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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

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.”

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.

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.

Read more: Samourai Wallet Prosecutors Are Considering Dropping Charges Under New DOJ Enforcement Priorities: Filing

New York prosecutors are seemingly considering whether or not to drop their case against Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill, according to a Monday court filing.

In a joint letter to District Judge Richard Berman of the Southern District of New York (SDNY), both prosecutors and lawyers for Rodriguez and Hill requested that the case be granted a 16-day continuance, or extension, “while the Government determines its position” in response to the defense’s request that the case be dismissed under the auspices of U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s recent memo to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) staff.

In his April 7 memo, Blanche announced that the DOJ’s crypto unit, the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) would be disbanded, and instructed staff to no longer bring 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 inconsistent with this new policy to be closed, and said that his office would work with the DOJ’s criminal division to “review ongoing cases for consistency with this policy.”

Read more: DOJ Axes Crypto Unit as Trump’s Regulatory Pullback Continues

Three days after Blanche’s memo, lawyers for Hill and Rodriguez sent a letter to SDNY prosecutors “requesting the dismissal of the superseding indictment under the Blanche Memo,” according to Monday’s filing On April 24, the parties met to discuss the request.

Last April, Rodriguez and Hill were charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years and five years, respectively. Prosecutors said Samourai Wallet had facilitated around $2 billion in “unlawful transactions” between 2015 and 2024, with the pair collecting a combined $4.5 million in fees.

When Dean Skurka joined Bitbuy in 2018, the platform had only four employees, a few thousand users, and about $25 million in trading volume. Fast-forward to today, Skurka now oversees WonderFi: A company that’s consolidated multiple Canadian exchanges, boasts 1.7 million accounts, and guards $2 billion in client assets.

But Skurka isn’t just sitting on a domestic empire—he’s building outward.

In a conversation with CoinDesk, WonderFi’s president and CEO, Dean Skurka, detailed his company’s next chapter: launching a Layer-2 blockchain in partnership with zkSync and expanding into Australia, a country he says “checks both boxes” of regulatory clarity and strong adoption. He also discussed the outlook for centralized exchanges and how Canada’s crypto landscape is changing.

Here is an edited and shortened version of his conversation with CoinDesk, ahead of his appearance at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.

Layer 2 push

The centralized exchange said in February that it is launching a Layer 2 blockchain based on ZKsync to connect its users to decentralized finance (DeFi).

“When we think about the long-term trend across the industry, we see a really strong synergy between centralized exchanges, where the users are originating or the assets are originating, and giving them a seamless bridge to everything that’s happening on chain today.”

Skurka says WonderFi’s knowledge of running trading platforms, regulatory credibility, and asset base gives it an edge over a plethora of other Layer 2s connecting DeFi.

Unlike some other rival Layer 2 chains launched with splashy token incentives or VC hype, Skurka says WonderFi’s approach is more grounded and long-lasting. It plans to foster long-term use through builder incentives, hackathons and ecosystem support.

Centralized vs decentralized exchanges

Rather than viewing decentralized exchanges as competitors for centralized exchanges, Skurka sees them as extensions. Centralized exchanges provide the bridge for first-time users to go from buying and selling crypto on regulated and trusted platforms to on-chain activities that open up more innovative new products that exist in the crypto ecosystem.

“[Centralized exchanges] are building out the components that will allow their users to seamlessly interact on chain, but at the same time building up the the capabilities on the exchange side to look more akin to traditional financial service products, which we think will create incremental value on both sides over the next 5 to 10 years,” he said.

Evolution of crypto in Canada

WonderFi is a dominant exchange in Canada, and able to observe how the crypto landscape is changing in the country.

Canada has a strong crypto history—Ethereum and the first spot bitcoin ETF were both born there. It was also one of the first countries to have a regulatory framework for crypto trading platforms.

“Some of the more innovative products and services that exist within this space have moved offshore or outside of Canada because of the lack of clarity around those products and services,” he said, pointing to products such as DeFi applications, Layer 2 blockchains and derivatives.

WonderFi is now aiming to change that, after working closely with Canadian regulators to create trading and staking guidelines.

“We are working hand in hand with regulators to give them comfort on some of these newer, more innovative products and services, and hopefully that will encourage entrepreneurs, builders, developers, to really stay in Canada and build products with confidence,” Skurka added.

And with the U.S. now becoming more open to crypto and many exchange-traded funds open to investors, the mindset in Canada is starting to shift as well. WonderFi, which has been a mostly retail-dominated platform, is now seeing interest from Canadian institutional investors such as family offices and private equities who want exposure to digital assets.

“​​I think that’s been a really big shift over the last year, and that’s something [institutional investors’ interest] that we expect to really accelerate in the next few years,” Skurka said.

Australia and beyond

Skurka isn’t stopping at Canada; he is looking to expand his company’s reach to other regions, starting with Australia—a country Skurka describes as having “clear, concise regulation” and a strong crypto adoption rate.

“Australia was a really good market for us to target initially, and from there, we’ll really look for other markets,” Skurka said.

The mighty volatility

Like the crypto’s 24/7 nature, a CEO’s job in this fast-paced industry is never done.

In Skurka’s case, it’s exactly what keeps him up at night: volatility— something that shapes the industry perception and sentiments.

“It’s probably just the short-term volatility that really impacts the outlook on the business and has an impact on the users, the staff, and the team morale. And so it’s really just something that we really look to to balance as best we can,” Skurka said.

But having been in the industry since 2018 and navigating extreme ups and downs, he’s learned to ride out the volatility.

“I think we have a really good handle on it, and we’ve got a really strong team that understands the 24-hour nature of this business—the volatility of this business—and we’re in a really good spot,” Skurka added.

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.

Robinhood’s (HOOD) record crypto trading revenue from the last quarter of 2024 may prove hard to repeat, according to JPMorgan analyst Kenneth Worthington, who forecast a drop in digital asset volumes for the first quarter of this year.

The online trading platform reports first quarter results after the U.S. market close on Wednesday.

The fourth quarter’s staggering 700% surge in cryptocurrency trading revenue was behind a sizable jump in HOOD’s overall transaction-based revenue. Worthington, however, sees that momentum stalling in the first quarter, citing a decline in both equity and crypto markets, especially in the latter half of the quarter.

Worthington and team estimate Robinhood users traded about $52 billion in crypto during the quarter, down from $71 billion in Q4. Worthington attributes the drop to a “risk-off” environment that erased much of the market’s gains since the start of the year. Robinhood’s assets under custody (AUC) are expected to fall 5% from the prior quarter to $183.3 billion, though still up 41% year-over-year.

While the report highlights strong retail buying in early April following tariff-related news from Washington, Worthington suggests that activity may not be enough to lift first quarter results. He warns that softer demand for margin and derivatives trading — also seen at competitor Interactive Brokers — could weigh on Robinhood’s overall performance.

Worthington maintained a neutral rating on the stock and trimmed his price target by $1 to $44, suggesting about 10% downside from the current price just below $49.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.