CFTC Chairman Michael Selig told CoinDesk the agency is deploying AI to review crypto registration applications — flagging incomplete submissions, rejecting obviously deficient ones, and routing others to the back of the queue without requiring a human to touch them. "We can see something come in with blank space or inadequate descriptions or things that are clearly wrong, picked up by AI, and it can reject those or put them at the back of the line," he said. The move is partly a workaround for staffing cuts: roughly a quarter of the CFTC's workforce has departed since 2025, even as the agency's mandate has expanded to cover crypto and the exploding prediction markets industry. Selig is currently the sole commissioner, raising questions about his authority to push through major rulemaking alone — a constraint he says he intends to ignore.
LayerTwo Labs CEO Paul Sztorc's August hard fork would copy Bitcoin's ledger and give every BTC holder an equivalent eCash balance — standard fork playbook. The controversy is what it does with Satoshi's coins on the new chain: 500,000 of the ~1.1 million eCash attributed to Satoshi's Patoshi-pattern addresses would be redirected to early investors instead. No actual BTC moves. No private key is touched. But critics say reallocating the most symbolically important untouched balance in crypto's history — even on a forked chain — violates Bitcoin's core property-rights ethic regardless of the technical distinction. "Bitcoin was created to preserve and protect inviolable property rights for everybody on earth," one mining CEO told CoinDesk. Sztorc argues the narrow technical fact is what matters.
Michael Terpin — the early bitcoin investor known as the Crypto Godfather — says the current rally is a relief bounce, not a bottom. In his view, bitcoin needs to fall to around $57,000 sometime in October before a genuine recovery can begin, and a new all-time high is off the table for 2026. The call puts Terpin directly at odds with Saylor's "Winter's Over" declaration last week and with analysts who see the current $76K–$78K range as a launching pad. Terpin's framework draws on the Bitcoin Supercycle thesis, which calls for a deeper reset before the next sustained leg up.
