Autor Cointelegraph By Felix Ng

Senate Republicans on Sunday released revised text of the CLARITY Act aimed at swaying Democrats ahead of a procedural vote on Tuesday, featuring major changes to rules relating to government officials’ involvement with digital assets.The 635-page proposal, released by US Senate Banking Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis alongside Chairmen John Boozman and Tim Scott, also includes changes to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) and provisions governing stablecoin yield. Lummis said the new ethics provisions had been agreed to by US President Donald Trump. “After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready,” she said. “President Trump voluntarily agreed to unprecedented ethics restrictions, holding every federally elected official, judge, and their spouses to some of the toughest ethics restrictions in US history.”The new bill text comes just two days before a procedural vote on the CLARITY Act on Tuesday at 2:15pm ET, which will determine whether the Senate can advance the bill toward floor consideration. The proposal has been described as a final offer on the bill, a Republican aide told reporters on Sunday.Key changes in final CLARITY Act text Lummis said the final bill text reflects a year of bipartisan negotiations and 126 changes made at the request of Democrats. The revised ethics rules would allow state attorneys general to enforce bans on federal officials issuing, sponsoring or holding significant financial interests in digital assets, and on exchanges listing assets in violation of those bans. Covered individuals would also be required to divest significant financial interests or place them in a qualified blind trust. Violations would carry civil penalties of $500,000 or 20% of the amount received in the prohibited transaction, whichever is greater, with the ethics provisions taking effect 360 days after enactment, or sooner if implementing regulations are finalized.Related: Treasury Secretary Bessent urges CLARITY Act passage after Senate returnsOn stablecoins, the Treasury Secretary would be required to introduce rules restricting rewards if they determine that community banks are losing deposits on a substantial scale, though the authority would expire 18 months after the bill becomes law. Meanwhile, the revised BRCA would retain protections against treating developers as money transmitters or financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act and extend the protections to miners and validators, which were previously excluded. It would also remove references to Section 1960 of Title 18 of the US Code, which relates to the prohibition of unlicensed money transmitting businesses.  Other changes would strengthen safeguards around affiliate trading and conflicts of interest at digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, and clarify how consumer protection laws apply. While still comparatively low, Polymarket odds for the CLARITY Act passing this year reached 35% on Monday, its highest level since late July. Magazine: Crypto’s biggest week ever? Swarm fears prompt AI slowdown: Hodler’s Digest

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A Bitcoin security researcher says he has been forced to go back to using open-source Chinese AI models after finding himself restricted from analyzing further codebases by OpenAI, highlighting a growing concern that the most capable AI tools aren’t being made available to defenders. In an X post on Tuesday, AnchorWatch CEO Rob Hamilton said he had begun integrating OpenAI’s Trust & Cyber capabilities into his Bitcoin Red Team work on Saturday, only to find his access restricted the following morning. “It absolutely guts me as a patriotic American to have to do this, but I will be going back to using Chinese open source models to conduct my research to protect Bitcoin infrastructure,” he added. Bitcoin Red Team, a group of volunteers, has been using AI tools and human review to scan hundreds of open-source Bitcoin-related repositories for vulnerabilities, with efforts accelerating days after the Coldcard hardware wallet hack, which has seen over $100 million in Bitcoin stolen. Last month, crypto executives told Cointelegraph that many of crypto’s biggest players are still waiting to gain access to powerful new AI models to strengthen their code from attacks, with only a select few having been able to get it.  “I am now prevented from being able to continue the investigation in a further effort to make sure their code changes are sufficient, as well as understand if there are other issues that have yet to be discovered,” said Hamilton. “Black hats will not hit these issues. The white hats will. We’ve hit a local minima in policy,” said Hamilton. “Intelligence is unrestricted for those who don’t follow rules, and those who engage in harm reduction are left on the sidelines.” Related: Crypto firms still seeking frontier AI access; only select few have itCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Australia’s anti-money laundering watchdog has suspended the operation of Cryptolink’s Bitcoin ATMs for three months, citing “ongoing concerns” about its compliance with anti-money laundering obligations. Australia has the highest number of crypto ATMs of all countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Australian authorities have been cracking down on the criminal use of crypto ATMs since at least late 2024. AUSTRAC CEO Brendan Thomas said Monday the company’s Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registration has been suspended for three months starting Sunday, meaning its crypto ATMs will not be allowed to operate during that time. AUSTRAC said Cryptolink failed to meet basic reporting requirements, particularly threshold transaction reports, and did not respond to AUSTRAC’s request for information. “As part of our continued focus on digital currency as a money laundering risk, AUSTRAC has ongoing concerns about the company’s ability to manage high-risk transactions through its CATMs,” said Thomas. The action follows an enforceable undertaking that Cryptolink entered into with AUSTRAC in October 2025, after its Cryptocurrency Taskforce identified alleged breaches including late transaction reporting and shortcomings in Cryptolink’s risk assessments. AUSTRAC also issued a $56,340 infringement notice, which Cryptolink paid. Cryptolink has 96 ATMs in Australia, allowing customers to exchange cash for Bitcoin. Most of its ATMs are located in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Cointelegraph reached out to Cryptolink for comment. Related: Bitcoin Depot stock crashes 71% premarket after Chapter 11 filingCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

The first sign that quantum computing has broken modern cryptography probably won’t be a splashy theft of Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant Bitcoin. It could just be a wave of unrelated crypto wallet breaches with no trace of how an attacker did it, according to the founder of blockchain startup Quantus. “When someone cracks your key, you don’t get a memo saying how they did it,” Christopher Smith, CEO and co-founder of Quantus Network, told Cointelegraph. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from public keys exposed onchain, allowing an attacker to move funds without compromising a wallet, device or exchange’s internal systems. This makes the arrival of “Q-day” — a hypothetical future moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard public-key cryptography — unusually difficult to detect. In a theft involving a highly secure organization, “the only forensic evidence would be that there was no breach,” Smith said.Smith’s warning comes as advances in quantum algorithms have reduced estimates of computing resources needed to attack the elliptic-curve cryptography used by major blockchains. First target may not be Satoshi’s Bitcoin Much of the fear around Q-day in crypto is what will happen if a quantum computer cracks the keys securing Satoshi Nakamoto’s estimated Bitcoin holdings, worth $63 billion at the time of writing, which could be suddenly dumped on the market. However, Smith said the first targets may be military systems and state secrets, while crypto attackers could go for even more valuable keys. “If I’m focusing on blockchain, what’s the single most valuable key? It’s probably Tether’s minting key,” Smith said. A quantum attacker could mint tokens out of thin air from an administrative wallet and dump them on the market before the issuer could respond, he added.USDT is a multi-chain stablecoin, and some of the networks on which it is deployed are already actively working on post-quantum migration. Related: Jim Cramer plans to sell his Bitcoin over quantum fears as BTC rises 1.6%Another theory is that attackers make a quieter opening move.Sean Cheetham, a security researcher at Blockchain Capital, said an attacker would more likely target hot wallets at exchanges “that aren’t going to ring alarm bells rather than stealing Satoshi’s coins.”Smith said an attacker may disguise a quantum theft as an ordinary compromise.“There’s an alternative scenario where they… have these plausible, deniable [explanations]: ‘Oh, somebody just lost their keys somehow,’” he said.Q-day timeline hard to pin downIn March, Google accelerated its post-quantum migration timeline to 2029 as an AI-assisted breakthrough showed elliptic curve cryptography can be cracked with far fewer physical qubits than previously forecasted.NGRAVE CEO Roy Blackstone said earlier quantum forecasts failed to account for the parallel development of AI. “Most threat models assumed we had well into the next decade before quantum technology could realistically crack the cryptography securing public keys, but it did not account for how fast AI would develop alongside it.”Despite growing urgency, there is little agreement on when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern cryptography will be ready.Smith, whose company is developing a blockchain network aiming to be quantum-resistant from launch, said there was a “50-50” chance it could happen by 2028, arguing that continued AI-assisted improvements in quantum algorithms and hardware research are making forecasts less reliable. Cheetham said the early 2030s “definitely is almost a certainty” and that an earlier arrival was “more of a trailing probability.” Michael Coates, the Solana Foundation’s chief information security officer, declined to give an estimate during an earlier interview, saying “there’s no way to know.” “If you talk to people in the industry, it is always five years away, and it’s been that way for 10 years or more now. Perhaps today people say it’s four years away,” he said. But the uncertainty is not a reason to delay, he added.“Thankfully, blockchains aren’t waiting and have started migrating to post-quantum signatures,” said Blackstone. “The damage would be catastrophic if they didn’t.”Magazine: How AI just dramatically sped up the quantum risk for Bitcoin