DL News

For a moment, it looked like Democrats and Republicans in Washington might actually come together to get something productive done for crypto.

But just days before a key vote, that spirit of bipartisanship is cracking.

A group of nine Senate Democrats who previously supported the GOP-led GENIUS stablecoin bill now say they won’t back it in its current form, throwing the bill’s path forward into doubt.

In a joint statement released Saturday, the lawmakers said the legislation lacks sufficient

Bitcoin has become the reserve asset of choice for corporate giants like Strategy and the newly formed Twenty One Ventures.

But other companies are hedging with memecoins.

One of them is Freight Technologies, a Houston-based logistics minnow whose stock more than doubled this week after announcing plans to buy up to $20 million worth of President Donald Trump’s eponymous meme token, TRUMP.

The company said it had secured funding through convertible notes and would make the memecoin a “corners

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants to strip the protocol down to its essence. And in five years, he says, it could be as “beautifully simple” as Bitcoin.

In a blog post published on Friday, Buterin outlined a sweeping plan to simplify Ethereum’s core protocol and shift away from years of growing technical complexity.

He says that the blockchain should prioritise simplicity alongside scalability and security, arguing that overly complicated systems increase maintenance costs, security ri

It made it right to the finish line, but wasn’t allowed to cross.

Arizona’s bid to become the first US state to hold Bitcoin as part of its official reserves has ended in a veto.

Governor Katie Hobbs formally struck down the Digital Assets Strategic Reserve bill on Friday, according to an update on the state legislature’s website.

The bill had passed its final House vote on April 28, but Hobbs followed through on a previous threat to veto any legislation not accompanied by a bipartisan deal o

Crypto companies see a potential windfall after a federal judge on Thursday struck down the “Apple tax” — the tech giant’s policy of limiting user purchases made outside iPhone applications, where it takes a 30% cut.

“This is huge for integration with mobile wallets where users can spend their crypto directly … without having to pay extra fees,” Cygaar, a pseudonymous software developer at Abstract Chain, wrote on X.

“The days of having to use mobile web pages to buy/sell NFTs are over — apps

Bitcoin is approaching a powder keg of shorts that could send its price rocketing to a new all-time high.

Data from Coinglass shows a massive $3.1 billion in short interest stacked at the $100,000 price level. That‘s just slightly above Bitcoin‘s high of $97,000 on Friday.

Should Bitcoin‘s price climb beyond $100,000, it would liquidate those shorts and trigger a feedback loop of aggressive buys. That scenario is called a short squeeze as bearish bets implode and short sellers are forced to bu

A version of this article appeared in our The Roundup newsletter on May 2. Sign up here.

Hi! Eric here.

What comes next?

That’s the question crypto companies and degens ask as Donald Trump marked his first 100 days as US president.

Trump claimed success, of course, but the crypto industry isn’t so sure.

Trump’s tariffs punctured the bull run and triggered an $800 billion slump, or about 22% of the crypto market’s value since its December high.

The growing Trump crypto empire has also raise

Romance scams, North Korean hackers, and an “unfreezable” stablecoin have put a shadowy crypto marketplace in Washington’s crosshairs.

The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has designated Cambodia-based Huione Group a “primary money laundering concern” and proposed to “sever its access to the US financial system.”

In a notice issued yesterday, FinCEN said Huione has laundered at least $4 billion in illicit crypto since 2021.

This included $37 million linked to North Korea’s L

Eleven crypto projects raised $213 million this week, according to DefiLlama.

The amount is about 67% lower from last week, but brings the total raised this year to $7.2 billion.

Let’s take a look at the most notable among them:

Alpaca, $52 million

Alpaca drew the week’s biggest round, a Series C, with participation from Derayah Financial, 850 Management, National Investments Company, Unbound and Portage Ventures.

The investment “allows us to expand our efforts globally,” Yoshi Yokokawa, co

BlackRock says Bitcoin will soon be risky not to own.

That’s if, and a big if, the price of the top cryptocurrency truly manages to break free of its tight correlation to riskier assets like US technology stocks.

“The correlation between bitcoin and tech stocks is going to be an absolutely critical driver,” Robbie Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, told DL News. “If Bitcoin trades more like a tech stock, it is not very interesting to institutions.”

But if Bitcoin trades with low

Donald Trump’s roller coaster trade war has rattled Bitcoin miners and chip producers, but Block is betting on resilience.

The company reported $2.29 billion in gross profit for the first quarter, up 9% from a year earlier, and reaffirmed its plan to launch a new Bitcoin mining chip, Proto, later this year.

CEO Jack Dorsey described how domestic production and strong supply chain ties will be a major strategic advantage amid growing concerns about tariffs and overseas manufacturing risk.

“We’

Crypto trader Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg was sentenced to four years and four months in prison Thursday for possession of child sexual abuse material.

But a federal judge said he needs more time to consider Avraham’s request for a new trial for his October 2022 exploit of now-defunct, Solana-based decentralised exchange Mango Markets.

A federal jury convicted Eisenberg, 29, of fraud and market manipulation in April of last year for the $110 million exploit.

Eisenberg exploited a flaw in Mango Ma

Robinhood did not escape crypto’s market downturn in the first three months of 2025.

The retail trading platform recorded $252 million in crypto trading revenue between January and March, a 30% decline from the previous quarter. The significant dip tracks the slump that saw the cryptocurrency market dip by an almost equivalent proportion earlier in the year.

Amid the downturn, CEO Vlad Tenev says the company is looking to diversify.

“It’s going to go up and down in terms of trading volume,” T

Ripple, Galaxy Digital, and Twenty One Capital are among crypto companies bucking expectations that deal activity will dry out due to US President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Crypto projects have secured $7.2 billion in venture funding in 2025, within spitting distance of the total $9.6 billion secured through the whole of 2024, according to DefiLlama.

Elsewhere, firms this year have reported 88 merger and acquisition deals worth $8.2 billion, almost triple the total transaction value of all of

The UK’s sweeping new crypto regulations may be burdensome, but incumbent fintech companies like Revolut are cheering them on.

The rules, which are said to align more with the US than the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, are seen to be favouring companies that already operate in heavily regulated environments.

“The UK framework appears to be significantly more complex and onerous than MiCA,” Konstantinos Adamos, Group Lead Legal Counsel for Crypto at Revolut, told DL News.

“Market pla

The UK’s crypto fog might be clearing. And Ripple, the blockchain firm that designed the XRP cryptocurrency for cross-border payments, is cheering it on.

Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s UK and Europe managing director, praised the announcement of a draft crypto legislation and called it a “clear signal of intent” from the government.

“At Ripple, we see huge opportunity here ― it’s why the UK is one of our largest office hubs outside the US, with year-on-year investment into our operations and talent

A coalition of crypto organisations is pitching the top US financial watchdog on a new pilot program to put stocks on a public blockchain.

In a letter filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, the Solana Policy Institute and Superstate, a New York tokenisation firm, proposed an 18-month trial program to experiment with issuing and trading tokenised versions of securities.

Lowenstein Sandler LLP, a Washington law firm specialised in blockchain technology and securities regul

It was a big month for decoupling — a term for Bitcoin’s divergence from tech stocks’ performance, which the cryptocurrency has mirrored for years.

Bitcoin was up 13% in April, outperforming gold, which gained 7.5%.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq, meanwhile, has dropped 0.1% over the last 30 days.

Analysts have noticed the shift.

“Big boy institutions are waiting for [Bitcoin] to behave like a safe haven,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas tweeted. “When it does, look out.”

US President

Crypto privacy protocol Tornado Cash cannot be re-sanctioned by the US government.

Tornado Cash users prevailed in a long-running lawsuit this week, when a federal judge in Texas granted their request that he bar the US government from re-sanctioning the protocol, as it had in 2022 due to its use by North Korean hackers.

The protocol’s token, TORN, jumped 5% on the news Tuesday.

The US Department of the Treasury removed Tornado Cash from its list of sanctioned entities in March, citing a “rev

BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF isn’t just winning the race — it’s lapping the competition.

In April, BlackRock’s IBIT fund hauled $2.45 billion, capturing around 80% of the entire $3 billion that flowed into Bitcoin ETFs.

Just this week, BlackRock was the only ETF provider to post positive numbers.

On Monday, IBIT investors accumulated $972 million in Bitcoin, while on Tuesday they added $217 million, according to JPMorgan.

Every other firm suffered outflows.

BlackRock’s supremacy over the market