Hi! In today’s edition:

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by 1inch!

Your DeFi Liquidity Just Woke Up

If you've provided liquidity in DeFi, you know the structure. You deposit tokens into a pool, the pool holds them whether swaps come or not, and the risk stays yours either way. 

1inch Aqua is built differently. It's a shared liquidity layer where tokens stay in your own wallet and one balance backs many positions across pairs and chains. Nothing is deposited. Tokens move only when a swap fills, and a swap your balance can't cover reverts. Aqua has been open to developers since November and audited by six independent firms. 

Providing liquidity carries risk and fees are not guaranteed.

See how shared liquidity works at 1inch.com/aqua.

CFTC Chair Michael Selig told crypto executives Thursday that his agency will not wait on Congress. If the Clarity Act stays stuck in the Senate, he said, the CFTC will build a crypto market structure regime using authority it already has.

Selig said he has directed staff to explore rules creating a crypto asset market registration category, comparable to the agency's existing designated contract markets. Unregistered crypto exchanges could come under CFTC oversight and offer leveraged or margin trading. He also told staff to work with on-chain protocol developers on a legal path in the U.S.

He still wants the bill. Passing Clarity, Selig said at the inaugural Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, is the surest way to prevent another Gary Gensler from running what he called a “campaign of lawfare” against the industry.

Two Binance employees were detained in the United Arab Emirates in recent weeks amid police inquiries into possible financial crimes at the exchange, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing four people familiar with the matter. Both were stopped at airports in the Emirates.

Binance reportedly told the Times the inquiries were routine and tied to third-party fund flows. The employees were never targets, the company said, and all were cleared and released.

Binance has made the UAE its regulatory home, with roughly 1,000 staff in the country, licensed entities under Abu Dhabi Global Market, and a $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi's MGX in March 2025.

Bitcoin cleared $75,000 in Asian trading Friday for the first time in more than three months, rising as much as 4.8% to trade near $77,000 before easing to most recently trade around $76,500. That puts it up about 20% on the week, on track for its strongest weekly gain since March 2024.

The catalyst came from the bond market, not crypto. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the department would at least double its buybacks of longer-dated Treasuries. The SEC's new crypto offering proposal and Trump's White House meeting with crypto executives added fuel.

Nearly $3 billion in crypto shorts were liquidated Wednesday, with hundreds of millions more since.

A CFTC advisory meeting turned into a public fight Thursday. CME Group chief Terrence Duffy said some prediction market contracts are open to manipulation, pointing to bets on Trump's State of the Union remarks and on Nicolás Maduro's ouster. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig cut in to say those contracts were listed offshore and called the claim “fake news.”

It escalated from there. Kalshi co-founder and COO Luana Lopes Lara asked whether CME had ever had a manipulation problem in its history. Duffy replied that his regulatory department outnumbers Kalshi's entire company. Lara suggested he learn about efficiency. Duffy told her to learn about credible markets.

DraftKings CEO Jason Robins eventually asked participants to stop “taking shots at each other's business models.”