Policy

The EU's stablecoin grandfathering period expired on 1 July. Tether never applied for e-money authorisation, and Circle now enjoys close to a monopoly on regulated European stablecoin liquidity.

Tuesday's deadline ends the public window on the joint Treasury proposal that would treat permitted payment stablecoin issuers as Bank Secrecy Act institutions. Major banking groups asked regulators to halt the docket until the core GENIUS Act rules are written.

The SEC's proposal abolishes the seasoning period and public-float thresholds that have kept newly listed and smaller companies out of the shelf-registration regime since 1985. For crypto firms with IPOs in the queue, the rule change matters more than the Clarity Act.

Iran's new Hormuz Safe platform offers cryptographically verified insurance certificates against vessel inspection, detention and confiscation — payable in bitcoin. The revenue target is $10 billion a year. CoinDesk and Bloomberg cannot confirm that a single policy has actually been sold.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded that the OCC produce records by June 1 explaining its approval of national trust charters for nine crypto firms including Coinbase, Ripple, Paxos, Circle, BitGo, Fidelity, Crypto.com, Protego, and Stripe's Bridge subsidiary.

BlackRock used the last day of the OCC's GENIUS Act comment window to demand the regulator scrap a proposed limit on how much of a stablecoin's reserves can be held in tokenised form. BUIDL backs more than 90 per cent of two of the largest crypto-native dollar tokens.

A CoinDesk poll of 1,000 registered voters published on May 3 found that 62 per cent do not trust the Trump administration to oversee the crypto sector, and 73 per cent — including 59 per cent of Republicans — oppose senior government officials holding personal business interests in the industry.

Senators Cynthia Lummis and Thom Tillis publicly stood behind the stablecoin yield language in the CLARITY Act on Monday after a coalition of five banking trade groups attacked the compromise as inadequate. The next two weeks will decide whether the deal holds.

Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks finalised the language on stablecoin rewards in the CLARITY Act on Friday, ending the months-long deadlock that had killed the bill's momentum. The compromise bans passive yield but preserves activity-based rewards — and Coinbase keeps the revenue stream that mattered most.

Senators voted unanimously on April 30 to bar themselves and their staff from trading on prediction markets, an immediate amendment to Rule 37 introduced by Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno after months of insider-trading concerns over senators wagering on policy outcomes they themselves were shaping.

Patrick Witt, Trump's new digital-assets adviser, told the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas that the White House is preparing a 'big announcement' on the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve within weeks — without specifying what it will contain.

The Senate Banking Committee will not mark up the CLARITY Act before its early-May recess after Senator Thom Tillis asked Chair Tim Scott for additional negotiating time. Galaxy Digital now puts the odds of 2026 passage at 50-50.

Canada's Spring Economic Update proposes a federal blanket ban on all 4,000 cryptocurrency ATMs nationwide, citing CAD 704 million in fraud losses last year and calling the machines a 'primary method' for scammers to defraud victims.

India's Reserve Bank has begun routing portions of the country's $80 billion welfare programme through the digital rupee in ten state-level pilots, while urging the federal government to put a BRICS-wide CBDC interoperability proposal on the agenda of the bloc's 2026 summit.

A coordinated international operation led by Dubai Police has dismantled nine cryptocurrency investment scam centres and arrested at least 276 people, with three defendants now facing federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the Southern District of California.

Lewis Kaplan denied Sam Bankman-Fried's motion for a new trial on Tuesday, six days after the convicted FTX founder asked to withdraw the same motion on the grounds that Kaplan would not give him a fair hearing. The judge denied the withdrawal too.

The EU's 20th sanctions package against Russia includes a total ban on crypto transactions with Russian-based providers, the bloc's most comprehensive crypto-specific enforcement action to date.

The stablecoin issuer blocked two TRON wallets holding a combined $344 million after OFAC designated them as part of Iran's sanctions-evasion network. Treasury Secretary Bessent called it part of a broader campaign to cut off Tehran's financial lifelines.

The National Bank has approved bitcoin, ether, solana and 23 other digital assets for use by crypto banks that will offer deposits, loans, staking and token issuance under direct central bank supervision.