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Key takeaways

• The Ethereum Foundation has reduced its workforce by 20% following the completion of a major reorganization.
• ETH is up by 1% and is now trading above $1,650.

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has completed a broad organizational restructuring that includes reducing its workforce by approximately 20%, affecting 54 employees across multiple teams.

In a blog post published Tuesday, the Foundation said the changes conclude a months-long reorganization process tied to the implementation of its updated mandate and treasury management strategy.

Ethereum Foundation introduces new organizational structure

As part of the overhaul, the EF has reorganized its operations into five core clusters: Protocol Layer, Access Layer, User Layer, Community Layer, and Institutional Layer. Two additional clusters will oversee management and operational functions.

According to the Foundation, each cluster has been designed with specific responsibilities, accountability frameworks, and internal structures tailored to its objectives.

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“Each domain of work requires a different approach, is held accountable for different kinds of results, and has a different internal structure tailored to the work that needs to be done,” the EF stated.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed in a post on X that the workforce reduction comes as the Foundation pursues a significant spending reduction strategy.

The EF plans to lower annual spending from approximately 15% of its remaining treasury before 2026 to a long-term target of 5% after 2030. As part of this effort, the Foundation is reducing its budget by roughly 40% this year.

Buterin acknowledged the human cost of the restructuring, rejecting the notion that the layoffs were simply an efficiency exercise.

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“Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost,” Buterin wrote. “I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost.”

The Foundation said affected employees will receive severance packages and transition assistance, similar to support provided to previous departing team members.

Ethereum price forecast: ETH risks further decline below key support

Ethereum continues to face downside pressure, with liquidation data highlighting persistent weakness in market sentiment.

On the 4-hour timeframe, ETH continues to trade below its 20-day, 50-day, and 100-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMAs), located near $1,753, $1,901, and $2,064, respectively.

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The cryptocurrency also remains below a previously broken descending trendline around $1,729 and a key horizontal resistance zone near $1,741. These technical barriers suggest the broader bearish structure remains intact.

Ethereum is now approaching the important support level at $1,611 after being rejected near the convergence of the descending trendline and the 20-day EMA.

A decisive break below $1,611 could expose the next major support zone at $1,524. If selling pressure intensifies, additional downside targets emerge at $1,404 and potentially $1,155.

Unless buyers reclaim key resistance levels, Ethereum’s price action remains vulnerable to further losses in the near term.

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Australian lawyer and prominent XRP community commentator Bill Morgan has been in the news headlines as he called on Ripple to relock less of its monthly 1 billion XRP escrow release. According to Morgan, accelerating the path to full circulating supply would establish XRP as a credible hard money asset and eliminate the supply overhang that continues to weigh on sentiment.

The argument is not new in outline, but the specifics of Morgan’s framing push it into sharper territory, and Ripple’s own CTO Emeritus has already drawn a clear line on how far the company is willing to go.

With 32.74 billion XRP still locked in escrow and the current release pace stretching the full-circulation timeline to roughly nine years, the structural math gives Morgan’s argument its weight. The question the XRP community is now openly debating is not whether the overhang is real, but whether Ripple has both the incentive and the flexibility to compress that timeline.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

Ripple Supply Overhang

Ripple established its escrow system in 2017, placing 55 billion XRP into 55 separate on-ledger contracts, each releasing 1 billion XRP on the first of every month. The mechanism was designed to create a predictable, auditable supply and avoid an unannounced dump from a centralized treasury.

However, what it also created, by design, was an indefinitely extendable schedule: Ripple takes what it needs for operations and institutional distribution, then relocks the remainder into new contracts, effectively rolling the timeline forward month after month.

Morgan’s position, stated publicly on X, is direct:

The logic is three-layered. First, relocking less shortens the nine-year horizon. Second, full circulation removes the psychological shadow supply that suppresses valuation. Third, a fixed, fully-circulating crypto supply is structurally more credible for institutional participants who price assets on known fundamentals rather than unknowable future release schedules.

It is worth noting that Morgan is looking for an argument. He has previously defended the escrow mechanism itself against claims that it is a deliberate price-suppression tool. He also pointed out that XRP ran from roughly $0.50 to above $3.00 between November 2024 and January 2025 while monthly releases continued uninterrupted. His current call is for faster completion of a process he considers legitimate.

Discover: The Best Token Presales

David Schwartz Draws the Line

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has not endorsed acceleration, and he has flatly rejected the most radical version of the proposal circulating in the XRP community: burning the escrowed supply outright.

Schwartz cited Stellar’s token burn as his primary cautionary reference. He argues that supply destruction produced a short-lived market reaction rather than a durable valuation re-rating. His broader defense of the current model is that Ripple voluntarily relocks whatever XRP it does not immediately need.

On the timeline question specifically, Schwartz acknowledged the inherent uncertainty:

“It’s hard to predict because you have to make assumptions about how much XRP Ripple uses and how much gets put back into subsequent escrow months.”

Schwartz’s position is structurally consistent with how Ripple has managed the escrow since inception. The company has positioned measured, predictable distribution as a feature, not a constraint. Changing that calculus would require Ripple to decide that the reputational and institutional benefits of acceleration outweigh the risks of increased near-term sell pressure. Basically, a trade-off that the company has not yet indicated it is willing to make.

Ripple’s recent MiCA regulatory approvals in Europe reinforce the pattern: the company is building compliant infrastructure, and supply stability is part of that institutional pitch.

Don’t Miss Out on Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop on ByBit

What the Community Debate Actually Reveals About XRP Beyond the News Headlines

Beyond the news headlines, the split inside the XRP community maps cleanly onto two different theories of what XRP is supposed to be. The pro-acceleration camp, aligned with Morgan, treats the hard money narrative as the primary long-term value proposition. A fixed, fully-circulating supply that can be evaluated on demand fundamentals alone. The pro-current-pace camp treats Ripple’s controlled distribution as an asset for institutional credibility, not a liability.

A third concern runs underneath both camps: if Ripple releases more net XRP per month without a corresponding increase in demand, the additional supply hits the market as sell pressure. XRP’s current price action does not obviously signal that the market is capacity-constrained on the demand side in a way that would absorb larger monthly net releases cleanly.

Xrp (XRP)

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The token burn option, meanwhile, is effectively closed. Schwartz’s Stellar reference reflects a settled internal view that destroying escrow reserves would produce noise and would permanently eliminate the optionality Ripple currently holds.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

The post XRP News: Why Ripple’s 9-Year Clock Divides the Community appeared first on Cryptonews.

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US President Donald Trump cancelled the signing ceremony for a housing bill containing a ban on a central bank digital currency (CBDC) as he looked for Republicans in Congress to prioritize a controversial voting bill.

In a Wednesday morning Truth Social post, Trump said that the signing for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, passed by the US Senate and House of Representatives, would be cancelled “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE America Act.”

Source: Donald Trump

The housing bill, passed by the House on Tuesday, included a provision barring the US Federal Reserve from issuing or creating a CBDC “or any digital asset that is substantially similar” until the end of 2030. However, the legislation also included a carve-out for stablecoins, allowing “dollar-denominated currency that is open, permissionless and private.”

Many had expected Trump to sign the bill, aimed at tackling housing affordability, into law on Wednesday without issues. However, the president said in March that he would “not sign other bills” until the SAVE America Act was passed.

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The legislation would require voters to provide proof of US citizenship in person to register.

Related: US Senate passes housing bill with CBDC ban until 2030

Senate Republicans largely supported the housing bill, which passed the chamber in a 85-5 vote on Monday. Tim Scott, the Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, expressed support for the legislation as recently as Wednesday morning before Trump’s announcement.

Could Trump’s position also impact crypto market structure?

Given the president’s opposition to signing any bill into law other than the SAVE America Act, it’s unclear whether Trump also intends to veto or delay signing of crypto-related bills. 

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As of Wednesday, the US Senate was still waiting to potentially vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, a bill expected to change the roles of financial regulators in overseeing and enforcing digital asset laws. However, Trump said in May that he intended to codify a “future-proof digital asset market structure,” likely referring to CLARITY.

Magazine: AI is banking the unbanked in Africa… faster than crypto

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

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DeFi has long promised open and self-custodial finance. But for most users, actually using it still means juggling through wallets, dApps, bridges, pools, approvals, and risks that are very hard to understand in real time, especially for someone who’s relatively new to the industry.

CoinFello believes that the experience is ready for a major shift. With Fello 1, the company is building a self-sovereign AI agent designed to help users interact with DeFi through plain language while keeping complete control over their wallets and keys.

In the following interview with the founder, we go through why agents could become the primary interface for onchain finance, how controlled delegation can make automation a lot safer, and why liquidity provision is one of the first major frontiers for agent-powered decentralized finance.

CoinFello is positioning itself as a self-sovereign AI agent for DeFi. In simple terms, what problem are you trying to solve that wallets and dapps have not solved yet?

CoinFello is a completely new way to understand, use, and automate smart contracts.

The previous paradigm required users to create a wallet, navigate many disjointed websites, connect that wallet to a website, and then almost blindly trust that the smart contracts on that website do what the website promises they do. This made DeFi inaccessible, extremely complicated, and dangerous, and was one of the primary barriers to broader DeFi adoption.

CoinFello’s approach is to give users an agent that can interface directly with the smart contracts through a Claude-like user experience that people are familiar with. The agent isn’t just easier to use, it also opens up new frontiers of automation, where agents can act on behalf of users to accomplish virtually anything in DeFi: batch swap multiple tokens and bridge them across networks, discover advanced yield strategies, optimize existing deposits, take out a loan and automate payments, and a whole lot more. CoinFello makes doing these things super simple.

Fello 1 is described as a general-purpose DeFi agent rather than a narrowly integrated assistant. Why is general-purpose execution important, and what does it unlock for users that protocol-specific interfaces cannot?

DeFi is not one app or use case.

DeFi is an ecosystem of contracts, protocols, pools, vaults, bridges, and networks that constantly change.

Unfortunately, most of the crypto AI agent products on the market are just trading bots connected to some centralized API. If an agent only works through narrow integrations, it will always be limited to a few narrow use cases. That’s not how people use the internet (web browsers), their phones (extensible smartphones), AI agents, or even Ethereum itself. All of the great innovations were fundamentally extensible.

General-purpose execution means Fello 1 can reason about and interact with EVM-compatible smart contracts more broadly, instead of being locked into a small set of pre-built workflows. That unlocks all kinds of use cases that we ourselves never anticipate or integrate with. New pools, new protocols, and new opportunities can become accessible faster, without waiting for a dedicated front end or a code release for every specific action.

For the user, the benefit is simple: they do not need to jump between ten different interfaces to complete one DeFi strategy. They can describe what they want, review the steps, and execute across protocols from one agentic interface.

One of CoinFello’s core promises is that users can interact with DeFi through plain language while keeping custody of their wallets and private keys. How do you balance ease of use with the security expectations of self-custody?

We’ve tried to bring self-custody principles to the agentic era. This means that funds must remain in a self-custodied wallet, and agents should have guardrails enforced on them that define what funds they can access, in what ways those funds can be used, and for how long that agent has access to those funds.

With Fello 1, users keep their wallets and private keys. The agent operates through limited permissions that the user chooses to grant, and users review and approve transactions before execution. Plain language is the interface layer, not a replacement for consent. We fundamentally disagree with the approach of transferring funds to a centralized trading bot and hoping for the best.

The goal is to reduce cognitive overload without reducing user sovereignty. Fello can do the math, explain the route, surface the risks, prepare the transaction, and monitor positions, but the user remains in control of what permissions exist and what actually gets executed.

The Fello 1 launch puts a lot of emphasis on liquidity provision, including Uniswap V2, V3, and V4 positions, fee tiers, impermanent loss, and live position monitoring. Why did you choose LP management as such an important use case for the product?

Liquidity provision is one of the best examples of DeFi’s promise and its complexity. Concentrated liquidity can be a powerful yield opportunity, but it asks a lot from the user. You need to understand price ranges, ticks, fee tiers, pool selection, position sizing, impermanent loss, and when your liquidity is in or out of range.

That is exactly the kind of experience where an AI agent can create real value. Fello 1 can handle the mechanical and analytical parts: identifying LP strategies, doing the math, monitoring the position, explaining whether it is in range, showing the real return, and helping the user understand the trade-offs.

We chose LP management because it is not just a button-clicking problem. It is a decision-support problem. If we can make LPing understandable and manageable for more users while keeping them self-custodial, that is a major step toward making DeFi more mainstream.

AI agents in crypto are often associated with automation, but CoinFello says Fello 1 is not designed as an autonomous trading bot and that users still review and approve transactions. Where do you draw the line between helpful automation and too much delegation?

To be clear, we are building for automation, and we deeply believe users should be able to delegate approval for tightly defined automations to their agent. These are very complex problems to solve, so we’ve been working to expand the agent’s capabilities and the kinds of automation the user can create through the permissions and delegations we’ve been championing.

You previously led operations at MetaMask, one of the most important wallet products in crypto. What did that experience teach you about user behavior, wallet UX, and self-custody that directly shaped CoinFello?

MetaMask had a very radical vision in the early days of Ethereum. Most people at the time were building “use case wallets” with a handful of brittle integrations. MetaMask sought to do something else: create a permissionless and extensible wallet that could be used with any smart contract protocol.

We’ve brought the same radical values and vision to CoinFello that we previously used to build MetaMask. While most in the agent space are building narrow “use case bots,” our goal is different: to bring users onchain, and give them access to the entire decentralized web.

We also learned about the limitations of trying to solve the safety and user experience problems at the wallet layer. Wallets are forced to maintain endless integrations with third party protocols, and these integrations make their products slow to innovate, highly prone to bugs, and generally dangerous because the wallet still can’t understand what a smart contract *actually does.*

CoinFello is how we will solve these problems for the next wave of on-chain innovation.

CoinFello relies on a delegation model where users grant agents limited permissions that can be modified or revoked. What does a safe permission system for onchain AI agents need to look like as these tools become more powerful?

A safe permission system needs to be specific, limited, transparent, and revocable.

Users should not have to grant broad, unlimited authority over funds to an agent. Permissions should be scoped by action type, asset, protocol, amount, duration, and any other relevant rule the user cares about. The user should be able to see what permissions exist, understand what they allow, and revoke or modify them at any time.

As agents become more powerful, permission design becomes one of the most important parts of the stack. The future is not giving the AI your keys. The future is controlled delegation, where the agent can help execute within boundaries that the user defines. That is how we get the benefits of automation without sacrificing self-sovereignty.

Looking ahead, do you think the future of DeFi will still be built around users manually navigating dapps, or will agents become the primary interface for onchain finance?

I think dapps will still matter, but agents will become the primary interface for most users.

Today, DeFi still looks like the early internet in some ways. Users manually navigate different websites, learn different interfaces, and stitch together actions themselves. That works for power users, but it does not scale to broader adoption.

Agents change the interface from navigation to intent. Instead of asking users to know exactly which protocol to use and which buttons to click, they can say what they want to accomplish, compare options, understand risks, and approve execution.

The future of on-chain finance will still be open, composable, and self-custodial. But the way users access it will become much more conversational, automated, and personalized. Our view is that agents will become the execution layer that makes DeFi usable for the next wave of users.

Disclaimer: The content shared in this interview is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, investment recommendation, or endorsement of any project, protocol, or asset. The cryptocurrency space involves risk and volatility. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research and consult with qualified professionals before making any financial decisions. This interview was conducted in cooperation with CoinFello, who generously shared their time and insights. The content has been reviewed and approved for publication in mutual understanding. Minor edits have been made for clarity and readability, while preserving the substance and tone of the original conversation.

The post From Wallets to Agents: CoinFello’s Bet on the Future of DeFi (Interview) appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Andrew Cuomo will co-chair a joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, the companies disclosed Monday. The former New York governor takes the role as ICE's strategic push into crypto markets reaches its highest-profile political appointment… Read the full story at The Defiant

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CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1682.86, up 0.5% (+8.62) since 4 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Fifteen of 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: AAVE (+5.9%) and ICP (+2%).

Laggards: XLM (-1.4%) and ADA (-1.2%).

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The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

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• World expands AgentKit for verified AI agents using World ID.
• AI agents can act online on behalf of verified human users.
• System aims to prevent bots while enabling trusted automation.

World is expanding access to AgentKit, its framework designed to create human-verified AI agents and allow individuals to connect those agents to a verified World ID.

The system enables AI agents to act on behalf of users across the internet while maintaining identity verification through World’s network.

The development comes as AI agents become increasingly capable of performing online tasks such as shopping, making reservations, navigating websites, and interacting with digital services.

This growing capability has created a challenge for businesses in distinguishing between agents representing real users and automated bot networks.

AgentKit is positioned as a response to that issue by linking AI agents directly to World ID, allowing websites and applications to verify when an agent is acting on behalf of a unique human.

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The framework is designed to support task delegation while maintaining safeguards tied to identity verification and user control.

How AgentKit links AI agents to verified identity

To begin using AgentKit, individuals require a verified World ID, access to World App, and a supported AI agent, including tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Hermes, or OpenClaw.

Users connect their proof of human through World’s ToolRouter interface, generate an API key, and link their AI agent within minutes.

Once connected, the agent can interact with services that support AgentKit and perform tasks on behalf of the user.

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The system is designed to allow individuals to delegate digital tasks to AI agents while preserving controls tied to verified identity.

According to the framework description, this structure is intended to ensure that AI activity remains attributable to a real human user rather than anonymous or automated systems.

Demo shows real-world use case

The technology was recently demonstrated through a limited-edition release of 500 “Human in the Loop” hats available exclusively to verified World ID holders.

During the demonstration, AI agents discovered the drop, verified eligibility, navigated the storefront, and completed purchases on behalf of users while maintaining one-item-per-person limits tied to verified identities.

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All 500 hats were claimed by verified individuals across multiple countries, including the United States, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

The demonstration was used to show how AI agents can execute real-world transactions while preserving identity-based constraints designed to limit abuse.

The example highlighted how businesses could allow AI agents to complete tasks on behalf of users while still preventing exploitation by bot networks.

Building a trust layer for the agent economy

As more services integrate AgentKit, World aims to create what it describes as a trust layer for an emerging agent economy.

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The goal is to enable AI agents to transact and interact online while remaining accountable to the humans they represent.

The system is intended to support a growing range of use cases where AI agents operate autonomously but within a framework of verified identity and user authorization.

This includes both commercial applications and broader digital service interactions.

The World project was originally conceived by Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, and Alex Blania, and aims to provide proof of human, finance and connection for every human in the age of AI.

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The company says AgentKit is part of its broader effort to support identity verification in an environment where AI agents are becoming increasingly capable of acting independently across online platforms.

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