New crypto FAQs: sec.gov/about/divisions-offi…

🚨NEW: Several Democrats who have spent months negotiating the Clarity Act, including Gillibrand, Warner, Booker, Warnock, Gallego, Alsobrooks and Cortez Masto, have all voted NO. One industry leader just texted me: “It died.”

Regulatory clarity finally arrived. It just arrived differently in every jurisdiction. We're measuring what that costs the teams operating across it. 3 min, anonymous survey. na2.hubs.ly/H07QrP70

A proposal to wind down Balancer and distribute the treasury to BAL holders is live on the forum, authored by Marcus Hardt. Discussion is open; a Snapshot vote is expected to happen from 25 to 29 September. Nothing changes today: pools and withdrawals work as they do now. Any wind-down action waits for the vote.

If you’ve never heard of Welles Crowther, watch this. And watch it every year on September 11.

AI and crypto groups were among the biggest players in this year’s primaries. Here’s how they did. politi.co/4iQWgjg via @politico

1/ Today, @m_mosier_ @malekanoms & I are sharing a new paper: "The Compatibility of Financial Integrity With Permissionless Networks". Institutions say BSA & sanctions laws prevent use of these networks. We debunk this & provide a path forward. 🧵 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

OpEd: This Is One of the Most Important Policy Decisions of Our Lifetime nytimes.com/2026/08/14/opini… via @NYTOpinion

DeFi Debrief: Week of August 10, 2026 defieducationfund.substack.c…

70% of paying check cashers have a bank account mail.blockworks.com/p/americ…

“The Al era will be defined less by generating outputs and more by evaluating them. As intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, the people who create the most value may be those who can distinguish good work from exceptional work and help guide increasingly capable systems. The conversation explores verification, judgment, and why expertise still matters in a world where Al can perform many tasks at a high level. Christian explains why today's experts are both highly valuable and simultaneously training the systems that may eventually replace parts of their work. Jeremy and Henrik also explore what this means at a personal level. They discuss building Al agents that reflect your own preferences, creating personal verification systems, and why Al may make it easier to learn new skills, switch careers, and pursue more ambitious ideas.”

SEC Commissioner @HesterPeirce gave a short but pointed speech yesterday at a Georgetown Law conference on privacy-enhancing technologies. In short, she said the quiet part out loud (thankfully): regulators have spent too long treating privacy demands as suspicious, when in fact privacy-preserving financial technology protects people from bad actors at least as much as it shields them from shoulder-peering regulators. Privacy and investor protection, she argues, are not in conflict. The most interesting idea in the speech was that transfer agents currently must record the name and physical address of securities holders. She suggested giving transfer agents the flexibility to record instead that securities reside at a public blockchain address, which by design carries no personally identifiable information. That would eliminate a whole category of PII honeypots and reduce the data exposure risk that comes with holding tokenized securities today. And the idea certainly makes the MOAR REPORTING types shudder with disgust. For self-custody wallets, the implication is significant. It would remove one of the structural barriers to holding tokenized securities outside a custodial intermediary. It could give them another meaningful feature. For DeFi interfaces, the more directly relevant part of the speech was the invitation Peirce extended to builders: if you have technologies that can accomplish KYC and AML compliance objectives while minimizing PII collection and storage, she wants to hear from you through the Crypto Task Force. That is a real opening for the kind of portable, on-chain KYC attestation model that makes the most sense for non-custodial interfaces at scale, where collecting and warehousing underlying customer data is architecturally awkward and creates liability exposure the interface should not have. It is one commissioner's speech, and that commissioner is leaving (😢), but it is notable that a sitting SEC commissioner is actively reframing privacy-preserving wallet and interface design as a feature worth accommodating rather than a compliance gap worth closing. sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-st…

Nothing says "we let the AI write our policy memos" like citing an academic paper that argues the opposite of your position. @bankpolicy filed evidence against itself and called it advocacy. 🍿

Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Today, a coalition of 100+ signatories join DEF in sending a letter to Congress. Software developer protections are a non-negotiable in digital asset market structure legislation. This critical issue unites us — crypto and tech builders, investors, and advocates.

I joined NYCBA to discuss the GENIUS Act, Treasury’s state similarity NPRM, and what issuers, boards, and market participants should watch next. Key issues: oversight, reserves, liquidity, supervision, and the $10B threshold. Listen here: nycbar.org/podcasts/the-geni…

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court nytimes.com/2026/04/18/us/po… via @NYTimes