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Will Arizona Become the First State to Join Feds in Planning a Bitcoin Reserve?

Arizona has broken new ground in what’s been a race among U.S. states to see which may become first to set up a crypto reserve as a formal part of their fiscal strategy, getting legislation approved with mostly Republican lawmakers in support.
It’s unclear whether Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, will look favorably on the legislation that was rejected by most Democratic lawmakers. She has vetoed a long list of bills in this session, and if she vetoes this, too, the matter is closed for the year.
If it were approved, Arizona’s inclusion of digital assets in its public-funds investments could even outpace the U.S. Treasury Department’s effort to get it done, which still awaits a full accounting of the U.S. holdings before federal officials can move to build the reserve that President Donald Trump has called for.
With the Arizona House of Representatives passing the crypto reserve effort in a 31-25 vote on Monday — three Democrats voted in favor — the state surged past others considering similar measures, including New Hampshire, where a bill has passed its House.
But Hobbs has been in a budget dispute with Republican lawmakers.
«Any bill not already on my desk will be vetoed until we have a serious, bipartisan funding solution that protects health care for Arizonans with disabilities,» the governor had said in an April 17 posting on social media site X. That matter may have been resolved with her signature on a disabilities-funding bill last week.
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Bitcoin Edges Above $95K, U.S. Stocks Remain Strong as Analyst Warns of ‘Blind’ Market

The crypto market experienced another relatively calm day on Tuesday despite widespread pessimism about the impact of the Trump administration’s tariffs on the economy.
Bitcoin (BTC) is up 1% in the last 24 hours, trading at almost $95,400 and within sight of topping $96,000 for the first time since the second half of February. The CoinDesk 20 — an index of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization except for stablecoins, exchange coins and memecoins — rose 1.1%, with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) outshining the rest of the index by surging 6.3%.
Crypto stocks had fairly muted performances Tuesday, with Coinbase (COIN) and Strategy (MSTR) up 0.9% and 3.3%, respectively. Janover (JNVR), continued to benefit from its SOL accumulation strategy, rising another 16%.
The stock market also continued its recovery from the early April-tariff induced panic, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each adding 0.55%.
For some observers, the market’s performance has seemed unanchored from the wave of economic data coming in that suggests that U.S. economic activity is slowing down due to the tariff policies unleashed by the White House.
Consumer confidence came in at its lowest level since May 2020, according to a Conference Board survey, while the consumer outlook hit its lowest point since 2011. Meanwhile, the JOLTS survey indicated that job openings had fallen to 7.19 million in March versus an expected 7.5 million.
In fresh tariff news, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said today that a trade deal had been reached with an unspecified country, though the deal still needed to be ratified with that country’s leaders.
Some shade on the rally
“Hard to fathom how blind the market really is,” Jeff Park, head of Alpha Strategies at Bitwise, posted on X.
“A Fed cut means nothing if U.S. creditworthiness is permanently impaired by the global community as resulted by dollar weaponization,” Park said, referring to recent speculation on whether the U.S. central bank will be forced to lower rates to counter the effect of Trump’s tariffs. “That’s the mispricing we are talking about here,» he continued. «The myopic focus on whether [we] are getting a fed cut in May/June is completely irrelevant if the notion of the risk-free as we know it is fundamentally challenged forever, which means cost of capital globally is going higher.”
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SoFi Plans Major Push Into Crypto Amid New Regulatory Environment

SoFi has plans to bring back crypto services for its clients after suspending those operations in 2023 so as not to impede its effort to become a regulated bank.
“We’re going to re-enter the crypto business, which we had to exit,» SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in an interview with CNBC. «We’ll re-enter the business of allowing our members to invest in cryptocurrency. We want to actually make a bigger, more comprehensive push into cryptocurrency, to include really providing crypto or blockchain capabilities in each product area that we have.»
The tech company had offered clients access to more than 20 tokens back in 2023 but decided to halt its services as it was in the process of receiving a bank charter in the U.S. during a time when scrutiny over the digital asset industry was decidedly unfriendly under the Biden administration.
Noto said that thanks to new guidance from the Comptroller of the Currency, which was published in March and promised a reduced burden on banks engaged in the sector, the tech company could start offering crypto investing by the end of this year.
SoFi will also look to use blockchain technology in all of its major products over the next 24 months, he said, and the company could also offer crypto payments as well as lending against crypto assets.
“Our aspirations are as broad as they are for any other product that we have, and we believe we can leverage the technology across lending and savings and spending and investing and protecting,» Noto said.
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Tornado Cash Can’t Be Sanctioned Again, Texas Judge Rules

Tornado Cash is officially safe from U.S. sanctions, following a district court ruling on Monday.
The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) removed Tornado Cash from its sanctions list in March, several months after an appeals court ruled that the agency had “overstepped its Congressionally-defined authority” by sanctioning the crypto mixing service’s smart contracts back in 2022.
However, the way that OFAC de-listed Tornado Cash, and the subsequent notices and motions its lawyers filed with the court in March, left apparent wiggle room for the agency to put the mixing service back on its no-fly list in the future, a federal judge said. The Treasury attorneys argued that, because OFAC had revoked sanctions against Tornado Cash before the district court’s final judgment (but after the appeals court’s decisive ruling), the issue was moot.
But, to the six plaintiffs in Van Loon vs. Treasury — all users of Tornado Cash — the issue was not, in fact, moot. In an April 21 filing, their lawyers blasted OFAC’s response to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, calling it “a study in chaos” and accusing them of “wav[ing] the mootness flag” in a last-ditch effort to “evade an adverse judgment.”
“Enough is enough,” lawyers for the plaintiff told the judge. “It is time for this Court to do what the Fifth Circuit ordered months ago … Defendants’ designation must be held unlawful and set aside.”
In his sternly-worded ruling yesterday, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of the Western District of Texas said that the case was not moot, and sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that OFAC’s designation of Tornado Cash was unlawful and the agency is therefore permanently enjoined from enforcing sanctions against it.
“[OFAC does] not suggest they will not sanction Tornado Cash again, and they may seek to ‘reenact precisely the same [designation] in the future’,” Pitman wrote. “Rather than acknowledge that the Fifth Circuit’s order required delisting Tornado Cash, Defendants state that they exercised their ‘discretion’ in deciding to do so based on more general policy and legal considerations.”
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently pursuing criminal charges against two Tornado Cash developers, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, who were charged in 2023 with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter, and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions. Semenov remains on OFAC’s sanctions list.
Earlier this month, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent DOJ staff a memo informing them of narrowing crypto-related enforcement priorities. Staff were instructed to no longer pursue cases against crypto exchanges, mixing services or offline wallets “for the acts of their end users or unwitting violations of regulations.” Blanche ordered any ongoing investigations that were not compliant with these new priorities to be dropped, and said that his office would work with the DOJ’s criminal division to decide how to proceed with any ongoing litigation that didn’t meet the new enforcement standards.
The memo has already made waves in ongoing crypto litigation. Prosecutors in the case against the two founders of crypto mixer Samourai Wallet filed a joint request with defense lawyers on Monday, asking the court for a 16-day extension in various deadlines as they decided whether or not to drop charges under the auspices of Blanche’s memo.
A host of prominent figures in the crypto industry also signed on to a letter from the DeFi Education Fund to White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks on Monday, urging U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene in the case to “discontinue the Biden-era Department of Justice’s lawless campaign to criminalize open-source software development” and the prosecution of Storm.
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