Bull Bitcoin has obtained a MiCA license in France, ensuring users in European Union member states can continue accessing its Bitcoin exchange and payment services without interruption or any reduction in functionality. Founder Francis Pouliot announced the development on June 23, 2026, via X, marking the end of a nearly three-year, self-financed effort to enter the European market.
“We are particularly excited to have obtained our MICA license without needing to compromise on our cypherpunk approach to self-custody and privacy,” Pouliot stated. “All features of our website and wallet will remain exactly the same as they have been for the first half of 2026, with no additional burden or restrictions imposed on our users. We have proven that it is possible to meet the highest requirements of regulatory compliance without becoming overzealous.”
The company also reported passing the required PASSI and DORA cybersecurity audits without outsourcing its core Bitcoin infrastructure to third-party hosted providers. “That was a huge win,” Pouliot wrote, noting that relying on external services would have been easier and cheaper but would have compromised sovereignty. The entire process was funded internally, with no external investors or lenders solicited.
Bull Bitcoin, founded in 2013 in Montreal by Pouliot, operates as a Bitcoin-only, non-custodial exchange. Users supply their own wallet address before any purchase, with Bitcoin sent directly to the customer’s control rather than held by the company. This model has defined the firm’s cypherpunk orientation since inception, alongside services such as Bitcoin bill payments for rent, utilities, and real estate, plus support for Lightning Network, Liquid, and Payjoin privacy tools.
The license provides a long-term regulatory foothold in Europe following the company’s expansion of its France-based team and eurozone services. Pouliot previously noted the firm’s experience navigating Canadian oversight and its willingness to meet obligations while pushing back against overreach. The new authorization aligns with that stance: core operations and user experience stay intact.
In October 2025, Bull Bitcoin launched its BULL Wallet, a global, open-source, privacy-first mobile app for iOS and Android with deep opt-in integration to the exchange. Features include Payjoin support, Lightning and Liquid compatibility, and no data collection or push notifications. The wallet and exchange integration remain unchanged under the new license.
Pouliot expressed pride in the team’s execution and outlined next steps: “Having secured a long-term foothold in Europe, our ambition is global domination and setting a new standard on how to build the infrastructure Bitcoin deserves.”
The development comes amid tightening EU crypto rules under MiCA, where many providers have faced pressure to exit or alter operations. Bull Bitcoin’s outcome suggests that rigorous compliance is achievable while maintaining direct user custody, in-house infrastructure control, and privacy tooling, though how exactly they resolved the tension between user privacy expectations and MiCA compliance was not explained in the announcement.
Ethereum is running out of money, according to former insiders.
The warning has sparked one of the fiercest Ethereum governance debates in months: should the network fund developers by taxing staking rewards, or just rely on wealthy Ether holders to bankroll its ecosystem?
At the center of the debate is a controversial proposal from Kleros co-founder Clément Lesaege. He suggested redirecting up to 10% of validator rewards to ecosystem funding through a protocol-level mechanism called Validator Redirected Revenue.
Lesaege argued that this may be necessary to solve Ethereum’s “coordination failure” and reduce the underfunding of shared ecosystem work.
The idea was met with a wave of backlash, with critics warning of cartel-like incentives and a dangerous precedent for validator-led redistribution.
Validator Redirected Revenue proposal. Source: Eth Research
But just as the Ethereum community was sharpening its knives, a “credibly neutral” solution was forming: Ethlabs.
Unveiled Monday by five former Ethereum Foundation researchers, the shiny nonprofit Ethereum research and development lab is backed by the ecosystem’s biggest supporters, including BitMine, Sharplink and ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin.
Related: Ethereum Foundation sacks 20% of workforce amid strategic restructuring
With large investors ready to dig into their pockets, the real question becomes less about whether Ethereum can fund itself and more about how it wants to be funded.
Ethereum’s ‘slow-burning funding crisis’
The latest ETH drama began on Friday when former Ethereum Foundation contributor Trenton Van Epps warned that Ethereum’s core development ecosystem could face a “slow-burning funding crisis” within three to nine months as older support programs dry up and Foundation spending falls.
He estimated that maintaining more than 10 client, research and coordination teams costs roughly $30 million a year, and that the Client Incentive Program and other support mechanisms were no longer enough to cover that bill.
Van Epps argued that Ethereum is entering an institutional “inheritance” phase in which the Foundation will move away from being the primary steward of protocol funding, and that new arrangements must replace the expiring programs he helped coordinate.
Having spent much of the year dealing with leadership turnover, public criticism over priorities, and a growing debate over core protocol funding, Van Epps’ warning touched a raw nerve.
But some Ethereum voices pushed back, arguing that the EF has “enough funds to run for at least 30 years, so there is zero funding crisis.” Bitmine’s Tom Lee also rejected the warning, saying there was “zero chance” of Ethereum running out of funds for protocol development.
Ethereum Foundation Treasury Policy. Source: Ethereum Foundation
The Ethereum Foundation’s own treasury policy already points to a multi-year operating buffer and a planned reduction in annual spending.
In June 2025, the EF said it would maintain a 2.5-year operating expense buffer in cash and stablecoins, pledged to cap annual spending at 15% of total treasury assets and gradually reduce that spending rate toward a 5% baseline over five years.
Related: Ethereum can quantum-proof accounts for just 7 cents, says Ethereum’s Kohaku lead
On Tuesday, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said the Foundation is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, in line with that policy, as it transitions from spending around 15% of its funds annually before 2026 toward a long-term target of about 5% per year after 2030. It laid off 54 staff members.
The proposal everyone hates
So the Foundation may not run out of money, but it is tightening its belt and has a lot less cash to spend on research and development than in its glory days. Lesaege argued that Ethereum suffers from a coordination failure in which everyone benefits from shared infrastructure — but no one wants to foot the bill.
His proposal would require validators to signal how much of their staking rewards they are willing to redirect, a figure between 0% and 10%. If a majority of validators supported a non-zero rate, that redirect would become mandatory for all.
At current staking levels, he estimated that even a 5%-10% redirect could generate roughly 50,000 to 70,000 ETH per year for ecosystem work, or roughly $82.5 million to $115.5 million at current ETH prices today.
Incentive to fund Ethereum growth. Source: Eth Research
Critics quickly zeroed in on the mechanism’s power dynamics, warning that it could entrench large validators, blur the line between operators and governance actors, and give a stake-weighted majority new leverage over ecosystem funding decisions.
What staking providers say
A spokesperson for Figment told Cointelegraph the proposal would compress margins, which “tends to consolidate the validator set toward larger, more integrated operators” serving institutional clients, like Figment.
This would come at the “cost of some operator diversity and potentially fewer net new ETH stakers,” the spokesperson said.
Andrew Gibb, chief executive and co-founder of Twinstake institutional staking, told Cointelegraph that various investor segments would respond differently.
While long-term ETH holders may value the prospect of a better-funded ecosystem, shorter-term capital, such as retail participants, liquid multi-asset funds and reward-focused allocators may be less receptive.
He said the proposal would “narrow the addressable staking market at the margin,” with the most price-sensitive cohorts likely to “reduce or exit positions,” adding that he would expect some clients to reassess their staking allocations.
Related: Buterin fires back at Ethereum Foundation critics, recommits to neutrality
Senior research associate at Bitwise, Max Shannon, told Cointelegraph that Ethereum staking participation has so far shown limited sensitivity to lower rewards.
He said that the staking annual percentage rate (APR) has fallen from about 4.6% in June 2023 to around 2.7% now, while staked supply and the staking ratio roughly doubled. However, additional reward compression would make “slashing risk and exit-queue liquidity risk more material relative to the return.”
He added that a lower net consensus-layer yield could push validators to rely more heavily on maximal extractable value (MEV) to make up lost APR, which could potentially weigh on censorship resistance.
How large is the problem, really?
On paper the funding gap is not that large. Shannon noted that if the annual shortfall is around $30 million and annual staking rewards are about $1.9 billion, so the gap could be filled with just 1.6% of staking rewards.
That makes Lesaege’s proposal look modest, even though it remains politically radioactive. In economic terms, a single-digit haircut on staking rewards is manageable. In governance terms, many Ethereum participants see it as a line-crossing move that turns validators into a tax authority.
Shannon also argued that networks with hard-coded development funding are not necessarily better off just because they earmark rewards. In his view, protocol success is driven far more by token performance and contributor incentives than by any one developer funding mechanism.
A new funding model emerges
Tom Lee’s comment there was “zero chance” of an Ethereum funding crisis and that funds were “secured” foreshadowed the unveiling of the new non-profit EthLabs a few days later.
Rather than taxing rewards at the protocol level, Ethlabs enables large ETH-aligned institutions such as BitMine and Sharplink to fund development directly.
Ethlabs nonprofit R&D for Ethereum. Source: Ethlabs
It does not replace the Ethereum Foundation, but complements it. EthLabs signals that the smart contract platform’s next phase may involve a more distributed funding model, where the EF remains central to the protocol’s core, while other labs and treasury-heavy institutions fund adjacent work.
In an X post on Monday, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin said there is still “an enormous amount of top tier talent” at the Ethereum Foundation that remain focused on “the cypherpunk core components” of the protocol. But he added that many other Ethereum R&D teams will now explore other dimensions.
Gibb said that the responsibility for funding ecosystem development sits with foundations and protocol treasuries. There are alternate mechanisms to explore, such as staking yield or priority fees, he added, “before making changes to validator economics at the protocol level.”
Whether Ethlabs proves sufficient remains to be seen. But its emergence has already shifted the debate from how Ethereum should tax itself to whether it needs to at all.
Market Moves: Why is Ethereum Foundation selling? BTC futures warning signs
Tanya Denisova, the former chief operating officer of Robinhood Crypto, has joined stablecoin issuer Agora as head of operations, according to a Tuesday blog post by Agora’s CEO and co-founder Nick van Eck.
She will also serve as COO of Agora’s proposed National Trust Bank, subject to approval of the company’s national trust charter application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the firm said.
Denisova spent the last six years at Robinhood, where she served as COO of Robinhood Crypto. CoinDesk first reported her departure from the brokerage’s cryptocurrency unit in May.
She led Robinhood Crypto’s day-to-day operations across its regulated U.S. and European entities, overseeing settlement, liquidity, trading, execution quality, custody and wallet operations.
Agora is a stablecoin infrastructure company that issues AUSD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by reserves managed by institutional asset managers. The company aims to provide businesses with a way to move dollars globally, earn yield on idle balances and access programmable payments infrastructure through blockchain networks.
Founded by Nick van Eck and Drake Evans, the firm is focused on building regulated stablecoin products for fintechs, exchanges and other financial institutions.
Craig Raw is a solo developer based in South Africa. In 2020, he built Sparrow Wallet — a free, open-source Bitcoin desktop wallet — because he thought the existing options weren’t good enough.
He has no company behind him, charges nothing for the software, and has kept building it for six years on the belief that it has value for people who want real control of their money.
Sparrow is a tool for people who take Bitcoin self-custody seriously — the kind of users who want to see every detail of what their wallet is doing, manage their own transaction privacy, and hold their own keys rather than trust a third party.
Raw designed it to educate as much as to function, building in tool tips, UTXO visibility, and transaction detail that most wallets hide from users. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. There is no mobile version, and Raw has been clear about that for years.
That last point is now at the center of a fight with Apple that could end his ability to ship software on Mac entirely.
Since 2023, fraudsters have published more than a dozen fake “Sparrow Wallet” apps on the App Store, according to Raw.
These apps impersonate Raw’s software. When a user enters their seed phrase — the master key to a Bitcoin wallet — the app sends it to the attacker and the funds disappear. Raw holds registered US trademarks for the Sparrow name and logo.
He has reported the fakes to Apple and warned the community since early 2024. Users have contacted him after losing their savings, in some cases their life savings. Apple has removed some fakes. More keep appearing.
Raw’s test for Apple
Raw tried something different. He submitted a placeholder app to the App Store — never published, no functionality — whose only purpose was to display a message: Sparrow is desktop-only, any mobile app claiming to be Sparrow is not his, do not trust it.
Apple rejected the app for being placeholder content. Then it escalated. Raw’s entire Apple Developer account is now flagged for termination, with a deadline of June 30. The stated reason: “dishonest activity.”
In other words, the man trying to warn users about fraudulent apps has been charged with dishonesty by the platform those apps live on.
What makes this more than a bureaucratic frustration is what an Apple Developer account actually does. Sparrow is not sold through the Mac App Store — Raw distributes it from his own website.
But macOS requires all apps to be signed with a valid Apple Developer certificate, or the system blocks them. If Apple kills his account, the certificate dies with it. New installs of Sparrow on Mac fail. Existing users stop receiving updates.
Raw posted about the situation on X on Monday, writing that he is “confident this is an automated misclassification that Apple would reverse on review,” but that he may be terminated before a human ever looks at his appeal. The June 30 deadline is one week away.
If Apple follows through, users lose access to updates, new installs fail, and the door opens wider for the fakes Raw has spent two years trying to stop. Raw is asking people to repost his thread.
UPDATE: On June 23, Craig Raw tweeted that Apple had reversed its decision to terminate his developer account following a successful appeal, though he said fake Sparrow Wallet apps remain on the App Store and continue to put users’ funds at risk.
Cody Carbone of The Digital Chamber testified Tuesday before the Senate Banking Committee that passing the CLARITY Act is a prerequisite for reducing financial friction costs that fall hardest on lower-income households, as no Senate floor vote has yet been scheduled.
Cody Carbone, chief executive of The Digital Chamber, testified before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday pressing for passage of the CLARITY Act, arguing the crypto market-structure bill is a prerequisite for reducing financial costs that fall hardest on lower-income households.
In written testimony submitted to the committee, Carbone argued that blockchain-based rails can lower costs across three areas: cross-border remittances, everyday merchant payments, and asset ownership and transfer. The hearing, titled “The Affordability Agenda,” came weeks after the Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act on a 15-9 bipartisan vote on May 14, and with no Senate floor vote yet scheduled.
Carbone’s Affordability Case
The testimony grounded the CLARITY Act argument in federal data. Carbone cited a May 2026 Federal Reserve report showing only 63 percent of adults could cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense from cash or savings. He also cited FDIC data that 4.2 percent of U.S. households were unbanked in 2023 and another 14.2 percent underbanked, pointing to those groups as the ones most exposed to high-cost financial services.
On remittances, Carbone referenced World Bank data showing the global average cost of sending money abroad was 6.36 percent, more than double the 3 percent international target.
Carbone also cited Citi Institute projections from June 2026 that the global tokenized asset market could grow from approximately $17 billion today to $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Senate Floor Gap
The Senate’s CLARITY Act problem is arithmetic. Republicans hold roughly 53 seats; the bill requires 60 votes to clear cloture. The Defiant reported last week that seven Democratic votes are the operative gate before the August recess. The two Democrats who backed the bill in committee, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks, both attached caveats that their committee votes do not commit them to support final passage.
Carbone addressed the political argument directly in his testimony, arguing that regulatory uncertainty has a measurable cost: companies divert resources from product development to legal compliance, and banks hesitate to engage with digital-asset products where statutory authority is unclear. A Senate floor vote has not been scheduled. Senator Cynthia Lummis, the bill’s lead Republican shepherd, has said an August-recess vote is more realistic than a pre-July-4 one.
New opposition emerged Tuesday alongside the legislative stall. Nearly 100 Catholic leaders have also urged the Senate to oppose the bill over the same provisions, per prior Defiant reporting. The Alliance to End Human Trafficking sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer urging review of Section 604, which incorporates the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, arguing the provision could weaken anti-money-laundering tools used to track trafficking-related financial activity, as crypto.news reported. Gambling industry organizations have separately pressed the Senate to clarify that the CLARITY Act would not expand Commodity Futures Trading Commission authority over sports betting on prediction-market platforms, per prior Defiant reporting on the gaming industry’s push.
House July Calendar
The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a July 17 field hearing dedicated to the CLARITY Act, titled “Building the Future of Finance: How the CLARITY Act Unlocks Innovation,” to be held in New York. The hearing narrows the legislative window: Senate action before August, followed by a House floor vote rather than a conference committee, is the fastest available path to enactment.
The 1,200-company Consumer Technology Association coalition urged a Senate vote Monday, as did a coalition of more than 200 crypto firms on June 8. The bill’s fate still turns on ethics and stablecoin-yield amendments that would bring the seven Democratic votes the calendar requires.
“We keep hearing that there are other competing priorities in the Senate, and while that may be true, everyone is still prioritizing this, and that’s why you see readouts daily of different Senate groups meeting together, Republicans and Democrats sitting over lunch talking about passing clarity,” Carbone said.
Lame duck?
The period of the congressional session after the November elections, a handful of weeks known as the lame-duck session, has been held out by some lawmakers and crypto leaders as a backup option to get Clarity passed this year. However, that period can be highly unpredictable and crowded with congressional action, depending on what’s left on the agenda.
Despite its remaining hurdles, some are still expressing strong assurances that 2026 is the year for the crypto market structure law.
“Clarity is no longer a question of if, but when Congress gets it across the finish line,” said Summer Mersinger, the CEO of the Blockchain Association, in a statement to CoinDesk. “Lawmakers are tackling the outstanding issues with real bipartisan resolve, and they are ready to turn years of debate into durable law that protects consumers, gives builders certainty and keeps American leading.”
But analysts are more reserved in their expectations.
“We believe that at least the Senate needs to pass the bill before its August recess for it to become law this year,” Beacon Policy Advisors, a policy research group in Washington, said in a Monday note. “While hypothetically negotiations could continue into the fall, incentives change around the midterms, and the odds that the bill will become law at all, not just this year, will diminish significantly if the Senate misses its August deadline.”
The Ethereum Foundation is cutting roughly 20% of its workforce, eliminating 54 positions as part of a broad restructuring that comes amid sustained senior leadership turnover and growing fragmentation across the wider Ethereum ecosystem.
The layoffs, announced Tuesday in a blog post, conclude a months-long internal reorganization tied to the implementation of the Foundation’s updated mandate and treasury policy. The EF said the reduction leaves it “leaner and more focused,” with a structure aligned around what it described as the “critical tasks” needed to support Ethereum’s long-term development.
The reduction follows a period of significant upheaval at the organization’s leadership level. Co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang stepped down earlier this month, following the prior departure of co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak. Board member Bastian Aue has since assumed expanded responsibilities overseeing the transition and day-to-day operations.
In total, roughly nine senior figures have left or transitioned out of the Ethereum Foundation over the past six months, fueling scrutiny of the organization’s governance model and performance as Ethereum faces intensifying competition from rival blockchain ecosystems.
While the EF shrinks, a separate ecosystem effort backed by some of Ethereum’s largest corporate holders is expanding.
Bitcoin’s BTC$62,537.93 fall below $60,000 on June 5, its lowest level since late 2024, reflects a convergence of macroeconomic and structural pressures, according to Deutsche Bank (DB), which said BTC is increasingly trading like an institutional risk asset rather than a retail-driven speculative bet.
The investment bank said bitcoin’s renewed sell-off was driven by a hawkish shift in Federal Reserve expectations, sustained outflows from U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), a confidence shock following Strategy’s (MSTR) first BTC sale since 2022, and a broader rotation of investor capital into artificial intelligence.
“Bitcoin is not disappearing; it is maturing into an institutional asset whose price is set by fund flows, Fed expectations, competing risk themes, and legislative outcomes,” analyst Marion Laboure said in the Tuesday report.
BTC has struggled in recent weeks, briefly falling below $60,000 on June 5 before rebounding to around $62,000-$63,000. Bitcoin remains more than 50% below its October 2025 record high, pressured by a hawkish shift in Federal Reserve expectations, persistent outflows from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds and a broader pullback in risk appetite.
In its first earnings report since its May IPO, Cerebras Systems (CBRS) is lower by 11% in after-hours trading after guiding to lower profit margins next quarter.
First-quarter revenue nearly doubled from the year-ago level to $193.4 million, and the company’s adjusted net loss of $2.5 million beat analyst forecasts of $36.75 million.
For the second quarter, the company guided to revenue of $194 million, but investors, for now, appear focused on core gross margin — the company expects 36%-38% in the second quarter versus 46.5% in the first.
Cerebras raised $6 billion in a May IPO priced at $185 per share. The stock soared as high as $385 shortly after going public, but has since retreated. It’s down another 11% in after-hours trading at $201.55.
The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a hearing on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (H.R. 3633) for July 17 in New York.
First introduced and House Financial Services Chairman French Hill on May 29, 2025, the CLARITY Act is the most significant attempt yet to build a durable regulatory framework for digital assets in the United States.
Its central mechanism is a jurisdictional division: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) would receive exclusive authority over spot markets for “digital commodities” — most notably Bitcoin — while the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) retains jurisdiction over digital assets that qualify as investment contracts.
That split has been the source of years of industry frustration. Without clear lines, firms have faced overlapping enforcement from both agencies, chilling innovation and pushing development offshore. SEC and Treasury officials have urged Congress to resolve the standoff, and the CLARITY Act represents the most concrete vehicle to do so.
The bill has been building momentum through the 119th Congress. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act 15-9 on May 14, with all 13 Republicans joined by two Democrats — though several committee members noted their votes did not guarantee floor support without further work on an ethics provision addressing government officials’ financial ties to crypto assets.
By June 1, the bill landed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders (Calendar No. 423), making it formally eligible for full Senate floor consideration.
The path forward isn’t without friction. The bill still needs to clear a 60-vote Senate threshold, be reconciled with the Senate Agriculture Committee’s version, and then be harmonized with the House-passed text before heading to the president’s desk.
The House previously passed a motion to advance the CLARITY Act alongside the GENIUS Act and Anti-CBDC provisions, signaling broad legislative appetite for a package approach.
More than 100 crypto firms have urged the Senate to advance the bill, and despite some early friction over developer liability language — Coinbase briefly threatened to withdraw support — the industry coalition has largely held together.
Galaxy Research currently estimates a 60–75% chance the bill becomes law in 2026, projecting a possible presidential signature during the week of August 3. The July 17 hearing is expected to be a critical signal of whether that timeline holds.
Senate passes Housing Act and pushes through CLARITY Act
In a somewhat significant parallel development, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in an 85-5 vote on June 22 — and tucked inside the housing supply legislation is a provision that bans the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) through the end of 2030.
The bill’s language is direct: the Fed “may not issue or create a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar to a central bank digital currency directly or indirectly through a financial institution or other intermediary” — through December 31, 2030.
The House had already passed an Anti-CBDC measure alongside its GENIUS Act vote, and an earlier version of the housing legislation cleared the House 390-9 in February.
House GOP leaders signaled plans for an expedited vote on the Senate-amended bill upon the chamber’s return from recess on June 23.
With White House backing and near-unanimous Senate support, the CBDC ban now looks likely to reach the president’s desk attached to must-pass housing reform.
