Source context: Four Pillars weekly report, translated and compiled by TechFlow, published November 10, 2026, at 12:52:45 UTC+8. Events, figures and regulatory developments below are presented as reported in that publication.
Crypto’s institutional-adoption narrative has two distinct tracks in this report: legislation that could define the industry’s legal boundaries, and trading infrastructure advancing through existing regulatory powers. Four Pillars argues that congressional gridlock could slow the first without necessarily stopping the second.
The distinction matters for onchain derivatives. Permission to offer a financial product is not the same as permission for a decentralized platform to serve U.S. customers. Likewise, expanding trading volume does not automatically produce proportionate protocol revenue.
Congress: a harder route to comprehensive legislation
According to the report, Democrats secured control of both chambers in the November 3 U.S. midterm elections, flipping at least seven Senate seats and gaining more than 20 House seats. The new Congress was scheduled to take office in January 2027.
Four Pillars sees that outcome as an obstacle to the CLARITY Act, which seeks to establish a federal digital-asset market structure and clarify the respective jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The report says the bill passed the House in July 2025 but failed to advance in a September 2025 Senate procedural vote of 49–50. Negotiations had already stalled over stablecoin yield rewards, liability for DeFi developers and conflict-of-interest provisions for government officials.
The researchers expect a Democratic-controlled Congress to place greater emphasis on investigations and oversight of the Trump family’s crypto businesses. They identify World Liberty Financial, its USD1 stablecoin and the TRUMP memecoin as subjects of previously expressed Democratic concerns about potential conflicts of interest. Those concerns are not findings that misconduct occurred.
Their interpretation is that comprehensive legislation would become harder to pass without stronger consumer-protection, illicit-finance and conflict-of-interest safeguards—not that every element of U.S. crypto policy would necessarily reverse.
Agency rulemaking remains a separate channel
The report describes two regulatory initiatives continuing outside the legislative process:
- An SEC Regulation Crypto Assets proposal introduced in August 2026, including targeted registration exemptions for certain token offerings and conditional safe harbors concerning investment-contract treatment.
- CFTC rulemaking launched in October for Crypto Asset Transactions, or CTX, and Crypto Asset Markets, or CAM, intended to establish a framework for retail-facing crypto commodity trading.
Four Pillars argues that agency interpretations, rules and exemptions could provide incremental clarity under existing law. It also stresses their limitations: agencies cannot exceed their statutory authority, and administrative approaches are more exposed than legislation to changes in government or commission leadership.
The practical test, in the researchers’ view, is whether these initiatives become final rules that deliver meaningful market access.
Single-stock perpetuals: product approval is not platform approval
The report says the CFTC cleared a path on November 3 for single-stock perpetual futures to trade on U.S.-regulated exchanges. Under the described framework, CFTC-licensed futures exchanges must also complete the relevant SEC registration for securities-futures trading.
Perpetual futures have no fixed expiration date and provide price exposure without requiring ownership of the underlying shares. The report says the contracts fall within the legal category of security futures under the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, bringing them under joint SEC–CFTC oversight.
According to Four Pillars:
- Kalshi became the first U.S. platform to launch regulated single-stock perpetual futures on November 5, covering more than 50 companies, including Nvidia, Meta and Palantir. Early trading volume exceeded $300 million.
- Payward, Kraken’s parent company, was preparing a launch through regulated exchange Bitnomial, initially targeting 10 major U.S. stocks.
- Coinbase Derivatives and a Crypto.com-affiliated exchange were also pursuing similar listings.
The development faced a legal challenge. The report says an industry coalition including Cboe and Citadel Securities sued over whether the CFTC had statutory authority to approve single-stock perpetuals under the existing framework.
Where Hyperliquid enters the story
Four Pillars reports that Intercontinental Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange’s parent, announced a strategic investment in and partnership with Trade[XYZ] on October 29. The proposed collaboration would use Hyperliquid’s underlying technology to develop a U.S.-regulated trading venue and clearing infrastructure.
Separately, Hyperliquid Strategies, a listed company holding HYPE, was applying for futures commission merchant registration to establish a compliant access route to Hyperliquid’s perpetual markets. Both initiatives remained subject to regulatory approval.
The report interprets these plans as evidence that traditional financial institutions were exploring crypto-native market infrastructure, rather than treating it solely as a competitive threat. But it explicitly distinguishes acceptance of perpetual futures from authorization for decentralized exchanges to serve U.S. customers. Exchange registration, custody, surveillance and clearing requirements would still apply.
Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework, which allows external deployers to establish multi-asset perpetual markets on its infrastructure, provides one possible route into that convergence. Four Pillars also identifies an opportunity for Lighter, while noting that a comparable compliance pathway remained to be established.
Hyperliquid: broader markets, uneven monetization
The report’s first-half 2026 Hyperliquid review was produced by the Hyperliquid Research Collective, an initiative of GLC Research and Four Pillars.
It reported protocol revenue of $351 million, up 6.4% year over year but down 38% from the record second half of 2025. June revenue reached $71 million, the strongest month since November 2025. Over the first half, bitcoin fell 33%, while HYPE rose 155%; the protocol spent $288 million repurchasing HYPE.
Those figures describe different things: protocol earnings, token-market performance and buyback spending. They should not be treated as interchangeable measures of adoption.
HIP-3 expanded the platform beyond crypto-native markets into commodities, equity indices and individual stocks. It generated $324 billion in first-half volume, representing 25.1% of total platform volume; its share reached 32.0% in the second quarter.
Revenue was less diversified. Because of subsidized fee pricing, HIP-3 contributed only 7.4% of protocol revenue, while native crypto perpetuals contributed 85.6%. Deployment was also concentrated: Trade[XYZ] accounted for 97% of HIP-3 volume in June.
The evidence therefore supports an expansion in trading activity, but not an equivalent expansion in direct revenue contribution.
Potential income is not yet recognized income
At the end of the reporting period, HyperEVM held $5.6 billion in stablecoin supply, 96% of it USDC. Under the AQAv2 arrangement described in the report, approximately 90% of reserve-interest income after cost adjustments would go to the Assistance Fund.
Using prevailing rates and stablecoin balances, the researchers estimated a potential annual contribution of $135 million–$200 million, potentially providing additional buyback funding. However, the first-half accounts had not recognized that income, and the actual economic allocation remained unconfirmed at publication. Stablecoin balances, interest rates and the final sharing percentage were key variables.
The report also recorded $309 million in cumulative net inflows into three U.S. spot HYPE ETFs through June 30. Under its methodology, ETFs, listed treasury companies and the Assistance Fund together held approximately 82 million HYPE, or 8.2% of total supply.
Team members claimed only 4.7% of their scheduled first-half unlock allocation. Nevertheless, $4.3 billion in vested but unclaimed allocations remained a potential source of supply pressure.
Binance: recovery capacity does not eliminate custody risk
In a separate security review, Four Pillars reported that Binance hot wallets across 10 blockchains were compromised beginning at 05:04 on October 30, 2026, with $6.36 billion stolen, mostly within approximately 20 minutes. It described the incident as the largest theft of its kind and said the FBI attributed it to North Korean group TraderTraitor.
According to the review, the compromise involved internal signing infrastructure rather than an isolated private key.
Tether and Circle froze approximately $2.4 billion in stolen stablecoins within an hour. Subsequent interventions involving the Arbitrum Security Council and token issuers brought frozen or recovered assets above $2.8 billion.
The report says Binance assembled $6.34 billion without external borrowing to fund full compensation and reopened withdrawals in stages from November 1. Binance’s own figures put first-day net outflows at approximately 2.1% of total assets.
Four Pillars cautions that this outcome depended heavily on Binance’s financial resources. A smaller exchange facing a comparable loss might lack the buffer to withstand withdrawals.
Approximately 90% of the funds leaving Binance after withdrawals reopened did not move to other top-10 centralized exchanges. The researchers interpret that as evidence of increased interest in self-custody, although the destination statistic alone does not establish where all those funds went. They also cite Ledger device tampering and a malicious Trust Wallet update as reminders that personal wallets carry their own security risks.
Other signals across the ecosystem
The roundup also reported that:
- NEAR governance approved reducing its token-issuance inflation ceiling to 1.6%.
- Samsung Wallet introduced Solana-based USDC accounts for U.S. Galaxy users.
- Hyperliquid Strategies disclosed $13.3 million in quarterly revenue alongside its FCM application.
- Aave Labs acquired financial-engineering team Avon as part of its fixed-rate onchain lending effort.
- Binance’s CFO stepped down nine days after the reported theft; its co-CEO said the transition had been planned six months earlier.
A separate Four Pillars study found that the share of newly listed KRW trading pairs on Upbit and Bithumb classified as “Korea-only” declined from 85% in 2019 to 9% in 2024, before reaching 18% in 2026. That is a change in listing composition, not by itself a measure of trading demand or adoption.
Across these stories, the central analytical boundary is the same: legislative prospects, regulatory permission, infrastructure investment, trading activity and realized revenue are related—but distinct—forms of evidence. The report’s institutionalization thesis depends on how those pieces connect, not simply on the prominence of the participants involved.
Original article: Four Pillars weekly report, translated and compiled by TechFlow
