Federal Reserve Chair nominee Kevin Warsh filed a 69-page financial disclosure with the US Office of Government Ethics on April 14, revealing assets worth well over $100 million across crypto, AI, and private equity.

The filing clears the last major bureaucratic step before the Senate Banking Committee can schedule his confirmation hearing.

Warsh’s Disclosure Reveals Wide-Ranging Portfolio

The document lists two investments valued at over $50 million each in the Juggernaut Fund LP and $10.2 million in consulting fees from the investment office of billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller.

It also includes approximately two dozen positions held through THSDFS LLC, with some individually worth up to $5 million. Those holdings’ details were withheld under confidentiality agreements.

Dozens of additional assets went unlisted by value but appear concentrated in AI and crypto sectors, according to Reuters.

Among the named crypto-related holdings is Blast, an Ethereum (ETH) layer-two network. Warsh has also previously invested in Bitwise Asset Management, the firm behind a spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETF.

Warsh pledged to divest his Juggernaut Fund and THSDFS positions if confirmed. OGE analyst Heather Jones approved the filing, stating he would be in compliance once those divestitures are complete.

What Comes Next for Warsh’s Confirmation

The Senate Banking Committee has yet to formally schedule his hearing, though it could come as early as next week. The committee had initially targeted April 16 but delayed due to incomplete disclosures.

However, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has said he will block a final vote on Warsh until a federal criminal probe involving current Fed Chair Jerome Powell is resolved. Powell’s term expires May 15.

“I will oppose the confirmation of any Federal Reserve nominee, including for the position of Chairman, until the DOJ’s inquiry into Chairman Powell is fully and transparently resolved,” Senator Tillis articulated in a late January post.

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Bitcoin (BTC) climbed above $76,000 on April 14 after the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported March producer prices well below Wall Street estimates.

The data marked a sharp reversal from months of hotter-than-expected wholesale inflation prints, lifting risk assets and pushing BTC past a key institutional benchmark.

March PPI Misses on Every Measure

The Producer Price Index for final demand rose 0.5% month over month in March, less than half the 1.1% consensus forecast. Core PPI, which strips out food and energy, increased just 0.1% against a 0.4% estimate.

On a year-over-year basis, headline PPI printed 4.0% versus the 4.6% expected. Core came in at 3.8%, also below the 4.1% projection.

The miss followed back-to-back hot readings in January and February that had fueled stagflation concerns across macro and crypto markets.

Energy drove most of the remaining price growth. Final demand energy prices jumped 8.5%, with gasoline alone rising 15.7%. Meanwhile, food prices fell 0.3%, and goods excluding food and energy rose a modest 0.2%.

Bitcoin rallied past the $75,000 threshold to record an intra-day high of $76,038. As of this writing, BTC was trading at $75,335, up by almost 5% in the last 24 hours.

Strategy’s BTC Holdings Flip Profitable

The price move carried significance beyond spot traders. BTC’s push to $76,038 took it above MicroStrategy’s average purchase price of roughly $75,580 per coin, turning the firm’s entire position profitable for the first time since late March.

Strategy holds approximately 780,897 BTC, making it the largest corporate Bitcoin holder. The company’s stock (MSTR) rallied 6.97% on the session to $141.58, and its Bitcoin reserve now carries a market value above $58.9 billion.

The firm had continued buying through April’s volatility, adding 4,871 BTC between April 1 and April 5 at an average price of $67,718 per coin.

That dip-buying strategy lowered its blended cost basis and positioned the portfolio for a quicker return to profitability.

Traders will now turn to Wednesday’s retail sales report and upcoming Federal Reserve commentary for signals on whether the cooler wholesale inflation trend will carry into consumer prices and rate-cut expectations.

If March CPI follows PPI lower, the case for a mid-year Fed pivot could strengthen considerably.

The post Bitcoin Hits $76,000 After Shock US PPI, MicroStrategy Shares Rally appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Japan’s largest e-commerce platform is bringing Ripple XRP into its payments stack on April 15, 2026, listing it on Rakuten Wallet for spot trading and wiring it into Rakuten Pay, the app that 44 million users already use to buy coffee, groceries, and bullet train tickets.

The headline number is large enough to matter.

The analytical question is harder: does XRP utility inside a closed loyalty ecosystem constitute retail adoption, or is this a product feature update that happens to use crypto infrastructure most users will never see?

How the Rakuten-Ripple XRP Integration Actually Works – and What It Doesn’t

Rakuten Points are not a crypto asset. They are a proprietary loyalty currency issued by Rakuten at a rate of roughly one point per yen spent across its ecosystem – shopping, travel, streaming, banking.

The company issued approximately 620 billion points in 2022 alone. The total outstanding balance exceeds 3 trillion points, worth around $23 billion USD at current exchange rates. That is a significant pool of locked consumer value.

What the April 15 integration does is open a conversion path: users can take those points, convert them into XRP through Rakuten Wallet, and then load the resulting balance into Rakuten Cash, the platform’s e-money layer, for spending at over 5 million merchant locations.

The Rakuten Pay app handles the front end. Rakuten Wallet, an FSA-licensed and JVCEA-registered exchange, handles the crypto backend.

Here is the part that matters for how you read the adoption headline: merchants receive fiat. When a user pays with XRP-funded Rakuten Cash, the conversion to yen happens in the background.

The retailer has no Ripple XRP exposure. The user, in most cases, is interacting with a points-to-payment flow that happens to route through XRP infrastructure. That is not the same as 44 million people buying and holding XRP.

Japan’s regulatory architecture makes this structure possible. The FSA has established a clear legal classification for XRP as a cryptocurrency, distinct from a security, a framework that Japan’s evolving crypto regulatory environment has been building toward through successive Payment Services Act amendments.

Rakuten is not pioneering the regulatory path; it is walking one that SBI Holdings and others have already cleared.

Liquidchain Targets Early-Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels

Liquidchain (LQC) is one project drawing attention in this context, a Layer-3 execution environment designed to aggregate liquidity across Ethereum and its rollup ecosystem, with a technical architecture specifically targeting the throughput bottlenecks that Glamsterdam addresses at the base layer.

The presale has raised over $660K at a current token price of $0.0147, with staking rewards available to early participants.

The project’s core differentiator is its unified liquidity routing across fragmented L2 environments, a structural problem that grows in relevance as Ethereum’s rollup ecosystem expands post-Glamsterdam. Presale investments carry real risk, and this is an early-stage L3 infrastructure project with meaningful execution uncertainty. DYOR applies unconditionally.

Explore the Liquidchain presale here

The post Rakuten Expands Ripple XRP Utility for 44M Users: Mass Adoption or Incremental Update? appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Kraken confirmed Monday it is being extorted by a criminal group holding videos of internal systems containing customer data, and the crypto exchange has publicly refused to comply.

Chief Security Officer Nick Percoco disclosed the threat via X on April 13, 2026, stating the firm is working with federal law enforcement across multiple jurisdictions to pursue arrests.

The refusal is the right call. It’s also a calculated institutional signal at a moment when exchange trust is structurally fragile.

How Kraken Crypto Breach and Extortion Mechanics Actually Worked

This was not a credential-scraping exploit or a protocol vulnerability. The entry point in both the February 2025 incident and the current extortion threat was insider recruitment; compromised individuals within Kraken’s organization granted access to internal systems, enabling reconnaissance rather than a full breach.

The access appears to have been read-only, sufficient to capture customer data on video without triggering immediate detection.

Percoco confirmed that Kraken received a tip about a video showcasing sensitive customer information from its internal crypto systems, the same mechanism used in the February 2025 case, when a similar video surfaced on a criminal forum.

In both instances, an internal actor was identified. The criminals are now threatening to distribute those videos and associated customer data to local media and across social networks unless Kraken complies with unspecified demands. The precise dollar figure of the extortion demand has not been publicly disclosed.

The pattern Percoco described is deliberate and scalable. “We have been collaborating with industry partners and law enforcement to investigate and disrupt insider recruitment efforts targeting not only crypto companies, but also gaming and telecommunications organizations,” he said.

That’s not opportunistic hacking. That’s a coordinated recruitment infrastructure operating across high-value data sectors, and Kraken is explicitly naming it as such, which matters for how the industry should respond.

Emerging crypto theft vectors increasingly target infrastructure access rather than on-chain exploits, and insider recruitment fits that same threat profile.

Discover: The best pre-launch token sales

What User Data Was Actually Exposed – and What That Enables

Kraken crypto has not publicly specified which data categories were captured in the videos, including KYC documentation, wallet addresses, transaction history, or account metadata.

What is confirmed: approximately 2,000 individuals had their information viewed, and Kraken states it has already contacted everyone at risk. The access was read-only, and internal systems were not breached in the fuller sense of data being exfiltrated at scale.

The practical risk for affected users is not account takeover; no funds were accessed. The risk is targeted social engineering and physical exposure.

(Source – TRM Labs)

With names, addresses, and account-level data in criminal hands, affected users become targets for the same wrench attack vector that CertiK tracked, resulting in over $40 million in losses last year.

That figure is almost certainly undercounted, given the norms of underreporting. Kraken’s outreach to affected users is the right procedural step; whether that outreach included specific security guidance, hardware key recommendations, address changes, or heightened vigilance is not confirmed.

Discover: The best crypto to diversify your portfolio with

The post Kraken Says It Is Being Extorted Over Stolen Crypto User Data and Refuses to Pay appeared first on Cryptonews.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent waits for the first meeting of U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-fraud task force convened by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 27, 2026.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent said the Federal Reserve could wait to lower interest rates amid the oil spike, in a departure from his previous stance on monetary policy.

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“Do I think rates should be lowered? Eventually. I think now that we have to wait and see,” Bessent told Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith at the Semafor World Economy conference in Washington, DC.

Bessent has previously said that Fed Chair Jerome Powell should hasten cutting interest rates, saying in January that reductions are “the only ingredient missing for even stronger economic growth. Which is why the Fed should not delay.”

But the change in thinking comes amid the ongoing war in Iran, which has driven up oil prices to above $100 a barrel.

That complicates the Fed’s mandate, as it eyes rising inflation alongside slowing growth. The central bank was last expected to hold rates steady this year, with the slimmest possibility of a hike, according to fed funds futures pricing.

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Coming out of “January and February — the economy was very strong,” Bessent told Semafor.

Powell’s term as chair is up in May, but he could have to stay on longer if Trump’s chair nominee which Bessent helped select, Kevin Warsh, can’t get confirmed by the Senate by the time. Sen. Thom Tillis has vowed to block a Warsh vote until U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro ends her criminal probe into Powell related to Fed building cost overruns. Powell has said the probe is designed to put pressure on him by the Trump administration for not cutting rates more.

See the full Semafor story here.

— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.

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Crypto has a capital efficiency problem.

For all the innovation we’ve seen in DeFi, a huge amount of onchain capital still sits idle. It’s staked, it’s locked, and it’s largely cut off from the rest of the financial system we’ve been building. That might have been acceptable a few years ago, but it doesn’t work for institutions.

Idle capital isn’t just inefficient, it’s incompatible with how modern financial systems operate.

Institutions don’t separate staking and markets in their thinking. They look at capital in terms of how hard it can work. Can it move? Can it generate yield? Can it be deployed across strategies without friction? If the answer is no, that capital becomes less attractive.

The same is increasingly true in payments. Once money moves onchain, it shouldn’t just sit idle between transactions. It should be programmable, composable, and capable of generating yield even while it’s waiting to be used.

That’s the gap we’re focused on solving at Polygon Labs.

With the launch of sPOL, we’re introducing a canonical liquid staking standard for POL. In simple terms, it allows users to stake POL while still keeping that capital liquid and usable across onchain markets. You continue earning staking rewards, but you also gain the ability to deploy that same capital in trading, lending, and collateral strategies.

This is especially powerful in payments contexts, where capital often sits at rest between settlement cycles, treasury rebalancing, or cross-border flows. Instead of remaining idle, that capital can stay productive without sacrificing availability.

That combination is what makes capital actually competitive.

If you look at Ethereum, liquid staking has already become a core part of the ecosystem. More than 40 percent of staked ETH is used in this way. On Polygon, it’s closer to 4 or 5 percent. That gap isn’t about demand. It’s about infrastructure.

Without a clear standard, liquidity fragments. Without liquidity, institutions don’t show up in size.

sPOL is designed to change that.

When you stake POL, you receive sPOL, which represents your position and continues to earn yield. At the same time, it can be used across DeFi just like any other liquid asset. That means funds, market makers, and treasury teams can run more sophisticated strategies without giving up staking rewards or waiting through unbonding periods.

It also means payment providers, fintechs, and onchain businesses can treat idle balances not as dead weight, but as yield-generating assets that remain fully usable.

It turns staking from something passive into something you can actively manage.

But usable capital only matters if markets can support it.

From day one, we’re seeding deep liquidity so sPOL is immediately functional at scale. We’re also integrating with venues like Uniswap v4 to ensure efficient execution and real market depth. At the same time, validator incentives are being structured to deliver more competitive yields, aligning participants across the network.

This is about building the conditions institutions expect as a baseline.

The impact is straightforward. There are billions of POL already staked. Even partial adoption of sPOL significantly expands the amount of capital actively participating in the ecosystem. That leads to deeper markets, better pricing, and more resilient liquidity.

It also strengthens the network itself. As more POL moves into productive staking positions, supply tightens and incentives align more clearly with long term participation.

Stepping back, this is part of a broader shift.

Crypto is moving from experimentation to infrastructure. Stablecoins are becoming settlement layers. Real world assets are coming onchain. Institutions are no longer just watching, they’re allocating.

And as payments infrastructure moves onchain, expectations change. Capital isn’t just meant to move faster, it’s meant to work continuously, even in the moments between movement.

But they will only scale into systems that meet their standards.

They need liquidity. They need composability. And they need capital that can be both productive and flexible at the same time.

That’s what we’re building with sPOL.

It’s not just an upgrade to staking. It’s a step toward making Polygon a place where capital behaves the way modern markets expect it to.

Because ultimately, the question isn’t how much capital is onchain.

It’s how much of it is actually working, and where it chooses to work.

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