South Korea should introduce interim stablecoin licensing guidance before lawmakers complete the wider Digital Asset Basic Act.

According to a policy report published July 29 by Hashed Open Research and the Solana Policy Institute.

The report summarises a June 23 symposium attended by lawmakers, lawyers and digital-asset industry representatives. It recommends a phased approach addressing stablecoin issuance, payments and foreign tokens while lawmakers continue negotiating a comprehensive market framework. The recommendations are advisory and do not change current law.

South Korea stablecoin rules could arrive in stages

The report argues that waiting for the full Digital Asset Basic Act could leave businesses without clear rules for issuing or using won-backed stablecoins. It recommends interim guidance on licensing, permitted activities and payment services so regulated firms can prepare before the final law takes effect.

Bae, Kim & Lee partner Kim Hyo-bong also urged South Korea to consider the European Union’s rollout of the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. MiCA’s stablecoin provisions began applying on June 30, 2024, six months before the framework became fully applicable. The comparison supports introducing stablecoin rules before completing every part of the broader crypto framework.

Bank control remains the central dispute

Democratic Party lawmaker Ahn Do-geol said policymakers were considering a “compromise” under which banks would retain majority ownership of stablecoin issuers while fintech or other non-bank partners managed operations. The model has not been adopted and remains part of negotiations.

As previously discussed a structure in which banks would own more than 50% of an issuer and a fintech company could hold 34% with management rights. Supporters say the model could combine bank oversight with technical expertise. However, critics of strict bank control argue it could narrow competition.

The Bank of Korea has supported a bank-led approach because of monetary, foreign-exchange and financial-stability concerns. Central bank officials have warned that easier conversion between won and U.S. dollar stablecoins could complicate capital-flow management.

Ten proposals may be folded into one bill

The Financial Services Commission told the National Assembly ahead of a July 29 policy briefing that it plans to prepare a consolidated Digital Asset Basic Act with the ruling Democratic Party. Ten digital-asset and stablecoin proposals are already pending, but the regulator has not announced a filing date or final wording.

The proposed framework is expected to cover stablecoin issuance and circulation, exchange conduct, disclosures, internal controls and system resilience. South Korea’s existing Virtual Asset User Protection Act mainly governs custody, unfair trading and customer safeguards, leaving issuer and market-structure rules for the second stage.

The policy report also asks lawmakers to look beyond issuer eligibility. Its wider recommendations cover payment networks, public blockchains, tokenised assets and links between traditional markets and decentralised finance. These proposals reflect symposium participants’ views rather than agreed government policy.

Foreign stablecoins and financial institutions need clarity

Kim said policymakers should define which digital-asset activities banks and other financial institutions may conduct. The report also calls for clear licensing treatment for stablecoin payments and rules covering foreign-issued tokens offered to Korean users.

Expected policy questions include whether overseas issuers must establish a local branch, meet reserve and custody standards, or obtain domestic approval. These details remain unsettled, so the report’s recommendations should not be read as current legal requirements.

As previously reported, South Korea has outlined a wider roadmap for won-backed stablecoins alongside foreign-exchange reforms, central bank digital-currency pilots and tokenised government bonds.

In addition, the FSC said it wants to combine ten pending proposals into a government-backed bill during 2026. Lawmakers must still reconcile bank ownership, non-bank participation, reserve safeguards and the treatment of overseas stablecoins.

No parliamentary vote or implementation deadline has been announced. Moreover, no verified crypto-market movement has been directly linked to the policy report’s publication.

Don’t fall asleep on the couch

Plan for your excuses now

US law-enforcement–linked prosecutors’ groups are asking for targeted changes to the CLARITY Act, a sweeping cryptocurrency market structure bill moving through the US Senate, according to a Politico report published this week.

With the Senate approaching a month-long break, the proposals focus on how the legislation addresses developer-related obligations inside the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act—particularly within provisions tied to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA). The White House’s crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, publicly pushed back on the idea that the administration is aligned with the changes, describing them as far from the Trump administration’s position.

Key takeaways

• Prosecutors’ groups reportedly urged the White House to adjust BRCA provisions in the CLARITY Act, including language aimed at developer conduct and criminal liability.
• White House adviser Patrick Witt said the reported proposals are “not even close” to the administration’s position and suggested the process wasn’t the product of “productive negotiations.”
• Democratic lawmakers have also signaled concerns about ethics rules in the CLARITY Act related to Donald Trump’s crypto investments, intensifying internal opposition.
• The Senate is not scheduled to vote on the bill before a planned summer recess, shrinking the time window for resolution.
• At the policy level, CLARITY’s market structure proposal would shift oversight from the SEC toward the CFTC, a move that would change the enforcement and regulatory toolkit for digital assets.

Prosecutors ask to narrow developer liability language

In a letter to the White House, the National Association of Assistant US Attorneys and the National District Attorneys Association reportedly requested changes to specific provisions regarding developers in the CLARITY Act, Politico reported on Tuesday.

Under the proposal, the groups want adjustments within the BRCA sections that are embedded in the larger CLARITY framework. The reported language would ensure guidelines for developers do not “create, expand, or modify criminal liability under Federal law.”

For developers and compliance teams, this kind of drafting is more than semantic. If regulatory certainty language is read to broaden exposure to federal criminal theories, it can influence how teams document releases, build features, manage tokens and smart contracts, and interpret what actions might be treated as legally risky. Conversely, if the goal is to prevent the bill from being interpreted as expanding criminal liability, it signals an attempt to narrow enforcement hooks that could arise from new obligations.

White House pushback complicates talks

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt responded to the reports by arguing the proposals are not aligned with the administration’s stance. In a post on X, Witt said the provisions were “not even close” to the Trump administration’s position and implied there had been no “productive negotiations” behind the letter.

Separately, Politico reported that Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has been pressing the White House to address the BRCA before any potential vote on CLARITY.

That sequence matters for the bill’s timing. If lawmakers believe the BRCA language remains unresolved, they may resist moving the bill forward procedurally—especially when opposition from other quarters, such as ethics concerns, remains active.

Ethics controversy and party-level resistance

The CLARITY Act has faced additional headwinds among Democrats, with reported criticism centered on ethics rules related to President Donald Trump’s crypto investments. According to the article coverage referenced in the source material, Trump’s crypto holdings were reported to be worth $1.4 billion in 2025.

Earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted that objections are tied to ethics restrictions within the bill for US President Trump’s crypto investments. In the broader political environment, ethics provisions often become a focal point for party discipline: opponents can use them to unify resistance even if they otherwise accept parts of the market structure framework.

As of Wednesday, the Senate Majority Leader John Thune had not scheduled a vote on the legislation before the chamber breaks, leaving uncertainty around whether negotiations can resolve both the ethics dispute and the BRCA/developer language before Senate procedures become harder to complete.

Timing pressure before the summer recess

The Senate is set to hold state work periods from Aug. 7 to Sept. 14, creating a compressed window for any vote or late-stage compromise. Thune told reporters last week that the Senate was unlikely to vote on the bill before the August recess.

One procedural complication highlighted in the source material is the difficulty of moving a contested bill through a full sequence of steps. Anne Kelley, a partner at Mercury Strategies, wrote on X that even if CLARITY were introduced “today,” the procedural steps—cloture, amendment processing, a second cloture, and as much as 30 hours of debate—would make finishing before recess extremely difficult without unanimous consent to waive process, which she described as rare for contested bills.

For readers watching legislative momentum, this is a key point: when the political environment is split, the Senate’s floor mechanics become a practical gatekeeper. Even if there is willingness to compromise, the calendar can determine whether changes occur in time to shape the final text.

What CLARITY aims to change: SEC versus CFTC authority

Beyond the fight over ethics and developer language, CLARITY’s central market-structure proposal would shift regulatory focus over digital assets largely from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The source material also notes that the CFTC currently has fewer tools and resources than the SEC for enforcement and oversight in certain contexts.

At the staffing and leadership level, both agencies have been described as understaffed at the leadership level, with the CFTC having one chair and the SEC having three commissioners—an imbalance that can affect how quickly agencies can operationalize new authorities, issue guidance, or prioritize enforcement.

For market participants, the SEC-to-CFTC shift matters because it can change how enforcement risk is assessed and how compliance is designed. Different agencies can interpret market conduct, custody, derivatives-related activity, and token classifications through different legal frameworks and enforcement priorities.

That institutional reshuffling is also why the BRCA debate may be consequential. If developer protections are intended to prevent criminal-liability expansion, the bill’s final language will determine how broadly those boundaries apply—and which regulator’s view ends up carrying more practical weight for day-to-day decision-making by builders.

As the Senate approaches its August recess, the immediate question is whether lawmakers can reconcile both the BRCA/developer provisions and the ethics-related objections without derailing the bill procedurally. The next signals to watch are whether the White House engages directly on the BRCA language and whether a vote is even realistically possible before the chamber pauses for the state work period.

BIP-360, the proposal to give bitcoin quantum-resistant addresses, specifies three algorithms NIST has already standardized, and includes several deliberately so users have fallbacks if one is later broken by quantum or classical advances.

What changed is the speed of the classical side. BIP-361, the companion proposal that would freeze more than a third of bitcoin’s supply, argues that the migration window is closing because cryptographic attacks are improving by up to 20-fold. Anthropic’s results align with that trend, with a model behind it.

Against HAWK’s smallest parameter set, Anthropic said the expected cost of recovering a key fell from about 2^64 operations to 2^38. Larger keys remain impractical to attack, but doubling key sizes to compensate removes most of what made HAWK attractive.

The company disclosed the attack to HAWK’s authors in June and coordinated publication with NIST’s public mailing list.

A second result improved attacks on a deliberately weakened version of AES, the cipher used across the industry to encrypt wallet files, by factors of 200 to 800.

Importantly for crypto developers, Anthropic said the model produced smaller improvements, under tenfold, against Poseidon, the hash function that underpins many zero-knowledge proof systems, including those securing rollups and privacy protocols.

The US Treasury has sanctioned two Iranian maritime firms involved in an alleged Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-backed insurance network, saying one accepted Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital assets to bypass Western sanctions. 

On Wednesday, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said that Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company and HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority were integral to what it described as an IRGC-backed insurance network that required commercial vessels to buy approved coverage before transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The firms were designated for operating in Iran’s financial sector.

The action comes after earlier reports that Iran was considering a Bitcoin-based maritime insurance platform. US authorities now allege the network generated revenue for the IRGC. Treasury also sanctioned eight companies linked to Iran’s shadow fleet and identified eight vessels as blocked property.

OFAC said HormuzSafe accepted BTC and other crypto as part of efforts to evade sanctions. It alleged that the platform generated revenue on behalf of the IRGC while helping Iran exert greater control over shipping through the strait. 

“The United States will not allow Iran to hold global commerce hostage,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, accusing the regime of using international shipping to finance the IRGC. 

HormuzSafe shifts from reported proposal to sanctions target 

On May 18, screenshots of the HormuzSafe website had circulated online offering “digital insurance” for maritime cargo, with policies payable in Bitcoin. At the time, reports suggested Iran was still considering the insurance-based model, and the website was inaccessible when checked. 

Iranian state-linked media Fars News Agency said the proposed platform could issue marine insurance policies and certificates of financial responsibility while potentially generating over $10 billion in revenue. 

The Strait of Hormuz handles about one-fifth of the global oil trade, meaning efforts to monetize or control traffic through the waterway carry significant implications for international energy markets.

Related: Bitcoin threatens $62K in risk-asset rout as President Trump says US will ‘run’ closed Hormuz Strait

Earlier reports, citing the Bitcoin Policy Institute, said Iran accepted oil toll payments in Chinese yuan, Tether USDt (USDT) and Bitcoin, though there was no onchain evidence that any Bitcoin payments had yet been made.

Bitcoin may be attractive to sanctioned actors because it has no centralized issuer capable of freezing funds, unlike centralized stablecoins whose issuers can block addresses. In April, US authorities froze $344 million in USDT stablecoin linked to Iran. 

Magazine: Inside the ‘fake police raid’ that forced a $1M Bitcoin transfer

Crypto’s largest tokens were close to unchanged on Thursday as the semiconductor selloff that has driven markets for two weeks showed its first real sign of easing.

Ether traded at about $1,905 and bitcoin at $64,100, both flat on the day, with XRP at $1.07, solana at $74, BNB at $572 and TRON at 33 cents. Hyperliquid’s HYPE slipped to $54. Volumes were modest, with roughly $28 billion changing hands in bitcoin and $10 billion in ether.

Electronics giant Samsung said chip profit rose more than 250-fold on AI memory shortages, and the Kospi swung between a 6% gain and a 2% loss before settling, after a stretch that took the index down more than 40% from its June peak.

Samsung’s reaction is the tell on how high the bar has become. Profit up 250-fold moved the shares 2%. SK Hynix reported profit up 557% on Wednesday and fell 17%. Results are not the problem, expectations are.

U.S. earnings split overnight. Microsoft gained nearly 9% in extended trading on its fastest cloud growth in four years, while Meta fell 8% on a weak revenue forecast. Nasdaq 100 futures rose 1% after the index entered a technical correction on Wednesday.