Two of the United States’ financial agencies tasked with overseeing and enforcing digital asset regulation will be down to just three commissioners after Friday, following the departure of a Republican member.On Friday, Hester Peirce, who served as a commissioner with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for eight years, will leave the agency about two months before the end of the 18-month extension for her second term. The departure of Peirce, whom many in the industry knew as “Crypto Mom” for her views on digital assets, will mark only the second time in US history the agency has operated with two commissioners.At the SEC, Chair Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda, both Republicans, will remain as the two final commissioners in a bipartisan panel expected to consist of five people. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), another federal regulator behind many aspects of crypto oversight and enforcement, has been led by Chair Michael Selig as the sole commissioner since December 2025, when acting chair Caroline Pham departed.As US President, Donald Trump is the only person under federal law who can nominate replacements to fill the empty SEC and CFTC leadership seats. However, the White House has not announced any nominations or intention to nominate additional members to the financial agencies, all of whom were chosen by Trump with the exception of Uyeda, a Biden pick from 2022.Related: Ex-SEC acting chair: Agency dropped crypto cases to avoid issues with credibilityCointelegraph reached out to the SEC and CFTC for comment on any potential nominations but did not receive an immediate response. A White House official said that Trump intended to nominate members to both agencies “in the near future.“ A CNBC report from Sept. 4 said that White House officials had been vetting four candidates to fill the empty commissioner seats at the CFTC, but did not mention any names.“Congress designed these boards and commissions to be bipartisan and gave them the authority to regulate some of the most vital and significant parts of American life,“ said Senate Democrats in a June letter to Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, referring to the SEC, CFTC and other departments. “But the Trump Administration appears intent on ensuring that it retains complete control over these agencies, with little interest in working in good faith with Congress.“Three commissioners regulating crypto without CLARITYWithout full leadership, both financial agencies continue to advance crypto regulation through rulemaking rather than laws passed by Congress. Many in the industry had been pushing US lawmakers to pass the Digital Asset Clarity (CLARITY) Act earlier this month, but the bill failed in the Republican-controlled Senate.The CLARITY Act was expected to give the CFTC more authority over digital asset regulation in roles now held by the SEC. Without the bill’s passage from Congress, both agencies have announced different ways of interpreting federal laws as applied to token issuers, from the SEC issuing staff guidance on investment contracts to the CFTC specifying how companies could use blockchain recordkeeping.Magazine: Winners and losers of the SEC’s new tokenized stocks rules

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Crypto asset manager Bitwise has launched the first US spot exchange-traded product tracking NEAR, giving investors exposure to the token through a fund trading on NYSE Arca.The Bitwise NEAR ETF, trading under the ticker NRR, carries a 0.75% management fee and will hold NEAR directly, with Bitwise intending to stake a significant portion of the fund’s tokens.The launch comes as activity on NEAR Intents, the network’s cross-chain transaction protocol, has increased sharply, with volume rising to more than $32 billion compared with less than $1 billion a year ago, according to Bitwise.Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan told Cointelegraph that the firm sees AI agents as a growing use case for NEAR and has already seen evidence of agents using the network. He expects that activity to increase over time, although most activity on NEAR today remains human-driven.Hougan added that Bitwise has been working on the US NEAR ETF since launching its European NEAR exchange-traded product in June 2025. NRR joins its US lineup of single-asset crypto products tracking Bitcoin (BITB), Ether (ETHW), Solana (BSOL), XRP (XRP) and Hyperliquid (BHYP).The NEAR token has rallied sharply over the past month, gaining about 167% to trade around $4.94 on Tuesday, according to CoinGecko data. The token is up about 81% over the past year.NEAR price. Source: CoinGeckoAI agents put crypto payment rails in focusNEAR is a layer-1 blockchain for decentralized applications that shifted its strategy toward AI in 2024 and has since focused increasingly on cross-chain infrastructure and autonomous AI agents.The shift comes as major financial institutions examine how autonomous software could drive demand for blockchain-based payment infrastructure. Last week, BlackRock said in a research paper that AI agents could increase demand for stablecoins, cryptocurrencies and tokenized assets as machine-to-machine transactions become more common.BlackRock described AI as a potential “structural catalyst” for digital asset adoption, arguing that programmable assets could be suited to high-frequency, low-value transactions that operate around the clock.NEAR is seeking to capture some of that activity through Intents, which allows users and AI agents to specify a desired transaction while third-party solvers compete to execute it across supported blockchains.“The design of Intents, for instance, aligns with the goal-based orientation of LLMs, and shields them from the complexity of bridging and other challenges,” Hougan told Cointelegraph.Hougan also pointed to cross-chain usability as a key factor behind Intents’ growth. “Bridging and cross-chain abstraction has been a challenge for crypto for nearly a decade, and a lot of people have lost both time and money trying to navigate that space,” he said.The protocol’s role in moving assets across blockchains came into focus this week after NEAR Intents said it blocked more than $50 million in attempted transfers linked to the $387.5 million Bitget hack. Its SHIELD system froze about $503,000 during execution, while roughly $166,000 in suspected stolen funds passed through the protocol.Magazine: Peter Brandt says Bitcoin may hit $600K by 2029, calls XRP a ‘fool coin’