X hires former Aave chief product officer and Base design lead Benji Taylor as head of design, as the company prepares to roll out its X Money payments product. Elon Musk’s X has hired crypto-native product designer Benji Taylor as its new head of design, ahead of a wider rollout of the platform’s X Money payments product next month. Taylor announced the move on X on Wednesday, saying he was “honoured” to join the company and looking forward to working closely with Musk and X’s head of product Nikita Bier. Taylor’s crypto-native background is notable, previously founding Los Feliz Engineering, a consumer software studio that was acquired by decentralized lending protocol Aave Labs in 2023. Bier said that he had followed Taylor’s work for years and knew that he was “on track to become one of the best designers in the world,” and that X was “finally teaming up and building the greatest design team in the industry.” Read more
Following its successes mobilizing crypto-minded voters in 2024, Stand With Crypto said it would prioritize House races in two US states for the midterms. Stand With Crypto (SWC), the advocacy organization launched by cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, said that its strategy for turning out crypto-minded voters in the 2026 US midterm elections will prioritize races in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In a Thursday announcement, SWC said its November 2026 battleground races would include industry-supported candidates in Iowa, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where “crypto voters represent a meaningful and potentially decisive share of the electorate.” The advocacy group added that its priority for the midterms would be in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District and Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District, where the respective incumbents Democrat Marcy Kaptur and Republican Scott Perry “have concerning records on crypto policy.” Perry voted against the GENIUS Act in 2025, while Kaptur voted against t...
BOLT Technologies founder Yoon Auh says the real challenge in the quantum transition is whether blockchain networks can coordinate system-wide upgrades. The race to make blockchains quantum-resistant is shaping into a test of governance, and decentralized networks may be at a disadvantage. Quantum upgrades don’t stop at protocol-level changes. For major networks, they require wallet-level migration across millions of users, making coordination the bottleneck. “The hard part is not changing the node itself, it’s having the wallets do the same,” said Yoon Auh, founder of BOLT Technologies, adding that each asset holder would need to migrate and do so in a coordinated way. Read more