September 2026 Community Updates
Market Overview
CLARITY Act on the Spotlight
It has been a defining month for US digital asset policy. On September 15, the Senate held the long-awaited cloture vote on the CLARITY Act, the market structure bill meant to finally divide oversight of digital assets between the SEC and CFTC. The vote fell short, 49 to 50, missing the 60 needed to even open floor debate.
Just two days later, the SEC moved on its own. On September 17, the Commission issued an “Innovation Exemption,” granting temporary relief from the legal definition of an exchange to venues that want to trade tokenised US stocks through permissioned automated market makers and liquidity pools.
The exemption runs for five years and comes with guardrails: a venue must give the underlying issuer 30 days’ notice before tokenising its shares, and the issuer can object within that window to block it. The framework could pull digital asset native platforms like Robinhood and Coinbase into closer competition with traditional brokers. It is a good example of regulators finding a practical workaround while Congress stays gridlocked.
Inflation Is Real
Meanwhile the Fed added its own twist to the month. On September 16, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate by 25 basis points to 3.75-4.00%, the first hike since July 2023, in a unanimous decision. Chair Kevin Warsh pointed to a resilient labour market, inflation that stayed elevated over summer, and an energy shock tied to the Iran conflict as the reasons for the shift. The dot plot showed 16 of 18 officials expect at least one more hike before year end. Despite the hike (usually a headwind for risk assets), digital assets have held up. Bitcoin’s climb from the summer lows shows the market is currently trading more on regulatory and adoption headlines than on rate policy alone.
Is AI Putting Brakes On?
On the AI side, the story of the month was a coordinated call to slow down. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend of September 12-13 calling for a deliberate slowdown in frontier model development, citing risks from cyberattacks, bioterrorism and economic disruption.
Within 72 hours, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk had both publicly backed the position, turning it into a three-lab consensus with concrete commitments, including embedding independent evaluators inside labs.
We covered this shift in more depth on our blog. All eyes are now on whether this translates into real coordination, or just a pause in tone.
Trump and Xi Meetup
The US-China relationship on AI is entering a genuinely new phase this month. Reuters reported that the two countries held their first official AI dialogue under the Trump administration, an outcome of the May Trump-Xi summit.
Xi Jinping wrapped up a three-day state visit to Washington, his first in over a decade, with plenty of ceremony but few breakthroughs including both sides agreeing to set up a US-China AI dialogue along with a channel for reporting AI incidents. Next round meetup targeted for November, expect this to be one of the most closely watched geopolitical moments of the quarter for anyone building in AI.
Hong Kong’s 5-Year Plan
Hong Kong just laid out its cards. On September 16, Chief Executive John Lee unveiled the city’s first Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2026-2030) alongside the 2026 Policy Address.
Stablecoin Development
Hong Kong is moving ahead with a licensed framework in the world of digital assets. On September 16, the Hong Kong’s Policy Address confirmed that regulated stablecoins can trade on licensed virtual asset platforms and settle tokenised money market funds, and on September 21 ChinaAMC, Standard Chartered and OSL completed the first HKD stablecoin fund transaction, ahead of launches by the first two licensed issuers, Anchorpoint Financial and HSBC, expected in the second half of the year.
AI for All Initiative
As also highlighted over at GMAsia’s news article , what’s interesting are key AI educational measures include an AI upskilling campaign expected to benefit 40,000 employees, 30,000 youth employment and internship opportunities, and expanded talent admission initiatives.
This builds on the direction set earlier in the year, when the government outlined five pillars for its AI+ push: talent development and education, digital infrastructure, R&D, empowering public services, and AI governance, alongside plans for a Sandy Ridge data facility cluster designed to deliver 180,000 PFLOPS of compute by 2032.
This is exactly the space GMAsia was built for. As more organisations across the city put real budget and headcount behind AI upskilling, the talent gap it is designed to close only becomes more visible. Our event last month connected us with a genuinely engaged community, and several follow-up conversations about collaboration are now underway. More to unveil here soon.
Upcoming Events in Asia
Two major regional events sit right on our calendar. TOKEN2049 Singapore runs October 7-8 at Marina Bay Sands, expecting more than 25,000 attendees, 7,000 companies and 300 speakers from over 160 countries across all five floors of the venue. AI & Blockchain sits alongside DeFi, Web3 infrastructure, tokenisation and crypto regulation as one of the event’s main topics this year.
Just before that, Korea Blockchain Week 2026 returns to Seoul’s Walkerhill Hotels & Resorts from September 29 to October 1, opening with a private institutional forum before two days of main conference programming spanning digital assets, institutional finance, AI integration and real-world adoption.
This year’s speaker lineup already includes sessions dedicated to the convergence of blockchain and AI, covering how AI models can run in decentralised environments and how AI agents might expand business use cases. It will be interesting to see how much AI ends up sharing the stage with the usual Web3 conversations at both events.
Closing Thoughts
It has been a genuinely eventful month, on regulation, on rates, and on the pace of AI itself. The CLARITY Act stumbled in the US, but the SEC found its own path forward on tokenised stocks. While in contrast, Hong Kong is pushing on a licensed framework for stablecoins, already seeing a path to adoption. And the biggest AI labs asked, in public, for the industry to slow down, even as Hong Kong doubled down on building out its own AI talent base.
Closer to home, regardless of how the frontier labs settle this, the direction of travel is set. Learning and adapting is now a city-wide and region-wide priority. While it is important to stay vigilant when experimenting with new agentic tools and the limits they operate within, the goal is to strike a balance between an automated digital life and one that can cause irreversible harm.
We’d also like to wish all our community members a very happy Mid Autumn Festival! We hope all of you who are celebrating the occasion are having a wonderful time with your loved ones.
Disclaimer: The above is an opinion piece written by an authorized author, but in no way represents the official standpoint of OAX Foundation Limited, nor should it be meant to serve as investment advice.
