Listed cryptocurrency firm Exodus Movement (EXOD) is suing W3C, the parent company of crypto card and payments specialists Baanx and Monovate, and its chief executive, Garth Howat, to complete its $175 million acquisition of W3C, agreed in November of last year.

A lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery seeks to compel Howat to comply with obligations under the November 24, 2025 Stock Purchase Agreement.

Howat and W3C accepted $80 million worth of loans from Exodus upon signing the deal, with $10 million given to Howat personally, who then declared that they did not need to repay these loans, according to the lawsuit.

“Defendants Garth Howat and W3C are engaged in a blatant, reckless, and improper campaign to escape closing a transaction for the sale of W3C to Exodus that they had promised to complete in a binding agreement,” the lawsuit states.

“They have attempted to pilfer millions of dollars from one of their own subsidiaries. They have falsely backdated documents filed with government authorities. They have purported to summarily dismiss entire boards of directors, as well as the CEO and CFO of their key operating entity, and replace them with lackeys of their choosing, despite being precluded from doing so by the binding agreement,” it said.

Howat did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

W3C companies Baanx and Monovate were behind the Crypto Life digital asset cards business that worked with the likes of Mastercard and MetaMask.

JP Richardson, CEO and Co-founder of Exodus commented, “We have a binding agreement with W3C and expect it to be fully honored. We’re confident in the path forward and anticipate a swift resolution.”

TLDR

• The American Bankers Association disputed the White House analysis on stablecoin risks.
• Bankers said policymakers must study a market where stablecoin yield remains allowed.
• Lawmakers drafted a compromise to restrict yield-like rewards on stablecoins.
• The Senate Banking Committee has not scheduled a hearing on the bill.
• Senator Cynthia Lummis called for urgent action to advance the legislation.

U.S. banking leaders have challenged a White House report that downplayed risks from stablecoins. They argue that stablecoin yield could draw deposits away from traditional banks. The dispute has stalled the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in the Senate.

Bankers Dispute White House Findings on Stablecoin Yield

The American Bankers Association rejected a recent Council of Economic Advisers report. The group said the report examined the wrong policy scenario. It argued that economists should have studied a market where stablecoin yield remains permitted.

ABA economists wrote, “The CEA paper minimizes the core risk by starting from the wrong question.” They said a ban on yield for payment stablecoins would protect insured deposits. They also said such a rule would support stablecoins as payment tools rather than deposit substitutes.

Bankers warned that allowing yield could speed deposit migration. They said returns from stablecoins may exceed bank interest rates. They argued that customers would move funds to chase higher rewards.

The ABA estimated that stablecoin markets could grow from $300 billion to $2 trillion. It said yield would act as the main driver of that expansion. It added that growth at that scale would reshape deposit flows.

Senate Negotiations Stall Over Crypto Bill

Lawmakers have struggled to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. The bill seeks to set rules for U.S. crypto markets. However, disagreements over stablecoin yield have delayed committee action.

Senators from both parties considered bankers’ concerns about deposit flight. They discussed how depositors fund lending activities. They then drafted a compromise to limit certain reward structures.

The compromise would ban yield on holdings that resemble deposit accounts. It would allow activity-based rewards similar to credit card programs. Still, banks have not publicly endorsed the proposal.

Senator Cynthia Lummis urged action on the social media platform X. She wrote, “America needs Clarity.” She also said the time to move the bill forward is “now or never.”

The Senate Banking Committee has not scheduled a hearing. Lawmaker advocates had expected a session before the month’s end. As of this week, no official date appears on the calendar.

Bank representatives have kept a lower public profile. However, they continue to circulate policy papers and letters. They argue that early safeguards would limit systemic shifts.

The White House economists had said banks face limited risk. They examined a scenario where Congress bans yield. Bankers countered that lawmakers must assess a no-ban environment.

The Aave DAO on Sunday approved the first binding component of the “Aave Will Win” framework, which founder Stani Kulechov calls “the most important proposal in Aave’s history,” directing 100% of revenue from all Aave-branded products to the DAO treasury and consolidating economic rights under the AAVE token.

The vote closed with roughly 75% support, a significantly stronger result than the initial Temp Check in early March, which narrowly cleared amid concerns that Aave Labs-linked addresses had tipped the balance.

The approved package includes a $25 million stablecoin grant from the DAO’s Collector Contract, split between an immediate $5 million allowance and streamed payments over six and 12 months, plus 75,000 AAVE tokens vesting linearly over 48 months from the Ecosystem Reserve, double the timeline outlined in the original temp check.

In exchange, Aave Labs commits to routing all revenue from Aave Pro, the Aave App, Horizon, Aave Kit, and swaps on aave.com to the DAO treasury, a stream that Kulechov said is already generating $10 to $20 million on top of protocol revenue, which hit $140 million in 2025.

“If you own AAVE, you own not just the economic rights of the protocol, but the brand, the users, and the integrations,” Kulechov wrote on X, laying out an ambitious multi-year roadmap spanning consumer products, fintech integrations, and regulatory licensing.

The proposal resolves a governance crisis that erupted in December when a delegate discovered that Aave Labs had been redirecting roughly $200,000 per week in interface fees, previously flowing to the DAO, to itself via a CowSwap integration. That controversy spiraled into a broader confrontation over tokenholder rights, brand ownership, and the power balance between Labs and the DAO.

The fallout was severe. BGD Labs, one of the core teams working on Aave V3, announced its departure in February. The Aave Chan Initiative followed in early March. And last week, risk management firm Chaos Labs became the third major contributor to exit.

The AAVE token has lost roughly 75% of its value since its August 2025 high near $356, though it rallied approximately 5% following the vote to trade near $95.

The vote comes just two weeks after Aave V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet, introducing a hub-and-spoke architecture that allows independent lending markets to share liquidity through a unified system. The framework formally ratifies V4 as the protocol’s long-term technical foundation.

Under the new framework, Kulechov outlined a zero-tolerance policy on “value leakage,” requiring that all service providers build exclusively for Aave with measurable performance goals.

Aave is DeFi’s largest lending protocol with roughly $25 billion in total value locked across multiple chains.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

Kraken’s Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco has revealed that the crypto exchange is being extorted by criminals who are threatening to leak videos of client data. 

Percoco shared the news on X today, detailing how it identified two instances of its staff accessing its client systems and leaking them online. 

He claims that in 2025, the exchange discovered one of its support staff had leaked client data after somebody tipped the firm off about footage circulating on criminal forums. 

Read more: Hyperbridge exploited less than two weeks after April Fools’ day hack prank

In this instance, Percoco says the firm was able to revoke the staff member’s access and enact additional security controls. 

Percoco says the firm has since learned of another more “recent” breach, and as before, it terminated the individual’s access to company systems. 

He claims that Kraken then received extortion demands.

“The criminals threatened to distribute materials from both the February 2025 incident and the recent incident to media outlets and on social media if we did not comply. We will not pay these criminals,” he said.

Clients included in the leaks were informed, and Percoco said it only affected “approximately 2,000 in total (0.02% of clients).”

Tom Duff Gordon, the vice president of international policy at U.S.-listed cryptocurrency platform Coinbase (COIN), has left the firm for pastures green.

Duff Gordon, who had been with Coinbase for close to 4 years, left the exchange to join OpenAI as head of EMEA Policy, a Coinbase spokesperson said via email.

Duff Gordon had previously spent 8.5 years working as a banker at Credit Suisse. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An expert on crypto regulations, Duff Gordon recently pointed out that U.K. banks are blocking millions of customers from accessing legal and compliant services, by failing to distinguish between Financial Conduct Authority-registered firms with low fraud rates and higher-risk operators.

The White House’s main crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, said that work is still being done to lock in the compromise that he thinks will move the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act forward in the U.S. Senate, though he said several other points are also being worked out behind the scenes.

In an interview on CoinDesk TV Monday, the executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets suggested Monday that the common ground that key senators from both parties said they’d secured on stablecoin yield seems to be intact.”We’re hopeful that the compromise that has been reached will be durable and will hold,” Witt said. “Solving that was a must-have before we could get onto the other outstanding issues,” which he said he’s now pivoted to, though some of the issues have already been resolved.

Apart from the question of yield on stablecoins, over which bankers had successfully convinced some in the Senate that their deposit base could be in peril, the Clarity Act had a number of other potential hangups. Among those have been the illicit financial protections in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, and a request from Democrats that senior government officials (most pointedly, President Donald Trump) be barred from profiting off of the crypto sector.

Though Witt wouldn’t identify the topics that have been settled in the ongoing talks, he said that the negotiations “made considerable progress in the background” while the yield argument between banks and crypto firms got most of the attention.

“We’re very close to closing them out,” he said. “All of these issues felt intractable and unsolvable at one point in time. So the fact that we’ve been able to close out a lot of them gives me confidence that we can close out these other ones, too.”

The Clarity Act would need a markup hearing in the Senate Banking Committee before it can be advanced toward a final Senate vote. It had been close to such a hearing at the beginning of the year, but the bank lobbyists raised objections to stablecoin yield that delayed the process.

Last week, White House economists issued a report that downplayed the threats the banking sector contended are posed by giving stablecoin holders a return that resembles interest from a bank account. On Monday, the American Bankers Association answered back, saying the White House argument was flawed. Witt said the view of bankers is wide-ranging, depending on how close they are to the technology.

“They’re grappling with it,” he said. “These are all important issues to their members.

And, you know, some of them are going to view stablecoins more positively. Some are going to be a little bit more threatened by them.”

Read More: Trump’s crypto adviser rejects Jamie Dimon on treating yield-bearing stablecoins like banks

The bitcoin price prediction just hit a turning point. BTC posted back to back quarterly losses for the first time since 2022, dropping 23% from its January price of $87,500, but April has closed green 9 out of 13 times since 2013 with a 69% win rate per 24/7 Wall St.

The pattern is clear: BTC falls hard then bounces harder. While that recovery builds over months from a $1.3 trillion cap, the wallets chasing the biggest return are not waiting on BTC.

They are filling Pepeto because a working exchange, a confirmed Binance listing, and $8.9 million in committed capital tell them the setup is already in place.

Bitcoin Price Prediction Shifts as April Win Rate Meets Quarterly Reset

BTC lost 23% in Q1 after falling from $87,500, and Q4 2025 also closed red, marking the first back to back quarterly losses since 2022 per 24/7 Wall St.

But April’s 69% win rate is one of BTC’s strongest months on record, and CME FedWatch shows 98% expect the Fed to hold at the April 28 meeting per 24/7 Wall St.

When BTC falls to levels that historically trigger rebounds and the Fed removes the threat of more rate hikes, the bitcoin price prediction shifts from fear to timing.

BTC at $71,140 and Pepeto at $8.9M: Where the Pattern Repeats

Pepeto: The Same Pattern That Made Every Early Crypto Fortune

What if you could go back and buy BTC at $100? Or catch BNB at $0.15? Or enter Pepe before $11 billion? Every one of those followed the same pattern: a real product, early fear, and a crowd that showed up late. Pepeto is following that exact pattern right now, except this time you are not late.

The exchange is already live. PepetoSwap handles every trade at zero cost so your gains stay whole, the bridge sends your assets between ETH, BNB, and Solana chains for free, and the scanner catches dangerous contracts before your money goes anywhere near them.

The mind behind the original Pepe, the meme token that hit $11 billion on nothing but hype and 420 trillion supply, built Pepeto with real tools and a Binance listing already confirmed. SolidProof audited every contract with results on chain for anyone to check. More than $8.9 million flowed in while the market sat in fear, and that is the tell. The people inside are not waiting and hoping. They already see where this goes. Staking pays 185% APY, growing your position every day before listing day arrives.

At $0.0000001862 per token, analysts project 100x to 300x once the Binance listing opens trading. Let those numbers sink in. $750 at 100x becomes $75,000. At 300x that same $750 becomes $225,000. How often does a setup like this land in front of you with a working exchange, a clean audit, and a confirmed listing all at less than a penny? The presale is filling fast and the listing will end this price for good.

Bitcoin Price Prediction: Levels, Targets, and What the Quarterly Reset Means

BTC trades near $71,140 with a $1.42 trillion cap, down 43% from its October 2025 all time high near $126,000 per CoinMarketCap.

The $75,000 level is the key resistance, and a clean break with volume opens the path toward $85,000 by summer.

Standard Chartered targets $120,000 by year end, and the CLARITY Act markup in late April is the next catalyst. Even the bull case at $120,000 delivers 67% from current levels, strong for a $1.3 trillion asset but taking the rest of the year to play out.

Conclusion

BTC carries the store of value story and April’s 69% win rate says the bounce is likely coming. But here is what it comes down to. Do you want 67% over the rest of the year from a $1.3 trillion token? Or do you want to be the person who put $750 into a presale and watched it become $75,000 to $225,000 from one listing?

Every fortune built in crypto started with one moment where someone moved while everyone else was still reading about it. BTC at $100. BNB at $0.15. Pepe at zero. The same creator who built that last one is behind Pepeto, and the Binance listing is the event that turns this presale price into history. The wallets already inside are the ones who will tell this story next year. The only question left is whether your wallet is one of them.

Click To Visit Pepeto Website To Enter The Presale

FAQs

How do back to back quarterly losses change the bitcoin price prediction?

BTC’s first back to back quarterly losses since 2022 pushed prices lower, but April’s 69% win rate signals a bounce, while Pepeto at presale pricing delivers returns one listing can produce.

Can a presale outperform the bitcoin price prediction this cycle?

BTC at $71,140 targeting $120,000 delivers 67% over months, but $750 inside Pepeto at 100x becomes $75,000 from one Binance listing, making the presale at the Pepeto official website the faster path.

Disclaimer: This is a Press Release provided by a third party who is responsible for the content. Please conduct your own research before taking any action based on the content.