Web3 personalities shared their thoughts on several issues before heading off to the beach.
Big, Beautiful Bill must clarify staking and mining rewards
“Today’s crypto and tax issue has been a work in progress since 2019 – that’s when I first sat down with the Treasury and the Hill to discuss staking and mining rewards. Today’s vote represents the work of many companies across the sector and dedicated policymakers and their staff.
“Clarifying the tax treatment of staking and mining rewards in the OBBB would both level the playing field for millions of American taxpayers and provide clarity for institutional players that have been sitting on the sidelines.
“Staking rewards should be treated like all other created property – taxed at the time of sale, not at the creation. Taxing staking rewards at creation is like taxing farmers the moment they plant seeds. You tax the harvest when it’s sold, not before it’s grown. What’s more, the character of income realized should be subject to longstanding tax principles and rules.
“While many have focused on securities issues surrounding staking, there is one current barrier to broader adoption – tax and structuring issues.
“Fair tax treatment of staking rewards isn’t just a crypto issue, it’s a question of consistency and common sense. This is a litmus test for how seriously we take innovation and consistency in the tax code.”
– Alison Mangiero, head of staking policy, Crypto Council for Innovation
Dig deeper when evaluating crypto ETFs
“Sygnum Bank recently estimated that each $1 billion of ETF inflows can push Bitcoin prices higher by 3% to 6%. Bitwise and others forecast Bitcoin could reach between $180,000 and $225,000 by the end of 2025. So far, more than $15 billion has flowed into spot Bitcoin ETFs since their approval, making it one of the fastest ETF adoption curves in history, surpassing early gold ETFs in speed and scale.
“Capital inflows are impressive, but they are not the same as long-term conviction. Many asset managers still view cryptocurrency as a tactical or opportunistic allocation rather than a core holding. A 2024 Fidelity Digital Assets survey found that just 36% of U.S. institutional investors considered crypto ‘very appealing’ as a long-term investment. The adoption curve is steep, and trust must be earned through performance, transparency, and clear regulations.
“Aside from Bitcoin and Ethereum, other projects, such as Solana, Chainlink, Avalanche, and Polkadot, have attracted institutional interest, but they are still considered experimental. Only a few of these are likely to survive long enough to gain serious attention from major capital allocators.”
– Andrejs Balans, risk manager, YouHodler
How smart contracts can improve transaction-side security
“Another reminder that smart contract interactions on Ethereum are fundamentally broken. People are being tricked into signing malicious transactions from contracts they don’t recognize, because there’s no way to verify who you’re really connecting to. The current system makes it far too easy to give spending permissions to the wrong party.
“If we want the next billion users to interact with crypto safely, we need better defaults. The address bar got verified domains; Web3 needs the same. That’s why every smart contract in our system has a name, not a random string. It’s readable, verifiable, and protected by our patent-pending technology. No more guessing and blind trust.”
Michal “Mehow” Pospieszalski, CEO of fintech security provider MatterFi