Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, announced late on October 29 that it had signed a commercial agreement with onchain derivatives underwriting platform Trade.XYZ: ICE will serve as the exclusive operator of the regulated marketplace and bring tokenized RWA perpetual contracts built on the Hyperliquid network (covering equities, indices, commodities and FX) under the US regulatory umbrella, while taking a strategic minority stake in Trade.XYZ. ICE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher revealed that management had held several rounds of commercial talks with Hyperliquid as early as May, describing the move as a “complement” to traditional futures products rather than a replacement. The news lifted HYPE from around $79.30 to an intraday peak of $87.303, a gain of roughly 10.1%, while bitcoin and ether pulled back about 1.5%, underscoring the standalone nature of the rally.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared at Ripple’s Swell conference in New York on October 27, sharing the stage with Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and elevating crypto to a matter of geopolitical strategy. Bessent made three core points: first, the power base of reserve currencies is shifting from military might to technology — “we’ll keep our military umbrella, but increasingly it becomes a technological umbrella” — with crypto, AI and semiconductors forming America’s technological foundation; second, more than 90% (CoinGecko puts it near 98%) of stablecoins are dollar-denominated, offering high-inflation emerging markets a dollar channel that bypasses the traditional banking system; third, under the GENIUS Act’s reserve requirements, every stablecoin minted corresponds to demand for US Treasuries — stablecoin issuers are becoming a significant funding source for the US Treasury, with his earlier estimate of up to $2 trillion in short-term Treasury demand from stablecoin reserves. On the CLARITY Act, which failed 49-50 on September 15, Bessent was blunt: Treasury will use its “convening power” to push the SEC and CFTC to close regulatory gaps through regulation rather than legislation.

Circle publicly disclosed on October 28 its October 20 comment letter to the SEC on the proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, a package of “cash-equivalence” asks: payment stablecoins compliant with the GENIUS Act should be treated as cash, valued at their dollar face amount, and made eligible for customer reserve accounts. The most attention-grabbing item targets capital treatment — SEC Trading and Markets staff, in a February 19, 2026 no-objection position, allows broker-dealers to apply a 2% haircut to qualifying stablecoin holdings in net capital (a $1B compliant position would be discounted by $20M). Circle argues that, subject to objective safeguards, the haircut should be reduced to zero, on the grounds that the GENIUS Act’s reserve, redemption, liquidity and consumer-protection standards justify capital treatment more favorable than other digital assets receive.

Ondo Finance announced on October 29 that it had expanded Ondo Intelligent Portfolios to Solana. The seven portfolios span income, growth and thematic strategies: three income portfolios (one based on a BlackRock strategy), two growth portfolios (both based on BlackRock strategies) and two thematic portfolios (Magnificent 7 with crypto, and AI leaders). Each portfolio is presented as a single transferable token holding a basket of Ondo Stocks tokenized equities and ETFs, with public holdings, allocations and fees encoded in smart contracts and rebalancing on a preset schedule; tokens can be transferred 24/7 and used in Solana DeFi applications. Ondo said the Ethereum and BNB Chain versions surpassed $45M in combined TVL within their first few weeks, more than double the $20M reported on October 20; its tokenized assets on Solana now exceed $500M in TVL, with more than 1.6 million addresses holding tokenized stocks.