Changpeng Zhao (CZ Binance) publicly backed a crypto license passporting system across ASEAN at the ASEAN Tech Summit Manila 2026 on July 28, arguing that firms already licensed in one member state should face only a streamlined approval process, not a full re-application, to operate across the rest of the bloc.

The proposal, if adopted, would materially reduce compliance overhead for crypto and stablecoin service providers targeting Southeast Asia’s fragmented regulatory landscape.

Speaking during the “One ASEAN, One Digital Economy” fireside chat alongside FinTech Alliance PH founding chair Lito Villanueva, CZ endorsed Villanueva’s idea of license portability across the region.

Regulators would retain the right to review applicants entering their jurisdiction, but the threshold would be fundamentally lower than starting from scratch in every market.

“I think that’s mostly a political problem,” Zhao said of cross-border regulatory coordination, adding that the underlying technology posed no meaningful obstacle.

He argued that allowing more licensed platforms to compete regionally would improve services and reduce costs for consumers, a straightforward pro-competition case that sidesteps the harder question of how to get nine politically distinct regulators to agree on mutual recognition standards.

Bitcoin News: Why Regulatory Fragmentation Is a Real Cost for ASEAN Crypto Firms

The problem Zhao is identifying is structural. Southeast Asia currently has no bloc-wide passport for crypto companies – each ASEAN member state runs its own digital asset licensing regime, with separate AML requirements, conduct rules, and capital standards.

A firm seeking a genuine regional presence must run parallel licensing processes across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously, which scales compliance costs in a way that disadvantages smaller, well-regulated operators relative to larger incumbents.

The regulatory framework Zhao described mirrors the EU’s MiCA model directly. Under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, a crypto-asset service provider authorized in one EU member state can passport its services across all 27 member states by notifying its home regulator of the countries and services involved, no fresh application required.

CZ referenced the MiCA architecture as the functional template for what ASEAN could build, and the comparison is structurally apt even if the political dynamics differ substantially between a treaty-based union and a looser regional grouping.
The ESMA implementation timeline for the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The argument around Crypto regulation fragmentation being primarily political rather than technical carries weight here. Brad Garlinghouse has made a parallel case in the US context, framing regulatory incoherence as the primary drag on institutional crypto adoption, a problem of legislative will, not technical incapacity.

Discover: The Best Crypto to Diversify Your Portfolio

ASEAN Already Has Passporting Precedents in Adjacent Markets

The idea is not without regional precedent. The ASEAN Capital Markets Forum’s Collective Investment Schemes Framework, operationalized in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand in 2014, with the Philippines joining in 2021, allows a fund authorized in its home jurisdiction to be offered in participating host markets through a streamlined authorization process rather than full reregistration.

The ACMF Pass extends a similar fast-track model to investment advisers across participating jurisdictions.

Bitcoin (BTC)

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These frameworks are narrower than those proposed by Zhao and Villanueva and remain subject to host-market requirements, but they establish that ASEAN regulators have already accepted the logic of mutual recognition in principle. Crypto-specific passporting would require agreement on supervision standards and consumer protection floors that don’t yet exist at the bloc level, but the institutional machinery for building them does.

For traders watching Binance’s regulatory trajectory, the Manila remarks fit a broader pattern of the exchange positioning itself in Asia as its primary licensing growth market. Ripple’s multi-jurisdictional expansion strategy illustrates the same operational reality CZ is addressing: operating at scale across Southeast Asia requires either accepting full licensing overhead in every market or pushing regulators toward a lighter mutual-recognition model.

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The post Inside CZ Binance Plan to Turn ASEAN Into Crypto Federation appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Google is no longer racing OpenAI and Anthropic to the same finish line. Its rivals want AI that improves itself. Google wants AI that understands the real world.

The split is easy to miss, because Google still ships models and still makes money. But its newest release landed 10th on one independent ranking.

What Google Has and Has Not Said About the AI Race

Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash on July 21. The pitch was speed and cost, not raw power.

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The model produces 17% fewer tokens than the version before it, Google’s blog said. Tokens are the small chunks of text an AI writes. Fewer tokens means a cheaper answer.

Power is another matter. One published reading of the Artificial Analysis index placed the model 10th. Every other major lab ranked above it.

Google is not standing still. It has begun its biggest training run yet, for Gemini 4. A larger model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, is still in testing with partners.

Sundar Pichai has pointed to a different prize. He has tied the roadmap to personalized agents rather than leaderboard wins.

Investors are less relaxed. Alphabet shares fell 6% in June after two senior researchers left for rivals.

Inside DeepMind’s Bet on World Models

A world model is AI that learns how physical things behave. Gravity, motion, cause and effect. It predicts what happens next in a room, not the next word in a sentence.

DeepMind’s own website shows the bet. It files Genie 3 and Gemini Robotics under a heading for world models and embodied AI, meaning software that controls machines.

In May the lab extended Project Genie to Street View. It also released SIMA 2, an agent that learns by playing inside virtual 3D worlds.

OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming somewhere else entirely. They want recursive self-improvement, shortened to RSI.

In plain terms, that is AI clever enough to build the next, better AI. Then that one builds the one after it.

Writer Alberto Romero argued on Tuesday that Google left this race on purpose.

“Hassabis is betting on something else: world models. Models that can understand and simulate the real world, not just predict the next token,” Alberto Romero wrote in a recent analysis.

Google has said no such thing. Demis Hassabis, who runs Google DeepMind, has never ruled out RSI in public.

Why a Rival Co-Founder Says DeepMind Is the Outlier

The sharpest outside read came from a rival, months earlier.

Jack Clark co-founded Anthropic. On May 4 he published an essay on where AI is heading.

He gave a 60% chance that AI can run its own research by the end of 2028. He put 2027 at 30%.

Clark then asked which labs are chasing that goal. DeepMind, he wrote, “appears to be the most circumspect of the big three.” Circumspect means cautious.

His evidence came from DeepMind itself. He cited its 2025 paper on AI safety, co-written by co-founder Shane Legg.

Anthropic is far bolder. It reported in a recursive self-improvement study that Claude wrote more than 80% of the code it ships by May 2026.

Before February 2025, that share was near zero.

The firm has documented AI building better AI. On one speed test, its models delivered a 52-fold gain in April, against 2.9-fold a year earlier.

A skilled engineer needs four to eight hours to manage a fourfold gain on the same task.

Why Google Might Not Have Quit the AI Race at All

Two facts cut against the whole idea:

• Google leads the test that comes closest to measuring AI research skill.

MLE-Bench asks a model to build machine-learning systems on its own. A Gemini 3 model scored 64.4% in February. That was the best result at the time. Google put 3.6 Flash at 63.9% in July.

Labs that quit a field rarely top its scoreboard.

• Google is nowhere near absent from the market.

Pichai told investors the Gemini app has 950 million monthly users. Google did skip NVIDIA’s open AI alliance this month. So did OpenAI and Anthropic.

Can Google Afford to Wait?

The case for patience is simple. Search ads pay for everything else, so DeepMind can take its time.

Alphabet’s own filing shows that cushion getting thinner.

Revenue reached $119.8 billion in the June quarter, up 24%, according to results filed July 22. Search alone brought in $63.3 billion.

Then comes the spending. Alphabet poured $44.9 billion into data centers and equipment in three months. That is roughly double a year earlier.

The result was negative free cash flow of $5.86 billion. Free cash flow is what is left after the building bills are paid.

That figure was positive $10.1 billion in March. In December it was positive $24.6 billion.

Alphabet covered the gap by selling $49.6 billion of new shares in June. It borrowed another $20.3 billion.

Long-term debt doubled in six months, from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion.

A line in the accounts covering shared AI research lost $5.79 billion, up from $3.37 billion. Patience now carries a price tag.

What to Watch Over the Next 30 Days

• Whether Gemini 3.5 Pro ships, and how it ranks
• Whether DeepMind shows world-model results tied to Gemini 4
• Whether Alphabet cash flow turns positive again in September
• Whether Hassabis answers the self-improvement question directly

Gemini 4 is the real test. If world models work where coding agents stall, the slow pace will look smart rather than scared.

The next earnings report will show how long Alphabet can keep paying to find out.

The post Why Google May Have Quietly Left the AI Race to OpenAI and Anthropic appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Crypto figures are warning that government control over what AI systems can know or discuss could create a dangerous precedent, after Erik Voorhees argued on X on July 28 that states should not decide what forms of intelligence are “safe.”

The post landed in the middle of a fresh debate over how much oversight AI companies should accept, a debate that picked back up after Anthropic laid out its own position on open-weights models.

Erik Voorhees Warns Against State Control of AI Knowledge

Voorhees, a longtime Bitcoin advocate and founder of the ShapeShift crypto exchange, posted his comment after Anthropic published a statement from CEO Dario Amodei pushing back on claims that the AI giant was advocating for the banning of Chinese open-weight models.

Amodei insisted that his company has “never advocated a ban on open-weight models” and argued that such systems can provide value for developers, businesses, and researchers when they do not have dangerous capabilities.

According to the executive, Anthropic’s main concerns involved authoritarian governments developing advanced AI for military or surveillance uses, along with the possibility of misuse in cyberattacks or biological threats. The company said it supports restrictions on access to advanced chips and action against industrial-scale distillation, as well as safety testing for highly capable AI systems.

The Information recently reported that the Trump administration was finalizing a framework for AI companies to voluntarily submit their most advanced models to the government for testing.

But Voorhees was not having it, saying that allowing governments to define acceptable AI knowledge could expand beyond its original purpose. In his post, he walked through a hypothetical progression starting from a seemingly reasonable rule against discussing bioweapons, then dangerous weapons generally, then anything contrary to public health and public safety, then anything that undermines financial solvency, and ending with the banning of unapproved encryption and a requirement that AI not obstruct government orders.

“Civilization must not permit the state to determine what manner of intelligence is ‘safe,’” he wrote, adding that only the United States has the cultural character to resist that outcome over time, and if it fails, then “nowhere will it be preserved.”

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz replied to Voorhees’ post with “Yes, this. Exactly this,” showing support for the argument. XRP community member Bird also responded, asking, “The moment someone gets to decide what knowledge is ‘safe,’ where does it stop?”

AI Safety Debate Expands Beyond Open Models

The same tension over who gets to police AI showed up earlier this month when Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis proposed a federally backed body to test and certify frontier models before release, an idea that OpenAI’s Sam Altman called “thoughtful” and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella welcomed as a way to keep any model from doing serious harm.

However, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong rejected the idea, arguing that a new body would just add another approval process on top of existing regulators. “Why design regulation around a hypothetical problem,” he said, pointing to fraud, tort, and consumer protection laws that already exist as being enough cover for any harm that might be caused by a model.

The post Crypto Pioneers Sound Alarm Over Government Control of AI Knowledge appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Prediction markets are lowering the chances of the CLARITY Act becoming law in 2026 as the Senate turns to Russia sanctions and federal nominations before its August recess.

Summary

• Polymarket traders place the bill’s 2026 passage odds at about 34%, down from 53% on July 21.
• Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn estimates a 30% chance of passage, citing vote math and limited floor time.
• Republicans may need support from at least 10 Democrats if three GOP senators remain unavailable or opposed.
• Bitcoin traded near $63,800 as regulatory uncertainty added to broader pressure across crypto markets.

CLARITY Act loses its place on the Senate schedule

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has not scheduled immediate action on the CLARITY Act, narrowing the path for the crypto market structure bill before lawmakers leave Washington.

The Senate is instead moving forward with federal nominations and legislation imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran. Preliminary action on the crypto bill remains possible during the week of Aug. 3, but the chamber is scheduled to begin its summer recess after Aug. 7.

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According to Galaxy Digital head of research Alex Thorn, the timetable has become the main threat to passage.

“The calendar is no longer merely an obstacle. It is now the enemy.”

Thorn estimated that lawmakers needed to begin the floor process by July 30 to leave enough time for procedural votes and debate. The Senate’s decision to prioritize other legislation makes that timeline increasingly difficult.

A vote after the recess is still possible. However, senators would return closer to the November midterm elections, when campaigning could displace complicated legislation requiring bipartisan negotiations.

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Senate vote math leaves little room for defections

Most legislation needs 60 votes to overcome the Senate filibuster, while Republicans control 53 seats.

Thorn argues that the bill’s effective Republican support may be closer to 50. Senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul have not committed to voting for the measure, while Mitch McConnell’s hospitalization could prevent him from participating.

Under that scenario, Republicans would need 10 Democratic votes to advance the bill.

The Senate Banking Committee approved its version of the CLARITY Act in May by a 15-9 vote, with two Democrats joining Republicans. Both Democratic supporters warned that their committee votes did not guarantee backing on the floor without further changes, particularly to ethics provisions governing public officials’ crypto interests.

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President Donald Trump later accepted the inclusion of ethics restrictions, helping Polymarket odds reach 53% on July 21. Those gains have since reversed, with the market showing roughly 34% odds at the time of publication.

Kalshi showed traders assigning a 42% probability to crypto market structure legislation becoming law before the end of 2026.

Trump ties deepen the partisan divide

SkyBridge Capital founder Anthony Scaramucci said Democratic opposition may persist because Trump has made the bill part of his political agenda.

“They will do everything they can to block it because he wants it,” Scaramucci said.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has made a similar argument, warning that the “Trump narrative” has turned crypto regulation into a partisan dispute.

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Democrats have raised concerns about the adequacy of the proposed ethics rules, citing Trump’s family-linked crypto activities. They have also sought stronger consumer protections, enforcement powers and restrictions covering officials’ indirect financial interests.

Republicans have made several concessions to attract Democratic votes, but the revised language has not produced enough public commitments to clear the 60-vote threshold. The bill would also return to the House if the Senate approves a materially different version, adding another step before it could reach Trump’s desk.

Bitcoin slips as US regulatory uncertainty continues

Bitcoin traded near $63,800 at the time of publication, down about 1.6% over the previous session after moving between roughly $62,772 and $64,953.

The decline coincided with the Senate delay, though the timing alone does not establish that the CLARITY Act caused the broader market pullback. Macro conditions, derivatives positioning and weaker demand can also affect daily price movements.

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US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $11.64 million in net outflows on July 27, led by an $8.82 million withdrawal from BlackRock’s IBIT. Ether funds attracted $9.23 million, while XRP ETFs added about $592,000.

For US investors, another delay would preserve the existing mix of SEC and CFTC oversight, court decisions and state-level rules instead of creating a single federal market structure. The bill is not dead, but failure to begin the Senate process before the August recess would leave its 2026 prospects dependent on a narrower post-election legislative window.

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Crypto critic Ben McKenzie has urged Congress to block the CLARITY Act due to President Trump’s financial ties to the digital asset industry.

McKenzie joined Senate Democrats like Richard Blumenthal and Chris Van Hollen at a Capitol Hill anti-corruption forum on Monday to lobby against the bill.

Trump Crypto Concerns

The actor argued that lawmakers could not oppose “Trump’s crypto corruption” while supporting the CLARITY Act, saying the legislation would only allow it to continue. He urged Democrats to reject the bill, warning that only a handful of votes could be enough for it to go through.

His comments come as Democrats continue to push for stronger ethics rules, consumer protections and national security safeguards in the bill. While Republicans added language banning the president and other public officials from issuing or sponsoring cryptocurrencies, Blumenthal believes the updated version still leaves loopholes that could allow Trump to profit from his crypto ventures.

“Donald Trump made $2 billion last year, and $1.4 billion of his income last year consists of cryptocurrency profits that exploit weaknesses in the current law,” he said.

He explained that the current CLARITY Act does not require Trump to divest his crypto holdings and that its ethics provisions would expire in 2029, leaving enforcement to the Department of Justice, which, according to him, would not be enough.

As for what they are doing to stop this, the Democrats said they plan on using their bargaining power to push for changes to the legislation before it comes up for a vote. This is especially important because the Senate will need at least 60 votes to advance the legislation.

New York AG Warns Legislation Could Weaken Oversight

On the same day, New York Attorney General Letitia James warned that the CLARITY Act could weaken state enforcement against crypto fraud, saying stronger regulations are needed to protect investors.

The proposal, she said, would limit the state’s ability to hold digital asset platforms accountable even as crypto scams continue to cost Americans billions of dollars a year.

James finished by saying that strict rules are needed to maintain trust in the financial markets, and warned that without sufficient laws and oversight, there would be financial crises. She therefore urged Congress to strengthen investor protections and safeguard the economy and national security.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has put the CLARITY Act on hold for now as the Senate focuses on confirming government nominees and debating a Russia sanctions bill. This now pushes the crypto bill off the pre-recess agenda, with September now the earliest it is expected to return for consideration.

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Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss declared the AI trade over on Tuesday, urging investors to rotate into Bitcoin (BTC) and Zcash (ZEC).

The call landed on the day South Korea’s Kospi index closed down 10.84%. deVere Group CEO Nigel Green blames circular financing between Nvidia, OpenAI and Oracle. Tuesday’s actual trigger was narrower, and it points at China.

What Triggered the AI Trade Selloff on Tuesday

The Kospi finished at 6,023.66 after a circuit breaker halted trading for 20 minutes. Samsung Electronics fell 13.4%. SK Hynix dropped 14.7%.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 lost about 4%. Tokyo Electron shed 10.96%, and memory maker Kioxia fell more than 18%.

Two China-specific catalysts drove it. Changxin Memory Technologies, the Hefei-based DRAM maker known as CXMT, closed its Shanghai STAR Market debut on Monday up 466%.

That valued CXMT near 3.3 trillion yuan. It passed Industrial and Commercial Bank of China as the most valuable mainland-listed company. Its prospectus put its 2025 global DRAM share at 7.67%, fourth behind Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.

Separately, reports said a Chinese state-backed firm has begun producing immersion deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machines. DUV equipment is the bottleneck tool that Western export controls were designed to withhold.

Tuesday reversed a recovery that had held through mid-July. The same chip names had rebounded from a selloff driven by memory valuation fears.

Nigel Green’s Circular Financing Case, Checked Against the Record

Green’s argument centers on who pays whom. Nvidia funds OpenAI. OpenAI buys cloud capacity from Oracle. Oracle then purchases Nvidia chips with the revenue.

“The same dollar gets counted as revenue three times on its way around the loop. This is not demand. It’s an accounting trick wearing a growth story as a costume,” deVere Group CEO Nigel Green stated.

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The loop is real, but three of his supporting figures do not survive a check against primary filings and company statements.

Nvidia and OpenAI announced the 10-gigawatt partnership in September 2025. CEO Jensen Huang later told Fortune it was “never a commitment.”

The correction cuts both ways. Oracle’s backlog is larger than Green says, and more than half of it traces to a single customer.

OpenAI’s contract with Oracle exceeds $300 billion over five years and starts in 2027. S&P has warned that Oracle could hold long-term data center leases with no exit if that customer stumbles.

OpenAI is on pace for roughly $14 billion in losses this year against about $25 billion in annualized revenue. However, that revenue is up from $21.4 billion at the end of 2025.

Bloomberg reported Nvidia is now assembling more than $750 billion in fresh AI deals. One would backstop up to $250 billion of OpenAI compute leases at a US data center project.

Against this backdop, Cameron Winklevoss urges investors to rotate into Bitcoin and Zcash,

His Zcash position is not new. In April, he argued that investors bullish on AI and quantum computing should also be bullish on the privacy coin.

He also defended Zcash after a June bug in its Orchard shielded pool. The twins have since funded independent protocol work.

Zcash remains up roughly 1,033% over the past year. Its Ironwood network upgrade went live Tuesday.

Schiff Sees a Peak, UBS Sees the AI Trade Maturing

Peter Schiff treats the drawdown as confirmation. He points to SpaceX, now roughly 48% below its $225.64 peak and trading under its $135 June listing price.

Schiff has framed SpaceX stock and bonds as a warning for equities and crypto alike. Its 2056 notes now yield about 7.6%, pricing like junk debt.

That test comes soon. SpaceX reports first results as a public company on August 4, and roughly 911.5 million insider shares unlock on August 6.

UBS disagrees with the peak thesis. The bank told clients the trade is maturing rather than breaking. Cheaper models redistribute compute demand instead of destroying it, in its reading.

Both readings can hold. CXMT’s debut supports Green’s China warning and UBS’s cost-deflation case at the same time.

What Tuesday did not show is a safe haven. Until Bitcoin holds ground on a day equities break, the rotation Winklevoss describes stays a thesis rather than a trade.

The post Cameron Winklevoss Pushes 2 Cryptos as AI Trade Rout Sinks Kospi 11% appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Markets are split on whether the Federal Reserve will hike rates or stay on hold on Wednesday, but analysts say bitcoin BTC$63,853.29 may be less vulnerable than AI-driven tech stocks.

Bitcoin BTC$63,853.29 recovered from its intra-day losses to trade flat just below $64,000 on Tuesday, while AI-linked technology stocks stumbled again ahead of one of the most uncertain Fed meetings in years.

Markets currently price a 70% probability that the Fed leaves rates unchanged on Wednesday and a 30% chance of a surprise 25-basis-point hike, CME FedWatch data shows. The split reflects Chair Kevin Warsh’s reduced use of forward guidance, leaving investors with less clarity on the central bank’s next move, according to derivatives analytics firm Block Scholes.

“Tomorrow’s FOMC meeting, Kevin Warsh’s second as chairman of the Fed, is one of the most uncertain in years,” said Thahbib Rahman, research analyst at Block Scholes. Looking at every Fed meeting since 2015, he noted that only two have seen markets more divided over the outcome.

Signs of decoupling

Even with that uncertainty hanging over markets, bitcoin has largely held its ground in July while chipmakers and other AI favorites have come under pressure, raising the possibility that crypto is beginning to diverge, at least at the margin, from traditional risk assets.

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