Regulatory Realities Meet Institutional Adoption (2026-05-23)

Powell sworn in as Fed Chair

Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve Chairman Warsh said in his speech that he is grateful to U.S. President Trump.

We are at an important moment; we will fulfill this responsibility with abundant energy and a sense of mission; I am not naive and I am well aware of the challenges we face; the next few years will bring unprecedented prosperity; inflation can be reduced and the economy will grow strongly; we will lead a reform-oriented Federal Reserve; we will learn from past mistakes and successes.

[Foresight News]

Federal Reserve Chair Walsh: Will promote a reform-oriented central bank governance framework

On May 23, Kevin Warsh was officially sworn in as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In his inaugural address, Warsh stated that the United States is at a critical juncture, expressed his gratitude for President Trump’s trust, and pledged to perform his duties with great energy and a sense of mission.

He emphasized that the Federal Reserve will learn from past mistakes and successes to promote a reform-oriented central bank governance framework. Warsh also indicated that inflation is expected to decline further and the economy will maintain strong growth, predicting “unparalleled prosperity” for the U.S. in the coming years, while acknowledging that there are still many challenges ahead.

[PANews]

Ripple backs Squid’s $6M round to simplify cross-chain crypto

Ripple joined a $6M funding round for cross-chain infrastructure platform Squid. The platform raised the funds in a strategic round to build new consumer-facing products that simplify how users move assets across blockchains.

North Island Ventures led the round, with Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, Scenius Capital, Altos, and Arche Capital also participating. Angel investors including Axelar co-founder Georgios Vlachos, Enso Finance founder Connor Howe, and Constructive founder Dan Lynch joined as well. Squid’s pseudonymous co-founder Fig declined to disclose the valuation or round structure.

“The vision is to make directly accessing whatever you need in crypto as simple as the cross-chain swaps Squid already handles today,” Fig told The Block. Squid’s application allows users to move assets across fundamentally different blockchain ecosystems, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, and the XRP Ledger, in a single transaction. Squid serves as the official bridge partner for the XRP Ledger and operates a validator on the network, making Ripple’s investment a natural extension of an existing relationship.

Squid officially announced the funding on social media, stating: “We are proud to announce that Squid has raised $6M in funding round led by North Island Ventures and backed by strategic investors! Our new chapter has begun, with more news coming soon. Today we celebrate and say thank you. CHEERS 💫.”

Since launching in January 2023, Squid has processed over $6 billion in volume through more than 4 million transactions across over one million users. Its execution layer, Squid Intents, uses market makers to fill cross-chain transactions and settles them through trusted execution environments rather than requiring smart contract deployments on every chain. That architecture lets the platform support more than 100 networks.

The round brings Squid’s total funding to $13.5 million, following a $3.5 million seed round in 2023 and a $4 million strategic round in 2024. The team currently has around 20 people and is not hiring.

Ripple’s participation fits a broader pattern of infrastructure investments around the XRP Ledger. As crypto.news reported, JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ripple recently tested tokenized Treasury settlement on XRPL. Separately, the XRP Alliance launched earlier this month to build yield products for XRP holders. Squid expects to share more about its consumer roadmap in the coming months.

SpaceX’s First Mars Crew Includes a Crypto Billionaire and It’s Not Elon Musk

SpaceX named crypto billionaire Chun Wang to lead its first crewed Mars flyby. The F2Pool co-founder will pilot a roughly two-year mission beyond the Earth-Moon system, the first of its kind. The reveal aired during SpaceX’s live broadcast of Starship V3’s first launch attempt, which was scrubbed on Thursday. The company has not disclosed a target launch window for Mars or for an earlier lunar precursor flight.

Chun Wang co-founded F2Pool in 2013, and it remains one of Bitcoin’s top crypto mining pools. Hashrate Index places its current share at roughly 10% of network hashrate. That share feeds scrutiny of Bitcoin mining pool concentration, where four operators dominate block production after the halving. Wang has remained tied to F2Pool while pursuing other ventures.

His wealth, built through early Bitcoin mining and pool operations, has already financed private spaceflight. Wang funded and commanded Fram2 in 2025, the first crewed polar orbit, by selling part of his bitcoin holdings. That mission carried an all-civilian crew over both poles and made Wang the first Maltese citizen in space. The same playbook now powers his interplanetary push, after earlier SpaceX Bitcoin transfers tied crypto treasuries to space.

Speaking from Bouvet Island in a pre-recorded video, Wang said the flyby should make Mars feel reachable. He framed the trip as a step toward future landings, not a substitute. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch leaders and journalists provide expert insights.

The schedule now depends on Starship V3, whose maiden flight slipped after Thursday’s scrub. A second launch attempt is set for Friday evening. If Starship V3 reaches orbit, the Mars timeline moves with it. Until then, both the lunar precursor and Mars flyby remain open. Musk’s Mars ambitions continue drawing crypto wealth into deep space. Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens.

Crypto Mom Hester Peirce Excludes Synthetic Tokenized Stocks From SEC Exemption

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce narrowed the scope of the agency’s proposed innovation exemption for tokenized stocks. She ruled out synthetic instruments and limited the carve-out to digital representations of real equity shares. Her clarification settled a debate that erupted across tokenization firms, as a single word in her earlier post had triggered confusion over which on-chain products would qualify.

Peirce wrote on X that the tokenized stock framework would cover only listed equities. The carve-out applies to shares investors can already buy on the secondary market. She pointed to the SEC’s January staff statement on tokenization for context. The document separates issuer-sponsored tokens and custodial wrappers from synthetic instruments. Linked securities only provide economic exposure to the underlying stock, where holders face counterparty risk if the issuer fails, while voting rights and dividends typically disappear.

Galaxy Research’s Alex Thorn highlighted the concern, noting that every policy team and tokenization firm spent the morning parsing Peirce’s chosen word. The friction reflects how varied product designs have become. Many DeFi-native platforms rely on synthetic wrappers to bypass issuer cooperation and broker-dealer custody. The structure enables faster launches and composability with lending or derivatives protocols.

Peirce’s framing favors fully-backed tokenization over derivative exposure tokens. It echoes her earlier digital securities sandbox proposal, which emphasized controlled experimentation. The clarification arrives as SEC Chair Paul Atkins finalizes the broader Project Crypto framework. The exemption now reads as one narrow pilot rather than wholesale deregulation of on-chain equity trading.

Grayscale resubmits revised Hyperliquid ETF application, trading code GHYP

On May 23, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart posted that Grayscale has once again submitted an application for a Hyperliquid ETF, which is the 3rd amendment. The document shows that if the ETF is approved for listing, the trading ticker will be GHYP.

James Seyffart stated that this means the product is getting closer to launch, and there may eventually be three ETFs tracking $HYPE listed on U.S. exchanges.

[TechFlow]

Powell sworn in as Fed Chair

Kevin Warsh was sworn in as the Chair of the Federal Reserve.

[Odaily]

Insider: Anthropic is expected to complete its latest funding round of over $30 billion as early as next week.

On May 23, according to CaiLianShe, sources said that Anthropic is expected to complete its latest round of financing as early as next week, with a financing scale of more than $30.00B.

Anthropic expects its annualized revenue to exceed $50.00B next month.

[PANews]

MSX launches a limited-time deposit cashback promotion, aimed at helping users seamlessly start investing in US stocks on-chain.

RWA trading platform MSX Maitong has launched a limited-time deposit cashback campaign called “Become a Shareholder in a New Place, Deposit into MSX to Share a Grand Moving Gift of 10,000 USDT,” aimed at helping users seamlessly start investing in US stocks on-chain.

The activity period is from 12:00 on May 22, 2026 to 23:59 on May 31, 2026 (UTC+0), and the participants are mainly new registered users during the activity period.

The activity rules show that new users only need to complete the specified net deposit task and make any RWA transaction (regardless of the amount) during the activity period to be eligible to participate in sharing the total activity prize pool of 10,000 USDT, and a single person can receive a maximum reward of 300 USDT. It is reported that the number of rewards for this event is limited and will be given on a first-come, first-served basis.

[Odaily]

Why traders are turning to smart forex bots for currency market automation

Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.

Smart forex bots gain traction in 2026 as traders seek automated tools to monitor fast-moving currency markets. Trading manually is getting harder and harder to justify, which is why an increasing number of retail traders have started turning to automated systems instead. The BIS triennial survey for April 2025 put daily forex volume at $9.6 trillion – a 28% jump from three years earlier. Read on for a look at how automation tools are involved in this increase, and what the trade-offs are.

London opens while Tokyo is wrapping up, then New York kicks in a few hours later. For traders watching two or three currency pairs at once (which most are these days), that’s an impossible amount of screen time to cover properly. Prices on the major pairs can move fast — we’re talking seconds — and a lot of this happens while a trader is asleep or otherwise occupied. That’s why smart forex bots have jumped in popularity. In short, they watch the market so a person doesn’t have to. Whether they do that job well is a different kettle of fish, but the case for their use is pretty understandable.

Most of these tools are what’s called expert advisors — scripts written in MQL4 or MQL5 that get loaded into MetaTrader. How this works is an EA watches price data on a specific timeframe and checks it against coded rules. When those rules line up with what’s happening on the chart, it opens a position automatically. The whole idea is to take humans out of the moment-to-moment decisions.

Over the past year or two, a lot of these EAs have become narrower. Rather than trying to trade 8-10 pairs, some of them now only focus on one. GBP/USD is a common pick thanks to its liquidity windows — which are predictable — plus the fact that it responds in fairly consistent ways to Bank of England and Fed rate decisions. If an algorithm only has to learn one instrument’s behavior, it can be tweaked better than a system trying to do it all. A setup might look at patterns on the daily chart to figure out which way the trend is going, then drop down to the M15 to time entries. Smart forex bots doing this analysis can filter out a lot of what trips up manual traders.

But in practice, it depends how good the bot’s underlying logic is. Risk management is coded in as well, covering all manner of variables from stop-loss placement, to how big each position is relative to the account, and how many trades can be open at once. Some EAs also use a protocol where position size goes up after a losing trade. This recovers drawdowns faster when it works, but it can be nasty if a losing streak goes on longer than expected too. There’s always that tension with automated recovery — it looks great in a backtest, until a unique scenario arises.

Backtesting is what most traders don’t spend enough time on. Years of tick data can be fed through an EA (Tick Data Suite from Thinkberry SRL is commonly used for this) and the results give a picture of how the system would have handled various market conditions. The quality of that data really does affect the outcome though, and it’s not all created equal. Over-fitting is still an issue. An EA that’s been tuned on 2018–2024 GBPUSD data can look incredible on paper, sure. But the week conditions shift with a surprise tariff announcement, it’ll fall apart. Trading bots typically deliver inconsistent results during volatility. April 2025’s tariff-driven chaos is a case in point, as it was a very revealing stress test for a lot of bots.

Trust is getting better, at least. Most platforms now let traders look at performance logs before putting money in. This is a step up from the old days of screenshots. If an EA provider won’t put up audited results going back a couple of years, that’s not good enough anymore. Infrastructure is worth thinking about too, especially for strategies that work in tight windows. An EA on a home laptop won’t execute trades at the same speed as one on a VPS sitting near a data centre. For a lot of retail setups, this gap is fine, but for anything that depends on getting in and out within a few pips, it’s not.

None of this is going away any time soon. Pair-specialized EAs are putting up track records long enough to judge now, which wasn’t the case a few years ago. Bottom line, a bot won’t turn a bad strategy into a good one — but for traders who’ve already figured out the risk side of things, automation is less of a gimmick now than it used to be.

Disclosure: This content is provided by a third party. Neither crypto.news nor the author of this article endorses any product mentioned on this page. Users should conduct their own research before taking any action related to the company.

Cross-chain platform Squid completes $6.00 million strategic financing, led by North Island Ventures

Squid, a cross-chain infrastructure platform, has completed a $6.00 million strategic funding round led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, Borderless, and others.

Squid was initially incubated within the Axelar ecosystem before evolving into an independent platform. Since its launch in 2023, Squid claims to have processed over $6.00 billion in cross-chain transaction volume across more than 100 blockchains, executed over 4.00 million transactions, and attracted more than 1.00 million users.

Following this funding round, Squid’s total raised capital has reached $13.50 million. The company plans to use the new funds to launch consumer-facing products that further simplify how users access, manage, and utilize crypto assets across chains.

[Odaily]

Kalshi, Polymarket lose bids to halt Nevada and Washington gambling cases

Prediction market giants Kalshi and Polymarket lost their bids to stop gambling-related cases against them in the U.S. states of Nevada and Washington. Among orders issued on Thursday, a Ninth Circuit Panel denied requests from Kalshi and Polymarket to block lower-court rulings, sending the cases back to state court.

The judges said the companies failed to show they would succeed in arguing the cases instead belonged in federal court. It is another setback for federally regulated prediction market platforms that have argued the Commodities and Futures Trade Commission holds “exclusive jurisdiction” over event outcome contracts in areas like sports and politics.

Nevada and Washington argue that those contracts amount to unlicensed gambling under their state laws. Nevada’s cases against the Kalshi and Polymarket are largely over the platforms’ lack of gaming licenses, while Washington’s lawsuit centers on whether Kalshi offers illegal gambling products.

That does not automatically create federal jurisdiction simply because the companies raised federal preemption defenses, the court said. “The CEA preemption defense is an affirmative defense, which cannot by itself give rise to federal question jurisdiction,” the panel wrote in the orders.

The court also rejected Polymarket’s argument that it was operating under federal direction because it complied with CFTC oversight requirements. “Polymarket’s actions merely demonstrate its own compliance with federal law, which cannot alone show that it is acting under a federal officer,” the judges wrote.

Earlier this year, a New Jersey appeals court sided with Kalshi and upheld an injunction blocking the state’s efforts to stop sporting event outcome contracts. But courts in Ohio, Maryland and Nevada have been increasingly siding with state gambling regulators. In April, Nevada state Judge Jason Woodbury extended a ban on Kalshi’s sports-related contracts, calling the offerings “indistinguishable” from placing bets through licensed sportsbooks.

The CFTC and DOJ have meanwhile launched a counteroffensive against several states, including Minnesota, Illinois, Arizona and Connecticut, arguing that they are unlawfully interfering with federally regulated derivatives markets.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures. © 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

MARA security proxy reveals $4.3M CEO protection spend

MARA security spending reached $4.3 million in 2025, including $430,000 to armor CEO Fred Thiel’s vehicle. MARA Holdings’ 2026 proxy filing disclosed $4.3 million in total personal security spending for CEO Fred Thiel in 2025, including $430,000 specifically for vehicle armoring. The scale reflects a broader industry response to a wave of physical attacks targeting crypto executives.

Physical attacks on crypto holders rose 75% in 2025, reaching 72 confirmed incidents and $41 million in known losses according to CertiK data. Jameson Lopp has tracked a roughly threefold increase in wrench attacks between 2023 and 2025. Wrench attacks are physical coercions in which attackers force victims to surrender digital assets or private keys. MARA currently holds 38,689 BTC, making CEO wealth a publicly visible and targetable security concern.

Power is becoming the foundation of modern compute. Join $MARA Tuesday, May 26 at 2:00 p.m. ET for a live X Spaces fireside with @fgthiel, @theRealSalKhan, and Duncan Dickerson on MARA’s digital infrastructure approach. Hosted by @RobSamuelsIR and @OG_Advisors. Set a reminder:… pic.twitter.com/KLlJfmqrJ5

Crypto.news has tracked MARA’s Q1 2026 results including a $1.3 billion net loss and its pivot toward AI infrastructure. Crypto.news has also reported on MARA selling $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to fund that transition. The MARA proxy also noted that the company’s annual meeting will be held virtually on June 18, 2026. CEO Thiel’s 2025 total compensation including security will be voted on by shareholders at that meeting.

Coinbase spent approximately $7.6 million on Armstrong security in 2025, more than 20% above the prior year and higher than most Wall Street bank CEOs. Gemini disclosed $400,000 per month for the Winklevoss twins, roughly $4.8 million annually. The security surge is concentrated at firms with large, publicly visible Bitcoin treasuries. The spending gap between crypto and traditional finance reflects how public blockchain holdings create a searchable threat surface that traditional bank executives do not face.

At the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas last month, high-profile speakers moved through the venue with personal bodyguards. The Bitcoin price page tracks holdings data that makes executive wealth publicly visible and therefore targetable.

[Crypto.news]

AI ETFs 2.0: Harbor capital targets Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI in ‘Lab’ funds

Harbor Capital is trying to slice the AI boom into lab-branded trades, filing for a suite of active “Lab ETFs” tied to Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI and xAI ecosystems. Harbor Capital has filed for five actively managed “Lab ETFs” that each target the ecosystems around Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI and xAI SpaceXAI, marking one of the first attempts to carve the AI boom into lab specific public market products.

According to a Harbor ETF Trust supplement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the firm has been retooling its active lineup and now plans a family of generative AI themed strategies that extend its existing Harbor Scientific Alpha franchise into lab specific products. While the detailed prospectus text for each Lab ETF is not yet public, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart noted that the funds are designed to hold public companies whose revenue, strategic alignment or product roadmaps are tightly linked to a given lab’s models, tools and distribution.

In practice, that likely means an Anthropic Lab ETF would tilt toward backers and heavy integrators of Claude models, while an OpenAI Lab ETF would lean into Microsoft, key chip suppliers and listed firms that have embedded GPT into their stacks, with similar logic for Google DeepMind, Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI SpaceXAI ecosystem. MediaCrypto, reacting to the filing on X, captured the bigger picture by arguing that “AI ecosystem ETFs are the new sector ETFs,” adding that “the financialization of AI is happening at the same speed as the financialization of crypto,” as providers race to wrap narrow themes in liquid, listed vehicles.

That race is already under way: KraneShares’ Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF AGIX, for example, offers direct exposure to Anthropic and SpaceX via secondary market stakes, while a separate wave of funds has experimented with special purpose vehicles to hold pre IPO positions in xAI and other private labs. Harbor’s lab specific approach lands as frontier AI houses themselves face deepening regulatory and geopolitical scrutiny, mirroring the way major crypto issuers and exchanges were pulled into national security and consumer protection debates once they scaled.

The Financial Times recently reported that Google DeepMind, Microsoft backed OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI agreed to let US authorities conduct national security reviews of their most advanced models before release, underscoring how concentrated and systemically important these labs have become. At the same time, former OpenAI staffers have warned in a public letter that xAI’s “poor safety record” represents a set of “unpriced risks” for investors in SpaceX’s anticipated $75 billion initial public offering, a reminder that lab ecosystems now sprawl across space, defense and critical infrastructure.

For crypto natives, the Harbor Lab ETFs read like a familiar playbook: sector specific exchange traded products that channel retail and institutional flows into a narrow technology thesis, not unlike how Bitcoin and Ethereum funds gave tradfi investors liquid exposure to previously opaque on chain risk. As coverage of crypto market outlook and macro driven flows into Bitcoin (BTC) have shown, once Wall Street builds an ETF wrapper, narratives and flows can become self reinforcing, with index inclusions and passive buying shaping both valuations and regulatory focus.

If the Harbor products launch and gather assets, they could accelerate that same feedback loop in AI, funnelling capital into whichever labs dominate each narrative cycle and further entrenching a handful of quasi oligopolistic players whose models already underpin everything from trading algorithms to chatbots used by crypto exchanges. Longer term, the segmentation of AI risk into Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, OpenAI and xAI SpaceXAI “buckets” could also create new correlation patterns for digital assets, as traders increasingly model how shocks to a given lab whether a safety scandal, a national security block or an IPO surge bleed into AI focused tokens and into crypto infrastructure that leans on those models.

[MediaCrypto]