The American Bankers Association: "It's kind of ironic, I suppose, the Clarity Act. At least for this particular section, I think there's still too much ambiguity."

In 2018, the Kremlin froze every bank account belonging to Russia's Anti-Corruption Foundation overnight. The organization survived because it had quietly started accepting Bitcoin years earlier. The Human Rights Foundation just released "Bitcoin for Nonprofits," a free guide built for activists and civil society organizations operating under authoritarian regimes. It covers how to receive, hold, and send bitcoin using self-custodial tools so that no government can freeze your funds and no bank can block your transactions. For nonprofits working under tyranny, the single biggest obstacle is no longer the mission or the danger. It is the way money works.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis: "The window to lead on digital assets won’t stay open forever. Europe isn’t waiting, and neither is China."

Tim Dillon: "The Tech and Financial sectors [dominate] the domestic agenda." "They obviously view themselves as the actual government. And whoever the president is, is a guy giving them a tour." "All these tech CEOs... clustered around Trump in China. These are the same people that were with Biden and Harris censoring their websites to limit conservative speech when they were in."

"The income tax started at 3% only on rich people. By the 1950s, marginal rates were in the 90s." Marc Andreessen warns California's proposed 5% asset tax on unrealized gains is following the same playbook. "We know from the history of the income tax that this is how it starts."

Marc Andreessen on JRE: AI hasn't replaced coders. It turned them into vampires. "The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high because if you go to sleep, you won't be with your 20 AI coding agents."

Hunter Biden broke his silence on X after deleting all previous posts, writing: "I'm Hunter Biden. You've never actually heard from me." He sits down with Candace Owens this Thursday to address the laptop, his past drug addiction, and related controversies.

JD Vance: "The president doesn't sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his Robinhood account buying and selling stocks. That's absurd. He's not making the stock trades himself."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai: Internal AI developer tools now process over 3 trillion tokens daily.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins: "Today the SEC put forward two important rule proposals that will help strengthen our public capital markets and make IPOs great again." "By making it easier for companies to go and stay public, these proposals give more American workers the opportunity to participate in the prosperity of the next generation of American business enterprises."

The Blockchain Association filed a comment letter with the FDIC on its proposed rules for implementing the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in July 2025. The letter urges the FDIC to implement the law consistent with Congress's intent: supporting innovation and competition while maintaining clear safety and soundness standards. The BA warns that overly burdensome rules risk creating a framework only the largest banks can navigate, which would entrench too-big-to-fail institutions and push stablecoin innovation offshore. Congress designed the GENIUS Act to open the door to bank subsidiaries, fintechs, and non-bank entities alike. Key recommendations: Stablecoin issuers must be fully independent from their parent banks. Reserves backing stablecoins cannot be commingled with or rely on the parent's customer deposits. The BA calls for a clean legal and operational wall between the two to prevent contagion in the event of insolvency. If a stablecoin issuer goes insolvent, the BA recommends stablecoin holders receive a "super-priority" claim on the segregated reserve assets, ahead of the parent bank's depositors and general creditors. The FDIC should not use the "other factors" provision in the law as a catch-all to deny applications based on generalized skepticism of digital assets or speculative competition concerns. Approval criteria should be objective, technology-neutral, and tied to concrete risks like cybersecurity, operational resilience, and custody. Using public blockchains, smart contracts, or zero-knowledge proofs should not count against an applicant. The letter also flags risks in bank consortia models where multiple banks jointly own a stablecoin issuer, citing free-rider problems, governance deadlocks, and exponentially more complex resolution planning. The BA predicts the FDIC should expect significantly more than 10 applications and warns that slow processing would inadvertently favor only the most resourced applicants.

Former FTC Chief Technologist: "By 2030 it's estimated data centers would use about as much water as 8% of the water golf courses do in the U.S. The water issue is just not accurate, and I think people need to dig in to that a lot more."

IREN CEO Dan Roberts: "We've got great relationship with both Dell and NVIDIA... partnering with $NVDA and $DELL to build an AI compute ecosystem from land, steel and power all the way to the end customer."

Martti Malmi, one of Bitcoin's earliest developers, just released a new version of Nostr VPN, an open-source mesh VPN that replaces the entire trust model of traditional VPN services. Traditional VPNs route all your traffic through a central server operated by a company you have to trust. They see your data. They require your email. They can log your activity. They can be subpoenaed, hacked, or shut down. Even modern mesh VPNs like Tailscale, which improved on this by sending data peer-to-peer, still require you to authenticate through a centralized coordination server using third-party accounts like Google or Microsoft. Nostr VPN eliminates the central server entirely. Your identity is a Nostr keypair, a self-generated cryptographic key pair with no registration, no email, no third-party account. The underlying transport layer is FIPS (Free Internetworking Peering System), a self-organizing encrypted mesh network where nodes authenticate each other, route traffic for each other, and establish connections without any central authority or global topology knowledge. Each node's Nostr public key (npub) serves as its network address. The architecture uses two layers of encryption: hop-by-hop encryption between peers and independent end-to-end encryption between mesh endpoints with periodic rekeying for forward secrecy. When direct connections fail due to NAT issues, the system falls back to Nostr-based multihop routing through other FIPS nodes rather than relying on company-operated relay servers. Peer discovery and NAT traversal happen through public Nostr relays using encrypted gift-wrapped messages. The new release adds native desktop apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows, an Android app, Nostr-based multihop routing for when NAT holepunching fails, and improved network management. It supports UDP, TCP, Ethernet, Tor, and Bluetooth transports simultaneously on a single mesh. This is what happens when you apply Bitcoin's design philosophy, permissionless, self-sovereign, no trusted third parties, to networking infrastructure. Built by one of the people who helped Satoshi build Bitcoin in 2009.

Standard Chartered to cut 8,000 support roles by 2030 using AI. CEO Bill Winters said the bank will replace “lower-value human capital” with technology and financial investment.

Spencer Pratt on the homeless nonprofit industry in LA: "These people make over a million dollars a year. Do you think they want homelessness to go away? Of course they don't."

Anthony Pompliano on Fox Business: "The compounding growth rate of Bitcoin over the last decade is 70%. It has destroyed every asset. People want certainty and they look to assets like Bitcoin, which are non-sovereign, finite, and can be audited by anyone in the world." "The four areas that are going to survive are Bitcoin, stablecoins, equity infrastructure, and tokenization. Most of the rest of the crypto industry is becoming a ridiculous clown show."

Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding the OCC explain its chartering of nine crypto-focused trust banks, including Coinbase, Paxos, Ripple, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Asset Services. Warren argues the firms are "effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank" by taking narrower trust charters instead of applying for full national bank status. She also requested records of any communications between the OCC and President Trump or his family members on chartering firms, a clear reference to World Liberty Financial.

The three largest bond markets on Earth are cracking at the same time. The US 30-year Treasury just hit 5.18%. Japan's 30-year JGB broke above 4% for the first time in history. The UK is in the same boat. This is not an isolated event. This is a synchronized global sovereign debt crisis unfolding in real time. Trump paused the Iran strike and signaled a nuclear deal could reopen the Strait of Hormuz, trying to talk yields down. The bond market isn't buying it. Yields are still rising. Oil is still elevated. The inflation picture the market is pricing in: oil supply remains constrained with Hormuz partially blockaded. Grain and fertilizer markets are under stress as Russia restricts exports and El Nino drives droughts across South America and Africa. Sugar is spiking. Diesel is tight. Morgan Stanley's mid-year outlook puts the recession trigger at oil above $150. Treasuries are used as collateral everywhere in the financial system. When yields surge, the principal value of that collateral drops, putting the entire banking system in a precarious position. We saw a preview with the UK gilt crisis in 2022 and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in 2023. The mechanism is the same, just bigger this time. Changes to the Supplementary Leverage Ratio could alleviate some pressure, but that's a policy fix applied to a structural problem. Bitcoin at $76,000 in this environment is mispriced. A sovereign, independent, neutral, apolitical, distributed, peer-to-peer digital cash system that cannot be debased, seized, or inflated away is incredibly valuable when the instruments that underpin the entire global financial system are in free fall. On a risk-adjusted basis, bitcoin has never been cheaper.

Elon Musk’s full interview with Forbes: