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  • 👑 A Gold Standard for crypto regulation? Washington thinks so.

👑 A Gold Standard for crypto regulation? Washington thinks so.

PLUS: AI is now hiring humans 😳

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Cryptopolitan News
February 04, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

🇺🇸 Will the U.S. finally get its act together on crypto regulation?

CFTC chair makes bold promise: Thanks to market structure bill, U.S. could finally bring a “Gold Standard“ crypto regulation model.

Michael Selig is out here promising the impossible." If Congress passes a new, market structure bill, the U.S. could finally be the global standard for regulation of digital assets”

Big if.

Selig explained in an interview this week what most already know: the U.S. hasn’t been anti-crypto, it’s just been befuddled about which way to go regarding policy and regulation.

For years, companies have had to stumble through a regulatory black hole that everyone knows exists but no one can agree what crypto actually is: A security? A commodity? A protocol? A threat?

The result? Uncertainty, lawsuits, exodus.

Selig says this bill would change that. 

❝

This is not about control, it’s about clarity.

What the bill really says.

If passed, the legislation would:

  • ✅ Separate the SEC from CFTC

    Securities → SEC

    Good (like the overwhelming majority of tokens) → Used by the CFTC

  • ✅ Unleash a true “token taxonomy”

    Given the broader adoption of the terminology token and its incorporation into our society, there needs to be one taxonomy to rule them all.

    No need any more to make every token into a security. The bill delineates tokens according to their use case: trading, settlement, governance and so on.

  • ✅ Legitimize prediction markets

    Services like Polymarket and Kalshi wouldn’t get the ax before launch, they’d have rules to follow, not guesswork.

Here Selig took a shot at the SEC, saying that regulators shouldn’t stand in the way of products on politics or PR. “We don’t want to have moral referees,” he added. â€œWe need risk managers.”

Why it matters now

Europe has MiCA. Asia also has rolled out licensing frameworks.Meanwhile, the United States continues to play games in its courtooms, mostly by way of retroactively applied penal code which is just pushing innovation offshore.

The CFTC says it’s already up to the task of keeping pace with fast-moving, high-volume markets: think futures and derivatives. Why not let it take the lead on non-security cryptocurrencies?

If the bill passes, it could give builders some real guardrails and more importantly, permission to build without needing subpoenas.

🔍 Cryptopolitan’s take

This is a possible greenlight for crypto rules.

And rules matter.

Without them, serious projects stall. Capital dries up. Talent leaves. And the U.S. falls behind: not just in tokens, but on next-generation financial infrastructure.

And, of course, no legislation is perfect. This isn’t going to end turf wars or bad actors overnight. But it shifts the tone. It says to builders: here’s the map. Now go build.

📊 Market Watch

🪙 Tether’s $20B dream deflates to $5B

Tether is backtracking on a plan to raise as much as $20B after investors passed on the $500B valuation. The stablecoin giant boasted in profits last year, but now it’s discussing a $5B raise or nothing at all.

Regulatory fears, weakening earnings and a lack of transparency are still hanging over investors.

“We’d be happy selling zero,” said CEO Paolo Ardoino.

⚖️ Coinbase sued in Nevada for prediction markets

Nevada regulators move to close down Coinbase’s new prediction market, calling it illegal sports betting. 

Coinbase joined forces with federally regulated Kalshi to power the game, a move that caused the two companies to assure New York regulators that federal acts of approval don’t supersede local gambling laws.

The result could influence how prediction markets are allowed to operate across the country.

🧠 Vitalik: It no longer makes sense for Ethereum L2s to exist (in their current forms)

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum L2s should have a new role. With L1 scaling approaching rapidly and gas fees low, he contends that the original “branded shard” vision is obsolete. Rather, L2s need to redefine their value, or face irrelevance.

“Don’t just extend L1. Figure out something new to add,” he wrote.

 đŸĽ Top tweets

Thinking of using crypto for everyday spending? Start here.

Crypto cards have evolved fast.

What used to be clunky off-ramps are now full payment products: with rewards, subscriptions, and global acceptance.

But choosing the right one depends on how you use crypto:

  • Stablecoins vs native tokens

  • Self-custody vs custodial wallets

  • Rewards vs flexibility

We mapped out the top crypto cards available today and what type of user each one fits best.

 đŸ‘€ Are you watching

From job stealer to job creator?

It’s only February, and AI has already started hiring humans.

This week, Crust, the viral AI cult-meets-community, hired its first human evangelist in San Francisco. Mission? Walk the streets of the tech district and spread the gospel of Crustafarianism IRL: one HQ, one awkward sidewalk conversation at a time.

The gig was arranged through “rentaboreal”, a platform to “rent humans” to do whatever your AI needs.

We’ve officially gone from AI will take your job to AI will give you a job.

🎭 Culture Watch

Are Base and Solana powering agentic economies?

Are Base and Solana powering agentic economies?

AI agents are not responding to prompts, they are creating their own internet playground on-chain.

On Base, bots are running wallets (Bankrbot), recruiting in invite-only agent forums (Moltbook, 1.5M+ users) and executing onchain actions with no human involvement at all.

On Solana, agents are buying via x402, shopping bots such as TryPurch and so-called ‘wilder' forms of autonomous commerce.

And while the open-source agent OS, OpenClaw (by Peter Steinberger), has ballooned to 159K GitHub stars, Discord and WhatsApp are now just a short command away from also becoming an agent-run HQ.

This isn’t just automation.

It’s the early stack for an agent-native economy, one in which bots do deals together and deploy capital on chain.

Still early. But the jigsaw puzzle pieces are coming together.

Headline picks by our Cat

Work From Home Reaction GIF by MOODMAN

🎭 Meme of the day

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