TLDR Crypto 2026-04-29

Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, previewed a "big announcement" on next steps for Trump's strategic bitcoin reserve in the coming weeks, noting the team has been working through the legal interpretations needed to solidify and protect the reserve's digital assets. The reserve currently faces a durability problem as executive orders don't carry the staying power of legislation, which is why Sen. Lummis and Rep. Begich have reintroduced the BITCOIN Act to codify it.

The DOJ will no longer investigate or charge blockchain developers for crimes committed by third parties using their software, provided the developer had no knowing involvement in those crimes. The new policy directly reverses the enforcement posture that produced Roman Storm's conviction in August 2025 and Roman Semenov's 2023 indictment over Tornado Cash. Crypto legal observers flag that the "knowingly helping" standard remains undefined, leaving open questions about where prosecutorial discretion ends and protected open-source development begins.

DeFi United, a coalition of ecosystem participants, has published the full technical implementation plan to restore KelpDAO's rsETH backing following the April 18 bridge exploit, where a forged inbound packet on the Unichain-to-Ethereum route released 116,500 rsETH without a corresponding burn. The exploiter distributed the rsETH across multiple addresses, supplied portions as collateral on Aave V3 (Ethereum and Arbitrum) and Compound, with seven addresses still holding active rsETH-backed positions. The plan covers the full path to making rsETH whole and resuming normal market operations, a critical test of DeFi's ability to coordinate post-exploit recovery at scale.

The EPOS CRYPTO Card for bitbank is a Visa credit card that lets users settle monthly payments by selling BTC from their bitbank holdings at a predetermined rate, a first-of-its-kind product in Japan. The card offers 0.5% crypto rewards (payable in BTC, ETH, or ASTR), has no annual fee, and includes a ¥2,000 crypto welcome bonus. It's a notable consumer product that bridges crypto holdings and everyday card spending in Japan's regulated market. The card is a potential template for similar products in other jurisdictions.

There are over 160 startups, protocols, and institutions across the onchain credit ecosystem, categorized into four main layers. These are Credit Issuance, Capital Allocation, Infrastructure, and Risk Management, with 19 sub-categories. The Credit Issuance layer spans institutional credit funds, tokenized offchain credit, and onchain origination models, including overcollateralized lending, P2P, InfraFi, and PayFi. This report provides a useful mental model for anyone trying to understand who the players are, which categories matter, and where the gaps remain in the onchain credit stack.

Onchain stablecoins generate 122x annual economic velocity per dollar deployed, compared to PayPal's ~40x turnover and US M2's 1.4x, with each $1B in stablecoin supply producing roughly $19M in annualized protocol revenue (excluding issuer float). Supply has grown 60x since 2020 to ~$300B, still just 1.4% of US M2, while tokenized RWAs have tripled to ~$25B over two years, led by BlackRock's BUIDL crossing $2B. The flywheel is now showing in market-hours displacement: during the Iran escalation, traders routed volume to onchain perps on platforms like Hyperliquid rather than waiting for traditional venues to reopen.

AI has pushed the cost of producing average crypto research to near zero, flooding the market with low-quality content and eroding the price-moving influence that early firms like Messari and Delphi Digital once carried. Institutional advisory demand has nonetheless accelerated through 2026, as organizations entering blockchain seek judgment and perspective rather than information aggregation. Four Pillars is responding by restructuring into five divisions (Crypto, Asia, Institution, Investment, and Tech) and announcing a Series A to reposition around perspective-driven, high-conviction coverage.

Circle Ventures announced an $AAVE token purchase aligned with Stani Kulechov's "DeFi United" campaign.

Confidence in pool/hub DeFi models has collapsed, with institutions demanding isolated risk controls and code-level compliance flexibility.

Block (formerly Square) disclosed 28,355 BTC in its Q1 2026 proof of reserves filing alongside preliminary Cash App Bitcoin Ecosystem Revenue, continuing the company's policy of investing 10% of bitcoin profits into BTC purchases each month.

Carry is a liquidity management platform that targets institutional capital allocators, letting operators spin up RWA liquidity facilities with configurable pricing, risk parameters, and multi-asset, multi-venue deployment from a single dashboard.