Axios

Nike's business is more of an oof than a swoosh at the moment.

Why it matters: Investors have been abandoning ship as Nike's strategies — both in innovation and distribution — have struggled to win budget-conscious consumers or beat back growing competition.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's anticipated complaint against Consensys, the maker of the MetaMask crypto wallet, landed with a thud this afternoon.

Why it matters: The suit labels an even wider swath of crypto tools as securities, with the SEC's latest enforcement action taking aim at services that enable folks to swap coins or stake them.

Blockchains make everything into a market, making it easy to place bets on almost anything, and last night the bets turned decisively further against President Biden.

Why it matters: When people express their opinions in these markets, they do it with money on the line, which, in theory, should give their opinions a different kind of weight.

VanEck filed the first application to launch a spot solana fund in the U.S. yesterday, right before the anticipated trading debuts of ether funds next week.

Why it matters: This would test a new regulatory boundary in the nascent crypto ETF market: whether the SEC would approve a product for a token with no regulated futures market.

Between the lines: The SEC kept bitcoin out of an ETF for several years, arguing that there wasn't a futures market of "significant size" related to the spot market — a key factor, it said, in mitigating the potential for fraud and manipulation through surveillance sharing agreements.

Coinbase linked with Stripe — what appears to be a new payments power couple in the making.

Why it matters: The U.S.'s largest crypto exchange has been on a mission to prove the value of digital assets through their utility, and linking with a payments giant can help facilitate that.

How it works: Coinbase is adding the payment processor's fiat-to-crypto on-ramp to its wallet. Stripe, meanwhile, is adding USDC on the exchange's Base network to enable crypto payouts and conversions.

The big picture: Coinbase Chief Brian Armstrong has said that his goal is to have the average transaction on Base "take less than one second and cost less than 1 cent anywhere in the world."

If meme coins could talk, they'd tell you that Doland Tremp beat Jeo Boden at the last night's first presidential debate.

• Our politics colleagues agree that President Biden's performance was a miss, "of epic proportions."

By the numbers: BODEN started sinking around the start of the debate and has fallen about 50%, trading at around 7 cents this morning.

• TREMP slid too, but declined less, about 18%.
• Betting site Polymarket shows Trump's chances of winning at 65%, and Biden at 21%.

I was at a watch party hosted by the Coinbase-started nonprofit Stand With Crypto and Web3 Familia in New York. It was a bit of a buzzkill, in that there was no mention of crypto or bitcoin.

Thursday night's debate will be remembered for President Biden's disastrous performance. But it also laid bare a key theme heading into November: a clash over how good or bad the economy that former President Trump handed off to Biden really was.

Why it matters: Memories fade, but the numbers can give a clearer view of the economic conditions that prevailed the last time Trump was president. The pandemic was a stark dividing line.

The Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation showed prices in aggregate barely budged in May, while annual measures hit the lowest level in over three years, the government said on Friday.

Why it matters: Inflation was benign last month, as the Consumer Price Index report released earlier this month indicated — a turnaround from early 2024 when it looked like progress had stalled out.