On Thursday morning the Securities and Exchange Commission signed an order that lets real American shares trade on a public blockchain. The agency calls the arrangement the Innovation Exemption. It is temporary, it is conditional, and it runs five years.

The order lifts two labels. A venue trading tokenized shares no longer has to register as a stock exchange, and the people supplying the shares and cash to its pools no longer count as dealers. Trading runs through an automated market maker, a pool that fills your order against itself instead of matching you with another buyer.

The SEC attached conditions, and they are the substance. A token has to carry the same dividends and the same votes as the share behind it, so synthetics are out. The smart contracts have to be public, auditable and on a chain anyone can join.

The venue also has to halt a token the moment the real stock is halted on its listing exchange. It has to tell the company before listing its stock, and the company can object. The number of tickers is capped and so is the volume.

Two days earlier, the crypto market structure bill had died in the Senate. Congress failed to write the rules, and the regulator wrote a narrower version of them anyway, using powers it already had. Paul Atkins, who chairs the SEC, called it a first step and asked for comment.

On Friday morning Michael Blaugrund of Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, said the exchange is building a system for round-the-clock on-chain trading. He named Avalanche as meeting many of its requirements.

The regulator moved on Thursday and the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. If you hold crypto partly because you expect this plumbing to end up on-chain, that's the first week the incumbents said so out loud. Nobody has traded a share on one of these venues yet.

The Bank of Japan raised its policy rate a quarter point this morning, from 1.0% to 1.25%. The vote was seven to two, and it is the highest Japanese rate in about thirty-one years.

Japan is where the cheap money comes from. Investors borrow yen for almost nothing and buy something that pays more elsewhere, and that money funds a lot of what you own. When Japanese rates rise, the borrowing costs more and some of it gets unwound, in steps rather than a slow drift.

That's four central banks leaning the same way inside a week. The Fed raised on Wednesday, the Bank of England held with a hard edge, and the ECB says it's still tightening.

Bitcoin is up 1.7%, a third green session in a row.

Three days of green candles is not a decoupling. Watch the yen against the dollar and Japan's ten-year bond.

US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $159 million on Thursday, after $450.4 million left them on Tuesday and another $295.9 million on Wednesday. Tuesday was the biggest single day of withdrawals this cycle.

BlackRock's IBIT took in $183.7 million on its own, and the whole group netted $159 million. So the rest of the group, taken together, saw money leave on the day the run of withdrawals supposedly ended.

Ether funds didn't even get that. Another $39 million left them, a third day of withdrawals in a row.

If you read ETF flows as the institutional bid under bitcoin, that bid is one fund wide this week. That's worth knowing before you read a green line in the flow table as the institutions coming back.