What's next for crypto regulation under the new SEC chair and how are markets reacting?
A lot is happening across the crypto landscape right now, and all eyes are in Washington. Newly appointed SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is set to speak at a cryptocurrency roundtable on April 25, 2025, his first public address focused solely on digital assets since taking office earlier this month.
Atkins stirred conversation during his inaugural speech, promising a more “rational, coherent, and principled” approach to regulating the crypto space. He also expressed his goal to make the U.S. the “best and safest place in the world” for crypto innovation. The upcoming roundtable is expected to touch on major regulatory themes including DeFi, DAOs, stablecoins, and the future of spot ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Meanwhile, the market's moving. Initia, a new layer-one blockchain designed to connect app-specific chains through an interwoven network, is gaining traction. Built on Cosmos SDK and leveraging rollup scalability, Initia supports up to 10,000 TPS with 500ms block times. There's already a pre-market order for it on BingX, and a launchpool running on Binance anticipation is clearly building ahead of its official listing.
Zooming out, the total crypto market cap now stands at $2.95 trillion, up 6.5% in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin is trading at $92,386 at the time of writing, after fluctuating between $91.6K and $94.6K. Other coins are showing mixed movement, though standouts like $ARDR (+30%), TRUMP (+27%), and $FTT (+22%) on Binance are leading the way. Notably, Sui $SUI has overtaken Chainlink (LINK) in market cap now valued at $98.8B vs. LINK $95.4B.
Lots of shifting pieces both on-chain and off-chain and April 25 could give us a clearer signal of where things are heading next.
