Morning Minute: CPI Comes In Hot; Stocks, Crypto Shrug

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors and stocks rebound after hot CPI; BTC at $80.6k
• Trump takes over a dozen CEOs to China ahead of Xi meeting
• Clarity Act receives over 100 amendments ahead of Thursday markup
• ETH devs launch Clear Signing in effort to avoid user losses
• Google discloses 1st instance of a threat actor using an AI-generated zero-day exploit in a live attack

📈 CPI Comes In Hot; Stocks, Crypto Shrug

The April CPI print dropped Tuesday morning and delivered the wrong news for rate cut hopes.

Headline inflation rose 0.6% for the month, putting the 12-month rate at 3.8%, the highest since May 2023. Core CPI, excluding food and energy, increased 0.4% monthly and 2.8% annually, above the 2.7% consensus on both fronts. Real average hourly wages slipped 0.5% for the month and fell 0.3% annually, meaning workers are getting paid more nominally but losing ground in real terms. That’s the stagflation concern: high inflation, slowing real income, and a central bank that can’t cut.

Clearly the Iran War and oil are a big driver. Energy costs jumped 17.9% year-over-year, the steepest annual increase since September 2022, driven by gasoline up 28.4% and fuel oil up 54.3%.

Markets briefly sold off on the news, though stocks still closed the day green and Bitcoin rebounded from $80k to $80.7k.

This all comes as Kevin Warsh takes over the Federal Reserve from Jerome Powell on Friday. Odds of a rate hike in 2026 (hike, not cut) jumped to 30% after the CPI print, up from just 1% a month ago. So hikes are much more on the table than cuts.

As for Warsh, he inherits a Fed that cannot cut, an economy with 3.8% inflation, oil still above $100, and rising stagflation concerns. He will have his work cut out for him…

📝 The Clarity Act Full Text Is Revealed

The Senate Banking Committee unveiled the 309-page Clarity Act text just after midnight Tuesday, ahead of Thursday’s 10:30am ET markup vote.

The text landed without major surprises. The core provisions include:

• SEC/CFTC jurisdiction split with most digital assets classified as commodities
• DeFi developer protections for those who don’t control user funds
• Stablecoin yield ban on passive holdings with activity-based rewards permitted.

Notably missing from the 309-page draft is any mention of Ethics provisions, resulting from the Trump family crypto dealings. Without those provisions, many Democrats believe the bill is dead on arrival.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) remains publicly uncommitted, and all 13 Republican votes are needed for the committee to advance the bill. Major US labor unions including SEIU, AFT, NEA, and AFSCME sent a joint letter to the Senate demanding the bill be rejected, arguing it could create risks for worker pension programs.

As of this morning, over 100 amendments have already been filed for review ahead of the Thursday markup—another sign that this is far from a done deal in its current state.

Citi analysts have tied their $143,000 BTC base-case target for 2026 directly to Clarity Act passage, projecting an additional $15 billion in net ETF inflows once the bill clears Congress. If it doesn’t pass, well, those targets will need to be re-evaluated.

💰 JPMorgan Files for 2nd Tokenized Money Market Fund on ETH

JPMorgan filed Tuesday to launch the JPMorgan OnChain Liquidity-Token Money Market Fund (JLTXX) on Ethereum, specifically designed to meet reserve requirements for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act.

The fund invests exclusively in short-term US Treasuries, cash, and overnight repo agreements backed by government securities. The fund will be powered by JPMorgan’s Kinexys Digital Assets unit, creating a permissioned system that sits on top of public Ethereum as its base layer.

It’s JPMorgan’s second tokenized money market product (its MONY fund launched on Ethereum in December 2025), but JLTXX is specifically structured around the stablecoin reserve use case rather than general institutional liquidity management. The filing puts JPMorgan directly in competition with BlackRock’s Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, filed the same week, and Morgan Stanley’s MSNXX fund, which launched last month targeting the same institutional stablecoin reserve market. The three largest financial institutions in the world are all racing to become the Treasury yield infrastructure layer for a $320 billion stablecoin market growing 28% annually.

The RWA market has grown 200% year-over-year to $30 billion. Expect that growth to continue.

💡Ethereum Devs Launch Clear Signing, Fixing Longtime Security Issue

An Ethereum working group consisting of wallet developers, security firms, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative launched Clear Signing Tuesday—an open standard designed to end blind signing, the flaw behind billions in user losses.

Blind signing is the practice of approving hexadecimal data without understanding what it actually does. When users approve Ethereum transactions, they currently see “low-level, machine-readable formats that are accurate but difficult to interpret without technical expertise.” Attackers exploit this by making malicious approvals look identical to legitimate ones at the point of signing.

The $1.5B Bybit exploit, the $235M WazirX breach, and the CoW DAO domain hijacking this month all followed the same playbook: get a user or multisig signer to approve a transaction whose true intent was hidden. That gets much harder to pull off with clear signing.

The working group includes Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, WalletConnect, and Fireblocks. Trezor CTO Tomáš Sušánka: “This addresses a fundamental vulnerability that has plagued cryptocurrency users for years: blind signing. When users can’t understand what they’re signing, security becomes much more difficult. This standard changes that, and every wallet provider should embrace it.”

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly green after a CPI beat and Trump’s China trip looming; BTC -0.1% at $80.6k; ETH +1% at $2,303; SOL even at $95; HYPE -3% at $39.40
• INJ (+24%), TIA (+11%) and STX (+9%) led top movers
• Oil -1% at $98; Gold +0.3% at $4,702
• Stock futures are green with the Nasdaq up 0.7% as Nvidia leads chip stocks higher
• Trump is taking over a dozen CEOs to China with him as he prepares to meet with Xi, including Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Larry Fink, Tim Cook and others
• Kevin Warsh was confirmed to the Fed Board of Governors Tuesday in a 51-45 Senate vote, with Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman the sole crossover vote
• The Senate Banking Committee received over 100 amendments to the Clarity Act ahead of tomorrow’s markup
• Wintermute called the latest Bitcoin rally a short squeeze rather than a breakout, pointing to open interest and spot volumes as its indicators
• Square crossed 1 million Bitcoin-enabled merchants Tuesday, six weeks after auto-enabling Lightning Network BTC payments for eligible US sellers on March 30; merchants receive USD by default with BTC converted instantly at checkout
• DTCC selected Chainlink to power its Collateral AppChain Tuesday, integrating Chainlink’s Runtime Environment and data standard to enable 24/7 near-real-time automated collateral management
• Franklin Templeton and Kraken parent Payward announced a strategic partnership Tuesday to bring tokenized equities, actively managed onchain funds, and BENJI money market fund integration onto Kraken’s platform

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE +4%, SHIB even, PEPE even, PENGU -6%, TRUMP +4%, BONK even%, SPX +2%, FARTCOIN -4%
• RKC (+140%), Worldcup (+800%), CopperInu (+90%), Hanta (+55%), Maga (+50%) and Aura (+36%) led notable movers

📈 Myriad Market of the Day

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Jez introduced his project PaperTrade as a fair-launch, fully onchain perpetuals exchange built on Hyperliquid, offering up to 1,000x leverage with zero slippage, no funding costs, and a self-bootstrapping liquidity pool
• Elliptic raised $120M led by SoftBank to expand its AI-powered blockchain compliance tools for financial institutions
• Google’s Threat Intelligence Group disclosed Tuesday it detected the first known instance of a threat actor using an AI-generated zero-day exploit in a live attack

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly red down 1-3%; Punks +1% at 29.6 ETH, BAYC -2% at 10.15 ETH, Pudgy -3% at 5.19 ETH; Hypurr’s -3% at 290 HYPE
• Gift of Time (+30%), Slonks (+30%) and GVC (+5%) led notable movers