News
Payward, Kraken's parent, filed May 8 for an OCC national trust charter that would create Payward National Trust Company — a federally regulated crypto custodian. Combined with its Fed master account and Wyoming SPDI, Kraken would hold the most complete banking stack of any crypto-native exchange.
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The Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise of May 1, 2026 drew a legal line that will reshape every stablecoin product in the US. Here's what it actually says, why banks pushed so hard for it, and what it means for your Coinbase rewards, PayPal PYUSD, and DeFi protocols like Aave.
Editor Pick
In six days, the SEC rewrote its onchain rulebook, Kraken's parent filed for a federal trust charter, and the Senate scheduled the CLARITY Act markup. This is not coincidence — it's the simultaneous assembly of institutional crypto's regulatory plumbing.
AI
Cloudflare cuts 1,100 jobs — 20% of its workforce — on the same day it posts record Q1 2026 revenue of $639.8M (+34% YoY), citing a 600% surge in internal AI use. It's the starkest proof yet that AI-era growth and mass white-collar displacement are now the same event.
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Kraken's parent Payward filed for an OCC national trust charter on May 8, 2026 — the 12th crypto firm in under six months to do so. Here's what the charter actually does, what it doesn't, and why institutional custody hinges on this one federal license.
AI
SEC Chair Paul Atkins, speaking at SCSP AI+ Expo on May 8, framed crypto and AI as one regulatory challenge — the first time a sitting Chair has proposed unified rulemaking for onchain exchanges, AI-driven settlement, broker definitions, and crypto vaults in a single agenda.
News
The Senate Banking Committee has set May 14 for a markup vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — a bill that would split SEC/CFTC jurisdiction, codify stablecoin yield rules, and hand crypto its first statutory rulebook. With Memorial Day recess looming, this may be the last on-ramp.
Funding
Payward, Kraken's $20B parent, agreed to acquire Hong Kong stablecoin payments firm Reap Technologies for $600M — its first Asia infrastructure deal. Reap nearly tripled revenue in 2025 and spans HK, Singapore, Mexico, Africa. The move plants a regulated payments stack at the core of Kraken's pre...
Funding
Kalshi's $1B Series F at a $22B valuation — doubling in five months — arrives as institutional trading volume surged 800% and annualized volume tripled to $178B. The raise signals prediction markets are transitioning from retail novelty into regulated Wall Street infrastructure, with Morgan Stanl...
Web3
The White House has set a July 4 target to pass landmark crypto market structure legislation — an aggressive timeline that would hand the U.S. its first comprehensive digital-asset regulatory framework and reshape how tokens are classified, traded, and overseen by federal agencies.
AI
Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro's administration filed a lawsuit on May 5 against Character Technologies Inc., seeking to bar its AI bots from posing as licensed medical professionals. An undercover state investigation found a chatbot named 'Emilie' claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist, provided a...
AI
Google, Microsoft, and xAI have agreed to submit frontier AI models to the US Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation for pre-release evaluation — joining OpenAI and Anthropic, which have participated in the program since 2024. The move expands an informal safety review into ...