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CLARITY Act Dead, SEC 5-Year Exemption & Nostra's Oracle Crisis | Sep 19
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The CLARITY Act failed its Senate vote 50-49, triggering immediate SEC and CFTC regulatory action that markets read as a net positive — Bitcoin jumped 5.1% to $78,215. Meanwhile, Nostra Finance suffered a $3.5M oracle exploit exposing structural DeFi risk on Starknet, and the Treasury sanctioned Iranian exchange BitBank for IRGC-linked crypto payments.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A three-and-a-half-million-dollar oracle exploit just shut down one of Starknet's primary lending markets, and the circumstances reveal something worse than the loss itself. Nostra Finance paused all lending and borrowing on its money market after an attacker manipulated the NSTR price feed to borrow against inflated collateral.
This is the second major oracle failure on Nostra in eighteen months. In March of twenty-twenty-five, the xSTRK and sSTRK liquid staking feeds inflated three times their real value.
Separate from Starknet entirely, the regulatory landscape shifted fast in the last twenty-four hours. The Clarity Act failed its Senate vote fifty to forty-nine.
Markets read the agency action as a net positive. Bitcoin rose five-point-one percent to seventy-eight thousand, two hundred and fifteen dollars.
The Treasury sanctioned Iranian exchange BitBank under Operation Economic Outcast. BitBank processed Bitcoin payments tied to Strait of Hormuz shipping tolls, funneling hundreds of millions to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
On the infrastructure side, Nvidia-backed AI compute firm Nscale filed for a NYSE IPO. The headline figure is one-hundred-and-three-point-four billion dollars in contracted value.
The two things to watch from here: whether Nostra can recover any of the bridged funds and what the post-mortem reveals about the NSTR oracle provider. That will determine whether Starknet DeFi collateral standards get rebuilt or remain as they are.
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