Stocktwits, “Fidelity Macro Chief Jurrien Timmer Says Bitcoin Bull Market Is Back, Targets $300K By 2029,” September 26, 2026. https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/cryptocurrency/fidelity-bitcoin-bull-market-is-back-price-target-300k-2029/cZMgS4qRBO6

²⁴ Jurrien Timmer, “Depth of Field,” via Advisor Analyst, September 15, 2026. https://advisoranalyst.com/2026/09/15/timmer-depth-of-field.html/

²⁵ Cointribune, “Bitcoin: Jurrien Timmer sees potential return to $100,000,” September 27, 2026. https://www.cointribune.com/en/bitcoin-jurrien-timmer-sees-potential-return-to-100000-dollars

²⁶ StoneX, “Bitcoin Takes Shine from Gold Even as Pullback Begins,” September 23, 2026. https://www.stonex.com/en-gb/news-and-analysis/bitcoin-takes-shine-from-gold-even-as-pullback-begins-2026-09-23/

Disclaimer

Published October 2026.

Evolve Funds Group Inc. is the investment fund manager and portfolio manager. The Evolve Bitcoin ETF (“EBIT”) is offered by Evolve Funds Group Inc., and distributed through authorized dealers.  

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