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On May 12, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee released the latest 309-page draft of the CLARITY Act, but Section 404 of the draft stipulates that it prohibits rewards "solely for holding" stablecoins.Specifically, no regulated entity may directly or indirectly pay any form of interest or yield (whether cash, tokens, or other consideration) to a restricted payee solely because the restricted payee holds its stablecoins, or pay stablecoin balance rewards in a manner economically or functionally equivalent to paying interest or yield on bank deposits.However, the latest draft also stipulates that rewards and incentives for stablecoins based on real activities or transactions are allowed, such as rewards linked to actual transactions, payments, platform activities, liquidity provision, etc.

According to CoinDesk, cryptocurrency industry practitioners saw the latest provisions regarding stablecoin yields in the revised version of the Senate's "Digital Asset Market Clarity Act" during a closed-door review meeting on Capitol Hill on Monday. The initial impression is that the relevant language is too narrow and not clear enough.The new provisions were announced last Friday by Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Thom Tillis. According to a person familiar with the current draft, the new provisions will prohibit earning yields solely from holding stablecoins, while restricting any practices that equate the program with bank deposits, and setting further limitations on other potentially allowed activities, with the specific identification mechanism for activity-based stablecoin rewards still unclear.This compromise stems from the lobbying struggle between the cryptocurrency industry and the banking sector: the banking industry insists that stablecoin rewards should not be similar to interest-bearing bank deposits, arguing that such competing products could harm the banking sector and suppress lending. The final compromise allows for reward programs based on user stablecoin activities but prohibits rewards based on balances.The closed-door review aims to push the Senate Banking Committee to schedule a hearing, which is an important step for the bill toward a full Senate vote. A similar version of the "Clarity Act" was passed in the House of Representatives last year, and another version has also passed the Senate Agriculture Committee's markup process. The advancement of the bill still faces other obstacles: all parties need to reach an agreement on the DeFi regulatory framework, and Democrats insist on including provisions that prohibit senior government officials from profiting personally from the cryptocurrency industry, a provision clearly targeting President Trump.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi recently published a post regarding the viewpoint that "the market crash on 10/11 was triggered by Binance and Ethena." He stated that this narrative is difficult to establish in terms of timeline, market dissemination path, and evidence. He pointed out that the price of Bitcoin had already bottomed out about 30 minutes before the anomaly in USDe appeared on Binance, indicating that the causal relationship is clearly inverted. Additionally, the deviation in USDe price only occurred on Binance and did not spread to other trading platforms, which cannot explain the large-scale liquidation across the entire market and is fundamentally different from events like Terra that caused global balance sheet shocks.Haseeb believes that a more reasonable explanation is the combination of multiple factors: Trump's tariff comments disturbed the market on Friday evening, the Binance API anomaly prevented market makers from hedging across platforms, liquidation and the ADL mechanism amplified volatility, and the lack of traditional financial-style circuit breakers and self-stabilizing mechanisms in the crypto market ultimately caused the market to evolve along an unfavorable path. He emphasized that there is no simple and conspiratorial "single culprit" for 10/11; although the market suffered a heavy blow, it has not been permanently damaged in the long run and only needs time to restore liquidity and confidence.

ChainCatcher news, the Trump family project World Liberty Financial (WLFI) clarifies the previous transaction regarding "the vault wallet has destroyed 47 million WLFI": "There are some misunderstandings about the WLFI tokens unlocked in the Safe, and WLFI has no plans to sell these tokens on the open market. The allocation of this portion of tokens is solely determined by community governance voting—how to use them is decided by the community.The status of the vault tokens is as follows:Initial quantity of 10 billion WLFI;47 million WLFI destroyed yesterday (governance decision);Current balance is 9.953 billion WLFI.All these tokens are subject to community governance rather than being decided by the team."

ChainCatcher news, according to a post by Hazeflow founder Pavel Paramonov on X platform, Polychain has invested about 20 million dollars in the Celestia project and has already profited over 80 million dollars solely from selling Celestia token staking rewards, achieving a return of over 4 times without selling the main investment.

ChainCatcher news, Nick Tomaino, the founder of 1confirmation, stated on X that most people in the crypto industry only focus on the industry itself, and the circle is very closed. Many people just happened to be in the right place at the right time and made huge fortunes, so the desire to replicate past successful models is natural. But that era has ended. Now, it is essential to truly understand mainstream culture and the intersection of the crypto industry with it. In today's crypto space, there is much more cognition, capital, and competition; simply "going with the flow" can no longer lead to easy success.For example, if you want to create on-chain games, you must thoroughly understand everything about Web2 games and build on-chain games based on that knowledge; merely copying the Axie model is far from enough.

ChainCatcher news, Satoshi Action Fund co-founder and CEO Dennis Porter initiated a vote on the inclusion of U.S. crypto strategic reserves as assets on the X platform.As of now, the percentage of votes supporting the inclusion of only BTC is 54.6%; the percentage supporting the inclusion of BTC, ETH, XRP, and SOL is 30.4%; the percentage supporting the inclusion of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap is 12.3%; and the percentage supporting the inclusion of all cryptocurrencies and meme coins is 2.7%.

ChainCatcher news, Aiccelerate DAO co-founder Ejaaz stated on social media that the profit model of AI agent platforms is shifting from simple issuance fees to service-level taxation.He pointed out two main profit directions: first, the agent market (similar to the Apple App Store), where the platform takes a commission from users purchasing agent services; second, the agent execution market, which provides infrastructure services such as AI model calls, computing power support, and agent collaboration for AI agents.Ejaaz emphasized that relying solely on profit from agent issuance is outdated, as this model tends to lead to a proliferation of low-quality bots. In the future, the industry's focus and revenue will shift towards the execution layer.

ChainCatcher news, Animoca Brands Chairman Yat Siu commented on Trump's plan to exempt domestic cryptocurrencies from taxes in the United States. He pointed out several issues with the plan: first, most token foundations are registered in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore; second, the origin of Bitcoin is unknown and most mining occurs outside the United States; furthermore, decentralized blockchains inherently possess a borderless nature.Yat Siu emphasized that due to previous SEC regulations, American institutions have almost exclusively issued tokens abroad. He suggested attracting foreign crypto companies to invest and build in the U.S. through inclusive tax incentives to create job opportunities, rather than implementing differentiated tax policies solely based on the location of token issuance.

ChainCatcher news, generally, there is sometimes a certain correlation between the weakness of the PPI and the weakness of the CPI in the same month. However, Santander Bank economist Stephen Stanley stated that the weaker-than-expected U.S. December PPI data does not necessarily mean that the December CPI data will also cool down. This correlation is particularly less obvious for the core CPI, which excludes the more volatile food and energy prices.He pointed out that food and energy prices do show a good correlation between these two indicators, but the correlation with other categories of goods is lower. "My prediction for the CPI relies on the PPI prediction only for the food and energy part, but not for the core CPI," Stanley said. (Jinshi)

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, the hacker involved in the Bitfinex theft case has made a public statement for the first time since being arrested. Ilya Lichtenstein reiterated that he alone stole 120,000 bitcoins, denying the speculation in the Netflix documentary that "his father was complicit and may belong to a Russian spy agency." This is his first public statement since his arrest in 2022.In the video statement, Lichtenstein said, "My father is not a hacker; he doesn't even know how to use Instagram. I sincerely apologize to Bitfinex for all the pressure I have caused them. I know what I did was wrong, but I did it anyway. Looking back at who I was then, I hate myself. I hate myself. For the past three years, I have been working hard to trace all assets and return them down to the last satoshi as required by my plea agreement, and I will continue to do so."

ChainCatcher News, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a man from Austin, Texas, was sentenced to two years in prison for falsely reporting the capital gains from the sale of $3.7 million in Bitcoin on his tax return. According to court documents and statements, Frank Richard Ahlgren III submitted false tax returns between 2017 and 2019, underreporting or failing to report $4 million in Bitcoin sales transactions, from which he made substantial profits. Regulatory provisions require all taxpayers to report any sales profits as well as gains or losses from the sale of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin on their tax returns.Lucy Tan, acting special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation Houston office, stated, "This case marks the first criminal tax prosecution solely related to cryptocurrency." In addition to imprisonment, the man is also required to pay $1,095,031 in restitution to the United States.

According to ChainCatcher news, monitored by The Data Nerd, a trader made $1.18 million in just one year by trading TRX.Last year, he accumulated 10 million TRX, worth $1.03 million, and sold all of it for $1.37 million seven months later. The profit was approximately $335,000.Last month, he purchased 10 million TRX for $1.64 million and sold all of it the following week for $1.88 million. The profit was about $240,000.Last week, he bought 6 million TRX for $1.25 million and sold all of it for $1.86 million just 30 minutes ago. The profit was approximately $610,000.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum founder Vitalik commented on a meme about the visions of L1 founders and VCs. He stated that if an L1 public chain founder casually mentions "ultimate goals" (northstar) that include phrases like "the chain should be fast (chaingofast)" but does not mention words like "robust," "anti-censorship," or "decentralization," then they undoubtedly reveal their true priorities.

ChainCatcher message, Sun Yuchen stated on social media: "Recently, I heard that the community has some concerns about my involvement in multiple projects including WBTC. I would like to clarify the following points:There have been no changes to WBTC compared to before. Audits are conducted in real-time and can be accessed via http://wbtc.network. The minting process is entirely managed by custodians Bitglobal and Bitgo according to the same procedures as before. Simply put, Bitglobal and Bitgo will not sign any unaudited transactions. The keys are still protected using the same Bitgo cold wallet technology and offline keys as before, with backups in multiple countries and regions.My personal involvement in WBTC is purely for strategic reasons. I do not control the private keys of the WBTC reserves, nor can I move any BTC reserves."

ChainCatcher news, according to CryptoPotato, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that a properly diversified BTC and ETH portfolio can yield greater returns and less downside volatility than simply investing in Bitcoin.Hougan presented three reasons why this might be a good idea. First is to diversify investments. Since predicting the future of cryptocurrencies is difficult, holding shares of both major assets simultaneously can provide investors with protection in case one of the assets falls out of favor or is outperformed by the other over time; second, the inherent differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum make it challenging to choose between the two, as Bitcoin's optimization goal is to become a "better currency," while Ethereum aims to be a "programmable currency" that can enable blockchain applications such as stablecoins and DeFi; finally, the historical performance of these two assets indicates that they work best when balanced within a portfolio.

ChainCatcher news, Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron criticized Layer3 by stating: "The existence of L3 is merely to siphon value from Ethereum and transfer that value to the L2 that builds L3. You don't need L3 for scaling, which is why Polygon Labs is not suitable for L3."

According to ChainCatcher news, official information shows that Invesco and Galaxy have submitted a third amended Bitcoin spot ETF prospectus (S-1 filing) to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which promises to focus on launching a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) created solely through cash.In this regard, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas pointed out that this is a clear signal indicating that the SEC prefers the cash creation method for initial ETF product approvals. Although the market is generally focused on whether BlackRock can persuade the SEC to accept the in-kind creation method, internal sources suggest that the SEC seems to only allow cash methods for the first batch of products.