Author: NBTC

CLARITY Act gridlock is mounting on Capitol Hill as House Republicans remain split over FISA surveillance reauthorization and budget reconciliation, burning the limited legislative bandwidth that crypto’s most important bill in a generation needs before midterm politics consume the calendar entirely. CLARITY Act gridlock is not a crypto story in isolation. The backlog of Republican infighting across FISA, budget reconciliation, and Iran war powers resolutions is consuming the precise legislative oxygen that the most consequential digital asset bill in US history requires in the next two weeks. None of those fights are about crypto. All of them determine whether crypto…

Polymarket betting markets reportedly appeared inside Google News results alongside established news publishers before disappearing. A Google spokesperson told The Verge that the platform’s appearance in News was an error. “This site briefly appeared in Google News in error, and it is no longer surfacing in News,” spokesperson Ned Adriance reportedly said. Before removal, Polymarket links were shown directly beneath mainstream outlets when users searched event-driven queries. In one example cited by Futurism, a search for “will ships transit the strait” related to the Strait of Hormuz returned a Polymarket market predicting outcomes on vessel passage alongside reporting from Reuters…

Austin Federa quit as the Solana Foundation’s head of strategy in 2024 to tackle what he saw as unfairness in the crypto trading environment. Eighteen months later, his company, DoubleZero, says it’s ready. DoubleZero aims to eliminate proximity to an exchange’s servers as a competitive advantage for traders. The private fiber network removes latency, the time it takes for an order to reach the platform from a trader’s desk, as a factor and introduces a more equitable environment even though regulators — and traders — aren’t asking for it yet. The problem, Federa says, is that crypto conflates decentralized with…

IRS 1099-DA crypto reporting requirements take effect for the first time on Tax Day 2026, requiring every American who sold or traded digital assets in 2025 to account for those transactions, while Treasury reports 53 million filers already claimed new Trump administration exemptions. IRS 1099-DA crypto obligations are real and unavoidable for the first time this filing season. The IRS’s first dedicated digital asset reporting form, a simplified version of an earlier draft that dropped requirements for wallet addresses and transaction IDs, went into mandatory use for brokers covering all 2025 digital asset transactions. But 53 million Americans are also…

Amidst its continued efforts to provide crypto users, traders, and investors with an innovative customer experience, Chiliz, a sports blockchain, today announced a strategic integration with BloFIN, a cryptocurrency trading exchange. According to the announcement revealed today on the X platform, this tech incorporation enabled Chiliz to launch its sports fan token, popularly recognized as PEPPER, on BloFIN’s digital asset trading platform. The Chiliz Chain is a Layer-1 blockchain network that specializes in the sports and entertainment industries. By using its specialized blockchain technology, Chiliz provides sports fans with a decentralized platform to connect with their favorite teams and athletes,…

Enterprise digital asset infrastructure platform Fireblocks said Wednesday it launched Earn, a feature that lets institutional clients route stablecoin balances into onchain lending strategies through Aave and Morpho-powered products. The product launches with a Sentora-curated vault on Morpho and direct access to Aave’s stablecoin lending markets, according to Fireblocks. The company said Earn is available now in Early Access for Fireblocks customers. Fireblocks said the feature is aimed at clients sitting on large idle stablecoin balances between settlement windows and deployment cycles. The company said it processed $6 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume in 2025 across more than 2,400 institutional…

The Take It Down Act has secured its first federal conviction, with an Ohio man pleading guilty to using more than 100 AI models to create and distribute nonconsensual deepfakes of women and children, putting the first real enforcement stamp on a landmark AI-specific law. The Take It Down Act has its first conviction. James Strahler II, a 37-year-old Columbus, Ohio man, pleaded guilty on April 7 to three federal counts: cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse material, and publishing digital forgeries, the law’s term for nonconsensual deepfakes. The Department of Justice confirmed he is the first…

Oil-linked perpetual futures on Hyperliquid climbed on Sunday after U.S. Vice President JD Vance left Islamabad without a nuclear agreement with Iran, reigniting fears of renewed conflict in the Middle East. Key Takeaways: VP JD Vance concluded 21-plus hours of U.S.-Iran talks in Islamabad on April 12, 2026, without a deal. Oil-linked perps on Hyperliquid hit $130+/barrel as Strait of Hormuz disruption fears returned. However, researcher Jim Bianco noted the cited data was the USO ETF, not crude oil. Hyperliquid’s daily oil volume, which reached $1.7B during the conflict, is expected to stay elevated. JD Vance Leaves Pakistan Without Iran…

Solv Protocol has integrated with Utexo to launch a bitcoin-native yield infrastructure that uses the RGB protocol and Lightning Network to enable direct, atomic swaps between bitcoin and $USDT. Key Takeaways: Solv Protocol and Utexo integrated to launch native $BTC yield with atomic swaps for $2 billion in reserves. The move cuts custodial risk, aligning with Tether’s 2025 plan to issue $USDT on RGB-compatible rails. Solv aims to capture institutional demand as Bitcoin-native stablecoins go mainstream throughout 2026. Eliminating Custodial Risks via RGB and Lightning Solv Protocol, an onchain Bitcoin asset management platform with more than $2 billion in reserves,…

A conservative U.S. political action committee backed by the Solana Policy Institute — the Sentinel Action Fund — has committed to a massive advertising spend on the political opponent of former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat and prominent crypto skeptic who is trying to return to Washington in this year’s Ohio Senate election. Sentinel and its affiliated nonprofit, Right Vote, committed $8 million to Jon Husted, the Republican named to fill Vice President JD Vance’s seat, according to a Wednesday statement. The committee accused his opponent, Brown, who had been the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee prior to losing…