Crypto World
US Prosecutors Seek CLARITY Rules Update as Voting Window Shrinks: Report
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.
The notice puts the aggregate market value at $53,394.95, or $20.45 per share, with Cantor Fitzgerald handling the sale on NYSE Arca.
Mintzberg acquired the shares on October 3, 2024, through a privately negotiated transaction with the issuer and paid cash. He reported no sales of the security in the previous three months. A Form 144 registers an intention to sell and does not confirm a completed trade.
Third Insider to File on GXRP
Mintzberg took over as Grayscale’s CEO on August 15, 2024, arriving from Goldman Sachs, which put the purchase seven weeks into the job. The fund was a private placement for accredited investors at the time, holding close to $17 million across 301,500 shares by its first anniversary in September 2025.
Two other Grayscale insiders filed notices on the same security in January. For example, Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert, listed as a 10% stockholder, reported 9,158 shares worth $336,373.34, held through a Roth IRA and routed via Capital Institutional Services.
Moreover, Chief Legal Officer Craig Salm reported 7,123 shares worth $266,970.04 through Canaccord Genuity. Silbert’s notice names OTCQX as the venue, while Salm’s and Mintzberg’s both name NYSE Arca.
All three insiders bought inside the same seven-week window in 2024. Silbert took 4,407 shares on September 14 and 4,751 on October 4. Salm took 2,319 on October 8 and 4,804 on October 31.
Both January notices reached the SEC on January 26, and Salm signed his three days earlier. The January filings imply share prices of $36.73 and $37.48, against the $20.45 in Mintzberg’s notice, a decline of 44% over the six months between them.
Trust Float Halves in Six Months
The January filings each listed 5,790,100 shares outstanding. Mintzberg’s July notice lists 2,840,100, a reduction of 2,950,000 shares, or 51%. At $20.45 a share, the remaining count values the trust near $58 million, behind the category leaders at close to $500 million for Bitwise’s fund and below $470 million for Canary’s XRPC.
Grayscale uplisted the fund eleven days after the first US spot XRP ETF began trading on Nasdaq on November 13, 2025, with GXRP shares opening on NYSE Arca on November 24.
Across the category, seven of the ten business days to July 19 recorded zero net flows, at US spot XRP funds, against close to $1.5 billion in cumulative inflows since launch.
XRP traded at $1.07 on July 30, 70.5% below the $3.65 high it set on July 17, 2025.
The post Grayscale CEO Files to Sell $53K of GXRP Shares Bought Before Ripple ETF Listing appeared first on CryptoPotato.
South Korea should introduce interim stablecoin licensing guidance before lawmakers complete the wider Digital Asset Basic Act.
Summary
- South Korea’s report urges stablecoin licensing guidance before lawmakers complete the Digital Asset Basic Act.
- Bank majority ownership could coexist with fintech management under a compromise discussed by lawmakers publicly.
- Ten pending proposals may be combined into one government-backed digital asset bill during 2026 negotiations.
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.
The Ethereum Foundation named Pascal Caversaccio, known as pc, to its board, becoming a fourth voice alongside founder Vitalik Buterin, president Aya Miyaguchi and Swiss counsel Patrick Storchenegger.
pc brings years of security and privacy work to Ethereum’s leadership. He co-founded SEAL 911 and sat on the Foundation’s Silviculture Society before this appointment.
Who Is Ethereum’s Newest Board Member
pc has spent years building tools and auditing smart contracts across Ethereum’s ecosystem. He leads SEAL 911, a rapid-response unit that helps crypto protocols recover from hacks and exploits. The unit often steps in to contain live incidents and coordinate recovery efforts across chains.
He also wrote The Ethereum Cypherpunk Manifesto, a 2024 essay that applies Eric Hughes’ original cypherpunk text to blockchain. A 2025 follow-up pushed the same argument toward self-sovereignty and on-chain privacy.
The Silviculture Society formed last year as an informal advisory group pairing cypherpunks with builders. Membership there gave pc a voice but no formal vote. His board seat changes that.
Ether (ETH) has struggled over a similar stretch, down roughly 50 percent over the past year. The token is trading near $1,900, well off the $4,946 high it reached in August 2025.
The appointment arrives after a turbulent stretch for Ethereum’s leadership. A co-director’s exit in June followed a 40 percent budget cut that trimmed staff and spending across the Foundation.
Those changes coincided with signs that Buterin stepped back from day to day Foundation decisions. That shift left more room for outside voices like pc’s.
A Fourth Voice for The Board
The board’s job, according to the EF Mandate released earlier this year, is to set Ethereum’s long term vision. It also confirms that management decisions match the Foundation’s values.
That mandate leans on the same principles pc has championed publicly, namely censorship resistance, privacy and open source software. His writing on chat control privacy risks echoes those themes elsewhere in Ethereum’s orbit.
The board functions as a security council too, protecting Ethereum’s founding values while confirming the Foundation meets its obligations as a Swiss entity. That compliance duty falls partly to Storchenegger, its Swiss counsel.
pc’s addition rounds out a board built around protocol vision, security and legal grounding. President Aya Miyaguchi welcomed pc on X, tying the pick to CROPS, the Foundation’s internal contributor alignment framework.
pc will serve an initial one year term, unpaid and voluntary, matching the terms of his fellow board members.
A security specialist with a public record on privacy now sits where Ethereum sets its long term direction. Whether that changes the board’s priorities or simply reinforces them should become clearer as Ethereum moves through the rest of 2026.
The post Ethereum Foundation Appoints New Board Member: What Will He Do for ETH? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Don’t fall asleep on the couch
Do it often enough, and you’ll train yourself to sleep there and dread your own bed. When sleepiness hits, get up and walk back to your bedroom.
Plan for your excuses now
Don’t wait until the middle of the night to figure out where you’ll go or what you’ll do. “You have to think about all the excuses you’re going to come up with at night,” Harris says. “Think about it during the day, and problem-solve for those.”
If the rest of your home is cold, for instance, “keep a robe and slippers right next to your bed,” she says, and consider leaving an electric blanket in the room where you plan to go. Choose your activity in advance, too, and have your book, magazine, cookbook, or art supplies ready.
You can also adapt the technique to your circumstances. If you live in a studio or don’t want to disturb your partner, sit up in bed or move to a nearby chair. Harris also recommends remaining seated in bed if you take medication that makes you groggy or you have an increased risk of falling.
Alongside Nvidia, many of the biggest companies signed their names, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. OpenAI and Google signed after the letter’s initial publication. (A notable absence was Anthropic.)
The background to all of this maneuvering was the unprecedented news from last week: that OpenAI models, undergoing internal testing, broke out of an offline “sandbox” inside OpenAI, accessed the internet, and used a never-before-seen cyber exploit to break into the AI repository Hugging Face—all without OpenAI employees’ direction, oversight, or, for several days, even awareness.
It was the kind of “warning shot” that AI safety advocates have long worried about: a rogue AI escaping its testing environment and causing real-world damage. Many saw it as a harbinger of worse hacks to come—especially when open-source AI models, which are widely seen as three to six months behind the frontier “closed” OpenAI models that carried out the attack, catch up to today’s level of capabilities. Open-source models are seen as especially worrisome by AI safety advocates because their guardrails can sometimes be stripped away. And because after they are released for free download on the internet, it is almost impossible to trace or destroy every copy of models that are found to be dangerous.
Policy report recommends interim licensing guidance, greater flexibility for stablecoin issuers and rules ahead of the Digital Asset Basic Act.
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.
Ten European financial institutions have launched Regulated Layer One (RL1), a jointly owned blockchain cooperative designed for regulated financial markets and tokenized assets.
On Tuesday, the group announced that RL1 had been established as a European Cooperative Society in Luxembourg and had begun operations with founding members including ABN AMRO, Cecabank, Chartered Investment, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis CIB, SC Ventures and Seturion.
RL1 said each member will have equal decision-making rights over the network’s governance and development.
The private, permissioned network is based on infrastructure developed by German fintech Secure Worldwide Interbank Asset Transfer (SWIAT), which has now transferred ownership of the network to the cooperative.
SWIAT said the platform has processed more than 50 transactions worth over 700 million euros (about $808 million) during three years of production use.
The blockchain is designed to support institutional use cases including digital money, tokenized bonds, collateral and blockchain-based settlement. RL1 said the shared network could reduce fragmentation caused by financial institutions operating separate distributed ledger systems.
Former SWIAT managing director Henning Vollbehr will lead RL1. KfW and L-Bank will continue supporting the initiative, while RL1 said it is in discussions with additional institutions, including NatWest, about joining the network.
Related: CoinShares debuts Bitcoin mining ETF in Europe entrance
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