The U.S. Senate Banking Committee has voted to advance the confirmations of President Donald Trump’s picks to run the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — both key positions for the future U.S. regulation of the crypto sector.

The nominations of Paul Atkins to permanently take over the SEC from former Chair Gary Gensler and of Jonathan Gould to lead the banking regulator OCC now move to consideration by the overall Senate. Approvals there will allow Atkins and Gould to start work at the regulatory agencies.

Atkins and Gould both advanced under party-line votes in the committee on Thursday — each going 13-11.

Committee Chairman Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, praised the nominees before the vote.

«Paul Atkins, the former SEC commissioner, will promote capital formation and provide much-needed clarity for digital assets,» Scott said. And of Gould, he said the nominee, once chief counsel at the OCC, will «put an end to the politically-motivated debanking» — a major point of complaint for the crypto industry.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the committee’s ranking Democrat, issued some last-minute criticisms of the nominees before rejecting all of them.

«Mr. Atkins was dead wrong in the leadup to the worst financial crisis in a generation,» she said of Atkins’ previous tenure at the SEC in the period before the 2008 global financial crisis, and she added of Gould’s previous time at the OCC that he «weakened the rules and helped undermine» the banking system’s safety and soundness.

The recent confirmation hearing for the nominees didn’t address crypto issues in significant depth, though both would be heavily involved in future regulation of the industry.

Read More: Trump’s Pick to Run SEC Paul Atkins Promises New Crypto Stance, Gets Few Questions

Ethereum developers set May 7 as the target date for the long-awaited Pectra upgrade on Thursday, beginning the countdown for the blockchain’s biggest changes since March 2024.

Pectra contains a series of improvements aimed at making Ethereum more user-friendly and efficient. One such improvement is adding «smart contract» capabilities to wallets, which can make them easier to use and recover.

The decision to schedule Pectra was made during a call between Ethereum’s core developers — just over a week after the upgrade went live on the Hoodi testnet without any hiccups. Pectra’s test on Hoodi was the third and final dry-run of the upgrade. Two earlier tests had bugs, which led the developers to delay the upgrade on Ethereum’s mainnet.

Pectra consists of 11 major code changes, or «Ethereum improvement proposals» (EIPs), that will be shipped all at once. Together, the features aim to improve the staking experience, introduce wallet features, and update the overall network.

One of the main Pectra changes that will benefit Ethereum validators is EIP-7251, which will increase the amount of ETH one can stake from 32 to 2,048. The change is meant to alleviate the experience for those staking across multiple validators, who can now set that up under one node instead of multiple.

Read more: Ethereum’s Final Pectra Test Goes Live on Hoodi Network

The team behind interoperability protocol Hyperlane shared Thursday their upcoming token airdrop plans happening at the end of the month.

The airdrop will occur on April 22, and users can check their eligibility to receive $HYPER tokens via a portal provided by the Hyperlane Foundation by April 13, the team shared in a press release with CoinDesk.

The token distribution will mostly go to the community, with 57% of the supply going to users, while the remaining circulating tokens will be distributed to the core team (25%), investors (10.9%), and the foundation’s treasury (7.1%).

The team also shared that the airdrop will be fully unlocked for community recipients, while the core team and investors’ tokens will be locked for the first 12 months.

In addition to the token distribution to early users, Hyperlane is coming out with their “expansion rewards” program, which is based on developer and cross-chain end-user activity, and will be distributed to users each quarter proportional to their activity on the network.

“The retroactive token allocation at TGE is just the first of many over the coming several years, as protocol ownership begins moving into the hands of the developers and end-users who rely on Hyperlane to send assets and other critical messages across chains,” said Nam Chu Hoai, a co-founder of Hyperlane.

Read more: Blockchain Startup Hyperlane Raises $18.5M Round Led by Crypto Investor Variant