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House Dems Get Bonus Hearing on Crypto Market Structure, Assail Trump Conflicts

WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. President Donald Trump’s crypto ventures were once again under the microscope during a House Financial Services Committee hearing that otherwise saw legal experts express worries about how regulators might police digital assets under a market structure bill.
The committee held a «minority day» hearing — meaning the witnesses were primarily picked by the Democrats, the current minority party in the House — on Friday, letting lawmakers ask questions more targeted on concerns they have with the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the Republican-led market structure legislation that will receive a markup vote next week.
Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the committee who’d demanding this extracurricular hearing after the panel met earlier in the week on the same topic, pointed to Trump’s various crypto efforts in her opening statement, saying her goal was to stop Trump from profiting off of his crypto ventures to the extent he has been.
«What I’m opposed to in this act … is the crooked president of the United States of America, who’s decided to use the office of the presidency to enhance his access to profits,» Waters said.
Republicans focused on a different tack: «Currently, there is no federal framework for non-security digital assets,» Committee Chair French Hill said in his own opening statement, a stance echoed by his colleagues Bryan Steil and Warren Davidson. They contend that Democrats and the administration of former President Joe Biden allowed years to pass in which they failed to protect consumers by offering no rules to oversee crypto.
Crypto has driven an ideological wedge into the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill, with many Democrats — typically skewing toward the younger members — supporting the advancement of digital assets legislation despite the direction of their leadership. Most of the Democrats attending this bonus hearing on the Clarity Act were in the crypto-critical camp, though Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, has supported crypto bills in the past and questioned witnesses at the hearing about his concerns that the bill may include loopholes that could allow financial firms to dodge oversight.
Himes, a yes vote on last year’s predecessor to the Clarity Act — the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, or FIT21 — said some of the provisions in the new effort may allow for a carveout that can be abused by certain types of issuers under Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.
The Clarity Act itself is more complicated than it needs to be and does not address some of the cybersecurity risks posed to the cryptocurrency industry, said Carole House, a former White House adviser who is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center. She pointed to recent crypto hacks, including crypto exchange ByBit, as an example.
Amanda Fischer, policy director at Better Markets, a Washington group advocating for financial policies that favor the public, said her bigger issue was with the exceptions that exist for companies to seek regulation under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying that it might provide loopholes for issuers or other crypto companies that otherwise would be regulated under the SEC and be subject to securities registration and reporting requirements.
But as has been seen in other recent hearings, Trump’s crypto ties again reappeared as the star of the show.
Bart Naylor, a policy expert at Public Citizen and a former investigator for the Senate Banking Committee, said he believes Trump is specifically soliciting gifts through his memecoin and selling favors through actions like his memecoin dinner or by terminating SEC lawsuits against companies which donated money to him.
White House officials have routinely denied Trump is exhibiting a conflict of interests in his pursuit of digital assets business gains.
Waters had staged a walkout last month from what was meant to be a joint hearing of this and the House Agriculture Committee on crypto policy, though industry insiders were careful to note that not all the panel’s Democrats followed Waters’ departure.
Read More: Planned Crypto Hearing in U.S. House Derailed by Democrat Revolt
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Michael Saylor’s Strategy Added 4,980 Bitcoin Last Week, Bringing Stack to 597,325 Coins
Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded company holding bitcoin (BTC), boosted its BTC reserves by buying 4,980 BTC for a total of $531.9 million last week.
This addition brings Strategy’s total bitcoin holdings to 597,235 BTC purchased for $42.4 billion, or an average price of $70,982 each. At bitcoin’s current price of about $107,500, that stack is worth more than $64 billion.
Strategy financed the purchase through $519 million of common share sales alongside about $59 million of STRK and STRF preferred stock sales.
MSTR shares are up 1.3% premarket.
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Spanish Police Arrest 5 in Suspected $540M Crypto Fraud Operation

Spanish police arrested five members of a suspected crypto fraud operation that allegedly laundered 460 million euros ($540 million) stolen from over 5,000 victims.
The bust, carried out by Guarda Civil, the armed wing of the country’s law enforcement agencies, saw three arrests from searches in the Canary Islands and two in Madrid on June 25.
The investigation was supported Europol, as well as police forces from Estonia, France and the U.S.
The criminal network raised funds through cash withdrawals, bank transfers and crypto payments, Europol said in a statement on Monday.
Investigators suspect the organization of having set up a corporate and banking network out of Hong Kong to receive, store and transfer criminal funds through accounts in different names and in different exchanges.
The investigation is still in progress, Europol added.
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Bitcoin-Gold Price Ratio’s 10% Surge Greenlights Bullish Flag Pattern: Technical Analysis

This is a daily technical analysis by CoinDesk analyst and Chartered Market Technician Omkar Godbole.
The ratio between the per-piece dollar price of bitcoin (BTC) and gold’s (XAU) per-ounce dollar-denominated price rose over 10% to 33.33 last week, registering its best performance in two months, according to data source TradingView.
The double-digit gain, representing BTC’s outperformance relative to gold, marked a breakout from the bull flag pattern. The so-called flag breakout signals a continuation of the rally from lows near 24.85 reached on April 11.
A bull flag pattern is characterized by a sharp uptrend followed by a relatively brief counter-trend consolidation that usually refreshes higher, as is the case with the BTC-gold ratio.
The flag breakout is said to extend the upside by an amount equivalent to the magnitude of the initial rally. So, the ratio could rise to 42.00, topping the record high of 40.73 hit in December.
Previous uptrends in the ratio have been characterized by sharp upswings in BTC’s dollar-denominated price, as observed in late 2024 and in April and May, rather than gold dropping more than BTC.
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