News linked to this event type.
According to CoinDesk, U.S. bipartisan lawmakers Steven Horsford, Max Miller, Suzan DelBene, and Mike Carey jointly reintroduced the Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation, and Yield Act (the “EQUAL Act”) on Wednesday. The revised bill primarily includes the following provisions: (1) specifying that regulated payment stablecoins generate no gain or loss if their cost basis is no less than 99% of their redemption value; (2) establishing a safe harbor for broker transactions or taxpayer account transactions; (3) clarifying how “wash sale” rules apply to digital assets; and (4) requiring the IRS to assess the current tax burden associated with small-value cryptocurrency transactions and study the feasibility—and potential for abuse—of introducing a tax exemption for transactions under $200. The crypto industry has long advocated for tax exemptions on small-value transactions to promote cryptocurrency adoption in everyday payment scenarios. Representative Horsford stated that tax policy forms the foundation of the crypto regulatory framework, and that current tax law remains silent on numerous core issues concerning digital assets.
Odaily OpenAI has been working with investment banks to prepare for the submission of an initial public offering (IPO) application in the coming days or weeks. Investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are assisting OpenAI in drafting its IPO prospectus. The company plans to confidentially file documents with regulators soon, potentially as early as this Friday. According to some informed sources, OpenAI aims to launch its listing as early as September, though the plans remain subject to change and may still shift.Earlier this week, OpenAI cleared a major hurdle on its path to an IPO: The company prevailed in a legal dispute with Musk, a co-founder who has since become a rival of CEO Altman. Musk stated that he plans to appeal the ruling. OpenAI still faces a series of other challenges, most notably concerns about whether it can generate sufficient revenue to support its massive data center spending commitments. (WSJ)
USDF, a custom stablecoin on the Solana blockchain jointly launched by Coinbase and Flipcash, has gone live. It is part of the "Custom Stablecoins" initiative, enabling businesses and protocols to easily issue their own branded USD stablecoins for payments, payroll, cross-border settlements, and more, while maintaining regulatory compliance.
fintech company Mercury has announced the completion of a new $200 million funding round, led by TCV with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coatue Management, and other institutions.Mercury primarily provides banking services to startups. It currently serves over 300,000 clients and has achieved approximately $650 million in annualized revenue. The company stated that the recent surge in AI entrepreneurship has significantly driven demand for new company registrations and account openings, serving as a key growth driver.Meanwhile, Mercury also announced that it has received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to apply for a federal banking charter. This would enable it to expand lending capabilities, gain access to payment networks like Zelle, and reduce its reliance on partner banks. The company's founder stated that the long-term goal remains an independent IPO rather than an acquisition. (CNBC)
According to an official announcement, Plume stated that it has obtained a Digital Asset Business License from the Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA), making it the world’s first regulated on-chain vault manager. Plume noted that this positions it alongside other BMA-regulated entities such as Circle, Coinbase, and Kraken, and said it brings the company closer to realizing its vision of open finance.
Odaily reports, In a recent video interview with Cointelegraph, Gate Founder and CEO Dr. Han stated that the crypto industry is transitioning from a primarily speculation-driven market towards a phase focused on infrastructure development and real-world applications. Dr. Han pointed out that stablecoins, RWA, AI, and asset tokenization are becoming core directions for the industry, and that clearer regulatory frameworks (such as the CLARITY Act) are expected to further drive innovation in DeFi, payments, and on-chain finance.Dr. Han also mentioned that high user entry barriers, security risks, and liquidity fragmentation remain significant challenges facing the industry. In the future, the crypto industry will further integrate with traditional finance, playing a more important role in areas such as payments, settlement, and the circulation of digital assets.Gate continues to deepen its multi-asset and TradFi strategy. In addition to expanding into assets such as stocks, metals, forex, indices, and commodities, it has also launched Pre-IPOs with the first project, SpaceX (SPCX). At the same time, as one of the first CEX platforms to integrate Polymarket, Gate is continuously promoting the development of the prediction market ecosystem, accelerating the construction of a comprehensive trading platform that spans crypto and traditional finance.
LayerZero Labs has released a recent incident report stating that on April 18, 2026, the KelpDAO rsETH cross-chain bridge, built on its cross-chain communication protocol, suffered an attack resulting in the theft of approximately 116,500 rsETH (around $292 million). Multiple security organizations, including Mandiant, CrowdStrike, and independent researchers, have attributed this attack to the North Korea-linked hacker group TraderTraitor (UNC4899).According to the report, the attack began on March 6, 2026. The attackers compromised a LayerZero developer account through social engineering, obtained session keys, and penetrated the RPC cloud environment. They further contaminated internal RPC node data and manipulated the returned results to deceive monitoring systems and the Decentralized Verification Network (DVN). Subsequently, the attackers launched a denial-of-service attack against external RPC providers, forcing the verification system to rely on the compromised nodes to generate forged cross-chain proofs, thereby successfully extracting the funds.LayerZero pointed out that the core vulnerability of this incident lay in the affected application adopting a "single-verifier" configuration. This allowed the target contract to execute asset releases upon receiving only a single valid signature, leading to the theft of rsETH.Following the incident, LayerZero Labs announced an adjustment to security policies. This includes no longer allowing its own DVN to act as the sole signer in a single-verifier configuration, rebuilding the affected cloud infrastructure, and introducing short-term credentials, instant permission upgrades, and multi-party approval mechanisms to enhance security. Additionally, zeroShadow and law enforcement agencies have initiated investigations and asset tracing. LayerZero stated it will continue to collaborate with ecosystem partners to strengthen the cross-chain security framework to address increasingly sophisticated nation-state attack threats.
: Digital asset infrastructure platform Fireblocks announced the launch of the "Agentic Payments Suite" to support the AI Agent payment framework of the x402 protocol, and simultaneously announced its joining of the x402 Foundation. It is reported that this suite covers the entire AI Agent payment process, including wallet infrastructure for Agents to initiate transfers, a merchant receiving layer, and settlement and risk control functions for compliant financial institutions. (Cointelegraph)
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, announced plans to launch futures contracts with "computing power" as the underlying asset, designed to track cost changes for GPUs and other computing resources supporting the AI industry. The product still requires regulatory approval. According to reports, ICE will collaborate with financial infrastructure company Ornn to develop a related derivatives pricing system based on its GPU Cost Index. This index will be used to underpin computing power futures contracts. (Bloomberg)
According to Bloomberg, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has revoked the Major Payment Institution (MPI) license of local cryptocurrency liquidity provider Bsquared Technology Pte. Ltd. (“BSQ”), prohibiting BSQ from offering digital payment token services in Singapore. MAS stated it identified “serious breaches” of regulatory requirements by BSQ last year. The report notes that this move is relatively uncommon for local regulators amid Singapore’s broader efforts to mitigate risks associated with the crypto industry.
Odaily Singapore's Monetary Authority (MAS) announced the revocation of the Major Payment Institution (MPI) license held by crypto payment company Bsquared Technology, citing deficiencies in risk management and conflict of interest policies, violations of outsourcing regulations, and the provision of false or misleading information to regulators on multiple occasions during the license application and on-site inspection processes. Bsquared obtained its license to offer digital payment token services 16 months ago and has now been required to submit a closure certificate from an auditing firm to confirm that all customer funds have been fully returned. MAS stated that it is further reviewing the responsibilities of the company's key management personnel. Currently, Singapore has approved only 37 institutions to provide digital payment token services, making license revocations relatively rare. (Bloomberg)
According to Fortune, Catena Labs—founded by Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle—has raised $30 million in its Series A funding round, led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED. Catena Labs focuses on developing tools that enable AI agents to conduct financial transactions securely. The company has applied to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in New York for a national trust bank charter, seeking regulatory authorization to process payments and hold customer funds. Previously, in 2025, Catena Labs secured an initial $18 million financing round led by a16z crypto.
According to Caixin, the global tax “satellite surveillance system,” CRS 2.0, is accelerating its rollout worldwide. Cryptographic assets, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and certain electronic money products have now been included within the scope of financial asset reporting. Hong Kong plans to implement CRS 2.0 by 2028 and simultaneously advance the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF). In the future, cryptocurrency exchanges, brokers, and operators of crypto ATMs will be required to report cryptocurrency–fiat currency conversions, cross-cryptocurrency swaps, and domestic and cross-border transfers of cryptographic assets. Reports must precisely specify the full names of assets—for example, Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Tether (USDT)—and aggregate data by transaction dimension, including total market value, total holdings, and number of transactions. For retail payment transactions, individual transactions exceeding USD 50,000 must be reported separately. Although mainland China has not yet officially announced a timeline for implementing CRS 2.0, since 2025, tax authorities in multiple regions have begun notifying taxpayers—via phone calls and text messages—to self-report overseas income earned between 2022 and 2024 and fulfill their tax obligations accordingly. It is understood that CRS 2.0 will not only fully expose overseas-held cryptographic assets to tax oversight but may also trigger coordinated scrutiny by other regulatory bodies.
According to The Block, Sarah Breeden, Deputy Governor for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, stated that the UK’s future financial system will advance tokenization, with the retail payments system incorporating tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and potentially a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC). The Bank of England plans to publish a draft regulatory framework for systemic stablecoins next month and finalize it by the end of 2026—imposing temporary caps on stablecoin issuance volumes if necessary. Breeden also noted that the Bank of England will continue supporting banks in developing tokenized deposits and advancing initiatives such as the Digital Securities Sandbox and Digital Gilt.
According to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary and Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Christopher Hui, stated that gold can serve as a potential bridge between traditional finance and new finance. He emphasized that Hong Kong needs to provide more development opportunities for the digital asset market to support its sustainable growth. He also noted that, given the “convergence” trend between traditional and innovative finance, Hong Kong has opted not to establish a separate digital asset regulatory authority. Hui pointed out that both gold ETFs and blockchain-based tokenized gold products are already available in the market. Earlier, HSBC and Hang Seng Investment launched Hong Kong’s first tokenized, non-listed Hang Seng Gold ETF product on HashKey Exchange in April.
Bitget has announced a new market governance framework to further strengthen the ongoing oversight of listed assets, project teams, and market makers. The framework will focus on enhancing post-listing market monitoring mechanisms, tightening project team responsibility requirements, and accelerating the platform’s response and remediation processes when identifying abnormal trading behavior or suspicious wallet activity, aiming to improve market fairness and user protection.
According to CoinDesk, German stablecoin startup AllUnity plans to launch SEKAU—a Swedish krona-pegged stablecoin—in June, following final regulatory and operational approvals, and will issue it under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulatory framework. Meanwhile, AllUnity has also launched Agentic Payments, enabling businesses to receive transactions initiated autonomously by AI software agents and settle funds directly into local bank accounts. The system adopts Coinbase’s x402 payment standard and targets online digital services, content, and data sales. AllUnity is backed by DWS, Flow Traders, and Galaxy Digital, and is regulated by Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin).
According to an official announcement, Kaiko—a provider of digital asset market data and analytics—has announced the acquisition of Cometh, a European decentralized finance infrastructure provider holding MiCA/CASP licenses. The acquisition aims to integrate data, analytics, indices, and on-chain infrastructure capabilities, while leveraging Cometh’s smart contract engineering expertise. Kaiko stated that upon completion of the transaction, the company will establish an integrated infrastructure covering BMR-authorized indices, MiCA-compliant products, oracles, and on-chain execution capabilities. Cometh previously obtained its MiCA/CASP license from France’s Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) and holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification.
According to the Financial Times, Amsterdam-based company Qivalis has secured support from 37 European banks—including BNP Paribas, ING, and UniCredit—for its yet-to-launch euro-pegged stablecoin, making it the single euro stablecoin project with the largest number of European backers to date. Newly added supporters include ABN AMRO, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Rabobank. Qivalis has applied for a license from the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank), aiming for approval in the second half of this year, and plans to complete operational readiness upon license issuance.
the governor of South Carolina has signed a crypto rights bill, which prohibits state government use of CBDCs, protects individual self-custody rights, and exempts specific taxes on digital assets. (Solid Intel)