Paul Atkins called the right to self-custody a “foundational American value” when addressing regulators and industry leaders discussing DeFi. US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins took aim at the previous administration’s crypto policies in the regulator’s latest roundtable event exploring digital asset regulation. In a Monday event led by the SEC’s crypto task force titled “DeFi and the American Spirit,” Atkins said the prior administration, suggesting the agency’s stance on digital assets under former chair Gary Gensler, took a heavy-handed approach through the courts. He added that the SEC’s policies on staking as a service provider needed congressional approval to have lasting authority, and touted self-custody as a “foundational American value.” “I’m in favor of affording greater flexibility to market participants to self-custody crypto assets, especially where intermediation imposes unnecessary transaction costs or restricts the ability to engage in staking and other onchain acti...
Digital asset infrastructure companies have seen more attention in recent years, with some fundraises in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Turnkey, a crypto infrastructure company founded by former Coinbase Custody builders in 2022, has raised $30 million in a Series B round to create an “open infrastructure layer” for crypto, which the company says will help the industry evolve in a similar way to the internet. Bain Capital Crypto led the round with participation from Sequoia Capital, Galaxy Ventures, Lightspeed Faction, Variant, and Wintermute Ventures. The round brings Turnkey’s total funding to $50 million. Turnkey specializes in providing wallet infrastructure, enabling embedded wallets that “remove the need to rely on phishable seed phrases.” Its clients include prediction market platform Polymarket, NFT marketplace Magic Eden, and Web3 development platform Alchemy. Read more