Eltropy to launch AI certification for credit union and community bank employees
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The AI certification program builds on the momentum of Eltropy's successful hands-on certification at its annual user conference EMERGE 2025, where more than 130+ CFI professionals earned their Eltropy AI Practitioner Certificate. The training that was delivered live at EMERGE to an audience of 350+ marked the industry's first practical certification in Generative and Agentic AI for community finance.
"This is the turning point for AI in community finance – we've moved beyond experimentation,' said Saahil Kamath, VP of Product and Head of AI at Eltropy. 'Our AI certification program proves that credit unions and community banks can build, deploy, and benefit from AI, not tomorrow but today. In under one hour, participants were able to create real bots on real channels, not just slides and ideas. That's what practical AI looks like, and that's how we close the gap between innovation and impact."
About the AI Certification Program
Launching later this summer, the self-paced online course will equip learners with foundational knowledge in AI, practical applications of Agentic AI, and safe, compliant usage tailored to regulated financial environments. The attending professionals will gain hands-on experience building live bots for telephony, websites, and internal knowledge systems, while mastering key AI technologies including LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, and QA automation.
'Our goal is to demystify AI,' said Rahul Prakash, Head of AI Engineering at Eltropy. 'By the end of the course, every participant should have a working solution – whether for voice, web, or internal operations – while gaining clarity on responsible AI usage in regulated environments.'
Unlike theoretical training programs, Eltropy's upcoming AI certification will provide participants with practical, deployable AI skills through immersive, hands-on sessions. Each certified professional will receive an official Eltropy AI Practitioner Certificate, along with access to advanced learning materials and tools they can immediately put to work at their institutions.
'EMERGE was our proof point,' said Kamath. 'Now we're democratizing access. Every credit union and community bank employee – not just tech teams – can get AI-ready with tools they'll use in their day-to-day work. Our new program brings that same hands-on energy, but at their own pace.'
Certification at EMERGE: A Glimpse of What's Possible
At EMERGE 2025, over 130+ participants completed the live course in under an hour, walking away with a working bot and actionable understanding of LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, and more.
"We came in curious and walked out certified – with a working voice bot, a clear understanding of LLMs, and a plan to bring it all back to our credit union. Eltropy made AI real and doable," said one participant from a Midwest credit union.
"It was both insightful and educational. We gained hands-on training in how AI can enhance both staff and member experiences, and we look forward to putting this knowledge into action with the launch of our Gen AI chatbot later this year," said Kate Alter, AVP, Enterprise Applications, TruStone Credit Union.
Sign Up for Early Access
"We're building a community of AI-certified professionals who know how to apply these tools responsibly and effectively,' said Ashish Garg, Co-founder and CEO of Eltropy. 'This certification program reflects our commitment to equipping community banks and credit unions with practical skills for their day-to-day operations."
Eltropy's new AI certification program represents a major step forward in AI literacy and operational readiness for credit unions and community banks. It's designed not just to educate, but to activate – giving staff confidence to adopt, manage, and scale AI in everyday operations.
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Coin Geek
28 minutes ago
- Coin Geek
Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Gov
Homepage > News > Editorial > Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Gov Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... For many years, I have talked about the hijacking of Bitcoin, the ensuing civil war, and the caricatures of 'Greg' and 'Mastercard' (NASDAQ: MA) because they are easy for readers and listeners to understand. But, I think it's time to be very clear that Gregory Maxwell and Mastercard are little more than symptoms of a disease and relatively small pillars of a system that is much more correlated and intertwined than we want to think. The problem is that explaining it requires long form, patience from the reader, and a lot of digging. Small blockers aren't a monolith. Neither are big blockers. In this article, I intend to show how intelligence agency officers, military, banking, finance, and government officers aren't a monolith either. But they also aren't very deeply separated. They share many of the same people, ideas, and policies, and have revolving doors among them. I summarize them, often, as 'Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Gov,' but the next time someone asks, 'was it the NSA, CIA, Silicon Valley, crypto-anarchists, or the Federal Reserve who hijacked Bitcoin?' You can just answer 'yes.' The Big Banks, Big Tech & Big Government successfully hijacked BTC over the last decade, and convinced normies to trade their freedom for dollar profits. BCH and BSV exist because some bitcoiners refused to be bought by Reid Hoffman, Henrie Di Castries and the UltimateBet guys. The truth is there is something very wrong with how the world has been knitted together since World War 2, but the rotten fruits we are harvesting from Musk, Thiel, and Trump were planted before the telegraph was cutting-edge technology. It's easy to think that trio is new and revolutionary tweeting Dogecoin memes on X or throwing millions behind culture war Senate candidates to usher in a new wave of surveillance capitalism or when a casino mogul turned populist president, promises to drain a swamp but then reneges on all the transparency within six months of inauguration. This is a story that began centuries ago, when controlling money meant controlling everything, and it continues today on the screens in your hands and the servers in data centers under mountains. It is the story of how Big Banks, Big Tech, and Big Government fused into a single sprawling machine, turning citizens into free-range serfs on a plantation that remains invisible to anyone who doesn't push the envelope. The only difference in today's authoritarian systems is that people used to get thrown in cages, slaughtered, viciously overthrown, etc… Today, everything is a 'soft' version of what came before. Soft coups, soft imprisonment, soft enslavement, soft wars… Bitcoin is different because it is hard, and understanding that may be the last chance to break free from our soft cages. The Rothschild template The modern playbook for financial control was written in the late 1700s by a family of farmers turned pawn shop owners, turned bankers. By the early 1800s, the Bauer family had become Lords under a red-shielded crest (or Roth-Schild, in German). Nathan Mayer Rothschild built a pan-European banking empire that didn't merely lend money to monarchs, but anticipated wars, underwrote both sides, and leveraged a network of private couriers and pigeons to obtain news faster than any government. When Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Rothschild agents delivered the news to London days before anyone else. Nathan quietly dumped British bonds, then repurchased them at panic lows, cementing his family's fortune and proving that whoever controlled information controlled markets, and whoever controlled markets controlled nations. Paul Julius Reuter, a former Rothschild carrier pigeon handler, founded Reuters by mid-century. It soon became the principal news wire of the financial world and was heavily patronized by NM Rothschild and Sons investment bank before blowing up as the official wire service of Europe and the United Kingdom. Across the Atlantic, the Associated Press was formed, consolidating narrative power in the hands of the largest media agencies, who use AP as a non-profit conglomerate to share the opinions of the largest companies in 'the news.' Finance and information had become two blades of the same scissor by the time of the Mexican-American War, and narratives set in board rooms became the official written history of the Western Hemisphere thereafter, thanks to 'the news' being whatever the big corporations decide it is. The consequences of this can be illustrated in Standard and Poors' refusal to downgrade the credit of the subprime lenders of Wall St before the 2008 global financial crisis under the auspice that the news of the credit downgrade would itself cause the collapse; suggesting that big media and big finance may be too closely intertwined to be useful when they're actually needed. Back to the top ↑ Industrialists and arms dealers As the 19th century lurched into the 20th, global cartels of industrialists and arms makers grew fat on the machinery of war. World War I and II marked the era when the Rothschilds lost much of their primacy in Western finance, scattered by Nazi oppression, the war, and then ultimately eclipsed by growing rivals. Yet while the family's grip loosened, their blueprint endured: central banking, industrial espionage, and the seamless fusion of state and permanent war economy. New players simply stepped into the Rothschild mold, turbocharging these strategies for an age of global surveillance and endless conflict. The post-war era also cemented the rise of the United States as the center of power for this new age. With the U.S. having essentially zero industrial damage or scars of war, and a newly booming economy due to massive investment in both infrastructure and a population emboldened by the victory and cultural shift to American exceptionalism, the United States was primed to dominate. This domination was formalized in 1944 at Bretton Woods. The dollar was pegged to gold, and every other currency pegged to the dollar. The U.S. Federal Reserve effectively became the world's central bank, stewarding not just American prosperity, but global dependency. In 1971, Nixon ended the gold peg, unleashing fiat currency maximalism. Here's President Nixon 'temporarily' suspending the dollar's convertibility into act dismantled Bretton Woods and launched the fiat era we live in — Gold Telegraph ⚡ (@GoldTelegraph_) May 2, 2025 Money was no longer restrained by physical collateral; only by political will and printing presses. Managed wisely, the Federal Reserve could plan investments with commercial and investment banks, government investment strategies, technology, and military excursions for profit. The inflation that would come from printing could be outpaced by growth in the American economy and debts repaid by profits generated in the cycle. For the most part, this worked. Soft money created a tremendous boom in technology, infrastructure and wealth for the American people—especially if they were lucky enough to own any hard assets, which were distributed cheaply in the form of real estate to WWII veterans and their children, making for a strong economy of ownership and creating the American middle class. But it was also fragile, cyclical, and the central planning of the economy by big finance and big government created the opportunity to build the ultimate plantation: infinite leverage, infinite debt, and infinite opportunities for control. They just needed a catalyst or two. Back to the top ↑ Lansky's neon laboratory Meanwhile, in postwar Las Vegas, Meyer Lansky, the mob accountant who built the Mafia's Murder Inc. into a global money laundering empire, was busy innovating. Working with Moe Dalitz, a former rum-runner turned casino kingpin, Lansky transformed Vegas into a giant lab for behavioral manipulation. They discovered that painting over windows, removing clocks, and blasting bright lights kept gamblers in a timeless haze. Feeding them steaks and booze sealed the deal and made gamblers profitably addicted to the atmosphere of the casino. That addiction created liquidity, and that liquidity created the means for incredible amounts of money laundering in cash when the world was quickly moving toward electronic means of accounting. Lansky famously set up sophisticated communications taps that gave him visibility into Federal Reserve movements: an underworld front-run on monetary policy. Vegas was not just a crime hub; it was a prototype for simultaneously hacking human psychology and financial markets, and the CIA was taking notes. MK Ultra, the infamous mind control program, is mostly remembered for LSD. But it quickly expanded into electromagnetic experiments, light pulsing, and frequency entrainment. The casino was a perfect model: override natural rhythms with artificial light, distort perception with alcohol and time loss, and rake in profits. The intelligence community and then the Department of Defense quickly understood that Lansky and Dalitz had built a behavioral Ponzi scheme that was as scalable as any multinational. Furthermore, while mind-altering drugs, torture, and brutalism made for rogue assets that were difficult to control, the soft control of the populace through their televisions and cultural experiences made the assets of the plantation—the people—easier to control without the need and risk of large-scale chemical experimentation. Back to the top ↑ Delgado, Becker, and the electromagnetic mind Enter Dr. Jose Delgado, the Spanish neuroscientist who, a generation before Neuralink, implanted electrodes in bull brains and famously stopped them mid-charge with a radio signal. Delgado proved that you didn't need to control an entire brain if you could tune a few neurons. Just the right circuit, and you owned the creature. Around the same time, Dr. Robert Becker, an orthopedic surgeon, mapped the tiny direct-current electric fields that govern how bones knit and tissues regenerate. The Pentagon funded his work after noticing Navy pilots exposed to avionics developed sky-high cholesterol and collapsed vitamin D cycles. The conclusion: electromagnetic environments and distance from the circadian rhythm rewrote biology at the cellular level. The casino was the seed. The lab tests were the sprout, and the budding military-industrial complex was quickly scaffolding the modern digital plantation with control of media, scientific research, finance, and the blue light full of numbing entertainment that was making its way into everyone's homes Back to the top ↑ From Stanford to Silicon Valley's Panopticon Much of this research funneled through the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a quiet outpost of Cold War spook experiments. From there emerged the Silicon Valley ethos: a fusion of military contracts, university labs, and private venture capital that blurred lines between spycraft, consumer tech, and behavioral economics. This is the world that gave us the MIT Digital Currency Initiative via their various media labs and financial entanglements with private financiers and intelligence community participants. Source: The Guardian It also gave us Peter Thiel (PayPal [NASDAQ: PYPL] co-founder and Palantir architect) who turned Big Data into the ultimate counterinsurgency tool, selling it to governments under the banner of 'knowledge management.' It produced Elon Musk, who absorbs billions in public subsidies for rockets, cars, and Neuralink brain chips that read like Delgado's wireless experiments reborn in the Matrix. Jack Dorsey, the bearded anachronist shaman of payments and social media, who quietly built Twitter into the globe's emotional steering wheel and handed the reins to big government censors before selling it to Musk and pivoting to Bitcoin (but the wrong version, as we'll see). Source: New York Post It also gave us a President who learned everything he knows from running a casino empire and mastering the art of social engineering via social media. On promises of 'draining the swamp,' he brought in a Vice President, a direct protege of Peter Thiel, and advisors with deep roots in the Silicon Valley surveillance economy. It's no wonder the swamp is still full, but Palantir gets juicy new contracts to surveil American citizens while Trump launches memecoins in a decentralized casino built on Solana blockchain. This was all underwritten by the same families, funds, and secretive institutions that once funded trench warfare and military bonds. Big Banks provided capital. Big Tech built the tools. Big Government enforced the architecture, and together, they created the cyclical economy that they all needed to stay in power and create the illusion of wealth. Back to the top ↑ Bitcoin: The last rebellion But the plantation had a crack in its wall. In the late 1970s, David Chaum, a cryptographer with a libertarian streak, proposed anonymous digital cash, seeing already that banks and states would unite to track every transaction. Many others followed with tooling to help make the individual more secure and more private. Phil Zimmerman's PGP, Timothy May's Blacknet, Len Sassaman with encrypted email and reputation protocols, Hal Finney building PGP 2.0 and reusable proof of work as a SPAM filter… There were dozens of attempts at creating a digital cash so that free people could have a free money separate from the central bank state, the military industrial complex and its tentacles into everywhere, but they were plagued with centralization risk and trust issues because the cypherpunk community was also embroiled and entangled into the mess of white, gray and black hat activities, so they couldn't trust each other not to be crooks or Feds, double agents or corporate shills. Due to trust problems, every digital cash or cryptocurrency attempt failed until Bitcoin. By 2008, the world had seen the booms and busts of multiple cycles, multiple massive and increasingly complex wars, the rise of asymmetric warfare, and more. Against that backdrop, Bitcoin was born from a stew of NSA hash functions, academic cryptography, cypherpunk manifestos, truly free market incentives, and the complex web of internet culture. Its genius was simple: by linking energy (proof of work) and time (block intervals) into an unforgeable public ledger, it turned computation into a monetary asset. No trust, no leverage, no threats. Just proof of work and public attestation of the truth; auditable by anyone. The ledger of account, humanity's oldest technology, was now decentralized and incorruptible—at least in theory. It was, as Satoshi Nakamoto wrote, 'a chain of digital signatures' that abstracted value, energy, and time into money, and maybe poked the bubble created by hundreds of years of meddling and corruption. Back to the top ↑ The hijacking: Silicon Valley's second gold rush This was intolerable to the plantation masters. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, PayPal), Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Facebook board), Peter Thiel, and the sprawling VC apparatus of Blockchain Capital, Digital Currency Group, Digital Garage, Baillie Gifford, AXA Strategic Ventures, and CME Ventures swarmed Bitcoin. MIT, which is a friendly nest for CIA projects, provided academic cover. They knew Bitcoin was technologically secure. It couldn't be cracked, hacked, or back-doored. It couldn't be brute-forced or censored directly, but the weak link in any system is always people. People run the Bitcoin GitHub repo. People mine the blockchain. People run the startups that use it and trade it. Those people were the target. These people were pitched to participate in Bitcoin's inevitable progress, but the real aim of investor capital was to neuter it: scale it down, throttle its capacity, and force all meaningful transactions onto private side-chains controlled by the same banks and data oligarchs who control the old world. Thus, the Bitcoin Civil War erupted. Bitcoin's true believers resisted predatory capital and social engineering campaigns while companies like Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Kraken, Bitfinex, Blockstream, Lightning Labs, Chaincode Labs, and others let themselves be bankrolled by this old world clique. They took over Bitcoin Core (BTC) and strangled it with propaganda about the need for throttled throughput. They sold the public on 'digital gold' as a sterile warehouse asset that 'will make you rich' while keeping the global programmable ledger neutered. It was a brilliant soft coup d'etat The companies like Coinbase and Blockstream that compromised their values and took in venture capital grew into multi-billion-dollar darlings, rebranding Bitcoin as a global casino, are now sending back into the military-industrial complex! It's just like Lansky's casinos. They facilitate the facade of business to test out people's behavior while committing them to the addiction of the system, pumping up liquidity, and selling services to Big Tech, Big Banks, and Big Government. The new neon lights are price charts, dopamine cycles, hideous influencers, and endless 'number go up' speculation. Meanwhile, side chains and off-chain solutions were readied alongside dark order books and market makers to facilitate illegal trade and money laundering for the insiders and spooks while managing the controlled rails to herd meaningful, taxable commerce of the average person back under banks and regulators. This occurred at the cost of Bitcoin ever becoming a useful asset in real, disruptive commerce. The fiat money-printing cycle now rewarded coin holders into satiety, compliance, and turned them into a soft marketing wing, much the same way as cheap real estate was weaponized to turn baby boomers into advocates for constant growth in taxes and welfare. All it took was for people to feel like they had left the rat race to become the foot soldiers of maintaining the trajectory of the plantation. But a splinter chain, Bitcoin SV (BSV), survived various rounds of cullings. It preserved Satoshi's original vision: unlimited scale, protocol stability, micropayments, and on-chain data ownership. In other words, the true Web3 of self-sovereign data, peer-to-peer apps, and unstoppable finance, all tied directly to the energy-time ledger that makes Bitcoin unique. Instead of fast gains in wealth, BSV exclusively offered the world a free and nearly costless access to a global database tied to a hard money system. But it also offered the hard truth of hard work to a people who had become addicted to soft money and neon lights. And that's only the first part of the challenge with BSV. Back to the top ↑ The suppression of BSV No surprise, then, that the empire fights BSV at every turn. Jack Dorsey's companies block their tickers and hashtags. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta (NASDAQ: META) shadowbans BSV content. Michael Saylor, a newly minted 'Bitcoin' evangelist, conspicuously pushes BTC's digital gold meme while ignoring Bitcoin's computational utility and feeds the gamblers' addiction with new financial vehicles like 'Bitcoin Treasury Stocks.' Exchanges delist BSV under regulatory excuses. Payment processors refuse integration. They might even kill their supporters for getting too close to liberating the people. He tweeted that specific message from Twetch, which is a BSV-powered blockchain-to-Twitter client. He understood the power of a truly scalable, public blockchain, and didn't care about the social stigma of BSV. A real hero! — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) July 12, 2025 Why? Because BSV is dangerous to the plantation, it breaks Big Tech by enabling data ownership and direct monetization, bypassing platforms. It breaks Big Banks by enforcing scarcity through proof of work, making a money that can't be printed by decree. It breaks Big Government by providing a transparent ledger for voting, budgets, and identity systems that don't require state attestation. Back to the top ↑ The last firewall before technoserfdom For hundreds of years, from Rothschild pigeons to Reuters wires, from Lansky's casino labs to MK Ultra's frequency experiments, from Palantir's social graphing to Neuralink's promise of wireless brain taps: the same triangle of Big Banks, Big Tech, and Big Government has refined the art of managing populations through money, media, and mind. BSV is the first technology since the printing press that genuinely threatens this triangle at a fundamental level. It is a ledger anyone can write to. It is money tied to physics, not policy. It is a data layer immune to censorship. It promises a world where your vote, health record, business contract, music royalties, and everything else is secured by the same transparent protocol and cannot be intimidated or social-engineered by the shifting whims of unelected corporate boards or opaque state agencies. The plantation will not give up easily. They haven't given up on keeping Bitcoin hijacked and under their control. Remember, they have had centuries of practice. They will dismiss BSV as a scam, obscure it with noise, or starve it of liquidity through pressure campaigns. But the plantation's greatest asset is your inertia. Your willingness to stare at blue-lit screens that siphon your dopamine. Your resignation to debts that rise faster than your pay. Your fatalism in the face of wars spun up by think tanks whose logos are older than your grandparents. we in craig wright vs klaus schwab timeline — ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️ (@delete_shitcoin) September 25, 2022 Back to the top ↑ The call to action It does not have to be this way. For every corrupt agent, investor, and politician, there's a good person looking for ways to make the world a better place. You stand at the same crossroads as every generation that faced a new feudal order, from serfs under steel visors to colonists under mercantilist tariffs. You can learn how this system was built, how fake news isn't new, how banks rig markets, how governments launder consent… We cannot 'trust the plan' or sit back and let anyone else fight these battles for us. Trump is now claiming the Epstein list is a democrat hoax…MAGA has about one week to completely remove the movement from Donnie and reclaim its values, or the whole thing is over. At least you got weird new prisons, Palantir, REAL ID & 5 trillion in new debt out of the deal! — Kurt Wuckert Jr (@kurtwuckertjr) July 13, 2025 We must opt out of the mind control and opt into a freer future, and one good way to start is by building, using, and transacting with BSV. By anchoring your digital life to a chain that anyone can audit, no one can censor, and no consortium can inflate. The chains are digital now, but so is the key. Break free! Back to the top ↑ Watch: How do you build a successful ecosystem? Bring blockchain to the builders!
Coin Geek
28 minutes ago
- Coin Geek
Champagne on ice as America's ‘Crypto Week' gets underway
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... America's 'Crypto Week' is underway as the sector prepares to celebrate the first digital asset legislation to head to President Trump's desk for signing into law. Monday saw the House of Representatives kick off its so-called 'Crypto Week,' which will bring floor votes on three critical pieces of digital asset legislation governing stablecoins (the Senate-approved GENIUS Act), market structure (CLARITY Act), and a ban on central bank digital currencies (Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act). While the House's tentative schedule suggests voting could start Tuesday, word is that Wednesday is the real launch date. CLARITY will reportedly be the first bill to get a vote before GENIUS steps up on Thursday, while the less impactful CBDC bill will tag along for the ride at some unspecified point. All three bills were discussed Monday by the House Rules Committee, which sets the parameters for the debate, possible amendments, and votes to follow. Once passed by the full House, CLARITY/CBDC will move to the Senate, which is promising (again) to unveil its own market structure bill this week, while GENIUS will head straight to the President's desk for signing into law. On Monday, Reps French Hill (R-AR) and Glenn Thompson (R-PA) released an op-ed via The Hill hailing this week's heretofore unimaginable legislative progress. There wasn't much substance to the article, more of an anticipatory victory lap that confidently declared 'the days of regulatory uncertainty are coming to an end.' There's still a little uncertainty left, however, as some last-minute updates to CLARITY make clear. While Trump has convinced House leadership to pass a 'clean' version of GENIUS (aka no revisions) in order to hasten its arrival on his desk, the House appears to want to use CLARITY to tweak GENIUS after the latter's passage. For instance, the revised version of CLARITY authorizes 'commodity-backed payment stablecoins,' aka a payment-focused token that's 'denominated in a highly liquid, publicly traded physical commodity, such as gold.' There are also tweaks to the text describing the monthly certification process for reports submitted by authorized stablecoin issuers. It bears noting that, while the House agreed to toss its own stablecoin legislation (the STABLE Act) and speed GENIUS through to Trump, the Senate has offered no assurances that it will return the favor regarding CLARITY. So, as far as market structure is concerned, there's still plenty of sausage-making ahead. The eternal agony of being a Democrat While House Republicans were celebrating their progress, House Dems were launching their own full-court PR effort. On July 11, Reps Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Stephen Lynch (D-MA) announced their own name for this week's proceedings: 'Anti-Crypto Corruption Week.' In reality, Dems have no means of derailing the GOP's crypto agenda. And even though they did, Dem leadership doesn't appear all that interested in doing so. On Monday, Politico reported that the office of Katherine Clark, the House Dem in charge of 'whipping' votes, had issued a notice to the caucus saying the stablecoin and market structure bills are fundamentally flawed. However, Dems weren't explicitly told to vote against them. The notice says CLARITY 'has a number of oversights and omissions that, when coupled with the actions of the Executive Branch, raise significant and long-term issues that may undermine the possibilities of new technologies.' As for GENIUS, 'there are no community reinvestment requirements, no third-party vendor federal oversight, and weak federal oversight of stablecoin issuers licensed by states or overseas … In addition, this bill still narrowly permits private commercial companies (e.g., Elon Musk's X) to issue stablecoins, jeopardizing a decades-old separation of banking and commerce created to prevent consolidations of economic and political power.' The juxtaposition of all these perceived flaws with the lack of will to organize mass opposition against them appears to confirm the fear of blowback from well-funded crypto lobby groups (so vividly expressed in those leaked group chat messages). In other words, the Dems' opposition is largely for show. A trio of House Dems, including two members of the Financial Services Committee, issued their own letter to colleagues on Monday urging them to vote in favor of CLARITY, arguing that '[a]lthough this bill is not without its shortcomings and may still be improved, inaction is not a viable option.' Not going quietly is Waters, who on Monday issued an 'I told you so' op-ed warning that Republicans' refusal to impose sufficient regulatory guardrails while opening up crypto access to U.S. banking means that 'America will eventually face its first crypto financial crisis.' Waters also bemoaned Republicans' refusal to include amendments that 'curtail the president's abuse of power,' thereby making it 'easier for Trump's personal financial interests to dictate U.S. policy.' Some proposed/failed amendments to CLARITY attempted to address Trump's crypto ventures, including a Lynch-sponsored change requiring the Inspectors General of the Treasury Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to conduct annual reports 'on any presidential crypto holdings.' Other amendments would have explicitly prohibited presidents, vice-presidents, members of Congress, and their family members from dabbling in crypto ventures. As stated above, none of these amendments survived the vetting process because (a) the Dems have no leverage, and (b) Trump has all the leverage in the world over the GOP. The Rules Committee ultimately voted 8-4 along party lines to allow the trio of crypto bills to proceed to the House floor this week for brief (an hour per bill) debate before voting. Back to the top ↑ WLF mystery buyer revealed? Speaking of Trump, writer Jacob Silverman believes he's identified the phantom figure behind the Aqua1 Foundation, the purportedly UAE-based 'Web3-native fund' that last month agreed to buy $100 million worth of WLFI, the governance token of the Trump-linked decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF). Last week, Silverman published an article in The Nation detailing the UAE government's lack of information on Aqua1. Silverman's findings were echoed in other reports by outlets like Reuters, which quoted officials in the Abu Dhabi financial center saying Aqua1 was 'not registered, licensed, or affiliated' with it 'in any capacity.' On Monday, Silverman posted a follow-up in which he claims to have identified Aqua1's purported co-founder, Dave Lee, as David Li, a 30-year-old 'senior project manager' at Hong Kong-based digital asset firm Web3Port. Li also appears to be a manager at the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) Beijing, a state-run energy giant. Silverman has asked the public to contact him on Signal at jacobsilverman.99 if they can shed more light on how 'a 30-year-old Chinese-Brazilian finance professional working for a Chinese state energy company [can] secure $100 million to buy crypto tokens from the President of the United States' main crypto firm? And what do he and his colleagues expect in return?' Back to the top ↑ Binance v Bloomberg v Coinbase Also coming under fire for their alleged Trump ties is the Binance exchange, which, according to a July 11 Bloomberg report, helped WLF launch its USD1 stablecoin earlier this year. The report quotes three unidentified sources who claim Binance wrote the smart contract behind USD1. A few months after USD1's launch, the UAE government-linked MGX investment firm acquired $2 billion worth of the stablecoin from WLF. The tokens were then forwarded to Binance as part of a deal in which MGX took a $2 billion stake in Binance. The report notes that, two months later, this $2 billion remains in Binance wallets, while the fiat assets backing that USD1 are generating millions in interest for WLF. The report went on to say that Binance, the unquestioned top digital asset exchange in terms of trading volume, also promotes USD1 to its users. Bloomberg sums up its findings: 'Binance helped create [USD1], helped promote it and took part in its largest known transaction. It's unclear whether Binance or [Binance founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao] has received any payment from World Liberty in return.' However, the report notes that CZ has applied to President Trump for a pardon of his 2023 conviction for violating America's Bank Secrecy Act. CZ reacted by calling the report 'another hit piece (sponsored by a competitor) containing so many factual errors I don't even know where to begin.' CZ also reminded his followers that Bloomberg's Chinese unit was forced to publicly apologize to him for an article it published in July 2022, adding that he 'might have to sue [Bloomberg] again for defamation.' The story took another turn when CZ retweeted posts by influencers Ian Miles Cheong and Matt Wallace accusing the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange of being the anonymous source behind the latest Bloomberg report. The day after the Wallace post, Coinbase's chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, responded by calling the claim 'pure misinformation. We absolutely did not contribute to this story. We don't attack competitors, and we welcome any businesses that share our goal of growing the crypto pie.' Back to the top ↑ It's good to be $TRUMP Among the more successful Trump-linked crypto ventures is the $TRUMP memecoin, which was released just days before he took the oath of office in January. This weekend, Reuters recounted the speed with which digital asset exchanges chose to list $TRUMP. Eight of the 10 largest exchanges listed $TRUMP within 48 hours of its January 17 debut. Of the other two exchanges, Coinbase made its decision in a single day, while South Korea's Upbit waited until February 13. That overall four-day average to list is a far cry from the average 129-day wait that other large memecoins have endured. Asked about their willingness to accelerate the process, most exchanges cited overwhelming demand, while Bitget CEO Gracy Chen suggested that the fact that Trump announced the token's launch on his social media accounts 'should kind of solve the compliance issue.' Obviously, there's no precedent for a U.S. president-elect issuing his own memecoin for personal profit, so the exchanges can be forgiven for rushing to take advantage of the resulting feeding frenzy by the MAGA faithful (and speculators regardless of political persuasion). The token has reportedly generated over $172 million in trading fees since its launch. Friday, July 18, will see the unlocking of an additional 50.5 million $TRUMP tokens (worth a combined $475 million at their current price), boosting the circulating supply by 25%. Justin Sun, founder of the TRON network and a major purchaser of both $TRUMP and WLFI, announced last week that 'we' planned to buy another $100 million worth of $TRUMP. It wasn't clear from Sun's announcement who 'we' referred to. It's equally unclear whether this $100 million would go toward buying already circulating $TRUMP or buying directly from the source, aka the Trump-controlled entity responsible for issuing $TRUMP. Back to the top ↑ U.S. banks get crypto custody guidance Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have jointly issued new guidance on 'crypto-asset safekeeping by banking organizations.' The guardians of America's financial system have been systematically loosening their previous restraints on banks' dealings with digital assets since Trump reoccupied the White House. And none too soon, given the speed with which digital asset legislation is hurtling through Congress and the rising interest of tradfi institutions in exploring the blockchain sector. The new guidance isn't all that dramatic, for the most part stating that banks should follow their existing approach to managing risk when deciding whether or not to custody customers' digital assets. For example, banks should understand the business they're getting into, keep abreast of developments, and have contingency plans in case things go squirrelly. Unlike fiat assets, the mishandling of cryptographic keys could lead to the permanent loss of digital assets, leaving the bank on the hook for making customers whole. The guidance goes as far as to suggest that steps be taken to ensure that 'no other party—including the customer—has access to information sufficient to unilaterally transfer the crypto-asset out of the control of the banking organization.' Entering into arrangements with third-party 'sub-custodians' is permitted but requires adequate due diligence, including how that third-party handles their cryptographic keys. Banks could soon be facing new competition as a growing number of digital asset operators are applying for national bank charters, which would allow them to self-custody fiat assets backing, say, stablecoins. Ripple Labs, issuer of the RLUSD stablecoin, has applied for a charter, but these applications move slowly. So last week, Ripple confirmed that BNY Mellon (NASDAQ: BK) will be the custodian of the assets supporting RLUSD, the market cap of which crossed $500 million last week. Stablecoin rival Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL), which has also applied for a charter, also uses BNY Mellon as a custodian. Back to the top ↑ Watch: Bringing the Metanet to life with Teranode title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen="">
Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
US appeals court puts Argentina's 51% YPF stake turnover on temporary hold
NEW YORK, July 15 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday put on temporary hold a judge's order that Argentina turn over its 51% stake in oil and gas company YPF ( opens new tab to partially satisfy a $16.1 billion judgment. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan gave Petersen Energia Inversora and Eton Park Capital Management, which won the judgment, until July 17 to oppose Argentina's bid for a longer stay while the country appeals the turnover. Argentina has until July 22 to reply, and the matter will be reviewed by "the next available" three-judge panel, the appeals court said. The dispute stemmed from Argentina's 2012 seizure of the YPF stake from Spain's Repsol ( opens new tab without making a tender offer to Petersen and Eton Park, which had been minority shareholders. Those shareholders are represented by litigation funder Burford Capital (BURF.L), opens new tab, which has said it expected to receive 35% and 73% of Petersen's and Eton Park's respective damages. Argentina has warned its economy could be destabilized if it gave up its controlling stake in YPF, the country's largest energy company. The country had faced a July 14 deadline for the turnover, but U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in Manhattan agreed to delay enforcement so Argentina could seek relief from the appeals court.
