Morning Minute: $11T+ Schwab Goes All In on Crypto

GM!

Today’s top news:

Charles Schwab confirmed on its Q1 earnings call Thursday that spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading is live in a phased rollout under the “Schwab Crypto” brand, operated through Charles Schwab Premier Bank.

Employees gain access first, then early-access registrants, then the full client base. Custody and settlement handled by Paxos. Notably, fees are 75 basis points per trade, substantially higher than ETFs.

CEO Rick Wurster also told analysts the firm will “likely” offer prediction markets at some point as well, specifically carving out financial event contracts as different from sports and politics bets.

For perspective, Schwab has $11.8 trillion in client assets and 16,000 financial advisors. Goldman Sachs filed for a Bitcoin income ETF this week. Morgan Stanley disclosed $1.24B in Bitcoin ETF exposure in its Q1 13F and launched its own ETF at 0.14%. The three biggest names in American retail and institutional finance are all making big moves inside crypto now. The institutions aren’t coming, they’re here.

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CFTC Chair Mike Selig appeared before the Senate Agriculture Committee Thursday and got squeezed from two directions at once.

Republican and Democratic senators alike pushed back on the CFTC’s aggressive stance defending prediction markets in court while simultaneously demanding to know what the agency is doing about Hyperliquid, the offshore perpetual futures exchange that has been pulling volume away from regulated US venues with no CFTC oversight whatsoever.

Selig’s position on prediction markets: federal exclusive jurisdiction, full stop. States suing to restrict them are “attempting to nullify federal law.” He filed an amicus brief to back that up.

The Hyperliquid problem is harder. It’s a fully decentralized perp exchange operating offshore, outside CFTC reach, running markets on assets the CFTC would regulate if they were onshore. Senators on both sides want answers on how the agency plans to address that gap. Selig’s answer, essentially, was that the Clarity Act would help. The same Clarity Act that’s still sitting in markup.

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Tether committed up to $127.5M to fund the recovery of Drift Protocol, the Solana-based perpetual DEX that was drained of ~$285M in an April 1 North Korean hack. It’s part of a $147.5M total package with partners, structured as a revenue-linked credit facility that repays the $295.7M in user losses over time from Drift’s trading revenue.

Drift’s DRIFT token jumped 20% on the news.

Tied to the headline - Drift is relaunching with USDT as its settlement layer, not USDC. On Solana, USDC has a 2.65x market cap advantage over USDT. Drift had $550M in TVL before the hack and 128,000 users.

Circle, for its part, faced criticism for not freezing the stolen USDC faster - the attacker moved $232M from Solana to Ethereum using Circle’s own cross-chain protocol while Circle declined to act without a court order. Tether just used a bailout to flip the dominant stablecoin on one of Solana’s largest protocols.

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Foundation, one of the defining NFT art platforms of the 2021 boom, announced Wednesday it is shutting down after a planned sale to digital art company Blackdove collapsed.

CEO Kayvon Tehranian posted an open letter on X: “Our goal in pursuing a sale was always to see Foundation live on. That’s no longer possible.” A one-year wind-down window is in effect, and users have been told to start migrating off the platform.

MakersPlace shut down in January 2025. Nifty Gateway announced closure in January 2026 with 650,000 NFTs still on platform. Christie’s closed its digital art department last fall. Sotheby’s gutted its Metaverse team in 2024. Magic Eden shut down its NFT marketplace.

OpenSea is the lone survivor.

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