Uncategorized

Trump Has Made His Major Decisions on His Crypto Regulation Team, Now Also OCC

Published

7 месяцев ago

12 февраля, 2025

admin

President Donald Trump is just about done naming the key figures he’s seeking to get into financial regulation posts that will direct the future oversight of the crypto industry, now including lawyer Jonathan Gould as a nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency that oversees U.S. national banks.

With a widely circulated White House nominations document showing Trump has settled on Gould, a partner at law firm Jones Day who was a top lawyer at the OCC and a former crypto executive, and the president will reportedly nominate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s Jonathan McKernan to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the slate is almost clear.

Gould had briefly worked as the chief legal officer for blockchain technology company Bitfury after he left the OCC as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel during the first Trump administration. At Bitfury, he worked for CEO Brian Brooks, who Trump had once installed at the OCC as an acting comptroller and also tried to make it permanent. At the OCC, Brooks worked to open U.S. banking for crypto firms, and he elevated Anchorage Digital as the first and only crypto bank chartered by the agency. Now the industry will find out if Gould will follow in those footsteps.

«For crypto, we believe Gould could seek to revive the concept of a limited-purpose national bank charter,» said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at TD Cowen, in a note to clients on Wednesday. «That could lead to banks that specialize in crypto. We also believe he would permit banks to get more involved with crypto including stablecoins.»

Rodney Hood, a former Republican chief of the National Credit Union Association, had been placed as Trump’s temporary comptroller and would be replaced by Gould if he wins his Senate confirmation. Temporary Republican replacements like Hood are now leading most of the financial regulators, including banking agencies, the FDIC and OCC; the pair of markets regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and the consumer watchdog CFPB.

At the CFPB, the Trump administration’s effort to gut the regulator with the assignment of his budget director, Russ Vought, as its interim leader has drawn vigorous protests from congressional Democrats. Now he’s announced the name he wants to eventually replace Vought there: McKernan, a Republican member of the FDIC. McKernan had served as a staffer for former Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican who had led an early (failed) charge to get stablecoins regulated in the U.S.

Ian Katz, a veteran financial-regulation analyst in Washington, noted the «conventional» pick of Gould for the OCC and the other recent choices for permanent chiefs of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that probably won’t ruffle feathers among the U.S. senators that will evaluate their nominations. The relatively sedate choices seem to hew closely to Trump’s model for financial regulators during his first term: No dramatic surprises.

Unlike some of Trump’s personnel decisions in his cabinet and other agencies, the choices are experienced and are absent political firebrands, including the pick of longtime securities consultant and former Commissioner Paul Atkins to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Virtually all of the names — temporary and those nominated for permanent roles — have crypto backgrounds or have demonstrated support.

The Senate must still confirm all of these nominees, and that process often takes months into an incoming president’s first year. Sometimes the confirmations fail entirely, and agencies are left with permanently acting heads, like the OCC was during the Biden administration.

Meanwhile, Trump also picked former Commissioner Brian Quintenz to run the CFTC, where sitting Commissioner Caroline Pham has been holding down the fort and making major agency changes as acting chairman. So far, Pham and other acting agency heads have already begun work to overhaul Biden-era crypto policy.

Quintenz said in a post on social-media site X on Wednesday that the CFTC will be «well poised to ensure the USA leads the world in blockchain technology and innovation.»

UPDATE (February 12, 2025, 17:26 UTC): Adds comment from Quintenz on CFTC nomination.

Uncategorized

CoinDesk 20 Performance Update: Index Drops 2.5% as Nearly All Constituents Decline

Published

30 минут ago

15 сентября, 2025

admin

CoinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 4248.74, down 2.5% (-109.09) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

One of 20 assets is trading higher.

9am CoinDesk 20 Update for 2025-09-15: vertical

Leaders: AVAX (+0.6%) and BCH (-0.8%).

Laggards: UNI (-9.9%) and LINK (-7.0%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Uncategorized

Pantera-Backed Solana Treasury Firm Helius Raises $500M, Stock Soars Over 200%

Published

39 минут ago

15 сентября, 2025

admin

Helius Medical Technologies (HSDT) announced on Monday it’s raising more than $500 million in a private financing round to create a Solana-focused treasury company.

The vehicle will hold SOL, the native token of the Solana blockchain, as its reserve asset and aims to expand to more than $1.25 billion via stock warrants tied to the deal, the press release said.

The financing was led by Pantera Capital and Summer Capital, with participation from investors including Animoca Brands, FalconX and HashKey Capital.

Shares of the firm rallied over 200% above $24 in pre-market trading following the announcement. Solana was down 4% over the past 24 hours.

The firm is joining the latest wave of new digital asset treasuries, or DATs, with public companies pivoting to raise funds and buy cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) or SOL.

Helius is set to rival with the recently launched Forward Industries (FORD) with a $1.65 billion war chest backed by Galaxy Digital and others. That firm confirmed on Monday that has already purchased 6.8 million tokens for roughly $1.58 billion last week.

Helius’ plan is to use Solana’s yield-bearing design to generate income on the holdings, earning staking rewards of around 7% as well as deploying tokens in decentralized finance (DeFi) and lending opportunities. Incoming executive chairman Joseph Chee, founder of Summer Capital and a former UBS banker, will lead the firm’s digital asset strategy alongside Pantera’s Cosmo Jiang and Dan Morehead.

«As a pioneer in the digital asset treasury space, having participated in the formation of the strategy at Twenty One Capital (CEP) with Tether, Softbank and Cantor, Bitmine (BMNR) with Tom Lee and Mozayyx as well as EightCo (OCTO) with Dan Ives and Sam Altman, we have built the expertise to set up the pre-eminent Solana treasury vehicle,» Cosmo Jiang, general partner at Pantera Capital, said in a statement.

«There is a real opportunity to drive the flywheel of creating shareholder value that Michael Saylor has pioneered with Strategy by accelerating Solana adoption,» he added.

Uncategorized

Boundless Launches Mainnet on Base, Ushering in Universal Zero-Knowledge Compute

Published

46 минут ago

15 сентября, 2025

admin

Boundless, the zero-knowledge (ZK) compute marketplace incubated by RISC Zero, has officially launched its Mainnet on Base, giving every blockchain access to verifiable compute.

The milestone builds on the network’s incentivized testnet, which went live in July and stress-tested Boundless’ architecture under real-world conditions.

During that Beta phase, Boundless operated like a decentralized marketplace where developers seeking ZK proofs for applications such as rollups, bridges and privacy protocols could connect with independent provers, or ZK miners, who generated those proofs.

The launch introduced Proof of Verifiable Work, an incentive mechanism that rewards provers based on the volume, speed and complexity of their computations. Community participation was strong, fueled in part by the anticipation of $ZKC token rewards.

With Monday’s mainnet launch, those capabilities are now operational at scale. The team behind Boundless says it can deliver verifiable compute across chains, enabling developers to build applications that preserve privacy while scaling seamlessly between ecosystems.

Some key protocols have started to integrate Boundless into their systems. Wormhole is integrating Boundless to add ZK verification to Ethereum consensus, making cross-chain transfers more secure.

BOB, a hybrid Bitcoin rollup, is tapping Boundless to allow EVM applications to interoperate with Bitcoin using proofs that inherit Bitcoin’s security while drawing on Ethereum’s liquidity. And staking protocol Lido is deploying Boundless to secure validator exits with transparent proofs, strengthening trust and auditability for its crypto assets.

“For the first time, developers on any chain can access abundant zero-knowledge compute to build complex applications that scale across ecosystems without sacrificing decentralization,” said Shiv Shankar, the CEO of Boundless.