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Eight U.S. Blockchain Lobby Groups Unite Ahead of Trump’s Crypto Friendly Regime

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With only a handful of days remaining until the second inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, crypto policy groups are readying to kick things into higher gear.

Blockchain associations from eight U.S. states announced on Tuesday the creation of the North American Blockchain Association (NABA), an organization aiming to provide cohesive crypto policy recommendations to the federal government.

“A few years ago [NABA CEO] Arry Yu and I led an effort to provide more information and best practices sharing between state associations,” Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council and a member of NABA’s board of directors, told CoinDesk. “NABA is the formalization of that process in which each state association is independent and retains agency but can act in concert with other states when necessary.”

Members include the Texas Blockchain Council, the Alabama Blockchain Alliance, the California Blockchain Advocacy Coalition, the Florida Blockchain Business Association, the Ohio Blockchain Council, the Pennsylvania Blockchain Coalition, the Virginia Blockchain Council and the Washington Technology Industry Association Cascadia Blockchain Council.

A former political science professor and Army officer, Bratcher founded the TBC in 2019. It’s a non-profit trade association, meaning that the organization gets its funding through memberships — large corporations such as Coinbase (COIN) and Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY), as well as law firms and banks, pay annual fees to be part of the association.

More than half of the TBC’s funding comes from bitcoin (BTC) miners: MARA Holdings (MARA), Riot Platforms (RIOT), Core Scientific (CORZ), Bitmain and Cipher Mining (CIFR) are among the association’s biggest financial contributors.

The incoming Trump administration isn’t likely to affect the TBC or Texas miners in a meaningful way, Bratcher said. That, in a sense, will already be a departure from the Biden regime, which contemplated passing a 30% tax, called DAME, specifically on bitcoin miners. The Department of Energy similarly attempted to collect proprietary and confidential information from bitcoin miners and make that data available publicly, which led the TBC and Riot Platforms to sue them in federal court.

“The only thing the bitcoin mining industry is asking from the Trump administration is to keep things fair and consistent and apply the rules the same for everybody,” Bratcher said. “We feel optimistic that some of the things that were unfair about the Biden administration will no longer happen.”

Texas and Miners

With its advantageous tax regime, enormous economy and abundant energy, Texas has become one of the most popular jurisdictions in the world for bitcoin miners.

Texas is home to a tremendous amount of renewable energy projects, and these may generate a lot of electricity when there’s little demand for it — think a wind farm on a windy night, for example, when everyone is asleep, and consumption is at its lowest. For the most part, electricity must be consumed immediately; transmitting that electricity from one place to another is also tricky since energy is lost in the process. In other words, Texas undergoes periods of great electricity generation and small demand and periods of great demand but insufficient production.

Why has Texas’ energy mix evolved in such a way? It all has to do with subsidies provided by the federal government, which according to Bratcher can reach $30 per MW/h and give a strong incentive for renewable energy companies to develop wind and solar power. Wind farms have been built in the wind corridor of West Texas; more recently, the number of solar projects has exploded — from about 2,000 megawatts (MW) to 22,000 MW statewide in a matter of five years, Bratcher said.

Enter bitcoin mining. Contrary to other types of data centers, which need almost 100% uptime, bitcoin mines can be turned on and off easily. So they are well-adapted to a grid that sees significant volatility in demand. “You had a period where miners were able to get wholesale power prices and lock in power purchase agreements for extremely low amounts of money,” Bratcher said.

Bitcoin miners now consume about 3,100 MW in Texas, according to Bratcher — enough energy to supply 620,000 homes, per data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator. “About half of all bitcoin mining in the U.S. is in Texas,” Bratcher said.

That explains why the TBC receives such a big portion of its funding from bitcoin miners. In fact, the TBC has hired a number of consultants with a specific focus on ERCOT and energy policy, whereas other types of businesses — crypto exchanges, money transmission — haven’t had the same need.

Will Texas remain friendly towards bitcoin miners in the years to come? That remains to be seen, Bratcher said. Mining firms aren’t the only ones that have rushed to take advantage of Texas’ unique grid, and there is now concern among elected officials that demand might end up being too high. The TBC estimates that the grid will grow somewhere between 5% and 6% per year for the next 10 years — a fast pace compared to the 1% or 2% per year of prior times.

Even so, ERCOT isn’t likely to discriminate against bitcoin miners specifically; it’s simply concerned with the rate of growth. New bitcoin mining operations, Bratcher said, are being built alongside new residential and industrial projects, and ultimately account for less than 10% of the anticipated growth.

“I think [ERCOT] will institute rules for how any large loads interconnect to the grid, and that will create some new planning requirements for bitcoin miners and other large loads, including data centers and industrial consumers,” Bratcher said.

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Canary Capital Files for Tron ETF With Staking Capabilities

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Canary Capital is looking to launch an exchange-traded fund (ETF) tracking the price of Tron’s native token, TRX, according to a filing.

The hedge fund submitted a Form S-1 for the Canary Staked TRX ETF with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. As the name suggests, the fund — if approved — would stake portions of its holdings.

This would be done through third-party providers, with BitGo acting as custodian for the assets. The fund would track TRX’s spot price using CoinDesk Indices calculations.

A proposed ticker as well as the management fee for the product have not been shared yet.

Issuers had initially filed applications for spot ethereum (ETH) ETFs with the staking feature included but removed them in an amended filing later in order to receive approval from the SEC on their proposals.

While the SEC under former Chair Gary Gensler was strictly against staking, issuers have grown more hopeful that they will be able to add the feature to their spot ether funds, among others, with the appointment of crypto-friendly Chair Paul Atkins.

A decision on a February request from Grayscale to allow staking in the Grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHE) and the Grayscale Ethereum Mini Trust ETF (ETH) was postponed by the regulator just a few days ago.

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Feds Mistakenly Order Estonian HashFlare Fraudsters to Self-Deport Ahead of Sentencing

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Just four months ahead of their criminal sentencing for operating a $577 million cryptocurrency mining Ponzi scheme, the two Estonian founders of HashFlare were seemingly mistakenly ordered to self-deport by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — an instruction that directly contradicted a court order for the men to remain in Washington state until they are sentenced in August.

In a joint letter to the court last week, lawyers for Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turogin told District Judge Robert Lasnik of the Western District of Washington that both men had received “disturbing communications” from DHS ordering them to leave the country immediately.

“It is time for you to leave the United States,” an email to Potapenko and Turogin dated April 11 read. “DHS is terminating your parole. Do not attempt to remain in the United States — the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”

The email, included with the letter filed last week, threatened both men with “criminal prosecution, civil fines, and penalties and any other lawful options available to the federal government” if they stayed in the country. It resembles emails that undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike have received over the past few days.

Ironically, Potapenko and Turogin are not in the U.S. of their own volition — they were extradited from their native Estonia at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2022 on an 18-count indictment tied to their HashFlare scheme. Though they initially pleaded not guilty to all charges, in February they both pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and agreed to forfeit over $400 million in assets. They have both been in the Seattle area on bond since last July.

“Although there is nothing Ivan and Sergei would want more than to immediately go home, they understood that they are also under Court order to remain in King County,” wrote Mark Bini, a partner at Reed Smith LLP and lead counsel for Potenko, wrote in the pair’s joint letter to the court. Bini did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

In his letter, Bini said DHS’s emails had caused both Potapenko and Turogin «significant anxiety.”

“We and our clients have all seen recent news. Immigration authorities make mistakes, and individuals who should not be in custody end up in custody, sometimes even deported to places where they should not be deported,” Bini wrote.

Six days after Bini’s letter to the judge, the DOJ filed its own letter with the court saying that prosecutors had coordinated with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division and secured a year-long deferral to the self-deportation order.

“This should provide ample time for the sentencing to take place,” the prosecution’s letter said.

DHS did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Potapenko and Turogin are slated to be sentenced on August 14 in Seattle. Their lawyers have said that they will request to be sentenced to time served, meaning no additional time in prison, and to be sent home to Estonia “immediately.”

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CoinDesk Weekly Recap: EigenLayer, Kraken, Coinbase, AWS

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Following last week’s tariff-caused drama, this was a relatively quiet week in crypto. Bitcoin remained stable around $84k. The CoinDesk 20, which tracks about 80% of the market, was up about 4% in the last seven days — i.e. nothing historic.

Still, plenty happened. On Tuesday, much of crypto went offline because of a tech issue at AWS, showing how the decentralized economy isn’t always that decentralized. Shaurya Malwa reported the news early. Bitcoin and other major cryptos slipped on bad news for Nvidia, Omkar Godbole reported.

Mantra, a project focused on real world assets, lost 90% of its value. Explanations varied (the company said it was due to “force liquidations” exchanges).

Meanwhile, EigenLayer, a restaking leader, rolled out a “slashing” feature meant to address security concerns (Sam Kessler reported). OKX, a major exchange, announced plans to set up in California following a $500 million settlement with the SEC over claims it operated previously in the U.S. without a money transmitter license. Cheyenne Ligon had that story.

In less good news, Kraken laid off “hundreds” of staff ahead of an expected IPO. And Coinbase became embroiled in a “front running controversy” linked to a curiously named token on its Base L2. Privacy advocates reacted with alarm to rumors that Binance was about to delist Zcash following a long decline in the value of privacy coins.

In D.C. news, Jesse Hamilton reported on a new wave of crypto lobbyists flooding the capital. Some asked if there are now too many trade groups and whether they really all could be effective.

Friends With Benefits, a buzzy social club for creative technologists, launched a new program to build Web3 products for music, film, publishing and other fun activities. (I wrote that one.)

Of course, there was plenty happening in the economy and markets (Trump’s disgust for Fed chair Powell fed into the unease). But, in crypto, it was pretty much business as usual. Fortunes won, fortunes lost, fortunes deferred.

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