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Wait — It Wasn’t on Solana? 😀
Plus, 🛡️ SEC switches gears, 🏦 Congress probes debanking claims, 🔍 BTC reserve gets early assessment, and more!
Juan Aranovich
February 05, 2025
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
In today’s edition:
🚨 XRP Ledger freezes
🔍 U.S. Bitcoin reserve inches closer
⚖️ SEC shrinks crypto enforcement
🏦 “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” set for hearings
🤖 Tether previews AI wallet assistant
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By Tikta and Veronica Irwin
The XRP Ledger resumed normal operations on Tuesday evening after the network was briefly halted. The root cause of the outage is still being investigated by XRP developers.
The stoppage took place at block 93,927,173 and no new blocks were produced for around an hour. However, there was no loss of funds, some consensus mechanisms continued to function, and the network appeared to recover from the outage on its own.
Ripple Chief Technology Officer David Schwartz said that validator operators might have manually intervened after choosing “a sane starting point” to begin publishing validations.
“Very few UNL [unique node list] operators actually made any changes, as far as I can tell, so it's possible the network spontaneously recovered,” Schwartz said. “I'm not sure yet.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has instructed his administration's artificial intelligence and crypto “czar,” David Sacks, to evaluate the feasibility of creating a national bitcoin reserve.
Sacks told a press conference in Washington that a BTC strategic reserve would be among the first priorities of a newly formed internal working group on digital assets within the Trump administration.
“We’re still waiting for some of those cabinet secretaries who are in the working group to get confirmed, so we’re still in the very early stages of this, but that’s one of the first things we’re going to look at,” Sacks said.
Some U.S. states are in the process of either considering or advancing legislation to establish strategic Bitcoin reserves. Utah is the current frontrunner, with a Bitcoin reserve bill that has passed a key committee vote.
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is downsizing its crypto enforcement operation, according to a report by the New York Times.
A special unit of 50 lawyers assigned to taking crypto enforcement actions are now being reassigned to other areas, five people with knowledge of the matter told the paper. Some of the lawyers have said their reassignments constitute unfair demotions.
The SEC is simultaneously gearing up a new crypto task force, part of a regulatory approach to crypto under the Trump administration that promises to eliminate what it describes as regulatory overreach involving digital assets.
SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, who leads the task force, said the first order of business would be determining the status of crypto assets under securities laws and scoping out areas in which crypto falls within the SEC’s jurisdiction.
“It took us a long time to get into this mess, and it is going to take us some time to get out of it,” Pierce said in a statement on Wednesday.
Ahead of Debanking Hearings, Industry Is Divided on Political Strategy
Two U.S. congressional hearings this week will address what the crypto industry has dubbed “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” an alleged conspiracy to make it nearly impossible for almost any crypto company to use banking services.
The first, held by the Senate Banking Committee on Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., will give senators a chance to ask questions of Brookings Institution fellow Aaron Klein, crypto bank Anchorage Digital’s chief executive, Nathan McCauley, Davis Wright Tremaine partner Stephen Gannon, and the CEO of conservative lender Old Glory Bank, Mike Ring.
The hearing, entitled “Investigating the Real Impacts of Debanking in America,” will focus on a wide range of alleged victims who claim to have been debanked by the Biden administration for political reasons.
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Tether Teases AI Bitcoin Wallet Assistant
Stablecoin issuer Tether on Wednesday previewed an AI Bitcoin wallet assistant, alongside a number of new artificial intelligence applications it is building.
According to a video shared by Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, the tasks users will be able to assign to the AI agent will include answering questions about their BTC wallet address and giving details of the wallet’s balance.
Users will also be able to check the wallet’s recipients and send BTC directly to those addresses through the interface.
“Tether Data's apps will focus on working locally on any device, full privacy, self-custodial (both data and money),” Ardoino said.
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⚖️ Acting Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Caroline Pham said on Tuesday that the agency had restructured its enforcement division to focus on fraud prevention, signaling a shift away from “regulation by enforcement.”
🐻 Berachain set its mainnet launch and BERA token airdrop for Thursday, with NFT holders expected to receive a significant share, while its proof-of-liquidity model aims to drive ecosystem value.
🏝️ FTX Bahamas creditors with claims under $50,000 will receive repayments by Feb. 18, with a 9% annual interest rate, while larger creditors can expect reimbursements later in the year.
🐱 Bitcoin ordinals startup Taproot Wizards raised $30 million to push OP_CAT, a Bitcoin upgrade that could enable smart contracts, aiming to revive a feature removed by Satoshi Nakamoto and bring Ethereum-like functionality to BTC.
⚡ Singapore-based Bitcoin miner Bitdeer on Tuesday acquired a 101 MW gas power plant in the Canadian province of Alberta for $21.7 million, planning to build a vertically integrated Bitcoin mining site with potential expansion up to 1 GW.
🤖 Autonomous artificial intelligence agent platform Olas garnered $13.8 million to launch Pearl, an “app store” for AI agents, allowing users to own and customize onchain AI for tasks such as DeFi trading and social media automation.
🎮 Beamable secured $13.5 million in series-A funding led by venture capital firm Bitkraft to expand its decentralized gaming infrastructure, reducing reliance on centralized cloud providers with a tokenized network.
💰 Solana investment firm Sol Strategies expanded its Solana holdings to nearly 190,000 SOL, spending $9.93 million in January, while its CIO, Moe Adham, resigned due to relocation.
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