Swing time

Bullishness is running relatively higher on a Fed-decision Wednesday despite a range of hostile situations around the globe.

Bitcoin, as of 10 a.m. (EST), was holding tightly to $97,200 on a spot price increase of 3.3% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

Litecoin (No. 25) sports one of the more impressive gains (+10%) of the day as it reacquaints with $90.

Among the Top 100 coins in terms of their market capitalization, Stacks (STX), dubbed "a Bitcoin layer-2 solution," is way out ahead of the pack today, enjoying a 24-hour increase of 17%. It's now nearly 90 cents.

According to The Block, Bitcoin Core developers, as part of an upcoming software release, plan to remove the long-standing 80-byte size limit on OP_RETURN outputs, thus allowing for greater amounts of ancillary data to be embedded into transactions. Nixing the cap garnered broad — but not unanimous — support, according to The Block, citing the developers' GitHub discussion. This tweak continues to stir disagreement within the dev community as reflected by debates across GitHub and social media. Bitcoin Core developers have not set a release date for the proposed update.

It's a move that could create a DeFi element to the Bitcoin network, which might bode well for STX, which rose to prominence in the early part of last year at the start of the ordinals and inscriptions boom. It was April of 2024 when STX reached its all-time high of $3.84.

The good news for Solana is that a critical vulnerability in its Token-2022 standard was successfully patched last month, allowing the network to avert potential disaster. But despite what was, technically, a victory, the incident's hush-hush nature spawned a backlash.

One community member, Clouted, first called attention to the private nature of the patch coordination. “Am I hearing this right?" Clouted said on X on April 17. "There was a zero-day on Solana mainnet and ... [less than 70%] of validators privately colluded to upgrade and patch the critical bug ... before it was even made public?”

And then a vocal Ethereum community member, Ryan Berckmans, chimed in with a warning about such coordinated efforts which can compromise decentralization.

But defenders of discreetness, including Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, pointed out how Bitcoin quietly patched a serious inflationary bug in 2018. That incident appeared to show how coordinated, non-public fixes are "sometimes the only viable approach in the face of critical vulnerabilities," said Coin360.

This entire discussion continues to generate unwanted attention as Solana awaits word of a possible spot SOL ETF. Solana is on a roll, awash in dApp activity. So much so that Solana led the blockchain sector in terms of total revenue during Q1. 

Its native token, SOL, however, has shed 4% over the past two weeks as it struggles to stay above $150. SOL's all-time high of $293.31 came on January 19, according to CoinGecko.

In the face of mounting opposition, Senate Republicans tomorrow will push ahead with a vote on a major piece of stablecoin legislation. It could be a bold gambit that some swing votes can be mustered in eleventh-hour fashion, or simply a nakedly political maneuver.

The bill, known as the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, or "GENIUS Act," would, as Decrypt explained, impose licensing, reserve and disclosure requirements on stablecoin issuers, "marking the first major U.S. federal framework for the sector."

Nine Democrats and at least three Republicans publicly have come out against it. Crypto is a major topic on Capitol Hill, but at the moment it's partly for the wrong reason. Yesterday, House Democrats, led by Rep. Maxine Waters of California, walked out of a Financial Services Committee hearing in theatrical protest over President Trump’s fingers in crypto pies, a situation deemed to be plagued by the potential for conflicts of interest. The latest hackle-raiser: a big chunk of UAE cash backing a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, which is owned by a company connected with the Trump family.

That Senate leadership is pressing forward despite the bill's iffy chances in itself is seen as shrewdly calculated. "GOP leaders appear to be forcing the vote to frame Democrats as obstructing crypto policy ahead of the 2026 midterms," Decrypt said.