What you’ll read: Market participants want clarity from the SEC on which blockchains qualify under its new tokenization exemption. Banking groups cry foul over the OCC’s stablecoin rewards rules, but crypto firms aren’t getting a free pass either. Plus, SharpLink CEO Joe Chalom joins the podcast, and a roundup of the week’s biggest headlines.

Comments are rolling in on the SEC’s new innovation exemption for tokenized securities venues, exposing a growing divide over which blockchains should qualify.

Released in September, the exemption allows qualifying firms to trade tokenized U.S. stocks without registering as traditional securities exchanges, subject to certain conditions. Among them, the smart contracts used by these venues must be auditable, public and deployed on a public, permissionless blockchain.

But the SEC’s definition of “public and permissionless” is drawing scrutiny, with some arguing it’s too broad and could allow more centralized networks to qualify, while others are seeking greater clarity or pushing to expand which blockchains are eligible.

As Crypto In America reported this week, three firms have already notified the SEC of their intent to operate TSVs, each pursuing a different approach. TSV LLC plans to use Canton Network, a privacy-focused blockchain whose foundation board includes one of the firm's founders, while OKXICE and Kephas Corp. plan to use Ethereum Layer 2 networks developed by their respective corporate groups.

In a letter submitted Thursday, the Solana Policy Institute urged the SEC to tighten its definition of “permissionless,” arguing regulators should look at who actually controls a blockchain, including who can validate or block transactions and change the network’s rules.

Hedera is pushing in the opposite direction. Its blockchain is public but permissioned, meaning only approved entities can validate transactions. In an October 9 letter, Hedera called on the SEC to expand the exemption to include networks like its own, arguing that restricted validator access shouldn’t disqualify them.

Others warn the SEC could be opening the door to regulatory arbitrage. Columbia Business School’s Omid Malekan, who has written about the benefits of decentralized blockchains, argues that centralized firms could exploit the exemption without giving up control over transactions or offering the transparency and censorship resistance associated with decentralized networks. Gabriel Shapiro, a securities lawyer at MetaLex Labs, raises similar concerns, warning that those controlling the underlying blockchain could have more power to influence or restrict trading than the venues operating on it.

The concerns extend beyond crypto firms. Wall Street trade group SIFMA has also asked the SEC to clarify what qualifies as a public, permissionless blockchain, while questioning whether companies should have to explicitly consent to having their shares tokenized, rather than being required to opt out. Better Markets, a Wall Street watchdog group, has gone further, calling on the SEC to withdraw the exemption altogether and pursue formal rulemaking.

An SEC official told Crypto In America that firms can begin operating 30 days after filing their notices, without waiting for SEC approval, provided they meet the exemption’s conditions. That means the agency doesn’t have to sign off on their chosen blockchains before they launch.

But that doesn’t mean the SEC is endorsing them.

“This isn’t a rulemaking,” the official said, explaining that the SEC deliberately kept its definition of “public and permissionless” broad to give firms room to experiment rather than prescribe exactly how blockchains must operate. Instead, the regulator is leaving it to the market to determine which blockchain models work.

The official said the agency is reviewing the feedback and could issue additional FAQs to address questions about the exemption. More substantive changes would require Commission action, while lessons from the temporary framework are expected to inform eventual formal rulemaking.

Separately, more companies are pushing back against having their shares tokenized. As of Friday, 22 of the 62 companies on OKXICE’s original list had objected, representing more than a third of the proposed issuers. OKXICE had previously disclosed 16 objections, with Reuters reporting six more on Friday, including Wells Fargo, Arm Holdings and Intuit.

Banks Cry Foul Over OCC's Stablecoin Rewards Rules

The OCC backed off proposed restrictions on stablecoin rewards in its final GENIUS Act rules this week, and the banking industry isn’t impressed.

The American Bankers Association slammed the OCC for dropping safeguards on stablecoin rewards, saying that crypto platforms could continue offering yield through third parties and lure deposits away from traditional banks.

“The result is a final rule that will preserve the status quo for crypto platforms despite Congress’s clear intent to protect local lending,” said ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols. “Attempting to address deposit flight and economic harm after it has occurred is the wrong approach.”

The Bank Policy Institute, which represents some of the country’s largest banks, also pushed back, warning that the OCC’s decision “replaces clarity with ambiguity” over which stablecoin rewards arrangements are allowed.

Community banks aren’t happy either. The Independent Community Bankers of America called for stronger safeguards, pointing to estimates that widespread stablecoin adoption could reduce community bank lending by as much as $850 billion.

But the impact on bank lending is far from settled. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service notes that money flowing into stablecoins doesn't necessarily leave the banking system, since issuers can hold reserves in bank deposits.

The OCC also acknowledged the uncertainty in its final rule, saying the impact will depend on how quickly the stablecoin market grows and where issuers hold their reserves. The regulator said it plans to monitor the market and could revisit the rules if necessary.

Crypto firms, meanwhile, welcomed the decision. Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad praised the OCC for interpreting the GENIUS Act as Congress wrote it, while Circle’s Dante Disparte called the final rules an important milestone in establishing clear, durable standards for stablecoins.

But that doesn’t mean crypto firms have won the fight.

“We will continue to enforce the statutory prohibition, regardless of whether or not there’s any presumption,” an OCC official told reporters during a briefing this week.

In other words, the OCC may have dropped its proposed restrictions on certain arrangements between stablecoin issuers and third parties, but it can still investigate potential violations on a case-by-case basis.

An industry source familiar with the matter also noted that existing crypto rewards programs aren’t grandfathered in, meaning they’ll still have to comply with the law when its provisions take effect.

From BlackRock to SharpLink: Joseph Chalom’s Big Ethereum Bet

This week on the podcast, we sat down with Joseph Chalom, CEO of Ethereum treasury company SharpLink and former BlackRock digital assets executive.

From stablecoins and tokenized assets to 24/7 markets and AI agents managing our money, Chalom sees a fundamental shift in how the financial system operates, with Ethereum at the center of it.

We also get into how the SEC’s new innovation exemption could accelerate the move to onchain markets, what still needs to happen on the regulatory front, and the strategy behind SharpLink’s multibillion-dollar crypto treasury.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

News Flash

Here are the biggest stories that made headlines this week.

• Bitcoin Slips Below $82,000 as Tech Stocks Sell Off. Crypto markets came under pressure alongside tech stocks, while rising oil prices added to inflation concerns. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw roughly $635 million in outflows Thursday, reversing some of the week’s earlier inflows.

• a16z Crypto Drops the Crypto Name. Andreessen Horowitz is rebranding its crypto investment arm as a16z Frontier, expanding its focus beyond blockchain startups. Managing Partner Chris Dixon said crypto will remain a core part of its investment strategy.

• SEC Flags Tokenization and AI in 2027 Exam Priorities. The SEC is putting tokenized securities, AI and private assets under the microscope, naming them as priorities for its 2027 examinations of Wall Street firms.

• SoFi Brings Tokenized Deposits to Consumers. SoFi launched SOFIE, an FDIC-insured tokenized bank deposit offering 4.4% APY, bringing blockchain-based banking products to everyday customers.

• Ireland Fines Coinbase Unit €3.25 Million. Ireland’s central bank penalized Coinbase Ireland over failures in safeguarding customer funds and overseeing outsourced services. Coinbase says customers suffered no financial losses.

• Solana Activates Major Alpenglow Upgrade. The blockchain’s new consensus system went live this week, targeting transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds.

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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has finalized its long-awaited GENIUS Act rules, backing away from proposed restrictions on stablecoin rewards and giving issuers more flexibility in managing their reserves.

The more than 700-page rule sets federal standards for stablecoin issuers covering everything from reserve backing and redemptions to capital, custody and risk management.

The OCC is the first federal banking regulator to finalize its core GENIUS Act rules, getting ahead of the Federal Reserve and FDIC, which have issued their own proposals. The Treasury Department is also working on separate regulations.

Stablecoin “Loophole” Left Open

In one of the biggest changes from its original proposal, the OCC dropped a provision that would have treated certain arrangements between stablecoin issuers and third parties as presumed violations of the GENIUS Act’s ban on interest and yield.

The decision leaves unresolved one of the biggest sticking points in negotiations over the Clarity Act: whether crypto exchanges and other third parties should be allowed to offer rewards on stablecoin balances.

The GENIUS Act bans stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders, but doesn’t explicitly ban crypto exchanges and other third parties from offering rewards. Banking groups have called this the “stablecoin loophole” and lobbied hard to close it.

Instead of presuming certain arrangements violate the law unless issuers can prove otherwise, the OCC will review them case by case and take enforcement action against violations or attempts to get around the ban.

“We will just let the market develop and address it as it comes,” an OCC official told reporters, adding that the agency may issue further guidance as the market evolves.

The official declined to say whether existing exchange rewards programs comply with the rule. The OCC also rejected calls to exempt rewards programs that predated the GENIUS Act.

Why it matters: Stablecoin yield was a red line for banks during negotiations over the Clarity Act, the crypto industry’s marquee market structure legislation. Banks pushed to restrict rewards on stablecoins held in accounts rather than used for transactions, warning that such payments could drain deposits and hurt lending.

After the bill failed in the Senate in September, banks looked to the OCC for tighter restrictions. Brooke Ybarra, senior vice president at the American Bankers Association, confirmed in a recent Crypto in America interview that the industry was relying on the OCC’s rulemaking.

But the final rule stops short of closing the loophole, leaving one of the biggest fights between banks and the crypto industry unresolved.

“This is why the banks should have supported the Clarity Act,” said a crypto industry source who requested anonymity. “They would have gotten more restrictions, which they don’t have now.”

More Flexibility for Stablecoin Issuers

Beyond stablecoin rewards, the OCC eased several proposed restrictions on how issuers manage their reserves.

The final rule scraps a proposed 20-day weighted-average maturity limit on reserve assets, giving issuers more flexibility to hold longer-dated eligible investments, including U.S. Treasuries.

Under the new rules, issuers will be able to withdraw surplus reserves at any time, rather than once a month, provided they maintain enough assets to back outstanding stablecoins. The OCC eased certain limits on how much issuers can hold with individual counterparties, while retaining safeguards designed to limit risk.

On redemptions, the agency removed a proposed provision that would have automatically extended redemption deadlines during a surge in withdrawal requests. Instead, issuers must notify the OCC within 24 hours if redemption requests exceed 10% of the outstanding value of any stablecoin they issue within a 24-hour period.

Issuers must still maintain reserves backing their outstanding stablecoins at least one-to-one, meet liquidity requirements and comply with counterparty exposure limits and stress-testing obligations.

The final rule also establishes a federal licensing and supervisory framework for eligible stablecoin issuers, including financial companies that aren’t banks, certain bank subsidiaries and foreign issuers operating under OCC jurisdiction.

“We are providing a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation, with strong standards for reserve backing, redemption, and risk management,” Comptroller Jonathan Gould said in a statement.

What’s Next?

The final rule takes effect on January 18, 2027, but the OCC has yet to announce when it will begin accepting applications from prospective stablecoin issuers.

Rules covering anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance are still to come, with the OCC and Treasury working on a separate proposal.

What you’ll read: Two of crypto’s top state regulators join forces to make state licensing more competitive with federal chartering. The OCC sets a timeline for final GENIUS Act regulations. Plus, what to watch this week and the stories making headlines.

Read more

What you’ll read: Patrick Witt leaves the White House, raising questions about the future of Trump’s crypto council. Fairshake ramps up Senate spending but holds fire on Clarity Act holdouts. Plus, this week's headlines and KAST’s CEO on the podcast.

The last remaining official on the White House Crypto Council has departed the administration, raising questions about the council’s future and whether crypto remains a priority for the White House following the Clarity Act’s failure to advance in the Senate last month.

Patrick Witt, who served as the council’s executive director for just over a year, has left the role after his temporary detail from the Defense Department expired, a White House official confirmed to Crypto In America.

“The White House appreciates his service to the Trump administration and wishes him the best in his future endeavors,” the official said.

Witt confirmed his departure in a lengthy post on X, calling his time in the administration the “privilege of a lifetime.” He also teased his next chapter in the private sector, saying he would have “more to share soon.”

Praise for Witt has poured in from industry leaders and lawmakers alike, commending his work on the Clarity Act and other administration initiatives.

Witt succeeded Bo Hines as executive director after Hines left the White House in August 2025 to lead Tether’s U.S. operations. Witt had been running the council alone since Deputy Director Harry Jung and staffer Nick Elliot, both detailed from the CFTC, departed earlier this summer. Jung later joined Nxum Group, a consulting firm co-owned by Hines and his father.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Nxum earned $6.3 million from a Tether-related deal, with payments beginning while Hines was still serving in the White House. Nxum denied that Hines knew about the dealings or received Tether funds while in office.

David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar who oversaw the council, also left his role earlier this year after his tenure as a special government employee expired. Sacks now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where he continues to advise Trump on technology policy.

He was also among those praising Witt following his departure, calling him “one of the sharpest people I’ve worked with in government.”

Witt’s exit comes at a critical juncture for the crypto industry. With the Clarity Act stalled in the Senate, attention has shifted to federal regulators, particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as the industry looks to them to advance the administration’s pro-crypto agenda.

But other initiatives remain unfinished. Among them is the strategic Bitcoin reserve, on which Witt teased a mysterious “big announcement” months ago that never materialized, leaving Bitcoin enthusiasts wondering what the administration has planned for the reserve.

Then there’s crypto tax legislation, currently being discussed in the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees, with reforms the White House itself called for in its 160-page digital assets report last year.

Witt’s departure now raises questions about who, if anyone, is coordinating those efforts from inside the White House.

“With Patrick gone, it’s not clear there’s anyone steering the ship over in the administration when it comes to crypto,” said an industry source who requested anonymity. “If they get rid of the council, the messaging there isn’t great.”

Another industry source said Witt’s departure was unsurprising, given that advancing the Clarity Act had been the council’s main priority following the passage of the GENIUS Act last year. While some are holding out hope for a revival during the lame duck session, others are far less optimistic.

“We all know there’s zero chance of the Clarity Act passing this year,” the source said.

A White House press official did not respond to a follow-up request for clarification on whether the council has been dissolved or whether a new executive director will be appointed.

Fairshake Ramps Up Senate Spending, But Holds Fire on Clarity Act Holdouts

With less than three weeks until the midterm elections, the crypto industry’s largest super PAC is ramping up its election spending plans in at least two key Senate races: Ohio and Nebraska.

In Ohio, Fairshake affiliate Defend American Jobs has increased its planned advertising against Democrat Sherrod Brown, who is challenging Republican Senator Jon Husted, by $15 million, bringing its total commitment to around $45 million. That’s $4 million more than the roughly $41 million the group spent helping Republican Bernie Moreno unseat Brown in 2024.

The spending blitz reflects concerns within the crypto industry that Brown, who chaired the Senate Banking Committee before losing his seat two years ago, could return to Washington and reclaim a leadership role on either the Senate Banking or Agriculture Committee. Both oversee key regulators of crypto markets, the SEC and CFTC, respectively, and would play central roles in any future effort to pass crypto legislation.

Fairshake has also committed roughly $7.5 million in advertising to support Republican Senator Pete Ricketts, also a member of the Banking Committee, who is facing a competitive challenge from independent Dan Osborn in Nebraska.

Backed by some of the crypto industry’s biggest donors, including Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz and Ripple, Fairshake and its affiliates have spent roughly $56 million on the 2026 general election, according to a spokesperson for the group. Their plans include supporting 32 pro-crypto House candidates across both parties, with at least $1 million each earmarked for Democrats Janelle Bynum (OR), Steven Horsford (NV) and Derek Tran (CA), and Republicans French Hill (AR), Bill Huizenga (MI) and Bryan Steil (WI).

Despite its aggressive spending in other Senate races, Fairshake has yet to announce plans to target any sitting senators who voted against advancing the industry’s landmark market structure legislation last month, even as some crypto advocates have called for electoral consequences. Among those up for reelection are Democrats Mark Warner of Virginia and Cory Booker of New Jersey, both of whom played key roles in Clarity Act negotiations, and Republican Susan Collins of Maine, who broke with her party to oppose advancing the bill.

Warner and Booker are not facing competitive contests, leaving Fairshake with few viable alternatives to support. Collins, however, faces a competitive challenge from Democrat Troy Jackson, who has not publicly taken a position on digital assets.

According to a source familiar with the group’s thinking, Fairshake had discussed spending several million dollars against Collins after the Clarity Act failed to advance in September. The group has not announced any plans to spend against Collins or in support of her opponent, and it remains unclear whether it intends to do so.

Another industry source noted that targeting Collins could backfire if it helped Democrats take control of the Senate, potentially complicating the industry’s legislative priorities.

“If the Senate flips, then Elizabeth Warren and potentially Sherrod Brown will be up for leadership roles,” the source pointed out. “So it would be the industry cutting off its nose to spite its face.”

Warren, currently the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, has long been one of crypto’s fiercest critics, while Brown was a vocal opponent of the industry during his tenure as committee chairman.

A Fairshake spokesperson declined to comment on whether the group plans to spend in any additional Senate races before Election Day.

News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest headlines shaping the week.

• Strategy Faces MSCI Index Ouster: New rules could exclude digital asset treasury companies like Strategy, Metaplanet and SharpLink from MSCI’s global equity benchmarks, potentially triggering billions in passive fund selling. A final list of affected companies is due November 11.

• Inflation heats up: September CPI rose 3.7% annually, while wholesale prices jumped 1.3% for the month, fueling concerns about another Fed rate hike.

• Bitcoin hovers around $82,000: BTC remains under pressure following hotter-than-expected inflation data and renewed concerns about interest rates.

• OCC targets October for GENIUS Act final rule: Comptroller Jonathan Gould says the agency expects to issue its final rule implementing the stablecoin law before the end of the month.

• SEC approves Cboe’s KPI-linked binary options: The exchange received the green light to list contracts tied to performance metrics reported by public companies, including Coinbase, Robinhood and MARA.

• OCC finds reputational risk policies at nine major banks: A new report finds all nine of the largest national banks reviewed had policies allowing reputational concerns to influence banking decisions, with crypto among the industries affected.

• XRP treasury firm Evernorth makes Nasdaq debut: The company began trading under the ticker XRPN, with a treasury of approximately 473 million XRP.

• WSJ: Tether payments to Bo Hines-linked firm began during White House tenure: Nxum, a company co-owned by the former White House crypto adviser, reportedly earned $6.3 million from a Tether-related deal. The firm denies Hines knew about the dealings or received Tether funds while in office.

• Crypto trade groups seek faster court ruling on Illinois tax: Crypto Council for Innovation and the Blockchain Association moved to expedite a legal challenge to the state’s 0.2% digital asset tax, which is now stayed until July 2027.

• Ledger hardware wallets compromised in nearly $93 million crypto theft: The company confirmed criminals planted hidden devices inside wallets to steal users’ recovery phrases, prompting sales suspensions across parts of Asia and Europe. Ledger says its own systems were not breached.

• BNY and Citadel Securities complete first-of-its-kind tokenized Treasury repo: The transaction uses a tokenized two-year U.S. Treasury note as collateral on a major triparty repo platform.

• Bank of America hit with $1.2 billion fine over money laundering failures: Federal regulators found the bank failed to properly monitor and report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, including activity linked to potential illicit finance risks.

From Crypto Cards to Global Banking: KAST CEO on Stablecoins and America’s Edge

On this week’s podcast episode, the team sat down with KAST CEO Raagulan Pathy at Korea Blockchain Week to discuss stablecoins, global banking and why he believes America is uniquely positioned to lead in crypto.

What started as a stablecoin-powered card offering is evolving into something much bigger. Pathy discussed KAST’s expansion into a broader financial platform serving individuals, businesses and institutions. At the heart of that evolution is growing global demand for access to U.S. dollars. Pathy explained how stablecoins are making it easier for people and businesses around the world to hold, send and spend dollars without relying on traditional banking infrastructure.

And despite KAST’s global footprint, Pathy believes America has a unique opportunity to shape the future of digital finance. With the dollar already dominating global trade and capital markets, he argues that U.S. leadership in crypto could set the tone for the rest of the world.

“When America does it, then everyone else is going to follow. It should 100% lean into it.”

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

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Where does risk management end and gambling begin? Former CFTC Chairman Russ Behnam sat down with Crypto In America at Georgetown University’s Psaros Financial Markets Quality Conference to explain why Congress needs to draw that line as prediction markets continue to see explosive growth. With lawsuits over sports contracts playing out across the country, he says the issue could ultimately land before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Behnam also weighs in on crypto regulation after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate. He explains why regulating spot markets with the CFTC’s existing authority can feel like using “Scotch tape and paperclips,” why there is now a premium on regulators writing durable rules, and what agencies can realistically do to protect customers if a crypto firm goes bankrupt.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The House is out. The Senate is in.

Tuesday

10:00 a.m.: The Conference Board releases its September consumer confidence reading.

10:00 a.m.: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its August Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report.

12:40 p.m.: Fed Governor Michael Barr speaks on the economic outlook.

3:00 p.m.: Fed Governor Christopher Waller gives a speech on payments.

Wednesday

Korea Blockchain Week’s main conference kicks off in Seoul. Crypto In America will be on the ground for the two-day event.

8:30 a.m.: The Commerce Department releases August personal income and spending data, including headline and core PCE inflation, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge. Its third estimate of second quarter GDP is also due.

Thursday

9:05 a.m.: Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin, Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid and Boston Fed President Susan Collins discuss regional economic conditions.

10:00 a.m.: The Institute for Supply Management releases its September manufacturing index.

1:30 p.m.: Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson discusses the U.S. economy and monetary policy.

Friday

8:30 a.m.: Jobs Friday: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the September jobs report, including payroll growth, the unemployment rate and average hourly earnings.

News Flash

• Luke Pettit, assistant secretary for financial institutions and acting under secretary for domestic finance, who worked on the GENIUS Act and Clarity Act efforts, will leave the Treasury Department next month for the private sector.

• SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce will leave the agency on October 2 after nearly nine years. She’s set to join Regent University School of Law as an associate professor in November.

• Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger is stepping down on October 16. BA board president Kristin Smith will take over as interim CEO the following day while continuing to lead the Solana Policy Institute. Mersinger will stay on as an adviser through the end of the year.

• Franklin Templeton and Bybit are partnering to let eligible institutional clients use tokenized money market fund shares as off-exchange collateral for crypto trading.

• A U.S. Senate Democratic investigation found that 84% of 846 wallets sanctioned by the U.S. and Israel over ties to Iran transacted exclusively or nearly exclusively in Tether’s USDT.

• Bitget says the vulnerability behind its roughly $388 million breach was in a third-party security product and allowed the attacker to obtain high-level internal credentials. The exchange says its private keys and cold wallets were not compromised.

• Citigroup is partnering with Coinbase to let its institutional clients accept stablecoin payments from customers. Coinbase will provide the payment rails and convert the stablecoins into fiat, while Citi will settle the funds.

• The Clearing House has selected Quant to power a new U.S. network for clearing and settling tokenized bank deposits. The network is expected to open to participating institutions in the first half of 2027.

• California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law barring state and local public officials from issuing meme coins.The law also restricts companies from listing certain meme coins tied to public officials for California residents.

• U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have pulled in $5.3 billion since the Treasury announced plans to increase its buybacks of longer-dated bonds, including $2.4 billion last week alone.

• Kalshi lost a major Sixth Circuit case over its sports event contracts. The court ruled that Ohio and Tennessee may enforce their sports gambling laws against the prediction market platform, rejecting Kalshi’s argument that federal commodities law preempts the states.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed at least $3.1 million in family cash, retirement investments and Bitcoin in his latest annual financial filing. His Bitcoin holdings were valued at between roughly $16,000 and $65,000.

• IBM is connecting its Digital Asset Haven platform to Swift’s blockchain-based ledger, giving banks a way to move tokenized deposits 24/7 before final settlement through existing systems. The new connectivity is currently in beta.

• Ondo partnered with BlackRock to launch three onchain investment portfolios using strategies developed by the asset manager. The products are currently available only to eligible investors outside the U.S.

• The Federal Reserve proposed two stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act. One establishes reserve, capital, custody and risk management requirements for issuers it supervises. The other outlines how state banks supervised by the Fed can apply to issue stablecoins.

• CFTC staff clarified that registered derivatives firms can hold certain customer investments as tokens and use blockchain records to meet federal recordkeeping rules.

Inside the Clarity Act’s Failed Senate Vote

ICYMI: Crypto In America’s Eleanor Terrett moderated a panel discussion with White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt and former Counselor to the Treasury Secretary for Digital Assets Tyler Williams at Georgetown’s Psaros Financial Markets Quality Conference to examine the Clarity Act’s failed Senate vote and what comes next.

They unpack the Clarity Act’s biggest challenges, including what went wrong during negotiations, what could have been done differently, whether banks overplayed their hand by lobbying against a deal that would have given them protections they now lack, and whether the bill can still make a comeback.

The conversation also covers the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill advancing out of the House Financial Services Committee, the administration’s crypto priorities going forward and how the market should ultimately judge its promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

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What you’ll read: SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and SEC Crypto Task Force chief counsel Taylor Lindman answer key industry questions about how the agency’s new Innovation Exemption will work. Plus, what to watch this week and the headlines you might have missed.

The first tokenized stock trading venues under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new Innovation Exemption could begin taking shape as soon as next quarter, Taylor Lindman, chief counsel of the SEC Crypto Task Force, told Crypto In America.

Speaking alongside Commissioner Hester Peirce in a joint interview, Lindman said the agency expects firms to begin publishing required notices outlining their plans to operate in the coming months. The notices would provide the first public indication of which firms intend to enter the new market.

“I think there will be a bit of a lag time between when it came out and when we’ll see the first firms filing their notices,” Lindman said. “That will probably be at some point in the next quarter.”

The SEC issued the five-year conditional exemption last week, allowing eligible platforms to facilitate permissioned trading in tokenized versions of U.S.-listed stocks through automated market makers and liquidity pools on public, permissionless blockchains. The relief is already in effect, but venues must publish notices outlining their operations and notify the SEC within one business day of publication.

“More onchain finance than DeFi”

Despite relying on automated market makers and liquidity pools commonly associated with decentralized finance, the new venues will not operate as true DeFi platforms.

Lindman characterized the model as “more onchain finance than DeFi,” noting that each venue will have a clearly defined person or entity responsible for running it and complying with the exemption’s conditions.

Peirce contrasted that structure with truly decentralized, peer-to-peer finance, which typically lacks a central intermediary to regulate. She said decentralized mechanisms could facilitate direct stock trading, but widespread use would raise broader regulatory questions.

Early Interest Takes Shape

Lindman said the agency is already hearing from firms interested in using the exemption. That interest was also evident at the SEC’s roundtable on 24/7 trading last week, where Wall Street representatives discussed round-the-clock markets and the potential benefits of blockchain-based trading.

At the same time, some in the crypto industry have questioned whether limits on the number of stocks a venue can offer and how much of each stock it can trade are too restrictive to support a commercially viable platform.

Peirce pushed back on those concerns, saying the caps give firms room to do more than test the technology.

“The caps are high enough that people can really do something viable,” Peirce told Crypto In America. “I’m not concerned that they’re so low that people can’t even do more than just a small experiment.”

Peirce framed the restrictions as part of an iterative approach to bringing tokenized equities into a heavily regulated market. She said the SEC can revisit the caps if they become an obstacle but, for now, believes firms can conduct “substantial experimentation” under the exemption.

She also reiterated that the five-year relief is not meant to be permanent, but rather a bridge to longer-term rules. If tokenized securities venues gain traction, she said the SEC could eventually adopt a framework in which additional requirements take effect as venues cross certain trading thresholds, similar to how alternative trading systems, known as ATSs, are regulated today.

With legislative certainty on ice after the Clarity Act failed to advance, Peirce addressed one of the industry’s biggest fears: whether a future SEC could unwind the initiatives the agency is pursuing now.

“If you build good things, later administrations will want to keep them, too,” she said.

More immediately, another potential constraint in the Innovation Exemption is the issuer veto. A venue must give a public company 30 days to object before offering a tokenized version of its shares created by an unaffiliated third party. An objection prevents the tokenized stock from trading on that venue.

Peirce said she does not expect widespread objections to derail the model.

“The issuers that I’ve spoken with, a lot of them are really excited about something like this,” she said, adding that she anticipates “pretty broad excitement” among issuers.

Peirce’s comments also cut against concerns that the exemption could create siloed markets disconnected from traditional trading venues. She noted that issuers value liquidity and said markets are “really good at interlinking different venues.”

“I’m really excited about seeing the tokenized markets interlink with the more traditional markets,” she said. “I think that’ll be positive for our markets as a whole.”

👀 What To Watch This Week

Tuesday

The House is out. The Senate is back.

Wednesday

Georgetown University hosts its annual Financial Markets Quality Conference, featuring Patrick Witt, Tyler Williams, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda, Kevin Hassett and Terry Duffy. Crypto In America will be on the ground.

2:30 p.m.: The Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee holds a hearing titled “Small Business, Big Impact: Entrepreneurs at the Heart of Thriving Communities for 250 Years.”

Thursday

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosts its 10th Annual Fintech Conference. The two-day event will examine how the GENIUS Act and other regulatory frameworks are reshaping digital assets, tokenization and their integration into traditional finance.

10:00 a.m.: The Cato Institute hosts a conference titled “Money, Markets, and the American Experiment: 250 Years of Financial Opportunity.”

Friday

10:00 a.m.: The University of Michigan releases its final consumer sentiment survey for September.

Georgetown’s Financial Markets Quality Conference returns September 23

Join Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for its annual Financial Markets Quality Conference, bringing together leaders from finance, government and policy.

This year’s agenda features digital assets, tokenization, prediction markets, private markets and financial regulation, with speakers including CME CEO Terry Duffy, JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), NEC Director Kevin Hassett, former Treasury advisor Tyler Williams and White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt.

Location: Wednesday, September 23 | Georgetown University | 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Registration is complimentary, but advance registration is required.

Register Here

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest headlines you may have missed since Friday.

• Bitcoin topped $87,000: The world’s largest cryptocurrency extended its rally Monday, shrugging off the Clarity Act’s failure and last week’s Fed rate hike.

• CFTC launches new technology roundtables: The agency’s Innovation Task Force announced its Frontier Forum series focusing on technologies “transforming American financial markets.” The first roundtable, covering AI and agentic finance, is scheduled for October 28.

• Fairshake targets Sherrod Brown: The crypto super PAC plans to spend at least $30 million opposing former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH), who is challenging Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) in a special election for the remainder of the term formerly held by Vice President JD Vance.

• Coinbase opens IPO access to retail investors: Eligible U.S. customers can now request shares in initial public offerings before they begin trading publicly.

• Trump announces an “AI Force”: The president also said he plans to appoint an “AI czar” to oversee the rapidly expanding technology.

• U.S. diesel prices hit a record: The national average topped $6.50 a gallon for the first time.

• Rate-hike bets climb: Markets are pricing in a greater than 50% chance that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again by October.

• Grayscale plans Zcash ETF share split: The firm filed for a 3-for-1 forward split of its Zcash ETF, giving shareholders of record at the close of trading on September 28 two additional shares for every share held.

• MSTR leads the Nasdaq-100: Strategy shares surged nearly 48% over the past month, making the stock the index’s top performer over that period.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

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What you’ll read: A breakdown of crypto’s roller coaster week in D.C. and a scoop on how Visa is closing a loophole that allowed memecoin purchases to earn ordinary credit card rewards. Plus, a roundup of the week’s biggest stories.

For anyone tracking the twists and turns of crypto policy in Washington, it was a long and bruising week. It also marked a shift in the center of gravity from Congress to the regulators.

On Tuesday, the Senate failed to advance crypto’s landmark market structure bill in a dramatic procedural vote that exposed how deeply President Trump’s crypto dealings have eroded Democrats’ willingness to work with Republicans on regulating an industry they themselves say badly needs oversight.

Democrats voted as a bloc against advancing the bill, while Republican Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Jerry Moran (R-KS) joined them in opposition. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) initially voted yes before switching to no, a procedural maneuver that preserved the option of bringing the bill back at a later date.

That left the final recorded tally at 49-50, well short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill after more than a year of grueling bipartisan negotiations.

Down in the basement of the Capitol, those negotiations continued right up until the vote began. A Democratic staffer told Crypto In America that Tillis was willing to delay the vote to keep negotiating, but that a staffer for Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) abruptly ended the talks without explanation.

The breakdown quickly gave way to finger-pointing on both sides, with Republicans accusing Democrats of never being serious about passing the bill and Democrats accusing Republican leaders of forcing the vote before negotiations were finished to protect what one staffer called Trump’s “grift.”

“Senate Democrats proved they were never truly serious about protecting consumers and preserving American leadership,” the bill’s chief architect, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), said. “I sat at the table with Senate Democrats working in good faith to get this done while they played games.”

But some of the same Democrats who voted no insist the bill isn’t dead.

“It’s not going to die,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) told Crypto In America immediately after the vote. “You know why it’s not going to die? Because over 70 million Americans are engaging in an industry that is unregulated, and we have a responsibility to regulate.”

Alsobrooks was joined by six other Democrats involved in the negotiations: Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Mark Warner (D-VA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA). The group called this week’s vote “a setback, but not the end” and said it remained “committed to working in a bipartisan fashion” to pass the Clarity Act.

The statement lands amid early efforts to restart bipartisan talks and gauge appetite on both sides for returning to the table, according to three sources familiar with the discussions.

But there is significant fatigue across the industry, with many now looking to regulators to write the rules of the road rather than waiting on Congress.

“Congress passed the GENIUS Act and pushed hard on the Clarity Act, but the political will to get it across the finish line wasn’t there. Congress had its chance and didn’t rise to it,” said Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith. “We’re now looking to regulators for guidance, and that’s the more viable path forward right now.”

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins explicitly tied the agency’s new innovation exemption to the Clarity Act’s failure to advance in the Senate. The SEC released the highly anticipated measure Thursday, opening a pathway for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade onchain and fueling fresh excitement across the industry as regulators move to take the lead.

The CFTC is also moving ahead. Staff issued a no-action position for passive software providers, while the agency submitted a broader crypto markets rulemaking proposal to the White House for review. Details of the proposal are not yet public.

The industry is getting clarity in one form or another. For now, it will come with a lowercase “c,” delivered by regulators rather than Congress.

Georgetown’s Financial Markets Quality Conference returns September 23

Join Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for its annual Financial Markets Quality Conference, bringing together leaders from finance, government and policy.

This year’s agenda features digital assets, tokenization, prediction markets, private markets and financial regulation, with speakers including CME CEO Terry Duffy, JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), NEC Director Kevin Hassett, former Treasury advisor Tyler Williams and White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt.

Location: Wednesday, September 23 | Georgetown University | 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Registration is complimentary, but advance registration is required.

Register Here

Visa Moves to Close Memecoin Credit Card Rewards Loophole

Banks came away empty-handed in their bid for tighter restrictions on stablecoin rewards after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate this week. But JPMorgan has scored a narrower victory in a separate fight over credit card rewards on crypto purchases, Crypto In America has learned.

Visa is moving to close an apparent loophole in checkouts powered by Crossmint, a crypto payments infrastructure firm, according to a source familiar with the matter. The workaround allowed memecoin purchases made with Visa credit cards to be processed under a merchant code intended for ordinary digital media.

The move comes after The Block published an investigation finding that users of the Robinhood Wallet and Fomo apps could purchase memecoins with credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay without completing a separate KYC process. The Block’s test purchases, powered by Crossmint and made with both Visa and Mastercard credit cards, were coded as “digital goods media,” a category typically used for e-books, movies and music, rather than as crypto transactions. That allowed customers to earn ordinary credit card rewards such as points or cash back on the memecoin purchases.

Chase told The Block that one Visa transaction had not been flagged as a cryptocurrency purchase, had been assigned the wrong merchant category code and should not have earned rewards. The bank subsequently opened a case with Visa challenging the classification. The New York attorney general’s office also told The Block it was aware of and reviewing the matter.

Crossmint defended its approach by pointing to a 2025 SEC staff statement that described certain memecoins as akin to collectibles rather than securities.

When it comes to payment processing, Visa clearly doesn’t agree.

In correspondence reviewed by Crypto In America, the payment giant told at least one industry participant that the merchant code used for digital goods media is not appropriate for memecoin purchases. Visa has also informed payment processors, including Checkout.com, that the code will no longer be accepted for those transactions, the source said. The processors have been given a grace period to wind down the practice, which is expected to end next week.

Visa did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement provided after publication, a Crossmint spokesperson said:

“Visa has not made a public statement or confirmed any change to how they treat merchant codes. Crossmint maintains good standing with Visa, card networks, and payment partners. Our position and procedures on how we process digital goods through our platform has not changed. As stated previously, if that guidance is updated, our procedures will be updated with it.”

But the correspondence reviewed by Crypto In America indicates that memecoin purchases, while not going away, will no longer qualify for ordinary credit card rewards. Once the grace period ends, the purchases must be processed as crypto transactions and will be subject to Visa’s corresponding rules and restrictions.

“The message to the crypto industry is clear: Stop being cute, stay in your lane and use the appropriate codes,” the source said.

Washington Can't Give Crypto Regulatory Certainty | Anthony Scaramucci

Recorded at SALT Wyoming, Anthony Scaramucci joined Crypto In America to explain why he believed the Clarity Act was headed for defeat and what Washington’s political dysfunction means for the industry.

The SkyBridge Capital founder and former White House communications director also grades the Trump administration’s crypto agenda, weighs the significance of the GENIUS Act and makes the case for “mama bear” regulation: rules strong enough to protect consumers without smothering innovation. He offers one piece of advice everyone in crypto can use: moisturize.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekly Recap

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories that made headlines this week.

• The Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate in a final recorded vote of 49-50 after Democrats voted as a bloc against the measure, citing concerns including insufficient ethics restrictions on President Trump’s crypto interests.

• The SEC rolled out its highly anticipated Innovation Exemption, creating a limited, conditional pathway for tokenized U.S. stocks to trade onchain.

• CFTC staff issued a no-action position allowing certain passive software providers to operate without registering as introducing brokers. The agency also sent a broader crypto markets rulemaking proposal to the White House for review.

• The House Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, advancing legislation that would clarify the tax treatment of mining, staking and other digital asset activity.

• The House Financial Services Committee advanced H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act, in a 28-21 vote. The bill would establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate Digital Asset Stockpile within the Treasury Department.

• The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points, bringing the target range to 3.75%-4%. It marked the central bank’s first rate increase in three years.

• MoonPay partnered with WisdomTree to expand U.S. access to WTGXX, WisdomTree’s tokenized Treasury money market fund. MoonPay also plans to use the fund as a reserve asset for its stablecoins.

• Coinbase said it filed for regulatory approval to list roughly 50 to 60 U.S. single-stock perpetual futures, with plans to offer 24/5 trading if approved.

• Nasdaq is set to introduce 23-hour weekday trading on Dec. 6, while the SEC is examining what a broader move toward round-the-clock trading would require.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is wasting no time plowing ahead with more of its own crypto agenda following the Clarity Act’s failure to advance in the Senate this week.

This morning, the agency rolled out one of its most highly anticipated crypto initiatives: an exemption that will provide a compliant pathway for bringing tokenized U.S. equities onchain as tokenization gains momentum across traditional finance and crypto.

“Earlier this week, Congress was unsuccessful in advancing the CLARITY Act despite the tireless efforts of many,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said in a statement. “So today, the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a significant step forward, within its statutory authority, to bring America’s capital markets into the digital age by facilitating onchain trading of certain tokenized stocks through the ‘Innovation Exemption.’”

How it works: According to SEC officials, qualifying platforms, known as Tokenized Securities Venues, or TSVs, will be able to facilitate trading in tokenized versions of U.S.-listed stocks using automated market makers, or AMMs, and liquidity pools on public, permissionless blockchains without having to register as national securities exchanges.

Certain firms supplying liquidity to those markets will also receive separate relief from dealer registration requirements.

But there are important limits.

The exemption, which takes effect immediately and lasts up to five years, only covers actual tokenized stocks carrying the same rights as their traditional counterparts, including dividends and voting rights. It excludes so-called “synthetics” that only track a stock’s price, products that have gained traction on offshore crypto trading venues but drawn significant pushback from traditional Wall Street firms.

Although the TSV will operate on a permissionless blockchain, access to the trading venue itself will be permissioned, meaning users and liquidity providers must meet the TSV’s eligibility requirements to participate. The SEC will not individually approve each TSV. Instead, a firm that meets the requirements can notify the Commission and operate under the exemption, subject to its conditions.

The SEC is also starting small, with limits on both the number of stocks each TSV can offer and how much of any individual stock’s daily trading volume can take place on the venue.

Perhaps most importantly, the exemption allows an unaffiliated third party to tokenize a public company’s stock, but the issuer gets the final say over whether it can trade. A TSV must notify the issuer and give it 30 days to object. If the company says no, the tokenized shares cannot trade on the venue.

Chris Hayes, executive director of the Coalition for Tokenized Markets and a partner at Thorn Run Partners, pointed to the issuer protections as a positive step, saying the ability of companies to object to unauthorized third-party tokenization, coupled with requirements that investors receive the same rights as traditional stockholders, “should help curb synthetic tokenization and give investors greater clarity about what they are buying.”

The potential impact could extend well beyond the relatively small tokenized stock market today.

“The innovation exemption could put DeFi trading platforms and liquidity pools in much more direct competition with traditional exchanges and alternative trading systems, while operating under a more flexible regulatory framework,” Hayes said. “That could encourage more traditional market participants to move activity into tokenized markets and help accelerate adoption.”

SEC officials described the exemption as a temporary bridge toward permanent rulemaking and potentially future legislation from Congress.

What you’ll read: Everything you need to know ahead of the Senate’s pivotal vote on the Clarity Act, including a last-minute counteroffer from Senate Democrats, Republican pushback and a new White House initiative aimed at countering the banks’ deposit flight argument.

Good morning from Washington, D.C., where later today the Clarity Act will face its first big test on the Senate floor.

In order to advance, the bill needs 60 senators to vote to invoke cloture and move toward formal floor debate. Getting this far has taken over a year of Senate negotiations and more than five years of attempts by Congress to pass comprehensive crypto market structure legislation.

The 2:15 p.m. vote comes after Senate Republicans released updated text Sunday evening that they say makes major concessions on ethics, software developer protections and the Ag title, while adding a new “circuit breaker” aimed at addressing concerns that stablecoin yield could drive deposit flight from community banks.

In all, Republicans say the draft incorporates 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats.

But Democrats still aren’t satisfied.

Late Monday, Senate Democrats sent Republicans a counteroffer responding to changes in Republicans’ latest text, according to two people familiar with the proposal. It does not seek further changes to the stablecoin yield provisions, an issue sources have described as “Republican-only.”

On ethics, Democrats are seeking additional restrictions on large crypto holdings, dependent children and paid crypto promotions. On the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, they want further changes to narrow the scope of the provision and affirmatively state that nothing in it modifies criminal law, while their Ag title changes include tighter rules around exchanges and conflicts of interest, and protections for Tribal gaming laws.

Republicans are pushing back.

“In response to a significant step in their direction, Democrats have chosen to move the goalposts again,” Senate Banking Committee spokesperson Jeff Naft said in a statement. “Republicans made 126 substantive changes at Democrats’ request, including major changes to address their ethics concerns. Yet we are hearing the same unreasonable asks and the same refusal to take yes for an answer. The final text is public.”

The new counteroffer follows comments from several key Senate Democrats, including Mark Warner (D-VA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who have said the ethics proposal signed off on by President Trump still needs work. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) objections go further, arguing the new ethics language gives Trump administration officials too much control over enforcement and leaves loopholes that would allow the president to continue profiting from some of his existing crypto interests.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who has been the face of Democratic negotiations over the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, is said to be behind the further changes to the provision, despite pushback from both the industry and Congressional Republicans over concessions already made to address her concerns, including the removal of explicit criminal protections.

It’s unclear whether Senate Republicans, who called the text released Sunday evening their “last, best and final” offer, will be open to making further changes ahead of the vote or tell Democrats they need to vote to get on the bill if they want to see further changes.

Speaking to Crypto In America Monday, White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt suggested there was little appetite for further negotiation.

“If there are any changes, we’re talking about punctuation at this point or technical changes,” Witt said. “I view that as definitely a best and final offer.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has been privately urging her Democratic colleagues to vote to get on the bill and continue negotiations on the floor, according to Politico.

And the banking lobby isn’t backing down without a fight.

Eight banking trade groups, including the American Bankers Association and Independent Community Bankers of America, pushed back on the new text Monday, saying the deposit flight “circuit breaker” added by Republicans is “not a safeguard at all” because it would only kick in after substantial deposit flight had already occurred.

The circuit breaker would effectively act as a backstop, allowing the Treasury Secretary to intervene if there is evidence of widespread movement of deposits from community banks to stablecoins.

In a letter to Senate leaders, the groups once again called for further tightening of the stablecoin rewards language to close what they describe as loopholes that could still allow interest-like payments on stablecoin balances.

The White House is pushing back, too.

The Council of Economic Advisers this morning launched a new interactive tool that allows users to test the banking industry’s deposit flight argument for themselves. It builds on earlier CEA analysis that found “no meaningful relationship between stablecoin growth and community bank deposit flight.”

Witt had some strong words for the banks Monday, arguing that Republicans had already gone to significant lengths to address their concerns, including through the new circuit breaker.

“If you oppose the Clarity Act because you just hate crypto, that’s fine. Just say that,” Witt told Crypto In America, adding that he questions the “good faith nature” of the banks’ continued objections.

That continued opposition could matter for the Republican whip count.

Some Senate Republicans remain on the fence amid concerns raised by the banking industry over the stablecoin yield language. Senator John Curtis (R-UT) told reporters he would vote to get on the bill this afternoon but remains a no on final passage over the banks’ objections. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Susan Collins (R-ME) told reporters they’re still considering how to vote.

One development that helps Republicans with the raw headcount: Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) returned to the Senate Monday night after a three-month absence. In an X post, McConnell said, “I will do my best to be present for tough votes when our Conference needs me.”

Today’s Clarity Act vote could prove to be one of them.

Witt, for his part, told Crypto In America he feels “very good” about the vote, but acknowledged that the final outcome may have little to do with the substance of the bill.

“Whether or not we get 60 votes is going to be a political calculation, not a policy calculation,” he said.

Want breaking updates on today’s vote? Crypto In America’s Eleanor Terrett will be on the ground in Washington covering the action. Follow her updates on X here.

Georgetown’s Financial Markets Quality Conference returns September 23

Join Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for its annual Financial Markets Quality Conference, bringing together leaders from finance, government and policy.

This year’s agenda features digital assets, tokenization, prediction markets, private markets and financial regulation, with speakers including CME CEO Terry Duffy, JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), NEC Director Kevin Hassett, former Treasury advisor Tyler Williams and White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt.

Location: Wednesday, September 23 | Georgetown University | 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Registration is complimentary, but advance registration is required.

Register Here

What Else We’re Watching

• The Federal Reserve kicks off its two-day policy meeting, with its latest interest rate decision coming Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET. Markets are pricing in roughly a 90% chance of a quarter-point rate hike.

• Over in the House, the Subcommittee on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Workforce Development will hold a hearing at 11:00 a.m. ET on what digital assets mean for small businesses. Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad will testify on the importance of crypto legislation and the potential benefits of digital assets for America’s small business owners.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will appear before the House Financial Services Committee to discuss the state of the international financial system.

• On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee will mark up a crypto tax bill at 10:00 a.m. ET, the latest congressional effort to establish clearer tax rules for digital assets.

What you’ll read: Senate Republicans released final Clarity Act text in an attempt to win Democratic support ahead of a highly anticipated procedural vote on Tuesday. Plus, Congress is back, a big interest rate decision is coming and more of what to watch this week.

A renewed sense of optimism is sweeping through the crypto industry as it heads into one of its most consequential policy weeks on record.

On Sunday night, Senate Republicans released a new version of the Clarity Act featuring changes to several key provisions in a final attempt to shore up Democratic support ahead of Tuesday’s procedural vote on whether to advance the bill. Invoking cloture on the motion to proceed will require 60 senators to vote yes, meaning Republicans will need at least seven Democrats to cross the aisle, and potentially nine or ten depending on Republican defections.

The latest package, which Republicans are calling their “last, best and final offer,” contains a revised ethics proposal with a stamp of approval from President Trump, along with concessions on other major sticking points that have dogged negotiations for much of the past year, including the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, stablecoin yield and the so-called “Ag title.”

Senate Democrats held two meetings Sunday, including one with the entire caucus, before the text was released. They have yet to engage with the new proposal, but Republicans are already daring them to vote against a bill they say now incorporates more than 120 of their demands.

“A no vote on Tuesday means opposing real ethics reforms on politicians’ personal investments, handing American leadership in digital assets to our foreign competitors, and leaving Americans with zero protections in the digital asset markets,” Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), one of the bill’s chief architects, said in a post on X.

What’s New?

Perhaps the most noteworthy development is that the self-described “crypto president” signed off on what one GOP aide described as “about 80%” of the original ethics counteroffer sent by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in July, putting a potential solution on the table to what has become Democrats’ biggest gripe: Trump’s crypto business dealings.

Changes made Sunday include language allowing state attorneys general to enforce prohibitions on covered officials issuing or sponsoring digital assets or maintaining “significant” financial interests in them, an idea the White House had previously balked at. The definition of covered officials was also expanded to include officials who have been elected but not yet sworn in, as well as their spouses.

The new text would also require covered officials to divest those financial interests or place them in a qualified blind trust and impose civil penalties for violations. The restrictions do not extend to adult children and, unlike the previous proposal, there’s no sunset date. Earlier language would have allowed the ethics restrictions to expire when Trump leaves office in January 2029.

It’s unclear exactly what changed Trump’s mind and convinced him to accept even stronger restrictions on his own financial interests. Just last month, he told Punchbowl News that he felt the ethics proposal unfairly singled him out.

The president, who reported more than $1.4 billion in income from his family’s various crypto ventures last year, also reported roughly $635 million in income from his $TRUMP meme coin. But investors in the token suffered significant losses, adding to concerns about conflicts of interest and investor protection.

Sources close to the negotiations tell Crypto In America that a Friday meeting, during which advisors including White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt discussed the issue at length with the president, helped move the needle. Crypto industry leaders also spent the August recess making the case to senior Trump allies that accepting parts of the ethics deal could put the president on stronger legal footing in the face of future investigations.

There may also be a financial upside for Trump in agreeing to divest. As Bloomberg previously reported, forced divestment could allow him to defer capital gains taxes on the assets he is required to sell, meaning he wouldn’t immediately owe taxes on potentially significant gains.

Another notable change came to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, which specifies that software developers that do not handle customer funds would not have to register as money transmitters or comply with Bank Secrecy Act requirements. The latest text removes explicit protections from criminal prosecutions under Section 1960, a red line for many in the crypto industry and a major concession to prosecutors and their allies, including Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV).

Galaxy Digital Head of Research Alex Thorn called it a “setback” for supporters of the provision, while other industry players have described the change as a “disappointment,” lamenting that it leaves intact the legal theory used to prosecute Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm. Storm was convicted last year of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, despite arguments from his defense team that the protocol did not give him control over users’ funds.

But Republicans also beefed up the bill’s civil protections, making clearer across multiple parts of the text that developers and service providers who do not control customer funds should not be treated as money transmitters under the Bank Secrecy Act. The text also extends those protections to miners and validators for the first time.

The banks also got a concession, though not the one they’ve been asking for. Republicans left intact the Tillis-Alsobrooks yield agreement struck in May, rejecting calls from the banking industry to broaden the prohibition on stablecoin rewards. Instead, they added “circuit breaker” language that would effectively act as a backstop, allowing the Treasury Secretary to intervene if there is evidence of widespread deposit flight from community banks to stablecoins.

The circuit breaker idea was first floated in July by Tillis, who told reporters it would serve as a “test” of whether the banks’ concerns were really about deposit flight. If banks continued to object even with a circuit breaker in place, Tillis suggested their objections would be “a red herring.”

A spokesperson for the American Bankers Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It’s not yet clear whether the concession will change the minds of the two Republicans, Sens. Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), who said they would oppose the bill without bank-backed changes.

The new text also includes changes to the “Ag title,” covering the Senate Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill, which saw significant heartburn throughout months-long negotiations between a coalition of crypto exchanges and Senate Democrats over vertical integration, exemptive authority, affiliate trading and conflicts of interest involving digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers. The updated language also clarifies that state consumer protection laws still apply and that protections for developers do not create exemptions from derivatives laws or impact prediction markets, a nod to concerns raised by Native American tribes that regulate gaming.

It’s unclear whether the new changes will be enough to tip the scales ahead of Tuesday’s vote on a bill that, just hours ago, looked like it might fail its first procedural hurdle. Press representatives for Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Reaction from the crypto industry, meanwhile, is starting to trickle out, with early reviews leaning positive.

“[T]his is still overall a great bill. There probably will never be another one as good for crypto in our lifetime, and it should pass,” said Gabe Shapiro, a crypto lawyer at MetaLeX Labs.

Thorn, who previously put the odds of passage in 2026 at just 10% in a research note, raised them to 25% Monday morning following the release of the new text. But he cautioned that the tight legislative calendar remains a major hurdle, with the House potentially having to take up the Senate version during the lame duck session.

Georgetown’s Financial Markets Quality Conference returns September 23

Join Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for its annual Financial Markets Quality Conference, bringing together leaders from finance, government and policy.

This year’s agenda features digital assets, tokenization, prediction markets, private markets and financial regulation, with speakers including CME CEO Terry Duffy, JPMorgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), NEC Director Kevin Hassett, former Treasury advisor Tyler Williams and White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt.

Location: Wednesday, September 23 | Georgetown University | 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Registration is complimentary, but advance registration is required.

Register Here

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The House and Senate are both back in session.

12:30 PM: Solana Policy Institute’s ‘Washington x Wall Street’ event begins at Union Station, with featured speakers including White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY).

Tuesday

10:00 AM: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears before the House Financial Services Committee to discuss the state of the international financial system.

2:15 PM: The Senate will take a procedural vote on the Clarity Act.

Wednesday

Avalanche Summit kicks off in New York for a two-day event featuring Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary as a headliner.

8:30 AM: August retail sales data comes from the Census Bureau.

2:00 PM: The FOMC will announce its interest rate decision. CME’s FedWatch tool currently puts the odds of a quarter-point rate hike at 88%.

2:30 PM: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will hold a press conference.

Thursday

8:30 AM: The Philadelphia Fed releases its monthly manufacturing survey.

Friday

9:30 AM: Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman will speak on stress testing at an event in London.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

Subscribe now

With summer in the rearview mirror, the Senate returns next week with crypto’s market structure bill at the top of its agenda.

Senators are expected to vote at 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 15, on whether to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to the Clarity Act, marking the first major test for the industry’s marquee legislation.

Cloture requires 60 votes. With at least two Republicans expected to oppose this initial procedural vote, it will need support from at least nine Democrats, many of whom have tied their support to stronger ethics provisions addressing President Trump’s crypto business interests.

As of this writing, the White House has not responded publicly or privately to a bipartisan ethics counterproposal offered in late July by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), according to two people familiar with the matter.

The Tillis-Gallego proposal would bar federal elected officials and judges from issuing or sponsoring digital assets and require them to either divest related financial interests or place them in a blind trust. It would also allow state attorneys general to sue the Department of Justice to enforce the ethics provisions, an approach strongly opposed by the White House and some Senate Republicans.

An updated version of the Clarity Act released Thursday by Senate Republicans added new DeFi provisions to the Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill and gave credit unions new authority to deal in crypto, but made no changes to the White House-approved ethics section rejected by Democrats and some Republicans in July.

The White House’s “radio silence,” as one Democratic staffer described it, comes despite Trump urging Congress to pass the bill during an August event with crypto CEOs. Industry leaders have also been making the case to senior Trump allies, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, that accepting parts of the ethics deal could put the president in a stronger legal position. In particular, they argue that divesting his crypto interests could reduce his exposure to a wave of subpoenas and investigations into his family’s crypto ventures should Democrats take control of the House in November or win the White House in 2028.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote to the Securities and Exchange Commission in August demanding an investigation into whether the $TRUMP meme coin facilitated “illegal fraud or unjust enrichment.” The move offers a potential preview of the scrutiny Trump’s crypto ventures could face under a future Democratic administration.

The stalled ethics talks come amid a change in White House counsel. David Warrington, a key player in earlier ethics negotiations, left the administration for the private sector earlier this month. His successor, Will Scharf, is a former federal prosecutor who, like Warrington, previously served on Trump’s personal legal team.

It remains unclear whether the administration will engage with the Tillis-Gallego counteroffer, let alone sign off on it, before Tuesday’s vote.

“I think it’s going to be really difficult for Democrats to vote for this unless they can hang their hat on something with ethics,” Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith told Crypto In America. “That continues to be the biggest piece.”

Where there has been progress: After extensive negotiations with Patrick Witt, executive director of the White House Crypto Council, the National Sheriffs’ Association dropped its opposition to the Clarity Act last week and moved to neutral. While not an endorsement, the shift means no major police organization remains publicly opposed to the bill.

It marks a notable change from July, when the NSA called the bill “harmful,” warned of “significant law enforcement and public safety risks” and described the language around the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act as “terrible policy.”

“It’s great to see more reasonable takes on market structure legislation,” said Amanda Tuminelli, CEO of the DeFi Education Fund, which advocates on behalf of DeFi and software developers.

Prosecutors’ groups, namely the National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys and National District Attorneys’ Association, remain resistant to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, a narrow but highly contentious provision in the bill governing when noncustodial software developers can be prosecuted as unlicensed money transmitters. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), a key Democratic vote who backed a July proposal to narrow those protections, has not publicly shifted her position. Whether further BRCA negotiations can secure her support ahead of Tuesday’s vote remains unclear.

Elsewhere, negotiations over the so-called “Ag title” remain ongoing between Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee and a coalition of major crypto exchanges. As Politico reported, a central issue is vertical integration, the practice of housing exchange, brokerage, custody and trading operations under one roof. Negotiators remain divided over what safeguards the bill should require to manage the resulting conflicts of interest and how that model squares with rules for the traditional financial industry.

“We all have slightly different business models, geographic footprints, and there are some valid issues to address,” Kraken Global Head of Policy and Market Structure Jonathan Jachym told Crypto In America. “Even though this is a new asset class, there should be a level playing field.”

Meanwhile, banking groups are renewing pressure for changes to the bill’s stablecoin rewards provisions. In a new letter, the American Bankers Association, Independent Community Bankers of America and more than 60 state and regional banking associations asked Senate leaders to close what they view as “loopholes” allowing rewards that resemble interest. They warned those rewards could pull deposits from community banks and reduce local lending, an argument that has gained traction among some Senate Republicans.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) said in August that he would oppose the bill without bank-backed changes. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has raised similar concerns, saying he would oppose the bill as written because of its potential impact on community banks. With the stablecoin language unchanged in the latest text, both could still vote “no” on Tuesday.

Supporters are making their case, too. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday urged senators to advance the bill and keep negotiating, warning that failure would send a “troubling signal” to allies and adversaries and cost the U.S. new tools to combat crypto-related crime.

Accion Opportunity Fund, a California-based nonprofit lender serving underserved businesses nationwide, called on Senate leaders Thune and Schumer to advance the bill in a letter. The group argued that smaller firms often lack the lawyers and compliance teams needed to navigate conflicting market rules, leaving them at risk of being shut out of the digital asset economy without a clear federal framework.

Of course, Clarity’s path to passage this year does not end in the upper chamber. Even if senators resolve the outstanding issues and pass the bill, the House would still need to approve the Senate’s changes for the bill to become law.

House leaders recently canceled the chamber’s final two voting weeks in September. With both chambers out in October, the decision makes it all but certain that any House action on the Clarity Act will slip into the lame duck session in November, a delay some say could further diminish the bill’s chances.

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), one of the House bill’s architects, rejected that idea.

“We need to get Clarity passed, and the House scheduling decision doesn’t have any impact on the likelihood of that happening,” Johnson told Crypto In America. “The House was never going to amend the Senate version and send it back over, because there isn’t enough time for that game of ping-pong.”

“We instead need to keep the pressure on the Senate,” he said. “If they pass Clarity in the next few weeks, I’m confident it will become law.”

What you’ll read: Crypto regulators are moving ahead on a handful of initiatives as the Clarity Act awaits Senate action. Plus, what to watch this week, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sits down with Crypto In America at SALT Wyoming, and the weekend headlines you may have missed.

While crypto market structure legislation sits in summer recess limbo, the SEC and CFTC are getting a head start on writing the rules for the $2.5 trillion industry.

Both agencies are pressing ahead with several crypto-related initiatives, including a fresh look at derivatives and a rewrite of the SEC’s crypto custody rules.

First up: Derivatives.

In June, the agencies asked for public input on how swaps, security-based swaps and novel or emerging products should be defined and where SEC and CFTC jurisdiction should begin and end.

Now, a bipartisan group of former SEC and CFTC officials is weighing in, warning that getting those lines wrong could continue driving lucrative markets overseas.

In a new comment letter, former CFTC Chairman Chris Giancarlo, former CFTC Commissioners Brian Quintenz and Sharon Brown-Hruska, former SEC Commissioner Steven Wallman and former SEC Chief Economist Chester Spatt argue that similar risks should face similar regulatory treatment and overlapping rules shouldn’t pile on additional compliance costs.

The bipartisan makeup is notable at a time when neither agency has bipartisan representation. The signatories argue these aren’t inherently partisan questions, pointing to longstanding common ground between commissioners of both parties on protecting investors and keeping U.S. markets competitive.

The issue is particularly relevant for crypto as the CFTC looks to bring perpetual futures onshore, a market some signatories have individually argued U.S. regulation has largely driven overseas. Earlier this month, President Trump said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig is working to bring popular offshore perps platform Hyperliquid into the United States.

On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Payward, the parent company of Kraken, is in talks with the Singapore-based platform to bring some of its perpetual futures contracts to U.S. traders.

Prediction market platform Kalshi, which began offering crypto perps earlier this year, estimates offshore perpetuals trading topped $90 trillion in 2025, up from around $28 trillion two years earlier. Kalshi sponsored the letter by retaining law firm Bellementis PLLC to help with drafting, though the signatories say they weren’t compensated and the company had no say over its contents. Quintenz, one of the letter’s signatories, is also a member of Kalshi’s Board of Directors.

The core message: regulation can push trading elsewhere, but it doesn’t make the demand or the risk disappear. And time is of the essence.

“The $90 trillion offshore perpetuals market isn’t a mystery to solve, it’s a market waiting for a sensible U.S. rulebook,” Giancarlo told Crypto In America. “If we calibrate federal regulation to actual risk instead of maximum burden, that liquidity comes onshore. Every year we wait, it gets harder to bring to America.”

Over at the SEC, custody is back in focus.

Last week, the SEC sent a planned rewrite of its custody rules for investment advisers and investment companies to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.

The planned rule is expected to tackle a question the crypto industry has sought clarity on for years: How can SEC-regulated investment firms provide custodial services for digital assets while complying with federal securities laws? This is particularly relevant for investment advisers, which are required to use “qualified custodians” which meet strict standards for safeguarding and accounting related to customer assets.

The text isn’t public yet, so details on which firms could qualify as crypto custodians or what requirements they would have to meet remain unclear. What is clear is that the SEC says it wants to clarify the rules around crypto custody while stripping out provisions it considers outdated.

That marks a notable change in direction from the agency’s previous attempt to tackle the issue three years ago, when then-Chairman Gary Gensler proposed a sweeping “safeguarding” rule that would have expanded existing adviser custody requirements beyond funds and securities to virtually all client assets, including crypto.

The Atkins SEC scrapped that proposal last year.

Meanwhile, the SEC’s “Reg Crypto” proposal, which would establish new rules for certain crypto asset offerings, has officially hit the Federal Register and is open for public comment until October 20.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The House is back in session. The Senate is out.

Tuesday

Crypto exchange Kraken is set to liquidate remaining balances of 21 delisted assets through Saturday after withdrawals closed on August 27.

9:05 a.m.: Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr speaks on the economic outlook and financial inclusion.

Wednesday

10:00 a.m.: The House Financial Services Committee will hold a hearing titled “Strengthening the American Economy: Promoting Growth, Opportunity, and Prosperity.”

Thursday

8:30 a.m.: Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller speaks on the economic outlook.

Friday

8:30 a.m.: Jobs Friday: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its August jobs report, including the unemployment rate.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

Sumsub is the identity verification and compliance platform trusted by 4,000+ companies, including 8 of the 10 largest crypto exchanges.

Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

Is New York the Crypto Capital?

ICYMI: We sat down with former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo at the SALT Wyoming Conference for a conversation about the future of crypto in the Big Apple. Cuomo, who oversaw New York’s early crypto regulations, says the state and the U.S. as a whole need clearer rules to keep pace with other jurisdictions, calling the Clarity Act critical to giving the industry a path forward.

The former NYC mayoral candidate, now a board member of crypto exchange OKX, called the remaining issues surrounding the legislation political rather than substantive, arguing that “if it’s not resolved, they’re not resolving it because they want it for political benefit.” He also reflected on New York’s BitLicense, saying its initial intent was right but that the regulatory regime became overly restrictive over time in response to a multitude of scandals.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest headlines from Friday and the weekend.

• Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s hawkish Jackson Hole remarks sent markets lower Friday as traders ramped up bets on another interest rate hike. Short term Treasury yields and the dollar rose while stocks and crypto fell, with Bitcoin dropping from around $80,000 to below $77,000. Bitcoin dipped below $77,000 again Monday morning before rebounding.

• A federal appeals court ruled that Kalshi cannot block Nevada from regulating its sports event contracts, handing state gaming regulators a win in the ongoing fight over prediction markets. The Ninth Circuit found Kalshi had not shown that federal commodities law preempts Nevada’s gaming laws, creating a split with the Third Circuit that could tee the issue up for the Supreme Court.

• The CFTC ordered a former White House teleprompter operator to pay more than $172,000 after finding he used advance access to President Trump’s speeches to profit from Kalshi “mention markets.” Perez agreed to return roughly $108,000 in profits, pay a $65,000 penalty and accept a three-year trading ban.

• Bitwise’s Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) crossed $1 billion in assets under management, becoming the first individual Solana ETF to hit the milestone just 10 months after its launch.

• Charles Schwab announced plans to add Solana, Avalanche and Chainlink to its crypto trading platform in the coming months, expanding its direct crypto offering beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.

• The Crypto.com-linked Cronos blockchain halted on Sunday following an exploit of lending protocol Tectonic that an onchain researcher estimates affected roughly $75 million in assets. Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the company’s app and exchange were not compromised.

• Cosmos Labs said a vulnerability in its Cosmos EVM software was exploited across six blockchains, with attackers converting stolen tokens into roughly $5.7 million in assets. The company acknowledged that the flaw had been reported through its bug bounty program in April but was incorrectly determined not to put live networks at risk.

• Advocacy group Public Citizen estimated that investors across five Trump-linked crypto products are at least $4.7 billion underwater, largely reflecting unrealized losses, while estimating that Trump earned at least $1.4 billion from crypto ventures in 2025.

• Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s retrial on money laundering and sanctions charges has been pushed to April 2027 at his request, while his motion for acquittal remains pending.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday!

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Washington’s usual August lull disappeared this week.

The SEC unveiled its first crypto rulemaking proposal on Tuesday, President Donald Trump hosted industry executives at the White House on Wednesday, and the CFTC convened the inaugural meeting of its Innovation Advisory Committee on Thursday.

President Trump had a clear message for the crypto execs invited to the oval office: Pass the Clarity Act.

Industry leaders left Wednesday’s White House meeting with renewed optimism about the Clarity Act’s prospects, convinced that the Trump administration was fully committed to getting the bill across the finish line. In his public remarks, Trump urged Congress to pass a “fair version” of the bipartisan bill when lawmakers return next month, a reference to ethics provisions proposed by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). Trump has argued that some of the provisions unfairly single him out, while the dispute over them has become the main obstacle to securing bipartisan agreement.

Ethics was also a focus behind closed doors. Ahead of the public remarks, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, a16z Managing Partner Chris Dixon, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi met privately with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

The discussion focused on the importance of passing the Clarity Act, including what it could mean for U.S. jobs, economic growth, and bringing crypto entrepreneurs and companies back onshore. The group also discussed the remaining hurdles, including ethics, and how the White House could help chart a path toward bipartisan agreement.

Another source with knowledge of the meeting said a concerted effort is underway to convince Trump’s closest allies who have his ear that accepting certain elements of the proposed ethics deal could ultimately be in the president’s own interest.

Getting crypto’s marquee legislation across the finish line was also a central theme at Thursday’s Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, which brought together leaders from traditional finance, crypto, prediction markets and AI.

“Passing Clarity is the surest way that we can prevent another Gary Gensler from running a rogue campaign of lawfare against the individuals and companies in this room today,” CFTC Chairman Mike Selig said, referring to the former SEC chief under whose leadership the agency brought 125 crypto-related enforcement actions.

But Selig also made clear that the commodities regulator is preparing to act if Congress fails to deliver.

“If Clarity continues to stall because of Democratic obstruction, the CFTC will utilize its existing authorities to begin establishing a regime for crypto asset markets,” he said, adding that he has already directed agency staff to begin exploring such rules.

Meanwhile, the SEC formally proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, a new framework for crypto fundraising in the U.S. The proposal would allow certain offerings of up to $5 million over four years or $75 million annually without full SEC registration, create a conditional safe harbor for crypto assets once an issuer’s essential managerial efforts have ended, and preempt certain state securities registration requirements.

The way the proposal was approved was also notable. The Commission voted through a “seriatim” process, meaning commissioners voted individually outside a public meeting, according to an SEC spokesperson. The SEC had been scheduled to consider Regulation Crypto Assets at an open meeting last Friday, but fueled intrigue when it abruptly canceled the meeting, citing an “unforeseen scheduling issue.”

Crypto In America reported earlier this week that pressure from both the White House and Wall Street groups like SIFMA contributed to the cancellation. The White House was concerned that Regulation Crypto Assets and a separate innovation exemption for tokenization could complicate negotiations over the Clarity Act. It may also have been responding to legal concerns raised by Wall Street groups, which argued that changes of that scale should proceed through formal rulemaking rather than exemptions or no-action relief.

Semafor later reported that a “White House mix-up” also contributed to the cancellation, with officials confused about whether the SEC intended to advance Regulation Crypto Assets or the more controversial innovation exemption.

Can Banks Compete With Stablecoins? N3XT Thinks So

Former Signature Bank Chairman Scott Shay is taking another swing at changing how businesses move money, and he thinks his latest venture could ultimately be bigger than Signet, the blockchain-based payments network he helped pioneer at Signature.

N3XT, the Wyoming special purpose depository institution Shay co-founded after Signature was shut down in 2023, announced this week that it is expanding its N3XT Digital Dollar, or NDD, beyond the bank’s own customers.

N3XT describes NDD as a digitized U.S. dollar bank deposit that can move 24/7 using public blockchains. Unlike tokenized deposits that remain within a bank’s network, NDD can be sent to approved outside wallets, including those belonging to businesses that do not bank with N3XT.

“We have created a new category in not just crypto but finance writ large — a digitized actual USD that travels at the speed of crypto anywhere and anytime,” Shay told Crypto In America. “No pegs, no bridges, no interoperability — just money moving between two parties safely and securely. That’s what banking was supposed to do. We made it happen.”

There is an important distinction for outside holders. N3XT says non-customers holding NDD do not have a direct deposit claim against the bank or a customer relationship with N3XT. As a special purpose depository institution, N3XT is not FDIC insured and is prohibited from lending against customer deposits. Instead, NDD is fully backed one-to-one by cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries. The rights of non-customer holders will be governed by terms that have not yet been published.

Signet allowed commercial customers to move dollars instantly, 24/7, and ultimately processed hundreds of billions of dollars, but it remained a closed network. Shay is betting that allowing NDD to move beyond N3XT’s customers will make this model significantly more impactful.

The timing is also notable. As banks warn that stablecoins could pull deposits out of traditional financial institutions and lobby for changes to the Clarity Act, N3XT is testing whether banks can compete by adopting the same technology that helped make stablecoins successful.

Inside Crypto’s Next Venture Cycle

This week on the podcast, we sat down with Dragonfly general partner Rob Hadick to discuss the state of crypto venture investing.

Hadick joined Dragonfly the same week FTX collapsed. Today, the firm has closed a $650 million fourth fund, even as AI draws capital and founders away from crypto and deal activity falls to its lowest level since 2021.

We also discussed why founders are returning to the U.S., whether regulatory action can sustain innovation if the Clarity Act fails and why Dragonfly has invested in Polymarket four times. Hadick believes prediction markets are only in the “third inning,” with corporate hedging and other institutional uses poised to drive the next phase of growth.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekly Recap

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories that made headlines this week.

• Bitcoin climbed to $79,400, its highest level since May, as the Treasury’s bond-buyback plan continued to fuel risk appetite.

• OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould said he expects to finalize the agency’s GENIUS Act rule by November, with changes based on feedback from the crypto industry.

• The U.S. national debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time.

• Fed minutes showed several officials favored a rate hike in July, while many said further tightening may be needed if inflation does not decline.

• A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 63% of Americans believe it was inappropriate for Trump and his family to profit from crypto while he is in office.

• Citi launched its Custody+ platform and plans to offer digital-asset custody later this year, starting with bitcoin.

• Nasdaq plans to launch overnight trading from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET on Dec. 6, subject to regulatory approval.

• Kalshi filed with the CFTC to offer perpetual futures tied to equity indexes, allowing traders to take leveraged long or short positions without owning the underlying stocks.

• TRON founder Justin Sun said a California federal judge rejected World Liberty Financial’s effort to force his individual claims into private arbitration, keeping them in open court.

• The CFTC resolved its cases against former FTX and Alameda executives Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, imposing five-year trading bans on both dating back to December 2022.

• Standard Chartered and HSBC completed the first live cross-border transaction using tokenized deposits on SWIFT’s blockchain-based ledger.

• Injective said its affiliate, Injective Institutional Services, is now registered with the SEC as a transfer agent.

• Stablecoin payments platform KAST launched a new rewards product offering users up to 12% on spendable USD balances, with the introductory program capped at $100 million.

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

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What you’ll read: The SEC postponed an open meeting that would have formally kicked off its crypto rulemaking process. What happened behind the scenes, what’s on Washington’s crypto policy agenda this week, and the top headlines you may have missed.

More drama in Washington’s ongoing crypto policy debate unfolded Friday when the Securities and Exchange Commission abruptly postponed a meeting that would have kicked off the formal rulemaking process for a new framework governing crypto fundraising in the United States, known as Regulation Crypto Assets.

The meeting had been announced just three days earlier and was widely viewed as the securities regulator taking the initiative to lay the groundwork for clearer crypto rules while the industry’s marquee legislation, the Clarity Act, remains in limbo until lawmakers return from recess in mid-September.

An SEC spokesperson attributed the cancellation to an “unforeseen scheduling issue” but provided no further details.

Talk to enough people in crypto policy circles with their ears to the ground, however, and you’ll hear additional details involving the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) and the White House.

First, some backstory: Over the past year, SIFMA, which represents many of Wall Street’s leading broker-dealers, investment banks and asset managers, has repeatedly pushed back against broad regulatory relief for crypto and tokenized securities firms. In a June 2025 letter, the group urged the SEC not to make major changes to the rules governing tokenized securities and other parts of the securities markets through no-action letters or exemptions. Instead, it called for a public notice-and-comment process, warning that broad relief could create regulatory arbitrage, weaken investor protections and fracture market liquidity.

The SEC’s Crypto Task Force has been working for months on an innovation exemption that could give crypto firms more flexibility to trade tokenized securities without being subject to all the same rules governing traditional Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reported that the agency was considering unveiling details last Friday, potentially alongside its proposed framework for crypto fundraising. Unlike the fundraising proposal, the innovation exemption would rely on the SEC’s existing exemptive authority rather than go through formal rulemaking.

Multiple industry sources who spoke with Crypto In America say the White House asked the SEC to postpone Friday’s meeting over concerns that Reg Crypto Assets and, separately, the innovation exemption could complicate Clarity Act negotiations ahead of the Senate’s procedural vote in September. The bill addresses both crypto fundraising and tokenized securities.

But there may be another layer to the story.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, SIFMA discussed the possibility of legal action if it determined that the SEC had exceeded its statutory authority under federal securities laws, including through exemptions or no-action relief. The prospect of a legal challenge may have contributed to the White House’s decision to ask the SEC to postpone the meeting, the sources said.

Asked about the discussions around a potential legal challenge, a SIFMA spokesperson declined to address them, saying: “SIFMA does not comment on specious or hypothetical theories. In this situation in particular, it would be premature to comment on something that currently doesn’t exist.”

The White House and the SEC did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this reporting.

It remains unclear whether the SEC will reschedule the meeting before the Senate returns next month.

In the meantime, the White House and crypto’s top regulators are expected to keep the policy conversation going this week, with separate events on Wednesday and Thursday.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Michael Selig will attend a White House event Wednesday alongside executives from across crypto, prediction markets and traditional finance, where President Trump is expected to deliver remarks.

Industry leaders expected to attend include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi, a16z crypto Managing Partner Chris Dixon, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour, Chainlink CEO Sergey Nazarov, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeff Sprecher and Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman, among others.

On Thursday, Selig will host the inaugural meeting of the CFTC’s Innovation Advisory Committee, whose 43 members include several of the executives listed above. Futures Industry Association President and CEO Walt Lukken will chair the committee. The agenda includes crypto regulation, the growing roles of artificial intelligence and agentic finance, and, of course, prediction markets.

Meanwhile, lawmakers and their staff are expected to continue negotiating the Clarity Act’s unresolved issues ahead of a cloture vote scheduled for the afternoon of September 15. DeFi and developer protections, provisions in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill, and ethics rules for government officials all remain outstanding.

Negotiators will also have to contend with continued lobbying from the banking industry for changes to the bill’s stablecoin yield provisions. Despite that push, some of the country’s biggest bank CEOs still support seeing the broader legislation pass, including Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Citi CEO Jane Fraser.

“We have not given up on pushing to get some improvements made to the bill, but we would like to see a good bill go through,” Fraser told FOX Business in an interview last week. “I think it would be excellent for the system.”

👀 What To Watch This Week

Tuesday

The Wyoming Blockchain Symposium (SALT Conference) kicks off in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Crypto In America will be on the ground.

Wednesday

The SALT Conference continues in Jackson Hole.

2:00 p.m.: The Fed will publish the minutes from its July FOMC meeting.

2:30 p.m.: Executives from across crypto, prediction markets and traditional finance will gather at the White House to discuss financial innovation.

Thursday

1:00 p.m.: The CFTC will host its inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting to discuss crypto regulation, artificial intelligence and prediction markets.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

Sumsub is the identity verification and compliance platform trusted by 4,000+ companies, including 8 of the 10 largest crypto exchanges.

Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

ICYMI: We sat down with Agora CEO and co-founder Nick Van Eck to discuss what the GENIUS Act could unlock for stablecoin adoption.

He tells us Agora is already working with some of the world’s largest companies as they prepare to use stablecoins across core parts of their businesses and explains why cross-border payments could be the first major market disrupted, why stablecoins are “100x more valuable” outside the U.S. and why he doesn’t expect the Clarity Act to have much impact on Agora’s business, whether it passes or not.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories making headlines.

• The Treasury Department issued proposed rulemaking on Section 3 of the GENIUS Act, which deals with licensing requirements and extraterritoriality for stablecoins.

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency conditionally approved a national trust bank charter for World Liberty Financial’s proposed trust company. The Trump-family-backed crypto venture issues the USD1 stablecoin and operates a DeFi platform.

• Kraken parent Payward reported $508 million in adjusted Q2 revenue, up 17% year over year despite an 18% decline in total platform transaction volume. Funded accounts rose 42% to a record 6.6 million.

• The Winklevoss twins’ Gemini posted its fourth consecutive quarterly net loss, losing $107.7 million as revenue climbed 37% year over year to $45.5 million.

• MSCI is revisiting whether to exclude “non-operating companies” from its global indexes, a move that could remove Bitcoin treasury companies such as Strategy and Metaplanet. Strategy responded: “Bitcoin doesn’t need MSCI. Neither does Strategy.”

• Bitwise partnered with Superstate to explore tokenizing shares of its Solana Staking ETF, BSOL, with other funds potentially following.

• KPMG U.S. completed Tether’s first full independent financial audit, giving its 2025 financial statements a clean opinion.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday and sometimes Friday!

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

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What you’ll read: The Senate punted a key procedural vote on the Clarity Act to September. How it happened, what comes next and why regulators are preparing to move ahead with crypto rules of their own. Plus, what we’re watching this week and the headlines making news.

There was light at the end of a dark week for the crypto industry when Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the Clarity Act in the early hours of Saturday morning, putting the bill on the Senate’s floor schedule when lawmakers return from August recess.

The filing likely tees up a key procedural vote for the afternoon of September 15, the day after the Senate reconvenes for a short three-week session before the midterms.

As Crypto In America reported Friday afternoon, Thune’s staff had told industry leaders to expect the filing before the Senate adjourned. Some characterized the move as a gesture of good faith meant to show that the Clarity Act remains a priority after the industry and the bill’s Republican champions were left angry and disappointed by news Thursday night that leadership would leave Washington without scheduling a long-awaited cloture vote.

“You all know me and how long and hard I’ve fought for this bill, so you can imagine how frustrated I am,” Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), the sponsor of the Senate version of the Clarity Act, said in a Friday statement. Lummis and her GOP colleagues had predicted the bill would be included among the Senate’s crowded slate of priorities before lawmakers departed for recess. Thune himself had said he expected it to get a vote, though he acknowledged the timing was uncertain.

So what happened?

It depends who you ask. By week’s end, the blame game looked something like the Spider-Man meme, with three Spider-Men pointing at one another: Republicans blamed Democrats for refusing to compromise and dragging out the process, Democrats blamed the White House for not coming to the table to negotiate a more palatable ethics agreement, and the White House blamed Democrats for rejecting the package already on offer.

Another Spider-Man for the banks would also be fitting. Their campaign to convince senators that the bill’s safeguards against stablecoin-driven deposit flight are insufficient has gained traction in recent weeks, with at least two Republican senators signaling that they are not prepared to support the Clarity Act as written.

The bill’s proponents have responded by blasting the banking lobby for slowing its progress. Sens. Lummis and Bernie Moreno (R-OH) went a step further Friday, signing on as co-sponsors of the bipartisan Credit Card Competition Act, joining Sens. Roger Marshall (R-KS), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

Banks fiercely oppose the measure because it targets their swipe-fee revenue and, they warn, could force them to scale back credit card rewards. The move was widely read as a shot across the bow from Lummis and Moreno over the banking industry’s efforts to delay Clarity.

But amid all the finger-pointing, most crypto policy wonks agree on one thing: Without a bipartisan ethics agreement, the bill likely lacked the 60 votes needed to advance, raising fears on both sides that it would fail at the first procedural hurdle. That gave Democrats leverage to keep negotiations going. Punchbowl News reported that they insisted on more time, warning that forcing a vote without a deal could kill the broader effort.

“Chuck Schumer got what he wanted,” one legislative aide said of the Senate minority leader. “He managed to keep all the Fairshake money on the sidelines for now.”

Fairshake and its affiliates recently reported nearly $129 million in combined cash on hand. With no vote, the industry’s biggest super PAC network lacks a fresh roll call to guide its general election spending, likely putting major commitments on hold until at least September. As one industry source put it, “That leaves the industry with plenty of frustration but no obvious target for its political firepower.”

What’s Next?

Senators will be back in their respective states for the next five weeks. By most accounts, Hill staffers, lobbyists and industry leaders are planning to take a breather before getting back to work.

“I think everyone’s going to wait to see if there’s any ethics movement,” Cody Carbone, CEO of the crypto trade association Digital Chamber, said. “We plan to keep doing what we’ve been doing for the next month, but everyone is sort of in ethics limbo right now.”

Reaching a deal everyone can live with on President Trump’s crypto dealings will undoubtedly remain the biggest hurdle, but further negotiations over the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and the commodities portion of the bill are also expected, according to two sources close to the talks. It remains to be seen whether any changes will be made to the bill’s stablecoin yield provisions to win over Republicans wary of being forced to choose between the crypto industry and community banks.

Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told reporters Friday that he thought the bill’s odds of passage would “drop precipitously” as the midterm elections approach.

As of Friday, the White House had not publicly responded to the bipartisan ethics counteroffer put forward by Tillis and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ). The proposal would give state attorneys general a role in enforcing the ethics rules and, according to Bloomberg, require President Trump to divest from crypto-related business interests.

Trump told Punchbowl News that he didn’t oppose placing his family’s crypto businesses in a blind trust but objected to being singled out by the proposed ethics language.

“In the bill, they want me to be different than everyone else,” he said.

Regulatory Relief on the Horizon?

As Senate staff spend at least part of the August recess pursuing bipartisan compromises on the bill’s outstanding issues, the crypto regulators are expected to remain active as well.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday that it will hold an open meeting on August 14 to consider proposing a tailored offering regime for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets, a vote that could formally launch the rulemaking process.

The notice identified the proposal as Regulation Crypto Assets, one of the agency’s top crypto priorities, which is expected to create registration exemptions and safe harbors for certain crypto offerings.

According to a source familiar with the matter, the proposal would likely build on the SEC and CFTC’s March joint interpretation, which established a five-category token taxonomy and clarified when an investment contract involving a crypto asset begins and ends.

The source added that action on tokenized securities may also be coming. But the meeting notice does not mention the agency’s long-awaited tokenization innovation exemption, leaving its timing and path forward unclear. The SEC’s rulemaking agenda also includes proposals addressing asset custody and broker-dealer and transfer-agent rules for crypto.

Formal rulemaking is not the agency’s only avenue. The SEC has also issued guidance and no-action letters this year aimed at providing greater clarity and targeted relief.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins has outlined even broader ambitions for the agency, saying in May that it was considering rules governing onchain exchanges, brokers and dealers, clearing agencies and crypto vaults. He and fellow commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda have repeatedly said they do not want to front-run Congress as lawmakers work to pass the Clarity Act. But with the bill’s prospects now uncertain, the agency’s calculus may be shifting.

The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“[T]he work of bringing clear rules to digital assets isn’t waiting on Congress,” Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad wrote on X. “The Trump Administration’s financial regulators continue to use the authorities they have to provide greater clarity and enable responsible adoption of blockchain technology, while governments and financial institutions around the world are moving ahead as well.”

For its part, the CFTC announced Monday that its Innovation Advisory Committee will hold its inaugural meeting on August 20. The panel includes leaders from Coinbase, Ripple, Robinhood, Kraken, Gemini, Polymarket, Kalshi, CME, Nasdaq and other major crypto and traditional finance firms.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

Bitdeer (BTDR) and Sharplink (SBET) report earnings pre-market.

Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), Bakkt (BKKT) and Exodus (EXOD) will report earnings after the closing bell.

Tuesday

eToro Group (ETOR) reports earnings before the opening bell. CoreWeave (CRWV) reports after the closing bell.

Wednesday

8:30 a.m.: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the July Consumer Price Index, a closely watched gauge of inflation.

Securitize (SECZ) reports earnings post-market.

Thursday

8:30 a.m.: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the July Producer Price Index, another closely watched inflation measure.

Gemini Space Station (GEMI) reports earnings after the closing bell.

Friday

8:30 a.m.: The Commerce Department releases its July retail sales report.

10:00 a.m.: The SEC will hold an open meeting to consider proposing tailored rules for certain crypto investment contracts.

The University of Michigan releases its preliminary consumer sentiment reading for August.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

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Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories making headlines.

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that its inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting will take place on August 20.

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined an updated roadmap that makes quantum safety, stronger privacy and native rollups top priorities for the network.

• Strategy sold 1,690 BTC for $108.6 million and used the proceeds to repurchase STRC preferred shares. The company separately raised $653 million through MSTR share sales, lifting its U.S. dollar reserve to $4.65 billion.

• Exodus posted an $18.6 million Q2 net loss, swinging from a $37.7 million profit a year earlier.

• Grayscale withdrew its S-1 registration statements for proposed Cardano, Hedera and Polkadot ETFs, according to SEC filings.

• Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, is unwinding multiple deals with crypto exchange Crypto.com, including plans for a CRO-focused digital asset treasury company. The firm also disclosed that it held 14,139 BTC worth approximately $891 million as of July 31.

• Crypto exchange Bybit is suing North Korea and the Lazarus Group over the $1.5 billion hack it suffered in 2025 and has secured a preliminary court order freezing certain identified stolen assets.

• The U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, sharply missing expectations for an 80,000 gain, while the unemployment rate fell to 4.1%.

• Crypto market maker Wintermute’s U.S. arm has registered as a broker-dealer, clearing the way for it to trade U.S. stocks and options for its own account and provide liquidity to crypto-linked ETFs.

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Of all the weeks that have been deemed “crucial” for the Clarity Act, this one arguably takes the cake.

What happens over the next few days could determine whether the bill has enough momentum and political capital to cross the finish line. Under Senate rules, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) would need to file cloture on Tuesday to set up a Thursday vote if senators still expect to depart for the August recess on time.

But Thune told reporters Monday that he plans to keep the Senate in session until it finishes a laundry list of outstanding business. That list includes a continuing resolution to fund the government, a Russia sanctions bill, a nominations package, a possible vote on a college sports bill and a cloture vote on crypto market structure legislation — even as eleventh-hour negotiations continue over the bill’s three biggest issues: ethics, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and provisions in the Senate Agriculture portion of the text.

“I think market structure we’ll get a vote on,” he said. “Whether we can get on it or not, we’ll see.”

Translation from Senate-speak: Thune isn’t sure Republicans can secure the 60 votes needed to formally begin debate and consider amendments to the bill. That’s where the focus now turns.

The elephant in the room is that the White House has yet to respond to the ethics counteroffer sent last week by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), according to a source familiar with the negotiations. The revised proposal builds on an earlier agreement between the White House and two Senate Republicans and includes an enforcement role for state attorneys general, a provision Democrats have pushed for but the White House has resisted.

That silence could prove significant.

Without a bipartisan agreement on ethics, the bill is unlikely to attract enough Democratic support to secure the 60 votes needed to advance. Tillis has signaled that he will not support it without stronger ethics provisions, while other Republicans have expressed unease about the bill’s stablecoin yield language.

Some industry advocates who have remained largely optimistic throughout the process are now privately voicing concerns that Clarity could fail a procedural vote. If that happens, the bill’s path forward gets murky.

Others are taking a longer view.

“Big bills don’t move in straight lines. They stall, then get pulled back for another round of negotiation. Votes get scheduled and then don’t happen,” said Kristin Smith, president of the Solana Policy Institute. “This is normal, though still frustrating.”

Smith pointed to the GENIUS Act, which failed cloture before passing the Senate 68-30 weeks later and becoming law, as evidence that a procedural setback does not necessarily kill a bill. Others note two important distinctions: there was no summer recess between the GENIUS votes, giving opponents less time to potentially pick apart the legislation, and the bill moved in a nonelection year.

With the midterms looming, political calculations are playing a much larger role this time around.

Fairshake and its affiliates reported nearly $129 million in combined cash on hand as of June 30, giving the network a formidable war chest ahead of the midterms. That’s led some industry observers to suggest that a vote could help clarify where both Senate Democrats and Republicans stand and inform the super PAC network’s spending decisions ahead of November.

While Fairshake has already spent in several primaries this year, some Washington lobbyists believe the crypto money machine is still biding its time, waiting to see how lawmakers vote on Clarity before making its biggest midterm bets.

“It’s time to put people on the record,” Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Crypto In America in a recent interview. “They’ll be given a choice: You either accept a bill that’s twice its original size because, at your request, we negotiated additional law enforcement, DeFi and ethics protections, or face the consequences of never getting to yes, no matter how much time we spend on this bill.”

For now, we’ll see whether Thune takes the first procedural step and files cloture as soon as today.

Coldcard Hack Rattles Bitcoin Community as Losses Top $100 Million

The security failure involving Coldcard, a popular Bitcoin-only hardware wallet used to store bitcoin offline, has now resulted in more than $100 million in losses, according to the latest analysis from Galaxy Research.

Coldcard, made by Canadian Bitcoin security firm Coinkite, is designed for self-custody, meaning users control the keys to their bitcoin rather than entrusting their assets to an exchange or another intermediary. The device had long been regarded as one of the more security-focused options among experienced bitcoin holders.

Until last week, when attackers began exploiting a software flaw dating to 2021 that made certain Coldcard recovery phrases easier to predict, allowing them to access the bitcoin without ever possessing the devices.

Galaxy, which has been tracking the thefts through onchain activity, says it has “high confidence” that 1,596 bitcoin was stolen from roughly 7,300 addresses across three major waves and 14 smaller incidents. Including suspected but unconfirmed activity, the potential losses climb to approximately $130 million, or 2,000 bitcoin.

What makes the breach particularly alarming is that victims weren’t phished and their devices weren’t remotely compromised. Coinkite believes AI may have helped uncover the flaw in its publicly available code, though that remains unconfirmed.

“The Coldcard hack has rattled the core of the Bitcoin community precisely because it hit people who did everything right,” Alex Thorn, Galaxy’s head of research, who is leading the firm’s analysis of the thefts, told Crypto In America. “They believe in the long-term vision, they stack bitcoin and they store it themselves. They didn’t lose their keys, they didn’t get phished, they didn’t speculate and lose their coins.”

“This is also a reckoning for the bitcoin and broader crypto security communities about the need for deep and continuous code audits, particularly in the age of AI,” he added.

In the days since the first thefts, Coinkite says it has released patched firmware, paused shipments and destroyed its remaining inventory containing the vulnerable software. But the company warns that installing the update will not secure an existing recovery phrase. Affected users must generate a new one and move their bitcoin.

The breach adds to a difficult stretch for the crypto industry, marked by a bear market, sector-wide layoffs, fading optimism over the passage of the Clarity Act and a string of major hacks. TRM Labs documented a record 207 crypto hacks during the first half of 2026, resulting in roughly $1 billion in losses before the Coldcard incident.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The Senate is in session. The House is out.

American Bitcoin (ABTC) reports earnings pre-market.

Tuesday

Hut 8 (HUT) reports earnings pre-market.

4:00 p.m.: The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs will hold a roundtable on the growth of prediction markets.

Wednesday

Circle (CRCL), Galaxy Digital (GLXY), Riot Platforms (RIOT) and TeraWulf (WULF) report earnings pre-market.

4:05 p.m.: Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook will speak at an event hosted by the Anchorage Economic Development Corporation in Alaska.

Block (XYZ) reports earnings after the closing bell.

Thursday

10:15 a.m.: The Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing titled “Empowering Main Street by Unlocking Access to Capital.”

CleanSpark (CLSK) and MARA Holdings (MARA) report earnings after the closing bell.

Friday

8:30 a.m.: Jobs Friday: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the July jobs report and unemployment rate.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

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Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

News Flash

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories making headlines this week.

• The Dow closed at a record high of 53,178 Monday, while Amazon surpassed $3 trillion in market value for the first time.

• Japan’s two-year bond yield hit 1.57%, a roughly 30-year high, following a rare joint U.S.-Japan intervention to support the yen after it sank to a 40-year low against the dollar.

• Crypto layoffs continued Monday, with FalconX cutting 10% of its global staff. Separately, a CoinDesk reporter said her role was eliminated as part of a restructuring at parent company Bullish.

• Tyler Williams, the Treasury’s chief crypto adviser, departed Friday and is returning to the private sector.

• Apple said it briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after finding content that violated its policies against child sexual abuse material. The app has since been restored.

• Strategy sold 1,638 bitcoin, reducing its holdings to 842,138, according to an SEC filing. Executive Chairman Michael Saylor said he has never sold any of his personal bitcoin.

• A former FBI agent has been charged with stealing nearly $1 million in crypto from wallets tied to a foreign target under investigation after reporting his own conduct to colleagues, according to Virginia federal court filings.

• Franklin Templeton joined the Canton Network as a Super Validator, making it the largest asset manager to take on the governance and infrastructure role.

• FinCEN hit UBS Financial Services with a record $125 million fine for repeat anti-money-laundering violations, following a similar penalty in 2018.

• Hashdex is closing its $14.7 million spot Bitcoin ETF after determining its asset base did not justify the operating costs. Trading is set to end August 17.

• BlackRock launched two tokenized money market products designed to qualify as stablecoin reserves under the GENIUS Act: an Ethereum-based share class of BSTBL and BRSRV, a new multichain fund.

• American Bitcoin reported $67 million in Q2 revenue, up 8% from the previous quarter, while its net loss narrowed to $57.2 million. The Eric Trump-backed miner produced a record 932 bitcoin and grew its holdings 14% to 8,002.

• Capital One said anti-money-laundering concerns, not politics, drove its 2021 decision to close more than 300 accounts linked to the Trump Organization.

• Minnesota’s statewide crypto ATM ban took effect August 1 after 134 scam complaints were tied to nearly $1 million in losses.

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This weekend will be a high-stakes waiting game for supporters of the Clarity Act as the White House considers a new ethics counteroffer that will likely determine the fate of the bill in the Senate next week.

The proposal is the culmination of weeks of bipartisan negotiations between Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego, both of whom have called for a stronger ethics package than the one agreed to by the White House and two Senate Republicans last week. According to three sources familiar with the negotiations, that initial offer did not pass muster with Tillis, Gallego and several other key Democrats. They want state attorneys general to be able to sue the Department of Justice if it fails to enforce ethics laws against federal officials.

The proposed mechanism is similar to one contained in the Laken Riley Act, which became law in 2025 and allows state attorneys general to sue federal officials over certain immigration enforcement failures that harm their states or residents.

It’s unclear what, if any, additional provisions were added to address White House concerns that state AGs could go too far in their enforcement.

Industry leaders and lobbyists also put in the legwork this week, making a flurry of calls to White House officials and influential allies urging them to reach an ethics compromise and help bring the Clarity Act to a long-awaited cloture vote before senators are scheduled to leave town Thursday.

It has been largely quiet publicly on the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty front since it returned to the news earlier this week, when the White House and Treasury Department rejected a proposal backed by Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and two prosecutors’ groups. The proposal would have removed language requiring prosecutors to prove that software developers intended to facilitate money laundering before they could face criminal liability.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also weighed in with a lengthy X post endorsing the BRCA, saying it “does nothing other than codify longstanding Treasury Department policy... non-custodial builders and developers are not, and have never been, subject to registration obligations under the Bank Secrecy Act.”

Another law enforcement group, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, came out in support of the bill, joining the National Fraternal Order of Police and at least two other groups that have publicly backed it. The National Sheriffs’ Association reentered the debate Friday with a lengthy letter calling for the BRCA to be deleted entirely or, failing that, narrowed through Cortez Masto’s proposal.

While ethics is widely considered the issue most likely to make or break the bill, a Democratic strategist who spoke with Crypto In America cautioned that it’s not the only obstacle. The BRCA and concerns with the agriculture section remain equally critical to securing the Democratic votes needed to reach 60.

“All three have to be locked in together if this bill is going to become a reality,” the strategist said.

On the Republican side, a handful of senators have raised concerns long voiced by the banking lobby that the stablecoin yield provisions are not strong enough to prevent deposit flight. They include Senators Mike Rounds (R-SD), James Lankford (R-OK) and Jerry Moran (R-KS), the latter of whom has been an ardent supporter of community banks.

It’s unclear whether those concerns will translate into “no” votes, but some industry lobbyists believe they could lead to further tweaks to Section 404, also known as the Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin yield compromise. Whether any changes materialize or prove sufficient to satisfy the banks remains an open question.

“If stablecoin products are permitted to attract and retain balances through interest-like rewards or other holding-based incentives, the local funding base that supports this lending could be weakened by hundreds of billions,” state banking officials wrote in a letter to Senate leadership this week.

If the Clarity Act ultimately fails, the GENIUS Act provisions will remain in place. Those provisions prohibit stablecoin issuers from paying yield but do not prevent crypto firms from offering rewards to customers, leaving banks with fewer protections against potential deposit flight than the current Clarity Act language would provide.

Binance.US Takes Its Comeback Bid to the CFTC

Binance.US plans to apply to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to become a Designated Contract Market next month, CEO Stephen Gregory told Crypto In America this week.

The designation would allow Binance.US to operate a regulated derivatives exchange and seek to list event contracts, the latest battleground for U.S. crypto platforms. Gemini secured DCM status late last year, while Coinbase offers event contracts through a partnership with Kalshi.

Applying for DCM status does not guarantee approval. The CFTC reviews applications under a 180-day statutory process, which can take longer if an application is incomplete.

The move is part of Binance.US’s broader comeback strategy, centered on lower trading fees and an expansion beyond spot trading into prediction markets and perpetual futures. Binance.US is separate from the global Binance exchange, though both share common majority ownership. It’s now mounting a U.S. comeback after nearly two years as a crypto-only platform and the loss of several state licenses following Binance global exchange’s $4.3 billion settlement with U.S. regulators over anti-money laundering and sanctions violations.

Gregory, a former Gemini executive, believes Binance.US can regain ground by responding quickly to customer demand and capitalizing on the next major product opportunity.

“I don’t think this is a super crowded market. The cool thing about crypto is that it’s not static,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of changes even over the last few months, so with the next product, we could grab a bunch of market share and compete with them.”

Beyond the Rate Decision

The Federal Reserve was back in the spotlight this week after holding interest rates steady, with Chair Kevin Warsh continuing his pullback from forward guidance by declining to signal where policy may be headed next. But monetary policy isn’t the only area where the central bank is undergoing change.

Eleanor sat down with Sunayna Tuteja, the Fed’s first Chief Innovation Officer, at the Injective Summit, where she took us inside her five years trying to transform the institution from within. She explains why the Fed was a “target-rich” environment for AI, her role in helping develop payment accounts for crypto firms and how she navigated the years of the so-called “Operation Choke Point 2.0.”

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekly Recap

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories making headlines this week.

• The Federal Reserve kept rates unchanged, with Chair Kevin Warsh saying policymakers will continue to monitor market reactions and incoming data before making future rate decisions.

• Circle secured a limited-purpose trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services for its subsidiary, Circle Internet Trust Company.

• Strategy reported an $8.2 billion Q2 loss after Bitcoin’s decline produced an $8.3 billion unrealized loss on its holdings. The company also disclosed that it has sold $218 million worth of Bitcoin this year to help fund preferred stock dividends.

• Robinhood reported record Q2 revenue of $1.3 billion, driven by record equity, options and prediction market activity. Net deposits also reached a record $22 billion.

• Coinbase reported a $360 million Q2 loss as revenue fell 19% to $1.22 billion, even as the exchange said trading volume market share reached a record 10.3% and prediction market revenue more than doubled from Q1.

• MoonPay launched PayBox, allowing people to use ChatGPT or Claude to move, trade and spend money just by asking.

• Morgan Stanley launched spot Ethereum and Solana ETPs on NYSE Arca.

• Visa is cutting about 2,600 jobs, or roughly 7% of its workforce, as it streamlines operations and ramps up investment in AI and other growth areas.

• A federal judge temporarily blocked Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation ban on prediction markets, finding that federal law likely preempts the state from prohibiting many contracts offered by platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket.

• FTX will begin distributing another $900 million to creditors today, with claims valued using crypto prices at the time of its November 2022 collapse rather than current prices.

• A new Wintermute report found that institutions accounted for a record 72% of its spot crypto trades in the first half of 2026, contributing to lower volatility, more selective investment in altcoins and growth in tokenized assets.

• JPMorgan warned that further delays to the Clarity Act could allow traditional financial firms to capture the growth of tokenization and blockchain technology at the expense of public crypto networks.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday and sometimes Friday!

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What you'll read: Senate Majority Leader Thune wants to get a Clarity Act vote underway before the August recess. Will Republicans have the votes to finish it? Plus, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce joins Crypto In America to discuss her latest warning on crypto vaults, what we're watching this week, and the weekend's top headlines.

The crypto industry is hoping Senate Republicans can get the ball rolling this week on a floor vote for the Clarity Act.

That would begin with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) filing cloture on the motion to proceed, setting up a vote (typically two session days later) that would require 60 votes to advance. If cloture is invoked, the Senate could then spend up to 30 hours debating the motion before voting on whether to proceed to the bill itself.

The problem: That timeline runs headfirst into the August recess, with senators scheduled to leave Washington on August 7.

The solution: Despite Thune saying last week that he did not think the Clarity Act could get done before the break, plugged-in crypto policy watchers say Senate leadership has discussed keeping members in town for the first few days of the recess to finish the job if the votes are there.

Whether they are is the bigger question. As of now, the bill likely does not have the 60 votes needed to advance, and Senate Republicans will spend this week working to shore up support on issues ranging from ethics to DeFi after seven key Democrats said the updated text “fell short” following its release last week.

Since then, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has called for stronger ethics provisions than those agreed to by the White House and his GOP colleagues, has been leading bipartisan talks aimed at finding a version of the proposal that Democrats can back.

Across-the-board Republican support isn't guaranteed either. With such a narrow margin and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expected to remain absent, the GOP has little room for defections. Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Rand Paul (R-KY), both of whom voted against the GENIUS Act last year, remain question marks.

A notable endorsement: On Friday, the National Fraternal Order of Police, which had been engaged in discussions over the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, endorsed the latest version of the Clarity Act. In a letter to Senate leaders, the group said it now believes the BRCA, which exempts certain non-custodial software developers from registering as money transmitters, does not limit law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute crypto crimes, while also praising the bill’s broader law enforcement provisions.

It remains to be seen whether the endorsement will move the needle with Democrats such as Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Mark Warner (D-VA), both of whom have said their support depends on whether the bill adequately addresses law enforcement concerns.

Crypto Mom Says Some Vaults May Be Securities

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, affectionately known in the crypto industry as "Crypto Mom," is warning firms that putting a yield-generating product onchain doesn't automatically place it outside the SEC’s remit.

Speaking to Crypto In America on Friday, Peirce said crypto vaults, which pool users' assets to generate yield, could trigger securities laws depending on how they're structured. In some cases, she said, they could effectively function as onchain investment funds that must register or qualify for an exemption.

The key question is who is making the investment decisions. Peirce drew a distinction between traditional DeFi pools, where smart contracts execute transactions automatically, and curated vaults, where a person or entity actively decides how users' assets are invested.

“When you have a third party involved in deciding how different assets are being allocated and invested, that’s really a situation where you have to start asking: Do the securities laws apply?

Custody is one factor the SEC could consider, but Peirce said it isn’t necessarily the central issue. Active management of users’ assets, or issuing something that resembles a note, could also be enough to raise securities law questions.

Peirce, a longtime champion of software developers and onchain privacy, said the SEC isn’t looking to regulate developers simply for writing code, but moving a traditional financial activity onchain doesn’t entitle firms to a different rulebook.

“We don’t want to live in a world where, if you do something onchain, you get a different set of rules simply because you’ve decided to do it onchain,” she said, warning against “bad regulatory arbitrage.”

Her advice: Don’t assume you’re outside the SEC’s reach. Work with counsel, evaluate the services you’re actually providing, and engage with the agency early.

Peirce stopped short of promising formal guidance but said the SEC has had productive conversations with industry participants and remains open to exemptions where appropriate.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The Senate returns. The House begins recess.

Deadline to submit final comments on the Federal Reserve’s proposed “payment accounts,” also known as “skinny” master accounts.

Tuesday

10:00 a.m.: The Conference Board releases its Consumer Confidence Index for July.

Wednesday

SoFi (SOFI) reports earnings premarket. Robinhood (HOOD) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) report after the close.

9:15 a.m.: Day 1 of the Rare Evo conference kicks off in Las Vegas. Crypto In America will be on the ground.

2:00 p.m.: The Federal Open Market Committee meets to make its next interest rate decision, followed by a press conference with Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh. Rates are expected to remain unchanged at 3.75%.

Thursday

Coinbase (COIN) and Strategy (MSTR) report earnings after the close.

8:30 a.m.: The Commerce Department releases its latest estimate of Q2 GDP and the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index, the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation.

BitMEX says it will settle and delist 35 derivatives contracts as part of the exchange’s scheduled wind-down.

Friday

Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT) reports earnings after the close.

10:00 a.m.: The University of Michigan releases its final Consumer Sentiment Index for July.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

Sumsub is the identity verification and compliance platform trusted by 4,000+ companies, including 8 of the 10 largest crypto exchanges.

Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: The biggest headlines from Friday and the weekend.

• Crypto exchange BitMart said it will wind down its platform after nine years, sending its exchange token down nearly 60% following the announcement. The move comes after BitMEX announced last week that it would also shut down operations.

• Strategy announced a $25 million buyback of its STRC preferred stock while selling approximately 5.4 million shares of MSTR common stock.

• The National Fraternal Order of Police endorsed the Clarity Act, saying the amended text released last week addresses its previous concerns and preserves law enforcement’s ability to investigate crypto crimes.

• The Digital Chamber, Blockchain Association and Crypto Council for Innovation sent a letter to Senate leaders urging them to bring the Clarity Act to the Senate floor.

• The State Department launched the Freedom Tech Excellence Program with founding partners Bitcoin Policy Institute, Palantir and Anduril to advance diplomatic efforts around “digital freedom and freedom of expression.”

• London-based fintech Wise plans to resubmit its application for a national trust bank charter under the GENIUS Act framework after the OCC denied its initial application.

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A lot has happened since Monday, when the Clarity Act appeared nowhere near ready for the Senate floor.

The White House agreed to an ethics package, and Senate Republicans released the long-awaited, 616-page updated bill text. Crypto stakeholders largely welcomed it. Senate Democrats did not.

Seven key Democrats whose support could determine whether the bill clears the 60-vote procedural threshold, including Sens. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Mark Warner (D-VA), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), say they cannot support it in its current form, arguing it falls short in several areas, including ethics and illicit finance. Bipartisan negotiations are set to continue through the weekend as Republicans hope to begin the floor process next week amid a serious time crunch, with just nine legislative days remaining before the August recess.

The industry push: The Digital Chamber, Crypto Council for Innovation and Blockchain Association are ramping up pressure on Senate leadership.

In a new joint letter to Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), first reported by Crypto In America, the groups’ CEOs praise the updated text for strengthening law enforcement’s ability to combat illicit finance and establishing the first comprehensive federal consumer protection framework for crypto markets.

“These improvements reflect engagement with policymakers across both parties and demonstrate that a well-crafted market structure framework can promote innovation while also bolstering national security,” they wrote.

While the bill currently lacks the votes to advance, the groups argue Senate leaders should begin the floor process as soon as possible, even as bipartisan negotiations continue.

“For the United States to maintain its position as the global leader of financial innovation, there is no substitute for the long-term certainty of durable market structure legislation,” the letter says.

Who’s in, who’s out: Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon broke with some of his fellow bank CEOs and major banking groups, saying he supports the Clarity Act and wants to see it move forward.

The banking lobby remains one of the loudest critics of the latest text. The American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute and Independent Community Bankers of America say it still does not go far enough to prevent stablecoin rewards from draining bank deposits and reducing local lending. The U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce echoed those concerns in a letter this week. Some banking advocates are also flagging changes they say would weaken the application of Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering requirements to certain DeFi platforms.

The DeFi Education Fund, which advocates for DeFi developers and users, praised the updated text for preserving the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act and adding new tools for law enforcement to combat crypto crime.

Matthew Hogan, a Connecticut State Police detective who leads the agency’s crypto working group, praised the bill’s new grants, financial sector liaisons and tools for freezing stolen funds. But he said it falls short on returning assets to victims and streamlining how crypto scams are reported.

“Overall, this is an improvement from the previous versions,” Hogan told Crypto In America.

What’s next: Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) is leading bipartisan talks over ethics after Democrats rejected a White House-backed package that would give enforcement authority to the Justice Department instead of state attorneys general. Tillis called the proposal “a step in the right direction” but has signaled his support hinges on stronger guardrails to prevent government officials from profiting from crypto.

It’s unclear whether Senate leadership can secure the votes needed to begin the floor process next week. Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral, which many Senate Republicans are expected to attend, could disrupt the schedule early in the week and leave the timing of any cloture vote uncertain.

Digital Chamber Sues to Block Illinois Crypto Tax

The Digital Chamber has become the first trade association to sue over Illinois’ new digital asset tax, filing a lawsuit seeking to block the nation’s first state tax targeting crypto business activity before it takes effect next year.

The complaint argues the law, which slaps a 0.2% tax on certain digital asset business activity, unconstitutionally singles out blockchain-based transactions for different treatment from comparable transactions conducted through traditional financial rails. The group alleges the tax violates the Illinois Constitution’s uniformity and due process protections, the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause and a federal prohibition on discriminatory taxes targeting electronic commerce.

At issue: The tax applies whenever a digital asset is exchanged, transferred or stored, even if no profit is made or the asset never changes hands. It covers Illinois businesses as well as out-of-state firms that generate more than $100,000 from customers in the state.

Critics say the levy, which is expected to generate roughly $60 million in annual revenue, is punitive enough to drive crypto businesses out of Illinois.

“Taxes should be carefully considered, not only for the revenue they produce but for the fairness of those being taxed,” said Digital Chamber CEO Cody Carbone. “That was not the case here, as the provision slipped into legislation the night before the bill’s final consideration.”

The lawsuit asks the court to strike down the tax and block Illinois from enforcing it.

From CFTC Commissioner to Blockchain Association: Summer Mersinger's Year Inside the Room Where It Happens

This week on the podcast, Jacquelyn sat down with Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger at the Injective Summit to reflect on her first year leading the trade group after leaving the CFTC and the view of Washington from the other side of the table.

Mersinger discusses the fight over the Clarity Act, her frustration with the banking industry’s pushback on stablecoin rewards and why she believes developer protections are essential. She also weighs what happens if the bill fails and what’s next for the Blockchain Association in her second year.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Weekly Recap

ICYMI: Here are some of the biggest stories making headlines this week.

• Crypto derivatives exchange BitMEX will shut down in September after nearly 12 years in operation, following a strategic review by its parent company.

• Strategy launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium alongside partners including BlackRock, Coinbase and Fidelity, with the group committing $15 million over three years to address long-term threats to the network, including risks posed by quantum computing.

• SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce warned that crypto vaults and lending strategies may still be subject to federal securities laws depending on how they are structured.

• The SEC will pay $150,000 to settle a Coinbase-backed FOIA lawsuit over its loss of former Chair Gary Gensler’s text messages.

• The House passed a bill that would restrict members of Congress and their immediate families from trading individual stocks while in office.

• Strike CEO Jack Mallers resigned as CEO of Twenty One Capital as plans for a three-way merger involving Twenty One, Strike and Elektron Energy were abandoned.

• White House Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt announced his National Guard training has been deferred, allowing him to remain in his role and oversee the Clarity Act’s path through the Senate.

• S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital launched a new digital asset index focused on tokens and companies with real-world utility and actual revenue, rather than price momentum or popularity.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

Subscribe now

⚽️ First things first: Congratulations to Spain on winning the World Cup! It made the sting of England’s last-minute semifinal loss to Argentina a little less painful. A great summer of “football” all around, nonetheless.

What you’ll read: It’s coming down to the wire for the Clarity Act as the White House has yet to sign off on ethics provisions and industry stakeholders await updated legislative text. Plus, what’s on tap this week and the top stories you need to start the day.

The third week of July is upon us and there are still no signs that the Clarity Act is ready to come to the Senate floor.

Much to the chagrin of the crypto industry, no date has been set for a vote, updated legislative text has yet to be released, and negotiations over the bill’s most contentious issues remain ongoing, with only 14 working days left before senators depart Washington for the August recess.

Ethics continues to be the elephant in the room, and finding a viable solution that Democrats, as well as some Republicans, can support will likely determine whether the Clarity Act sees floor time this month.

But Democrats say they have been left largely in the dark about ethics discussions in recent weeks, including a White House meeting last Thursday afternoon aimed at securing the president’s support for provisions designed to prevent government officials from profiting from digital assets.

President Trump met privately in the Oval Office with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Counsel David Warrington, Crypto Council Executive Director Patrick Witt, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Republican Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Bernie Moreno (R-OH).

While it remains unclear what was discussed or what, if anything, the president agreed to, sources familiar with the negotiations tell Crypto In America that, as of this morning, the White House still had not made clear what ethics parameters it would support, potentially further delaying Republicans’ release of an updated version of the bill.

Without new text, the industry, too, has been left guessing about changes made over the past two months to key provisions, including the fate of the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), as well as language in the Senate Agriculture Committee’s portion of the bill addressing conflicts of interest arising from crypto exchanges’ vertical integration, affiliate trading and the preemption of state law.

“I think the BRCA will remain intact, and I think the Banking piece is probably not going to change when the bill comes out,” Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger told Crypto In America. “They’re still negotiating text in the Agriculture Committee. They made it sound like they were down to technical edits at this point.”

One potential complication for the BRCA is public opposition from the National Sheriffs’ Association, which released a video last week calling cryptocurrency “the cartel currency of choice” and arguing that the Clarity Act would facilitate criminal activity and make law enforcement’s job much harder, a narrative that proponents of the bill, including the White House and Acting Attorney General Blanche, have spent months trying to counter.

It’s unclear what this will mean for efforts to secure the votes of Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who have signaled that their support could hinge on whether concerns raised by law enforcement and the Department of Justice about illicit finance are addressed in the final bill.

“I want America to lead in digital assets, but if we get it wrong, the downside ramifications could be huge as well,” Warner said during a Senate Finance Committee hearing last week.

Industry leaders are still holding out hope for a vote on the Clarity Act as early as this week, though the volume of unresolved issues makes that highly unlikely. The prevailing view on Capitol Hill is that negotiators have until the end of this week to tee up a cloture vote on the motion to proceed, which would require 60 votes to advance the bill to the Senate floor.

If the Clarity Act does not reach the floor next week, the window for passage before the August recess will effectively close.

👀 What To Watch This Week

Monday

The House and Senate return.

Tuesday

10:00 a.m.: Day One of the Out East Summit kicks off on Long Island’s North Fork. The invitation-only conference brings together leaders in institutional digital assets. Crypto In America will be on the ground.

The House Financial Services Committee hosts an oversight hearing of FinCEN.

Wednesday

CME Group (CME) and Nasdaq (NDAQ) report earnings before the market opens.

12:30 p.m.: The Center for American Progress will host Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) for a panel titled “Stopping Trump’s Crypto Corruption,” focused on “the risks of the Clarity Act to democracy and national security.”

Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet (GOOGL) report earnings post-market.

Thursday

10:00 a.m.: The Senate Banking Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for three Trump administration nominees, including Brian Johnson, the president’s pick to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Friday

Deadline to submit comments on the OCC’s proposed GENIUS Act rules, which would apply anti-money-laundering and sanctions compliance standards to supervised stablecoin issuers.

Robinhood Has 27 Million Accounts. Now It Wants to Bring Them Onchain | Johann Kerbrat

ICYMI: Last week on the podcast, we sat down with Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto and International, to discuss the company’s push to bring its 27 million accounts onchain.

We dug into the early activity on Robinhood Chain, with memecoins leading the way, the firm’s expansion into tokenization and DeFi, and what could happen if Congress fails to pass the Clarity Act.

Catch the full episode on all platforms here.

Crypto compliance isn’t slowing teams down anymore. It’s becoming a growth lever.

Sumsub is the identity verification and compliance platform trusted by 4,000+ companies, including 8 of the 10 largest crypto exchanges.

Their free State of the Crypto Industry 2026 report covers how the industry has shifted into a regulated maturity era: smarter fraud, higher expectations, and a new playbook for teams that want to scale. Inside: how to balance friction and conversion, where Travel Rule gaps remain, and why verification is now a competitive edge, not a checkbox.

Data from 4M+ fraud attempts and 300+ crypto companies surveyed. See how your peers are adapting here.

Weekend News Flash

ICYMI: The biggest headlines from Friday and the weekend.

• U.S. regulators, including the Treasury Department, OCC, FDIC and Federal Reserve, missed the GENIUS Act’s one-year deadline on Saturday to finalize rules for stablecoin issuers.

• Rapper Drake lost a $1.5 million USDT bet after backing Argentina to beat Spain in regulation in the World Cup final. The wager would have paid out more than $5 million.

• The Senate unanimously passed a resolution stating that convicted FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should not receive a presidential pardon.

• JPMorgan tokenized shares of the Invesco QQQ Trust, creating a blockchain-based representation of the ETF.

• Stripe and Advent International have offered more than $53 billion to acquire PayPal, but the company’s board considers the bid inadequate, according to Reuters.

• Morgan Stanley’s E*TRADE completed its rollout of spot trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana through its partnership with Zerohash.

• Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities invested $400 million in Crypto.com at a $20 billion valuation, marking the exchange’s first institutional funding round.

• The SEC proposed making electronic delivery the default method for issuers, broker-dealers, investment advisers and other market intermediaries to provide required regulatory information.

• T. Rowe Price launched its Active Crypto ETF ($TKNZ), offering actively managed exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Hyperliquid.

• Visa launched a stablecoin platform that allows banks, fintechs and crypto firms to mint, move and manage digital dollars across its network of more than 200 million merchants.

Remember: New editions of the Crypto In America newsletter drop every Monday and Thursday.

If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe!

Subscribe now