Tomorrow, the Senate votes on whether to open debate on the CLARITY Act. If the bill becomes law, exchanges serving U.S. consumers will have to adopt safeguards that FTX lacked. If the bill doesn’t, those gaps will remain.

Technologies don't un-invent themselves. The question is... where do they get built? "Every American citizen, regardless of their political position, should want America to be the technology leader in the world." @pmarca on the CLARITY Act and why crypto belongs in the US.

What would the CLARITY Act mean for people building and using crypto? 10 building blocks to understand, from how tokens are regulated to protections for open source developers and self-custody.

Over $35B in traditional assets live onchain, not counting stablecoins. Almost 3x more than when GENIUS passed 1 year ago. CLARITY provides the guardrails for the onchain infrastructure these assets live on. What will this chart look like next year? That’s decided next week.

1/ grateful to @a16zcrypto for recognizing the importance of ensuring financial institutions can use/build on permissionless networks. The article published today gives a brief synopsis of the paper (&framework) @m_mosier_ @malekanoms (link ⬇️).

I've said before that Jolt is a contrarian bet on what a zkVM can and should look like. Some people have prematurely declared victory of hashing-based SNARKs over alternatives. Today, Jolt shows that there's another way. With the integration of lattices, Jolt (i) is post-quantum, (ii) proves 2-3x faster, (iii) uses less memory, all while keeping proof sizes under 100 kB –– nearly a Pareto improvement upon Jolt with elliptic curves. Another reason you should care about the first lattice-based zkVM: diversity. Multi-prover architectures aim to strengthen security by using multiple proof systems, each independently proving/verifying the same statement. But if all of the proof systems are using the same software libraries, cryptographic primitives, and conjectures, the shared surface area for vulnerabilities undercuts this point. While we expect lattice Jolt to be an attractive default for most use cases, a hashing-based Jolt is still on the roadmap. Expect more announcements from the Jolt team soon!

There were $4T+ in stablecoin transfers last quarter, roughly double what it was a year ago. That's the regulated part of crypto. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoins clear rules. Now the rest of crypto needs them. It's time to pass CLARITY.

We have rules for stablecoins. What about the blockchains underneath them? "It’s like having a regulatory framework for cell phones, but not for cell towers.” @cdixon on how CLARITY would do for blockchains what GENIUS did for stablecoins.

Introducing Akita, the first production-ready, lattice-based polynomial commitment scheme for post-quantum security. It’s the first major step in making Zero quantum-secure, and will be implemented in Jolt on day one, thanks to our partnership with @a16zcrypto. Read the full research paper:

Introducing Lattice Jolt ⚡️ A new version of our open-source zkVM (zero-knowledge virtual machine): faster and post-quantum, with compact proofs built on lattice-based cryptography. The key unlock is Akita, a new polynomial commitment scheme. @LayerZero_Core led its development with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California, and our team at a16z crypto. The era of lattice SNARKs is upon us.

1/ Today we're releasing Lattice Jolt: a post-quantum version of the Jolt zkVM, built on lattices instead of elliptic curves. It's _faster_ than curve-based Jolt and has the shortest proofs of any post-quantum zkVM — under 100 KB. Post:

A phrase you’ll hear a lot these next 2 weeks: market structure. Market structure means the rules of the road... - who can trade what - on which platforms - under whose watch Stocks have had these rules for 90 years. Crypto never got them. That's the gap CLARITY closes.

This week the OCC granted conditional approval for a full-service U.S. national bank charter application to @OpenReserveBank. Founders Dee Choubey and Rick Correia discuss designing a financial institution around 24/7 settlements, stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and onchain capital markets. 00:00 Introduction 01:17 Why now is the time to build a new bank 06:24 What a bank actually does 10:11 Rebuilding the bank core like an L1 32:43 What makes a founder partnership work 35:54 Why they decided to build another company 40:46 Building a bank for stablecoins 45:20 Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and lending 56:04 Forward-deployed bankers & institutional sales 1:00:13 Why American capital markets matter 1:03:39 What Open Reserve plans to build next @deechoubey @guywuolletjr

Introducing @OpenReserveBank , a blockchain native de-novo digital bank, finally out of stealth. This week the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted conditional approval of our full-service U.S. national bank charter application. Preliminary conditional approval to charter a de novo national bank is a privilege our team does not take lightly. It is a significant milestone and the beginning of the most demanding phase of the work. We're building toward real-time settlement across fiat and blockchain rails, direct Federal Reserve connectivity, tokenized deposits, and GENIUS Act-designed payment stablecoin infrastructure. Thank you to the entire OpenReserve team, our board, investors, and to the OCC who ran a rigorous review. More to come! See what we are building: