Galaxy Launches $10M Prediction Markets Trade, NYDFS-EBA Pact Covers $314B Stablecoins, Trump Names Bitcoiner Pulte Acting DNI

Crypto News

Galaxy Digital opened an institutional door into prediction markets on Tuesday, becoming one of the first Nasdaq-listed blockchain firms to offer over-the-counter access to event-driven contracts at scale. Its global markets desk completed a $10 million trade with crypto hedge fund Arca tied to the outcome of the proposed CLARITY Act, the legislation that would set federal rules for digital assets. The initial menu covers non-sports contracts listed on Kalshi and Polymarket, with hedges available across equities and commodities. Galaxy executives framed event-driven markets as core macro infrastructure, while Arca cited liquidity gaps on retail venues as the reason large funds previously stayed away. GLXY shares slipped 6%.

The New York Department of Financial Services and the European Banking Authority signed a 22-page memorandum of understanding to jointly supervise the $314 billion stablecoin sector. The pact obliges both regulators to share supervisory data, flag operational or financial distress at issuers in near-real time, and exchange material from civil and criminal investigations upon request. Officials framed the arrangement as a defense against the cross-border depeg risk that surfaced when Circle's USDC briefly traded near 87 cents in 2023. The coordination lands as European Central Bank board member Isabel Schnabel publicly warned that stablecoins remain vulnerable to bank-style runs, sharpening calls for harmonized rules between Brussels and Albany.

President Donald Trump elevated Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to Acting Director of National Intelligence, a move that drew immediate cheers from Bitcoin holders despite the 38-year-old's lack of intelligence credentials. Pulte will retain his FHFA post and his chairmanships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while serving dual roles. His policy record is overtly crypto-friendly: in June 2025 he ordered the mortgage giants to count digital assets in underwriting without forcing borrowers to liquidate, and in March 2026 he expanded the rule to permit crypto reserves as mortgage collateral when held on U.S.-regulated venues. Federal filings disclose personal holdings in Bitcoin, Solana, and MARA Holdings.

U.S. equities held near record highs as artificial-intelligence earnings overpowered a fresh round of geopolitical noise. The S&P 500 added 0.14% after Hewlett Packard Enterprise reported $10.68 billion in quarterly revenue and lifted full-year guidance to 29-33% growth, while a high-profile chip endorsement carried Marvell Technology into a broader semiconductor bid. Broadcom climbed roughly 5% and Qualcomm gained 5.6%. April JOLTS data showed job openings surging to 7.62 million, the highest reading since May 2024 and well above the 6.88 million consensus, complicating near-term rate-cut bets. Iran's decision to walk away from nuclear talks with Washington capped the upside.

Trump also signed a long-delayed executive order titled "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security," directing federal agencies to accelerate AI-driven cybersecurity and to stand up a classified review pathway run by the National Security Agency. The framework lets developers voluntarily submit frontier models for evaluation up to 30 days before broader release, alongside a new AI cybersecurity clearinghouse for inter-agency coordination. The administration shelved a similar draft in May over concerns it could hand China a development edge. Critics, including Public Citizen, argued the voluntary architecture lacks enforceable guardrails, calling on Congress to pass binding transparency, testing, and worker-protection rules.

Two senior security researchers warned that quantum computing's threat to Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptography has accelerated faster than the community planned for. Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation and Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet detailed how a March 31, 2026 Google Quantum AI result demonstrated a 10x speed-up in attacking elliptic-curve math, dropping the logical-qubit requirement under 1,200. French researcher André Schrottenloher independently reconstructed the core optimization within two months, and amateur participants beat Google's benchmark by more than 8% within hours of a public challenge opening. Guillemet flagged that elements of the underlying zero-knowledge proof were withheld at U.S. government request.

CFTC Chair Michael Selig escalated his campaign to unwind Biden-era enforcement actions, telling CNBC the agency "politically targeted" Gemini's Winklevoss twins and moving in federal court last week to vacate the $5 million settlement reached with the exchange in January 2025. The Winklevoss brothers each donated $1 million to Trump's 2024 campaign and have appeared at White House events including the GENIUS Act signing. Former CFTC Chair Timothy Massad called the reversal "extraordinarily unusual." Selig, the agency's sole sitting commissioner, has also asserted that federal commodities law preempts state-level restrictions on decentralized exchange-adjacent prediction venues such as Kalshi and Polymarket.

The day's events trace a single thematic arc: the institutionalization of crypto's political and regulatory perimeter. Galaxy's prediction-market desk, the NYDFS-EBA stablecoin pact, Selig's enforcement reversal, and Pulte's elevation all show capital, supervision, and intelligence machinery converging on digital assets at the same time Washington recalibrates its AI posture and researchers compress the quantum threat horizon. The dominant narrative this cycle is no longer adoption alone — it is the contest over who governs the rails. Markets are pricing a pro-crypto policy tailwind, but the parallel acceleration of quantum risk and stablecoin contagion concerns argues that infrastructure hardening, not just sentiment, will define the next leg.