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Best’s Special Report: Most insurers expect to leverage AI though data, security challenges may impede fast adoption

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Best’s Special Report: Most insurers expect to leverage AI though data, security challenges may impede fast adoption

An AM Best survey of carriers and managing general agents (MGAs) to gauge the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the insurance industry found that while nearly 60% of respondents expect AI to significantly transform their business models within the next one to three years, data readiness, security and privacy and integration with legacy systems are their largest impediments in deploying AI within their organizations.

The survey results can be found in a new Best’s Segment Report, titled, “Artificial Intelligence Appears to be Ready, But Most Insurers Are Not.” According to the results from more than 150 respondents, made up of rated insurers and MGAs with a Best’s Performance Assessment, insurers are rapidly deploying AI, with 41% stating that their organization is actively using AI across core business areas and nearly 20% agreeing or strongly agreeing that their organization is at an advanced stage of implementation. A majority of respondents said their company has a formal AI policy in place. The survey also found that insurers are less concerned with change resistance and third-party model risk but viewed the potential for breaches of AI systems by bad actors, or data readiness, as significant challenges to AI implementation.

“AI systems are heavily dependent on high-quality, clean and well-structured data. Legacy systems can create significant barriers when implementing AI because they simply were not built for this type of data integration. Many of these legacy systems are outdated and store data in inconsistent formats lacking standardization,” said Kaitlin Piasecki, industry research analyst, AM Best.

Sridhar Manyem, senior director, Industry Research and Analytics, AM Best, added: “AI systems can produce unreliable outputs when underlying data is of poor quality, fragmented across legacy systems, insufficiently governed or lacking appropriate context. Insurers that have invested in modernizing their legacy systems and have robust data governance will find it easier to integrate AI into their workflow.”

Approximately two thirds of respondents said they seek to increase their AI investment in the next 12-24 months, with improving employee productivity, lowering operating costs and assisting with underwriting functions for risk selection and pricing leading goals sought by insurers. For those that have implemented AI solutions, 63% of respondents reported a small improvement in workforce productivity and satisfaction, with 11% reporting a significant improvement. Overall, 31% of the respondents said there would not be any material change to staffing with 37% expecting employees to be redeployed to higher-value work.

“Given that this technology is still relatively new, a return on investment in AI would be difficult to measure at this stage; the cost benefits will likely take years to materialize,” said Jason Hopper, associate director, Industry Research and Analytics, AM Best. “Insurance roles, especially those that require judgment, critical thinking and accountability, were ones respondents felt AI wouldn’t yet be able to fully replicate.”

Why EBay Should Ignore GameStop And Use Bitcoin To Save $1.2 Billion In Transaction Costs

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Why EBay Should Ignore GameStop And Use Bitcoin To Save $1.2 Billion In Transaction Costs

Ryan Cohen’s unsolicited $55.5 billion unsolicited bid to absorb eBay into GameStop has the corporate world doing a double-take. Cohen’s pitch sounds seductive on paper: he promises to slash $2 billion in bloated overhead and instantly rocket eBay’s diluted GAAP earnings per share from $4.26 to $7.79 in year one.

But behind the flashy presentation lies a massive hurdle: a highly speculative cash-and-stock structure that requires taking on $20 billion in new debt from TD Securities and drastically diluting GameStop’s own stock to buy a company four times its size. Analysts and investors are deeply skeptical, which is why eBay’s stock continues to trade well below Cohen’s $125 offer price.

eBay’s board doesn’t need a smaller, meme-backed retailer to step in and aggressively strip its budget to find efficiency. Instead, they can look at a real-world blueprint proving that true operational efficiency isn’t found by gutting marketing, it’s found by upgrading the payment layer.

By taking a page out of the broader digital asset ecosystem and looking at how legacy brand Steak ‘n Shake just revolutionized its business model, eBay can unlock a massive structural victory completely on its own terms.

The Proof of Concept: The Steak ‘n Shake Case Study

When the national burger chain Steak ‘n Shake activated Bitcoin Lightning Network payments across its locations, it wasn’t just a marketing gimmick. The real-world data completely flipped the script on corporate retail finance:

The Opportunity Cost: What This Math Means for eBay

The Payments Blindspot

eBay is an e-commerce titan, facilitating massive scale across its global marketplace. In its fiscal year 2025 financial results, eBay reported steady momentum, yet it remains anchored to traditional payment rails. Because eBay runs its own internal payment infrastructure (eBay Managed Payments), it is stuck swallowing massive transaction fees from legacy credit card cartels, passing those costs onto sellers via a hefty ~13.25% take-rate.

While eBay guards its exact net processing fees, traditional credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) charge large digital merchants an average global interchange and processing toll hovering between 2.5% and 3.5%.

Assuming a standard 3% merchant legacy swipe fee across eBay’s massive $80 billion volume, replicating Steak ‘n Shake’s proven 50% reduction in processing costs reveals a staggering annual opportunity cost currently paid to the banking cartel:

  • $80B (Annual GMV) x 3% (Est. Legacy Swipe Fee) = $2.4B in Friction
  • $2.4B x 50% (Lightning Efficiency) = $1.2B Annually

The Treasury Blindspot

While eBay has been letting its $2.92B in cash reserves sit in low-yield traditional treasury notes (generating a baseline productivity of just 12.23%), the opportunity cost of ignoring Bitcoin over the last three years has turned into a multi-billion dollar boardroom mistake.

If eBay’s board had allocated 100% of those reserves to Bitcoin instead of flat fiat cash, that treasury would have grown by a massive 1,406%. That represents a $5.02B unrealized gain that eBay completely left on the table.

🤖 Try the Bitcoin Treasury simulator.

Legacy Credit Card Rails vs. The Bitcoin Lightning Network

Instead of letting a leveraged buyout dictate its future, a native crypto payment layer permanently restructures eBay’s economics in favor of its 135 million active users [1.1].

Metric Legacy Payment Systems Bitcoin Lightning Layer The Operational Impact
Projected Processing Drag ~$2.4 Billion ~$1.2 Billion Instantly unlocks $1.2 Billion, which can be passed directly back to sellers to expand their margins.
Settlement Velocity 2 to 5 Business Days [1.1] Instant (Seconds) [1.4] Eradicates capital lockup for millions of global small businesses.
Chargeback Fraud Liability Millions lost to “friendly fraud” $0.00 (Irreversible Ledger) [1.5] Complete mitigation of merchant losses via forced bank chargebacks.
Cross-Border FX Penalty 3% to 5% friction fees [4.2] 0% (Unified Settlement Asset) [1.5] True friction-free international commerce without banking borders.

3 Reasons Why the Payment Play Beats Cohen’s Takeover

1. It Protects Shareholders from Volatile Corporate Debt

GameStop’s proposal relies on stitching together an unconfirmed $20 billion financing letter and highly unpredictable meme-stock equity to cover the massive acquisition. Integrating a decentralized payment protocol, by comparison, costs eBay virtually nothing to implement. It expands profit margins organically without adding a single dollar of toxic corporate leverage to the balance sheet.

2. It Empowers the Lifeblood of eBay: The Sellers

Ryan Cohen intends to extract value by aggressively cutting $1.2 billion from eBay’s sales and marketing budget. Tech-forward payment integration takes the opposite approach: it extracts value from the banks. Passing a massive fee reduction back to power-sellers gives them an overwhelming incentive to list their best inventory exclusively on eBay rather than moving to independent storefronts or Amazon.

3. It Dominates the Collectibles Market Automatically

A massive pillar of GameStop’s buyout logic is using its 1,600 brick-and-mortar storefronts as physical hubs to authenticate trading cards and luxury items. However, the high-end collectibles market is already deeply intertwined with digital asset wealth. Seamlessly allowing global buyers to purchase a luxury watch or a rare comic book natively via Bitcoin unlocks a vast ecosystem of highly liquid global capital that a physical retail storefront simply cannot replicate.

The Ultimate Counter-Punch

GameStop is targeting eBay because it views the platform as a massive cash-generating engine that has grown technologically stagnant. Rather than allowing a smaller company to leverage itself to the hilt for a takeover, eBay’s board can render GameStop’s cost-cutting thesis totally obsolete.

By using the retail industry’s blueprint to fix its payment layer, cutting out banking monopolies, and returning $1.2 billion in annual savings to the marketplace, eBay can drive its own historic earnings boost, proving it doesn’t need a savior to dominate the future of digital commerce.

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.

References

  • [1.1] GameStop Investor Relations. (2026). GameStop Proposes to Acquire eBay at $125.00 Per Share. GameStop Investor Relations
  • [1.2] ANI News. (2026). GameStop proposes to acquire ebay at USD 125 per share in cash and stock. ANI News
  • [1.3] Bitcoin Magazine. (2026). Steak ‘n Shake Says Bitcoin Payments Cut Processing Costs by 50%, Save $6 Million Annually. Bitcoin Magazine
  • [1.4] CoinoMedia via Binance Square. (2025). Steak ‘n Shake Saves Big with Bitcoin Payments. Binance Square
  • [1.5] Reddit r/Bitcoin. (2026). Steak ‘n Shake Says Bitcoin Payments Cut Processing Costs by 50%, Save $6 Million Annually. Reddit
  • [2.1] Kotaku. (2026). GameStop’s Absurd Bid To Buy eBay For $56 Billion Sounds Bad. Kotaku
  • [2.2] Digital Transactions. (2026). How Steak ‘n Shake Slashed Costs With Crypto. Digital Transactions
  • [2.3] MyBroadband. (2026). GameStop offers R930 billion for eBay. MyBroadband
  • [2.4] Reddit r/Bitcoin. (2026). Starting March 1, Steak n Shake will give all hourly employees at its company-operated restaurants a Bitcoin bonus. Reddit
  • [3.1] Bitcoin Magazine. (2026). Steak ‘n Shake Teases “Bitcoin Milkshake” For Bitcoin Conference 2026. Bitcoin Magazine
  • [4.1] eBay Inc. Investor Relations. (2026). eBay Inc. Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results. eBay Investor Relations
  • [4.2] Value Added Resource. (2026). eBay Q4 2025 Earnings: GMV Growth & Depop Acquisition Surprise. Value Added Resource

Gnosis Treasury Redemption Vote Swings as Whale Counters Cofounder

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Gnosis Treasury Redemption Vote Swings as Whale Counters Cofounder

Votes in favor of a redemption proposal that would let GNO holders claim roughly $170 per token from a $223M treasury have retaken the lead on Snapshot.

A live Snapshot vote on Gnosis DAO is asking GNO holders to authorize an opt-in redemption mechanism that would allow any holder to surrender tokens for their pro-rata share of the DAO treasury, reigniting one of crypto’s longest-running debates over whether token holders or operating companies have the stronger claim on a DAO’s balance sheet.

The tally has swung twice in 24 hours: first against the proposal after Gnosis co-founder Stefan George voted against it earlier today, then back in favor after a single large wallet with 67,000 GNO voted for it.

Tally of Votes

The proposal currently sits at roughly 116,000 GNO For (~65%), 59,600 Against, and 1,600 Abstain, clearing the 75,000 GNO quorum with voting open until May 12.

$223M Treasury

Per analyst Ignas, the Gnosis treasury holds roughly $223 million in ETH, stablecoins, and ecosystem tokens, with about 1.3 million GNO eligible to redeem against it. That works out to roughly $170 of treasury value per token.

GNO last traded near $132, implying a 27% discount to NAV, or about $38 per token if redemption executes. Backers have flagged the figure as conservative, since it values Gnosis Chain and Gnosis Pay at zero and marks the venture portfolio at the operator’s own internal number.

The structure is opt-in. Liquid assets (ETH, stables) would be distributed at face value, while illiquid positions, including off-chain investments and Gnosis Ltd. equity, would convert into a claim token, gLTD-CLAIM, that pays out as value is realized. Non-participants, in theory, are not forced into a wind-down.

The Case for Redemption

Investor Wismerhill argues that Gnosis Ltd. has become a “cash sink” structurally misaligned with the holders funding it. Per his post, Gnosis Ltd. received $30 million in DAO funding under GIP-128 ten months ago. Over the two quarters in which the company disclosed revenue, the total was under $300,000, and disclosures stopped in Q1.

The flashpoint, per Wismerhill, is a quiet treasury reclassification. The DAO’s treasury manager was instructed to reclassify 250,000 Ltd.-held GNO as circulating supply, a change he says would cut NAV per GNO by roughly 16.5% overnight. He claims it was executed without a Snapshot vote, a GIP or a public announcement, and contradicts the purpose-driven entity structure under which Ltd. was restructured in 2025.

Another supporter, chud.eth, noted that GnosisDAO raised 250,000 ETH at its 2017 ICO and now holds under 85,000 ETH worth of assets, with no significant operating revenue between then and now and substantial ETH-denominated salary spend in the interim.

The Case Against

Safe co-founder Lukas Schor pushed back using dollar terms instead of ETH. Per his post, GnosisDAO raised $12.5 million in 2017 and now controls more than $200 million in assets without any further fundraising, while building “a ton of value for the industry.”

Ignas, who voted against, framed the proposal as the latest iteration of the “RFV Raiders” playbook that previously triggered the Rook wind-down, the Fei wind-down at Tribe DAO, and the campaign that pushed Aragon to repurpose its treasury. He acknowledged the underlying logic, that holders have grounds to question why they should keep funding Ltd. while their token trades below NAV, but argued the proposal would also defund Gnosis Pay, Circles and Gnosis Chain, all of which have real users, and noted that tokens trading under NAV is a common feature of bear markets that often resolves over time.

He also flagged a contagion risk. If the proposal succeeds, every other DAO trading below NAV becomes a target.

Familiar Territory

The dynamic is not new for Gnosis. In 2020, hedge fund Arca pushed for a GNO tender offer on the same logic that GNO was trading well below the book value of its underlying assets. Arca’s then-CIO Jeff Dorman argued at the time that any token trading below the book value of its DAO should “immediately” face calls for liquidation.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

AI Shopping Agents Trigger ‘False Decline’ Crisis for Merchants, Warns Chargebacks911

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AI Shopping Agents Trigger ‘False Decline’ Crisis for Merchants, Warns Chargebacks911

The rapid growth of agentic commerce—where AI systems autonomously search, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers—is creating a significant and largely overlooked risk for global merchants. According to Chargebacks911, legitimate AI-initiated purchases are being misclassified as fraudulent bot activity, triggering a wave of false declines and scaling revenue loss.

While much of the industry conversation surrounding agentic commerce has heavily focused on disputed AI purchases and fraud risks, the reverse problem represents an equally significant threat. Fraud systems originally built for human behaviour are now fundamentally struggling to distinguish legitimate AI-driven transactions from malicious automated bots.

The scale of the AI commerce shift

The warning arrives as agentic commerce moves rapidly from a futuristic concept to commercial reality. According to The Paypers Global Ecommerce Report 2026, agentic commerce could account for 25% to 30% of all global online purchases by 2030.

Major industry players are already leaning heavily into this ecosystem:

  • Visa and Mastercard are currently piloting agent-initiated transactions alongside major banking partners.

  • Platforms including Perplexity, Walmart, and Amazon are actively enabling AI agents to transact directly on their consumers’ behalf.

However, fraud detection systems have largely failed to keep pace with this rapid shift. According to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, 51% of internet traffic is now generated by bots, of which 37% is considered malicious.

Historically, merchants could reliably distinguish between automated bot traffic and genuine consumer behaviour. Today, however, AI shopping agents operate seamlessly within browsers, generating traffic patterns that appear increasingly human, thereby triggering fraud systems designed for a world where a human being was always behind the keyboard.

A structural threat to merchant revenue
Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks911

Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks911, highlighted the immediate threat these false declines pose to businesses.

“The fraud systems most merchants rely on today were built to detect bad human behaviour,” Eaton stated. “They were not designed for a world where a legitimate AI agent and a malicious bot look almost identical.”

Eaton warned that merchants face a clear choice as agentic commerce scales: adapt their detection and evidence infrastructure now, or watch a growing share of legitimate revenue get declined by their own legacy systems. A false decline carries no chargeback, but the immediate cost in lost sales, damaged brand trust, and reduced visibility to AI agents is severe.

Traditional fraud prevention relies on behavioural signals tied directly to human interaction, such as device fingerprints, session patterns, click sequences, and authentication flows. Agent-initiated transactions inherently disrupt each of these markers. Without a clear evidence trail showing what the agent was authorised to do, what it actually executed, and on whose behalf it acted, merchants lack the essential data needed to accurately classify the transaction.

Adapting infrastructure for an agentic future

To address this gap, Chargebacks911 utilises its Unified Dispute Management System (UDMS) and ResolveLab, which leverage AI and machine learning to build and analyse the exact evidence architecture that agentic transactions require. Rather than relying on point-of-transaction signals, UDMS captures the full consent and permission trail. This includes what the agent was authorised to do, the limits in place, and a timestamped record of each action taken.

Donald Kossmann, chief technology officer at Chargebacks911, noted that merchants must shift their perspective on transaction validation.

“In an agentic commerce environment, the evidential anchor shifts from a real-time human action to a prior consent framework,” Kossmann explained. “Merchants need systems that can read that framework accurately and quickly. The organisations that build that capability now will not only reduce false declines; they will have a structural advantage as AI-driven purchasing becomes the norm.”

To safeguard their revenue, Chargebacks911 recommends three immediate actions for merchants:

  • Establish highly granular permission frameworks for AI agents that transact on their platforms.

  • Invest heavily in evidence capture infrastructure that logs agent authorisation directly alongside transaction data.

  • Comprehensively review fraud detection thresholds and rules to actively account for the behavioural differences between human and agent-initiated purchases.

“The industry has rightly focused on what happens when an AI agent makes a purchase the customer did not want,” Eaton concluded. “The question that remains largely unasked is what happens when a merchant’s fraud system refuses the purchase the customer did want. Both problems need solving, and both require the same thing: a clear, auditable record of what was authorised and what happened.”

US Senator Gillibrand says crypto market structure vote could happen by August

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US Senator Gillibrand says crypto market structure vote could happen by August

US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said lawmakers working towards passage of a digital asset market structure bill likely need to meet three conditions before the chamber could vote on the legislation.

Speaking at the Consensus conference in Miami on Wednesday, Gillibrand said she considered addressing consumer protection, illicit finance, and ethics provisions essential before any potential vote on the CLARITY Act. She said that if Congress were to consider those issues, as well as combine the draft of the market structure bill with the version already passed in the Senate Agriculture Committee and ensure ethics language, lawmakers could have a vote “before the August recess,” which begins Aug. 10.

“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” said Gillibrand. “Because the truth is, is that we cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents or vice presidents, to get rich off of these industries because of their insider status. It is the worst form of pay for play.”

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand speaking on Wednesday. Source: Cointelegraph

Although Gillibrand did not explicitly mention US President Donald Trump by name, his ties to the crypto industry, through the launch of his memecoin, his family’s crypto business World Liberty Financial, and other dealings with the industry have come under scrutiny as lawmakers consider the CLARITY Act.

Last week, senators on the banking committee announced a deal on stablecoin yield which could allow the market structure bill to advance, but did not address language on public officials’ potential conflicts of interest.

Related: Americans distrust crypto, AI as industry super PACs flood midterms, poll finds

Crypto industry leaders and advocates have been weighing in on the market structure bill since the stablecoin yield compromise was announced. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said on Tuesday that lawmakers likely needed to address the bill in the next two weeks before it became muddied by issues amid the US midterm elections.

“There’s a window of opportunity, and that’s always important that you act when you find that window of opportunity,” said Summer Mersinger, a former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a separate panel on the market structure bill at Consensus on Wednesday.

“That doesn’t mean the window’s not going to open again. You just never know what’s going to happen in the intervening events that maybe will bring people back to this issue after August recess,” she said.

Bill awaits markup in Senate Banking Committee

As of Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee had not rescheduled a markup on the market structure bill after postponing the event in January. At the time, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the exchange could not support the legislation as written, leading to other crypto companies and advocates speaking out against certain provisions in the bill on decentralized finance, stablecoins and tokenized equities.

Traders on prediction markets platform Polymarket see a 65% chance of the CLARITY Act being signed into law by the end of 2026. On Kalshi, traders currently put the probabilty that the bill will become law before August at 49%.

Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs: Mid-2026

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Bitcoin’s post-quantum migration will be harder than Taproot and needs to start now, Project Eleven CEO says

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Bitcoin’s post-quantum migration will be harder than Taproot and needs to start now, Project Eleven CEO says

Bitcoin’s developer community should stop waiting for certainty about quantum-computing timelines and focus on getting a post-quantum signature scheme into production, Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

Pruden said the asymmetry between acting now and waiting favors action.

“We added some new cryptography, we kind of built in this optionality, it turns out we didn’t need quite yet, but at least we have it,” he said, describing the worst case of moving early.

The worst case of moving late is far worse: a sufficiently capable quantum computer could derive private keys from any exposed public key using Shor’s algorithm, the 1994 algorithm that remains the canonical example of what a quantum machine can do that a classical one cannot.

Pruden valued the asset at stake at roughly $2.3 trillion.

“In a very real sense, someone with a sufficiently large and capable quantum computer kind of owns everyone’s digital assets or bitcoin for the public key that they can see,” Pruden said.

The path forward, Pruden said, is to introduce a new signature scheme into Bitcoin that does not rely on the classical math underlying the elliptic-curve digital signature algorithm, or ECDSA, it uses today.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has standardized post-quantum schemes based on hash functions and lattices, he said, and Bitcoin community discussion has trended toward the hash-based option. BIP-360, proposed last year, laid groundwork for adding a quantum-resistant Taproot output type, and Blockstream has deployed a hash-based signature scheme on its Liquid Network.

“Moving stuff out of just research into production is, I think, actually what we need to focus on,” Pruden said. “Let’s focus on the D of R&D.”

The migration will be substantially harder than the Taproot upgrade, Pruden warned.

“Taproot took five years, but that’s not even really the entire challenge that this will take.” Where Taproot was opt-in and most users never bothered migrating, every bitcoin holder and every wallet, exchange and institution that touches the asset will need to participate in a post-quantum migration.

Pruden said the timing risk is severe: if a quantum computer arrives before users have migrated, an attacker could front-run pending transactions within a single block time, paying a higher fee to capture funds whose private keys it has just derived.

Pressed on the unresolved debate over what to do with bitcoin sitting in dormant, quantum-vulnerable addresses, Pruden urged the community to defer that fight and focus on the migration itself. Harper framed that debate as involving upward of 5 million dormant coins, including coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto via the so-called “Patoshi” pattern of early miner blocks.

“The question of the Satoshi coins in particular is a hard one,” Pruden said, because it puts two philosophical commitments in tension: Bitcoin’s fixed-supply ethos and its commitment to digital property rights. Asked for his personal lean, Pruden said the dormant coins could potentially be “recycle[d] back into the end of the supply curve” to extend Bitcoin’s mining-incentive runway after the block subsidy runs out.

“If you put me on the hot seat, that’s probably what I would say,” Pruden said. “So I guess overall would be the confiscation side. But again, I think ultimately, the community is going to decide. The institutions and the market are going to decide.”

On whether Bitcoin Core developers are taking the threat seriously, Pruden said the answer is mixed. “Core is not a monolithic entity. So I think there are definitely [some] in Core that are taking it seriously. I think there are some people that have the opinion” that quantum computers will never arrive. He pointed to the broader scientific community as a counterweight: “The majority of physicists out there, if you ask them this, they’ll say, yes, it will be a thing. And by the way, many of them believe that the timelines are accelerating.”

The same physics that makes quantum computers a threat to existing cryptography may also seed the next generation of cryptographic primitives, he said, citing key-exchange protocols based on quantum entanglement and certified-randomness work that won the Turing Award last year.

ekko Launches the Nature Footprint, Enabling Payment Providers to Embed Environmental Impact Insights and Action Into Everyday Spending

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ekko Launches the Nature Footprint, Enabling Payment Providers to Embed Environmental Impact Insights and Action Into Everyday Spending

WHY THIS MATTERS: The financial services industry is in the midst of a pivot from voluntary environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting to mandatory, granular data disclosure. For consumers, this shift is manifesting through deeper integration of sustainability metrics into day-to-day services. This announcement is significant because it elevates the conversation beyond simple carbon tracking, which has become a baseline offering. By launching a real-time biodiversity metric, ekko is demonstrating a critical advancement in sustainable finance. This tool represents a powerful application of embedded finance, bringing sophisticated environmental impact data directly into the transactional flow. It allows banks and payment processors to offer customers a tangible, immediate feedback loop on their spending choices, forging deeper loyalty while simultaneously preparing the payments ecosystem for a future where nature-related risk is a quantifiable factor for every transaction. This moves ESG from a back-office compliance issue to a front-end customer proposition, offering a new competitive advantage in a crowded market.

ekko, a mission-led fintech platform enabling banks, payment providers, and merchants to embed positive environmental action into everyday purchases, today announces the launch of its world-first solution, the Nature Footprint. 

The Nature Footprint is ekko’s real-time biodiversity metric, embedded directly into the payment experience. Through integration with payment providers and financial institutions, it enables consumers to see how their everyday spending impacts the natural world. This helps to raise awareness and educate consumers, enabling them to make more informed and sustainable choices. 

ekko’s Nature Footprint is the first to bring biodiversity impact to the point of payment. It translates complex biodiversity modelling into a clear, real-time metric that shows consumers how their spending affects the living natural world – from habitat loss and land use to pollution – complementing their existing carbon footprinting solution to give consumers a more holistic view of environmental impact.   

Beyond education, the Nature Footprint enables payment providers to offer consumers the option to take action at checkout, such as rounding up purchases to contribute to vetted environmental projects. Working with partners across the payments ecosystem, ekko aims to channel $1 billion USD into sustainability projects worldwide by the end of 2030.     

“Small steps can create monumental change. We know that 80% of consumers want to live more sustainably, but until now they haven’t had a tangible picture of the environmental impact of their everyday purchases. This is where the Nature Footprint will turn the tide,” comments Oli Cook, CEO and Co-Founder of ekko. 

“With 1 trillion purchases happening every year, every 1% of those contributing to meaningful environmental projects can unlock extraordinary impact. By partnering with payment providers, banks, and merchants to embed nature education and action into day-to-day spending, we can turn everyday activities into powerful forces for change. For our commercial partners, this creates an opportunity to deepen customer engagement and retention, stand out in a crowded market, and strengthen their relevance with increasingly values-driven customers.”

The Nature Footprint is a spend-based indication calculated using transaction amounts, merchant category codes, country of purchase, and a life-cycle assessment using ekko’s proprietary methodology, developed alongside expert-driven environmental and social sustainability consultancy, Nature Positive. It draws on peer-reviewed, internationally recognised data sources including EXIOBASE, GLOBIO, AWARE water stress indicators, and biodiversity impact indicators via CDC Biodiversité’s Global Biodiversity Score.  

The indicative footprint is then translated into a relatable area of nature affected, making it easier for consumers to understand – such as the size of a football pitch or a parking space.

“The Nature Footprint turns complex data into something people can actually see and feel. We know consumers want to live more sustainably. Now they have a real-time window into how their everyday spending affects not only climate but the natural world, and a simple way to act on it. The combined action over many millions of payments has an incredible power to transform financial transactions moving forward,” comments Majda Dabaghi, Chief Sustainability Officer at ekko. 

“It is built on the same scientific foundations used by institutional biodiversity analysts, but made accessible through the banking and payment experiences people already use every day. We are helping to build the infrastructure for an economy that takes into account not only the financial cost, but also the environmental one – and we make it possible for everyone, everywhere, to do something about it,” she concludes. 

FF NEWS TAKE: This product decisively moves the needle in the sustainable finance space by giving consumers the first practical tool to measure their direct, real-time impact on the natural world. Previously, biodiversity was too abstract for the point-of-sale experience. The key challenge now shifts from what is measured to who adopts it. We are watching for partnerships with Tier 1 financial institutions to validate the methodology and drive mass consumer adoption. The future of payments is inherently linked to impact; this is infrastructure for that reality.

White House targets July 4 for Clarity Act passage, says crypto adviser Patrick Witt

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White House targets July 4 for Clarity Act passage, says crypto adviser Patrick Witt

The White House is aiming for July 4 for Congress to pass the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk’s Consensus Miami conference on Wednesday.

“We’re targeting July 4th. I think that would be a tremendous birthday present for America, celebrating our 250th,” Witt said. The mechanics, according to Witt, are: Senate Banking Committee markup this month, four working Senate weeks in June for floor passage and enough runway for a U.S. House of Representatives vote before the Independence Day deadline.

That timeline runs ahead of the prediction Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand shared on the same stage earlier in the day, when the New York Democrat predicted Clarity would reach the president’s desk by the first week of August.

“There’s not a lot of slack left in the rope right now,” Witt said. “But it is an achievable timeline.”

The path to markup opened when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) released a compromise on the bill’s stablecoin-yield provisions in early May, banning bank-deposit-equivalent yield on stablecoins while leaving room for rewards tied to spending. Witt said the White House convened banks and crypto firms to fashion the language, then handed it to the senators, who ran their own process and arrived at a text both sides found equally unsatisfying.

“Crypto is unhappy, banks are unhappy, but they’re both about equally unhappy,” Witt said. “And so we know that we got the right compromise.” Witt considered that the stablecoin-yield issue “is closed.”

The White House is also closing in on a deal on the conflict-of-interest provision that has divided Democrats and the administration. Witt said the negotiating posture is to accept rules that apply “across the board, from the president all the way down to the brand new intern on Capitol Hill,” but reject anything that singles out a particular office or officeholder. “We’re not going to allow targeting of anyone’s family, any one particular politician,” he said. “I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to close that out.”

Speaking on what happens if Clarity slips past 2026, Witt said “If we’re not setting the standard, if we’re not writing the rules, then we are going to be a rule follower, and we’re going to be following somebody else’s rulebook on this. And God forbid it’s China that’s ultimately writing those rules.”

U.S. leadership in global capital markets, he added, is one of the things that “underwrite American hegemony.”

Witt also discussed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, the stablecoin-issuer law passed last year, where rulemaking by the Treasury Department, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and other agencies is closing in on a one-year July deadline.

“These are complicated issues. They require following the Administrative Procedures Act, soliciting comments. And we received a flood of comments,” Witt said. The law, he added, exemplifies “the efficient frontier of regulation: just enough to allow an industry to flourish… but not so much that you overly burden an innovation into irrelevance.”

Dominance of Tether and Circle is a net bad for stablecoins, says Bridge executive

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Dominance of Tether and Circle is a net bad for stablecoins, says Bridge executive

Miami Beach — The stablecoin universe, dominated by Tether and Circle, hampers competition that could lead to better product-market fit for some important use cases, according to Ben O’Neill, Bridge’s head of money movement.

“I think it’s a net bad for the growth of stablecoins as a whole, because you have two counterparties that have pros and cons to what they’ve built, and the design choices they’ve made. But they don’t work for every use case,” O’Neill said on a panel about stablecoin growth at Consensus Miami.

Tether’s USDT, with its gargantuan market capitalization of approximately $189.5 billion, and Circle’s USDC, which has grown to around $71 billion, each emerged at different generational eras in the crypto evolution.

Tether, launched in 2014 as Realcoin, won the Chinese export trade, O’Neill said, and built this shadow economy of dollars that people can use without the U.S. financial system. Circle, launched in association with Coinbase in 2018, sought to do the exact opposite: a U.S.-regulated stablecoin, which later leaned hard into decentralized finance (DeFi).

For O’Neill, the perspective of a large payments firm, such as Bridge-owner Stripe, illustrates the shortcomings of the two dollar-pegged token giants.

“As a payments company, I need certainty on how things are going to work,” he said. “So with Tether, they say we’ll burn for 10 bips, which is crazy expensive for a payments company, or you can trade on the open market, which means I have no certainty.”

“For Circle, their whole business is AUM, and they keep kind of notching up those burn fees. So again, if I’m someone like Visa, and I want to do trillions of dollars of card settlement and stablecoins, I’m burning a bunch of USDC, and that’s gonna be a net bad,” O’Neill said.

The solution, “which needs to come pretty quickly over the next couple of years,” is more stablecoins built for specific use cases, so they can be optimized for those use cases. The other part is the rise of the clearing house, “a sexy topic for founders and VCs” to make it “as efficient as possible swapping between stablecoins,” he added.

Closing out his argument, O’Neill said, “You need more competition, otherwise [Tether and Circle] are going to just keep upping the fees. They’re not gonna share the yield. They’re gonna disincentivize you from burning it. They’re gonna make it harder and harder to make it feel like money at each turn.”

Crypto bill won’t move without a ban on officials’ industry ties, says U.S. Senator Gillibrand

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Crypto bill won’t move without a ban on officials’ industry ties, says U.S. Senator Gillibrand

MIAMI — The long-awaited legislation to establish U.S. regulations for the crypto markets won’t survive the Senate if it doesn’t include a contentious ethics provision that bans senior government officials from personal interests in the industry, said U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

“There will be no one voting for this bill if we don’t have an ethics provision,” Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has been engaged in bipartisan crypto legislation for years, said Wednesday at Consensus Miami 2026. The inclusion of that section — aimed largely at the business interests of President Donald Trump — remains one of the few major sticking points on the bill negotiation, which is coming to a head this month.

“We cannot allow members of Congress, senior administration officials, presidents or vice presidents to get rich off of these industries because of their insider status,” Gillibrand said. “It is the worst form of pay-for-play; it is the worst form of campaign finance violations; it’s a violation of the Constitution.”

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the crypto industry’s top policy aim in Washington — is awaiting a necessary Senate Banking Committee hearing in order to advance to the Senate floor for a vote.

Gillibrand said the ethics negotiation needs to be resolved in the next week to get a bipartisan approval in the hearing, which is expected as soon as next week. She said the negotiators are also working on consumer protection and illicit finance elements. So far on the ethics provision, White House officials have denied that Trump’s business interests represent a conflict, and they’ve said they won’t tolerate a bill that targets him.

“We cannot let greed and corruption in Washington tear this industry down, and without that provision, that’s exactly what will happen,” Gillibrand argued.

The window for legislative action is narrowing considerably, and the needed Senate bandwidth to move the legislation will be at a premium, with about 10 weeks of Senate calendar time remaining before Congress pivots to the midterm elections.

Gillibrand predicted a final vote could happen in the first week of August, “if we’re lucky.” That would mark the last chance before Congress’ summer break.

However, in another Consensus panel, Summer Mersinger, the CEO of the Blockchain Association who served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, suggested a legislative window may never permanently close.

“There’s a window of opportunity, and that’s always important that you, you act when you find that window of opportunity,” she said. “But I always say that that doesn’t mean the window’s not going to open again.”

Read More: Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says Clarity better than chaos as Senate hits key moment

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