Coindesk

By Francisco Rodrigues (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)

Cryptocurrencies fell slightly in the past 24 hours, with the broad market CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index dropping 1.4%. Bitcoin (BTC) is little changed around $95,000. These figures are well within recently volatility ranges and come on the back of a strong monthly performance — BTC is on track to rise 15% in April, the most since November.

The market has been grappling with growing pessimism surrounding the potential impact of President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs on nearly every country and optimism that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates earlier than expected.

Stock prices have rallied over the past week on expectations Trump would lower the tariffs and the continuation of interest-rate cuts, according to Spanish bank Bankinter.

“Yet the perspective could turn for the worse from today, applying the logic of the data, because — regardless of tariffs and rate cuts — part of the damage has already been done, chiefly to confidence, which is the market’s foundation,” the bank wrote in a note.

Indeed, various major companies, including P&G, UPS, PepsiCo, American Airlines and GM, have lowered or pulled their earnings forecasts. Bankinter pointed out that French first-quarter GDP data released today showed a quarter-on-quarter increase that was entirely inventory-driven, while consumption, investment, and exports are weakening.

That bodes poorly for the U.S. figure, set to be released at 8:30 a.m. Some market observers, including Bankinter, suggest it could contract sharply. Bitcoin’s rise so far this year, contrasting with the stock market’s worst 100 days of a presidential administration since 1974, could be further evidence the cryptocurrency is starting to be used as a hedge.

As mentioned earlier in the week, Greg Cipolaro, the global head of research at NYDIG, wrote in a note that BTC has been acting “more like the non-sovereign issued store of value that it is.”

Bitcoin has decoupled from U.S. equities after the trade war between the U.S. and China escalated and has been seeing bets on it rise. This month, spot bitcoin ETFs posted monthly total net inflows of little over $3 billion according to SoSoValue data, further pointing to a flight to the cryptocurrency space amid the uncertainty. Stay alert!

What to Watch

• Crypto:
  • April 30, 9:30 a.m.: ProShares will debut three ETFs that will provide leveraged and inverse exposure to XRP: ​​the ProShares Ultra XRP ETF, the ProShares Short XRP ETF and the ProShares UltraShort XRP ETF.
  • April 30, 10:03 a.m.: Gnosis Chain (GNO), an Ethereum sister chain, will activate the Pectra hard fork on its mainnet at slot 21,405,696, epoch 1,337,856.
  • May 1: Coinbase Asset Management will introduce the Coinbase Bitcoin Yield Fund (CBYF), which is aimed at non-U.S. investors.
  • May 1: Hippo Protocol starts up its own layer-1 blockchain mainnet built on Cosmos SDK and completes a migration from Ethereum’s ERC-20 HPO token to its native HP token, enabling staking and governance.
  • May 1, 9 a.m.: Constellation Network (DAG) activates the Tessellation v3 upgrade on its mainnet, introducing delegated staking, node collateral, token locking and new transaction types to enhance network security, scalability and functionality.
  • May 1, 11 a.m.: THORChain activates its v3.5 mainnet upgrade, adding the TCY token to convert $200 million in debt into equity. TCY holders earn 10% of network revenue, while native RUNE remains the protocol’s security and governance token. TCY activates May 5.
  • May 5, 3 a.m.: IOTA’s Rebased network upgrade starts. Rebased moves IOTA to a new network, boosting capacity to as many as 50,000 transactions per second, offering staking rewards of 10%-15% a year and adding support for MoveVM smart contracts.
  • May 5, 10 a.m.: The Crescendo network upgrade goes live on the Kaspa (KAS) mainnet. This upgrade boosts the network’s performance by increasing the block production rate to 10 blocks per second from 1 block per second.
• Macro
  • April 30, 8 a.m.: Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) releases March unemployment rate data.
    • Unemployment Rate Est. 7% vs. Prev. 6.8%
  • April 30, 8 a.m.: Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography releases (preliminary) Q1 GDP growth data.
    • GDP Growth Rate QoQ Prev. -0.6%
    • GDP Growth Rate YoY Prev. 0.5%
  • April 30, 8:30 a.m.: The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases (advance) Q1 GDP growth data.
    • GDP Growth Rate QoQ Est. 0.4% vs. Prev. 2.4%
  • April 30, 10 a.m.: The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) releases March consumer income and expenditure data.
    • Core PCE Price Index MoM Est. 0.1% vs. Prev. 0.4%
    • Core PCE Price Index YoY Est. 2.6% vs. Prev. 2.8%
    • PCE Price Index MoM Est. 0% vs. Prev. 0.3%
    • PCE Price Index YoY Est. 2.2% vs. Prev. 2.5%
    • Personal Income MoM Est. 0.4% vs. Prev. 0.8%
    • Personal Spending MoM Est. 0.6% vs. Prev. 0.4%
  • May 1, 8:30 a.m.: The U.S. Department of Labor releases unemployment insurance data for the week ended April 26.
    • Initial Jobless Claims Est. 224K vs. Prev. 222K
  • May 1, 9:30 a.m.: S&P Global releases Canada April purchasing managers’ index (PMI) data.
    • Manufacturing PMI Prev. 46.3
  • May 1, 10:00 a.m.: Institute for Supply Management (ISM) releases U.S. April economic activity data.
    • Manufacturing PMI Est. 48 vs. Prev. 49
• Earnings (Estimates based on FactSet data)
  • April 30: Robinhood Markets (HOOD), post-market, $0.33
  • May 1: Block (XYZ), post-market, $0.97
  • May 1: Reddit (RDDT), post-market, $0.02
  • May 1: Riot Platforms (RIOT), post-market, $-0.23
  • May 1: Strategy (MSTR), post-market, $-0.11
  • May 8: Coinbase Global (COIN), post-market, $2.08
  • May 8: Hut 8 (HUT), pre-market
  • May 8: MARA Holdings (MARA), post-market

Token Events

• Governance votes & calls
  • Compound DAO is voting on moving 35,200 COMP ($1.5 million) into a multisig safe to test selling covered calls on COMP for USDC, lend that USDC in Compound for extra yield, then use the returns to buy back COMP and repeat — targeting a roughly 15 % annual gain. Voting ends May 2.
  • April 30, 12 p.m.: Helium to host a community call meeting.
  • May 5, 4 p.m.: Livepeer (LPT) to host a Treasury Talk session on Discord.
• Unlocks
  • May 1: Sui (SUI) to unlock 2.28% of its circulating supply worth $261.2 million.
  • May 1: ZetaChain (ZETA) to unlock 5.67% of its circulating supply worth $12.31 million.
  • May 2: Ethena (ENA) to unlock 0.73% of its circulating supply worth $12.99 million.
  • May 7: Kaspa (KAS) to unlock 0.56% of its circulating supply worth $13.08 million.
  • May 9: Movement (MOVA) to unlock 2.04% of its circulating supply worth $12.31 million.
• Token Launches
  • May 2: Binance to delist Alpaca Finance (ALPACA), PlayDapp (PDA), Viberate (VIB), and Wing Finance (WING).
  • May 5: Sonic (S) to be listed on Kraken.

Conferences

CoinDesk’s Consensus is taking place in Toronto on May 14-16. Use code DAYBOOK and save 15% on passes.

• Day 4 of 4: Web Summit Rio 2025
• Day 1 of 2: TOKEN2049 (Dubai)
• May 6-7: Financial Times Digital Assets Summit (London)
• May 11-17: Canada Crypto Week (Toronto)
• May 12-13: Dubai FinTech Summit
• May 12-13: Filecoin (FIL) Developer Summit (Toronto)
• May 12-13: Latest in DeFi Research (TLDR) Conference (New York)
• May 12-14: ACI’s 9th Annual Legal, Regulatory, and Compliance Forum on Fintech & Emerging Payment Systems (New York)
• May 13: Blockchain Futurist Conference (Toronto)
• May 13: ETHWomen (Toronto)

Token Talk

By Shaurya Malwa

• Solana-based Housecoin (HOUSE) zoomed to nearly $100 million market cap early Wednesday driven by a 24-hour price bump of 63% that brought its price to just under a cent.
• HOUSE has surged more than 900% in the past three weeks, mainly on niche popularity in crypto circles and mentions from well-followed X accounts.
• The trending memecoin is a satire on the real estate market, where prime locations are priced out for most of the general populace.
• Holding HOUSE is, jokingly, considered by its cult to be holding actual property even though the token is intrinsically valueless and not backed by any real-world assets.
• While its momentum and accessibility offer trading opportunities, its volatility, lack of clear fundamentals, and memecoin risks demand caution.

Derivatives Positioning

• Among large-cap assets on Binance, PEPE and ADA hold negative funding APRs of -14.7% and -11.2%, respectively, according to Velo data. In contrast, TON, XLM, and XMR have seen funding APRs spike to 11%, highlighting a clear divergence in speculative positioning across major tokens.
• In terms of open interest, BSW, DRIFT and PROMPT are among the top gainers, with daily open interest rising by 61%, 58%, and 33%, respectively — signaling idiosyncratic, intraday interest in these assets.
• ALPACA, a BNB Chain asset, recorded over $55 million in short liquidations in the past 24 hours. That’s the largest of any asset, according to CoinGlass data. The surge followed heavy short positioning after Binance’s delisting announcement a week ago, before a 550% price rally triggered widespread liquidations.

Market Movements

• BTC is down 0.19% from 4 p.m. ET Tuesday at $94,915.28 (24hrs: unchanged)
• ETH is down 0.57% at $1,805.20 (24hrs: -1.48%)
• CoinDesk 20 is down 0.51% at 2,751.84 (24hrs: -1.27%)
• Ether CESR Composite Staking Rate is up 19 bps at 2.99%
• BTC funding rate is at 0.0008% (0.8377% annualized) on Binance

• DXY is up 0.19% at 99.43
• Gold is down 1.16% at $3,278.15/oz
• Silver is down 1.64% at $32.36/oz
• Nikkei 225 closed +0.57% at 36,045.38
• Hang Seng closed +0.51% at 22,119.41
• FTSE is up 0.13% at 8,474.22
• Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.24% at 5,174.41
• DJIA closed on Tuesday +0.75% at 40,527.62
• S&P 500 closed +0.56% at 5,560.83
• Nasdaq closed +0.55% at 17,461.32
• S&P/TSX Composite Index closed +0.31% at 24,874.48
• S&P 40 Latin America closed unchanged at 2,548.27
• U.S. 10-year Treasury rate is down 5 bps at 4.17%
• E-mini S&P 500 futures are down 0.28% at 5,568.25
• E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are down 0.44% at 19,556.00
• E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are down 0.22% at 40,596.00

Bitcoin Stats

• BTC Dominance: 64.54 (0.16%)
• Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.01902 (-0.31%)
• Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 837 EH/s
• Hashprice (spot): $49.08
• Total Fees: 6.17 BTC / $585,773.63
• CME Futures Open Interest: 134,825 BTC
• BTC priced in gold: 28.9 oz
• BTC vs gold market cap: 8.19%

Technical Analysis

• With bitcoin and most digital assets breaching key high-timeframe liquidity levels, a market pullback now appears likely.
• Solana, along with many altcoins, has broken its weekly market structure with a strong upward move that swept liquidity at $153 before facing rejection at the 100-day exponential moving average (EMA) level.
• Bulls will want the price action to print a higher low with the 100-day EMA on the weekly time frame sitting at $137, aligning with the weekly orderblock of demand.

Crypto Equities

• Strategy (MSTR): closed at on Tuesday $381.45 (+3.3%), down 0.41% at $379.88 in pre-market
• Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $206.13 (+0.42%)
• Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at $21.09 (-0.57%)
• MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $14.22 (+1.5%), down 0.28% at $14.18
• Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $7.42 (-2.75%), down 0.40% at $7.39
• Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $8.29 (+0.61%), down 0.48% at $8.25
• CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $8.44 (-1.52%), down 0.24% at $8.42
• CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $14.19 (-0.98%)
• Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $33.97 (-3.96%), up 4.95% at $35.65
• Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $40.97 (-2.87%), up 2.49% at $41.99

ETF Flows

Spot BTC ETFs:

• Daily net flow: $172.8 million
• Cumulative net flows: $39.16 billion
• Total BTC holdings ~ 1.15 million

Spot ETH ETFs

• Daily net flow: $18.4 million
• Cumulative net flows: $2.50 billion
• Total ETH holdings ~ 3.44 million

Source: Farside Investors

Overnight Flows

Chart of the Day

• Alpaca Finance (ALPACA) emerged as the top gainer on centralized exchanges with a price that’s surged nearly 2,500% over the past seven days.
• The rally is driven by a significant short squeeze, following heavy short positioning in the wake of Binance’s April 24 delisting announcement.
• As a result, the token surged to a multiyear high of $1.375.

While You Were Sleeping

• Telegram’s TON Takes On Real World Assets With Libre’s $500M Tokenized Bond Fund (CoinDesk): Libre plans to tokenize $500 million in Telegram debt as the Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) on the TON blockchain.
• BlackRock Looking to Tokenize Shares of Its $150B Treasury Trust Fund, SEC Filing Shows (CoinDesk): The new “DLT” shares are expected to be bought and held through BNY, which plans to use blockchain technology to keep a mirror record of ownership for its clients.
• SEC Delays Dogecoin and XRP ETF Decisions (CoinDesk): The SEC delayed decisions on the Bitwise DOGE ETF and the Franklin XRP Fund until June 15 and June 17, respectively.
• Investors Turn to Emerging Market Debt After Trump Tariffs Hit U.S. Treasuries (CNBC): As confidence in Treasuries as a safe haven weakens, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa could see more bond demand, said Carol Lye, citing yield premiums and potential currency appreciation.
• Chinese Investors Pile Into Gold Funds at Record Pace (Financial Times): China’s gold ETF holdings have doubled to 6% of the global total, with $7.4 billion in inflows this month accounting for more than half of global demand.
• Asia Hedge Funds Add Japan, India After Tariff Shock, Says Morgan Stanley (Reuters): Funds increased exposure to Japanese tech, industrials and materials while retreating from Chinese consumer shares, as global investors expect Washington to strike trade deals with Tokyo and New Delhi.

In the Ether

The Nasdaq exchange filed a 19b-4 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday to approve listing and trading shares of the 21Shares Dogecoin ETF.

Asset manager 21Shares submitted an S-1 registration with the SEC on April 10, as reported, in partnership with the House of Doge — the Dogecoin Foundation’s corporate arm — to help promote the fund.

The ETF aims to track the performance of dogecoin, as measured by the CF DOGE-Dollar US Settlement Price Index, adjusted for the Trust’s expenses and other liabilities.

It is a passive investment vehicle that will hold DOGE directly. The Trust will not utilize leverage, derivatives, or any similar arrangements to meet its investment objective, the filing mentioned.

Coinbase Custody Trust will hold the fund’s tokens and serve as the official custodian for the ETF.

The filing comes as the SEC postponed its decision on Bitwise’s spot DOGE ETF application, extending the review period until June 15.

Digital assets exchange KuCoin has unveiled a new initiative, the “Trust Project,” with a massive $2 billion investment aimed at reinforcing user safety, boosting transparency, and ensuring long-term accountability in the crypto market.

The announcement came during TOKEN2049 Dubai, where KuCoin CEO BC Wong, alongside the exchange’s European Union CEO Oliver Stauber, detailed the initiative’s vision to align crypto operations more closely with regulatory frameworks and user-centric principles.

At its core, the Trust Project focuses on key values such as infrastructure neutrality, responsible innovation, and enhanced protections against platform risks. KuCoin’s native token, KCS, play a more pivotal role in governance, ecosystem management and user reward programs.

“We’re directing resources where they count — toward building credibility, protecting our users, and securing the future of crypto,” Wong said during his keynote.

Bitcoin developers are again at odds over how the world’s oldest and largest blockchain should handle storing information on-chain, with a proposal to relax long-standing limits on the size of data held sparking fierce debate reminiscent of 2023’s battles over Ordinals.

The blockchain’s OP_RETURN feature allows people attach a small piece of extra data to a transaction It is often used for things like notes, timestamps or digital records. The proposed change, put forward by developer Peter Todd, would remove the 80-byte cap on such data, a limit originally designed to discourage spam and preserve the blockchain’s financial integrity.

Supporters argue the current limit is pointless because users are already bypassing it by using Taproot transactions, to hide data inside parts of the transaction meant for cryptographic signatures. This is how Ordinals and Inscriptions work (and why they have their critics): They embed images or text into Taproot transactions that are often unspendable, turning the Bitcoin blockchain into a kind of data storage system.

Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr, a vocal critic of Ordinals, which he has long labeled a “spam attack” on the blockchain, called the proposal “utter insanity” and warned that loosening data restrictions would accelerate what he sees as the degradation of Bitcoin’s financial-first purpose.

“It should be needless to say, but this idea is utter insanity,” Dashjr posted. “The bugs should be fixed, not the abuse embraced.”

Critics of the proposal also have another concern. The change could normalize illegal content storage, degrade the chain’s fungibility, and turn node operators into unwitting hosts of malware and copyright violations.

To demonstrate the potential maelstrom this may bring, one Ordinals team inscribed a whole Nintendo 64 emulator onto the blockchain, which may get the attention of Nintendo, a company known for being protective of its intellectual property.

Supporters of the change, including Pieter Wuille and Sjors Provoost, argued that relaxing OP_RETURN limits may actually reduce what’s known as UTXO (unspent transaction output) bloat, a phenomenon that slows down the blockchain when the network gets cluttered with non-financial transactions, and mempool fragmentation.

UTXO bloat is a documented side effect of Ordinals and Inscriptions using Taproot transactions. For example, in May 2023, at the height of Ordinals’ popularity, the Bitcoin blockchain became so congested Binance had to suspend bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals for a number of hours.

“The demand exists,” Wuille wrote. “And pushing it outside the public relay network only causes greater harm.”

For now, the proposal remains under review. One thing is for certain: The intensity of debate on GitHub and blockchain developer mailing lists shows the battle for Bitcoin’s identity is far from over.

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s largest digital asset by market value, recently held steady as President Donald Trump’s trade war spurred a shift away from U.S. assets.

The so-called decoupling reinforced the belief of crypto advocates that BTC is as a safe haven and a low-beta play relative to equities.

BlackRock’s Head of Digital Assets, Robert Mitchinik, believes the cryptocurrency could actually evolve into a permanent low-beta play reflexively.

“It makes no fundamental sense, and yet when it’s repeated enough, it can actually become a little self-fulfilling, right?” Mitchnik said during a panel discussion at the Dubai Token2049 conference on Wednesday. “It is something that can happen reflexively because enough pundits and research outlets and other commentators have said that it would.”

Investors aggressively dumped the U.S. assets, including the tech-heavy Nasdaq index and the S&P 500, early this month as the escalating U.S.-China trade tensions spurred recession fears. BTC, however, held relatively steady, so much so that on a seven-day basis, the cryptocurrency looked less volatile than the S&P 500.

That short decoupling reinforced the crypto community’s belief in an asset known to be detached from the economic, political and monetary risk of a particular country, spurring renewed capital inflows into the U.S.-listed spot ETFs, Mitchnik explained.

Investors have poured in at least $3 billion in the spot ETFs in the last ten trading days, with BlackRock’s IBIT receiving the most inflows, according to data source Farside Investors.

Mitchinik added that part of the recent decoupling could be due to the transfer of BTC from the less stable hands to more long-term fundamental-driven holders. The shift is “definitely happening,” he said.

Jan van Eck, CEO of VanEck, while speaking at the same panel, said he would like to see bitcoin revert to the pre-2020 period when it was an uncorrelated asset.

The institutionalization of BTC after the Covid crash in 2020 and since the debut of ETFs early last year has led to the cryptocurrency developing correlations with tradfi assets, mainly the Nasdaq index. That has led to BTC losing its appeal as a portfolio diversifier.

Jan van Eck explained that traders would be inclined to hold more BTC if the correlations weaken.

UPDATE (April 30, 09:19 UTC): Adds ‘Reflexively” to headline.

BlackRock is preparing to bring blockchain to the back office of one of its largest funds, filing to offer a digital share class of its $150 billion Treasury Trust money market fund through BNY Mellon.

The new “DLT Shares,” short for distributed ledger technology, won’t hold crypto. But BNY Mellon, the fund’s exclusive distributor, intends to use blockchain to mirror share ownership records, an incremental step that could pave the way for broader adoption of tokenized cash, digital assets, or blockchain-based settlement infrastructure in traditional finance.

BlackRock’s Liquidity Treasury Trust Fund is part of the firm’s BlackRock Liquidity Funds suite and manages over $150 billion in assets as of April 29. The DLT share class has a minimum investment requirement of $3 million for institutional buyers, with no minimums on subsequent purchases. The SEC filing is preliminary and subject to approval.

This isn’t BlackRock’s first move into tokenization. Its blockchain-native BUIDL fund, created in partnership with Securitize, now manages over $1.7 billion in assets and recently expanded onto Solana.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has consistently emphasized his belief in the long-term potential of tokenization and decentralized finance. In his 2025 annual letter to shareholders, Fink warned that the U.S. risks ceding its financial dominance if it fails to control its debt – a vulnerability that could accelerate investor interest in alternatives like Bitcoin.

“If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control … America risks losing [its reserve currency status] to digital assets like Bitcoin,” Fink wrote. “Decentralized finance is an extraordinary innovation. It makes markets faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Yet that same innovation could undermine America’s economic advantage.”

Libre, a tokenization firm that works closely with the likes of hedge fund Brevan Howard, investment management firm Hamilton Lane and Nomura’s digital assets unit Laser Digital, plans to tokenize $500 million worth of Telegram debt as the blockchain-based Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) on the TON network that’s linked to the messaging platform.

TBF will offer accredited investors exposure to some of the around $2.4 billion of outstanding bonds issued by Telegram, providing institutional-grade yield products that will also be available as collateral for on-chain borrowing and product development on TON, Libre said.

“What we’ve created is like a fixed income fund that acquires the bonds and then we tokenize the fund,” Libre CEO Avtar Sehra in an interview. “When you purchase units in the fund these are on the TON chain, giving you access to the returns of the underlying bonds themselves. This opens up opportunities to use the bonds for collateral, ease of transfers, etc, to ultimately create utility with these financial instruments.”

The past year or two has seen a rush to create blockchain-based representations of real world assets (RWAs), bringing the traditional finance world rapidly within the ambit of crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Sehra said many of his customers want either tokenized money market products because they’re looking for quick access to cash, or something that’s associated with an ecosystem they are involved in or work within.

The TON network was originally developed by Telegram before continuing as an independent operation. Over the last year or so, TON has been focused on bringing a large swathe of Telegram’s 950 million-plus users on-chain.

Libre has already tokenized over $200 million in assets across funds from leading institutions including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, and Laser Digital.

“Our objective isn’t just to tokenize things for the sake of tokenizing them,” Sehra said. “I think the real value in tokenizing traditional financial instruments is unlocking the utility of those assets.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed approval decisions on spot xrp (XRP) and dogecoin (DOGE) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) late Tuesday, in line with analyst expectations.

The SEC said it will wait until June 15 for the next steps for the Bitwise DOGE ETF and June 17 for the Franklin XRP Fund, separate filings show.

The law says the Commission has 45 days from when a proposed rule change is announced to approve it, reject it, or start a process to decide if it should be rejected. These 45 days can be extended to 90 days if the Commission thinks more time is needed.

“The Commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change and the issues raised therein,” the agency said in the filings.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart said in an X post that these delays are expected as final deadlines for most filings are in October or later.

XRP and DOGE are little-changed in the past 24 hours alongside flat bitcoin price action.

Two recent shepherds of U.S. crypto oversight — Republican former lawmaker Patrick McHenry and Democrat former Commodity Futures Trading Commission chief Rostin Behnam — shared a view that there’s a tremendous amount of work still to do on U.S. crypto legislation but that now is the moment to do it.

McHenry, in a discussion hosted by Georgetown University’s Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy, said that Senator Tim Scott, the South Carolina chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and Representative French Hill, the Arkansas Republican who leads the House Financial Services Committee, present the industry an ideal opportunity to establish sound law.

“And I think you should take it,” he said, arguing that solid law will act as a better future defense than regulatory stopgaps that aren’t associated with congressional action. “Let’s ward against bad regulators taking these seats that could try to kill digital innovation.”

Last year, McHenry backed the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act (FIT21), which has become the foundation for this year’s congressional effort on crypto’s market structure. The former lawmaker, who now advises industry investor a16z, predicted a “wicked hot summer for legislating.”

McHenry also had a direct hand in last year’s stablecoin legislation that’s returned with new versions in the House and Senate. Though they’re mostly aligned with each other, he said a “major brewing battle” is shaping up between U.S. stablecoin issuer Circle (USDC) and the global leader, Tether (USDT), over how non-U.S. issuers would be handled.

Both want to be in business after Congress passes a law, McHenry said, “and they’re both working actively on Capitol Hill to make their point of view heard.” He said he expects a “reasonable landing spot” will be found in a U.S. regime for Tether that allows it to deal with U.S. investors.

“You shouldn’t blow up an international product that desires to be dollar-denominated; I don’t think that’s a rational outcome,” he argued, though the matter may take more months of negotiating among lawmakers. The debates over the meat of highly technical policies will eventually transition from “science to art” as lawmakers do what they can to convert ideas into law, McHenry said.

Meanwhile, the industry keeps going, largely unregulated at the federal level. As Behnam noted: “You can’t stop the industry from doing what it’s doing, whether it’s trading the tokens or developing protocols and whatnot, and that’s been going on for years.”

He was never able to get on the same page with former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler to initiate crypto policies, and he offered a reality check for those now waiting for laws from a cooperative Congress: They’ll also have to be implemented by the regulators.

“It’s going to take a while,” he said, starting with the market structure legislation that may still be several months away. “But then it kicks over to the harder part, where you’re going to have the market regulators and the bank regulators writing rules, which often can take over a year, even at the quickest clip.”

Read More: U.S. CFTC Chief Benham’s Last Words to Crypto: Protect the Investors

Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), which is majority-owned by U.S. President Donald Trump, is considering launching a cryptocurrency.

“As part of our rewards program, we’re exploring the introduction of a utility token with a Truth digital wallet that can initially be used to pay for Truth+ subscription costs, and later be applied to other products and services in the Truth ecosphere,” the company said in a letter to its shareholders on Tuesday.

DJT barely reacted to the news; the stock is down 0.52% in after-hours trading.

The company is also looking into launching exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that will combine equities with cryptocurrencies, the letter reiterated.

Trump’s entourage has released a panoply of crypto products over the years, including memecoins, NFT collections, and a DeFi protocol.

Read more: Trump Media Wants to Partner with Crypto.Com for ETP Issuance