US Locks In CBDC Ban to 2030 as SpaceX Buys Cursor for $60B, WLF Nears Bank Charter

Crypto News

A Taiwan court has granted bail of NT$20 million (about $640,000) to the principal suspect in one of the island's largest virtual-asset fraud cases. The Shilin District Prosecutors Office charged 14 people, alleging Bitshine Technology helped a fraud ring launder proceeds between January 2024 and April 2025. Investigators counted 1,539 victims and roughly NT$1.275 billion (about $40 million) in losses, with traced laundering flows exceeding NT$2.3 billion. The operation allegedly used physical storefronts to convert cash into USDT before routing funds through layered transfers to obscure the trail. Prosecutors are seeking a combined 25-year sentence, while the court imposed travel bans and electronic monitoring for eight months.

US lawmakers reached a bicameral agreement on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, attaching a clause that bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency. The provision prohibits the Fed from creating a CBDC, or any asset substantially similar, with the restriction sunsetting on December 31, 2030. The Senate passed its version 89-10 in March, the House cleared a revision 396-13 in May, and negotiators merged the texts on June 16. Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren led the effort alongside Representatives French Hill and Maxine Waters. The carve-out leaves private dollar-pegged tokens as Washington's preferred digital-dollar path.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao praised rival Hyperliquid, calling the decentralized exchange's on-chain order book, zero-gas orders and sub-second execution genuinely impressive, while noting he would never run a venue allowing trading without identity checks given compliance risks. Speaking on a podcast, he flagged the same permissionless design as its biggest liability. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams sharpened the critique toward regulation itself, arguing US securities law mostly ensures only existing millionaires can back startups. The remarks, touching the same access debate that surrounds every AMM, landed as the altcoin HYPE traded at an all-time high, reviving the accredited-investor argument.

The Trump-backed crypto venture World Liberty Financial is poised to receive a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, with former agency staff describing approval as all but certain. The license would let the firm issue and redeem its USD1 stablecoin, manage reserves and offer custody directly, bypassing its current intermediary. The development sharpens conflict-of-interest scrutiny: disclosures show 75% of WLFI token-sale proceeds flow to a Trump-controlled entity, and estimates peg the family's crypto earnings above $2.3 billion. A House probe is already examining USD1 over potential conflicts and national-security concerns tied to foreign investment.

SpaceX announced an all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, in a deal valued at $60 billion. Founded in 2022 by four MIT students and led by 25-year-old Michael Truell, Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue within three years, a record pace for B2B software. The platform, which lets developers dial autonomy from single-line completion to fully autonomous agents that plan, code and submit pull requests, supports multiple models including Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok. The purchase folds the tool into a sprawling industrial group spanning space, automotive and artificial-intelligence ambitions, deepening the founder's footprint across frontier technology.

A data breach exposed the membership roster of Dialog, the invitation-only society co-founded by investor Peter Thiel in 2006, listing 222 registrants for its 2026 closed-door retreat. The leaked roll reportedly names the US Treasury secretary, sitting senators, the Army secretary, NATO's top European commander and numerous Silicon Valley executives, including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. The exposure traced to an unsecured directory in the group's website code, surfaced by a hacktivist acting on an anonymous tip; the underlying data sat in a business database without access controls, services terms or invite verification. The episode underscores recurring security failures across elite, tech-linked institutions.

Read together, these threads map a sector caught between aggressive institutionalization and persistent fragility. According to COINOTAG's aggregate market data, sentiment remains strained: the Fear & Greed Index sits at 22, deep in Extreme Fear, while Bitcoin dominance holds near 69.8% and total crypto market capitalization stands around $1.87 trillion. Charter approvals, a legislated CBDC ban and record-priced tokens signal capital and policy converging on digital assets, yet the Bitshine prosecution and the Dialog breach show enforcement and security gaps widening in parallel. With capital concentrating in Bitcoin amid a defensive, bear-market posture, regulatory clarity — not hype — looks set to decide which of these bets endures.