Republican senator Steve Daines has released a new proposal to update the tax code with regards to digital assets.
The senator for Montana released the Aligning Digital Assets with Principles of Taxation Act — or ADAPT Act — sponsored by Sen. Daines with Sens. Lummis, Moreno, and Tim Scott on Wednesday, aiming to draft rules for assets like stablecoins.
Lawmakers and regulators are fast trying to draft rules for digital assets since U.S. President Trump took office on a pro-crypto platform. The Clarity Act collapsed in the Senate last month; one day after, the House Ways and Means Committee overwhelmingly approved legislation that would revamp the tax treatment of cryptocurrency.
“Digital assets have moved into the mainstream, but the tax code hasn’t kept up,” Senator Daines wrote on X.
Digital assets have moved into the mainstream, but the tax code hasn’t kept up. My bill would create clearer rules for stablecoins, network fees, staking and lending—while extending familiar tax rules like wash sales and constructive sales to digital assets. pic.twitter.com/W6nXSsTgvX
“My bill would create clearer rules for stablecoins, network fees, staking and lending — while extending familiar tax rules like wash sales and constructive sales to digital assets.”
The bill proposes that everyday users of stablecoins get tax relief for everyday uses. Spending a qualifying dollar stablecoin on goods or services wouldn’t trigger gain or loss, and brokers wouldn’t have to report those transactions.
To qualify, the stablecoin must be issued under the GENIUS Act framework, appear on a quarterly Treasury list of coins that have held within 3% of $1.00, and have been bought by you within 3% of $1.00.
Separately, network or gas fees paid in crypto would be tax-free dispositions as long as the fees for a given transaction total $10 or less, with anti-structuring rules.
The bill would also apply wash sale rules to crypto for the first time. The rules bar investors from claiming a tax loss if they sell an asset and buy it back within 30 days. Stock investors have long been bound by them, while crypto traders could sell at a loss and immediately rebuy.
The rules would cover traded digital assets other than qualified stablecoins. Assets bought before the bill becomes law would be grandfathered, and staking rewards, mining rewards and regular recurring purchases would be exempt.
Tokenized versions of stocks would count as “substantially identical” to the underlying shares.
The ADAPT Act now heads to committee, which would need to approve it before it could reach a vote by the full Senate.
Bitcoin O.G. Peter Todd has joined the MARA Foundation as lead maintainer of Slipstream, the miner’s private Bitcoin mempool service.
Announced by the foundation on Thursday, the new role will see Todd responsible for developing and running the service.
Slipstream lets users send bitcoin transactions straight to MARA Pool, the company’s mining pool, without going through Bitcoin’s public peer-to-peer network. It was useful after hackers exploited Coldcard hardware wallets in July, stealing over $115 million in user funds.
Because transactions sent through Slipstream stay private until they’re confirmed in a block, the service helps to keep key information hidden before confirmation — protecting exposure of their public keys.
“I most look forward to seeing what’s possible on Bitcoin — using Slipstream as a proving ground for experimental development and protocol innovation,” Todd said.
Todd added: “Working with Slipstream is a natural complement to my work on Libre Relay, and my mempool policy work more broadly. I’ve always believed that Bitcoin is better when we design protocols with economic demand in mind. This is also a good opportunity to build bridges between Bitcoin Core developers and miners.”
MARA’s Slipstream first drew attention in 2024 for publishing large Ordinals inscriptions. More recently it has been used for research projects like Quantum Safe Bitcoin and Binohash, a way to emulate covenants without a soft fork.
Todd is a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, who co-authored BIP 125 (replace-by-fee), created OpenTimestamps, and in 2024 launched Libre Relay, a Bitcoin Core fork with looser relay rules for non-standard transactions.
He argues that mempool policy should follow what the market wants miners to mine, rather than restrict how people use Bitcoin.
Austrian Bitcoin platform 21bitcoin will start paying 1.21% annual interest on customers’ uninvested euro balances from today — and letting them collect it in BTC, with no conversion fee.
The company says it’s the first provider in Europe to pay savings interest directly in Bitcoin.
The interest covers every euro in the account, including cash waiting for the next savings-plan purchase or reserved for an open limit order, the company said. There’s no minimum deposit and no lock-up.
21bitcoin präsentiert den Bitcoin Bonus
Ab sofort erhältst du auf Euro-Guthaben variable Zinsen von 1,21% p.a.*
Und das Beste: Wir tauschen sie auf Wunsch direkt & ohne zusätzliche Gebühren in Bitcoin um.
“Building wealth with Bitcoin does not begin with the purchase itself, but with the euros set aside for it,” said co-founder and CEO Daniel Winklhammer.
The money is paid by Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Bayern Mitte eG, a German bank that has owned a stake in 21bitcoin since 2023.
Customer euros sit in a segregated trust account at the bank as instant-access savings. 21bitcoin says it passes the interest on in full and keeps no margin. The company is pitching this as a deliberate contrast to the high-yield promises that brought down several crypto lenders.
The rate is variable, and interest is subject to German withholding tax.
The launch follows 21bitcoin’s zero-fee Bitcoin savings plan, introduced earlier this year. The company last year teamed up with VR Bank Bayern Mitte eG and Sopra Financial Technology GmbH to launch a pioneering European pilot project in hopes to develop an institutional-grade Bitcoin-backed credit product.
Bitcoin-backed loans, insured cold storage, and multisig inheritance custody are slated for 2027.
Founded in 2021, 21bitcoin holds a MiCAR licence in Austria and is authorized by Germany’s BaFin. It reports more than 100,000 users and over €650 million in trading volume.
For as long as Bitcoin has existed, new forms of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) have been used to predict its demise. Despite this, Bitcoin has grown into a multi-trillion dollar asset and begun to take its place in the global monetary order. In recent months, the specter of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) enabling an attacker to recreate secret keys from public keys and sign Bitcoin transactions moving other people’s coins has returned as an evolved form of FUD. Is this a realistic threat to Bitcoin’s continued growth? In a word, no. There is no evidence that a CRQC will be built within a decade, and it remains unknown whether such a machine will ever be built. The quantum threat remains FUD.
State of the Art
To date, no quantum computing machine has computed anything out of reach of a precocious 6-year-old (confirmed empirically). Quantum computers are remarkable technology and showcase the truly science fiction worthy capabilities of the modern world. These devices harness foundational technologies such as optical tweezers, laser cooling, superconducting flux qubits, electromagnetic traps, dilution refrigerators, and many more. Within these devices individual qubits are coerced into specific subatomic states (different for each candidate technology), entangled into superpositions, manipulated to represent computations, and then their subatomic properties are read and interpreted. The astounding truth is that these devices exist, and can be manipulated to produce meaningful computations across a handful of inputs. The cold reality check is that (for an example candidate tech.) to do a computation that a small child can do requires enough power to air condition a Texas high school, many hours of setup, and further hours of post-processing.
Reading the Future
I know what you’re thinking, “but there’s so much money flowing into quantum computing”. Does money flowing into a field correlate with the rate of real-world technological progress in that field? Not really. In fact, it can be argued that until the correct underlying technology has been developed and the product-market fit confirmed, money flowing into an area has a negative correlation with the likelihood of applicable technology being developed. This can be clearly seen by comparing NASA’s Space Shuttle program to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. SpaceX took (mostly) known science and reduced it to practice to satisfy a demonstrable market need for reliable and lower cost access to space, at a program cost of less than $5 billion to first crewed mission. The Space Shuttle cost roughly $50 billion to reach its first crewed mission. Not only did Falcon 9 cost an order of magnitude less to develop, but it has a perfect crew safety record to date. There are many reasons for these differences, but it goes to show that no amount of money makes a technology that is not ready practicable. Translating this to quantum computing: we can see that with tons of money being thrown at the problem, technology demonstrations at massive cost are possible. But this tells us nothing about whether more money will bring us the holy grail of stable, low-error qubits (like the reliability of the Falcon 9). No amount of continued development on the Space Shuttle program would ever have produced the low cost, high reliability of Falcon 9, and it’s entirely probable that no amount of continued development, at any cost, will ever make any of the current quantum computing technologies reliable enough to break a single key pair.
Now, you might be thinking, “but what about all the recent advancements?” There are two important things to keep in mind about recently published advancements. First, many of these advancements have been advancements in pure mathematics only. For example, the recent Google paper which had such an important result that they chose to redact the theoretical quantum circuit rather than risk it being used to break important cryptographic systems. This may seem like massive progress toward the future of CRQCs, but in fact it changed nothing. Unless (or until) the quantum hardware has its Falcon 9 moment, there simply is no device which comes anywhere near the stability and scale needed to run the redacted circuit. It’s pure theater to hide a circuit designed for a device which may never exist. Second, on the hardware side itself, we see many new results and bits of progress published in a given year, but how many of these relate to the same quantum computing candidate technology? How many represent merely a starting over after a prior result ended in a dead end? The reality is that these advancements do not represent some linear track toward eventual success. They represent the breadth-first search of an infinite possibility space within which quantum researchers are hoping to find a path along which they can proceed for even a modest distance without reaching yet another dead end.
When we look at the reality of the future of quantum computing, it’s hazy at best. There are promising technological developments. Especially, to my eye, in the area of neutral atom devices. But it’s far too early to tell if there’s a path open toward an eventual CRQC along any of the currently known branches or if more restarts are in our future. If, at some point, we see many iterations of the same candidate technology implementing progressively more capable devices, and computing meaningful results that a precocious child cannot also compute, we can revisit this discussion with different evidence.
In Theory
There are two possible explanations for the repeated failure of quantum research to develop a CRQC over many decades. It’s possible that it’s just a hard problem and we’re continuing to apply science and engineering to solve it and one day the ingenuity of the human species will prevail as it has in the development of the Internet, the smart phone, social media, and Bitcoin (left to the reader to decide which of these are positive developments). On the flip side, it may be that developing a CRQC is either impossible or will remain forever outside our grasp. Consider what it would mean for a CRQC to exist: the machine would have to represent within its superposition a field of possibilities the same size as the complexity of the cryptographic problem to be solved. I.e. to break the 128-bit security of the elliptic curve discrete log on Bitcoin’s secp256k1 curve, the quantum superposition would have to represent all possible values of a 128-bit number. In classical computing, representing all such values would require more computer storage (by many orders of magnitude) than humans have ever produced. If there is even the slightest granularity to the quantum superposition (i.e. the quantum superposition is not perfectly continuous across all possible values) then the quantum computer cannot ever become cryptographically relevant. If the energy required to hold a superposition scales with the complexity of the field being represented then a quantum computer cannot ever be cryptographically relevant. The contemporary understanding of quantum physics does not rule out either of these possibilities.
Conclusion: Bitcoin Cannot Rest
Despite all of the preceding, Bitcoin development toward new cryptographic algorithms must continue. While a quantum attack on Bitcoin’s cryptography is not imminent by any means, it’s entirely possible that another flaw could be found through other means. We know that certain elliptic curves have been found to have weaknesses, and secp256k1 could be next. Bitcoin has survived as long as it has because attacks on the system have strengthened it and that will continue to be true as the quantum FUD attack plays out. The development of P2MR or P2TRv2, of SHRINCS, SPHINCS, IBC, ML-DSA, and more post-quantum signature schemes will eventually lead to improvements to Bitcoin’s resilience in the face of future attacks even if an actual CRQC is never developed.
This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Quantum Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.
Researchers have proposed a way to make Bitcoin private without changing Bitcoin itself. Misha Komarov, co-founder of alloc/init, explains Shielded Bitcoin: zero-knowledge proofs that hide the sender, receiver, and amount of a Bitcoin transfer, with no soft fork, no custodians, and no bridges. He covers how Bitcoin PIPEs make it possible and what the proposal still needs. It is a research proposal, not a finished product.
Chapters: 0:00 Shielded Bitcoin: Private Bitcoin Transactions With Zero-Knowledge Proofs 0:38 How Bitcoin PIPEs Make Privacy Possible Without a Soft Fork 1:42 Do Indexers and ZK Rollups Require Trust? 3:16 Shielded Bitcoin vs. Monero and Zcash 4:21 What Privacy Shielded Bitcoin Protects 5:59 How Private Are Early Users? The Small Privacy Set Problem 7:37 Is Shielded Bitcoin an Altcoin Killer? 9:12 Fees, Block Space, and Larger Shielded Transactions 10:50 Who Needs Private Bitcoin? Wrench Attacks and Corporate Treasuries 12:20 Dark Pools, Governments, and the Next Wave of Bitcoin Buyers
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
Robinhood is bringing crypto perpetual futures to US customers, with up to 10x leverage on Bitcoin and Ether. Nicola White, Robinhood’s vice president of institutional crypto, explains how the CFTC no-action letter, the Bitstamp exchange, and Robinhood Derivatives made it happen, and why the company wants markets to be always on.
Chapters: 0:00 Robinhood’s Hood Summit: 24/7 Stock Trading and US Crypto Perps 0:40 Why Robinhood Wants Markets That Never Close 1:32 Bitstamp Perps and the CFTC No-Action Letter 2:19 Tokenized Stocks, the Basis Trade, and the Path for US Perps 3:20 Bitstamp’s Volume and the Retail–Institutional Merger 4:54 What Institutions Want to Do With Bitcoin 6:00 Institutional Bitcoin Depth and Large Block Trades 6:49 AI Trading Agents and Robinhood’s Sub-Account Controls 8:29 Lessons From the 2022 Meltdown and US Leverage Limits 10:12 How Bitcoin Changes Finance in 10 Years and What’s Next for Tokenized Stocks
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
The Fed just raised rates, yet Bitcoin keeps climbing. Mark Moss, host of the Market Disruptors podcast, explains why he thinks most people are misreading why long-term rates are rising, how a booming economy could be part of the answer, and why he says Bitcoin benefits from both the debasement trade and a bullish technological future.
Chapters: 0:00 Mark Moss on the Fed’s “Token Raise” and an October Pause 1:54 The Flat Yield Curve, Bank Lending, and the 5.1% 10-Year 2:56 Why Bitcoin Is Rising as Rates Rise: “Price Is Truth” 5:40 Bitcoin vs. Gold: The Debasement Trade and a Bullish Future 6:19 Can the US Grow Its Way Out of $40 Trillion in Debt? 10:30 The Monetary Reset Is a Process, Not an Event 13:33 Four Ways Out of the Debt Problem and What Happens in 2029–2030 16:27 Stablecoins, the Genius Act, and Why 6 Billion People Want Dollars 20:14 Institutions Are Buying Bitcoin While Retail Sells 24:29 Bitcoin’s S-Curve, Its CAGR, and a $1 Million Price Target
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has opened applications for crypto firms to become authorized, bringing the sector under full regulation for the first time.
In a Wednesday announcement, the watchdog said companies can apply so that the crypto industry has “clarity and legitimacy.”
The UK is in the process of drafting a sweeping new crypto bill. The FCA finalized its regulatory framework for cryptoassets in June, and the regime is due to take effect in October 2027.
“The UK’s new crypto regime will give consumers greater protections and firms a clear framework to operate in. Firms can now apply for authorisation and start preparing for regulation,” Dominic Cashman, director of authorisation at the FCA, said in a statement.
The statement added that firms will have to demonstrate that they meet requirements covering consumer protection, customer-asset safeguarding, market integrity and financial resilience.
Britain is pushing ahead with digital asset legislation since last year recognizing bitcoin and other digital assets as property. The reform came from a 2023 recommendation by the Law Commission, which argued that digital assets did not fit neatly into existing legal categories.
Despite the FCA’s announcement, the UK currently is trailing behind Brussels and Washington with digital asset regulation.
The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation has applied to service providers since 30 December 2024.
And the U.S. under President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, establishing a federal framework for dollar-backed tokens.
Despite lawmakers blocking landmark legislation the Clarity Act last month, U.S. regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission have pushed ahead with rulemaking regardless.
Bitcoin is having one of its best quarters ever — another indication that the biggest cryptocurrency is in a bull market.
As noted by the The Kobeissi Letter this week, the price of bitcoin is now up close to 30% since August 19, when the U.S. Treasury announced it planned to more than double the size of its government debt repurchases.
Over the past quarter, the bitcoin price has surged by 40% — its best quarterly performance since Q4 2024.
Bitcoin’s price recently stood at nearly $83,698, unmoved over a 24-hour period but up 6% over a 30-day period.
The coin has benefited from news that the Treasury would try to lower bond yields — which have soared to highs not seen since the 2000s.
Bitcoin has done well with lower long-term yields because it reduces the opportunity cost of holding non-yielding assets like bitcoin and gold, and generally supports risk-on sentiment.
But despite the Treasury stepping in to try and tame the bond market, yields have continued to stay high.
Bitcoin investors don’t seem that bothered. The asset is still doing well as the dollar continues to slip. The so-called debasement trade — where investors throw money at an asset to hedge against a currency losing its value — is hot again after total U.S. debt topped $40 trillion for the first time in July.
The price of Bitcoin had been battered since notching a new all-time high of $126,080 in October, dropping by over 50%. Still, it has experienced the shallowest bear market — so far — in its history.
CryptoQuant said in a report last week that bitcoin was back in a bull market after crossing above its 365-day moving average — the “definitive technical signal” that has marked the start of Bitcoin’s bull markets in past cycles.
The coin has shrugged off the Federal Reserve raising interest rates and lawmakers blockage of landmark crypto legislation, the Clarity Act.
Investment bank TD Cowen has said that Bitcoin is more than an asset — and will be increasingly used as financial infrastructure to underpin institutional products.
Writing in a Tuesday note, TD Cowen said that after attending a BitcoinTreasuries Conference this week in New York, it noticed institutions were more than interested in just accumulating the leading cryptocurrency.
The comments come as major banks around the world delve deeper into the technology that underpins Bitcoin, with firms offering — and using — crypto products for customers and to streamline their own services.
JUST IN: Investment bank giant TD Cowen says Bitcoin "is evolving from an asset into a capital markets ecosystem"
“Bitcoin increasingly appears to be moving beyond its role as an investable asset and toward a broader role as financial infrastructure capable of supporting new capital-markets activity,” the report read.
“In our view, the most interesting conversations were not necessarily about bitcoin itself, but about the ecosystem being built around it,” the report continued.
It added that Bitcoin could be used in its next phase by “supporting capital markets infrastructure.”
Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin treasury Strategy has long argued that the leading cryptocurrency will underpin other products in the financial sector. The company, which is the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, currently offers preferred stocks which pay investors dividends.
TD Cowen said that bitcoin custody was becoming more institutional as “larger pools of capital enter the ecosystem.”
U.S. and European banks have spoken about or started offering bitcoin custody services in recent years.
BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services. And this month, German multinational Deutsche Bank said it would debut a bitcoin custody service for European corporate and institutional clients later in 2026.
“We believe these developments suggest that bitcoin is continuing to evolve from a standalone asset into a broader financial ecosystem capable of supporting increasingly sophisticated institutional participation,” TD Cowen added.
TD Cowen is a division of multinational TD Securities.
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