In a landmark move for the crypto industry, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to establish a dedicated working group focused on digital assets.

Trump has signed an Executive Order establishing the Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, a new initiative aimed at bolstering U.S. leadership in digital finance, according to Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett.

The Working Group will develop a Federal regulatory framework for digital assets, including stablecoins, while evaluating the feasibility of a national digital assets stockpile. 

Chaired by the White House AI & Crypto Czar, David Sacks, the group will include key officials such as the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside other agency heads.

The Executive Order mandates collaboration with industry experts to ensure that cutting-edge insights beyond the Federal Government inform policies.

It also directs agencies to review and recommend changes to existing regulations that impact the digital asset sector. The order prohibits any Federal action to create or promote central bank digital currencies.

SEC crypto task force

In tandem with the executive order, the U.S. SEC announced the formation of a cryptocurrency task force. 

This group is charged with creating a regulatory framework that provides legal clarity for crypto assets, addressing longstanding industry concerns about ambiguous regulations.

The executive order also repeals the Biden Administration’s Digital Assets Executive Order and the Treasury Department’s international framework, citing concerns over their restrictive impact on innovation and U.S. economic competitiveness in global digital finance, according to Terrett.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The Sackler family and the opioid maker they founded, Purdue Pharma, have together agreed to pay $7.4bn to settle liabilities over their roles in the opioid crisis, ending months of negotiations after a previous deal fell apart.

This latest agreement, which still needs bankruptcy court approval, is $1.4bn greater than the previous deal struck between the parties. The new settlement was agreed between more than a dozen US states and other individuals who had filed lawsuits against the company.

The drugmaker initially filed for bankruptcy in 2019 in a New York federal court to manage hundreds of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis. As part of the agreement, the Sackler family will pay $6.5bn over the next 15 years, while Purdue will pay $900mn.

“Families throughout New York and across the nation are suffering from the immense pain and loss wrought by the opioid crisis,” New York attorney-general Letitia James, one of the officials who helped broker the deal, said on Thursday. “While no amount of money will ever fully repair the damage they caused, this massive influx of funds will bring resources to communities in need so that we can heal.”

The latest Purdue settlement is one of the biggest potential payouts to emerge from the US opioid crisis, which has led to more than 600,000 deaths since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A previous $6bn deal agreed between the Sackler family and creditors — which was largely negotiated during the pandemic — was struck down by the US Supreme Court last summer. The agreement relied on shielding family members from future lawsuits, which the high court said was impermissible without the family members filing for bankruptcy themselves.

The new deal is structured so that the Sacklers are not given automatic protection from liabilities, but victims will need to agree to not pursue further legal action in order to receive a payout, according to the New York attorney-general office’s statement.

The Supreme Court decision had left lawyers and companies trying to decide how to resolve so-called “mass torts”, where corporate product liability claims totalled in the thousands of victims and hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

The funds committed by the Sacklers and Purdue will be used over the next 15 years to fund opioid addiction treatment and recovery programmes, Texas’s attorney-general’s office said.

Critically for many victims, members of the Sackler family will no longer be allowed to sell opioids in the US as part of the deal, and their ownership of Purdue has ended.

The Sackler family did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to review the creation of a “National Digital Asset Stockpile,” according to Fox News.

• As reported by FOX Business White House correspondent Edward Lawrence and shared by partner Eleanor Terret, the executive order established a “Presidential Working Group” on digital assets.
• This group is tasked with “evaluating the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile,” as well as creating a federal regulatory framework for digital assets and stablecoins.
• It will be chaired by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, and include heads of the SEC, Treasury, and other relevant agencies. Among other things, it also bars federal agencies from taking action to establish, issue, or promote a CBDC.
• Finally, this executive order revokes the Biden administration’s crypto executive order, issued in 2022.
• Trump initially promised to create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” in July, but has now seemingly expanded the scope of its inclusion to other digital assets.
• Senator Cynthia Lummis is pushing legislation to formally establish a Bitcoin reserve, and to have the U.S. government sell some of its gold stash to buy 1 million BTC.
• Trump has already shown openness to other coins personally, launching his own official memecoin last week on the Solana blockchain.

Recent developments suggest that crypto investors looking to catch the next quick 5x should be keeping an eye on the Dogecoin price. This is based on both technical and fundamental analysis, which proves that DOGE could record a 500% price surge from its current level. 

Analyst Predicts 500% Surge For The Dogecoin Price

In an X post, crypto analyst Javon Marks predicted a 500% surge for the Dogecoin price, representing a 5x increase from its current level. The analyst explained that Dogecoin is back showing strength, and by its historical performance, DOGE can be set for an over 432% gain at the least from its current level.

Related Reading

Javon Marks further remarked that the Dogecoin price could rally above the 1.618 Fib extension, which is currently at $2.2. In line with this, the analyst added that market participants could still be early, considering that DOGE could witness a 5x price increase from its current level.

Crypto analyst Trader Tardigrade also recently predicted that the Dogecoin price could rally above $2. In an X post, the analyst stated that the meme coin had formed a bull flag on the 2-day chart. According to the analyst, this DOGE bull flag pattern puts a target of over $2 for the foremost meme coin. 

The crypto analyst had previously predicted that the DOGE price could even rally as high as $8 if it mirrors the 2017 bull run. He added that DOGE could also reach $30 if it mirrors the 2021 bull run. These projections further prove that the foremost meme coin could at least record a 500% price surge from its current level. Crypto analyst Master Kenobi has also previously predicted that Dogecoin could rally to $2 in this cycle and top around $3. 

Bullish Fundamentals Also Support A 5x Increase For DOGE

The Dogecoin price also boasts bullish fundamentals, which support a 5x increase from its current level. One of the fundamentals includes the potential launch of a Dogecoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the US. Asset manager Bitwise recently filed for a Dogecoin ETF in Delaware, indicating that an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may be next.

Related Reading

Asset manager REX Shares, in collaboration with Osprey, already filed with the SEC to offer a Dogecoin ETF. This is bullish for the Dogecoin price, considering the amount of institutional funds that could flow into the DOGE ecosystem if the SEC approves these funds. There is also a huge likelihood that the SEC will approve these funds, considering the pro-crypto climate under Donald Trump’s administration. 

It is also worth mentioning that there has been a huge accumulation trend among DOGE whales, which is also bullish for the Dogecoin price. IntoTheBlock data shows there has been a 41% spike in the meme coin’s large transactions, with $23.35 billion traded in the last 24 hours. Another bullish fundamental is Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which puts the foremost meme coin in the limelight. 

At the time of writing, the DOGE price is trading at around $0.35, down almost 4% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Featured image from iStock, chart from Tradingview.com

• Sextortion scams evolve with personalized tactics and heightened intimidation.
• Threat actors exploit invoicing platforms to bypass email security filters.
• Robust email filters and training help counter sextortion threats effectively.

Sextortion scams are becoming more complex and personal as the scams now frequently target individuals across different sectors with greater precision creating a sense of immediate threat.

Cofense Phish Defense Center (PDC) recently observed a notable evolution in sextortion scams, which unlike earlier versions, which relied primarily on generic scare tactics, now use more sophisticated strategies, often bypassing traditional security measures.

U.S. President Donald Trump has come through with an eagerly awaited executive order on crypto that directs his administration to establish friendly policies to put the industry on solid U.S. footing and work toward establishing a “digital asset stockpile.”

After years of courtroom combat with federal authorities, Trump’s order could allow the digital assets sector to move forward in the U.S. with a more welcoming framework set by the White House. Such orders are more of a beginning than an end in federal policy, but the pro-crypto president has taken that first step, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

When Trump had failed to issue it among his opening flurry of executive orders, crypto insiders grew increasingly tense about the new relationship he’s promised. But behind the scenes, leaders at the U.S. markets regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission — were already prepping this week to move digital assets businesses out of the multi-year penalty box the previous agency officials kept them in.

TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors.

Tech companies are scrambling to determine where to get all the electricity they’ll need for energy-hungry AI data centers that are putting growing pressure on power grids. They’re increasingly turning to nuclear energy, including next-generation reactors that startups like TerraPower are developing.

“The energy sector is transforming at an unprecedented pace after decades of business as usual, and meaningful progress will require strategic collaboration across industries,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a press release.

A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a “strategic collaboration” that’ll initially look into the potential for new nuclear power plants in Texas and the Rocky Mountain region that would power SDC’s data centers.

There’s still a long road ahead before that can become a reality. The technology TerraPower and similar nuclear energy startups are developing still have to make it through regulatory hurdles and prove that they can be commercially viable.

Compared to older, larger nuclear power plants, the next generation of reactors are supposed to be smaller and easier to site. Nuclear energy is seen as an alternative to fossil fuels that are causing climate change. But it still faces opposition from some advocates concerned about the impact of uranium mining and storing radioactive waste near communities.

“I’m a big believer that nuclear energy can help us solve the climate problem, which is very, very important. There are designs that, in terms of their safety or fuel use or how they handle waste, I think, minimize those problems,” Gates told The Verge last year.

TerraPower’s reactor design for this collaboration, Natrium, is the only advanced technology of its kind with a construction permit application for a commercial reactor pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to the company. The company just broke ground on a demonstration project in Wyoming last year, and expects it to come online in 2030.

Microsoft made a deal in September to help restart a retired reactor at Three Mile Island. Both Google and Amazon, meanwhile, announced plans last year to support the development of advanced reactors to power their data centers.