After years languishing in label limbo, @raye is riding her independence toward global superstardom. 💫 She opens up about her album ‘THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE’ and more in her cover story for Billboard’s Indie issue:

Exclusive: The US has cleared around 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip, the H200, but not a single delivery has been made so far, leaving a major technology deal in limbo as CEO Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. More here -

Sanctions exemptions on Russian crude oil purchases expired without renewal from the Trump administration. The licenses, issued in March and April, had covered oil already loaded onto tankers. Those transactions are now prohibited again, and any cargo still in transit is in legal limbo.

Anthropic just lost its bid to pause the government's supply chain designation while the legal fight plays out. A 3-judge DC Circuit panel (one level below SCOTUS) ruled the "equitable balance cuts in favor of the government." To win a stay, you need to show (1) you're likely to win the underlying case and (2) you'll suffer irreparable harm beyond just money. The court shot down both — and used Dario's own words against him on the irreparable harm question. The panel of judges they drew couldn't have been better for the Administration if they'd picked themselves. So what's next? Anthropic could push for full en banc review — all 11 DC Circuit judges weighing in. But given the expedited briefing schedule set for May, it's hard to see the full court stepping in before the 3-judge panel rules on the merits which I expect could come in June. TLDR – at a minimum Anthropic’s relationship with the DoW will likely remain in limbo for another two months, unless the parties settle sooner.

Been thinking a lot about the Clarity Act this week and honestly I think most people are still underestimating what is actually happening right now. As I'm typing this the Senate Banking Committee is holding the markup hearing in Dirksen 538. Tim Scott gavelled in at 10:30. This is the session that was supposed to happen in January and got pulled at the last second after Coinbase walked away over the stablecoin yield fight. Bitcoin already pushed above $81k on the open and the market is starting to wake up to what a committee passage actually signals. Warren came out swinging in her opening, calling it a bill "written by the crypto industry for the crypto industry" and pointing to that CoinDesk survey showing 1% of voters rank crypto as a top issue. Predictable. There are dozens of amendments queued up, most of them from Warren and Reed, and almost none of them are going to survive. Lummis called it the hardest piece of legislation she's ever worked on and the Republican majority looks whipped. If Scott has the votes lined up the way reporting suggests, the bill clears committee today and that is a very big deal. Here is why I keep banging this drum. For years the real blocker to institutional capital was never volatility or narrative. It was that legal and compliance teams at every major allocator could not get a straight answer on what crypto even is under US law. Security? Commodity? Both? Neither? Pension fund managers cannot sign off on an asset class living in regulatory limbo. Insurance regulators won't approve products without a statutory floor. Bank custody desks have been sitting on their hands for the same reason. Clarity fixes that. It draws an actual jurisdictional line between SEC and CFTC, defines what a digital commodity is, and finally builds a real compliance pathway for exchanges, brokers, and custodians. The 1:1 reserve mandate on stablecoins is exactly the hard rule traditional finance has been quietly begging for so they can stop treating this entire space like radioactive material. The piece that gets missed in all the X takes is this. Once allocation committees at the big shops get a green light, the money that flows in is not retail. It's pensions, endowments, sovereign wealth, corporate treasuries, RIAs, family offices, the entire long tail of capital that has been writing legal memos and waiting for cover for two years. You don't need much rotation from a pool that size for the impact to be enormous. Even one or two percent of addressable AUM is measured in the trillions. People keep asking why ETF flows have plateaued and why institutional adoption felt slower than expected. This is why. The plumbing didn't exist. Clarity builds the plumbing. XRP is the most obvious example sitting right in front of us. Trading around $1.37, stuck in a $1.35 to $1.45 box for weeks despite spot ETF inflows. The chart isn't broken, the legal classification is. Today's markup is the first real crack in that ceiling. Yes the conflict of interest fight is still unresolved. Yes the bill still needs to be merged with the Ag Committee version, then survive a floor vote where 60 yes votes means at least seven Democrats have to cross. Yes Washington can break anything on the way to a finish line. Lummis has been blunt that if we miss this May window the bill realistically slips to 2030 after the midterms. But the direction of travel is set, the White House is pushing for July 4, the banking lobby's last stand on the Tillis Alsobrooks compromise is losing, and in my view the market has not even started to price what a final signed bill actually does to the capital pipeline. Bullish doesn't really cover it. Today matters.