The GENIUS Act, signed into law last year, established the first federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. Among other requirements, issuers must hold reserves in cash, short-term Treasury securities and certain government money market funds.
The legislation has created an opportunity for traditional asset managers to offer regulated vehicles that stablecoin issuers can use to manage those reserves while generating yield.
Fidelity’s fund will invest in U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds with maturities of 93 days or less, cash, overnight repurchase agreements backed by Treasuries and other government money market funds that comply with the law.
“Fidelity has a longstanding history in fixed income and money markets, making us uniquely positioned to offer a money market fund for stablecoin issuers that is compliant with the new GENIUS-Act legislation,” said Robin Foley, Fidelity’s head of fixed income, in a statement.
While Fidelity’s announcement focused on reserve management, State Street framed its launch as part of a broader push into tokenized finance through partnerships with crypto firms such as Anchorage Digital and products designed for onchain liquidity management.
The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady at its June meeting, but signaled a shift toward tighter policy under new Chair Kevin Warsh, marking a decisive turn away from expectations of near-term easing.
The Federal Open Market Committee left the federal funds rate unchanged at a range of 3.50% to 3.75%, in line with market consensus. The policy statement and updated projections, however, pointed to renewed concern over inflation and a growing willingness among policymakers to raise rates later this year.
Officials now expect the benchmark rate to reach 3.8% by the end of 2026, up from a 3.4% projection in March. Rate expectations for 2027 and 2028 also moved higher, signaling that restrictive policy may remain in place for longer than previously anticipated.
The shift comes as inflation pressures persist across the U.S. economy. The Fed now forecasts headline personal consumption expenditures inflation at 3.6% for 2026, with core inflation at 3.3%, both above prior estimates.
Policymakers pointed to supply shocks tied to the Middle East conflict and elevated energy costs as key drivers.
“Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace despite elevated uncertainty,” the Fed said in its statement, while reaffirming its commitment to restoring price stability.
Bitcoin’s price has dropped after the announcement, trading near $64,000.
Kevin Warsh takes the helm as Fed chair
The meeting marked Warsh’s first as Fed chair following his confirmation last month. His arrival appears to have influenced both tone and communication strategy. The post-meeting statement was shorter and omitted language that had previously suggested a bias toward rate cuts.
All voting members supported the decision, with no dissent for the first time in a year.
Updated projections showed that nine officials now expect at least one rate increase by year-end. In March, none had forecast a hike in 2026.
Futures markets moved in response, with traders pricing in a quarter-point increase by October and a high probability of a second move by early 2027.
Treasury yields rose following the announcement, with the two-year yield climbing to around 4.14%. Equities and crypto assets also reacted. Bitcoin fell from near $66,000 to around $64,000 before stabilizing, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 each dropped close to 1%, erasing earlier gains.
A ‘good family fight’
Warsh used his first press conference to frame the decision as part of a broader shift in how the Fed approaches policy and communication. He described the meeting as a “good family fight” and emphasized that the central bank is entering a “new chapter.”
He declined to provide forward guidance on the rate path and reiterated skepticism toward the Fed’s traditional use of projections. Warsh did not submit his own rate forecast, underscoring his long-standing criticism of the dot plot as a policy tool.
Instead, he signaled openness to changes in how the Fed interprets economic data. Warsh noted that many official indicators rely on survey-based methods that may lag real-time conditions. He suggested that alternative data sources and improved analytics could play a larger role in future policy decisions.
On the economic outlook, Warsh pointed to mixed signals on how restrictive current policy is. He cited weakness in housing as evidence of tight financial conditions, while noting that strength in broader markets complicates that assessment.
He also highlighted the growing impact of artificial intelligence on the economy, calling it one of the most significant structural shifts in decades. The Fed has established a task force to study how AI could affect productivity, employment, and the transmission of monetary policy.
The policy pivot comes amid political pressure for lower rates, though Warsh stressed the importance of central bank independence. President Donald Trump has called for easing in recent months, but has also stated that the Fed should act without direct influence from the White House.
For markets, the message from June’s meeting is clear: the Fed no longer sees a path toward imminent rate cuts. With inflation above target and growth holding firm, the risk of further tightening has returned to the forefront.
Congressional negotiators folded a statutory ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency into the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, blocking any Fed-issued retail digital dollar until December 31, 2030. The text now heads back to the Senate floor.
Congressional negotiators have folded a statutory ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency into a bipartisan housing package, blocking any Fed-issued retail digital dollar until December 31, 2030. The text is the most durable legislative CBDC prohibition yet assembled in Washington.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, House Financial Services Chair French Hill, and Ranking Member Maxine Waters released updated bill text Tuesday for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, codified as H.R. 6644. The package combines Senate, House, and White House priorities and now returns to the Senate floor for final action. Warren called the package “the biggest housing bill in more than 30 years.”
The CBDC Provision
The CBDC section amends the Federal Reserve Act. It states that the Fed “may not issue or create” a central bank digital currency, or any substantially similar asset, either directly or through a bank or other intermediary. The prohibition runs through December 31, 2030, unless Congress acts again.
The bill defines a CBDC as a dollar-denominated digital asset that is U.S. currency, a direct liability of the Federal Reserve System, and widely available to the public. The definition keeps the restriction tight on a Fed-issued retail product while leaving wholesale settlement experiments and private-sector digital dollars outside its reach.
Stablecoins Get a Carveout
The updated text exempts a digital currency that is dollar-denominated, open, permissionless, and private, with privacy protections comparable to physical U.S. currency. That language is designed to keep private stablecoins outside the freeze.
The carveout slots in alongside the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework, which is moving through enforcement, and the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, which is still grinding through the Senate. Issuers building toward dollar-pegged tokens on payment rails, including the eight chains recently lit up by Mastercard for card settlement, would compete for years without any Fed-issued digital dollar in the same lane.
Getting To The Deal
The Senate first attached the CBDC ban to the housing package in March, passing it 89-10. The House cleared its amended version 396-13 in May. The chambers spent the months since reconciling differences over institutional homebuyer limits, disaster-recovery block grants, and community banking provisions.
To seal the deal, the Senate accepted a three-year sunset for a disaster-recovery block grant program and adopted House measures including nine community banking bills and language limiting institutional homebuyers. Hill said in the Senate Banking statement that he looks forward to “President Trump signing it into law.” Waters said the legislation includes more than 50 housing and banking provisions Democrats fought to secure.
The White House Posture
The anti-CBDC provision sits alongside an executive backdrop that already disfavors a digital dollar. Trump’s January 2025 executive order on digital financial technology barred federal agencies from establishing, issuing, or promoting CBDCs except where required by law. The order cited threats to individual privacy and U.S. sovereignty as the rationale.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has reiterated that a Fed digital dollar is off the table under the current administration. The statutory ban would harden that policy into law and outlast the current term.
What’s Still In Play
Some House conservatives want a permanent prohibition rather than the 2030 sunset. The Hill reported that Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, argues “CBDCs are bad for everyone” and has pushed for the ban to be made permanent. Their leverage in the next round will depend on whether Senate leadership opens the text for further amendment.
The provision also revives parts of the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, the standalone bill championed by House Majority Whip Tom Emmer that cleared the House in earlier sessions but stalled in the Senate. Folding the language into must-pass housing legislation is what gives the current path its durability.
If the package passes in its current form, the U.S. would impose a time-limited statutory bar on a Fed-issued retail digital dollar, and Congress would retain authority to extend, harden, or let lapse the ban before December 31, 2030. The updated text now heads back to the Senate floor.
Congressman Nick Begich (R-AK) sat down with the Bitcoin Policy Institute at PubKey in New York for a wide-ranging conversation that touched on his path from startup founder to Capitol Hill, his landmark American Reserve Modernization Act, and the dual promise and peril of artificial intelligence.
The interview offered a window into one of Congress’s more technologically fluent members — a distinction Begich traces not to his political career but to the decades before it.
Begich’s resume reads unlike most of his colleagues. After undergraduate studies in entrepreneurship at Baylor University and an MBA from Indiana University focused on information technology and decision sciences, he spent time at Ford Motor Company before returning to Alaska to found a software development firm.
Starting with a credit card and a laptop, he built the company to roughly 150 employees across three countries, with a practice centered on early-stage startups — helping founders transform PowerPoint pitch decks into fundable products, often in exchange for equity stakes.
That background, he said, shapes how he operates in Washington. “Congress can be a frustrating place,” Begich said. “You’re not a CEO. You can’t say, ‘We’re doing this.’”
He drew a parallel between the consensus-building required in the House and the kind of obstacle navigation that defines startup life — facing capital constraints, entrenched competitors, and perpetual skepticism from investors. The difference, he noted, is that in Congress the runway is measured in election cycles, not funding rounds.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Congressman Nick Begich says he introduced a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve bill because the world reserve currency “may not be the U.S. dollar forever.” 👀
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) June 17, 2026
The case for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
Begich entered Bitcoin in early 2013, operating on the thesis that it could serve as a hedge against dollar depreciation for his business.
He lost roughly 440 Bitcoin in the Mt. Gox collapse — “I got Goxed,” he said — but emerged from the bankruptcy process with what he described as a positive outcome, and his conviction in the asset intact.
That conviction is now law in proposal form. The American Reserve Modernization Act, or ARMA, which attracted significant co-sponsorship, would create a mechanism for the federal government to retain Bitcoin seized through law enforcement rather than auction it off.
The idea, Begich said, stems from a simple question: if Bitcoin can function as a reserve asset for a private company, what could it do for a government?
His argument rests on two properties he considers non-negotiable for reserve assets: scarcity and diffusion. Gold, he said, satisfies both — it is hard to produce, and broad ownership has built consensus around its value over centuries.
Bitcoin, he argued, is approaching that same status within the digital asset ecosystem, representing close to 60 percent of total cryptocurrency market capitalization.
“Once those network effects are in play,” Begich said, “the earlier you are to that cycle, the more advantaged you will be.”
He also framed ARMA as an insurance policy — not a bet on Bitcoin’s dominance, but a hedge against the possibility that the dollar does not remain the world’s reserve currency.
“Every 93 years on average, that reserve currency changes hands,” he noted, pointing to historical transitions through Portugal, Spain, France, and Britain. Holding gold is an acknowledgment of that reality, he argued. Bitcoin should be viewed in the same light.
AI: Promise and peril
The conversation shifted to artificial intelligence, where Begich was measured but direct about the stakes. He described two competing visions of an AI future: one defined by abundance — cheaper healthcare, higher productivity, broader access to economic opportunity — and one defined by displacement, where the removal of human roles at scale creates what he called “a disintermediation of purpose.”
On the question of open-source AI models, Begich pushed back against the idea that openness is an unqualified good at advanced capability levels. He cited the logic behind keeping nuclear and certain biotechnology research restricted — some asymmetric risks, once released, cannot be contained.
“The genie is out of the box,” he said of AI broadly, but argued that the full open-sourcing of frontier models, particularly post-AGI systems, hands negative actors a tool with no practical upper bound on the harm they can cause.
He was pointed in his characterization of China’s open-source model strategy, suggesting it is less a gesture of openness than an economic tool — a way to undermine the investment case for American AI development and collapse the domestic ecosystem from the outside.
Two US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political aisle are backing a resolution that “under no circumstances should Samuel [SBF] Bankman-Fried receive executive clemency, including a pardon or commutation.”
In a resolution to be introduced Wednesday, Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis and Democratic Senator Rubén Gallego warned that should US President Donald Trump grant SBF’s request for a pardon, it would “erase [his] conviction […] weaken deterrence, and send a deeply damaging message that perpetrators of large-scale financial fraud can escape permanent accountability.” The resolution would be non-binding, as a US president’s pardon power is enshrined in the Constitution.
“[The US Senate] affirms that the 25-year sentence imposed upon Bankman-Fried reflects the extraordinary scale and deliberateness of his crimes, his lack of remorse, and the catastrophic harm inflicted upon millions of victims, and that such a sentence serves the interests of justice,” read the resolution.
Source: Senator Rubén Gallego
The resolution came after Bankman-Fried formally applied for a pardon from Trump of his conviction on seven felony counts related to the misuse of FTX user funds. Last week, a federal appeals court upheld that conviction and sentence, leaving his only legal path forward a presidential pardon or an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 following the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX a year earlier, which resulted in investor losses totaling billions of dollars. He was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Related: Onchain, in court: What happened in crypto legal news this week
Following his sentencing in March 2024, the former CEO posted several messages to social media aligning with Trump’s political agenda, including US military actions in Venezuela and Iran. However, in a January interview with the New York Times, the president said he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried.
Source: Sam Bankman-Fried
Cointelegraph sought comment from Gallego’s office but did not receive an immediate response. A spokesperson for Lummis said that the senator “wants him to know that her and her colleagues think Mr. Fried is right where he belongs” by introducing the resolution.
Other FTX figures still serving time
Although some of the former executives of the defunct cryptocurrency exchange were sentenced to time served in exchange for their cooperation and testimony at SBF’s trial, one is still in federal prison, and another was released earlier this year.
Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, received a two-year sentence in 2024 and was given an early release in January after 14 months. FTX former engineering director Nishad Singh and co-founder Gary Wang were both sentenced to time served. All testified against SBF at trial.
Ryan Salame, the co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, was sentenced to 90 months in prison related to unlawful political contributions and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. His wife, Michelle Bond — though not an FTX employee — was recently indicted on charges related to her 2022 run for Congress allegedly financed with illegal campaign contributions from the crypto exchange.
Magazine: The end of anon? AI could unmask crypto’s hidden identities
The Federal Reserve left its benchmark fed funds rate range unchanged at 3.50%-3.75% on Wednesday, a move markets had expected nearly unanimously.
“Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace despite elevated uncertainty that owes, in part, to the conflict in the Middle East,” the press release said. “Inflation remains elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy.”
“The Committee will deliver price stability,” it added.
Policymakers are increasingly lean towards a rate hike this year, expecting the fed funds rate at 3.8% at the end of 2026, versus a 3.4% in the March projection. Easier monetary policy will not come anytime soon as they expect rates at 3.6% for 2027 and 3.4% in 2028, both higher than their previous guidance.
They also see higher inflation, with personal consumption expenditure (PCE) rising 3.6 this year and core PCE inflation at 3.3%, compared to a forecast of 2.7%-2.7% in March.
Trading around $66,000 earlier, bitcoin BTC$65,388.42 fell to $64,800 in the minutes following the decision, and recently stabilized around $65,300. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both dropped nearly 1%, erasing earlier gains.
The role of benchmark indexes is to describe and measure markets. Providing transparent rules, documented governance, independent oversight and clear procedures under stress requires rigor and discipline. Index providers adopt these disciplines voluntarily, drawing on standards refined over decades in other asset classes.
A new report from the Index Industry Association examines how digital asset indexes are evolving to meet these expectations — and must keep evolving as stablecoins and tokenized assets enter the picture. Transparency is rarely the loudest part of a market, but it tends to be the part that lasts.
Principled Perspectives
One market, not two: CoinDesk’s Dave LaValle on crypto and TradFi converging
The conversation about crypto in client portfolios has shifted in the past six months, and advisors who still think in terms of the old framework risk being caught flat-footed. In a new interview with The Wealth Advisor, Dave LaValle, president of CoinDesk Data & Indices, laid out why.
The clearest signal came from Wall Street. “The Morgan Stanley team launched their bitcoin ETF in early April, and a little bit more than a month in, and they’re over $230 million in assets,” LaValle said. “To amass $230 million in basically a month, it’s kind of insane.”
He framed crypto as a disruptive technology that needs two things to take hold: the tech itself, which exists, and regulatory clarity. The GENIUS Act has set a framework for stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasuries, and the CLARITY Act, addressing market structure, could reach a vote “sometime in the next month or two.”
The crypto industry is pushing back against a new tax law in the state of Illinois that enacts a 0.2% tax on businesses transacting or storing crypto for customers in the state, but it may be too late to change it in the short-term.
The law enacts a 0.2% tax on “receiving any digital asset business activity,” according to the text of the bill, which defined digital asset business activity as “any single occurrence of exchanging, transferring or storing a digital asset as part of a business or on behalf of a customer.”
The tax applies to firms that are based in Illinois or provide services to residents of the state with total gross receipts of at least $100,000. The tax is expected to raise around $60 million, said a person following the process.
The provision was added last-minute to Illinois’ broader budget bill, according to two people following the matter, and was approved by Governor J.B. Pritzker on June 16, according to the bill’s status page. The legislation creates a roughly $56 billion budget for the 2027 fiscal year and also includes new taxes on fantasy sports, social media and other areas, ABC 7 reported.
Long before bitcoin existed, Ricardo Salinas Pliego was learning about hard money at the family dinner table.
Born in Mexico City in 1955, Salinas is the founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, a corporate conglomerate with interests in telecommunications, media, financial services, and retail. In 1987, he took over from his father as CEO of Grupo Elektra — originally a family-owned furniture manufacturing company founded in 1906 by his great-grandfather — and refocused it on appliances, electronics, and consumer credit for Mexico’s emerging middle class.
Today, his empire includes Banco Azteca, TV Azteca, and dozens of other enterprises spanning the country.
But Salinas’ financial philosophy was shaped well before any of that. He traces his deep belief in fiat devaluation to the era when President Richard Nixon severed the U.S. dollar’s direct convertibility into gold, ending the gold standard.
“The conversation at the family table, way back then, with my grandfather and my father was always about gold,” he told CoinDesk in a recent interview, adding that “the famous fiat fraud committed by Richard Nixon” was a constant topic of discussion at home. The Salinas family, long involved in gold and silver mining, had direct skin in the game.
Salinas: Bitcoin is unseizable
Those early lessons hardened into conviction. Salinas has argued for years that bitcoin is unseizable and can be transferred instantly worldwide — advantages he sees as superior to both fiat money and the gold standard, which he says “has always been subject to governmental intervention.”
Salinas didn’t arrive at bitcoin all at once. His bitcoin allocation has grown dramatically — from just 10% of his investment portfolio in 2020 to 70% today, a trajectory that mirrors his deepening conviction in the asset over half a decade.
In June 2021, Salinas publicly announced he was working with his bank, Banco Azteca, to make it the first in Mexico to accept bitcoin — a bold move that drew both applause from the crypto community and swift pushback from Mexican financial regulators, who issued warnings about virtual assets. The banking ambitions stalled, but his personal conviction only grew.
That same year, his hunger for bitcoin exposure led him into one of the stranger episodes of his financial career. Salinas wanted to put $400 million into bitcoin in 2021 but didn’t have the liquid cash readily available, so he borrowed against his shares in Grupo Elektra — pledging $416 million as collateral for a $150 million loan.
His instincts about bitcoin were correct. The only problem was the lender turned out to be a fraud: a firm calling itself Astor Capital Fund, whose CEO “Thomas Astor-Mellon” introduced himself on a video call from what appeared to be a yacht, but was actually a man with prior convictions for forging prescriptions and stealing jewelry.
Even that painful episode didn’t shake him loose. At Bitcoin 2022, Salinas gave a keynote address discussing what he calls the “fiat fraud” — his term for centralized institutions that assure users of generational wealth while quietly destroying their currency’s purchasing power. He told the crowd his conviction was personal, not theoretical: “It’s one thing to understand a theoretical problem, and another to have lived it in your skin.”
The 70% bet — and why you should mortgage your house to buy Bitcoin
As of today, Salinas has placed approximately 70% of his investment portfolio into BTC — a figure he discussed in the interview with CoinDesk.
The allocation dwarfs what most wealth advisers would sanction. But Salinas has never been one for conventional wisdom. He is so convinced of BTC’s long-term superiority that he persuaded his own wife to act.
“I know this is a controversial topic, but I convinced my wife to mortgage the house that she has and take a loan to buy bitcoin,” he said. And she did.
He wants ordinary investors to think similarly. “For most people, the biggest investment, their nest egg, is their home equity,” he said. “Find a way to transform that into some kind of bitcoin exposure to a larger or to a smaller degree.”
His argument is grounded in a straightforward historical comparison. In January 2016, bitcoin hovered near $400 and the average Central London home cost roughly $1.6 million — about 4,000 bitcoin. With London property prices little changed a decade on, that same home would now cost fewer than 30 bitcoin. For Salinas, that comparison is all the proof anyone needs.
“It’s an asymmetrical bet to the upside,” he told CoinDesk. “The more people find out about bitcoin, the more demand there will be.”
When asked on the price predictions of fellow BTC bulls like Cathie Wood and Michael Saylor — who have suggested bitcoin could eventually reach seven figures — Salinas was uncharacteristically brief.
“So it will be a million dollars,” he said. “I just don’t know when.”
Crypto exchange Bybit has been added to the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Investor Alert List, a registry designed to warn consumers about entities that may be wrongly perceived as licensed or regulated by the financial watchdog.
Bybit Fintech Limited and Bybit appeared on the MAS alert list on Wednesday, although the regulator did not provide a specific reason for their inclusion.
Bybit Fintech Limited, the corporate entity behind the exchange, appears on the MAS Investor Alert List website. Source: MAS
According to MAS, the Investor Alert List identifies entities and investment offers that may create the false impression of being licensed, authorized, regulated or registered by the authority, or whose investment offerings may be mistakenly viewed as having received MAS approval.
Based on publicly available information, Bybit is not licensed or regulated by MAS. Cointelegraph reached out to a Bybit spokesperson for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Although Bybit was founded by Singaporean entrepreneur Ben Zhou, the exchange does not operate in the city-state. Singapore is listed among the company’s “Service Restricted Countries” on its website, meaning users in the jurisdiction are not permitted to access its services.
Singapore maintains strict oversight of crypto sector
Singapore has cemented its position as a leading crypto hub, ranking among the world’s top jurisdictions for decentralized finance and institutional digital asset services in Chainalysis’ 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. Retail crypto adoption, however, ranked significantly lower.
The MAS has continued to take an assertive approach to industry oversight. In May, the regulator revoked the Major Payment Institution license of crypto liquidity provider Bsquared Technology after uncovering what it described as serious regulatory breaches, including weaknesses in risk management and conflict-of-interest policies.
MAS also said the company had provided false or misleading information on multiple occasions, from its initial license application through a subsequent inspection.
Separately, Singapore police charged former Hodlnaut CEO Zhu Juntao in May with six counts of fraud for allegedly misleading customers about the crypto lender’s exposure to the 2022 Terra ecosystem collapse.
Hodlnaut, a Singapore-based crypto lending platform that once served tens of thousands of users, suspended withdrawals in August 2022 following the Terra implosion and was later ordered to liquidate.
The regulator placed Binance.com on its Investor Alert List in 2021, The Straits Times reported at the time. However, a search on Wednesday of the list did not show any mention of Binance among 910 records in the query.
Related: Singapore Gulf Bank adds stablecoin mint and redeem for 24/7 settlement
