The latest of many signs that the SEC is backing off the Biden-era grilling of the digital-asset industry came yesterday morning, when Robinhood announced the agency had dropped its investigation against the firm.

• Why it matters: The federal securities regulator is ushering in a new U.S. regulatory scheme for digital assets.

Cases are falling like dominos. On Friday afternoon, OpenSea announced that the SEC dropped its investigation into the platform's operation of a market for NFTs.

• A day earlier, Coinbase said agency staff had agreed to drop the regulator's nearly two-year-old lawsuit against the crypto exchange.
• And earlier this month the SEC stayed a securities-based case against another exchange, Binance, saying the work of the agency's new crypto task force "may impact and facilitate" a potential resolution.

What they're saying: "In addition to being a welcome signal of progress, this is also clear confirmation that the previous SEC leadership failed to sufficiently uphold its mission to protect American consumers, innovations, and markets — particularly related to the crypto industry — and new leadership is working quickly to course-correct," DeFi Education Fund chief legal officer Amanda Tuminelli said in a statement.

Other lawsuits from the Biden-era SEC include a case against a software development firm, in which the regulator sought to bring decentralized finance (DeFi) tools under the securities umbrella.

• It sued a crypto market maker and issued a variety of warning notices, so-called Wells Notices, including against the maker of the most popular decentralized exchange.
• The big picture: Like the cases that were dropped, these suits are all about arcane legal questions of how authorities should look at one transaction versus another.

The bottom line: The SEC seems to be reprioritizing its focus on the crypto industry. Thursday, the agency unveiled its new crypto unit, which is focused on fraud and malicious actors.

Bybit, a major crypto exchange, got hit last week with the biggest hack of all time, but the market has been largely unmoved by it.

• That sharp drop in the middle of the chart is the news of the nearly $1.5 billion hack — but then ether price quickly went back to normal.

Why it matters: In Bybit's case, reserves were fine when customers panicked and started withdrawing funds (unlike at FTX).

• Between the lines: Because it really did lose a lot of ether (ETH) and ETH-based assets, Bybit quickly secured loans to cover the difference. But its other reserve assets turned out to be safe, exactly where they should have been.

The big picture: Hacks on exchanges often lead to panic, which often get described as a "bank run."

• This is half-fair because exchanges do take deposits, like a bank.
• It's half-unfair too, though, because exchanges don't — or shouldn't — do anything with those deposits but guard them. (Here's looking at you FTX.)
• Zoom in: Crypto exchanges make their money off users trading the funds with each other. A bank lends money out, so a bank run can destroy it because it doesn't have all the money.

The bottom line: Bybit had customers' remaining funds, which is why the market hasn't cared too much about this news the way it did with FTX. (Crypto prices across the board did tank again yesterday but for other reasons.)

Whodunit: The hackers are almost certainly linked to North Korea, according to blockchain research. That much money has to be a nation-state, because no one else would be able to turn that much crypto into cash.

One fun thing: Best tweet. (In case you don't get it, this will help.)

Key House Republican leaders have sent the FDIC suggestions about policy changes to prevent debanking in the future.

Why it matters: The goal of the reforms is to prevent a case where regulators could shut a legal industry out of the financial system, thereby shutting it down.

Zoom in: The legislators sent a letter with five suggestions following hearings in the House and Senate on debanking legal businesses.

• The goal is to provide clarity to customers about why their accounts are getting shut down, remove subjective standards such as "reputational risk" from risk assessment by banking regulators and ensure uniform application of law.

What they're saying: "Even without being explicit, [regulators] can send out these signals that you really don't want to take on certain kinds of customers, and the institutions are going to respect that," Chester Spatt, a business school professor at Carnegie Mellon and former chief economist at the SEC, tells Axios.

• This letter, however, read to Spatt as a good-faith effort between legislators and executive branch staff to chart a path forward.
• "The way it works when an executive branch and part of the legislature are in the same party, they are a little bit trying to learn from each other," he says.

The bottom line: Letters like this are part of a larger process.

• Legislators may know the outcome they want, but they understand that agency staff have seen more edge cases and have a deeper understanding.

I'm going to ETHDenver this week. Look for me Thursday through the end Saturday.

The big picture: I will ask questions in three firesides on the Regeneratooor Main Stage.

• Joey Krug, Founders Fund, talking mostly about prediction markets, but also Krug has some spicy stuff for us on Operation Chokepoint 2.0. So come check it out. (3:10pm MT Thursday.)
• Joseph Lubin, CEO of ConsenSys. His firm runs much of the infrastructure of Ethereum, so we can hear about what he sees in the second-biggest blockchain that the market does not. (10:55am Friday.)
• Caitlin Long, whose travails getting Custodia Bank going have been well-documented in these pages. Long and I will discuss the path forward for her company under a White House with a different philosophy. (3:45pm Friday.)

The big news: Bo Hines, the crypto-focused guy on David Sacks' team, will speak Friday.

The bottom line: I will, of course, also be talking to people on the ground, meeting folks and searching for stories, particularly about crypto policy.