Box Elder County commissioners approved Kevin O’Leary’s 9GW Stratos AI campus in Utah on May 4, amid loud public protests from hundreds of local residents.

Box Elder County commissioners in Utah voted unanimously on May 4 to approve the Stratos AI campus backed by Kevin O’Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of O’Leary Ventures.

The approval came over the objections of hundreds of residents who chanted “Shame!” as the vote was announced and who said they had been given too little time to raise concerns before the decision.

The campus, designated through Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, spans more than 40,000 acres and will reach 9 gigawatts of generation capacity at full buildout.

Phase one calls for approximately 3 gigawatts. Kevin O’Leary told Fox Business the site will be powered entirely by an on-site connection to the Ruby Pipeline, a 680-mile natural gas line crossing northern Utah, rather than drawing from the state grid.

China as the stated rationale

O’Leary made the competition framing explicit. “China built 400 gigawatts of new power over the last 24 months, and much of it is powering AI data centers,” he said, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “We’re in a race with them.” He described the project as providing compute power for US AI companies and national defense.

Utah’s MIDA cut Stratos’s energy use tax from 6% to 0.5% and agreed to rebate 80% of property tax revenue to attract the project. Environmental critics raised concerns about water use near the already-depleted Great Salt Lake and potential weather pattern changes.

O’Leary said the facility would use closed-loop water recycling and air-liquid cooling. No hyperscale tenant has been publicly named. Initial delivery is expected in Q4 2026, with full buildout spanning approximately ten years across multiple phases.

NFTs are due for a “rebirth” as AI agents force the internet to solve new identity and trust problems, Reid Hoffman told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said agents transacting with other agents will require trustworthy digital identity systems that resemble what NFTs originally tried to solve. Hoffman said he began revisiting NFTs as he considered a future in which AI agents outnumber humans online.”When you begin to think we’re going to have more agents than people, what does the identity layer look like? What is the notion of, hey, when your agent’s talking to my agent, and we book this talk here, is it a trustable transaction?” Hoffman said. “And that got me back into thinking about NFTs.”

Hoffman said identity systems will exist inside companies, but the harder problem will be identity for agents operating across the open internet.

“It’s going to be kind of free range on the internet, and how does that work? And crypto is the obvious answer,” he said.

This argument carries a throughline from Hoffman’s earlier work at LinkedIn, where real-world professional identity was central to the network’s design. Hoffman said actual identity can create “more responsibility, more reliability,” while also acknowledging that pseudonyms have legitimate uses in some contexts.

Hoffman, who said he bought his first Bitcoin over a decade ago and has never sold any, framed crypto as the natural answer to the deepfake-era trust problem. He cited his own AI clone, Reid AI, which he has sent to speak at conferences, as an example of why provenance will matter more as generative media improves.

“When I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014, it was like, actually, in fact, this is part of a design feature, that this is how DNS should work. This is how identity should be working, generally when you get to the internet,” he said.

That identity problem, Hoffman explained, extends beyond agent-to-agent commerce. He pointed to AI-generated content, bot farms, manipulated polls and paid political influence campaigns as examples of why proof-of-humanity is becoming harder to ignore online.

In a politically calibrated stretch, Hoffman urged the crypto industry not to overcommit to Republicans on policy.

“If the industry goes, oh, we’re overly reacting against Gensler, et cetera, and then being kind of, as it were, anti-Democratic Party on this, the problem is that the pendulum swings,” he said. “It’s good to be bipartisan from a viewpoint of what we care about is the ecosystem. We care about how it plays a good role in society.”

Hoffman also disputed the prevailing narrative that AI is driving Big Tech layoffs.

“What I’ve seen so far in every company that says, ‘I’m doing layoffs because of AI,’ maybe other than Meta, is not out of productivity, but is just out of reshifting,” he said. “We’ve overhired because of the pandemic. We need to change. We’re going to call it AI for a position of strength.”

As an investor, Hoffman said he is looking for crypto ideas that may have been tried too early during prior market cycles but could return as AI changes the internet. NFTs are one such area, he said, while “DAOs and other areas” could also see renewed relevance.

Asked at the close what his Bitcoin exit price was, Hoffman didn’t name a number. “Is there such a thing as an exit price?” he asked.

Samsung SDS, Samsung’s information technology services subsidiary, will reportedly build a token securities platform for the Korea Securities Depository (KSD), moving South Korea’s central securities depository closer to operating blockchain-based securities infrastructure as the country prepares a legal framework for tokenized assets. 

Samsung SDS won a contract to build and operate the platform for KSD, according to local reports from Yonhap News Agency and The Korea Times. The project is expected to be completed by February 2027 and will convert a technology verification testbed into a formal system capable of stable service operations. 

KSD plans to link its existing electronic securities account system with blockchain-based distributed ledger data to strengthen tokenized securities issuance and rights management, according to the reports. 

Samsung SDS previously worked on KSD’s tokenized securities efforts, including function-analysis consulting in 2024 and testbed platform construction in 2025, Seoul Economic Daily reported. 

The news comes as South Korea is preparing the market infrastructure needed to support tokenized securities once its incoming legal framework takes effect.

South Korea prepares its tokenized securities framework

On Jan. 15, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) said amendments to the Electronic Registration Act and the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act had passed the National Assembly, paving the way for the issuance and circulation of security tokens.

The FSC said the amended Electronic Registration Act legally recognizes blockchain-based distributed ledgers as securities registries. The regulator also said token security issuers will be required to follow legally mandated procedures and apply for electronic registration with KSD, placing the depository at the center of South Korea’s future token securities infrastructure. 

Related: South Korea crypto sector warns AML proposal goes too far: Report

On March 4, the FSC launched a public-private consultative body on security tokens. The consultative body will work on rules and infrastructure for security tokens across four areas: technology and infrastructure, issuance, circulation and payment and settlement. 

In the announcement, the FSC also said that the framework is scheduled to take effect on Feb. 4, 2027, after updates to subordinate rules and the setup of relevant infrastructure. That timing closely matches Samsung SDS’s reported February 2027 target for completing the KSD platform.

Magazine: North Korea denies crypto hacks, Upbit’s bank tests Ripple: Asia Express

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Bitcoin’s developer community should stop waiting for certainty about quantum-computing timelines and focus on getting a post-quantum signature scheme into production, Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

Pruden said the asymmetry between acting now and waiting favors action.

“We added some new cryptography, we kind of built in this optionality, it turns out we didn’t need quite yet, but at least we have it,” he said, describing the worst case of moving early.

The worst case of moving late is far worse: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could derive private keys from any exposed public key using Shor’s algorithm, the 1994 algorithm that remains the canonical example of what a quantum machine can do that a classical one cannot.

Pruden valued the asset at stake at roughly $2.3 trillion.

“In a very real sense, someone with a sufficiently large and capable quantum computer kind of owns everyone’s digital assets or bitcoin for the public key that they can see,” Pruden said.

The path forward, Pruden said, is to introduce a new signature scheme into Bitcoin that does not rely on the classical math underlying the elliptic-curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA, it uses today.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has standardized post-quantum schemes based on hash functions and lattices, he said, and Bitcoin community discussion has trended toward the hash-based option. BIP-360, proposed last year, laid groundwork for adding a quantum-resistant Taproot output type, and Blockstream has deployed a hash-based signature scheme on its Liquid Network.

“Moving stuff out of just research into production is, I think, actually what we need to focus on,” Pruden said. “Let’s focus on the D of R&D.”

The migration will be substantially harder than the Taproot upgrade, Pruden warned.

“Taproot took five years, but that’s not even really the entire challenge that this will take.” Where Taproot was opt-in and most users never bothered migrating, every bitcoin holder and every wallet, exchange and institution that touches the asset will need to participate in a post-quantum migration.

Pruden said the timing risk is severe: if a quantum computer arrives before users have migrated, an attacker could front-run pending transactions within a single block time, paying a higher fee to capture funds whose private keys it has just derived.

Pressed on the unresolved debate over what to do with bitcoin sitting in dormant, quantum-vulnerable addresses, Pruden urged the community to defer that fight and focus on the migration itself. Harper framed that debate as involving upward of 5 million dormant coins, including coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto via the so-called “Patoshi” pattern of early miner blocks.

“The question of the Satoshi coins in particular is a hard one,” Pruden said, because it puts two philosophical commitments in tension: Bitcoin’s fixed-supply ethos and its commitment to digital property rights. Asked for his personal lean, Pruden said the dormant coins could potentially be “recycle[d] back into the end of the supply curve” to extend Bitcoin’s mining-incentive runway after the block subsidy runs out.

“If you put me on the hot seat, that’s probably what I would say,” Pruden said. “So I guess overall would be the confiscation side. But again, I think ultimately, the community is going to decide. The institutions and the market are going to decide.”

On whether Bitcoin Core developers are taking the threat seriously, Pruden said the answer is mixed. “Core is not a monolithic entity. So I think there are definitely [some] in Core that are taking it seriously. I think there are some people that have the opinion” that quantum computers will never arrive. He pointed to the broader scientific community as a counterweight: “The majority of physicists out there, if you ask them this, they’ll say, yes, it will be a thing. And by the way, many of them believe that the timelines are accelerating.”

The same physics that makes quantum computers a threat to existing cryptography may also seed the next generation of cryptographic primitives, he said, citing key-exchange protocols based on quantum entanglement and certified-randomness work that won the Turing Award last year.

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said lawmakers working towards passage of a digital asset market structure bill likely need to meet three conditions before the chamber could vote on the legislation.

Speaking at the Consensus conference in Miami on Wednesday, Gillibrand said she considered addressing consumer protection, illicit finance, and ethics provisions essential before any potential vote on the CLARITY Act. She said that if Congress were to consider those issues, as well as combine the draft of the market structure bill with the version already passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee and ensure ethics language, lawmakers could have a vote “before the August recess,” which begins Aug. 10.

“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” said Gillibrand. “Because the truth is, is that we cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents or vice presidents, to get rich off of these industries because of their insider status. It is the worst form of pay for play.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand speaking on Wednesday. Source: Cointelegraph

Although Gillibrand did not explicitly mention US President Donald Trump by name, his ties to the crypto industry, through the launch of his memecoin, his family’s crypto business World Liberty Financial, and other dealings with the industry have come under scrutiny as lawmakers consider the CLARITY Act.

Last week, senators on the banking committee announced a deal on stablecoin yield which could allow the market structure bill to advance, but did not address language on public officials’ potential conflicts of interest.

Related: Americans distrust crypto, AI as industry super PACs flood midterms, poll finds

Crypto industry leaders and advocates have been weighing in on the market structure bill since the stablecoin yield compromise was announced. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said on Tuesday that lawmakers likely needed to address the bill in the next two weeks before it became muddied by issues amid the US midterm elections.

“There’s a window of opportunity, and that’s always important that you act when you find that window of opportunity,” said Summer Mersinger, a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a separate panel on the market structure bill at Consensus on Wednesday.

“That doesn’t mean the window’s not going to open again. You just never know what’s going to happen in the intervening events that maybe will bring people back to this issue after August recess,” she said.

Bill awaits markup in Senate Banking Committee

As of Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee had not rescheduled a markup on the market structure bill after postponing the event in January. At the time, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the exchange could not support the legislation as written, leading to other crypto companies and advocates speaking out against certain provisions in the bill on decentralized finance, stablecoins and tokenized equities.

Traders on prediction markets platform Polymarket see a 65% chance of the CLARITY Act being signed into law by the end of 2026. On Kalshi, traders currently put the probabilty that the bill will become law before August at 49%.

Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs: Mid-2026

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Wall Street’s clearinghouse is working with blockchain developers to bring one of capital market’s least glamorous but most operationally complex functions onchain: corporate actions.

Frank La Salla, CEO of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), said Wednesday at Consensus 2026 in Miami that the market infrastructure giant is collaborating with several layer-1 (L1) blockchain networks to improve how dividend payments, tender offers and other post-trade events could be processed in tokenized markets.

“We are working with some very good L1s right now, who are focused on the ability to process at faster rates, have higher resiliency,” he said.

Currently, the bottleneck is that on most blockchain networks could take a few days to process corporate actions, he pointed out.

“We process millions of dividend payments a day to feed to the industry,” Le Salla said. “We need high-performance L1s to do that.”

DTCC sits at the center of U.S. capital markets infrastructure, processing roughly $20 trillion in Treasury and corporate securities trades each day. The clearinghouse has spent nearly a decade exploring blockchain applications, but La Salla said the technology only became commercially meaningful once real-world use cases began to emerge in the pst few years.

Recently, the firm accelerated its push to modernize market infrastructure with tokenization and blockchain tech. This week, DTCC announced to begin testing its tokenized securities platform in July ahead of a broader rollout in October.

La Salla said collateral movement may become blockchain’s first large-scale institutional use case. Tokenized collateral could allow firms outside U.S. market hours to access liquidity in real time without relying on legacy settlement windows. He described a scenario where firms in Asia could access U.S. dollar on a Sunday in New York by posting tokenized collateral onchain in real-time.

“That is incredibly powerful,” La Salla said.

But he cautioned that blockchain systems still face major hurdles around scalability, liquidity fragmentation and risk management.

One challenge, for example, is netting transactions. Traditional market infrastructure compresses massive trading activity into smaller settlement obligations, reducing capital requirements across the system.

“Blockchain is decentralized,” La Salla said. “Many of the efficiencies that we get in our industry are through concentration of liquidity.”

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Nasdaq President Tal Cohen said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) changing approach to crypto regulation is giving market operators more room to experiment with blockchain-based infrastructure and tokenized assets.

Speaking at Consensus in Miami on Wednesday, Cohen said the industry now feels it can “build” again after years of regulatory uncertainty.

“The gray zone four years ago was a no-fly zone,” Cohen said. “The gray zone now is we can build. We can gain some scale. We can experiment without maybe any brush back.”

Cohen described a broader shift inside financial markets toward “always on” trading systems that operate nearly around the clock and move money, securities and collateral faster than traditional infrastructure.

Nasdaq, which provides trading technology to more than 130 markets globally, is investing in blockchain infrastructure, tokenization and artificial intelligence as part of that transition, Cohen said.

“We’re embracing two trends,” he said. “Always on market infrastructure” and “convergence” between traditional financial rails and digital asset systems.

Cohen said interoperability between those systems remains one of the largest hurdles for the industry. Firms do not want to operate separate infrastructures for traditional securities and tokenized assets, he said.

“Whether you’re in the existing world or you’re in the digital world, let me tell you, I’m bringing it all together for you so you get the benefits of both,” Cohen said.

He also pointed to a more collaborative stance from regulators.

“The SEC is much more constructive,” Cohen said. “It’s not even open mindedness. It’s a proactivity.”

Cohen said tokenization could eventually make assets easier to move, finance and trade while giving issuers better insight into shareholders.

“What it really does is take an asset and put it in motion,” he said.

Nasdaq is also testing AI systems designed to simulate trading activity in a digital replica of its matching engine. Cohen said the technology could help the exchange test market stress scenarios and improve software reliability as markets move toward extended trading hours.

Grant Cardone, a multibillionaire real estate investor, said Wednesday he added another $100 million in bitcoin as part of a strategy combining the asset with income-producing real estate, during a Fireside chat at Consensus Miami 2026.

“We just simply added another $100 million of bitcoin,” Cardone said, describing a recent property deal where BTC was paired with a $235 million asset, a hybrid strategy he believes will outperform real estate investment trusts (REITs).

Cardone said traditional real estate investment trusts are structurally limited. “These companies can never, ever hold bitcoin on their balance sheet,” he said. “We believe by combining real estate and bitcoin […] I’ll end up with somewhere between a 22 and a 32% return.”

The property investor said the latest allocation builds on an earlier bitcoin purchase made in 2025, when Cardone Capital added 1,000 BTC to its balance sheet, a position valued at just over $100 million at the time, bringing the firm’s total bitcoin exposure to roughly $200 million.

The real estate mogul said the structure combines two asset types within a single investment vehicle. “I have two assets that we just fused together in an LLC,” Cardone said.

He explained the approach also consists of introducing new investors to bitcoin. “Eighty percent of the people that invested in that fund own zero bitcoin,” he said, adding that the strategy does not involve putting real estate directly on blockchain rails.

“I’m not putting real estate on the blockchain,” Cardone said. “All I’m doing is buying a bunch of bitcoin and stuffing it into the discount gap.”

However, in February, In an X post, the investor said that Cardone Capital had plans to tokenize its holdings to give investors “collateral and liquidity in the secondary markets.” At the time, he also said the firm aimed to become a market leader in tokenizing assets at scale.

At Consensus, Cardone explained his hybrid strategy combines stable cash flow with bitcoin exposure. “If bitcoin goes to zero, I’m not getting rid of the real estate.” He said the combined model is intended to compete with existing real estate structures. “I’m going to rip [their] face off,” referring to competing investments without bitcoin exposure.

Fairshake has spent $28 million in 2026 primaries as a new poll shows most Americans distrust crypto and AI, raising questions about the political value of industry-backed super PAC money.

Fairshake, the pro-crypto super PAC backed by Coinbase, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ripple, has spent $28 million across competitive 2026 primaries. Combined with pro-AI group Leading the Future, which launched in August 2025 and has raised more than $75 million, the two industry-aligned groups have together deployed over $100 million in the current midterm cycle.

The spending arrives against a difficult backdrop. A Public First poll conducted for Politico in April, surveying 2,035 US adults, found 45% of Americans say investing in cryptocurrency is not worth the risk, 44% say AI is developing too fast, and nearly two-thirds want Congress to impose strict regulations or broad AI oversight.

“I do think if they see somebody is backed by crypto, that’s always going to be a problem,” former Ohio Representative Jim Renacci was quoted as saying.

Despite those distrust numbers, public awareness of both groups remains remarkably low. Only 3% of respondents recognised Fairshake, and just 9% had heard of Leading the Future.

Political observers told Politico that backlash could be swift once voters make the connection between the spending and the industries behind it.

The stakes for crypto legislation are direct. As crypto.news reported, if Democrats take either chamber in November, the CLARITY Act’s passage odds are described as close to zero, with Senator Elizabeth Warren likely to take over the Senate Banking Committee chair.

Fairshake’s current $193 million war chest is explicitly aimed at preventing that scenario. In 2024, a Fairshake-affiliated PAC spent over $40 million helping unseat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a longtime crypto critic who is now running again.