Regulation & Politics

Former CFTC and SEC chair Gary Gensler filed an amicus brief with the Sixth Circuit arguing that sports-event prediction markets are not swaps under Dodd-Frank, directly contradicting the CFTC's own position in the KalshiEX v. Ohio appeal.

Japan's lower house passed a bill amending the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act to regulate crypto like stocks, opening a path to regulated ETFs by 2027 and cutting the capital-gains tax from up to 55% to a flat 20%. Upper-house passage is pending; the reform is not yet law.

Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, examining whether banks unlawfully terminated customer accounts for political reasons. The probe directly validates the crypto industry's Operation Chokepoint 2.0 grievances.

The full text of H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026, is now public, revealing a mandatory 20-year prohibition on selling any acquired BTC and a requirement for quarterly, publicly audited proof-of-reserve reports.

A coalition of more than 200 organizations including Coinbase and Ripple pushed Senate leadership for a floor vote Monday. Galaxy Digital's research head simultaneously lowered his 2026 passage probability by 15 points, citing a shrinking calendar and unresolved ethics provisions.

Jamie Selway, Director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets, outlined two structural workstreams on June 4: a framework to list and trade tokenized securities under an 'innovation without arbitrage' principle, and a joint SEC-CFTC effort to harmonize conflicting rulebooks across swap reporting, portfolio margining, and product definitions.

A Blockchain Association letter signed by ex-CIA, DOJ, Treasury, FBI, IRS-CI, Secret Service and military officials lands on Thune and Schumer the same day the Senate restarts crypto market-structure negotiations.

The Atkins-era Commission's FY26-FY30 plan places a 'firm regulatory foundation for digital assets and distributed ledger technologies' as the first objective of its first goal, opening a public-comment window through July 2 on a multi-year operating constraint that binds policy, examiner and enforcement capacity.

Tuesday's joint action by the three tier-1 US bank regulators completes the rewrite of supervisory text that crypto firms and Wyoming digital-asset bank Custodia spent years alleging was used to push lawful businesses out of the banking system.

The 22-page memorandum is the first formal supervisory link between the New York regulator licensing Circle, Paxos and Gemini and the EU body overseeing MiCA stablecoin issuers, committing both authorities to quarterly reserve-data exchange as the GENIUS Act and MiCA move toward enforcement.