The Trump administration’s exemption on tariffs for electronics may be short-lived.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that the White House’s decision to exempt items like smartphones, computers, and other consumer electronics from steep tariffs earlier this month was only temporary.

A new set of duties focused on semiconductors is expected within “a month or two,” he said.

“All those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they’re going to have a special focus type of tariff to make sure that those products get reshored,” Lutnick said during an interview on ABC’s This Week.

The goal, he added, is to encourage chip and flat panel production in the U.S. and reduce dependence on Asian manufacturing. The clarification follows a bulletin from U.S. Customs and Border Protection released late Friday bringing a temporary exemption for a range of key electronics from the reciprocal tariffs President Donald Trump announced earlier this month.

However, Lutnick emphasized that those same items would soon be swept up under a more targeted policy aimed at “national security” industries like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.

“We need to have chips, and we need to have flat panels — we need to have these things made in America,” Lutnick said.

The price of bitcoin dropped roughly 1% on headlines reporting on Lutnick’s words, before recovering back to the $84,000 mark. The wider crypto market, measured by the CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index, is down roughly 1.6% in the last 24-hour period.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is bracing for a disruption in the near $30 trillion U.S. Treasury market — one he says could force the Federal Reserve to step in, just as it did during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There will be a kerfuffle in the Treasury markets because of all the rules and regulations,” Dimon said in a Friday earnings call, warning that the Fed won’t act until “they start to panic a little bit.»

Dimon’s comments come as bond yields spike and market volatility rises. The rising yields have suggested investors are pulling back from popular trades that exploit gaps between Treasury prices and futures, adding stress to a market already rattled by trade tensions under the escalating U.S.-China trade war.

Dimon said current regulations are keeping banks from stepping in as buyers when liquidity dries up. In 2020, a similar situation forced the Fed to launch a multi-trillion-dollar bond-buying program to keep the market functioning.

He’s pushing for reforms that would let banks act more freely as intermediaries. One idea under discussion is exempting Treasuries from leverage ratio calculations, which could allow institutions to buy more government debt without hitting capital buffers.

“If they don’t [change the rules], the Fed will have to intermediate, which I think is just a bad policy idea,” Dimon said.

The Treasury market plays a central role in global finance, setting the tone for everything from mortgage rates to corporate bond yields. Dimon warned that if the system locks up again, the consequences could ripple across the economy.

A Treasury market disruption that leads to Fed intervention could drive some investors toward bitcoin (BTC), which is often seen as a hedge against monetary instability. That appears to have been the case in 2020, when bitcoin’s price surged following the Fed’s aggressive stimulus response. Others factors, including the cryptocurrency’s 2020 halving impact, could have also factored into bitcoin’s price jump.

Luxor Technology wants to make bitcoin mining easier. That’s why the firm has rolled out a panoply of products (mining pools, hashrate derivatives, data analytics, ASIC brokerage) to help bitcoin miners, large and small, develop their operations.

Aaron Forster, the company’s director of business development, joined in October 2021, and has seen the team grow from roughly 15 to 85 people in the span of three and a half years.

Forster worked a decade in the Canadian energy sector before coming to bitcoin mining, which is one of the reasons why he’ll be speaking about the future of mining in Canada and the U.S. at the BTC & Mining Summit at Consensus this year.

Follow full coverage of Consensus 2025 in Toronto May 14-16.

In the leadup to the event, Forster shared with CoinDesk his thoughts on bitcoin miners turning to artificial intelligence, the growing sophistication of the mining industry, and how Luxor’s products enable miners to hedge various forms of risk.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

CoinDesk: Mining pools allow miners to combine their computational resources to have higher chances of receiving bitcoin block rewards. Can you explain to us how Luxor’s mining pools work?

Aaron Forster: Mining pools are basically aggregators that reduce the variance of solo mining. When you look at solo mining, it’s very lottery-esque, meaning that you could be plugging your machines in and you might hit block rewards tomorrow — or you might hit it 100 years from now. But you’re still paying for energy during that time. At a small scale, it’s not a big deal, as you scale that up and create a business around it.

The most common kind of mining pool is PPLNS, which means Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares. Basically, that means the miner does not get paid unless that mining pool hits the block. That’s also due to luck variance, so it’s no different from that solo miner’s situation. However, that creates revenue volatility for those large industrial miners.

So we’re seeing the emergence of what we call Full-Pay-Per-Share, or FPPS, and that’s Luxor is operating for our bitcoin pool. With FPPS, regardless of whether we find a block or not, we’re still paying our miners their revenue based on the number of shares they’ve submitted to the pool. That gives revenue certainty to miners, assuming hashprice stays the same. We’ve effectively become an insurance provider.

The problem is that you need a very deep and strong balance sheet to support that model, because while we’ve reduced the variance for miners, that risk is now put on us. So we need to plan for that. But it can be calculated over a long enough period of time. We have different partners in that regard, so that we don’t bear the full risk from our balance sheet.

Tell me about your ASIC brokerage business.

We’ve become one of the leading hardware suppliers on the secondary market. Primarily within North America, but we’ve shipped to 35+ countries. We deal with everybody from public companies to private companies, institutions to retail.

We’re primarily a broker, meaning we match buyer and seller, mostly on the secondary market. Sometimes we do interact with ASIC manufacturers, and in certain cases we do take principal positions, meaning we use money from our balance sheet to purchase ASICs and then resell them on the secondary market. But the majority of our volume comes from matching buyers and sellers.

Luxor also launched the first hashrate futures contracts.

We’re trying to push the Bitcoin mining space forward. We’re a hashrate marketplace, depending on how you look at our mining pools, and we wanted to take a big leap and take hashrate to the TradFi world.

We wanted to create a tool that allows investors to take a position on hashprice without effectively owning mining equipment. Hashprice is, you know, the hourly or daily revenue that miners get, and that fluctuates a lot. For some people it’s about hedging, for others it’s speculation. We’re creating a tool for miners to sell their hashrate forward and use it as a basic collateral or a way to finance growth.

We said, ‘Let’s allow miners to basically sell forward hashrate, receive bitcoin upfront, and then they can take that and do whatever they need to do with it, whether it’s purchase ASICs or expand their mining operations.’ It’s basically the collateralization of hashrate. So they’re obligated to send us X amount of hashrate per month for the length of the contract. Before that, they’ll receive a certain amount of bitcoin upfront.

There’s a market imbalance between buyers and sellers. We have a lot of buyers, meaning people and institutions wanting to earn yield on their bitcoin. What you’re lending your bitcoin at is effectively your interest rate. However, you could also look at it like you’re purchasing that hashrate at a discount. That’s important for institutions or folks that don’t want physical exposure to bitcoin mining, but want exposure to hash price or hashrate. They can do that synthetically through purchasing bitcoin and putting it into our market, effectively lending that out, earning a yield, and purchasing that hashrate at a discount.

What do you find most exciting about bitcoin mining at the moment?

The acceptance and natural progression of our industry into other markets. We can’t ignore the AI HPC transition. Instead of building these mega mines that are just massive buildings with power-dense bitcoin mining operations, you’re starting to see large miners turning into power infrastructure providers for artificial intelligence.

Using bitcoin mining as a stepping stone to a larger, more capital intensive industry like AI is exciting to me, because it kind of gives us a bit more acceptance, because we’re coming at it from a completely different angle. I think the biggest example is the Core Scientific / CoreWeave deal structure, how they’ve kind of merged those two businesses together. They’re complimentary to each other. And that’s really exciting.

When you look at our own product roadmap, we have no choice but to follow a similar roadmap to bitcoin miners. A lot of the products that we built for the mining industry are analogous to what is needed at a different level for AI. Mind you, it’s a lot simpler in our industry than in AI. We’re our first step into the HPC space, and it’s still very early days there.