Zack Shapiro, Head of Policy at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Founder of Rains, joins us to talk about the shifting landscape of crypto regulation under the Trump administration. We discuss why the CLARITY Act is in limbo, the "Defi mullet" and the legal challenges facing AI agents. Zack gives a behind-the-scenes look at the banking lobby's war on stablecoin yields and evaluates the progress of the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

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Notes:

* Banks lobbied for 1:1 yield ban.

* Coinbase takes their pound of flesh

* AI ends billable hour standard.

Timestamps:

00:00 Start

00:24 Who is Zack?

01:25 Bitcoin Policy Institute

04:23 Current policy outlook

10:49 CLARITY Act

17:34 Will CLARITY pass?

19:32 Commodities vs Securities

21:02 Safe harbor

21:19 Howey & Utility tokens

22:37 Developer protections

24:25 How good are protections in CLARITY?

28:56 Crypto crashout & AI agents

33:43 Front ends & KYC

36:13 OFAC

39:43 Ideals in crypto

42:21 BASE

43:30 Crypto in-fighting

46:55 LLMs & the law

52:17 Prediction markets

The Gwart Show is sponsored by Ellipsis Labs. Ellipsis Labs builds the most efficient on-chain markets. Their orderbook and Prop AMM products have delivered price improvement to hundreds of billions of dollars in retail volume. Now, they are bringing their expertise to build Phoenix, the best on-chain perpetuals platform.

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Why The Banking Lobby Is Fighting Stablecoin Yield