US House committee passes stablecoin-regulating STABLE Act
The US House Financial Services Committee has passed a Republican-backed stablecoin framework bill, which will now head to the House floor for a full vote.The Committee passed the Stablecoin Transparency and Accountability for a Better Ledger Economy, or STABLE Act, with a 32-17 vote on April 2. The bill would provide rules around payment stablecoins, a type of crypto token tied to a currency such as the US dollar, and aims to ensure issuers give information about their business and how they back their tokens.Related: Lawmaker alleges Trump wants to replace US dollar with his stablecoinOther stablecoin-related bills are also working their way through Congress, including the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, which lays out oversight and reserve rules for issuers.This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.Magazine: How crypto laws are changing across the world in 2025
Elon Musk’s Neuralink seeks patients globally to try its brain chips
Elon Musk’s computer-chip brain implant company Neuralink is seeking patients all around the world to trial its device that allows one’s thoughts to control a computer.Neuralink is looking for people with quadriplegia — those who are not able to use their arms or legs — to sign up for a clinical trial, it said in an April 2 post on X, the social media platform also owned by Musk.As of January, Neuralink has said three patients have been implanted with a device. All are quadriplegic and are testing a small brain implant that tracks neural activity to control a computer or smartphone as part of a clinical trial called the Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, or PRIME study.Neuralink is one of several companies and academic institutions developing and testing so-called brain-computer interfaces, which vary from small wire-like implants as part of clinical trials to non-invasive devices akin to a hat.Source: NeuralinkNeuralink’s website says its clinical PRIME study, which will take around six years, is looking for quadriplegics with spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to use their thoughts to control a computer.Musk also heads vehicle maker Tesla and is the Trump administration’s government cost-cutting czar. He has said he wants Neuralink to move beyond just allowing humans to operate computers by thinking and wants to help “give people superpowers.”First Neuralink patient reports no side effects after a yearNoland Arbaugh, Neuralink’s first patient, said in a March 28 X post that he’s “had no negative side effects, neither physically nor psychologically” in the year after receiving his brain implant. Arbaugh, a quadriplegic, demoed his brain chip about a year ago by controlling a computer cursor to play chess and surf the web.Arbaugh said he’s now using his brain chip “for all sorts of things” and guessed he’s using it for over 10 hours a day.Related: SpaceX flight bankrolled by crypto investor launches first manned polar orbitHe said the company’s researchers were “figuring out how to control a wheelchair with the implant,” which he added he won’t use “unless it’s next to perfect. I think it benefits everyone if I don’t lose control and drive into traffic.”Arbaugh said he had found work as a traveling keynote speaker, which he attributed to Neuralink’s implant, which helped him write, research, and communicate online.“I can’t tell you how much hope and purpose this technology has provided me,” he wrote. “It’s only a matter of time before the implant is in dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people.”Magazine: Crypto fans are obsessed with longevity and biohacking — Here’s why
‘National emergency’ as Trump’s tariffs dent crypto prices
Crypto markets dipped after US President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency and sweeping tariffs on all countries as part of his latest salvo in the ongoing trade war. The Trump administration has hit all countries with a 10% tariff starting April 5, with some countries facing even larger rates, such as China facing a 34% tariff, the European Union 20%, and Japan 24%. During an April 2 speech in the Rose Garden at the White House, Trump said the US is charging countries “approximately half of what they are and have been charging us.”🚨 @POTUS signs an Executive Order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world.It’s LIBERATION DAY in America! pic.twitter.com/p7UnfE617B— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 2, 2025The crypto market briefly went up at the news of a 10% sweeping tariff, but once the full scope became known, it dipped with bleeding across the board. Bitcoin (BTC) had been staging a rally, reaching a session high at $88,500 but dropped 2.6% back to around $82,876. Meanwhile, CoinGecko data shows Ether (ETH) dropped over 6% from $1,934 to $1,797 following the tariff announcements and the total crypto market cap dropped 5.3% to $2.7 trillion. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index, which measures market sentiment for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, returned a score of 25, classed as extreme fear, in its latest April 2 update. However, prices have clawed back some losses since. Bitcoin has recovered 0.8% to $83,205. While Ether regained 1.2% to take back $1,810.The crypto Fear & Greed Index score has returned an average rating of fear for the last week but has now dipped to extreme fear. Source: Alternative.meStock markets didn’t fare much better; trading resource The Kobeissi Letter said in an April 2 post to X that the stock market index S&P 500 erased over $2 trillion in market cap, working out to be roughly $125 billion per minute.Trump tariffs could bring certainty to marketsRachael Lucas, a crypto analyst at Australian crypto exchange BTC Markets, said the brief surge was a case of “uncertainty relief,” then a sell-off as the full tariff details were released. “On BTC Markets, trading volume surged 46% as local traders scrambled to reposition. Big players took profit on the spike, while smaller investors hesitated,” she said in a statement. Source: Daan Crypto TradesShe added that if China or the European Union “hit back hard,” expect another round of panic selling.US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged US trading partners in an April 2 interview with Bloomberg against taking retaliatory steps, arguing “this is the high end of the number” for tariffs if they don’t try to add more levies in response, which could provide a “ceiling” and certainty for markets.David Hernandez, a crypto investment specialist at crypto asset manager 21Shares, told Cointelegraph that markets experienced significant volatility during Trump’s speech, but the clarity could be a good thing in the long term. “Although the tariff rates were slightly higher than expectations, the announcement provided much-needed clarity on the scope and scale of the policy,” he said.Related: 70% chance of crypto bottoming before June amid trade fears: Nansen“Markets thrive on certainty, and with speculation now largely removed, institutional investors may see an opportunity over the coming days to take advantage of compressed valuations.”Hernandez says global responses will be key for the market going forward, speculating that Mexico and key East Asian economies, including China, South Korea, and Japan, could be evaluating countermeasures.Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again
Former New York governor advised OKX over $505M federal probe: Report
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX reportedly hired former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to advise it over the federal probe that resulted in the firm pleading guilty to several violations and agreeing to pay $505 million in fines and penalties.Cuomo, a New York-registered attorney, advised OKX on legal issues stemming from the probe sometime after August 2021 when he resigned as New York overnor, Bloomberg reported on April 2, citing people familiar with the matter.“He spoke with company executives regularly and counseled them on how to respond to the criminal investigation,” Bloomberg said.The Seychelles-based firm pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business in violation of US Anti-Money Laundering laws on Feb. 24 and agreed to pay $84 million worth of penalties while forfeiting $421 million worth of fees earned from mostly institutional clients.The breaches occurred from 2018 to 2024 despite OKX having an official policy preventing US persons from transacting on its crypto exchange since 2017, the Department of Justice noted at the time.A spokesperson for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, told Bloomberg that Cuomo has been providing private legal services representing individuals and corporations on a variety of matters since resigning as New York governor.“He has not represented clients before a New York city or state agency and routinely recommends former colleagues for positions,” Azzopardi added.OKX reportedly wasn’t willing to comment on its relationships with outside firms.Cuomo also influenced OKX to make executive appointments: BloombergCuomo, who is now running for mayor of New York City, also advised OKX to appoint his friend US Attorney Linda Lacewell to OKX’s board of directors, Bloomberg said.Lacewell, a former superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, was added to the board in 2024 and was named OKX’s new chief legal officer on April 1, according to a recent company statement.Source: Linda LacewellRelated: New York bill aims to protect crypto investors from memecoin rug pullsAfter the investigation concluded, OKX said it would seek out a compliance consultant to remedy the issues stemming from the federal probe and bolster its regulatory compliance program.“Our vision is to make OKX the gold standard of global compliance at scale across different markets and their respective regulatory bodies,” OKX CEO Star Xu said in a Feb. 24 X post.Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again
US lawmakers press SEC for info about Trump family-backed crypto firm
Two Democratic lawmakers in the US Senate and House of Representatives have called on acting Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Mark Uyeda to preserve information regarding World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm backed by President Donald Trump’s family.In an April 2 letter, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Maxine Waters — ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and House Financial Services Committee, respectively — asked Uyeda to provide information to Congress based on Trump’s ties to World Liberty Financial (WLFI). The two lawmakers suggested the SEC may be being influenced by the firm, and “this conflict of interest may be interfering with its mission to protect investors and maintain fair and orderly markets.”“The Trump family’s financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest with the potential to influence the Trump Administration’s oversight — or lack thereof — of the cryptocurrency industry, creating an obvious incentive for the Trump Administration to direct federal agencies, including the SEC, to take positions favorable to cryptocurrency interests that directly benefit the President’s family,” said the letter.April 2 letter to acting SEC chair Mark Uyeda. Source: House Financial Services CommitteeThe letter came roughly a week after WLFI announced it had launched a stablecoin, USD1, on the BNB Chain and Ethereum blockchain. However, since January, Trump has followed through with several crypto policies and projects with potential conflicts of interest, including plans to establish a national cryptocurrency stockpile and the launch of a TRUMP memecoin.Related: Crypto has a regulatory capture problem in Washington — Or does it?According to Warren and Waters, Americans deserved transparency about Trump’s crypto ventures and how they could potentially influence policy at the SEC, a financial regulatory agency largely intended to be independent of the administration. The two called on Uyeda to preserve records and communications related to WLFI from Trump and his family, as well as communications with the SEC.“The American people deserve to know whether their financial markets are being regulated impartially or whether regulatory decisions are being made to benefit the President’s family financial interests,” wrote the Democratic lawmakers.The letter reiterated arguments Waters made in an April 2 House Financial Services Committee hearing. The California lawmaker said that without oversight and accountability, Trump could install WLFI’s stablecoin for government payments and profit directly from his position as president. Many other lawmakers and financial experts across the political spectrum have expressed concern over Trump’s potential conflicts of interest with the crypto industry.SEC leadership under TrumpSince Trump appointed Uyeda as acting chair, the SEC has dropped investigations and enforcement actions into several crypto firms, including those with executives who contributed directly to the president’s 2024 campaign. Paul Atkins, Trump’s pick to chair the SEC after Uyeda, is expected to face a vote in the Senate Banking Committee on April 3. If Atkins’ nomination moves out of committee, the full chamber will decide whether to confirm him.Magazine: Trump’s crypto ventures raise conflict of interest, insider trading questions
Trump imposes 10% tariff on all countries, reciprocal levies on trading partners
United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing reciprocal tariffs on trading partners and a 10% baseline tariff on all imports from all countries.The reciprocal levies on will be approximately half of what trading partners charge for US imports, Trump said. For example, China currently has a tariff of 67% on US imports, so US reciprocal tariffs on Chinese goods will be 34%. Trump also announced a standard 25% tariff on all automobile imports.Trump told the media that tariffs would return the country to economic prosperity seen in previous centuries:“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation. The United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy, in fact, that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting.”“Then, in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying,” Trump said.Full breakdown of reciprocal tariffs by country. Source: CointelegraphTrump presented the tariffs through the lens of economic protectionism and hinted at returning to the economic policies of the 19th century by using them to replace the income tax.Related: Bitcoin rally to $88.5K obliterates bears as spot volumes soar — Will a tariff war stop the party?Trump proposes eliminating federal income tax and replacing it with tariff revenueTrump proposed the idea of abolishing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and funding the federal government exclusively through trade tariffs while still on the campaign trail in October 2024.According to accounting automation company Dancing Numbers, Trump’s plan could save each American taxpayer $134,809-$325,561 in taxes throughout their lives.US President Donald Trump addresses the media about reciprocal trade tariffs at the April 2 press event. Source: Fox 4 DallasThe higher range of the tax savings estimate will only occur if other wage-based taxes are eliminated at the state and municipal levels.Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who assumed office in February, also voiced support for replacing the IRS with the “External Revenue Service.”Lutnick said that the US government cannot balance a budget yet consistently demands more from its citizens every year. Tariffs will also protect American workers and strengthen the US economy, he said.Magazine: Elon Musk’s plan to run government on blockchain faces uphill battle
EY updates privacy L2 as nixed Tornado Cash sanctions ease fears
Big Four accounting firm EY, formerly Ernst & Young, has changed its enterprise-focused Ethereum layer-2 blockchain Nightfall to a zero-knowledge rollup design as it says corporate clients are more comfortable with privacy solutions with easing US sanctions.EY said in an April 2 announcement that Nightfall’s new source code, “Nightfall_4,” simplifies the network’s architecture and offers near-instant transaction finality on Ethereum while making it more accessible to users than its previous optimistic rollup-based version.EY’s global blockchain leader, Paul Brody, told Cointelegraph that switching to a ZK-rollup model “means instant finality, but it also makes operations simpler since you don’t need a challenger node to secure the network,” which verifies the correctness of transactions.The move away from optimistic rollups means Nightfall users won’t need to challenge potentially incorrect transactions on Ethereum and wait out the challenging period, leading to faster transaction finality.No such feature is present with zero-knowledge rollups, meaning that a transaction becomes final as soon as it is added into a Nightfall block, EY said. It is the fourth major update to Nightfall since EY launched the business-focused Ethereum layer 2 in 2019.Nightfall enables the firm’s business partners to transfer tokens privately using Ethereum’s security while being cheaper than the base network. It also uses a technology that binds a verified identity to a public key through digital signatures to try to stem counterparty risk.Nixed Tornado Cash sanctions “helped people feel comfortable”Brody said the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions on the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash “had a chilling effect on legitimate business user interest.”“Even though we long ago took steps to make Nightfall unattractive to bad actors, since it cannot be used anonymously, the removal of OFAC sanctions has really helped people feel comfortable that using a privacy technology will not be risky,” he added.Nightfall’s code is open source on GitHub but remains a permissioned blockchain for EY’s customer base, competing with the likes of the IBM-backed Hyperledger Fabric, R3 Corda and the Consensus-built Quorum.Brody said that EY’s blockchain team is working toward “a single environment that supports payments, logic, and composability.”Currently, the firm requires Nightfall and Starlight, a tool that can change smart contract code to enable zero-knowledge proofs “to enable complex multiparty business agreements under privacy,” he added.“We’ll spend some time supporting Nightfall_4 deployments initially,” Brody said. “Then we’ll move on to the development of Nightfall_5.”Magazine: What are native rollups? Full guide to Ethereum’s latest innovation
Ethereum price may have bottomed, but pro traders show little interest in buying ETH
Ether (ETH) price has risen 6.4% from its March 30 $1,768 low but the altcoin has struggled to regain the $2,000 level. Some traders believe that the downturn is partially connected to the deflating memecoin market, which, while not exclusive to the Ethereum network, significantly reduced activity across the decentralized applications (DApps) ecosystem and broader crypto space.Ether is currently 44% down year-to-date, and derivatives metrics indicate that traders are far from bullish and show little confidence in a strong recovery in the near term. Proof of this can be found in the premium on Ether futures relative to spot markets. While the figure rose to 4% on April 2, up from 2% on March 31, it is still below the neutral 5% threshold. This data indicates that Ether investors remain far from turning bullish, despite the strengthening support at the $1,800 price level.Ether 2-month futures annualized premium. Source: Laevitas.chTo assess whether whales and market makers lack confidence in Ether’s performance, one should analyze the ETH options market. Under neutral conditions, the 25% delta skew should be balanced between call (buy) and put (sell) options, typically ranging from -6% to 6%.Deribit ETH 30-day options 25% delta skew (put-call). Source: Laevitas.chThe Ether delta skew metric has retreated from the 9% level seen on March 31, yet the current 7% reading suggests that risk-aversion sentiment remains strong. The rising cost of hedging indicates that whales fear further downside for ETH, suggesting it may take longer for traders to regain confidence.Ethereum adoption remains strong despite DApps revenue dropIt’s easy to attribute much of Ether’s price decline to the 49% drop in Ethereum DApps revenue between January and March. However, while the reduced network activity limits the influx of new users and dampens overall demand for ETH, its advantages over traditional financial markets and its dominance in decentralized finance (DeFi) remain unchanged.The stablecoin holdings on Ethereum are nearing an all-time high of $124.5 billion, and Ethereum is still the undisputed leader, with $49 billion in total value locked (TVL). This data suggests significant potential for ETH adoption, particularly as new use cases emerge, such as structured products and more complex DeFi applications leveraging synthetic assets.Despite the early struggles of metaverse applications, declining interest in memecoins, and the sharp downturn in non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace activity, the Ethereum network continues to expand.ETH funding rate neutral as ETFs dampen retail trading enthusiasmInstead of focusing solely on how professional traders are positioned, it is also valuable to assess retail investors’ sentiment. Perpetual futures (inverse swaps) typically follow spot prices closely, as leverage imbalances are corrected through a fee known as the funding rate, which is charged every eight hours. In neutral markets, this rate fluctuates between 0.1% and 0.3% over a seven-day period.Ether 8-hour perpetual futures funding rate. Source: Laevitas.chThe ETH perpetual funding rate has been neutral since March 31, indicating that retail traders are not attempting to catch a falling knife. A key factor behind this lack of enthusiasm is the spot Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which saw $37 million in net outflows over the past two weeks.While derivatives data is often backward-looking and does not necessarily signal further ETH price declines, sentiment could shift quickly given the positive momentum from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial investment in ETH and Eric Trump’s vocal support for Ether. For the time being, professional traders and retail investors remain cautious about ETH’s price outlook.This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.