The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) withdrew two pieces of crypto-related staff guidance on Friday, further streamlining its approach to crypto regulation.

The first advisory rescinded on Friday was Staff Advisory No. 18-14, Advisory with Respect to Virtual Currency Derivative Product Listings. Originally published in May 2018, the advisory established guidelines for crypto-related derivatives, including requiring reporting firms to maintain “close coordination with [the] CFTC surveillance group” and establishing a large trader reporting threshold of five bitcoins (or the equivalent value for other cryptocurrencies), among other suggestions. On Friday, the CFTC published a letter saying that “additional staff experience” and “increasing market growth” had rendered the guidance unnecessary.

The second advisory, Staff Advisory No. 23-07, Review of Risks Associated with Expansion of DCO Clearing of Digital Assets, from May 2023, “emphasize[d] compliance” with CFTC regulations due to the “hieghtened cyber and other operational risks that may be associated with digital assets.” This guidance was withdrawn for another reason — to clearly treat crypto-related derivatives and their issuers fairly, the CFTC suggested. In a separate letter on Friday, the CFTC said it was rescinding Staff Advisory No. 23-07 “to ensure that it does not suggest that its regulatory treatment of digital asset derivatives will vary from its treatment of other products.”

The CFTC’s sister regulatory agency, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has overhauled its approach to crypto regulation since President Donald Trump took office in January. Under the new leadership of Acting Chair Mark Uyeda, the SEC has created a Crypto Task Force that has spearheaded its transformation, engaging with the industry and backing down from a host of lawsuits and investigations into crypto companies that began under the leadership of former Chair Gary Gensler.

Though the SEC’s rapid transformation may be flashier, the CFTC is currently undergoing a transformation of its own, streamlining its regulatory strategy as part of Acting Chair Caroline Pham’s plan for the agency “get back to the basics.” In addition to the two pieces of dropped crypto-related guidance, the agency has rescinded other non-crypto-related staff advisories and overhauled its enforcement division, slashing a multitude of specialized enforcement teams down to just two, pledging that a simplified enforcement division would be more efficient and “stop regulation by enforcement.”

Liz Davis, a Washington, D.C.-based partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and a former chief trial attorney in the CFTC’s Division of Enforcement, told CoinDesk she sees the two pieces of rescinded crypto guidance as in line with Pham’s “back to basics” approach to running the agency.

But Davis also suggested that the changes could be tied to a larger restructuring going on at the CFTC.

“They’re probably undergoing a reorganization with everything that’s going on with [the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)],” Davis said, adding that Pham’s ongoing efforts to “centralize” the CFTC’s operations could help facilitate a reorganization.

A new artificial intelligence-infused blockchain with Andreseen Horowitz’s backing is «ultimately designed as a replacement for Bitcoin,» according to its co-founder Travis Good.

The far-fetched claim is rooted in what Good prognosticates as unvarnished reality: Bitcoin’s encryption mechanisms are «getting really stale» and could be «completely obsolete within five years,» creating a business conundrum for the miners behind it.

«You’ve got people who’ve invested billions of dollars in hash power for securing a network in ASICs,» he told CoinDesk at this year’s ethDenver conference. «And the question is like, where do they all go?»

His answer is Ambient, a blockchain with deep capabilities in the AI space – the «future economy,» as Good puts it – that could become a «decentralized competitor to OpenAI.» The network operates on a proof-of-work mechanism with familiar appeal to bitcoin miners, he said, making it an easy switch.

«It’s a useful proof of work network, which we don’t think anyone has ever done well in crypto,» Good said.

Many crypto projects have attempted to fuse the two buzzy tech trends on the belief that blockchains and decentralized crowdsourcing can steer AI better toward delivering for humanity than singular, private corporations possibly could.

One of the biggest and best-funded is Bittensor. But Good claims the market leader is woefully deficient because it doesn’t actually run AI models on blockchain, despite its original intention to «be this global computer.» His alternative, Ambient, cooks AI into its core.

Whether Bitcoin miners – let alone users – would actually embrace a radically new and different network likely hinges on Ambient’s economic success. Good seeks for Ambient to deliver super-intelligent AI fast, cheap, and critically, in the open, so that users get the answers they paid for.

While Ambient’s security rhymes with Bitcoin’s, the network itself runs like Solana.

Ambient raised $7.2 million in seed funding from a16z’s crypto accelerator program as well as Delphi Digital, one of the VC world’s hungriest funds for crypto-AI crossover tech.

«Everyone in crypto is currently using centralized AI to power their apps, to power their frontend,» said Alex Golding, a venture associate at Delphi. He thinks that’s a big issue because it deprives users of understanding what the models are trained on and exposes them to getting hoodwinked with answers derived from inferior models.

«Verified inference» by miners (the heart of their rewards mechanism) acts as a provenance fact-checker, ensuring that answers spat out by Ambient originate from the model people paid to use.

«If you don’t have verified inference, you’re guaranteed to get rugged,» Good said, adding a hyperbolic warning: «Nation state actors are going to poison your model and just do fun stuff, like we saw with Lazarus,» North Korea’s hackers.

Circle Internet Financial, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has reportedly hired investment banks JPMorgan Chase and Citi as the underwriters of a hoped-for IPO, Fortune reported.

While timing is not yet totally decided, sources say Circle will publicly file its prospectus in late April, meaning a potential IPO perhaps prior to June.

The company had previously filed confidential paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in January 2024.

Circle in 2021 had attempted to go public via a SPAC merger in 2021, but that attempt was derailed first by an intransigent SEC and then by the crypto collapse of 2022. It ultimately pulled the SPAC deal by the end 2022.

According to people familiar with the matter that spoke with Fortune, Circle is seeking a $4 billion to $5 billion valuation.

CoinDesk reported in July that the company was valued at roughly $5 billion in private secondary markets.