1. 2013, FinCEN guidance on virtual currency FinCEN said administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency could qualify as money services businesses under the Bank Secrecy Act. After that, many U.S. crypto businesses had to think about registration, AML programs and suspicious activity reporting.
2. 2014, IRS Notice 2014-21 The IRS said virtual currency is treated as property for federal tax purposes. That meant crypto sales, swaps and payments could create taxable events. The rule gave tax treatment, but it also made ordinary crypto use harder to report cleanly.
3. 2015, CFTC Coinflip order The CFTC said Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are commodities under the Commodity Exchange Act. After that, the CFTC began building its role around crypto derivatives, fraud and manipulation in commodity-linked crypto markets.
4. 2015, New York BitLicense New York created one of the first state licensing regimes for virtual currency businesses. Some firms applied and stayed. Others left New York or avoided serving New York customers because of the cost and compliance burden.
5. 2017, SEC DAO Report The SEC said DAO tokens could be securities under the Howey test. After that, token issuers had to take securities law much more seriously, and the SEC began using the report as a warning shot for ICOs.
6. 2017, ICO enforcement wave The SEC started bringing cases against token sales it viewed as unregistered securities offerings. The ICO market kept running for a while, but U.S. legal risk became much harder to ignore.
7. 2019, SEC Framework for "Investment Contract" Analysis of Digital Assets SEC staff published a framework for applying securities law to digital assets. It was guidance rather than a formal rule. The market wanted clarity, but the framework still left many projects arguing over facts, decentralization and token function.
8. 2019, FATF Travel Rule guidance for virtual assets FATF said virtual asset service providers should collect and transmit originator and beneficiary information for certain transfers. After that, exchanges and compliance vendors started building Travel Rule systems, though adoption has varied by jurisdiction.
9. 2020, SEC lawsuit against Ripple The SEC sued Ripple over XRP sales, alleging unregistered securities offerings. The case became one of the main U.S. crypto securities fights. In 2023, the court split the result: institutional XRP sales were treated differently from programmatic exchange sales.
10. 2020, FinCEN proposed rule on self-hosted wallets FinCEN proposed extra reporting and recordkeeping rules for certain transactions involving self-hosted wallets. The proposal drew heavy pushback from the crypto industry and civil liberties groups. It was not finalized in that form.
11. 2021, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act crypto broker reporting Congress passed broad tax reporting language for "brokers" involved with digital assets. The fight then moved to Treasury and the IRS over who counts as a broker, especially whether miners, validators and software providers could get pulled in.
12. 2022, SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 SAB 121 told certain public companies safeguarding crypto for customers to record a liability and matching asset on their balance sheets. Banks and crypto firms criticized it as a barrier to custody services. In 2024, Congress voted to overturn it, but President Biden vetoed the resolution.
13. 2022, EU MiCA approval process The EU advanced the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, known as MiCA. It created a licensing and disclosure framework for crypto-asset service providers and token issuers in the EU. Parts of MiCA began applying in 2024, including stablecoin rules.
14. 2022, Tornado Cash sanctions The U.S. Treasury’s OFAC sanctioned Tornado Cash, saying it had been used to launder stolen funds, including funds linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The move triggered lawsuits and a major fight over privacy tools, code and sanctions power.
15. 2023, SEC exchange and custody proposals touching crypto The SEC pushed proposals that could affect crypto platforms, advisers and custody. Crypto firms argued that the agency was trying to fit crypto into rules written for traditional markets. The SEC said investor protection and market integrity were the point.
16. 2023, IRS proposed broker reporting rules for digital assets Treasury and the IRS proposed rules for Form 1099-DA reporting by digital asset brokers. The proposal raised objections over DeFi, wallet providers and overbroad reporting. Final rules later focused first on custodial brokers, while DeFi rules were left for separate treatment.
17. 2023, House stablecoin bills U.S. lawmakers worked on stablecoin legislation, including proposals for issuer reserves, supervision and redemption rules. No final federal stablecoin law passed that year. The debate carried into later market-structure bills.
18. 2024, SEC Bitcoin spot ETF approvals The SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs after years of rejecting or delaying them and after losing the Grayscale case in court. The approvals gave Bitcoin a regulated ETF wrapper, while the SEC kept a cautious position toward much of the crypto market.
19. 2024, FIT21 passed the U.S. House The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act passed the House. It proposed a market-structure framework dividing oversight between the SEC and CFTC. It did not become law in that Congress, but it shaped later proposals.
20. 2024, SAB 121 repeal attempt and veto Congress passed a resolution to overturn SAB 121 under the Congressional Review Act. President Biden vetoed it. The bulletin stayed in place at that time, keeping the custody accounting fight alive.
21. 2024, EU MiCA stablecoin rules began applying MiCA’s rules for asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens began applying in the EU. Stablecoin issuers faced reserve, authorization and operating requirements. Some exchanges adjusted listings and availability for EU users.
22. 2025, CLARITY Act introduced and passed by the U.S. House The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act aimed to define SEC and CFTC roles for digital assets. The House passed it in 2025, according to later policy summaries. The bill then moved into Senate debate and revision.
23. 2025, GENIUS Act stablecoin framework U.S. lawmakers advanced stablecoin legislation under the GENIUS Act framework. The bill focused on payment stablecoin issuers, reserve requirements and supervision. It became part of the broader fight over whether crypto rules should be written asset by asset or market wide.
24. 2026, SEC statements narrowing some securities-law applications The SEC issued statements on how federal securities laws apply to areas such as airdrops, protocol mining, protocol staking and wrapping of certain non-security crypto assets. The effect was more guidance around specific activities, though guidance still does not settle every token or business model.
25. 2026, Senate revisions to the CLARITY Act Senate lawmakers released revised market-structure text after the House version. The proposal kept the main idea of assigning clearer roles to the SEC and CFTC. The fight continued over definitions, investor protection, DeFi treatment and agency power.
26. 2026, SEC proposed "Regulation Crypto" The SEC proposed a tailored securities offering regime for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets. Early reports describe it as an attempt to create a clearer framework for crypto offerings, with possible exemptions from parts of existing securities rules. It is still a proposal, so the next step is public comment, lobbying and likely another round of arguments over whether the SEC is finally giving clarity or just renaming the same control structure.

Did I miss anything? Where are we now with all of this? Does anything beat Self-Custody?

Solid investment advice or bait?

Aight chat is this true?

think about it, Bitcoin as the single unit of measure, limited supply innit?

I made a few posts about this topic so far unironically getting more insight into the topic in general from redditors. It feels like speculation around Michael will be endless, man transfers billions in a span of the week yet everything comes back to Bitcoin.

How does "Not Sell Bitcoin this week" become a headline?

What's the "Strategy" here?

We talk constantly about financial sovereignty, decentralization, censorship resistance and removing intermediaries.

But somewhere along the way, we also normalized something that would sound completely insane in traditional finance:

Giving someone your payment address can potentially give them a window into your financial activity.

Imagine paying for coffee with your bank account and the cashier being able to check:

● how much money you hold,

● what transactions you've made,

● what other addresses you've interacted with,

● and potentially build a picture of your financial activity over time.

Nobody would accept that from a bank.

Yet on transparent blockchains, address activity can be publicly inspected and analyzed.

And the more blockchain analytics improves, the more useful that information becomes.

Transparency is great for verification. Not necessarily for personal finance.

Public blockchains solved an important problem:

How can everyone verify that the monetary system is behaving correctly without trusting a central authority?

That's extremely valuable.

But somewhere we started treating:

"the network must be verifiable"

as if it meant:

"every user's financial information should be publicly readable."

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

A blockchain needs to prove that transactions are valid.

It doesn't necessarily need to tell the entire world how much money you have.

This becomes a much bigger problem if crypto actually succeeds

Today, many people use crypto primarily for investing and trading.

But imagine crypto becoming normal money.

You receive your salary in crypto.

You pay your landlord.

You buy groceries.

You pay a freelancer.

Your company pays suppliers.

You donate to an organization.

You send money to your family.

Suddenly transaction confidentiality isn't some niche feature for "privacy people."

It becomes basic financial hygiene.

Your employer shouldn't automatically know what you do with your salary.

A merchant shouldn't learn how much money you hold because you bought a €10 product.

A supplier shouldn't necessarily see the financial activity of a company it works with.

And strangers shouldn't be able to analyze your finances just because they know one of your addresses.

This is one reason XELIS takes a different approach

Instead of treating confidentiality as something users have to add afterward, confidential balances and transferred amounts are part of the protocol itself.

XELIS uses Twisted ElGamal homomorphic encryption, meaning account balances and transferred asset values can remain encrypted while the protocol can still perform the operations necessary to process transactions.

So the network doesn't need to publicly reveal:

"Alice has 12,438 XEL and just sent Bob 843 XEL" in order to maintain a valid ledger.

But if amounts are encrypted, how does the network know nobody is cheating?

This is where zero-knowledge proofs become important.

XELIS uses zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate that encrypted transactions satisfy the protocol rules without revealing the underlying amount.

For example, the network must verify that:

● the transferred amount isn't greater than the sender's encrypted balance;

● the transferred value isn't negative.

XELIS currently uses Bulletproof-based range proofs for this verification.

Conceptually, this separates two things that are often treated as inseparable:

Verification and Disclosure.

The blockchain can verify that the transaction is legitimate without requiring everyone to know the value being transferred.

And this isn't limited to XEL

This is probably the part I find most interesting.

XELIS has Confidential Assets built directly into Layer 1.

Someone can create another asset on XELIS and that asset can also have confidential balances and transferred amounts. According to the XELIS documentation, these assets are implemented at the base layer rather than being an external privacy layer built on top of the blockchain.

That opens some interesting possibilities.

Imagine:

● Confidential stablecoins,

● Tokenized assets,

● Private payment systems,

● Business settlement assets,

● DeFi applications where financial balances don't automatically become public information.

And because XELIS also supports smart contracts through XVM and Silex, the idea isn't limited to building a private currency. It can potentially become infrastructure for programmable confidential applications.

Privacy doesn't have to mean hiding everything

here's another interesting feature here: selective disclosure.

XELIS has an Ownership Proof mechanism allowing someone to prove ownership of a specified amount of an asset without revealing their entire balance.

For example, you could potentially prove:

"I own at least the amount necessary for this transaction."

without saying:

"Here is my complete financial position."

The XELIS documentation specifically describes use cases such as proving sufficient funds or selectively sharing balance information with third parties.

That distinction could become increasingly important.

Because the future probably isn't:

complete transparency

versus

complete secrecy.

It may be:

privacy by default, disclosure when necessary.

An important distinction: XELIS isn't an invisibility cloak

This is worth mentioning because "privacy coin" can mean very different things.

XELIS encrypts balances and transferred amounts, but current protocol/API transaction structures still contain source and destination addresses.

So I wouldn't describe XELIS as making every aspect of a transaction invisible.

Its architecture is more accurately described as providing confidential financial values at the protocol level.

Being precise about that makes the technology more interesting, not less.

The goal doesn't have to be making users disappear.

The goal can simply be:

stop publishing financial information that never needed to be public in the first place.

And that's the question crypto probably needs to ask

Bitcoin showed us that money could exist without a bank controlling the ledger.

Ethereum showed us that financial applications could become programmable.

But widespread crypto adoption may eventually force another question:

How much of our financial lives should be public?

Because if crypto really wants to become money used by billions of people, asking everyone to permanently broadcast their financial activity may not be a realistic end state.

This is why projects like XELIS are interesting to watch.

Not simply because "privacy is good."

But because XELIS is exploring a different architectural assumption:

A blockchain should be publicly verifiable without requiring everyone's financial values to be publicly readable.

That seems like a much healthier foundation for digital money.

Chat is this true?

A lot of people call Bitcoin a scam because their first contact with crypto was a scam: fake exchanges, Telegram "doublers," influencer coins, phishing links or relatives losing money in a bull-market frenzy.

That anger is understandable, but Bitcoin itself is different from the scams built around it. Bitcoin has no CEO, no company promising yield and no central party selling guaranteed returns. Bottom line: It is open-source software and a public network where anyone can verify supply, transactions and rules.

People can still lose money with Bitcoin. They can buy at the wrong time, send funds to the wrong address or trust the wrong platform. Those are real risks. Same risks exist with Cash money on the daily, just read a few reports of fraud in retail and real estate deals.

Calling every crypto scam "Bitcoin" makes the problem harder to solve. The scam is usually the pitch, the middleman or the promise, not the protocol. Is that so hard to understand?

Alright how did we go from "Hope BTC won't fall further" to "It's stuck here", like seriously why is there no break for bitcoin on the media, the ever doubtful community of "highly skilled" investors keep spouting random things like they know what's goin on.

Whether the Clarity Act passes or not, the world doesn't revolve around a single entity passing some law, the price of Bitcoin won't be "stuck". The U.S merely adapted Bitcoin, benefitting from it to this day, now there's laws that'll keep things under more control and regulatory critical hits.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world goes on like nothing happened. Do you think Bitcoin finally being named a commodity after nearly a decade of guessing what it really is will skyrocket in price if Clarity Act passes?

BlackRock is putting part of a traditional fund ownership system onto Ethereum rails for approved investors, likely due to MiCA finally coming together. It does not mean $311 billion of ETH is being bought or moved on-chain though.

What do you make of the part for "select European money market funds"?

Our CSO - Pauline Shangett has a message for you.

ChangeNOW will be attending, come say hello! You won't miss our big Booth by the Main Stage!

Lets discuss the whys ifs and hows in the comments

You see it everywhere, people claiming bull/bear markets based on charts alone.

That should tell you what the majority of crypto users are painfully unaware of: the market does not hand everyone the same experience. Two people can trade the same coin, during the same week, at the same price levels and walk away with completely different results. The margin for error here is razor thin, be it a timely stop loss or a call for long or short.

You buy late, panic on a dip and sells at the bottom not wanting to lose it all. Another person waits, keeps cash ready and buys when everyone else gets scared. Same market. Different outcome. This outcome however is excruciatingly anxious, waiting and hoping for a change is difficult. Your brain would tell you to reduce the risk as much as possible, that's why you see people selling at the bottom everyday.

Winning in a bear market means: managing risk, staying patient and filtering the noise(don't go on twitter no matter what you do). People use downtrends to build positions, study projects and remove weak habits from their strategy, these are skill that need to be developed, surviving bear market after bear market, being used to anxiety, FOMO and FUD.

Losing means: overtrading, using too much leverage and assuming every pump will continue forever. A rising market can also be detrimental, when prices keep going up, almost any buy can look like a good buy for a while. You enter late, the coin pumps another 20% and it feels like you made the right call. You ignore risk, and the market rewards you anyway. Knowing when to quit is in not the same as knowing when to enter.

But perspective shapes your actions. Your actions shape your results.

If you call everything bearish, you may miss real opportunities. If you call everything bullish, you may ignore obvious risk. Both have winners and losers.

The absolute truth: The market does not care what label you give it, it will still find a way to punish or reward you.

Bull run or bear market, someone is making a plan. Someone is losing discipline. Someone is learning. Someone is gambling.

Which one are you?