Crypto World
CLARITY Act’s real obstacle: Trump’s crypto business
The CLARITY Act has the votes and the momentum to become law, having cleared the House and a key Senate committee. It is stuck anyway. The deepest reason is not crypto skepticism but a fight over the president’s own crypto empire, estimated in the billions, and whether the rules should restrain it.
Summary
- The CLARITY Act, the U.S. crypto market-structure bill, has cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee and reached the Senate calendar, yet it remains stuck.
- The deepest obstacle is not crypto skepticism but an ethics fight over President Trump’s family crypto interests, estimated at roughly $2.3 billion or more, spanning World Liberty Financial, the USD1 stablecoin, and the TRUMP memecoin.
- Democrats led by Senator Gillibrand say there is no bill without ethics language restricting officials from profiting on digital assets, and a committee amendment to that effect failed on a party-line vote.
- The White House argues that ethics limits must apply uniformly and not single out the president, and a target to sign the bill by July collapsed when the ethics talks broke down.
- With a hard deadline before the August recess and a 60-vote threshold that needs several Democratic votes, the bill’s fate now turns on whether credible ethics language can be agreed, not on crypto policy itself.
The CLARITY Act is the bill the American crypto industry has wanted for years, the one that would finally settle how digital assets are regulated in the U.S., and by the ordinary logic of legislation it should be on a path to becoming law.
It passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, cleared the Senate Banking Committee on a 15-to-9 vote, and was placed on the Senate calendar, formally eligible for a floor vote. The industry is mobilized behind it, with hundreds of companies urging passage, and analysts have spent the year handicapping when, not whether, it would be signed.
And yet it is stuck.
The reason it is stuck has surprisingly little to do with crypto policy itself, on which a workable consensus largely exists, and a great deal to do with something the bill’s authors never intended it to be about: the president’s own crypto business.
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests estimated in the billions of dollars, and the question of whether a law regulating crypto should also restrain officials who profit from it has become the obstacle that crypto policy alone never was.
This piece explains how a bill with the votes to pass got trapped by the president’s crypto empire, and why that fight is harder to resolve than any technical dispute over digital assets.
This is a politically charged subject, and the aim here is to lay out the situation factually and fairly, presenting what each side argues rather than taking a position. The dispute touches genuine disagreements about ethics, executive power, and the proper scope of a market-structure bill, and reasonable people land in different places on all of them.
What follows covers what the CLARITY Act would do, the two obstacles blocking it, the scale and nature of the president’s crypto holdings, the conflict-of-interest concerns that critics raise, the responses from the White House and its allies, why the impasse is so hard to break, and the deadline that now governs the bill’s fate.
The goal is to make a complicated and contested situation legible, not to argue for an outcome.
A bill that should pass, and cannot
Begin with the puzzle, because it is genuinely strange.
The CLARITY Act has cleared the procedural hurdles that kill most legislation. It advanced through the House with broad bipartisan support, survived markup in the Senate Banking Committee with two Democrats crossing over to join Republicans in a 15-to-9 vote, and landed on the Senate legislative calendar, meaning it is formally ready for floor consideration.
Behind it stands an unusually unified industry. Hundreds of crypto companies and organizations have publicly pressed Senate leaders to bring it to a vote, arguing that clear federal rules are needed to keep digital-asset innovation in the U.S.
By the normal measures of legislative momentum, this is a bill on track.
And yet it has not moved to a floor vote, and the window to do so is closing. The reason is not that the Senate cannot agree on how to regulate crypto.
The core architecture of the bill, which divides oversight between regulators and gives the market the legal certainty it has long wanted, commands fairly broad support.
As crypto.news previously explained in the bill explained in full, the CLARITY Act is designed to create defined lanes for digital assets rather than leave the market trapped between agencies.
The bill is stuck on two provisions that have little to do with that core architecture, and the deeper of the two has nothing to do with crypto regulation at all.
It concerns ethics, specifically whether the law should restrict government officials, up to and including the president, from profiting on the very digital assets the law would legitimize.
That question has fractured the fragile coalition the bill needs, and it has done so at the worst possible moment, against a hard deadline.
The bill that should pass cannot, because it has become entangled with the president’s personal financial interests in a way its authors did not design and cannot easily escape.
What the CLARITY Act would do
To understand what is at stake, it helps to know what the bill actually does, because the prize is substantial and explains why the industry is so eager.
The CLARITY Act creates a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets, resolving the long-running uncertainty over which regulator oversees what.
In broad terms, it grants the commodities regulator primary jurisdiction over the spot markets for digital commodities, assets that function more like commodities than securities, while leaving the securities regulator in charge of assets sold as investment contracts.
For tokens like the major cryptocurrencies, this would provide the clear legal classification the industry has sought for years, removing the cloud of uncertainty that has hung over the market and deterred some institutional participation.
The bill also creates new pathways for crypto projects to raise money and operate within defined legal boundaries, including a tailored exemption that lets certain projects raise capital from the public without the full weight of traditional securities requirements, subject to disclosure rules and caps.
The overall effect would be to bring the American crypto market inside a defined regulatory perimeter, with clear rules for who is overseen by whom, how tokens are classified, and what protections apply to consumers.
For an industry that has spent years operating amid legal ambiguity, and watching some activity move offshore as a result, this clarity is the entire point.
It is why hundreds of companies are lobbying for passage, and why supporters argue that failing to pass it would leave the U.S. behind as other jurisdictions write their own rules.
That comparison matters because how other regions wrote their rules has become part of the pressure campaign in Washington. Europe has MiCA, stablecoin issuers have the GENIUS Act framework, and the U.S. market still lacks a full digital-asset structure.
The substance of the bill, in other words, is broadly what the industry wanted. The trouble lies in the provisions attached around it.
The two obstacles
Two distinct disputes have blocked the bill from a floor vote, and it is worth distinguishing them, because they are different in kind.
The first concerns a provision, carried over from a separate piece of legislation and folded into the bill, that shields software developers who do not control customer funds from being treated as money transmitters subject to certain financial-crime obligations.
The crypto industry considers this provision essential, arguing that developers who merely write code, without ever holding anyone’s money, should not face the legal exposure of a money-transmitting business. Without this protection, builders argue the broader bill would fail to deliver the certainty they need.
Opposing it, several law-enforcement organizations and other groups have warned that the exemption is too broad and could create blind spots that sophisticated criminals exploit, making it harder to trace illicit activity.
This is a substantive policy disagreement, and it is negotiable in the ordinary way, through tighter drafting and compromise language.
The second obstacle is the one this piece focuses on, because it is deeper and far harder to resolve.
It concerns ethics, and specifically whether the law should bar senior government officials, including the president, the vice president, and members of Congress, from issuing, promoting, or profiting from digital assets while in office.
This dispute is not really about how to regulate crypto. It is about whether a crypto law should constrain the people writing and enforcing it, at a moment when the most powerful of those people has a large personal stake in the industry.
Where the developer-shield fight is a technical disagreement that careful drafting might bridge, the ethics fight runs into something structural and personal: the president’s own crypto business, and the question of whether the rules should touch it.
That is why, of the two obstacles, the ethics one has proven the more intractable, and why it, more than anything in the bill’s actual crypto provisions, now threatens to sink the whole effort.
The president’s crypto empire
To understand the ethics fight, you have to understand the scale and nature of the president’s involvement in crypto, which is unprecedented for a sitting head of state and which both sides acknowledge as a fact even as they dispute its significance.
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests that have been estimated at roughly $2.3 billion, with some broader estimates running considerably higher.
The holdings span several ventures. There is World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture the Trump family launched in 2024, in which the family holds a large ownership stake and which issues a dollar stablecoin called USD1.
There is the TRUMP memecoin, a token bearing the president’s name that trades largely on political news and has been highly volatile. And there are further crypto-adjacent ties through the family’s media company, including an arrangement involving a major exchange.
That is why the USD1 stablecoin at issue is not just another stablecoin in this debate. It sits at the intersection of crypto policy, payment regulation, and presidential financial exposure.
Several features of these holdings have drawn particular scrutiny.
The stablecoin venture received a large investment from a fund linked to a foreign government for a significant ownership stake, a transaction that routed substantial sums to entities associated with the family, and the same stablecoin was used in a multibillion-dollar transaction involving a major exchange whose founder was later pardoned by the president.
Critics point to the timing and structure of these deals as raising questions about whether regulatory and policy decisions and private financial interests have become entangled.
Supporters and the White House dispute that characterization.
What is not in dispute is the basic situation: a sitting president and his family have a large, active financial stake in the crypto industry, at the same time that the president’s administration is shaping crypto regulation and enforcement.
It is that overlap, unprecedented in modern times, that the ethics fight in the CLARITY Act is ultimately about.
The conflict at the center of the bill
The concern that critics raise is, at its core, a conflict-of-interest argument, and it is worth stating in the terms its proponents use.
The objection is that the same administration writing and enforcing crypto rules is personally exposed to those rules, which creates at least the appearance, and potentially the reality, of decisions being shaped by private financial interest rather than public good.
Ethics experts, watchdog organizations, and Democratic lawmakers have argued that a president whose personal wealth is tied to crypto ventures has an incentive to favor policies and enforcement choices that benefit those ventures.
They also argue that allowing such an arrangement to stand without guardrails sets a troubling precedent.
Some have characterized specific transactions, particularly the foreign investment in the stablecoin venture, as self-dealing, and have warned about the entanglement of a sitting president’s personal finances with assets the government regulates.
From this vantage, the logic of insisting on ethics provisions in the CLARITY Act is direct.
If the law is going to legitimize and regulate digital assets, the argument goes, it should also ensure that the officials overseeing that regulation cannot personally profit from it, precisely because the current situation shows how real the conflict can become.
Democratic senators have made this case the basis of their conditional support, with one prominent senator stating flatly that there is no version of the bill she will support without ethics language addressing it.
The concern, in this framing, is not partisan obstruction but a principled insistence that a law regulating an industry should not enrich the people enforcing it.
Whether one finds this argument compelling or overstated, it is the substance of the objection, and it is what has made the ethics provisions a condition rather than a preference for the senators whose votes the bill needs.
The White House and Republican response
The other side of the dispute deserves equal weight, because the White House and its allies have substantive responses, and the disagreement is genuine instead of one-sided.
The central counterargument, advanced by the administration’s crypto policy lead, is that ethics limits should apply uniformly to all officials and should not be written to single out the president or his family.
From this view, crafting provisions targeted at one administration is itself improper, a politicization of what should be a neutral market-structure bill, and the appropriate approach is general ethics rules applied evenly instead of bespoke language aimed at a particular person.
The White House has stated directly that the president has acted in the public interest and that there are no conflicts of interest, rejecting the premise of the critics’ case.
Republicans have added a jurisdictional argument, contending that sweeping ethics provisions restricting officials’ financial conduct fall outside the proper scope of a banking and market-structure bill, and belong, if anywhere, in dedicated ethics legislation instead of bolted onto a crypto framework.
They have also emphasized the cost of letting the ethics dispute sink the whole bill, arguing that the country needs the regulatory clarity the CLARITY Act provides and that allowing a fight over the president’s holdings to block it would harm the broader industry and cede ground to other jurisdictions.
The companies and individuals named in connection with specific transactions have, for their part, disputed the characterizations of those deals as conflicts, offering their own accounts of how and why they occurred.
The result is a real clash of principles: one side insisting that a crypto law must restrain officials who profit from crypto, the other insisting that singling out the president is improper and that the bill’s substance should not be held hostage to that fight.
Both positions have coherent logic, which is part of why the impasse has been so difficult to resolve.
Why this is so hard to break
The reason the ethics dispute has proven nearly intractable, where the technical disagreements in the bill are negotiable, is that it sits on a genuine structural conflict that compromise language struggles to dissolve.
The fault line runs straight through the coalition the bill needs.
Because passage in the Senate requires clearing a 60-vote threshold, the bill needs support from several members of the minority party, and the Democratic senators whose votes are in play have tied their support to meaningful ethics guardrails.
Meanwhile, the White House and Republican leadership have resisted provisions they see as targeting the president.
These positions are not easily reconciled, because the thing one side considers essential, language that would restrain officials including the president from profiting on crypto, is close to the thing the other side considers unacceptable, language singling out the president.
An attempt to write a provision strong enough to satisfy the senators demanding guardrails tends to be exactly the kind of provision the White House rejects, and vice versa.
The negotiations have borne this out. A committee amendment that would have barred senior officials from holding crypto business interests failed on a party-line vote, signaling that the dispute splits cleanly along partisan lines instead of admitting an easy middle.
A separate effort to craft an enforcement mechanism collapsed when it was withdrawn, leaving the central question unresolved.
Each attempt to find compromise language has run into the same wall: the gap is not really about wording but about whether the rules should reach the president’s business at all, and that is a question of principle, not phrasing.
Add the personal and political stakes, in which any provision becomes a referendum on the president’s crypto dealings, and the difficulty compounds.
This is why a bill that commands broad agreement on its actual crypto provisions cannot get to a vote.
The obstacle is not a drafting problem that a skilled negotiator can solve over a weekend. It is a structural conflict between the votes the bill needs and the interests of the administration whose cooperation it also needs.
The clock, and what comes next
All of this is now racing against a hard deadline, which is what gives the impasse its urgency.
The practical window to pass the bill runs up against the Senate’s summer recess, and the consensus among those tracking it is that if the CLARITY Act does not clear the Senate before that recess, its prospects deteriorate sharply.
Some of the bill’s own architects have suggested that a failure to act could push comprehensive crypto legislation back by years.
Negotiators have set out a compressed timeline, aiming to publish updated text and then move to floor action within weeks, but the ethics dispute has already caused a target to sign the bill earlier in the summer to collapse.
The calendar is unforgiving, with the Senate facing competing legislative demands for its limited remaining time.
The market for predictions reflects the uncertainty. Wagering on whether the bill passes this year has fallen sharply over the course of a month, from comfortable odds to roughly a coin flip, as the ethics and developer-shield disputes hardened.
Independent analysts have likewise moved toward viewing passage as genuinely uncertain instead of likely.
The path forward, if there is one, runs through some compromise on the ethics language credible enough to win the Democratic votes the bill needs without provoking the White House into withdrawing support, a needle that has so far proven extremely difficult to thread.
What happens next will be decided not by any argument over how to regulate digital assets, on which the bill is largely settled, but by whether the parties can resolve a fight about the president’s personal crypto interests under intense time pressure.
If they can, the U.S. gets its long-awaited crypto framework. If they cannot, the most consequential crypto legislation in years may die not over crypto, but over the crypto business of the man whose signature it would require.
That is the irony at the center of the whole affair, and it is the truest summary of where the CLARITY Act stands: its obstacle was never the technology. It was the president’s stake in it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the CLARITY Act?
The CLARITY Act is a U.S. crypto market-structure bill that would set up a comprehensive federal framework for digital assets. It resolves which regulator oversees what, broadly granting the commodities regulator primary jurisdiction over digital-commodity spot markets while keeping the securities regulator over assets sold as investment contracts, and it would create defined pathways for crypto projects to raise money and operate.
For the industry, it would deliver the long-sought legal clarity that removes regulatory uncertainty. It has cleared the House and the Senate Banking Committee and reached the Senate calendar, but it has not yet received a floor vote.
Why is the CLARITY Act stuck if it has the votes?
Because two provisions attached around the bill’s core have fractured the coalition it needs, and the deeper one concerns ethics instead of crypto. The core crypto framework commands fairly broad support, but the bill has stalled over a developer-protection provision that law enforcement opposes and, more intractably, over whether the law should restrict officials, including the president, from profiting on crypto. The second dispute runs into the president’s own large crypto holdings, making it a fight about personal financial interests instead of crypto policy, which is far harder to resolve through ordinary compromise.
What are the president’s crypto holdings?
President Trump and his family hold crypto interests estimated at roughly $2.3 billion, with some estimates higher. They include World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture in which the family holds a large stake and which issues the USD1 stablecoin, the TRUMP memecoin, and further crypto-adjacent ties through the family media company.
Particular scrutiny has fallen on a large investment in the stablecoin venture from a fund linked to a foreign government, and on the stablecoin’s use in a major exchange transaction. The basic fact, undisputed by both sides, is that a sitting president has a large active stake in the industry his administration regulates.
What is the conflict-of-interest concern?
Critics, including ethics experts, watchdog groups, and Democratic lawmakers, argue that the same administration writing and enforcing crypto rules is personally exposed to those rules, creating at least the appearance, and potentially the reality, of decisions shaped by private financial interest.
They contend a president whose wealth is tied to crypto has an incentive to favor policies benefiting those ventures, and that a law legitimizing digital assets should ensure officials cannot personally profit from it. Some have characterized specific transactions as self-dealing. This concern is the basis for Democratic senators conditioning their support on ethics guardrails.
How does the White House respond?
The White House and its allies argue that ethics limits should apply uniformly to all officials and not be written to single out the president, viewing targeted provisions as an improper politicization of a neutral bill. The White House has stated that the president acted in the public interest and that there are no conflicts of interest. Republicans add that sweeping ethics provisions fall outside the proper scope of a market-structure bill and belong in dedicated ethics legislation, and they warn that letting the dispute sink the bill would harm the industry and cede ground to other countries. Parties named in specific deals dispute that they were conflicts.
What happens if the CLARITY Act does not pass soon?
The practical deadline is the Senate’s summer recess. The consensus among those tracking the bill is that if it does not clear the Senate before then, its prospects deteriorate sharply, and some of the bill’s own architects have suggested failure could delay comprehensive crypto legislation by years. Passage requires a 60-vote threshold needing several Democratic votes, which are tied to ethics guardrails the White House resists. Prediction markets have moved from comfortable odds toward roughly a coin flip. If a credible compromise on the ethics language cannot be reached under time pressure, the bill may not pass this year.
This article is information, not legal, financial, or political advice. It describes a contested and fast-moving legislative situation, and presents the positions of the parties involved instead of endorsing any of them. Vote counts, holdings estimates, deadlines, and negotiations reflect reporting available as of June 26, 2026, and can change quickly. Verify current developments through primary sources.
WEMIX suspended bridges, liquidity-pool trading and several services after an attacker compromised a WEMIX$-linked contract and moved 724,198 USDC.e.
The Federal Reserve (Fed) decides on interest rates this Wednesday. Almost every economist expects no change. Traders are far less sure.
That gap matters. If the Fed surprises, stocks, bonds, oil and Bitcoin (BTC) all move fast. Bitcoin traded near $64,915 on Monday, up 0.7%.
Economists Say Hold, Traders Say Maybe Not
The Fed’s main interest rate has sat between 3.50% and 3.75% for four meetings. The FactSet consensus says it stays there.
Reuters asked 104 economists in mid-July. All 104 said hold. Fully 78 expected no change through December.
Traders tell a different story. Fed funds futures put the chance of a rate rise at 13% a week ago. By Friday it had jumped to 38%. It now sits near 36%.
“We are currently seeing the biggest indecision by the markets regarding the expected outcome for some time,” analyst The Martini Guy noted.
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The two camps are not really arguing. Economists name the single likeliest outcome. Futures price every outcome, including the unlikely ones.
The panel is also shifting. Most of those same economists now rate the chance of a hike later in 2026 as high. A month ago, most said low.
Why the doubt? Chair Kevin Warsh has stopped hinting at what comes next. The Fed will not publish new forecasts either. That leaves traders guessing ahead of this week’s central bank decisions.
“Absent, also, is so-called forward guidance, which we agreed was not well suited to the current policy conjuncture,” said Warsh.
Gregory Daco of EY-Parthenon calls a July hike unlikely. Even so, he puts the rest of the year at 60-40. Larry Meyer, a former Fed governor, expects a hold but sees Lorie Logan and Beth Hammack voting against it.
Oil and Tariffs Brought Inflation Back
Oil is the trigger. Brent crude closed at $100.69 on July 23, its first close above $100 since May 26. Prices are up over 30% this month.
Costlier oil means costlier fuel, and that lifts inflation. A weekend pause in Iran strikes has calmed things a little.
Tariffs came next. On Friday, the US added new import taxes of 10% and 12.5% on goods from 60 trading partners.
These replace tariffs the Supreme Court threw out in February, using a law that is harder to challenge.
Bond markets reacted. The 10-year Treasury yield closed Friday at 4.69%, its highest since January 2025. That is the rate the US government pays to borrow for a decade.
The two-year yield is the real tell. It ended the week at 4.33%, above the Fed’s own 3.75% ceiling. Bond traders are already braced for higher rates.
What It Means for Bitcoin
Bitcoin trades near $64,915. That is roughly 49% below its record of $126,080, set in October 2025.
When safe bonds pay 4.69%, risky bets look less appealing. That has capped Bitcoin all month.
A rate rise would be the Fed’s first since July 2023, ending three years of pauses and cuts.
A calm hold could do the opposite. Bitcoin stalled near $66,000 earlier this month, when AI-driven inflation worries capped the rally.
Warsh speaks 30 minutes after the decision. With forecasters and traders this far apart, his tone will matter more than the vote. Priced-in outcomes rarely move markets. Surprises do.
The post Fed Rate Decision Pits 104 Economists Against a 36% Hike Bet appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Bitcoin ended the first half of 2026 near $60,000 after falling about 32% since January, Binance Research reported. Its Half-Year 2026: Macro & Bitcoin report described the decline as a third consecutive quarterly loss across broader financial markets worldwide.
The weak first-half performance also extended Bitcoin’s longer-term drawdown. According to the report, the asset has fallen more than 50% from its October 2025 record high near $126,000. It has also spent 275 days below that peak, underscoring the depth and persistence of the current market downturn.
On-Chain Data Signals Market Stress
On-chain data showed 10.83 million BTC ended the period in unrealized loss, while 9.22 million units remained profitable instead. Binance Research said this marked the first loss-over-profit crossover during the current market cycle, making conditions important for analysts.
The researchers noted similar crossovers have historically appeared near major Bitcoin market bottoms before stronger recoveries eventually followed. However, they cautioned that historical patterns alone cannot confirm the current cycle will produce the same outcome.
Beyond the on-chain signals, Binance attributed Bitcoin’s weak performance mainly to broader macroeconomic conditions rather than crypto-specific developments. The report said markets shifted from liquidity-driven expectations toward economic fundamentals as monetary policy remained restrictive throughout the first half of 2026.
Expectations for interest rates also changed as hopes for aggressive cuts faded. Futures markets instead reflected an 80% probability of another Federal Reserve rate increase before December, adding pressure across financial markets.
Macro Pressures Weigh on Bitcoin
The report also said higher real yields, a stronger U.S. dollar, and tighter liquidity continued to weigh on Bitcoin. While technology stocks rebounded on optimism around artificial intelligence, BTC lagged behind many major asset classes during the same period.
A resilient U.S. economy also reduced expectations that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates soon. Binance Research said artificial intelligence was a key driver of first-quarter economic activity. At the same time, core PCE inflation rose to 3.4%, its highest level since late 2023, reinforcing concerns that price pressures remain stubborn.
That backdrop also weakened demand for crypto. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $5.4 billion in net outflows during the first half of the year.
The post Down 32% in 6 Months: What Binance Research Says About Bitcoin’s Next Move appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Storj filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday. The company says its network still works and STORJ tokens still work. Its owner made similar promises nine months ago.
Storj now wants to hand token holders a slice of the rebuilt company. But a judge must approve that. And creditors get paid first.
Why Storj Filed Chapter 11
Storj Labs filed in a federal bankruptcy court in West Virginia. The case number is 5:26-bk-00512.
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Chapter 11 is not a shutdown. It lets a company keep trading while a court helps it clear its debts.
Storj says those debts are old. They came from an earlier phase of the business. The company cannot grow its way out of them.
“The business underneath is strong and right-sized. What holds it back are legacy obligations from an earlier chapter.”
That was Kaloyan Raev, Storj’s director of software engineering. He also signed the letter to token holders, not Chief Executive Colby Winegar.
What It Means for STORJ Holders
Nothing changes for the token today, Storj says. Data still moves across tens of thousands of storage locations in more than 100 countries.
The company plans to offer holders equity in the new Storj. Equity means part-ownership. The rules for who qualifies have not been written yet.
Those rules will matter. About 143.8 million STORJ trade freely out of 425 million in total. Two-thirds of the supply sits elsewhere.
Bankruptcy also has a payment order. Creditors come before owners. Storj’s letter to token holders admits it can promise intent, not results.
The Warning Sign From October
Inveniam Capital Partners announced it was buying Storj on Oct. 22, 2025. It promised no changes to contracts, pricing, or leadership.
“We’re particularly excited to integrate the STORJ token into our ecosystem, driving greater utility and alignment across our platforms.”
That was Patrick O’Meara, Inveniam’s chairman and chief executive. STORJ traded near $0.1872 that day. It has fallen about 60% since.
A closer warning came this month. MVMT Labs filed Chapter 11 in Delaware on July 15. Its Movement (MOVE) token hit a record low of $0.00964 ten days later.
STORJ has held up so far. It trades near $0.0745, up 1.5% on the day. Volume is $5.6 million and market value is $10.7 million.
The wider sector is soft too. Storage and infrastructure tokens have lagged even as network usage grew.
Storj says it will share court dates as they land. But the fine print of the equity offer will decide what holders actually get.
The post Storj Chapter 11 Raises the Biggest Question for STORJ Token Holders appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Some analysts say Bitcoin (BTC) could reach $200,000 if the CLARITY Act becomes law. That is a very big if. Seven roadblocks now stand between the bill and a Senate vote.
The CLARITY Act would decide which US agency polices crypto. It has sat on the Senate’s to-do list since June 1 without a vote.
Why $200,000 Depends on One Bill
Start with the number. It describes one scenario, not a firm forecast. Research desk FM Intelligence sees Bitcoin between $135,000 and $200,000 over the next year. It gives that outcome one-in-four odds, and only if the bill is signed before the November midterms. Its main case is far lower at $95,000 to $130,000, per its published scenarios.
Now look at the gap. Bitcoin trades at $64,671, up 0.48% in a day, with a market value of $1.29 trillion.
Reaching $200,000 means the Bitcoin market price would need to roughly triple. It already sits about 49% below its record of $126,080, set on October 6, 2025.
Sentiment has turned this month, though. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on July 21 that Congress was on the “1-yard line.” Bitcoin jumped toward $67,000, ending roughly 15% above its early July low.
“The formal passage of the Clarity Act into law will be the ultimate catalyst, sparking a new bull market as institutional allocators race to gain exposure out of a fear of missing out,” Forbes reported, citing CK Zheng of ZX Squared Capital.
CK Zheng once ran risk for Credit Suisse. He now runs the hedge fund ZX Squared Capital.
Wall Street Has Already Priced In Some Failure
Big banks have moved the other way. Citi cut its 12-month Bitcoin target to $82,000 on July 1. That was its second cut of 2026. The bank opened the year expecting $143,000, then trimmed that to $112,000 in March.
Its target has fallen 43% this year. Each time, Citi blamed the stalled bill rather than Bitcoin.
Alex Saunders leads the bank’s macro and decentralized finance (DeFi) research. He warned in March that the window for US legislation was closing.
Standard Chartered is warmer but still modest. Geoffrey Kendrick kept its year-end target at $100,000 in mid-July, which would need a 55% climb.
7 Roadblocks in the Bill’s Way
The following roadblocks make the case for what may make the Clarity Act not get the passage analysts are wagering their passage best on.
1. The senators blocking it are not crypto opponents
Seven Democrats rejected the current text in a joint statement on July 22. They are Catherine Cortez Masto, Angela Alsobrooks, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, John Hickenlooper, Mark Warner and Raphael Warnock.
Here is the surprise. All seven voted for the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law, in June 2025.
That bill passed 68-30 with 18 Democrats behind it, Senate records show. Trump signed it into law weeks later.
Elizabeth Warren voted against it and remains opposed today. She was never a winnable vote, so she is not the obstacle.
The wall is built from proven crypto supporters.
2. Republicans cannot reach 60 without them
Senators can stall any bill by refusing to end debate. Breaking that stall takes 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, so seven must come from Democrats.
3. Trump earned $1.4 billion from crypto
Senate Banking’s minority staff reviewed the President’s financial disclosures. They found more than $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025 alone.
World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s DeFi venture, supplied $799 million. The $TRUMP meme coin added another $636 million.
4. Only Trump’s Justice Department could enforce the new rules
Republicans released fresh ethics language on July 22, and Trump agreed to it. Ranking Member Warren says it has holes.
State attorneys general could not enforce it, she argues. The rules would also expire once Trump leaves office.
“Donald Trump raked in more than $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures, and this bill does nothing to prevent him from vacuuming up his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits… This bill should be dead on arrival,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren.
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5. The real deadline is August 7
The Senate’s summer break starts August 10, its own calendar shows. Friday, August 7 is therefore the last working day before members head home.
6. September offers only 14 working days
Senators return on September 14. They leave again on October 5 to campaign for the midterms.
That leaves 14 scheduled working days. It is a thin window for a bill that took a year to negotiate.
7. The House may reject the Senate’s version
Chairman Tim Scott moved the bill through committee 15-9 on May 14. The Senate then swapped in its own text.
The House passed a different version 294-134 in July 2025. It must now accept the 300-page Senate draft text or negotiate a compromise.
The Trap at the Center of the Bill
Traders have turned optimistic quickly. On Kalshi, the odds of passage before April 2027 jumped to 52% from 33% in one week.
Yet the bull case contains a trap. Bitcoin needs the bill signed before the midterms. The unresolved fight is over how much the President may keep earning from crypto.
Passing it would hand Trump a win weeks before voters decide control of Congress. Blocking it costs Democrats little, since the hurdles facing the bill run out the clock anyway.
Seven senators who already backed crypto once must decide whether this version is worth the price.
The post Analysts See Bitcoin at $200,000 on CLARITY Act Passage, But 7 Roadblocks Remain appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, says it plans to roll out cryptocurrency trading infrastructure by Dec. 1, including a “digital depository” designed to record customers’ crypto ownership and handle transactions largely outside the public blockchain.
Interfax reported that the depository will track rights in clients’ cryptocurrency positions and process most transfers off-chain, while Sberbank will also run active wallets for deposits, withdrawals, and client-initiated transfers.
Key takeaways
- Sberbank’s scheduled Dec. 1 rollout would add a regulated-style custody and settlement layer, using a digital depository to record ownership and process transactions off-chain.
- Russia’s crypto market framework is progressing toward an effective date of Sept. 1, 2026, defining regulated participant categories and expanding central bank oversight.
- Regulatory preparation is unfolding alongside intensifying EU and UK sanctions affecting crypto-asset service providers linked to Russia-related activity.
- Investors and market participants should watch how Russia’s central bank sets licensing rules and eligibility for which assets can be offered through intermediaries.
Sberbank’s digital depository: custody and off-chain settlement
According to Interfax, the digital depository will serve as the core component of Sberbank’s planned infrastructure. It is intended to maintain records of customers’ cryptocurrency rights and to account for transactions outside the main blockchain.
The state-affiliated press service quoted Alexander Vedyakhin, Sberbank’s first deputy chairman of the management board, explaining that the depository would also support transfers requested through “active wallets.” In other words, customers’ interactions—depositing, withdrawing, and moving crypto via the bank—would be handled through a banking-operated system that mirrors custody and payment workflows more than traditional on-chain exchange mechanics.
The practical implication is that, if implemented as described, Sberbank could reduce reliance on direct peer-to-peer blockchain settlement for everyday client movements, instead concentrating transaction processing and ownership accounting inside the bank’s infrastructure.
Russia’s regulated crypto framework heads toward 2026
The Sberbank announcement arrives as Russia’s legislators have advanced the country’s first comprehensive crypto market framework. Earlier in the month, lawmakers completed final readings on a bill intended to bring crypto trading, custody, and settlement into a regulated financial system.
Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted that the bill would grant the Bank of Russia broad oversight of the regulated market. That oversight would include determining which crypto assets may be offered via licensed intermediaries and issuing implementing regulations.
Cointelegraph’s reporting also highlighted that the central bank has established liquidity thresholds for participating in the regulated market. Those thresholds include an average market capitalization above 5 trillion rubles (about $64 billion) and an average daily volume above 1 trillion rubles (about $12.8 billion) over a two-year period.
Once the framework takes effect, it establishes five categories of regulated market participants: crypto exchanges, brokers, asset managers, custodians, and exchange service providers. The framework is set to define what market participants can do—such as buying, selling, holding, and exchanging crypto assets—as of the effective date, Sept. 1, 2026.
Infrastructure rollout meets tightening sanctions environment
While Russia builds out domestic infrastructure, external compliance pressure continues to rise. The move toward a working crypto system inside Russia is unfolding as the European Union expands sanctions targeting Russia amid its war on Ukraine.
Last week, the EU listed cryptocurrency exchange HTX (formerly Huobi Global) among sanctioned entities. In a Thursday decision, the European Council amended earlier measures “in view of Russia’s actions destabilizing the situation in Ukraine,” adding HTX to a list of 18 entities “providing crypto-assets services or payment services established outside of the Union that are significantly frustrating the purpose of the prohibitions” against Russia.
Earlier, Cointelegraph reported that EU officials said they would prohibit Belarusian nationals and residents from owning, controlling, or managing crypto exchanges and digital asset service providers, aligning the approach with the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) framework.
The sanctions on HTX were not limited to the EU. The UK government imposed similar measures in May, stating there were “reasonable grounds to suspect” HTX supported Russia’s government by using financial services and funds facilitated by sanctioned entities.
For market participants, the key tension is that Russia is tightening domestic regulation while many foreign-facing crypto service providers remain exposed to sanction risks and compliance constraints. That gap can shape where liquidity flows, which counterparties can operate with certain clients, and how banks and exchanges structure their services.
What to watch next: licensing mechanics and depository operations
Sberbank’s planned digital depository—alongside the broader Russia framework set for Sept. 1, 2026—puts the spotlight on implementation details. Readers should watch how the Bank of Russia operationalizes licensing requirements, how asset eligibility is defined under the liquidity thresholds, and whether bank-operated off-chain custody and transfer accounting becomes a model for other regulated intermediaries.
Outside Russia, the sanctions trajectory suggests that cross-border partnerships and access to international payment rails may remain a moving target for crypto businesses tied to the region.
It was less than a year ago when the Ethereum validator exit queue had stretched for 45 days as millions of tokens waited to be unlocked from staking.
Today, that queue has completely emptied out, while the number of ETH actually staked continues to grow to a new record.
No One Wants to Unstake ETH
Current data from ValidatorQueue shows that there are zero ETH waiting to be unstaked from the network. This means that if anyone decides to unstake their altcoin holdings, they can do so immediately, subject only to the protocol’s normal withdrawal process.
This is a significant turnaround from Q3 last year, when the exit queue had swelled to roughly 2.6 million coins. Validators were forced to wait up to 45 days before they could withdraw their holdings. At the time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin defended the extensive period, arguing that it’s an important element of the network’s defense.
The narrative has completely flipped now. ValidatorQueue shows that over 2.5 million ETH is currently waiting to enter staking, translating into an estimated activation delay of nearly 44 days. Investors are willing to wait for a month and a half just to begin earning staking rewards on their ETH holdings.
This shifted imbalance suggests that investors are confident in Ethereum’s long-term outlook to remain strong despite the year-to-date price retracement. It also removes one of the most significant concerns from last year – that millions of staked ETH could suddenly flood exchanges if validators decide to cash out.
Record ETH Is Locked
The broader staking picture has also continued improving as the total number of active validators securing the network has neared 900,000. Almost 41 million ETH is currently staked, which is equivalent to roughly 33.6% of the entire circulating supply. This is the highest percentage in the network’s history, and it means that every one out of three ETH is locked in staking rather than sitting on exchanges or actively circulating.
Tom Lee’s Bitmine remains a leader in this field, having staked over 4.9 million tokens through its institutional platform MAVAN.
Although staked ETH is not permanently removed from supply, it is generally considered less liquid because validators must go through Ethereum’s withdrawal process before they receive access to those holdings.
However, Merlijn The Trader reported a rather intriguing and unexpected twist. The record amount of staked ETH comes even as staking rewards are down to 2.62% per year from 3.05% and issuance has increased from 0.757% to 0.842%.
The post Nobody Wants to Unstake Ethereum Anymore: Here’s Why It’s a Big Deal appeared first on CryptoPotato.
People shared private chats with Claude. Then strangers found those Claude chats indexed by Google, wallet details and all.
The chats also held access keys, CVs and company files. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, had not addressed the matter as of this writing.
Claude Chats Indexed by Google, Explained
A Reddit thread over the weekend showed the problem. One simple search brought up page after page of shared Claude chats.
People in the thread blamed a missing “noindex” tag. That tag tells Google to hide a page. The real cause looks different. Anthropic’s robots.txt file tells search engines to skip its share pages.
Here is the catch. Google will not open a blocked page. So it never sees the hide tag inside.
Picture a locked door with a note taped behind it. Nobody gets in. Nobody reads the note either.
Google can still show the web address. Other sites link to it, so Google knows it exists. Google just cannot see what sits on the page. Its own guide spells this out.
That fits the screenshots going round on X. Under each Claude link, Google said “No information is available for this page.” Bing showed a similar line.
So the chats never appeared in search previews. But anyone who spotted a link could click it and read the lot.
What the Share Button Really Does
Claude chats are private by default. That changes only when a user clicks Share.
Share builds a public web page. It holds every message sent up to that moment.
Two things stay out, according to Anthropic’s own help pages. Uploaded files are not included. Nor is raw data pulled in by connected tools.
Team and Enterprise accounts cannot share in public at all. This one lands on free, Pro and Max users.
Old links sit under Settings, Privacy, then Shared chats. Click Unshare to kill one.
Why Crypto Users Should Care
Developers flagged it, noting that wallet details and login credentials sat among the results, with some allegedly being able to read strangers’ chats through Brave Search.
For crypto, the stakes differ. A leaked password can be changed. A leaked private key cannot, as BeInCrypto has shown in past private key leak losses.
Small wallets are already the main target. Chainalysis counted 158,000 personal wallet hacks in 2025. Those hit 80,000 people and cost $713 million.
The 2022 figure was 54,000. None of it is tied to AI chats. It simply shows where thieves now spend their time.
More traders also connect AI to wallets to move funds and check code. Researchers have flagged tools that could expose wallet seed phrases as well.
One caution belongs here. Nobody has confirmed a seed phrase or a working key in the indexed chats. Nobody has reported stolen funds either.
Some developers pushed back too. Those pages were public by choice, they argued.
What Happens Next
The pages have gone from search. They have not gone away. Anyone with a saved link can still open the chat. Only the owner can stop that, by unsharing.
This has happened before. Google indexed just under 600 Claude chats in September 2025, as Forbes reported. OpenAI had dropped its own public sharing option a month earlier. It now faces a ChatGPT data sharing lawsuit.
A clean fix exists. Let Google open the share pages, then add the hide tag there.
Whether Anthropic does it will decide if this happens a third time.
The post People Found Crypto Wallet Data in Claude Chats Indexed by Google appeared first on BeInCrypto.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has issued another warning to prediction market operators, urging them to ensure that contract “self-certifications” are detailed and product-specific when event contracts cover a wide range of outcomes.
In an advisory published Friday, the CFTC said that—despite ongoing policy discussions and proposed rulemaking for prediction markets—operators may still certify certain event contracts as compliant with the Commodity Exchange Act and applicable CFTC regulations under the existing self-certification framework, so long as they follow the statutory requirements.
Key takeaways
- The CFTC warned that platforms should not use broad, template-style self-certifications for events contracts that cover many permutations.
- According to the agency, “self-certified” submissions must include the terms and conditions for each proposed variation and a concise explanation of compliance for the product as structured.
- The latest advisory echoes a prior CFTC warning earlier this year about overly generalized filings.
- The guidance arrives shortly before the CFTC’s July 27 deadline for comments on proposed rule amendments tied to public interest determinations for certain event contracts.
Why the CFTC is pushing back on template certifications
The CFTC’s Friday notice focused on how operators describe and certify event contracts under the agency’s jurisdiction. The regulator highlighted concerns with the number of instances where platforms have “self-certified” event contracts without providing sufficient detail for each version of the product.
In particular, the CFTC criticized submissions that do not include, for each proposed permutation of the contract, the terms and conditions and a concise explanation and analysis addressing compliance with respect to the product’s terms, the underlying commodity, and the product’s regulatory compliance.
As the CFTC put it in its July 24 announcement, the guidance “reiterates that broad, template-style certifications should not be submitted.” The agency framed this as a compliance issue rather than a change to the underlying legal concept of self-certification.
A repeat warning earlier this year
This is the second time in 2026 that the CFTC has flagged the same type of problem. In March, the Commission issued an earlier warning about submissions that were “overly generalized,” again indicating that template-level descriptions are not adequate when contracts are structured to cover a broad range of event outcomes.
By issuing a follow-up advisory in July, the CFTC effectively signaled that its concerns are ongoing and that it expects operators to make practical adjustments to how they document certifications—especially for contracts with multiple permutations rather than a single, narrowly defined instrument.
The practical takeaway for platforms is straightforward: if an operator is certifying a wide slate of event outcomes under one certification approach, the filing must still be organized in a way that maps to each contract variation and explains how the design fits regulatory requirements.
Advisory timing ahead of public interest rulemaking
The advisory landed just days before the July 27 deadline for submitting comments on the CFTC’s proposed rule amendments related to public interest determinations for certain event contracts that fall under the Commodity Exchange Act’s enumerated activities.
While the Friday guidance largely addresses self-certification behavior, the timing matters because it underscores that multiple regulatory strands for prediction markets are moving at once: day-to-day product certification practices, and longer-term rules for determining when specific types of event contracts should be evaluated or restricted on public interest grounds.
The CFTC has proposed amendments that outline how it determines whether certain event contracts are contrary to the public interest. In the agency’s proposal, it would apply a three-step analytical framework to evaluate contracts, including those involving activities such as terrorism or assassination, as well as gaming-related considerations tied to the enumerated activities listed in the Commodity Exchange Act.
If those proposed amendments are adopted, the CFTC said they would reshape parts of the regulatory landscape for prediction markets by clarifying the evaluation method used for specific contract types. Legal analysis cited in the source notes that the proposal could represent a meaningful shift in how prediction markets are assessed from a public interest standpoint.
What operators and traders should watch next
For prediction market operators, the CFTC’s warning increases pressure to ensure certification workflows produce filings that are not only legally sufficient but also detailed enough to match each contract permutation and the underlying product structure. Investors and traders should watch for how platforms revise their certification documents—and whether the CFTC’s public interest rule amendments, due to be shaped by the July 27 comment process, later alter the types of event contracts that can be listed or how they are evaluated for regulatory compatibility.
The S&P 500 rose 8.28% this year. However, ten of its own stocks lost more than 40%.
Both things are true at once. Investors are paying almost anything for AI. They are dumping whatever they think AI will kill.
AI Fear Crushed Software and Consulting Stocks
The damage is concentrated. Software, consulting and advertising names fill the bottom of the Slickcharts list.
It started in February. Anthropic released a new AI model. Enterprise software stocks sold off hard. Traders called it the SaaS-pocalypse.
Intuit (INTU) is the clearest victim, down 55.27%. It owns TurboTax, which brings in about a quarter of company revenue and profit.
Then cheap AI tax tools arrived. Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges cut her price target in June to $276, down from $519.
Intuit moved fast. It cut 17% of staff, roughly 3,000 jobs. It also lowered its TurboTax forecast.
The company is now worth about $88 billion, Forbes reported. A year earlier it was worth more than $219 billion.
Accenture (ACN) tells a similar story, down 45.21%. Clients are spending on AI instead of consultants.
New client orders slipped to $19.3 billion from $19.7 billion. Accenture cut its sales growth forecast to between 3% and 4%. The stock fell almost 18% in one day.
Cognizant (CTSH), Gartner (IT) and The Trade Desk (TTD) each lost 44% to 55%. All three sell work that AI can copy.
But the Two Biggest Losers Had Nothing to do with AI
Here is the twist. The two worst stocks fell for old-fashioned reasons.
CoStar Group (CSGP) is down 58.86%, the weakest in the index. Its problem is spending, not AI.
CoStar owns Homes.com, a property listings site. In January it said the site will not cover its own costs until 2029. Profit is not expected until 2030.
The core business is fine. Revenue jumped 23% to $897 million last quarter. Profit was just $3 million.
Investors lost patience. In February, hedge fund D.E. Shaw told CoStar to quit or shrink Homes.com. It said the move could unlock more than $10 billion. CoStar called the campaign “activism malpractice.”
Shareholders backed the board in June. Nasdaq had already dropped the stock from its Nasdaq-100 index in May.
Boston Scientific (BSX) is down 53.59%. It simply grew slower than promised.
In February it expected sales to grow 10% to 11%. By April it cut that to between 6.5% and 8%.
A rival explains why. Medtronic said its heart device sales rose 124% in the United States. It took “an additional 8 points of U.S. share.”
Then bad news piled up. Boston Scientific recalled its Accolade pacemakers. Regulators tied the fault to four deaths and 2,557 serious injuries. It also agreed to buy Penumbra for $14.5 billion.
Where the Money Went Instead
Chip and memory makers took it. Sandisk (SNDK) is up 505.17% this year. Dell Technologies (DELL) rose 247.55%. Micron Technology (MU) gained 222.68%.
Small investors piled in too, feeding the AI capex boom through chip funds. A narrow group of winners now drives the whole index, as data on AI stocks driving gains shows.
Everything else got punished for any slip. Expensive stocks fell hardest when forecasts came down, a danger flagged in recent earnings bubble warnings.
CoStar and Boston Scientific both report results this week. Those numbers will show whether investors were right or just impatient.
The post 10 Stocks Lost Over 40% in 2026 as Investors Dumped Everything AI Might Kill appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Heavily pregnant mother-to-be, 21, is kidnapped, killed and has her unborn baby ripped from her
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