Equities update - September 22nd 2026

Week 38 was shaped by a combination of macro volatility, mixed regulatory developments and continued momentum across AI infrastructure. The Federal Reserve raised rates by 25bps to 3.75–4.00%, its first hike in three years, although equities rallied following the decision as yields eased from earlier highs. Crypto assets performed particularly well, supported by positive SEC developments around tokenised securities despite the CLARITY Act failing to advance in the Senate. From a corporate perspective, activity remained strong across both blockchain and AI infrastructure, with continued financing activity, rising data-centre and GPU pricing, and further expansion of crypto-native businesses into areas such as banking, custody, lending and tokenisation. The team also attended the H.C. Wainwright conference in New York, where discussions highlighted the increasing breadth of the AI opportunity for Bitcoin miners, including modular data centres, behind-the-meter generation, smaller inference-focused sites and the potential for Bitcoin mining to remain part of a flexible power and compute strategy. 

Week 38 Key Developments in Blockchain Equities:

• Index Performance: The Index was broadly unchanged over the week, underperforming Bitcoin which gained 5.2%, in a volatile week. The Federal Reserve raised rates by 25bps to 3.75–4.00%, its first hike in three years, following last week’s resilient inflation numbers. The Fed also maintained a relatively hawkish bias, with most policymakers expecting at least one further increase this year. Equities nevertheless rallied following the decision, as the rate increase removed some near-term uncertainty and yields eased from their earlier highs. Crypto assets performed particularly well, supported by positive regulatory developments from the SEC, including its Innovation Exemption for tokenised U.S. equities, despite the CLARITY Act failing to advance in the Senate.

• Block Index Key Movers: 7-day top performers: Hyperliquid Strategies (+16.5%), AMD (+8.2%), Cipher Digital (+6.3%) 7-day worst performers: Metaplanet (9.2%), Samsung (-8.6%), Nu Holdings (-7.9%)

• HCW Conference Takeaways – AI and Crypto Opportunities Continue to Deepen: The team attended the H.C. Wainwright Global Investment Conference in New York this week, meeting with companies across Bitcoin mining, AI infrastructure and the broader digital-asset ecosystem. One of the takeaways was that the AI opportunity for Bitcoin miners continues to deepen and become more nuanced. The discussion has moved beyond simply converting large mining campuses into hyperscale data centres. Companies are increasingly exploring different routes to monetise power, including modular data centres, behind-the-meter natural gas generation and, over the longer term, nuclear power. Smaller sub-75MW sites in Texas are also becoming more relevant, as they can bypass ERCOT audit requirements that apply to larger loads. This could make them attractive for inference workloads, regional cloud providers and smaller AI customers that do not require hyperscale campuses.

The scarcity of immediately available power remains the common denominator, giving operators with energised sites, grid connections and development expertise a potentially valuable head start. Recent industry projects increasingly reflect this model, with Crusoe, for example, deploying modular AI facilities alongside behind-the-meter power generation. At the same time, pricing remains supportive: data-centre lease rates continue to rise across capacity bands, while GPU rental rates have also moved higher, reinforcing the scarcity value of both powered capacity and compute.

Importantly, Bitcoin mining does not necessarily disappear as AI is introduced. Several discussions highlighted its potential role as a flexible or load-balancing workload: ASICs can consume excess power when AI demand is lower and rapidly curtail when higher-value compute requires the capacity. This could be particularly useful for behind-the-meter generation, where maintaining consistent utilisation of a gas turbine or other generation asset can improve project economics. In this model, Bitcoin mining effectively becomes the buyer of last resort for power, allowing sites to monetise capacity while AI demand ramps or fluctuates rather than leaving infrastructure underutilised. Our discussions also suggested that AI customers may be comfortable with Bitcoin mining operating alongside their workloads, provided it does not impact the availability or performance of their contracted AI capacity. However, we are yet to see a major commercial contract that explicitly incorporates this structure, so it remains more of an emerging concept than an established industry model.

Financing also remains readily available, but conversations suggested the market is becoming increasingly credit-sensitive rather than simply capacity-sensitive. Access to capital and financing costs ultimately depend on the quality of the end customer, contract duration, project readiness and visibility over power. A long-term contract with a high-quality hyperscaler can support materially different leverage and economics from speculative capacity targeting smaller customers. For colocation operators, another important part of the model is the ability to recycle capital once a data centre is fully built, energised and generating contracted cash flows. Operators can refinance the completed asset and redeploy that capital into subsequent developments, reducing the amount of new equity required to fund growth. This creates a potentially repeatable development model, but ultimately depends on tenant quality and the ability of completed assets to support attractive financing terms. This should increasingly separate operators capable of securing high-quality customers and structured financing from those that simply control power.

The second major takeaway was that crypto adoption itself is becoming deeper rather than simply broader. Crypto-native companies are increasingly attacking individual layers of the traditional financial system, payments through stablecoins, brokerage and trading, derivatives, custody, settlement, tokenisation and eventually issuance. The boundaries between crypto companies, exchanges, brokers and financial-market infrastructure are therefore becoming less distinct. This was reinforced this week by the SEC's Innovation Exemption for onchain trading of tokenised U.S. equities, while traditional market operators are simultaneously partnering with crypto-native platforms.

Taken together, the meetings reinforced a broader shift across blockchain equities: the investment opportunity is becoming less dependent on the price of Bitcoin alone. For miners, value is increasingly tied to control of scarce power and the ability to convert that power into whichever compute workload produces the highest return; for crypto-native companies, value is increasingly tied to how much of the traditional financial stack they can absorb onto blockchain-based infrastructure. In both cases, execution, access to capital and the quality of underlying customers are becoming increasingly important differentiators.

Other news - Index constituents:

• Bitdeer continued to accelerate its AI Cloud strategy, securing a 65.1MW facility in Johor, Malaysia under a 10-year data-centre services agreement, taking secured AI Cloud capacity to approximately 206.5MW, around 59% of its targeted 350MW capacity by Q1 2028.

• CleanSpark announced plans to issue $2.227bn of senior secured notes due 2031, with proceeds primarily being used to fund the remaining construction costs of its Sandersville data-centre development, reimburse prior equity investment and fund debt-service reserves.

• Cipher Digital rallied after reporting approximately 3.2GW of conditional ERCOT grid capacity, including roughly 1.1GW of baseload capacity and 2.1GW of studied load. Around 1.4GW also received provisional controllable-load-resource qualification, further increasing the visibility around Cipher's longer-term Texas development pipeline.

• HIVE Digital's BUZZ HPC partnered with ProCogia to offer sovereign AI infrastructure and applied-AI services to enterprise and SMB customers across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. ProCogia will procure dedicated GPU capacity from HIVE's Canadian data centres while layering its AI software and services on top.

• Galaxy expanded Galaxy Curation onto Solana through Kamino, launching institutional USDC and USDT lending vaults that apply Galaxy's institutional risk-management framework to onchain credit markets. The offering builds on its existing Morpho vaults and further extends Galaxy's traditional trading/lending capabilities directly into DeFi infrastructure.  

• Coinbase partnered with Stablecore to bring crypto infrastructure directly into community and regional banks and credit unions. The integration allows institutions to offer crypto trading, custody and stablecoin payments within their existing banking platforms, with the companies estimating the addressable network at 3,000+ U.S. banks and credit unions. 

• SBI Group and Kyobo Life Insurance completed a proof-of-concept for direct institutional transfers between Japanese-yen and Korean-won stablecoins, removing the need to route settlement through the U.S. dollar. The trial used Canton Network and is another example of stablecoins moving towards institutional cross-border settlement use cases in Asia.

Other news – Non - Index constituents:

• Crypto.com moved forward with plans to offer U.S. single-stock futures through its Nadex business and said it is also working with regulators towards offering single-stock perpetual futures, continuing the convergence between traditional equities and crypto-style trading products.

• Deutsche Bank announced plans to launch institutional digital-asset custody in Europe this year, initially supporting Bitcoin, Ether and stablecoins including USDC and EURC, with tokenised financial instruments also on the roadmap.

• AI infrastructure pricing remained firm despite concerns around a potential slowdown in frontier-model development. Nebius reportedly increased rental pricing on Nvidia GPUs by around 20%, following similar increases from CoreWeave earlier in the year, providing further evidence that near-term compute availability remains constrained despite rapid capacity additions.