Crypto & Digital Assets

The digital-asset industry in mid-2026 is undergoing a structural transition from a speculative market into regulated financial infrastructure. Three forces are driving this simultaneously: (1) the GENIUS Act (signed July 2025) is converting stablecoin issuance from a legal gray zone into a licensed business with bank-equivalent reserve requirements, with an effective date of January 18, 2027 at the latest; (2) the March 2026 SEC-CFTC joint interpretation ended the decade-long "regulation by enforcement" model, explicitly naming Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Cardano, and Dogecoin as digital commodities (an earlier "16 tokens" figure in this KB could not be re-confirmed against source text); and (3) spot ETFs have pulled ~$58.5B in cumulative inflows since January 2024, permanently embedding crypto into the TradFi allocation stack. Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $126,000 in October 2025 before falling below $80,000 by November 2025.

The industry's capital stack is being rebuilt around six functional layers: Layer 1 protocols (Bitcoin, Ethereum) as settlement infrastructure; Layer 2 / rollup networks (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) as transaction throughput; stablecoins as the native unit of account and payment rails; custody as the institutional on-ramp bottleneck; tokenization/RWA as the bridge between on-chain settlement and traditional finance; and ETFs/investment wrappers as the access layer for regulated capital. Miners — historically pure BTC producers — are pivoting to AI/HPC colocation as a second revenue stream, reshaping their business model permanently.

The regulatory geography is bifurcated: the US (GENIUS Act + SEC-CFTC clarity) is the most consequential market, while the EU (MiCA, in force 2025) provides the alternative model and Switzerland/UAE/Singapore remain major operational centers.

Frontier — What's Moving Now

• GENIUS Act effective date is Jan 18, 2027 (backstop), possibly as early as ~Nov 2026 — Brookings frames four unresolved issues (interest, par/singleness of money, illicit finance, operational resilience); OCC conditionally chartered Circle, Paxos + 3 others (Dec 2025); rulemaking across Treasury/FDIC/NCUA/OCC still incomplete as of April 2026; USD stablecoin supply ~$280B at year-end 2025
• Spot BTC ETF inflows concentrating into an IBIT+FBTC duopoly — the pair took ~79% of daily inflows (May 1, 2026) and >90% (Jan 14), even as Bitcoin fell 29% YTD; April alone added $2.44B; IBIT ≈59–70% of all spot BTC ETF assets ($102-120B total AUM, varies by date)
• Ethereum staking ETFs live — SEC-CFTC Mar 2026 ruling classified staking rewards as non-securities; Grayscale made the first-ever US crypto-ETP staking distribution Jan 6, 2026 ($9.4M); gross yield ~3%, ~60-70% captured net of fees
• RWA tokenization: ~$30B distributed / ~$600B represented — 2,000+ tokenized assets, ~300M stablecoin holders; tokenized Treasuries $13.4B (led by BUIDL, recorded at $1.7B-$2.4B depending on source); RWA.xyz argues adoption is decoupling from crypto price
• Digital-asset treasuries scale as a parallel access channel — 100+ DAT companies raised $29B in 2025 (vs $11B 2024); public cos hold ~1.06M BTC (~4.7% of supply); 2025 crypto-IPO wave (Circle, Bullish, Gemini, Figure)
• Public miners pivoting to AI/HPC — HIVE, Core Scientific, MARA, Hut 8, Riot, TeraWulf, IREN, CleanSpark named movers; hashprice fell to a "structural low" ~$35/PH/s; the previously-cited "70% AI revenue by end-2026" and "12.3x/5.9x" multiple figures could not be re-confirmed against full-text source this session — see Bitcoin Mining / ASIC
• Sourcing gap found this session: claims attributing $1B+/day JPMorgan Kinexys volume and a January 2026 Canton Network launch to a specific registered source do not hold up on full-text verification — see On-Chain Settlement and JPMorgan Kinexys entity

Concept Map

Concepts

Note: this table lists only concept pages that exist as files (8). An earlier version of this index implied more granular per-source evidence than some pages actually carry — several pages above have specific claims downgraded to "weak/unverified" this session even though the page's overall evidence rating stays Moderate/Strong on the balance of its claims. See each page's Key Claims section for per-claim ratings.

Entities

Corrected 2026-07-22: this table previously listed 16 entities; only 8 have actual files in wiki/entities/. The 8 phantom rows (Core Scientific, Securitize, BitGo, Anchorage Digital, Chainalysis, Bitmain, Grayscale, Fireblocks) are removed — they were never compiled and should not be treated as existing KB pages.

Regulators

Timeline

See timeline.md for chronological developments.

Research Frontier

See frontier.md for active frontiers and knowledge gaps.

Sources

All 14 registered sources are now compiled (10 compiled 2026-07-22, 4 previously). No sources remain in ingested/pending state.