In a way, Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency windfall is a reflection of the speculative nature of the nascent industry, in which executives behind these often highly volatile ventures are at times able to generate huge profits at the expense of smaller investors, who often lose vast sums on experimental coins. Former federal financial regulators said Mr. Trump has taken that to…
NFTs: 95% to zero. 23 million people left holding worthless tokens, and the images are now literally vanishing off dead servers. Web3 and the metaverse: Meta lit more than $80 billion on fire. Disney, Walmart, Microsoft, and Tencent built their virtual worlds, looked around at billion-dollar ghost towns with a few dozen daily visitors, and walked out. Blockchain — the…
… According to this narrative, FTX established itself in the Bahamas because the United States lacked a comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto. Had Congress acted sooner, proponents argue, FTX would have operated within the United States under proper supervision instead of relocating offshore to avoid regulatory uncertainty. […]
The problem with this narrative is that it is completely backwards. FTX did not collapse because the Bahamas lacked a bespoke crypto regulatory framework. FTX chose the Bahamas precisely because it had one.
The crypto industry’s “clarity” talking point is a form of Orwellian doublespeak deployed to advance a self-serving deregulatory agenda in Washington. The reality is that FTX and many other crypto firms deliberately avoided the United States because they did not want to register with the SEC and comply with the federal securities laws.
Source: The Crypto Industry Wants America to Become the Bahamas – The FinReg Blog
The Justin Sun settlement underscores the incoherence of this posture. In March 2026, the SEC announced a proposed settlement of its long-running case against Sun for $10 million, while dismissing the outstanding charges against him. The case, originally brought in 2023, alleged that Sun and his companies offered and sold unregistered securities in the form of TRX and BTT and manipulated the secondary market for TRX through wash trading. The proposed settlement did not require Sun to admit wrongdoing. But to impose the penalty, the SEC still had to assert jurisdiction, meaning the Commission effectively maintained that, at least at the relevant time, TRX had been offered and sold as part of an investment contract.
That creates an awkward problem for the Trump SEC. The agency has spent the past year arguing, explicitly and implicitly, that most crypto tokens fall outside the securities laws and that the prior administration’s crypto enforcement program was overbroad. Yet when it came time to settle with Sun, who has business ties to World Liberty and is now suing the company, the SEC still relied on the very securities-law logic it has otherwise tried to minimize.
This matters for $WLFI because the Sun settlement shows that the SEC still knows how to apply Howey when it chooses to. It can still recognize that a token may be offered and sold as part of an investment contract, even if the token is not itself a stock or bond. It can still impose penalties for unregistered crypto securities offerings. What it has not shown is a willingness to apply that same analysis to a token project financially tied to the president of the United States.
That creates a basic enforcement-integrity question: if this were any other crypto issuer, would the SEC be investigating?
Source: Is $WLFI an Unregistered Security? – The FinReg Blog
Powerful Wall Street interests, long used to getting their way when Republicans control Washington, are on the brink of a stunning public defeat in the GOP-run Senate.
Senators are poised to move forward on a bipartisan proposal to end a clash between banks and cryptocurrency companies that Wall Street lobbyists hate, clearing the way for a landmark crypto bill to advance this month.
The apparent outcome of the fight shows how the crypto industry, still a relatively new special interest in Washington, is supplanting the banking sector’s entrenched lobbying power. While banks have benefited from friendlier GOP-appointed regulators during the second Trump administration, they have spent much of the last two years fighting against upstart crypto companies that have plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into political and lobbying spending, employing bare-knuckle tactics to notch key policy wins.
Source: Wall Street went to war with crypto. It’s losing. – POLITICO
U.S. voters placed cryptocurrencies toward the bottom of a list of their highest priorities for the upcoming midterm election.
Just 1% of respondents said they ranked crypto as their top concern, according to a survey of 1,000 randomly selected registered U.S. voters, though other responses revealed a wider view of the technology as an important political issue.
The survey was conducted near the end of April by Public Opinion Strategies on CoinDesk’s behalf, as part of CoinDesk’s coverage of the 2026 U.S. midterm election. The survey was evenly split between Republican and Democrat respondents (41% of respondents identified with each party to some degree), with a credibility interval of plus or minus 3.53%.
Source: Crypto is at the bottom of U.S. voters’ priorities heading into the midterm, CoinDesk survey shows
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins said Monday that the agency has limited ability to ensure the Trump administration’s push to accelerate cryptocurrency development will endure beyond his term without market structure legislation from Congress.
“Nothing future-proofs things like a statute,” Atkins said during an appearance at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, adding that “good opinions from courts” also help.
The chair said the SEC has room to be nimble and act under the securities laws but that the commission is ultimately bound by its existing authority, which is “basically a 1930s-type thing.”
Atkins, as well as Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig, has made bringing regulatory clarity to the crypto industry a central focus of his tenure, issuing numerous staff interpretations aimed at providing greater certainty.
Source: Crypto Push Won’t Last Without Congress, SEC’s Atkins Says | Law.com
A gold-hued skyscraper is rising above the traffic-clogged streets of the capital city on the Mekong River.
The building is already Cambodia’s tallest structure—and a monument to the spoils generated by transnational cybergangs that have stolen billions of dollars from unsuspecting Americans and others worldwide.
The skyscraper is being built by a company under sanctions by the U.S. Treasury Department for its alleged connection to one of hundreds of scam operations that have cropped up across Cambodia. Scam compounds, some the size of small towns, have housed enslaved workers doing the grunt work of online scams, posing as love interests, investors or police.
Predominantly Chinese syndicates operating in Cambodia have grown so enormous in scale that some foreign politicians refer to the country of 18 million people as “Scambodia.”
Source: How Cybercrime Became a Leading Industry in ‘Scambodia’ – WSJ
But the CFTC under Selig’s sole leadership has a long way to go to take on the expansive universe of digital commodities, while also contending with a web of emerging jurisdictional questions around prediction markets, agency watchers say.
“It’s hard to imagine expanding the remit of a federal agency that already punches above its weight in terms of its size and capacity without increasing the resources allocated to the commission,” said Kristin Johnson, a former Democratic CFTC commissioner who’s now a professor at George Washington University Law School.
The CFTC has lost more than 20% of its staff since the end of fiscal 2024, and was down to fewer than 550 employees as of February, according to Office of Personnel Management data. It was hiring for just six full-time roles as of late Thursday, according to USAJobs listings.
Reductions in force last year hit economists and enforcement personnel at the CFTC, as well as licensing and supervision staff, according to Johnson. […]
“There’s definitely going to be more on the CFTC’s plate,” said Frank Zarb, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP and former SEC special counsel. “The CFTC is going to have to find a way to increase its staffing in order to perform all the functions that the market structure legislation would allocate to it.”
Source: Crypto Bill Languishes in Senate, Leaving Tiny CFTC in Limbo
Anyway. World Liberty Financial is a crypto project that, possibly among other things, provides a way for people to give money to Donald Trump and get a receipt for it on the blockchain. Why would you want to give Donald Trump money on the blockchain? Reasons! The goodness of your heart! One of the biggest buyers of World Liberty tokens, when they launched in 2024, was Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who at the time was being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud. Now he isn’t!
What did Sun get in exchange for buying $30 million of World Liberty tokens? Well, possibly among other things, he got the tokens. Which are tradable. Except lol they aren’t:
Source: World Liberty