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White House Signals Breakthrough on ‘Clarity Act’: Federal Stablecoin Floor Nears Reality

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Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets and the White House’s chief crypto adviser, said on Monday that negotiations on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act have advanced well beyond the stablecoin yield impasse, with multiple outstanding issues being resolved in parallel behind the scenes.

The signal is the clearest indication yet that a federal regulatory floor for payment stablecoins is within legislative reach.

The question isn’t whether the White House wants this bill passed. It clearly does. The question is whether the Senate Banking Committee can hold a markup hearing before the political window closes, analysts warn that missing a May 2026 advancement deadline risks pushing the entire legislative effort past the November midterms.

Key Takeaways:
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  • Yield Compromise Holding: A bipartisan deal on stablecoin yield – the primary bank-industry flashpoint – is intact, per Witt, who called it a “must-have” precondition for tackling remaining issues.
  • Secondary Issues Closing: DeFi illicit finance protections and restrictions on senior government officials profiting from crypto – a Democratic demand targeting President Trump – are both reportedly near resolution.
  • Senate Banking Committee Markup Pending: The Clarity Act requires a committee markup before reaching a full Senate floor vote; that hearing was derailed in January 2026 by bank lobbyist objections and has not been rescheduled.
  • Federal Reserve Role Contested: A core negotiating tension remains over whether the Fed retains veto power over state-chartered stablecoin issuers – a provision that would materially affect whether issuers like Circle’s USDC gain direct access to federal payment infrastructure.
  • Banking Sector Split: The American Bankers Association responded critically Monday to a White House economic report downplaying yield-bearing stablecoin risks to bank deposits – signaling the industry remains internally divided.
  • Midterm Clock Running: Sen. Bill Hagerty and Sen. Cynthia Lummis have flagged a late-April markup target; failure risks post-election delay until 2027.
  • Watch: Updated stablecoin yield legislative text expected after Easter recess following final industry-bank talks.

Discover: Best Crypto Presales to Watch Amid Stablecoin Regulatory Clarity

What the Clarity Act Federal Floor Actually Changes for Stablecoin Issuers and Market Infrastructure

The core structural shift embedded in the Clarity Act is the establishment of a federal minimum standard , a regulatory floor, that all payment stablecoin issuers must meet regardless of their state charter status.

Before this framework, issuers operated under a patchwork of state money transmission licenses with no unified federal reserve, capital, or transparency requirements.

That ambiguity has been the primary barrier preventing institutional adoption at scale for settlement and cash management.

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Under the proposed framework, issuers would be required to maintain 1:1 reserve backing with high-quality liquid assets, meet federal safety-and-soundness standards, and comply with AML and illicit finance controls, including, critically, new DeFi-specific protections that Witt confirmed are still being finalized.

The DeFi provisions are not cosmetic. They determine whether decentralized protocols that route stablecoin liquidity face issuer-level compliance obligations or are treated as distinct actors, a distinction that shapes the entire secondary market architecture for USDC and its competitors.

The Federal Reserve dimension carries the highest institutional stakes.

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Negotiations are reportedly centering on whether the Fed retains override authority over state-regulated issuers, a mechanism that would function as a systemic risk check but would also effectively give the central bank leverage over which issuers can access federal payment rails.

For Circle, that access would reduce counterparty risk at the settlement layer and open institutional corridors currently closed to non-bank entities.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly urged rapid spring 2026 passage, citing midterm urgency, a signal that Treasury views this not as incremental cleanup but as foundational market infrastructure legislation.

Photo: Scott Bessent

The stablecoin yield compromise, reached between key senators from both parties, addresses what banks had framed as an existential threat to their deposit base.

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan warned in February that trillions in deposits could migrate to yield-bearing stablecoins if Congress authorized interest-like returns.

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Witt proposed language at ETHDenver in February limiting stablecoin rewards to “activities or transactions” rather than balances, with violations penalized up to $500,000 per day, a formulation that appears to have formed the basis of the current bipartisan compromise.

This dynamic mirrors what’s unfolding in Japan’s reclassification of crypto as a financial instrument, where the core legislative tension also centered on where digital assets fit within existing banking and payment system hierarchies.

Discover: Best Crypto Exchanges for Stablecoin Trading and Settlement

The post White House Signals Breakthrough on ‘Clarity Act’: Federal Stablecoin Floor Nears Reality appeared first on Cryptonews.

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fake Ledger app steals $9.5 million

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fake Ledger app steals $9.5 million

A crypto scam posing as the official Ledger Live hardware wallet app passed Apple’s App Store review process and drained at least $9.5 million from more than 50 victims across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and XRP between April 7 and April 13, with stolen funds routed through more than 150 KuCoin deposit addresses and into a centralized mixing service.

Summary

  • The three largest individual thefts were $3.23 million in USDT on April 9, $2.08 million in USDC on April 11, and $1.95 million in BTC, ETH, and stETH on April 8, with blockchain investigator ZachXBT tracing all stolen funds to deposit addresses linked to a mixing service called AudiA6, known for charging high fees to obscure illicit transactions.
  • The attack worked by prompting users to enter their 24-word seed phrase into the fake app during what appeared to be a normal wallet setup flow; once a seed phrase is entered into any connected application, attackers gain full and immediate control of every wallet derived from it.
  • Apple has removed the fake app from the App Store but has not publicly commented on how it passed the review process; ZachXBT separately reported that Apple appears to be blocking a security analysis tool from examining the fraudulent listing, which has complicated independent investigation.

A report on the theft brought the incident to wide attention after ZachXBT published his on-chain analysis. One of the victims, posting on X under the handle @glove, was Philadelphia musician Garrett Dutton of G. Love and Special Sauce, who lost 5.92 BTC accumulated over a decade of saving. “I worked ten years for this,” he wrote. “Be careful out there.” He was setting up his Ledger hardware wallet on a new MacBook when he searched the App Store for Ledger Live and downloaded the impersonating app. The seed phrase he entered gave attackers immediate access.

The incident is not without precedent. A nearly identical fake Ledger app scheme stole approximately $600,000 through Microsoft’s app store in 2023, using the same impersonation-plus-seed-phrase playbook.

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The mechanism that makes this attack effective is not technical sophistication. It is social trust. Users going to the Apple App Store reasonably expect that the apps listed there have been reviewed and are legitimate. The fake Ledger app exploited that trust by appearing in search results for “Ledger Live” with convincing branding and a standard setup flow. Apple’s review process, which has rejected crypto apps for policy reasons, apparently did not catch a malicious application designed to steal funds from users of hardware wallets that Apple’s own review policies pushed them toward using in the first place.

Why Seed Phrases and App Stores Are Structurally Incompatible

The hardware wallet’s entire security model rests on one rule: the seed phrase never touches a connected device. The physical hardware generates the seed phrase offline and signs transactions internally, so private keys are never exposed to the internet. The moment a user types their seed phrase into any app, website, or keyboard, the hardware wallet’s protection is eliminated. No legitimate wallet provider, including Ledger, ever asks for a seed phrase during setup. Any application that requests one is either malfunctioning or malicious. Security experts recommend downloading Ledger Live only from ledger.com directly, never from any app store.

What Happens to Stolen Funds and Why Recovery Is Unlikely

ZachXBT traced the stolen funds through nine transactions into KuCoin deposit addresses linked to the AudiA6 mixing service. KuCoin has been barred from onboarding new EU users by Austrian regulators in February 2026, just three months after receiving a MiCA license, and previously paid over $300 million to US authorities in 2025 to settle anti-money laundering violations. Recovery would require coordinated law enforcement action and voluntary exchange cooperation that ZachXBT said he did not expect. The incident has prompted discussion of potential class-action lawsuits against Apple for platform liability, and reinforces why crypto security experts consistently warn against downloading wallet software from any source other than the manufacturer’s official website.

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DOJ opens $40 million OneCoin victim claims after $4 billion global crypto fraud

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U.S. DOJ hits Paxful for $4 million in case tied to illegal sex work, money laundering

Victims of the OneCoin $4 billion fraud scheme can now seek compensation through a $40 million fund of seized assets, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Monday.

Between 2014 and 2019, Ignatova and Karl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founders of OneCoin Ltd. (OneCoin), and others operated an international cryptocurrency investment scheme defrauding up to 3.4 million investors from around the globe, the DOJ said.

The Sofia, Bulgaria-based operation marketed and sold a fraudulent crypto by the same name through a global multi-level-marketing (MLM) network.

Victims worldwide invested over $4 billion worldwide in the fraudulent cryptocurrency which operated through a network of promoters, who solicited investments in return for purported tokens, but notably did not actually involve any cryptocurrencies nor did OneCoin exist on any blockchain.

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The ponzi scheme, which the DOJ called “one of the largest global fraud schemes in history”, collapsed in 2017, after Ignatova and her team were found to have manipulated OneCoin’s perceived value through the automatic generation of new coins.

In June 2024, the DOJ offered a new $5 million reward for the missing Cryptqueen. Greenwood, who allegedly called the investors “idiots”, admitted to federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in 2022.

“OneCoin’s founders sold a lie disguised as cryptocurrency, costing victims more than $4 billion worldwide,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York. He also said the DOJ would continue working to seize criminal proceeds and prioritize getting money back into the hands of victims.

The compensation process for OneCoin comes roughly four weeks after the FTX Recovery Trust announced it would distribute $2.2 billion to creditors in its fourth payout under the exchange’s Chapter 11 plan. Earlier rounds totalled more than $6 billion as part of a process aimed at recovering assets for users of the once-prominent crypto trading platform, which collapsed in November 2022, triggering a steep crypto bear market.

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Fed Chair Nominee Discloses Holdings in Crypto and AI

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Federal Reserve, Government, Donald Trump, Cryptocurrency Investment

Update (April 14 7:51 PM UTC): This article has been updated to with date of nomination hearing.

Kevin Warsh, US President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve to replace Chair Jerome Powell, has reported millions of dollars in assets ahead of his confirmation hearing, including investments in crypto and AI companies.

In a filing with the US Office of Government Ethics, Warsh reported Excepted Investment Funds (EIFs) in Compound, Dapper Labs, Kinetic, as well as AI companies Delphi, Conversion, Factory, Glue and others ahead of his confirmation hearing in the Senate.

While the prospective Fed chair’s assets amounted to more than $100 million, none of his crypto and AI investments included a value range, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

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Federal Reserve, Government, Donald Trump, Cryptocurrency Investment
Sample of Kevin Warsh’s asset disclosure forms. Source: US Office of Government Ethics

It’s unclear why the value of the crypto and AI investments were not included in the disclosures, but the ethics’ office rules do not require reporting for assets under $1,000. Among the biggest disclosures were more than $50 million in the Juggernaut Fund and more than $10 million in income from consulting fees for Duquesne Family Office, the investment firm of Stanley Druckenmiller.

Trump announced Warsh as his pick to lead the US central bank in January, but only formally advanced his name to the Senate in March following numerous threats to oust Powell. Whoever heads the Fed has significant influence over US financial policy, including federal interest rates.

Related: Deutsche Börse invests $200 million in Kraken parent Payward

Powell’s second four-year term as chair ends on May 15. The Senate Banking Committee announced Tuesday afternoon that it will hold a hearing on Warsh’s nomination to replace the Fed chair on April 21.

Trump still hasn’t announced key nominations for financial agencies

While the Senate Banking Committee may soon consider Warsh’s nomination, Trump has not signaled that he plans to announce additional picks for commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), both of which have empty leadership seats at a crucial time for digital asset regulation.

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The SEC currently has only three out of five commissioners in its leadership — all Republicans — while another Republican, Michael Selig, is the sole commissioner at the CFTC, where four remaining slots are unfilled. Both regulatory agencies are expected to play significant roles in digital asset regulation should the Senate pass a crypto market structure bill that has been stalled in the chamber since July 2025.

Magazine: Singapore is no ‘crypto hub’ — but it is serious about stablecoins: StraitX CEO