Unchained Daily
Posts
Schwab Brings Bitcoin and Ether to the Masses

Schwab Brings Bitcoin and Ether to the Masses

Plus:⏳ The Clarity Act faces another delay | 🔐 Bitcoin's quantum dilemma has no good answers | 💸 Drift gets a $148M Tether lifeline with a catch

David Okoya
April 17, 2026

Hi! In today’s edition:

🏦 Charles Schwab begins rolling out spot bitcoin and ether trading
⏳ A key Clarity Act text has been delayed
🔐 Hoskinson blasts BIP-361 as a hard fork in disguise that would permanently freeze 1.7 million BTC, including Satoshi's
💸 Drift secures a $147.5 million lifeline from Tether and partners to cover user losses and relaunch on Solana with USDT

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Nexo!

Unlock Exclusive Rates with Nexo

Rates, product availability, features, and applicable terms may vary based on jurisdiction, eligibility, loyalty tier, and other factors, and are subject to change at any time.

Nexo is a premier digital wealth platform offering:

crypto yield up to 15% (based on stated annual interest rates)
crypto-backed credit lines from 1.9%
a wide range of digital assets.

Join today and get 30-day access to exclusive rates.

Schwab Brings Bitcoin and Ether to 39 Million Clients

Charles Schwab, the largest U.S. brokerage with 39 million active accounts, began rolling out direct spot trading for bitcoin and ether on Thursday, marking the brokerage giant's formal entry into a market. The product, called Schwab Crypto and operated through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, is launching in phases, the company said. Paxos is handling custody and trade execution behind the scenes.

Pricing is set at 75 basis points per trade, which Schwab said is among the lowest in the industry. New York and Louisiana are excluded from the initial rollout.

The launch came the same day Schwab reported Q1 revenue of $6.48 billion, up 16% year over year but slightly below analyst expectations — sending shares down nearly 8%. Wurster also said Schwab will "likely" offer prediction markets focused on financial events at some point, though not sports or politics.

Clarity Act Stablecoin Yield Text Slips to Next Week as Markup Date Remains Unset

The Clarity Act hit another procedural snag Thursday when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he won't release the long-awaited stablecoin yield compromise text this week. Tillis told Politico he wants a firm date for the Senate Banking Committee markup before going public with the language. The development means the text and any vote on it could slip to next week or later.

The delay keeps alive a standoff that has dogged the bill for months. The draft currently bans rewards on idle stablecoin balances while allowing yield tied to activity like transactions — language meant to satisfy banks worried about deposit flight without fully shutting out crypto firms like Coinbase. Tillis has been developing the text with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), and a source told The Block that substantive changes at this stage would be difficult.

If the Banking Committee doesn't move the bill this month, analysts say the odds of passing crypto market structure legislation in 2026 drop sharply.

Hoskinson Says Bitcoin's Quantum Fix Is a Hard Fork That Can't Save Satoshi

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says Bitcoin's proposed quantum defense, BIP-361, is mischaracterized as a soft fork and would, in practice, require a hard fork — something Bitcoin's development culture has historically treated as a red line. The proposal, authored by developer Jameson Lopp and others, would freeze addresses with exposed public keys and let holders reclaim funds using zero-knowledge proofs tied to their BIP-39 seed phrases.

The problem, Hoskinson argues, is that roughly 1.7 million BTC predate the BIP-39 standard introduced in 2013. Those coins, including an estimated 1.1 million attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, were generated using legacy wallet software with no seed phrase — meaning the zero-knowledge recovery mechanism cannot apply to them. Under BIP-361 as written, those coins would be permanently frozen.

More than 34% of all bitcoin supply has exposed public keys on-chain according to an Ark Invest report last month. Hoskinson added that large institutional holders like BlackRock and the U.S. government may eventually compel a hard fork regardless of ideological resistance. Lopp himself has described BIP-361 as "a rough idea for a contingency plan," not a finished specification.

Tether Rescues Drift With $148M — and Pushes Circle Out

Drift Protocol, Solana's largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange, is relaunching after securing a $147.5 million funding package from Tether and partners following the year's biggest DeFi exploit.

Tether is committing up to $127.5 million through a revenue-linked facility, with $20 million from additional partners. The deal is structured to gradually cover roughly $295 million in user losses over time as trading revenue grows. Drift will also issue a dedicated recovery token separate from the DRIFT governance token to represent user claims on the recovery pool.

The relaunch comes with a pointed stablecoin swap: Drift is dropping Circle's USDC as its settlement layer and replacing it with Tether's USDT.

The shift follows widespread criticism of Circle's response to the April 1 exploit, in which North Korean-linked hackers drained more than $280 million and moved approximately $232 million in stolen USDC to Ethereum via Circle's own cross-chain transfer protocol — over 100 transactions across several hours — without Circle freezing a single address. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has defended the decision, saying the company does not freeze wallets without formal law enforcement or court direction.

Law firm Gibbs Mura filed a class action lawsuit against Circle on April 14, alleging the stablecoin issuer had both the authority and operational precedent to intervene.

⚠️ Hyperbridge revised its exploit losses to approximately $2.5 million, roughly 10x the initially reported $237,000, after reconciling attacker activity across four chains. Stolen funds have been traced to a Binance deposit address, with law enforcement engaged.
⚖️ CFTC Chair Mike Selig faced bipartisan grilling in Congress over prediction markets, Hyperliquid perps, and suspicious trades timed to White House actions, with both parties raising concerns about consumer risk and potential insider trading.
🤫 A Polymarket trader netted $320,000 betting on Biden's last-minute pardons with a perfect win rate, correctly predicting four pardons at near-zero odds in his final hours. Blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps flagged the trades as matching patterns seen in suspicious Trump-era prediction market activity.
🔒 The Ethereum Foundation's ETH Rangers Program identified ~100 North Korean IT workers infiltrating crypto firms, recovered or froze over $5.8 million, and catalogued 785-plus vulnerabilities over six months.
🤖 Mastercard and Lobster.cash announced an integration letting AI agents make purchases on users' existing Mastercard accounts, with each transaction cryptographically tied to explicit user approval. It launches first for OpenClaw, which has over one million agents deployed across 20-plus messaging platforms.
🇬🇧 The UK FCA launched a consultation on its new crypto regime covering stablecoins, trading platforms, staking, and custody, ahead of an October 2027 rollout. Firms can apply for authorization starting September 30.
🏛️ The Cato Institute argued U.S. bitcoin tax rules are broken, noting everyday bitcoin spending can generate 70-plus pages of tax filings. The think tank said the simplest fix is to scrap Bitcoin capital gains tax.
🔍 Crypto fund manager Joe McCann is being questioned by Tanzanian authorities after his fiancée, influencer Ashly Robinson, died at a Zanzibar resort on April 9. Police cite suicide; her family disputes it.
🏗️ Ethereum Foundation exec Josh Stark is stepping down at end of April after five years, the second senior EF departure in recent months following co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak's exit in February.
🎮 Yuga Labs has tapped longtime staff Michael Figge as new CEO as co-founder Greg Solano moves to chairman.
🔐 Tempo unveiled Zones, a product letting enterprises run permissioned parallel blockchains that can selectively share data with a public chain.

🏦 Morgan Stanley's Amy Oldenburg told GSR that digital assets have moved from an experimental initiative to standard practice across the firm's institutional, wealth, and asset management divisions. The bank is targeting tokenized equities trading on its alternative trading system in the second half of 2026 and recently launched a crypto pilot on E*TRADE through infrastructure provider Zerohash.
🌐 Flow Capital put a $150 million private credit fund on-chain, marking another step in the tokenization of real-world assets for institutional investors. The move continues a broader trend of private credit managers exploring blockchain rails for fund administration and distribution.

💸 Bitcoin miner HIVE Digital is raising $75 million through a private offering of exchangeable senior notes due 2031, with proceeds earmarked for GPU data center and AI infrastructure expansion. The raise signals continued miner diversification into AI compute amid pressure on bitcoin mining margins.
💰 Kiedex raised $3.5 million in a new funding round led by Marqel Capital.
🔮 Claw Intelligence completed a $3 million seed round Castrum Istanbul, Titans Ventures, Super Labs, Genesis Capital.

Enter Bitcoin Capital Markets