Cathie Wood's ARK Sells $60 Million in Crypto Stocks Days Before SEC Innovation Exemption

Mastercard has joined Ant International and Visa in building a common trust framework for AI-powered commerce, an effort known as the Know-Your-Agent approach. The framework is designed to make verified identity signals portable across card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and online marketplaces, establishing who operates an AI agent, applying shared certification standards and continuously monitoring transactions while leaving final approval decisions with each participant. Mastercard shares slipped approximately 0.1% to $564.54 on the news. No pricing, payment-volume or revenue commitments were disclosed, so adoption will matter more than the announcement itself. At $564.54, Mastercard trades 17.46% below the GF Value estimate of $683.92.

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest rotated sharply across AI, crypto and healthcare last week, buying nearly $25 million of CoreWeave while selling almost $40 million of its ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF. Ark purchased roughly 239,000 CoreWeave shares worth about $24.7 million, making the AI cloud-infrastructure company one of its largest purchases of the week, and added approximately $7.25 million of Meta Platforms. On the selling side, Ark unloaded 1.53 million ARKB shares worth roughly $39.8 million, its biggest sale of the week, and cut about $10 million of Advanced Micro Devices, $13.1 million of Alphabet, $6.5 million of Shopify and $5.9 million of Palantir Technologies. In crypto, the firm reduced Circle Internet by about $13.5 million and Coinbase Global by $6.8 million, while making a smaller cut to Bullish. In healthcare, Ark bought about $9.3 million of Guardant Health and $8.9 million of Ionis Pharmaceuticals, sold $21.8 million of 10x Genomics, and added $5.8 million of AeroVironment in aerospace and defense.

Bitcoin climbed to an eight-month high of $85,326.10 on Sep. 21, its strongest level since late January, according to CoinGecko. The leading cryptocurrency gained 6% in 24 hours, lifted by forced buying from a short squeeze that liquidated roughly $383 million in Bitcoin short positions over the past day, per the onchain analytics platform CoinGlass. Across all cryptocurrencies, more than $781 million in positions were liquidated in the last 24 hours, of which $659 million were shorts. Ether rose 6% to $2,731.56 and XRP gained 7.8% to $1.48, while Hyperliquid's HYPE token hit a new all-time high of $95.99 after the decentralized exchange rolled out a loan feature allowing users to borrow USDC and USDT against HYPE or Bitcoin collateral. Strategy bought 950 Bitcoin for $75.7 million during Sep. 14-20 and now holds 846,000 BTC, while Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 27,562 Ether last week and now holds 5,983,940 ETH. The rally followed the failure of the Senate cloture vote on the CLARITY Act and the Federal Reserve's first interest rate hike since 2023, after which the Trump administration made several pro-crypto moves, including the SEC's five-year Innovation Exemption for tokenized U.S. stocks, a CFTC no-action position for certain software developers, the House Ways and Means Committee's passage of the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, and the House Financial Services Committee's passage of the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026 to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Bitcoin was trading at $84,999 at the time of writing, per Decibel.