Hi! In today’s edition:
⚖️ The White House gave up something on crypto ethics
🎖️ The man running the crypto bill isn't leaving after all
🏛️ A former New York governor landed a seat on a crypto exchange’s board
💰 Saylor's company keeps raising money but won't touch bitcoin with it
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Trump Moves on Clarity's Ethics Roadblock
The White House has agreed to an ethics package for the Clarity Act and sent the language to Senate Republicans on Monday, according to Crypto in America's Eleanor Terrett. The deal covers President Trump himself and was struck with Sens. Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno, Punchbowl News reported.
Moreno told reporters the provisions would be enforced by the Justice Department, not state attorneys general, according to Punchbowl News.
Still, Democrats, whose votes are mathematically required to pass the bill, have not seen the text, Punchbowl News reported. Sen. Ruben Gallego was quoted by Politico as saying last week that the language Republicans are pushing will not win Democratic support. Updated bill text is expected within days.
Witt Won't Ship Out After All
Patrick Witt, the White House's lead Clarity Act negotiator, said Monday that his mandatory Army National Guard training has been deferred, letting him stay to see the bill through.
Witt was set to report on July 27 to the Georgia National Guard's program for military attorneys, Crypto in America reported last week, adding that the Army would not let him defer a second time after he had already pushed back an April start.
Witt has run the Clarity negotiations for months, and his exit would have handed the final push to his deputy Harry Jung just as the bill approaches a Senate floor vote. Jung, however, has now said he is leaving his post in two weeks.
Cuomo Lands on a Crypto Exchange Board
Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor and state attorney general, has joined the board of crypto exchange OKX. He spent Monday on Fox Business promoting round-the-clock tokenized stock trading, arguing that letting people trade equities 24/7 could pull trillions in foreign capital into US markets.
Cuomo has advised OKX since 2023 and already co-chairs its joint venture with Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange. That deal, focused on tokenizing NYSE-listed stocks, followed an ICE investment that valued OKX at $25 billion.
OKX pleaded guilty in 2025 to running an unlicensed US money-transmitting business and paid more than $504 million, and Cuomo advised the exchange through the very case that ended in that plea.
Saylor's Cash Pile Grows While Bitcoin Sits
Michael Saylor's Strategy raised $263.5 million by selling stock last week and put it all toward cash, not bitcoin. Its dollar reserve now sits at $3.225 billion, up from $3 billion a week earlier, while its bitcoin holdings held flat at 843,775 BTC for a second straight week.
For a company whose identity was built on relentless accumulation, that is a real shift. Strategy has not bought bitcoin since June 22, having pivoted to a new capital framework that prioritizes covering dividends on its preferred shares. The reserve has more than doubled since late June.
MSTR is down over 40% this year, its STRC preferred stock trades below its $100 par value, and Strategy's average bitcoin cost of $75,476 now sits well above the current price.
🚨Today on DEX in the City 📺
Kalshi got ordered to cancel trades by a Michigan court, then ordered to honor them by the CFTC, and this week Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos, Jessi Brooks, and Vy Le dig into who actually wins that fight.
They also break down Japan reclassifying crypto under its securities law and what it means that JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Goldman want to tokenize stocks through DTCC.
Live today at 12pm ET.
🇷🇺 Russia is two votes away from passing its first comprehensive crypto law, which licenses exchanges and lets companies pay foreign partners in crypto. Only Bitcoin and Ethereum would initially qualify to trade, retail buyers are capped at roughly $3,800 a year, and privacy coins are banned outright.
📈 Grayscale filed with the SEC to launch a Worldcoin ETF, aiming to list shares of Sam Altman's WLD token on Nasdaq under the ticker GWLD. The filing would give Wall Street investors exposure to the $1.3 billion token behind the eyeball-scanning World Network.
🏦 Tom Lee's Bitmine slowed its ether buying last week, acquiring just 7,430 ETH after spending about $86 million to repurchase 5.5 million of its own shares. The Ethereum treasury company now holds 5.78 million ETH, about 4.8% of the supply, and reported $11.5 billion in total crypto and cash.
⚖️ Kalshi was blocked in Washington after a federal judge granted the state a preliminary injunction, agreeing with Attorney General Nick Brown that its prediction markets amount to unlicensed sports betting. The ruling adds Washington to a growing list of states, including Nevada, restricting the platform.
🇰🇷 The Bank of Korea will test live transactions in September, expanding its digital-won CBDC pilot to nine banks including KB Kookmin, Shinhan, Hana, and Woori. The central bank will run the infrastructure while the banks issue deposit tokens, a step it says lays the groundwork for commercialization.
🇻🇳 Vietnam will fine traders who use unlicensed crypto platforms VND 30 million to VND 50 million (about $1,140 to $1,900), penalties roughly on par with the country's drunk-driving fines. The decree takes effect September 1 as Vietnam builds a licensed domestic market and prepares to restrict offshore exchanges like Binance and OKX.
🔒 Vitalik Buterin released a demo of an anonymous message board built on the privacy-focused Layer 2 Aztec, letting users post without revealing their address while an onchain policy and a local AI daemon handle moderation. The Ethereum co-founder called the "vibe-coded" project an early test of an idea he first floated in 2022.
🚨 The SEC charged a Florida man and his company, Mining Automatic, over an alleged $22 million crypto-mining scheme that drew in more than 380 investors with promises of guaranteed monthly returns. Regulators say only about 13% of the money went toward actual mining, with the rest spent recruiting new investors and on the operator's personal expenses.
💼 Exodus is cutting 25% of its global workforce, roughly 77 people, to fund a pivot from crypto-swap fees toward stablecoin cards and payments. The self-custody wallet maker expects to save $10 million to $13 million a year after first-quarter revenue fell 37% and its stock dropped about 85% over the past year.
🇧🇷 Brazil's Securities and Exchange Commission set up a task force to draft an experimental framework for tokenized securities, with 60 days to deliver a first proposal. The securities regulator will tackle who controls ownership records, how private keys are held, and when onchain transactions can be reversed, as the country's tokenized-asset market nears $2.34 billion.
💰 Hut 8 signed a second lease worth about $9.8 billion at its Beacon Point AI data center campus, doubling its anchor tenant's contracted capacity to 704 MW. The deal lifts the campus's base-term contract value to $19.6 billion, with renewal options that could take it to $50.2 billion.
💸 DGridAI raised $5 million in a seed round from Waterdrip Capital, IoTeX, Paramita VC, and Zenith Capital. The decentralized-compute startup claims it generated more than $23 million in revenue from over 15,000 paying users in the first half of 2026.
Omid Malekan: The Machiavellian Case for Decentralized Networks
