As Congress prepares to debate three major crypto bills during “Crypto Week,” the crypto community and advocacy groups are racing to turn momentum into real legislation. The US House of Representatives is gearing up for what Republican leadership has branded “Crypto Week,” a legislative push scheduled from next Monday to Friday that could reshape the future of digital asset regulation in the country. This week’s episode of Byte-Sized Insight explores the political stakes of these bills, the industry’s lobbying efforts and whether bipartisan support is enough to push legislation across the finish line. Lawmakers are expected to debate and potentially vote on three high-profile bills: the CLARITY Act, which would define regulatory oversight of crypto markets; the GENIUS Act, which creates a framework for stablecoins and has already cleared the Senate; and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which would ban the creation of a US central bank digital currency. Read more
Bitcoin’s latest rally sparked a reaction from Peter Schiff, urging a switch to silver, while others were more bullish than ever. Longtime Bitcoin critic and gold advocate Peter Schiff said the latest BTC rally may be a selling opportunity for investors to buy silver instead. “With Bitcoin hitting new highs today (in dollars), it’s a great time to sell some and buy silver ahead of silver’s next big leg up,” Schiff said in a Thursday X post as Bitcoin (BTC) put on its moon boots again and set new highs above $112,000. He claimed that silver has more upside potential than Bitcoin and added that while BTC “can easily crash, silver’s downside seems very limited.” Read more
The Ethereum Foundation is preparing to bring zero-knowledge technology to Ethereum, with plans to launch a zkEVM on the layer-1 network within a year. Ethereum is preparing for a significant architectural upgrade that could see a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) integrated directly into its layer-1 blockchain within a year. In a post by Sophia Gold, a developer in the Ethereum Foundation’s (EF) protocol support team, the EF outlined a path toward replacing traditional block execution with zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs). Instead of requiring every validator to re-run transaction blocks to verify them, the system will switch to validators only checking ZK-proofs, which are tiny cryptographic receipts that confirm everything was done correctly. Read more
Local authorities and state-owned publications in mainland China are increasingly calling on the government not to dismiss the increasing global adoption of stablecoins. Mainland China, one of the most restrictive global jurisdictions for cryptocurrencies, is reportedly showing signs of a shift in tone regarding stablecoins amid new developments in Shanghai. The Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) has held a meeting to discuss strategic responses to stablecoins and digital currencies, Reuters reported on Friday. Following the Thursday meeting, SASAC director He Qing called for “greater sensitivity to emerging technologies and enhanced research into digital currencies,” in a post on the authority’s official account. Read more