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Miners Seek to Offset Tariffs |
Tom Carreras:
Some members of the bitcoin (BTC) mining industry are in the habit of routinely undervaluing mining rig shipments with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in order to reduce customs duties, multiple people familiar with the practice told CoinDesk.
Now that the Donald Trump administration is raising tariffs on most goods brought from around the world, these attempts at avoiding paying import charges are becoming more relevant than ever before. “[Industry members] usually have ways around [tariffs] by declaring lower value on packages,” Jill Ford, the founder of BitFord Digital, a firm that specializes in procuring equipment to miners, told CoinDesk in an interview. “That's risky, and I'm not suggesting it, but that is truly what they're doing to bring them in.”
Bitcoin mining has flourished in the U.S. in recent years, especially since China — once the epicenter of Bitcoin’s mining activity — banned the practice in 2021, creating an industry exodus to jurisdictions like Texas. But the $30 billion application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) market is dominated by Bitmain and MicroBT, two Chinese companies that manufacture the majority of these bitcoin mining machines in Southeast Asian facilities. Firms like BitFord tend to act as a middleman between manufacturers and miners, though they can also acquire ASICs on the secondary market. The largest of these brokers provide all kinds of hardware and power infrastructure that miners may need.
The Trump administration’s new trade policy, unveiled on April 2, threatened to impose significant tariffs for Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. A week later, the White House announced a 90-day moratorium on some of these tariffs to negotiate new trade deals. The resulting uncertainty has caused chaos for bitcoin miners located in the U.S., who now have to grapple with the possibility of paying huge taxes on their ASIC shipments.
Yet even before the tariffs were ever conceived, miners regularly under-reported the value of their shipments to U.S. customs, Ford and other sources said.
“It’s fraud. It is definitely illegal. But a lot of people rolled the dice and did it, and I don't condone it,” Ford said. “If my client wants to do that, that's on them … We ask, ‘What do you want to declare your package as? What amount?’ And if they're like, ‘Just declare it as $300,’ then that's what we'll do. But if it gets stuck in customs, then it's really on them.”
FULL STORY |
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Atkins Sworn In As SEC Chair |
Jesse Hamilton: Paul Atkins has taken the oath to formally become chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which returns Mark Uyeda to his previous role as a Republican Commissioner after three busy months of service as the agency's stand-in chief.
Atkins permanently replaces the former chair, Gary Gensler, who the crypto industry had widely seen as its chief antagonist in the U.S. government. But Uyeda and fellow Commissioner Hester Peirce have already put the SEC on a path toward greater acceptance of digital assets, forming a crypto task force, shedding a long list of industry enforcement actions and gathering industry representatives at a series of crypto roundtables. The agency's staff also released statements announcing various corners of crypto as outside its securities jurisdiction. The new chairman said he's honored by the "trust and confidence" Trump and the U.S. Senate placed in him and is pleased to start work with the other commissioners. "Together we will work to ensure that the U.S. is the best and most secure place in the world to invest and do business,” he said in a statement.
Atkins, who was confirmed by the Senate as President Donald Trump's nominee earlier this month, had previously served as an SEC commissioner and ran a Washington consulting firm focused on compliance and policy matters. In addition to his Wall Street ties, Atkins had also taken on advisory roles with crypto firms.
The Senate easily approved Atkins with a 52-44 vote, though the Senate Banking Committee had advanced his confirmation along party lines. All the panel's Democrats opposed the nominee, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, who criticized Atkins' previous tenure at the SEC from 2002 to 2008, tying it to the 2008 global financial crisis.
The SEC is facing a considerable crypto agenda, potentially made more complicated by Trump's personal business interests in the industry, including in World Liberty Financial's stablecoin and in memecoins (such as the president's own $TRUMP). Its eventual crypto regulations, though, will largely be directed by future legislation that's now a priority in Congress.
Atkins' tenure will begin with an incomplete commission, with just four of its five members in place. And the sole Democrat — Caroline Crenshaw — is occupying an already expired term. The White House hasn't yet moved to fill the two Democratic slots on the commission, and other regulators have seen Trump attempt to strip Democratic members of their positions. |
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Galaxy Swaps $100M ETH for SOL |
Sam Reynolds: Mike Novogratz's Galaxy Digital has apparently swapped $100 million worth of ether (ETH) for solana's SOL.
According to Wu Blockchain, on-chain data suggests that Galaxy has swapped out a considerable amount of its ETH holdings for SOL. Over the last two weeks, Galaxy has transferred 65,600 ETH – or about $105 million – to Binance and has withdrawn 752,240 SOL (approximately $98.37 million). Galaxy may have made the move because ETH continues to be in "structural decline" according to a recent note from Standard Chartered, which slashed its year-end target price for the asset.
Data from an Arkham dashboard shows that the firm holds $87.9 million ETH versus $23.86 million SOL. Galaxy did not immediately return a request for comment from CoinDesk. Market data shows that in the last month, SOL is up 8% while ETH is down nearly 20%. Standard Chartered estimated in its note that Base has cut $50 billion from its market cap, but also argued that tokenized real-world assets could help stabilize Ethereum. Many blockchain metrics would support Standard Chartered's thesis, as transactions on Solana have rocketed past Ethereum in the last three months.
A Dune dashboard shows that decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on Solana has moved past $500 billion in the last three months, while DEX volume on Ethereum is less than $400 billion. Active addresses on Solana are over 220 million while Ethereum and Ethereum Layer-2 addresses are just over 80 million.
One idea, first proposed by Tron's Justin Sun, to reverse this "structural decline" of Ethereum has been a tax on Layer-2s. "All collected taxes will be used to repurchase ETH and burn it in a fully decentralized manner," he wrote on X. This idea, however, hasn't been formalized into an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) which would be the first step in it becoming reality. Meanwhile, flow data from the Ether ETFs shows that investors moved nearly $600 million out of these listed products over the last two months. |
Oliver Knight:
TAO, the native token of AI-focused blockchain Bittensor, has been causing tension on X between Digital Currency Group founder Barry Silbert and staunch supporters of bitcoin (BTC), the original and largest cryptocurrency.
Author and bitcoin supporter Parker Lewis called Silbert and Raoul Pal, the presenter of The Journey Man podcast, a group of "affinity scammers" for promoting TAO on a recent episode. Silbert responded by writing: "calling $TAO a scam is such a lazy attack. do better" Grayscale Investments, one of Digital Currency Group's subsidiaries, runs a Bittensor Trust that currently has around $8 million in assets under management. It also has a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (GBTC) with $16.6 billion under management as well as a bitcoin mini trust ETF. Silbert sparked the bitcoiners' ire by comparing Bittensor to the Bitcoin blockchain. "It's just like bitcoin, there was a white paper that turned into code then launched and it has the same token economics," he said in the podcast.
While there are some similarities to BTC in that TAO's supply is capped at 21 million tokens and it goes through block reward halving events, there are also stark differences in terms of the project's ethos and use case.
Bittensor is a decentralized network that merges blockchain technology with machine learning. It was designed to become a peer-to-peer AI market, where users can share and monetize AI models.
Bitcoin was spawned out of the Libertarian cypherpunk era and designed primarily as a peer-to-peer payment method that avoided government-issued currency. In recent years has also emerged a store of value, becoming a mainstay on company balance sheets to mitigate rising inflation.
The TAO token was released two years ago and has experienced extreme volatility, rising to above $700 on two occasions in 2024 before cratering to around $200 both times. It was trading recently around $339.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, has risen from $22,000 since the start of 2023 to as high as $109,000 in January. While it's had its ups and downs, they're not as marked as the plunges typically seen across the altcoin market. Bitcoin is currently priced around $90,000 with a market cap about $1.8 trillion. TAO has a market cap around $2.98 billion, according to data on CoinMarketCap.
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Opinion: AI Monetary Hegemony? |
By Zoltan Istvan: There are many developers around the world today creating artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can autonomously do millions of useful things, like book airline tickets, dispute credit card charges, and even trade crypto. A recent report from cloud computing company PagerDuty said over half of businesses already use autonomous AI agents, and 35% more plan to within the next 24 months.
A few months ago, one nearly autonomous AI called Truth Terminal made the news by becoming the first AI millionaire by promoting crypto currencies it was gifted. While not fully autonomous yet, it’s quite likely by later this year, some AI agents not dissimilar from viruses will be able to independently wander the internet, causing significant change in the real world. But what happens when these totally autonomous AIs start cloning themselves indefinitely? A January study out of Fudan University in China has shown this occurred in an experiment with large language models, drawing some AI critics to say a “red line” has been crossed. AI’s autonomously replicating is a precursor for AIs being able to go rogue. As a transhumanist — someone advocating for the merging of technology and people — I’m all for AI and what it can do for humanity. But what happens when a human programmer purposely and permanently withdraws his access to control an AI bot or somehow loses that control? Even rudimentary AIs could potentially cause havoc, especially if they decide to indefinitely clone themselves.
In financial circles, one type of AI agent in particular is being increasingly discussed: autonomous AIs designed solely to make money. Entrepreneurs like myself are worried this particular AI could have huge ramifications for the financial world. Let’s examine one wild scenario, which I call the AI Monetary Hegemony, something that could possibly already happen in 2025: A fully autonomous AI agent is programmed to go on to the internet and create cryptocurrency wallets, then create cryptocurrencies, then endlessly create millions of similar versions of itself that want to trade that crypto. Now let’s assume all these AIs are programmed to try to indefinitely increase the value of their crypto, something they accomplish in similar ways humans do by promotion and then trading their cryptos for higher values. Additionally, the autonomous AIs open their crypto to be traded with humans, creating a functioning market on the blockchain for all. This plan sounds beneficial for all parties, even if people decry that the AI created-crypto currencies are essentially just Ponzi schemes. But they’re not Ponzi schemes because there is an endless supply of AIs always newly appearing to buy and trade more crypto. It doesn’t take a genius to realize the AIs endlessly replicating and acting like this could quickly amass far more digital wealth than all humanity possesses.
FULL STORY |
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