Bitcoin Magazine

White House Presses Senate Democrats To Accept Trump Ethics Deal On Clarity Act

The White House is pushing Senate Democrats to accept a conflict-of-interest agreement that President Donald Trump worked out with Republicans, a move that negotiators hope will settle the last major dispute in the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told CoinDesk that Trump “has agreed to the most comprehensive and wide-ranging ethics provision in history.” 

No details have emerged on what crypto restrictions Trump has consented to, and Democrats have been kept out of the loop on the provision.

The ethics section would restrict senior government officials from personal business ties to the crypto industry, including Trump, whose family holdings have generated more than $2 billion in new wealth since he returned to office, according to Reuters. Release of the final draft has stalled for several days as negotiators work through the language.

Democratic lawmakers have not received a briefing on the concession, though Republicans and the crypto industry have begun a sales campaign that casts Democrats as the obstacle.

“If Senate Democrats block this historic legislation after the administration has bent over backward to accommodate their concerns, stakeholders should make no mistake: It is the Democrats who are blocking this legislation because they were never serious about a legislative outcome,” the White House official said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has added his voice to the push, saying that lawmakers stood at the “1-yard line” on the Clarity Act and urging Congress to pass the bill before the recess.

Clarity Act updates coming out of the White House

Democratic negotiators such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks have not seen details of the agreement with Trump, who met with Republican senators at the White House last week.

Many of the Democrats have drawn a line that the ethics provision needs to be strong. Trump has pressed the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, and his disclosure that he made more than $1 billion from crypto in 2025 has given critics fresh ammunition.

The Clarity Act’s text cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote, with Gallego and Alsobrooks joining Republicans to advance it. 

Both said in May they would not back the final passage without an ethics provision. During the committee markup, an amendment from Senator Chris Van Hollen to bar the president, vice president and members of Congress from crypto business ties failed 11-13.

The industry expects full circulation of the legislative text this week, according to CoinDesk. 

The Senate has fewer than three weeks to finish the bill and clear a floor vote before Majority Leader John Thune’s August 7 deadline, when lawmakers break for their reelection campaigns and enter a narrow stretch to finish the bill. 

Galaxy Research puts the odds of passage at 50-50.

This post White House Presses Senate Democrats To Accept Trump Ethics Deal On Clarity Act first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Once a quirky bastion of amateur vulva jewelry and pet portraits, Etsy is now deluged with mass-produced goods and AI knockoffs. Some customers don’t seem to mind.

We're at the halfway point of 2026, making it a great time to look back at what Netflix has released so far while also looking ahead to the rest of the year. Personally, my two favorite Netflix movies from earlier this year are The Rip and War Machine. As for what's in store for the rest of the year, it's a mix of horror, animation, crime, and drama.

What is Gold Eagle? A new federal cybersecurity hub called Gold Eagle was created to combat the growing threat of cyberattacks powered by artificial intelligence. The initiative is led through...

The post Inside “Gold Eagle”: The White House’s New AI-Driven Clearinghouse for Critical Infrastructure appeared first on Cyber Defense Magazine.

The new program stems from an AI-focused Executive Order signed by President Trump on June 2.

The post White House Launches AI-Driven ‘Gold Eagle’ Vulnerability Coordination Initiative appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Representatives Urge Senate to Vote on CLARITY Act in July, Address Ethics Concerns

Rep. French Hill wants a deadline. 

One year after the House passed the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee used a Fox Business interview with anchor Maria Bartiromo to press Senate leaders for a floor vote before the August recess.

“I’ve encouraged Senate leadership to put it on the floor,” Hill said. “I think if you schedule a floor date here in the month of July, that will cause these final meetings, these final discussions to take place. You’ve got to have a deadline in Congress to get people to move and find consensus.” 

Hill thanked Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman and Tim Scott for working toward a deal, and pointed to the 78 Democrats who backed the House measure a year ago.

Hill’s central argument is that the CLARITY Act would resolve the ethics concerns now used to block it, rather than deepen them. 

Critics point to President Trump’s crypto ventures, including $TRUMP meme coin licensing and World Liberty Financial token sales, which a July 1 financial disclosure tied to about $1.4 billion in 2025 income. 

Hill contends a market framework offers the transparency those critics want. 

“If we passed the CLARITY Act last summer, many of the things that people are expressing concern about — meme coin issuance, co-investment, use of exchange, investing in exchanges — all that would be under a market framework of regulation with clarity, no pun intended, and that would provide a lot of transparency to people that are concerned about the Trump family’s investments,” he said.

JUST IN: Congressman French Hill says lawmakers are going to have a field hearing for the Clarity Act in New York next week

"We’ve got to get this market framework in place to be combined with the GENIUS Act" pic.twitter.com/F1b9QpSdQT

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 10, 2026

Clarity Act pairs with the GENIUS Act

Hill framed the bill as the missing half of a system that pairs it with the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law enacted last year. 

“Stablecoin is like a cell phone not connected to a cell phone network,” he said, “and the market framework is in fact that network that we need.” To keep the pressure on, Hill plans a field hearing in New York next week, led by digital assets subcommittee chair Rep. Bryan Steil, to make the case for a market structure.

His push drew support from two other voices in the same Bartiromo appearance. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig warned of “mission creep beyond what’s really critical here” and cautioned that a stalled bill leaves the rules to regulators. 

Coinbase Vice Chair Ryan VanGrack, a former SEC official, described the measure as “on the one-yard line,” with senators from both parties “working around the clock to get this across the finish line.”

JUST IN: Coinbase Vice Chair says Clarity Act has bipartisan support

"Democratic and Republican senators are working around the clock to get this across the finish line." pic.twitter.com/OvKPU3SHuC

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 10, 2026

The Senate returns July 13 with about three weeks before recess. Prediction market Polymarket prices Clarity Act 2026 passage near 39%, a fall from the prior month’s 74%.

This post U.S. Representatives Urge Senate to Vote on CLARITY Act in July, Address Ethics Concerns first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Recent regulatory changes from the Trump administration are overhauling how employee removals and disciplinary actions function across the federal workforce.

© Federal News Network

Seattle startup Optimly, which helps brands manage what AI understands and says about them, went into the Flywheel Investment Conference in Wenatchee, Wash., in May as a last-minute entrant, and walked out with a triple crown.

The company won a $150,000 investment, a $50,000 relocation offer contingent on moving to the region, and a $5,000 fan-favorite prize. Founder and CEO Apurva Luty, who’d strolled to the event from her hotel, expecting nothing, ended up with too many giant ceremonial checks to carry back on her own.

This unexpected sweep came from a solution to a problem that’s suddenly becoming urgent for many brands. Optimly builds a public index where brands can claim and correct the information that AI chatbots use to describe them — then measures whether it actually works.

The $150,000 investment from Flywheel Angel Network became part of a broader $800,000 pre-seed round that Optimly closed just recently. Also participating in the round were Mighty Capital and AI House, the Seattle startup incubator formerly known as AI2 Incubator.

“The funny thing about winning at Flywheel is that it got us noticed by Seattle investors,” Luty explained. So even though she has decided to work out of AI House on Seattle’s Pier 70, passing up the relocation prize, the Wenatchee group gets a stake and an assist. 

The problem: Optimly addresses a phenomenon that increasingly unsettles marketers: AI models generally don’t learn about a brand from its own website. They read everything else — Wikipedia, Reddit, online reviews, analyst write-ups — and synthesize it into the response each chatbot gives shoppers when they ask about a company, or its product or service.

“Shoppers used to Google — now they ask AI,” Luty said during her presentation at a separate event in June, the Technology Alliance’s Seattle Investor Summit + Showcase in Redmond, where GeekWire first heard the Optimly pitch.

The solution: Optimly has two connected products:

• The AI Brand Index is the free, public layer: a directory that AI agents can pull from, offering a short, structured description of a company generated automatically from across the web. The company says it has scored about 60,000 brands, with more than 24,000 now live and searchable.
• BrandVault is the paid layer. A brand verifies that it owns the name, then rewrites its entry in the plain, factual language an agent can parse, instead of the marketing copy on its website. Optimly then monitors how AI describes the brand and flags what to fix.

Background: Luty founded Optimly in October 2025. A researcher by training, she had studied public policy and economics at the University of Oregon, before a decade in consumer insights and product strategy in tech, studying how people decide which brands to trust. 

At Microsoft, she worked on the launch of the Surface line as a consumer research manager. At Meta, she led product marketing insights for the Quest and metaverse products and worked on the rebrand from Facebook to Meta. At Discord, she headed UX research and product strategy during the pivot back to gaming.

Each job, she said, came down to explaining a product to a new group of customers during a big shift in technology. She came to see AI as the next shift, with one difference: this time the initial consumers of the information are the AI systems themselves.

How it caught on: The idea started as an experiment. Optimly put up a small index of about 200 brands, just to see if anyone would notice, and AI agents swarmed it, asking for the data.

OpenAI sent three kinds of bots, Luty said: one crawling for training data, one building its own index, and one pulling live answers for users. The AI giants are each building their own private brand indexes that don’t talk to one another. Optimly wants to be the public, verified version. 

Anthropic’s Claude recently started pulling from the index as well.

The brand index now gets about 11,000 agent requests a week, up from 4,000 a few weeks earlier, the company says, and more than 100 brands have claimed their profiles since the index launched this spring. Many found it on their own, through Google or ChatGPT.

Landscape: Other startups already promise to track and improve how brands show up in AI. The category goes by AEO or GEO — answer-engine or generative-engine optimization. Most stop at telling a brand to publish more content, Luty said. 

Optimly’s pitch is different. Give a brand a page it can correct, then measure whether the fix changes what the AI says. AI chatbots have already started citing Optimly’s data in live answers, Luty said. The near-term goal is making that repeatable — proving a specific fix leads to a specific change.

Funding: Prior to the $800,000 pre-seed round, Optimly raised an initial $100,000 in late 2025 from Right Side Capital Management and Forum Ventures as part of their accelerator program. It also participated in a WTIA startup accelerator.

Business model: Brands pay monthly subscriptions, with tiers ranging from $100 to $799 a month. Luty said the long-term goal is to charge for results, not reports. 

The team: Optimly’s original technical co-founder has stepped back from his role in California into an advisory position. Luty is now hiring in Seattle, with openings for a technical co-founder and a senior founding engineer, and recently brought on a data engineering intern. 

She also works with contractors and, yes, makes significant use of AI agents. 

What’s next: The focus now is making the early results repeatable — running A/B tests to prove a specific profile fix leads to a specific change in how AI describes a brand.