The US Senate moved to curb presidential war powers, advancing a resolution that could force President Trump to obtain congressional authorization before expanding military actions against Iran. The procedural measure passed 50-47, with four Republicans voting in favor, according to Reuters. The move underscores a long-running debate over who has the authority to commit U.S. forces, a dispute written into the constitutional balance between the executive and legislative branches.

The bill seeks to require congressional sign-off for any further U.S. troop deployments in or attacks on Iran, effectively challenging the administration’s unilateral discretion in a conflict that has endured for several months. While it signals legislative intent to reassert Congress’s war powers, the measure still faces substantial obstacles before becoming law. It must clear the full Senate and a Republican-led House of Representatives, and President Trump could veto the bill, potentially triggering a veto override that would demand two-thirds support in both chambers.

Key takeaways

• The Senate advanced a war-powers resolution related to Iran with a 50-47 vote; four Republicans sided with the Democrats, highlighting intraparty divisions on foreign-action authority.
• Even if approved by the Senate, the bill faces a steep climb through the Republican-controlled House and could be vetoed by the White House, with a two-thirds override unlikely without broad cross-party support.
• Supporters argue Congress should have a formal check on military engagement, while opponents warn that requiring authorization could hamper strategic responses to perceived Iran threats.
• Analysts see potential short-term crypto and risk-asset implications tied to the debate, especially if tensions de-escalate and oil prices ease; in the near term, Bitcoin traded around the mid- to upper-$70,000s.

The legal and political crossroads

At the heart of the vote is a constitutional question: who should authorize war? The measure’s sponsors frame it as a correction to what they view as an overreach by the executive branch in setting military policy. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the bill’s sponsor, has framed the issue as a test of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. On X, Kaine argued that Congress has the power to stop an “unwise conflict,” calling for the Senate to tell the President to halt the war. His message echoes calls from many lawmakers who contend that ongoing military commitments abroad should not proceed without legislative consensus.

Republican voices have cautioned against rigidity in wartime decision-making. Senator Bill Cassidy publicly voiced concerns that the administration and military leadership have left Congress insufficiently informed about the scope and aims of the operations in question, describing a lack of transparency around what has been termed an ongoing campaign in Iran.

What happens next—and why it matters for markets

Even with momentum in favor of the bill at this stage, passage through the Senate represents only part of the journey. The much larger political hurdle is the Republican-led House, where party leadership could resist moving the measure forward. A presidential veto remains a real possibility, and an override would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers—a threshold that is hard to obtain in the current partisan climate.

Beyond the political calculus, financial markets are watching the tug-of-war over war powers because it can influence risk sentiment and macro conditions. The ongoing Iran scenario has already fed macro headwinds—rising inflation, energy price volatility, and investor caution—contributing to a broader crypto market stagnation in recent months. Bitcoin and other digital assets have traded in a narrow range as traders weigh the geopolitical backdrop against the prospect of policy shifts and economic resilience.

HashKey Group senior researcher Tim Sun weighed in on the political signal this week, noting that the procedural advance “directly indicates that Trump is facing mounting domestic political pressure regarding his continued use of military force.” He suggested the move could act as a mild positive catalyst for risk assets, rather than a decisive driver, adding that the market’s attention remains anchored to macroeconomic shifts rather than a single congressional vote. If geopolitical tensions ease and oil prices retreat, Sun said, the valuation risk across risk assets could ease and support a broader crypto rebound.

In a separate assessment, Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at the Bitrue Research Institute, described the war-powers development as a bullish catalyst for crypto, potentially sparking a 6% to 10% relief rally in Bitcoin in the near term. Adziima pointed to prior episodes where de-escalation headlines quickly translated into price spikes for Bitcoin, estimating that a calmer geopolitical backdrop could relieve risk-off pressure and drive flows back into digital assets.

As of the latest notes, Bitcoin hovered around the mid- to upper-$70,000s, a level that observers see as a barometer for risk appetite in scales ranging from altcoins to large-cap tokens. The market’s sensitivity to the Iran dynamic reflects a broader pattern: crypto assets often move in relief rallies when headlines suggest reduced geopolitical risk or credible openings for economic normalization. Yet with the House and the White House still to weigh in, the immediate market trajectory remains uncertain.

Context for the current debate also includes the broader energy landscape. The conflict has been tied to shifts in energy markets—oil and gas prices can respond sharply to supply disruptions and geopolitical risk, with the Strait of Hormuz historically a critical chokepoint. Any near-term de-escalation could help temper energy-driven inflation pressures and, by extension, reduce the risk premium on high‑beta assets such as Bitcoin and altcoins.

Reuters’ reporting on the Senate vote anchors the procedural development in a concrete political process, while cryptocurrency researchers frame the potential market response in terms of risk-on sentiment and macroeconomic alignment. The unfolding narrative thus sits at the intersection of constitutional governance, U.S. foreign policy, and a volatile digital-asset market that remains highly sensitive to global risk signals.

Looking ahead, watchers should monitor whether the resolution gains traction in the Senate’s full vote and whether the House sponsors align with or resist the move. A veto scenario could still prevail, but even a protracted negotiation over war powers would shape investor expectations and could influence both traditional markets and crypto pricing in the months ahead. The next few legislative steps—and any corresponding shifts in oil prices or inflation expectations—will help determine whether crypto markets find a clearer path toward renewed risk-taking or remain tethered to ongoing macro uncertainties.

For readers tracking the implications of policy on prices and risk appetite, the key question remains: will Congress reassert its authority to check military action, and how swiftly could any resulting policy changes influence liquidity, capital flows, and the appetite for higher-risk assets like Bitcoin in the current economic climate?

Keep an eye on the coming votes and any executive responses, as markets will likely calibrate to the most immediate signals about how the U.S. intends to balance deterrence, diplomatic engagement, and domestic political dynamics in the months ahead.

Tether and Gnosis have participated in a $4.4 million seed round for Sorted Wallet as the crypto firms continue expanding stablecoin payment infrastructure across emerging markets.

According to an announcement shared by Sorted Wallet, the round included $3.4 million in equity funding led by Tether and Gnosis, alongside participation from Movement, Angel Invest Group, and several angel investors, including the founders of RWA.io. Vox Solutions also contributed $1 million in strategic support as part of the funding package.

Meta has reportedly begun cutting staff in Singapore as the company executes a plan to reduce employee numbers by 8,000 to lean more heavily on AI. 

Emails were sent out at 4 a.m. Singapore time to affected employees, and staff in the US and Europe were also expected to be notified that morning, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta’s engineering and product teams are expected to be hit hardest. 

Meta is one of several Big Tech firms cutting staff while investing heavily in AI infrastructure in an effort to streamline operations and reduce costs. An estimated 49,135 layoffs have occurred at US companies in 2026 as a result of AI integration. 

The cuts have also hit crypto firms, such as digital payments platform Block, which laid off 4,000 workers in March, while Coinbase and Crypto.com also recently cut about 700 and 180 employees, respectively. 

A memo from Meta’s head of people, Janelle Gale, seen by Bloomberg, said Meta’s “flatter structure” and “smaller teams” would enable the company to move faster than before.

“We believe this will make us more productive and make the work more rewarding,” Gale wrote. 

The people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that additional layoffs could follow later in the year.

Related: Hong Kong’s Boyaa Interactive eyes $70M crypto treasury expansion 

Earlier this month, employees at Meta widely criticized a company initiative to collect data from their devices, such as keystrokes, mouse movements and screen content, for the company to train its AI models.

Meta’s aggressive spending on AI infrastructure has also caused investor concern that it won’t pay off.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has already poured more than $100 billion into AI, and it also plans to build the world’s biggest AI facility in the US state of Louisiana, potentially valued at $200 billion.

The amount is more than the $80 billion that Meta poured into the metaverse before shifting its vision to mobile as it shut down the VR version of Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual reality social network that was intended to underpin its broader metaverse strategy.

Magazine: Crypto scammers face death, Aussie CGT makes Asian hubs attractive

GitHub said on Wednesday it is investigating unauthorized access to its internal repositories following the compromise of an employee’s device. 

“While we currently have no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories, we are closely monitoring our infrastructure for follow-on activity,” the developer platform said in a statement.

In a subsequent post, GitHub said it detected and contained a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned VS Code extension on Tuesday. “We removed the malicious extension version, isolated the endpoint, and began incident response immediately,” it added. 

GitHub is the go-to platform for developers, many of whom host their open source projects and repositories on its servers.

TeamPCP claims responsibility

Meanwhile, a hacking group called TeamPCP has reportedly claimed responsibility for the compromise and has attempted to sell the GitHub data online, claiming to have “4,000 repos of private code” related to GitHub’s main platform and internal organizations.

TeamPCP is a sophisticated, automation-heavy hacking group that turns compromised developer tools into credential-harvesting machines for financial gain, SecurityWeek reported.

TeamPCP claims responsibility on underground hacker forums. Source: Hackmanac

“If you have API keys in your code, even private repos, now is the time to double-check and change them,”  Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said. 

Related: Hackers used AI to craft zero-day attack to bypass 2FA: Google

It comes just a day after Grafana Labs, an open-source data observability company, said on Tuesday it was hit by a supply-chain attack in which malicious actors accessed its GitHub repositories and downloaded its codebase.

The attackers issued a ransom demand under threat of data disclosure, which the firm did not meet.  

This incident also came shortly after the April 28 public disclosure of a critical remote code execution vulnerability, CVE-2026-3854, that allowed authenticated users to execute arbitrary commands on GitHub’s servers.

Wiz Research, which discovered the critical flaw, reported at the time that millions of public and private repositories belonging to other users and organizations were accessible on the affected nodes.

Magazine: DeFi’s billion-dollar secret: The insiders responsible for hacks

Blockchain data platform Bubblemaps said it identified a cluster of Polymarket wallets that collectively earned $2.4 million with a 98% win rate on contracts tied to US military operations.

Nine wallets placed all their major bets just before major military developments, including the Feb. 28 attack on Iran, the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the US-Iran ceasefire agreement, Bubblemaps wrote in a Monday X post.

The accounts were all funded through centralized cryptocurrency exchanges in a tight timeframe and made some minor losing bets on Feb. 20, which likely served to “avoid attention,” according to Bubblemaps. Four of them each made around $400,000 in profit on their bets that the US would strike Iran on Feb. 28.

The investigation highlights the growing insider trading concerns tied to decentralized prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi. It aimed at curbing insider trading on prediction markets.

Source: Bubblemaps

While the data platform doesn’t have definitive proof that the accounts belonged to insiders, the onchain trail is “symptomatic of someone with an unfair informational advantage,” Nicolas Vaiman, the CEO of Bubblemaps, told Cointelegraph. He added:

“We cannot say with certainty that this was an attempt to hide, but it is suspicious that funds were routed through CEXs and third-party services before funding new Polymarket accounts, effectively covering their tracks.”

US lawmakers seek stricter regulations on war-related prediction market contracts

US lawmakers have previously proposed new laws to fight the growing insider trading concerns tied to military contracts on prediction markets.

On March 10, US Democratic Party Senator Adam Schiff introduced the DEATH BETS Act, which seeks to ban federally regulated prediction markets from listing contracts tied to war, terrorism, assassination and individual deaths.

DEATH BETS Act. Source: Schiff.senate.gov

The bill came shortly after six Polymarket traders netted $1 million by betting on the US strike against Iran.

Separately, in late March, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order to curb public servants from insider trading on prediction markets tied to political or economic events they can influence.

Related: CFTC no-action letter eases event contract reporting rules

Polymarket, Kalshi, notional volume per category, weekly. Source: Dune

Politics-related contracts are currently the third-largest category on Polymarket, accounting for 12% of notional trading volume, and the fifth-largest on Kalshi, where they account for 0.7% of weekly trading volume, according to Dune data.

Magazine: Inside a 30,000 phone bot farm stealing crypto airdrops from real users 

Banks crash. Payment platforms freeze at the worst possible moment. Trading systems lag during market spikes. Financial software has quietly become the most critical — and most unforgiving — software category in existence.

One bug costs millions. One compliance gap shuts a company down. This guide covers what financial software development actually involves, what the market looks like today, and how to build something that survives contact with reality.

The State of the Market Right Now

JPMorgan employs more technologists than many software companies have total staff. Goldman Sachs has been calling itself a tech company for years — and at this point, arguing with that framing feels pointless. The demand for software development for financial services has spread across three segments: retail banking, institutional finance, and compliance infrastructure. Each has its own rules. Each punishes bad decisions differently.

The shift isn’t just about startups disrupting banks anymore. Established players are moving too, and fast. Companies building at enterprise scale — where platforms covering financial services technology solutions span everything from core banking modernization to AI-driven analytics — face a specific kind of pressure: modernize legacy COBOL systems without taking them offline. That constraint shapes almost every architectural decision.

What’s actively being prototyped and tested right now?

• Real-time payment rails — FedNow launched in the US in 2023. Instant payments have stopped being a differentiator and started being a baseline expectation.
• Embedded finance APIs — Stripe, Plaid, and Unit are letting non-financial companies offer banking features inside their own products. The line between “fintech” and “tech company with a bank account” keeps blurring.
• Tokenized assets — JPMorgan’s Onyx platform processes short-term loan transactions on distributed ledger infrastructure. Whether blockchain becomes foundational or stays niche in finance is still genuinely open.
• Cloud-native core banking — Thought Machine’s Vault platform runs with no mainframes. That’s still unusual enough to be notable.
• Post-quantum cryptography — NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024. Long-horizon financial firms are already planning migration timelines.

What Financial Software Actually Covers

“Financial software” gets used as if it means one thing. It doesn’t.

Core Banking Platforms

Core banking systems handle transactions, accounts, and ledgers — often still running on IBM Z mainframes in large institutions. Modernizing them is genuinely one of the hardest problems in enterprise software. Temenos, FIS, and Finastra sell packaged solutions. Challenger banks like N26 and Revolut built custom. Both paths come with real costs.

Trading Systems

Low-latency trading infrastructure operates in microseconds. Firms like Virtu Financial have built reputations on near-flawless execution over long stretches — that kind of consistency comes from software precision, not luck. C++ dominates here, and in some cases FPGA programming moves logic to hardware to shave off the latency that matters.

Risk and Payments

BlackRock’s Aladdin manages risk analytics for a substantial share of global institutional assets. Building something comparable isn’t a short engagement — it’s a sustained investment in data science and infrastructure. Payments are a different beast: every card swipe triggers authorization, fraud checks, settlement, and reconciliation in under two seconds. Stripe has turned that complexity into a clean developer API. The infrastructure underneath is anything but simple.

The Technical Stack

No vague “Java is a solid choice” framing here. Here’s what actually gets used.

Languages. Java still dominates enterprise banking — after decades, it’s not going anywhere. Python runs most quant finance and ML workloads. C++ handles latency-sensitive trading. COBOL still processes a significant share of daily global commerce. Yes, in 2025. Kotlin and Swift handle mobile banking. Rust is gaining ground in payment infrastructure where memory safety is non-negotiable.

Databases. PostgreSQL and Oracle handle transactional data with ACID compliance. Time-series databases like kdb+ are standard in trading environments — the query patterns are completely different from typical relational workloads. For distributed high-throughput systems, Apache Cassandra is a common answer.

Cloud. AWS GovCloud, Azure for Financial Services, Google Cloud’s Financial Services APIs — all competing for the same contracts. Capital One’s full migration to AWS became a widely-cited case study. BBVA and Deutsche Bank followed with their own significant cloud commitments.

APIs. Modern financial software development is largely integration work. PSD2 in Europe and CDR in Australia mandated API-first architectures. Every major bank now has a developer portal. Quality varies considerably.

Compliance Is Not Optional

Most teams underestimate this work. By a lot.

• PCI DSS — Non-negotiable for anything touching card data. Certification takes months, not days.
• SOX — US public companies must maintain complete, unbroken audit trails and financial controls.
• GDPR / CCPA — Fines can reach a percentage of global annual revenue. Regulators have demonstrated willingness to use that authority.
• Basel III / IV — Capital adequacy frameworks affecting how banks model and report risk.
• MiFID II — European markets regulation requiring transaction reporting and documented best execution.
• DORA — The EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, effective January 2025, requiring demonstrable ICT risk management and resilience testing.

Building compliance in from the start costs a fraction of adding it after launch. The Equifax breach and its aftermath — a massive settlement, years of reputational damage — remains the standard cautionary example for good reason.

AI in Finance — Useful vs. Overhyped

Worth separating the two.

Fraud detection is genuinely mature. Mastercard’s Decision Intelligence scores transactions in real time using graph neural networks that weigh device data, location, merchant context, and behavior history simultaneously. The technology works and has been production-hardened for years.

Credit scoring is more contested. ML-based models can consider far more variables than traditional FICO scoring, and some lenders report meaningful improvement in default rates. Whether every vendor claim holds up to scrutiny is debatable. The directional shift toward richer models is real; the specific results vary by context.

Algorithmic trading has been a serious discipline since the late 1980s. Renaissance Technologies is the famous example — a fund with a long, remarkable track record built on statistical models and continuous retraining. Most hedge funds now use quantitative strategies to some degree.

RegTech is arguably the most underappreciated category. ComplyAdvantage, Behavox, and NICE Actimize use NLP and ML to automate AML screening and transaction monitoring. Manual compliance at modern transaction volumes simply doesn’t scale. These tools are being procured heavily.

Custom Financial Software Development — Build vs. Buy

Buy a packaged solution or build custom? The real answer depends on specifics. That said, some patterns tend to hold.

Buying makes sense when the use case is standard — expense management, simple reporting — or when speed to market matters more than differentiation. If Salesforce Financial Services Cloud covers most of what’s needed, a custom build is a difficult case to justify.

Custom financial software development makes sense when competitive advantage depends on software performance, when existing solutions can’t meet jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements, or when integration complexity exceeds what packaged products handle well. Revolut, N26, and Chime went custom from day one because no existing platform could support their product roadmap and growth pace. That decision created real complexity — and also created the product.

Common Mistakes in Software Development for Financial Services

These show up constantly — in startups, in enterprise teams, in consultancies.

Underestimating integration complexity. A new lending platform needs to connect with credit bureaus, KYC providers, payment rails, accounting systems, and regulatory reporting infrastructure — simultaneously. Every integration point is a potential failure mode. Mapping them before writing a line of code saves weeks of painful rework.

Ignoring disaster recovery. What happens when the primary database fails? How long does failover take? Financial software needs explicit RPO and RTO targets from day one. “We’ll figure it out later” is how organizations end up explaining to regulators why transactions disappeared.

Security as an afterthought. OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities appear in production financial systems more often than anyone publicly admits. SQL injection, broken authentication, insecure deserialization — not exotic attack vectors. Running penetration testing only at the end is how critical issues make it to launch.

Over-engineering early. A startup building payment infrastructure doesn’t need multi-region Kubernetes clusters on day one. Build complexity when scale genuinely demands it. Premature architecture burns runway and slows everything down.

Poor audit trail design. Every financial transaction needs a complete, immutable audit trail — not just for compliance, but for debugging production issues when real money is involved. Getting the event log structure right before launch costs far less than redesigning it after.

What’s Actually Coming

Central Bank Digital Currencies have moved from research papers to live pilots. The digital euro is in its preparation phase under the European Central Bank. China’s e-CNY has been tested across multiple cities with wide participation. When CBDCs scale, payment infrastructure will need fundamental rethinking — not incremental updates.

Real-time gross settlement keeps expanding. FedNow, Faster Payments in the UK, Brazil’s PIX — instant settlement is becoming the global baseline. Any financial software being built today should treat real-time settlement as a core requirement, not a future-state feature.

Quantum computing is a longer-term concern but already on the roadmap for firms managing data with long sensitivity horizons. Current encryption standards — RSA, ECC — are theoretically vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum hardware. NIST’s post-quantum cryptography standards are finalized. Migration planning isn’t theoretical anymore.

Final Thought

Financial software development is demanding, regulated, technically complex, and high-stakes in ways most software categories simply aren’t. The teams that get it right tend to share common traits: they understand the domain before designing the architecture, treat compliance as a first-class feature rather than a constraint, and don’t pretend good intentions substitute for good design.

The market keeps moving. New rails, new regulations, new attack surfaces. Staying current isn’t optional — it’s the job description.