Coindesk

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) newly-created Crypto Task Force is working to create long-awaited regulatory clarity for the crypto industry, according to a Tuesday statement from Commissioner Hester Peirce.Pierce, who was appointed by Acting Chair Mark Uyeda to spearhead the Crypto Task Force, laid out 10 of the group’s priorities, including resolving the question of what makes a cryptocurrency a security vs. a commodity, and creating a more “viable” path to registration by modifying the SEC’s existing paths.Other priorities include “provid clarity about whether crypto-lending and staking programs are covered by the securities laws” and deciding which parts of the market fall outside the SEC’s jurisdiction.The Crypto Task Force was established just two weeks ago, one day after...

Taproot Wizards has raised $30 million with which it plans to build an ecosystem of applications using the OP_CAT Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP).OP_CAT is a feature that Bitcoin's pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto included in the software's original code but which he/she/they removed out of concerns that it exposed it to risks such as denial-of-service (DoS) attack.Many developers have expressed a concern in bringing it back. The proposal could bring Ethereum-like smart contract functionality to Bitcoin through introducing "covenants," or rules that determine how a specific transaction will function.Taproot Wizards, whose vision is to "make Bitcoin magical again," sold a collection of 3,000 non-fungible token (NFT)-like pieces of digital art called "Quantum Cats" to drum up support for OP_CAT one year...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda unveiled a list of the agency’s newly-appointed executive staff on Tuesday, including three members of the Crypto Task Force.Two of the task force’s appointees come from within the SEC’s ranks. Richard Gabbert, who formerly served as a counsel to crypto-friendly task force head Commissioner Hester Pierce will be its chief of staff, as well as a senior advisor to Uyeda. Taylor Asher, who was previously a senior policy advisor to Uyeda, will be the task force’s chief policy advisor.The other named appointee – Landon Zinda, who will be counsel to Uyeda and a senior advisor for the task force – previously served as policy director for crypto think tank Coin Center....

The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate are forming a joint working group to advance crypto legislation, and David Sacks, the crypto czar appointed by President Donald Trump, said his aim is "ensuring American dominance in digital assets," Tuesday at a joint press conference in Washington. Alongside the chiefs of the congressional committees that will work on digital assets legislation, Sacks laid out a broad pro-crypto agenda. "I look forward to working with each of you in creating a golden age in digital assets," he said, calling crypto a "week-one priority for the administration."A part of the plan was already revealed earlier on Tuesday, when details of a Senate stablecoin bill emerged. Senator Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican, wrote a...

The artificial intelligence (AI) world was taken by storm a few days ago with the release of DeepSeek-R1, an open-source reasoning model that matches the performance of top foundation models while claiming to have been built using a remarkably low training budget and novel post-training techniques. The release of DeepSeek-R1 not only challenged the conventional wisdom surrounding the scaling laws of foundation models – which traditionally favor massive training budgets – but did so in the most active area of research in the field: reasoning.The open-weights (as opposed to open-source) nature of the release made the model readily accessible to the AI community, leading to a surge of clones within hours. Moreover, DeepSeek-R1 left its mark on the ongoing AI...