Mastercard will contribute its global experience securing payments and digital infrastructure to support the Blockchain Security Standards Council (BSSC) as it works to strengthen trust, interoperability, and security across blockchain ecosystems.
Mastercard has joined the Blockchain Security Standards Council (BSSC) as a Charter-level member. The BSSC is a non-profit consortium focused on defining and maintaining rigorous security standards designed to support safe, reliable, and scalable blockchain and digital asset adoption.
“Part of my job is to make life difficult for criminals.” — Claire Le Gal, Senior Vice President, Integrity & Standards, Security Solutions for Mastercard and its representative on the BSSC board.Share
As a member of the council, Mastercard brings decades of deep experience across secure payments, identity verification, and trusted digital infrastructure to help advance industry-wide security best practices for blockchain-based and tokenized value exchange. The company will also collaborate through the BSSC to help shape security frameworks that protect consumers, financial institutions, and the broader financial system, while fostering trust and innovation that can operate at a global scale.
Mastercard joins a roster of leading blockchain innovators and digital asset pioneers, including Figment, Coinbase, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, Ribbit Capital, and BitGo, collaborating through the BSSC to promote consistent, high-integrity security standards across the ecosystem.
“Part of my job is to make life difficult for criminals,” said Claire Le Gal, Senior Vice President, Integrity & Standards, Security Solutions for Mastercard and its representative on the BSSC board. “As blockchain technology moves from experimentation toward scaled, real-world use cases, strong, shared security standards are essential. Joining the BSSC allows us to bring lessons from decades of securing global payment networks and to collaborate with peers to strengthen trust across blockchain systems.”
“We’re thrilled to welcome Mastercard as a member,” said Adam Rak, Executive Director for the BSSC. “Their experience securing complex, global payment networks will be invaluable as we work to provide rock-solid security guidelines for blockchain and digital asset ecosystems.”
Mastercard’s engagement with the BSSC will help deepen capabilities it has already brought to market, including the Multi‑Token Network and Crypto Credential—solutions designed to embed trust, security, and standardization into blockchain and digital asset infrastructure.
Mastercard also plans to actively participate in BSSC working groups on security and privacy, contributing both technical guidance and operational insights. The company’s cross-functional security team has expertise in fraud prevention, cyber resilience, disputes, and threat intelligence—all critical capabilities for shaping the council’s standards.
As blockchain adoption accelerates and financial use cases scale globally, Mastercard’s involvement with the BSSC reflects a proactive and collaborative approach to security, transparency, and trust in digital ecosystems—ensuring that new technologies are implemented safely and responsibly from the outset.
Carmine Agnello, the mob boss John Gotti’s grandson, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for defrauding the U.S. government’s Covid relief funding system out of $1.1 million, proceeds which he used to invest in crypto, the Department of Justice said.
In a statement released Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Eastern District of New York office said Agnello fraudulently obtained multiple disaster relief loans from the government’s Small Business Administration (SBA) and used the funds in cryptocurrency investments.
Gotti’s grandson “diverted [the proceeds] for his personal use, including by investing approximately $420,000 in a cryptocurrency business,” the attorney’s office said.
The fraudster, who will turn himself in for imprisonment on July 1, submitted false information to the SBA between April 2020 and November 2021, stating the proceeds were for his autoparts and recycling business in Queens, including for employee salaries.
“During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the defendant shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars, which he must repay as part of today’s sentence,” United States Attorney Joseph Nocella said.
“Mr. Agnello defrauded a program designed to assist businesses and employees during the pandemic,” stated United States Postal Inspection Service, New York Division (USPIS) Inspector in Charge Larco-Ward.
Agnello is not the only individual to have defrauded the government’s Covid relief fund. Among several cases that ended up in court, Bruce Choi’s stands out as he illegally obtained $2 million in pandemic-eric business loans on behalf of non-existent companies and used the money to buy cryptocurrency via Kraken. David T. Hines fraudulently obtained $3.9 million from similar relief funds and used some of the proceeds to purchase a Lamborghini.
Based on statistics from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), fraud against Covid-related relief funds was rampant, with roughly $135 billion, or up to 15% of the total funds, lost to scams.
Agnello’s grandfather exerted power with brutal violence and enjoyed the spotlight. He took over the Gambino, running enterprises that authorities claimed earned him roughly $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud. In 1992, Gotti was found guilty on 13 criminal counts and sent to federal prison, where he died of cancer at age 61.
Core Scientific (CORZ) is preparing to raise $3.3 billion through a junk bond sale as it continues its transition toward artificial intelligence-focused data center operations.
Demand for AI services has pushed data centers, power supply and advanced chips to their limits. To keep up, firms are tapping riskier parts of the debt market for funds to keep developing their operations. Core Scientific, once a bitcoin miner, sold $175 million in bitcoin last month to further its AI pivot.
Borrowers linked to AI infrastructure have raised $17.9 billion in junk bonds so far this year, Bloomberg reported. CORZ itself is building six data centers that will support AI workloads, with the capacity leased to CoreWeave under a 12-year agreement that could bring in around $10 billion in revenue, the report adds, citing sources familiar with the deal.
Core Scientific’s move follows a string of large deals. Recent offerings tied to Google-backed data centers and CoreWeave raised a combined $6.7 billion. Another firm, Edged Compute, is marketing $1.3 billion in bonds to fund facilities leased to CoreWeave and an Alibaba unit.
Core Scientific said it will use proceeds to repay existing debt and fund reserves. It also plans to support construction across several states if costs exceed available funds, signaling how capital-intensive the AI buildout has become.
The company still holds “under 1,000 bitcoin,” according to CFO Jim Nygaard.
Big AI pivot
Core Scientific was founded in 2017 and grew into one of North America’s largest bitcoin miners before filing for Chapter 11 in December 2022, squeezed by high power costs and a weak bitcoin price. It emerged from reorganization in January 2024 and was relisted on Nasdaq under the ticker CORZ.
The pivot from bitcoin mining to AI hosting is all about the margins.
The April 2024 halving cut block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125, and by late 2025, the average cash cost to mine one bitcoin rose while the price of BTC itself had been on a downturn, from over $125,000 to around $75,800. With rising power costs and competition, most miners became unprofitable and had to find alternative ways to continue earning revenue.
That’s when AI came to the rescue. Miners’ most valuable assets, already-built data centers and power contracts, meanwhile, gained a new use case: hosting computers that power AI.
Their power contracts, grid connections and cooling-ready sites are attracting hyperscalers, including Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet and others, in the ongoing AI race. Core Scientific was one of the first miners to pivot on a large scale, which caught investors’ attention and sparked the AI push.
Core Scientific’s shares were up about 6% on Tuesday and are up nearly 42% this year, while bitcoin fell 11%.
At MPE 2026, David Ricart, Principal Product Manager on the Payments team at SoundCloud, discussed the evolutionary leap facing the payments sector. Ricart explained that his team is responsible for the full, end-to-end payment flow, managing everything from users purchasing services on the platform to paying out earnings to music creators.
SoundCloud pointed out that the widespread adoption of LLM and AI-based tools is a paradigm change, creating a massive opportunity to 10x their productivity. However, capitalizing on this opportunity requires flexibility and SoundCloud has observed that top-tier merchants are choosing to take ownership of the most critical business components of their payment stack.
This strategy allows them to quickly test, validate, and adapt to the ever-changing payment landscape and according to Ricart, companies that stick with rigid partners or inflexible infrastructure that cannot support this aggressive development speed risk being left behind.
The central topic of the event was agentic commerce, which SoundCloud believes the industry is rightly acknowledging as a reality. This shift will usher in a new era where “bots are going to be buying from bots” and interacting through fund transfers.
This changes the way companies view automated transactions; historically, a bot at the checkout was seen as a bad sign, but the industry must now prepare for good bots making good purchases. The critical challenge is developing the ability to distinguish a legitimate, programmatic agentic purchase from a bad bot attempting to abuse the platform.
While the industry is acknowledging that agentic commerce is going to happen, Ricart stressed that there is no gold standard yet, and current solutions are fragmented. There is a expectation that card payments, which constitute the majority of transactions today, will be the default method for agentic commerce. However, Ricart personally believes that crypto is a “perfect use case” for agents and bots to conduct and operate transactions.
Prediction markets are gaining traction as a new growth area for Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD), as investors look beyond a weak first quarter for crypto trading and focus on future products, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Ramsey El-Assal.
El-Assal said “investors are increasingly treating the quarterly print as backward-looking,” with attention shifting to “forward-looking demand trends and the product roadmap,” including newer offerings such as prediction markets.
Both companies are expected to report softer results for the first quarter of 2026 after a pullback in crypto prices and trading activity. Bitcoin BTC$76,277.20 and ether (ETH) fell about 23% and 29% in the quarter, weighing on volumes across exchanges. Trading activity also slowed as the quarter progressed, with Coinbase volumes declining from roughly $66 billion in January to $54 billion in March, based on third-party data.
Cantor estimates Coinbase’s consumer and institutional trading volumes at $35 billion and $167 billion, both below Wall Street expectations. The firm also projects exchange revenue below consensus. Still, El-Assal maintained an “overweight” rating on the stock and raised his price target to $250, citing improving sentiment and longer-term growth drivers.
Robinhood faces similar near-term pressure. The analyst expects a sequential decline in trading volumes due to softer market conditions, along with a hit to net interest revenue from lower rates. But the company’s business model offers some cushion. Higher volatility can lift trading margins, and Cantor expects stronger yields in equities and options to partly offset weaker activity.
At the same time, crypto revenue quality may come under pressure. El-Assal noted the platform’s “tiered pricing structure … earns lower yields on large active traders … and higher yields on marginal traders,” with the latter group pulling back during volatility.
Despite these headwinds, both stocks have rallied in recent weeks. Coinbase shares are up about 18% quarter-to-date, while Robinhood has climbed roughly 40% in April from late-March lows, helped by improving risk sentiment and easing geopolitical tensions.
The focus now is on what comes next. For Coinbase, investors are watching regulatory developments and new business lines. The company’s prediction markets offering, launched this year, “continues to attract meaningful interest,” El-Assal said.
Robinhood is also leaning into prediction markets alongside other initiatives such as tokenization and private market access. The analyst said these efforts, along with regulatory changes like updates to pattern day trading rules, could help drive future growth.
Cantor maintained an “overweight” rating on Robinhood and raised its price target to $110.
The broader view, according to El-Assal, is that while current trading trends remain tied to crypto price cycles, the next phase of growth will depend more on product expansion and new use cases.
Later on Tuesday, the New York Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against Coinbase and fellow crypto exchange Gemini over their prediction market offerings, alleging that the products were actually gambling products and therefore in violation of state regulations.
Whether prediction markets — specifically, sports-related prediction markets — are gambling products are not is currently a topic of debate in both state and federal courts. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has argued that prediction markets are swaps, and therefore properly regulated by that agency at the federal level. States have argued that at least the sports-related contracts are not swaps, and should be licensed and overseen by state regulators. This question is likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
New York sued Coinbase and Gemini on Tuesday, becoming the latest state to argue that prediction market contracts dealing with sports, entertainment and elections are violating state gambling laws.
According to the lawsuits, Coinbase and Gemini’s prediction market offerings are really unlicensed gambling products, pointing to how the companies advertised their prediction markets and their role as bookmakers on the platforms. The NYAG’s office also described the actual behavior of the prediction market platforms, describing users as “bettors” and saying that “each contract is a bet.” The suits also argued that the platforms allow people to place bets between the ages of 18 and 21, when New York bars anyone under 21 from gambling on mobile apps.
“As described above, what Respondent offers through its platform is quintessentially gambling: It allows a bettor to stake or risk money upon the outcome of a contest of chance or a future contingent event not under the bettor’s control or influence, upon an agreement or understanding that he will receive something of value in the event of a certain outcome,” the suit against Coinbase said.
New York is just the latest state to sue prediction market providers over their sports and entertainment products. Nevada, Washington and a host of other states have similarly filed suit, arguing that at least the sports-related bets are, indeed, bets, and not federally regulated swaps. It’s an issue that now sits before multiple appeals courts, and is likely to wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that “prediction markets are federally regulated national exchanges” and that Coinbase would fight for federal oversight.
A spokesperson for Gemini said the company did not have a comment.
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Mike Selig, for his part, has argued that prediction markets — including the sports-related contracts — fall under his agency’s “exclusive jurisdiction.” The CFTC has filed suit against Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to block them from bringing charges against prediction market providers, and it filed to join another case out of Nevada to defend the prediction market providers.
Kalshi, one of the biggest prediction market providers, was not named as a defendant on Tuesday. The company preemptively sued the New York State Gaming Commission last fall, asking a federal court to rule that state gambling laws do not apply to its platform. That case is still working its way through the Southern District of New York courthouse.
In a statement, New York State Attorney General Letitia James said both Gemini and Coinbase’s products were “illegal gambling operations.”
“Gambling by another name is still gambling, and it is not exempt from regulation under our state laws and Constitution,” she said.
Ripple has laid out a multi-phase roadmap to prepare the XRP Ledger for a post-quantum future by 2028.
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Recent research from Google Quantum AI shows that the cryptography most blockchains rely on today can be broken by sufficiently advanced quantum computers, including the algorithms that secure wallets, sign transactions, and protect digital assets.
Ripple says that the findings make it clear that it needs to prepare for the quantum threat with a plan that treats the required migration as an “architectural challenge touching performance, storage, usability, cryptography, and protocol design”.
The roadmap is made up of four phases, beginning with post-quantum recovery if classical cryptography breaks, to enable safe recovery for account owners. Phase two is proactive planning and experimentation to assess the full impact of post-quantum cryptography on XRPL, while phase three will explore post-quantum primitives.
Finally, in 2028 Ripple is targeting a move from experimentation to execution with the entire XRPL ecosystem. Says the firm: “We’ll design, build and propose a new amendment to the XRPL ecosystem for native post-quantum cryptography and begin transitioning the network to PQC-based signatures at scale.”
April appears to be a lost cause for the crypto Clarity Act, but a U.S. Senate committee hearing sometime in May could keep the critical market structure legislation alive, as long as it can reach a final vote of the overall Senate by July, according to lobbyists and a lawmaker aide focusing on the market structure bill’s sluggish progress.
The legislative calendar is running out of room for this year, but a Senate aide told CoinDesk that a potential new delay of a couple of weeks — allowing Republican Senator Thom Tillis to finish discussions with bankers over stablecoin-yield concerns — is not yet pushing this work past the point of no return. The aide also said that earlier negotiations over decentralized finance (DeFi) protections are effectively settled, leaving few other impediments in the way of a committee approval.
One of the chief problems the crypto industry faces (if it can leap the stubborn hurdle of the banking sector’s objections about stablecoin rewards) is that the Senate Banking Committee hearing that the bill needs to clear would be only a first step of many.
Here’s the scheduling maelstrom the effort is now circling: The Senate will essentially flee Washington in August and be in election mode until the November congressional midterms arrive. It’s currently scheduled for about a dozen weeks of DC work before the elections, and it has some pressing matters on its plate during that time, including the funding battle over the Department of Homeland Security, clashes over the Iran war, the debate on voter identification and addressing nominations such as President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh.
If the bill manages to finally get signoff from the Senate Banking Committee, the text needs to be merged with the version that passed the Senate Agriculture Committee. That merger work is the timing cushion that these current delays are eating into, the aide said.
The final legislation would likely be revised further as lawmakers add their final compromise on an ethics piece in which Democrats wanted to limit senior government officials (most pointedly President Trump) from profiting off of crypto interests. The aide said that language is now circulating back and forth on that point but that it won’t be in the banking panel’s version and would be added later. If they can get past that dispute and another demand about appointing a full slate of commissioners to oversee markets regulation, the bill may win enough Democratic support to pass.
Then the House would need to approve it again, because it’s very different from the version that chamber already advanced last year. But that would be expected to go quickly, as long as further disagreements don’t arise.
The last step, Trump’s signature, is expected to be the easiest, though he inserted some uncertainty in March when he said he wouldn’t sign any bill until he gets legislation approved that would demand voters prove their citizenship before they can cast ballots.
The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, if approved, would become the second major crypto bill to become law, joining last year’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act. But it’s an unresolved stablecoin matter from the GENIUS Act that has delayed progress on the Clarity Act since the start of the year, as bank lobbyists have drawn enough support from senators to back their worry that stablecoin rewards programs could be close enough to deposit yield that it jeopardizes the banks’ business model.
The debate — far afield from the central aims of the Clarity Act — has raged through White House interventions and tough rhetoric from crypto insiders. Coinbase, which stands to take a substantial hit if stablecoin reward programs are curtailed, has been at the forefront, and Chief Legal Office Paul Grewal posted Tuesday on social media site X with another push.
“You can’t be for CLARITY and against rewards,” he wrote. “It’s one or the other. Time to choose.”
Though key Senate negotiators had recently said they had an “agreement in principle” to move forward with a compromise, Republican Senator Tillis told reporters that earlier hopes for April progress was likely slipping into May. The White House has leaned into the crypto position on allowing some rewards that don’t look like interest on core bank deposits.
“It’s hard to explain any further lobbying by banks on this issue as motivated by anything other than greed or ignorance,” Patrick Witt, a top crypto adviser in Trump’s White House, said in how own recent posting on X. “Move on.”
In the current version, insiders say that the compromise has hovered steadily around an approach that would ban payment of yield on any product that looks or acts like insurance on a deposit, but it would still let firms such as Coinbase structure rewards programs that would be more akin to credit-card incentives. But the lawmakers have been shy about releasing text that could spark further negotiation drama, after letting both crypto and banking industry representatives review language last month.
“We’re too close to let this effort fail,” said Cody Carbone, CEO of the Digital Chamber, in a statement to CoinDesk. “A markup must happen to move this forward. It’s been three months since it was initially scheduled, and given the progress on all issues, especially the bipartisan stablecoin yield agreement, now is the time.”
Every day that passes without progress marks a decline in the odds for eventual Clarity Act success. The very next action should be the scheduling of the markup hearing and the sharing of the long-awaited bill text that the negotiators have been wrestling over.
“In our view, the odds of CLARITY being signed into law in 2026 are roughly 50-50, and possibly lower,” according to a research note that crypto investment firm Galaxy is planning on publishing this week. “The uncertainty stems not from any single issue but from the sheer number of unresolved questions that must be settled in sequence under severe time pressure.”
In other words, a single further blowup among the negotiators could be a fatal delay, though the period after the November elections could offer a final low-odds, last-ditch opening. The so-called “lame duck” session of Congress at the end of the year can be a period in which the outgoing Congress can still act, and more than one crypto insider has suggested that it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a hypothetically derailed Clarity Act could reappear then.
While crypto lobbyists are desperate for immediate action on the legislation, the industry is playing the long game on the political front. Crypto PACs have already devoted millions of dollars to keep adding to the list of its friends in Congress from both parties. The sector’s leading campaign-finance arm, Fairshake, is careful to back members of both parties, and many of their political picks will be joining next year’s Congress. If the Clarity Act is law by then, there are likely to be other pressing legislative matters for the industry, potentially including a tax overhaul and the establishment of a federal stockpile of bitcoin BTC$75,796.88.
Bitcoin (BTC) mid-size wallet inflows to Binance fell to 3,000–4,000 BTC, marking a multi-year low in sell-side activity from this cohort.
This coincides with Coinbase recording about 8,500 BTC in inflows from similar wallets on April 19, while other exchanges saw much smaller flows. Binance exchange Bitcoin inflows have also fallen to 2023 levels, but how is this significant to today’s market?
Binance BTC inflows cool sharply to 2023 levels
CryptoQuant data classifies mid-size wallets as the entities holding roughly 100–1,000 BTC, often linked to active traders and smaller institutions. These wallets tend to move coins to the exchanges during distribution periods, making their inflows a useful proxy for near-term selling intent.
Binance inflow structure by Investor size. Source: CryptoQuant
Crypto analyst Amr Taha noted that seven-day average Bitcoin inflows from this cohort into Binance have dropped to 3,000–4,000 BTC. This remains well below the deposits observed during April to May 2023, which ranged from 5,500 to 6,000 BTC.
The lowered inflow levels suggest reduced immediate sell-side pressure, as fewer coins are being positioned on the exchange, although inflows alone do not translate into active selling.
The chart shows no comparable surge from retail participants (1-100 BTC) either, with smaller wallets contributing limited inflows of less than 300 BTC on Tuesday. This indicates a contained flow profile rather than broad-based selling pressure.
Related: Bitcoin metrics line up bull signals with $78K the BTC price level to beat
Bitcoin flows on Coinbase dominate
The distribution of BTC inflows across exchanges provides another perspective. Data from CryptoQuant shows that mid-size investor inflows into Coinbase reached about 8,500 BTC on April 19, approaching levels last seen after the FTX exchange collapse in November 2022.
Bitcoin mid-size wallet inflows on Coinbase. Source: CryptoQuant
BTC activity across other exchanges remained relatively muted. Amr Taha noted that a broad distribution phase would typically reflect synchronized inflows across multiple exchanges, which is not evident in the current data.
A similar spike on Coinbase was observed on Jan. 14, shortly before Bitcoin declined from $95,000 to below $67,000 in February. However, the current conditions differ, as exchange inflows appear fragmented rather than market-wide, suggesting mixed sentiment rather than coordinated distribution.
Data from Bitcoin researcher Axel Adler Jr. also highlights a deeper shift in supply dynamics. Bitcoin’s 30-day net flow dropped to -300,000 BTC in March from +94,000 BTC in February, signaling a strong withdrawal phase. The metric stands near -98,000 BTC as of April 21, with outflows continuing at a slower pace.
Bitcoin 30D net flows. Source: CryptoQuant
Adler Jr. added that exchange reserves have declined for seven consecutive weeks, falling by over 105,000 BTC since early March. Notably, even during the April 2 pullback toward $67,000, there was no significant return of coins to exchanges.
Related: Inside the ‘fake police raid’ that forced a $1M Bitcoin transfer
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