Fed Fight: Warsh Wins by a Hair

Plus: ⚖️ CLARITY Act hits a Senate minefield | 🚨 T3 triggers a massive global crypto freeze | 📉 Wall Street hits the "sell" button

Author

Aakash Girimath
May 14, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

  • 🏛️ The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair Wednesday in a 54-45 vote, the closest margin in the central bank's modern history

  • ⚖️ The CLARITY Act faces a Senate Banking Committee markup today with more than 130 amendments on the table

  • 🚨 The T3 Financial Crime Unit, the Tether-TRON-TRM Labs partnership, has frozen more than $450 million in illicit crypto globally

  • 📉 Bitcoin slipped below $80,000 as investors yanked $635 million from spot ETFs in a single day

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Senate Confirms Kevin Warsh as Fed Chair in Closest Vote Ever

The U.S. Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday in a 54-45 vote, the slimmest confirmation margin ever for the role. Only Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) crossed party lines.

Warsh, 56, takes over from Jerome Powell, whose term as chair expires Friday. The transition makes Warsh the 11th Fed chair of the modern banking era and the first to take office with direct equity exposure to digital assets, including stakes in Bitcoin payments startup Flashnet, crypto index manager Bitwise, and stablecoin project Basis.

Powell will stay on the board as a governor, the first time in nearly 80 years. Warsh's first FOMC meeting is scheduled for June 16-17.

CLARITY Act Hits Senate Banking Today With Over 130 Amendments on the Table

The Senate Banking Committee opens its long-delayed markup of the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act at 10:30 a.m. ET Thursday with more than 130 amendments filed, 44 of them from Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The proposals range from substantive (Senator Jack Reed's push to tighten stablecoin yield rules, Catherine Cortez Masto's legal protections for software developers) to symbolic, including a Warren amendment referencing Jeffrey Epstein's bank supervisory records. Most are expected to fail on simple-majority votes.

The 309-page bill text includes the Tillis-Alsobrooks stablecoin yield compromise. Polymarket put the bill's 2026 passage odds at 62% heading in.

T3 Financial Crime Unit Has Now Frozen More Than $450 Million in Illicit Crypto

The T3 Financial Crime Unit, the joint initiative by Tether, TRON, and TRM Labs, said Thursday it has now frozen more than $450 million in illicit assets globally.

The unit said it intercepted 43.9% more illicit proceeds in 2025 than the year before, working with law enforcement in the U.S., Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria. It now operates across 23 jurisdictions and five continents.

The headline action of the past year was Operation Lusocoin, a Brazilian Federal Police investigation that froze more than R$3 billion in crypto assets, including 4.3 million USDT tied to the criminal network.

Bitcoin Slips Below $80,000 as Spot ETFs Bleed $635 Million in a Day

Bitcoin slipped to roughly $79,400 Thursday morning after investors pulled $635 million from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs on Wednesday, the largest single-day outflow since January 29.

The five-day total reached $1.26 billion, dragging cumulative net inflows since launch down to $58.5 billion from $59.76 billion a week earlier. BlackRock's IBIT alone shed $284.69 million. Bitcoin's rally has stalled at the 200-day moving average near $82,000.

The structural story runs the other direction. Long-term holders now control a record 4 million BTC, worth roughly $320 billion, a 300% increase since the end of 2025, per BitGo data.

📢 Don’t Miss Unchained on Air Today 🚨

Bits + Bips, 12pm ET: Repo is a $16 trillion market. Onchain credit is $5 billion. What's the holdup? FalconX's Craig Birchall and Pareto's Matteo Pandolfi reveal what their new Morpho-Gauntlet loop is quietly borrowing from TradFi — and the one thing crypto still can't replicate.

Unchained, right after: Wall Street has crypto equities all wrong. Artemis' Alex Weseley explains why Coinbase could be a $300B company, who's really winning the Circle vs. Coinbase cold war, and whether Kraken's $2.6B shopping spree was genius or desperation.

Join us on X, YouTube or PumpFun.

  • 🏅 Fidelity International's first tokenized fund received a top-tier AAA-mf rating from Moody's on Wednesday, matching a same-day AAA rating for BlackRock's BUIDL fund. The Ethereum-based USD Digital Liquidity Fund (FILQ) mirrors Fidelity's $7 billion LVNAV fund, uses Sygnum's tokenization platform, and taps Chainlink for daily NAV data sourced from JPMorgan.

  • 📊 Strategy's STRC may be fueling recurring mid-month bitcoin rallies, K33 Research said, as the perpetual preferred stock's ex-dividend date on the 15th creates predictable buying pressure. STRC-driven BTC purchases surged from 4,467 BTC in January to 46,872 BTC in April, though the instrument has added just 1 BTC so far this month, suggesting demand may be plateauing.

  • 🇯🇵 Metaplanet posted a ¥114.5 billion ($725.6 million) Q1 net loss driven by ¥116.4 billion in bitcoin valuation markdowns, even as revenue surged 251% to $19.5 million and operating profit rose 283%. The third-largest corporate BTC holder added 5,075 BTC in Q1 to reach 40,177 BTC, with $302 million drawn from a $500 million bitcoin-backed credit facility.

  • 🔐 BitGo doubled Q1 revenue to $3.8 billion (+113% YoY) in its first earnings report since going public in January, driven by digital asset sales and stablecoin-as-a-service growth. The net loss widened to $60.7 million from $25.7 million a year earlier, largely from non-cash bitcoin treasury markdowns and IPO-related stock compensation, while clients grew 42% to 5,569.

  • 🪐 Jupiter tapped Bitwise to curate the first institutional-grade Solana-based USDe lending market on Jupiter Lend, marking the first time a TradFi asset manager has curated a market on the platform. The isolated Ethena USDe market is powered by Fluid's infrastructure and designed to scale into billions in institutional capital.

  • 🚫 Ledger put its U.S. IPO plans on hold due to unfavorable market conditions, without filing a draft S-1 with the SEC. The French crypto wallet maker had hired Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Barclays earlier this year for a potential listing at a roughly $4 billion valuation.

  • 🛑 Consensys delayed its potential U.S. IPO until fall at the earliest, after the MetaMask wallet builder had aimed to file a draft S-1 by late February with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs as lead bankers. The company, last valued at $7 billion in a 2022 Series D, joins Ledger and Kraken in shelving 2026 listing plans as crypto IPO appetite cools.

  • ☀️ DeFi Development Corp reported 108% yearly growth in SOL per share to 0.0670 as of May 13, with total Solana and equivalents reaching 2,294,576 SOL. The Nasdaq-listed treasury firm also repurchased $4.4 million in convertible notes at a 41% discount and reaffirmed its long-term target of 1.0 SOL per share by December 2028.

  • 🏦 Charles Schwab launched spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for a select wave of eligible retail clients, expanding direct crypto access beyond ETF offerings at the brokerage managing roughly $12 trillion in client assets.

  • 🇯🇵 Japan's enterprise-led blockchain will issue a yen stablecoin called eJPY for B2B settlements, targeting domestic corporate payment flows through a consortium of Japanese financial institutions.

  • 🤝 Anchorage Digital and Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas' Grupo Salinas inked a cross-border payments partnership to power settlement with federally issued stablecoins between the U.S. and Mexico.

  • 🇰🇷 Korean won stablecoin KRWQ expanded to Solana following its March EDX Markets listing, adding a major Layer 1 deployment for the regulated KRW-pegged token.

  • 🌍 AWARP secured a strategic investment from Animoca Brands to accelerate RWA tokenization across minerals, renewables, and AI data centers in emerging markets. The sovereign-grade financial infrastructure project operates a closed-loop model through its Lao entity LADT, with 1.3 million+ users covered by NewPay and $180 million+ in Q4 2025 transaction volume.