Miami Beach — The stablecoin universe, dominated by Tether and Circle, hampers competition that could lead to better product-market fit for some important use cases, according to Ben O’Neill, Bridge’s head of money movement.

“I think it’s a net bad for the growth of stablecoins as a whole, because you have two counterparties that have pros and cons to what they’ve built, and the design choices they’ve made. But they don’t work for every use case,” O’Neill said on a panel about stablecoin growth at Consensus Miami.

Tether’s USDT, with its gargantuan market capitalization of approximately $189.5 billion, and Circle’s USDC, which has grown to around $71 billion, each emerged at different generational eras in the crypto evolution.

Tether, launched in 2014 as Realcoin, won the Chinese export trade, O’Neill said, and built this shadow economy of dollars that people can use without the U.S. financial system. Circle, launched in association with Coinbase in 2018, sought to do the exact opposite: a U.S.-regulated stablecoin, which later leaned hard into decentralized finance (DeFi).

For O’Neill, the perspective of a large payments firm, such as Bridge-owner Stripe, illustrates the shortcomings of the two dollar-pegged token giants.

“As a payments company, I need certainty on how things are going to work,” he said. “So with Tether, they say we’ll burn for 10 bips, which is crazy expensive for a payments company, or you can trade on the open market, which means I have no certainty.”

“For Circle, their whole business is AUM, and they keep kind of notching up those burn fees. So again, if I’m someone like Visa, and I want to do trillions of dollars of card settlement and stablecoins, I’m burning a bunch of USDC, and that’s gonna be a net bad,” O’Neill said.

The solution, “which needs to come pretty quickly over the next couple of years,” is more stablecoins built for specific use cases, so they can be optimized for those use cases. The other part is the rise of the clearing house, “a sexy topic for founders and VCs” to make it “as efficient as possible swapping between stablecoins,” he added.

Closing out his argument, O’Neill said, “You need more competition, otherwise [Tether and Circle] are going to just keep upping the fees. They’re not gonna share the yield. They’re gonna disincentivize you from burning it. They’re gonna make it harder and harder to make it feel like money at each turn.”

The White House is aiming for July 4 for Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

“We’re targeting July 4th. I think that would be a tremendous birthday present for America, celebrating our 250th,” Witt said. The mechanics, according to Witt, are: Senate Banking Committee markup this month, four working Senate weeks in June for floor passage and enough runway for a U.S. House of Representatives vote before the Independence Day deadline.

That timeline runs ahead of the prediction Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shared on the same stage earlier in the day, when the New York Democrat predicted Clarity would reach the president’s desk by the first week of August.

“There’s not a lot of slack left in the rope right now,” Witt said. “But it is an achievable timeline.”

The path to markup opened when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) released a compromise on the bill’s stablecoin-yield provisions in early May, banning bank-deposit-equivalent yield on stablecoins while leaving room for rewards tied to spending. Witt said the White House convened banks and crypto firms to fashion the language, then handed it to the senators, who ran their own process and arrived at a text both sides found equally unsatisfying.

“Crypto is unhappy, banks are unhappy, but they’re both about equally unhappy,” Witt said. “And so we know that we got the right compromise.” Witt considered that the stablecoin-yield issue “is closed.”

The White House is also closing in on a deal on the conflict-of-interest provision that has divided Democrats and the administration. Witt said the negotiating posture is to accept rules that apply “across the board, from the president all the way down to the brand new intern on Capitol Hill,” but reject anything that singles out a particular office or officeholder. “We’re not going to allow targeting of anyone’s family, any one particular politician,” he said. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to close that out.”

Speaking on what happens if Clarity slips past 2026, Witt said “If we’re not setting the standard, if we’re not writing the rules, then we are going to be a rule follower, and we’re going to be following somebody else’s rulebook on this. And God forbid it’s China that’s ultimately writing those rules.”

U.S. leadership in global capital markets, he added, is one of the things that “underwrite American hegemony.”

Witt also discussed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, the stablecoin-issuer law passed last year, where rulemaking by the Treasury Department, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other agencies is closing in on a one-year July deadline.

“These are complicated issues. They require following the Administrative Procedures Act, soliciting comments. And we received a flood of comments,” Witt said. The law, he added, exemplifies “the efficient frontier of regulation: just enough to allow an industry to flourish… but not so much that you overly burden an innovation into irrelevance.”

Linea Consortium has joined Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT) as a premier member and contributed the open-source zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup stack powering Linea as a new code project called Lineth.

The contribution places Linea’s core layer-2 technology under LFDT’s open-source governance framework, rather than the control of any single company, Linea Consortium said in a release on Tuesday, positioning the move as a step toward decentralization. However, the contribution concerns governance of Linea’s open-source technology stack, not necessarily the decentralization of the Linea network itself.

Linea Consortium board director Declan Fox will join the LFDT governing board alongside representatives from companies like Consensys, Hedera, Kaleido, OpenAssets and Shielded Technologies.

Linea Consortium is a nonprofit that guides Linea’s ecosystem growth, protocol strategy and decentralization, while LFDT is the Linux Foundation’s open-source organization for blockchain, ledger, identity and related decentralized technologies.

Lineth includes Linea’s core ZK rollup components, including its execution, consensus and proof systems, as well as L1 and L2 smart contracts. Linea said the project aims to expand its maintainer base, attract enterprise and institutional users, and support long-term sustainability beyond any single company.

Cointelegraph reached out to Linea Consortium for additional information, but did not receive a response by publication.

Open-source move does not decentralize Linea network

The move gives Linea’s ZK rollup stack a foundation-governed home for maintainers, contributors and potential enterprise adopters. However, key parts of the network remain centralized, including its sequencer, prover, upgrade controls and validator participation.

In the announcement, Fox highlighted one of Ethereum’s core value propositions: credible neutrality. He said that joining LFDT and contributing Lineth are “deliberate steps in Linea’s progressive decentralization.” He added that the move gives the technology powering the L2 ecosystem a “neutral home that no single company controls.”

Related: DeFi can freeze stolen funds, but not everyone agrees it should

According to Linea’s risk disclosures, its Mainnet Beta still includes centralized components such as the sequencer, prover and Security Council, which are maintained by the team. The sequencer can also postpone transaction inclusion and reorder transactions.

Linea’s information page at L2Beat. Source: L2Beat

L2 analytics tracker L2Beat classifies Linea as a Stage 0 rollup, a category used for networks that still rely heavily on operators or other trusted actors. 

The distinction comes amid a broader Ethereum debate over the role of L2 networks. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in February that L2 progress toward Stage 2, where networks are mostly controlled by smart contracts and permissionless mechanisms rather than by the core team, had been slower and harder than expected.

Magazine: AI-driven hacks could kill DeFi — unless projects act now

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Spot bitcoin ETFs cleared crypto’s long-standing access hurdle by placing bitcoin inside brokerage and advisor accounts already used for stocks and bonds. Two and a half years in, panelists at CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference agreed that part had worked. However, they said custody concentration, modest advisor uptake and back-office plumbing all remain unresolved.

Christopher Russell, head of strategic planning and analysis at Calamos Investments, framed the access win in numbers. “The ETF solved one big problem, which was access,” he said. The roughly dozen US spot bitcoin ETFs now hold around $107 billion in combined assets, with about $20 billion in institutional hedge funds, $12.5 billion allocated by registered investment advisors, and 60% sitting in direct retail accounts.

Out of $146 trillion in advisor-managed AUM, that $12.5 billion advisor allocation “seems like a big number, but it’s a really small number,” Russell said. He pointed to what he called the 1% problem: “They can take a 1% position in a 50-60 vol asset, but they don’t want to spend 50% of their client meetings explaining why a 1% position went down 50%.”

Jean-Marie Mognetti, CEO and co-founder of CoinShares, pressed on the structural side. “Right now they are all using one custodian, which is Coinbase, creating a massive concentration risk in the market,” he said. “From a protection and diversification point of view, it’s a zero. If you were in any hedge fund, you would want to get a number of prime brokers to diversify your risk.”

Mognetti’s warning lands in a market that is no longer uniformly single-custodian, but where Coinbase remains a central piece of ETF infrastructure. Fidelity’s FBTC uses Fidelity Digital Assets, VanEck’s HODL launched with Gemini and later added Coinbase, BlackRock’s IBIT added Anchorage Digital Bank alongside Coinbase, and Morgan Stanley’s proposed bitcoin ETF names Coinbase Custody and BNY as bitcoin custodians.

Aaron Dimitri, general counsel for digital assets at Flow Traders, said ETFs have shifted bitcoin from pure buy-and-hold exposure into broader portfolio construction. “You’re not just buying and holding an asset, hoping it appreciates over time,” he said. “You’re able to build in yield products, different structured vehicles.” For institutions, Dimitri said, ETFs do not remove bitcoin’s volatility, but they make the exposure easier to package and manage. “If you’re going to go on a roller coaster, you might as well make sure that the lap belt locks down before the ride takes off,” he said.

Simeon Hyman, global investment strategist at ProShares, pushed back on treating volatility as a problem to be engineered away. “Volatility is a feature, not a bug,” he said, citing bitcoin and ether both up 20% since the start of the war in Iran. If an asset is volatile but not closely correlated with stocks and bonds, “you sprinkle a little in and you’re going to improve Sharpe ratio efficiency,” Hyman said. “But you got to be ready to tell the story.” He also argued that futures-based products retain a role: ProShares’ BITO, launched in October 2021, holds about $2 billion in assets but still trades at 35% of the daily volume of BlackRock’s IBIT, the dominant spot product.

The discussion lands against an unsettled demand backdrop. Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder with 818,334 BTC, reported a roughly $12.5 billion Q1 net loss this week. CoinDesk reported that the company signaled it could sell some bitcoin to help meet dividend obligations. Strategy’s accumulation has been widely viewed as one of the structural demand pillars of the post-ETF era.

Asked for a five-year price target, Russell predicted Bitcoin reaches $1 million within five years, “but it’s not going to be a straight line.”

Zcash (ZEC) has outperformed the broader crypto market over the past month, rising by over 125% compared to an average 15% gain for most coins.

ZEC/USD versus TOTAL crypto market cap 3o-day performance chart. Source: TradingView

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency may rally further in the coming weeks as a mix of bullish technical and fundamental catalysts converges.

Key takeaways:

• US crypto hedge fund Multicoin Capital revealed it has been buying ZEC since February.
• Robinhood will list ZEC as Zcash’s network activity has been booming in the past weeks.
• ZEC technicals are painting a 40% rally setup.

Multicoin disclosure boosts ZEC momentum

On Tuesday, Multicoin Capital, a US-based crypto hedge fund managing $2.687 billion in assets, revealed a “significant position” in ZEC, fueling speculation that institutional investors are warming up to privacy-focused digital assets again.

Its co-founder, Tushar Jain, revealed that the firm had been accumulating ZEC since February.

Jain described Zcash as “the most direct public market vehicle” for exposure to private, censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant money, framing the investment as a bet on rising demand for financial sovereignty and cypherpunk-style privacy tools.

Source: X

ZEC has rallied by over 43% in the past 24 hours, showing that traders have interpreted the Multicoin announcement as institutional validation of the privacy coin narrative.

ZEC’s flag breakout hints at further gains

From a technical perspective, Zcash has entered the breakout phase of a prevailing bull flag pattern on the weekly chart.

A bull flag forms when the price consolidates lower within a descending parallel channel after a strong uptrend. It resolves when the price breaks above the channel’s upper trendline and rises by as much as the previous uptrend’s height.

ZEC/USDT weekly chart. Source: TradingView

Applying that rule to ZEC’s chart puts its breakout target near $800. As of Wednesday, Zcash traded as high as $607, leaving the token on track to test the bull flag’s measured upside target located roughly 40% above.

Zcash’s weekly relative strength index (RSI), a momentum indicator that measures whether an asset is overbought or oversold, also suggests the rally may continue.

The RSI currently remains just below 70, a level traders typically associate with overheated market conditions, indicating ZEC may still have room to climb before buyers show signs of exhaustion.

BitMEX Co-Founder Arthur Hayes said ZEC’s target is 10% of Bitcoin’s market capitalization, a scenario that would imply a multi-trillion-dollar valuation for ZEC and prices potentially ranging between $8,000 and $10,000 per coin based on current supply levels.

Source: X

Robinhood listing, tightening ZEC supply adds tailwinds

Zcash’s breakout also has fundamental support.

ZEC has rallied alongside the broader crypto market as US–Iran peace-deal hopes improve risk appetite, mirroring patterns in early April.

Its Robinhood listing on April 23 added another tailwind by opening spot access to 25.9 million funded users, including those in stricter jurisdictions like New York.

Meanwhile, more than 30% of circulating ZEC now sits in shielded addresses, according to data resource ZecHub.WIKI. This tightening supply shows a big jump in demand for private on-chain transactions over the past year.

Zcash shielded supply weekly chart. Source: ZecHub.WIKI

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

Key takeaways:

• A sharp fifty percent drop in exchange activity and decentralized application revenue is stalling Ether price growth.
• Institutional investor interest in Ether remains under pressure as major holders like Bitmine face billions in unrealized losses. 

Ether (ETH) has failed to sustain levels above $2,400 for the past three months, consistently lagging behind most of its peers. Ether’s down 21% in 2026, and investors have expressed uncertainty about the altcoin’s inability to mirror the broader market recovery.

Total crypto market capitalization vs. ETH, USD. Source: TradingView

The total cryptocurrency market capitalization is down 11% year-to-date, suggesting specific headwinds for Ether remain in play. A decline in decentralized applications (DApps) activity partially explains this fading interest. Regardless of whether this trend has affected the industry as a whole, the shift negatively affects ETH price formation.

Ethereum DEX monthly volumes vs. DApps revenue, USD. Source: DefiLlama

Decentralized exchanges (DEX) volumes fell by 53% in six months, a sector largely responsible for Ethereum’s DApps activity. Consequently, these DApps experienced a 49% decline in revenue over the same period. While the sharp drop in memecoin prices and token launches contributed to reduced DEX appeal, other factors, including protocol hacks, also played a significant role.

Multiple hacks had a negative impact on DApp activity

The cryptocurrency industry suffered $630 million in hacks in April, with KelpDAO and Drift Protocol accounting for 82% of the losses. Blockchain security company Hacken attributed the attacks to actors linked to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Aggregate crypto industry DEX activity dropped by 47% in three months.

Blockchain DApps revenue market share. Source: DefiLlama

Some Ethereum competitors have opted for base layer scalability, providing less friction for regular users. While Ethereum remains the absolute leader in the aggregate ecosystem, including its layer-2 solutions, Solana and Hyperliquid account for a combined 42% market share in DApp revenue. Such data is even more impressive given that Ethereum’s total value locked is six times larger.

Source: X/uttam_singhk

Uttam Singh, engineer at Alchemy, noted that part of the market incorrectly judged that Ethereum’s upcoming glamstedam hard fork would put rollups “in danger.” The upcoming network upgrade should result in a threefold increase in base-layer capacity and allow clients to pre-fetch block data, thereby enabling parallel transaction execution.

Fierce blockchain competition, ETH whales underwater

Regardless of how straightforward Ethereum’s scaling plans are, most users and investors struggle to understand the need for layer-2 rollups once base-layer scalability reaches a certain threshold. There is also limited visibility on whether these changes will actually generate higher network fees, which ultimately act as a catalyst for higher staking yields.

Related: Ethereum backers pledge up to 30,000 ETH to rsETH recovery after bridge incident

Institutional investors’ perception of Ether has also been negatively impacted as Bitmine (BMNR US), the largest publicly listed holder of ETH, remains underwater in its corporate reserves. The company, led by chairman Tom Lee, spent $12.2 billion to acquire ETH, but its position is currently valued at $10.8 billion. While this does not pose an immediate sell-off risk, it reduces the asset’s institutional appeal.

None of these factors is an absolute impediment for Ether price to reach $2,800. However, declining onchain activity, fierce competition in the DApps industry, and reduced institutional appeal continue to contribute to its underperformance relative to the broader crypto market.

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand indicated at the Consensus conference in Miami that the fate of the digital asset market structure bill hinges on lawmakers meeting three practical conditions before the Senate can consider a vote. Speaking on the record, she identified consumer protection, illicit finance controls, and ethics provisions as essential elements that must be addressed prior to any action on the CLARITY Act. She suggested that if Congress can merge the market structure framework with the version already advanced by the Senate Agriculture Committee and attach robust ethics language, a vote could occur before the August recess that begins on August 10.

“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” Gillibrand said, underscoring that integrity standards are non-negotiable in a landscape where public officials’ involvement in the industry could raise conflicts of interest. “Because the truth is, 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.”

While Gillibrand did not name specific individuals, the remarks come amid renewed scrutiny of ties between public figures and crypto ventures. The broader political debate surrounds the CLARITY Act as lawmakers weigh how to regulate a fast-evolving sector, including stablecoins, DeFi platforms, and tokenized equities, within a cohesive federal framework.

Beyond the ethics question, the evolving policy conversation has touched the linkage between regulatory risk and industry structure. Last week, senators on the Senate Banking Committee announced a deal on stablecoin yield issues that could help move the market structure legislation forward, although the agreement did not address language on potential conflicts of interest among public officials. The development signals that it is possible to find bipartisan consensus on certain technical elements while leaving other concerns to future negotiations.

In the broader policy discourse, industry voices have pressed for timely progress. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse pointed to a narrow window for legislators to address the bill before it becomes entangled in electoral-year dynamics, a sentiment echoed by other executives who argue that delay raises uncertainty for infrastructure planning, product launches, and institutional compliance programs.

From the regulatory side, former Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner and Blockchain Association chief executive Summer Mersinger described the current moment as a critical juncture—the window to act could open briefly, and if missed, there is no guarantee it will reappear in the same form. Her remarks highlighted the practical implication for compliance teams and legal professionals who must map to evolving standards and potential licensing regimes.

Key takeaways

• The CLARITY Act’s path to a Senate vote depends on three conditions: consumer protection, illicit finance safeguards, and ethics provisions.
• Lawmakers aim to merge the market structure bill with the Agriculture Committee version and attach ethics language, with possible action before the August recess.
• Ethics provisions are framed as essential to prevent conflicts of interest and pay-for-play risks in crypto policymaking.
• Recent discussions on stablecoin yield could facilitate movement on the bill, though work remains on public official conflicts language.
• Industry voices view the timing as delicate: act now to avoid entrenchment during the midterm cycle and potential political headwinds.

Legislative status and the regulatory backdrop

The market structure bill, which seeks to establish a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets, has become a focal point of regulatory policy debates in Washington. As of the week described, the Senate Banking Committee had not yet rescheduled a markup after postponing it earlier in the year. The postponement followed public criticism from some industry participants who argued that the bill, in its current form, may unduly constrain innovation in areas such as decentralized finance, stablecoins, and tokenized equities.

Coinciding with legislative momentum, industry leaders have stressed the need for precise and enforceable rules that align with existing financial oversight while safeguarding innovation. The stance from Coinbase’s leadership earlier this year, which signaled reservations about certain provisions, illustrates the sensitivity around DeFi and crypto token classifications. In this context, the ethics language Gillibrand emphasized would address concerns about potential corruption risks in the legislative process and strengthen the bill’s legitimacy from a governance perspective.

On the regulatory horizon, the interplay with cross-border and domestic regimes remains a strategic consideration. In the European Union, MiCA represents a parallel trend toward centralized regulatory clarity for crypto assets and stablecoins, influencing how U.S. policymakers think about licensing, supervision, and market integrity. Although the CLARITY Act is a U.S.-centric initiative, its design and potential impact will be evaluated against international practice, especially in areas related to consumer protection, AML/KYC requirements, and orderly markets.

In public commentary, industry participants have flagged specific policy areas requiring careful calibration. Regulatory and enforcement considerations—ranging from disclosures and fiduciary duties to anti-money laundering controls and executive ethics requirements—shape what compliance teams must prepare for. The need for robust governance language is underscored by discussions about conflicts of interest and the integrity of public decision-making when it touches crypto markets.

Timing, signals, and practical implications for institutions

Timely action on the market structure bill matters for exchanges, banks, and institutional investors that seek clear, predictable rules for custody, settlement, and product structuring. A stable policy framework can reduce the risk of ad hoc enforcement actions and provide a stable basis for licensing, risk management, and operational compliance. The recent stablecoin yield discussions—though not sealing language on conflicts of interest—underscore efforts to resolve key technical issues that affect product design, liquidity management, and capital treatment for regulated entities interacting with crypto assets.

From a market perspective, traders and risk managers have tracked predictions about the bill’s prospects. Prediction-market platforms reflect divergent expectations: one platform assigns a higher probability to passage by year-end, while another assigns a more immediate likelihood of action within the August window. These signals influence how institutions calibrate internal roadmaps for product launches, governance reviews, and regulatory reporting.

Industry advocates argue that progress on the CLARITY Act could harmonize U.S. oversight with evolving international standards, reducing fragmentation across markets and jurisdictions. The emphasis on consumer protection, illicit finance controls, and ethics aligns with a growing consensus that credible crypto regulation must balance innovation with oversight, a balance that institutions require to manage risk, ensure compliance, and preserve customer trust.

Enforcement, compliance, and policy implications

Legal and compliance teams should monitor the potential alignment between the CLARITY Act and broader enforcement priorities. The proposed ethics provisions would likely shape internal governance policies, whistleblower channels, and disclosures related to political contributions, corporate sponsorships, and senior leadership ties to the industry. For banks and regulated intermediaries, the framework could inform licensing expectations, disclosure regimes, and risk-based AML/KYC programs tailored to crypto assets.

lawmakers are also weighing how to articulate standards for consumer protection—ranging from product disclosures to protections against misrepresentation and fraudulent schemes. The delicate balance between enabling new financial products and safeguarding consumers will influence how firms structure disclosures, marketing materials, and relationship-based risk controls. The discussion also intersects with anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism regimes, where clarity in definitions, reporting obligations, and enforcement mechanisms matters for integration with existing financial compliance ecosystems.

On the enforcement front, the CLARITY Act would potentially interact with actions by the SEC, the CFTC, and the DOJ as agencies delineate jurisdictional boundaries and supervisory expectations. Institutions would need to map regulatory requirements across agencies, ensuring that liquidity management, custody, and trading activities align with the evolving standard for crypto assets and digital securities. The outcome could also influence cross-border operations, especially for firms with global exposures and interconnected stablecoin initiatives.

Closing perspective

As policymakers continue to refine the bill, the central questions revolve around how to reconcile innovation, investor protection, and governance integrity within a coherent legal framework. The window for consensus appears to be narrowing as the August recess approaches and midterm dynamics intensify. Observers should watch for developments on the ethical governance provisions, the final alignment of the House and Senate market structure texts, and any forthcoming language on conflicts of interest that could determine whether the CLARITY Act advances in its current form. In practice, the outcome will influence not only regulatory clarity for crypto markets but also the risk and compliance posture of a broad set of financial institutions engaging with digital assets.