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US lawmakers and crypto leaders say a major bill could move fast. According to an on-site interview, Senator Bernie Moreno told reporters he hopes the US CLARITY Act will clear Congress by April.

The comment came during a recent gathering with members of the press, and it set off a flurry of reaction across markets and inside the halls of power.

Lawmakers And Industry At Odds Over Clarity Act

Reports note that the biggest fight left on the table is stablecoin yields. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said industry talks are more hopeful now, but he had pulled his group’s backing earlier because the bill would ban interest-bearing stablecoins and put the SEC front and center as the lead regulator.

That tug-of-war matters. Banks worry that easy yield on crypto tokens could pull deposits and weaken their model. Crypto firms counter that such products are useful and in demand. Both sides also want clear rules so firms can plan ahead.

Policymakers Have Momentum

Based on reports, the White House reacted strongly when one major exchange stepped back from support. The executive office signaled surprise and urged quicker agreement.

Markets noticed. Prediction markets moved, with odds on passage swinging dramatically in response to the media interview.

Polymarket showed a sharp uptick in probability that the bill would pass — then a pullback once details were questioned.

“Hopefully by April,” Moreno said during an interview at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Wednesday. What Could Break The Deal

Trump has pushed a pro-crypto message, and that helps gathering momentum among allies in Congress. But partisan lines remain.

If members tie the bill too closely to a single political brand, bipartisan support could fray. Also, banks and regulators are not uniform: some large institutions want stricter rules; others prefer limited, clearer guardrails that let certain products exist under oversight.

Why Fast Passage Is Uncertain

Reports say industry players want clarity asap, while some regulators want broader authority. That difference explains the public sparring.

Negotiators can and do move quickly when leadership prioritizes a measure, yet complex financial bills often require many rounds of drafting and amendment. Even so, lawmakers and execs at industry meetings appear to be pushing hard for a resolution soon.

If the bill clears, it could bring clearer rules for exchanges, banks, and stablecoin issuers. For investors, clarity is usually good. For firms, the shape of the final text will determine whether new products live or die.

Featured image from Wallpapers.com, chart from TradingView

Balaji Srinivasan is once again making the most provocative version of a privacy argument and he’s pinning it to a specific chain: Zcash. In a Feb. 18 video shared on X, Srinivasan framed the stakes in stark terms: “The choice is clear. It’s Zcash or communism,” tying the rise of AI-enabled surveillance to what he described as a renewed appetite for wealth seizure.

In a follow-up post, he argued that AI has shifted surveillance from a state-scale project to something closer to an on-demand service. “Any scrap of information online can now be integrated, digested, and synthesized…by any state or stalker capable of running an AI model…to form a dossier more complete than anything the Soviets could ever dream of,” he wrote.

Srinivasan’s prescription was blunt: “There will be no single silver bullet. But anything you haven’t encrypted can and will be used against you.”

Srinivasan anchored his “communism requires surveillance” claim in an historical example meant to make a modern point about data exhaust. “In 1918, in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin gave an order to murder 100 nearby ‘kulaks,’” he said, emphasizing that such an order “required a list”: names, locations, and a population that couldn’t easily move.

His argument is that the internet reverses that asymmetry if encryption becomes the default. “Today, neo-communism is rising once again. But the Internet could change the game,” he said. “No full list, if we encrypt it. No fixed location, either. They can’t hit what they can’t see.”

Those themes carried into a longer discussion on the Never Say Podcast, where Srinivasan connected privacy to basic operational freedom. “If you’re under surveillance, you’re not sovereign,” he said. “If every move is being tracked…you don’t have the advantage of surprise. You can never launch something. You can never have private deliberations.”

Arjun Khemani, a 19-year-old Zcash researcher on the episode, echoed the AI angle from the user side: “Especially with AI, being able to recognize where you are exactly…you can’t have freedom without privacy,” he said, arguing that broadcasting every transaction and context signal is “not… the world that I want to live in.”

The choice is clear. It’s Zcash or communism.pic.twitter.com/4sAG9WG0jA

— Balaji (@balajis) February 18, 2026

Zcash As A Scaling Bet, Not Just A Privacy Stance

Srinivasan’s pitch wasn’t limited to privacy-by-principle. He positioned Zcash as a technical response to where he thinks the market has landed on scalability: on-chain throughput wins, and routing complexity loses.

Asked why “Zcash must scale” is a “moral imperative,” Srinivasan contrasted Bitcoin’s scaling reality: exchanges, custodians, and database entries with the decentralization promise many users think they’re buying. “Lightning…they’ve been saying, ‘Lightning is going to be there any day now’ for 10 years,” he said, arguing that real-world deployments tend toward “a hub and spoke topology” resembling traditional finance rails. “Within a bank, it’s fast…between banks, they do settlement,” he added, describing a dynamic he sees mirrored in major Lightning implementations.

From there, he argued crypto has effectively segmented into layers: Bitcoin for immutability and brand, Ethereum for programmability, and Solana for straightforward on-chain execution at scale. The opening he sees for Zcash is combining “Solana-like scalability” with private transactions, leaning on zero-knowledge proofs as “compression technology” as much as secrecy. “It’s what a lot of people wanted Bitcoin to be,” he said.

Srinivasan also stressed that privacy doesn’t necessarily replace transparency, it complements it. He argued that Bitcoin’s public ledger can be a feature for proof-of-reserves narratives, while Zcash’s private-by-default design targets a different threat model. His bottom line is coexistence, not conquest: “It’s possible that Bitcoin… and Zcash coexist because Bitcoin is transparent and Zcash is private,” he said, while suggesting “this could be Zcash’s moment.”

At press time, ZEC traded at $259.18.

The XRP Ledger has just activated one of its most anticipated upgrades. According to XRPScan, the Permissioned DEX amendment was enabled on February 18, 2026 at 10:58:10 AM UTC after 82.35% of validators voted in favor.

This is the second amendment to go live on the Ledger in less than a week, following the activation of the Token Escrow (XLS-85) amendment on February 12. XRP enthusiasts are happy with the development, as evidenced by various posts on the social media platform X. However, what does a Permissioned DEX actually mean for everyday users?

Permissioned Dex Is Bigger Than A Simple Upgrade

Ripple enthusiasts and executives have repeatedly stated that the largest obstacle to institutional adoption of decentralized exchanges is compliance. Without permissioning tools, even Ripple itself could not fully utilize certain XRPL functionalities in regulated environments.

A Permissioned DEX is still a decentralized exchange, but with controlled access. A Permissioned DEX is where anyone can trade freely, but creators of the DEX restrict participation to verified entities. This means that banks, payment providers, and regulated financial institutions can take advantage of a Permissioned DEX to trade, provide liquidity, and settle transactions inside an environment where all participants are known and approved.

Decentralized networks like the Ledger are permissionless, meaning anyone can participate without authorization or approval from a gatekeeper. However, as nice as that may sound, the reality behind this structure is that traditional financial institutions cannot transact on open systems with anonymous counterparties due to compliance, AML, and regulatory obligations. They must know who they are trading with, maintain audit trails, and prevent exposure to illicit activity. A permissioned environment solves that barrier without removing the decentralized foundation of the ledger itself.

The Ledger already had built-in DEX functionality, fast settlement, low fees, and deterministic execution. The new amendment adds the compliance layer that large financial institutions need before deploying huge amounts of capital into the XRP ecosystem.

What Does This Mean For XRP Users?

Therefore, the launch of Permissioned Dex on the XRP Ledger is another obstacle to mass institutionalization that has been removed. According to an enthusiast known as Nick on the social media platform X, once the market structure bill is passed this year, then every other single obstacle to mass institutionalization of the Ledger will be removed. 

According to another analyst on X known as Stern Drew, the upgrade is huge because permissioned liquidity unlocks institutional participation, the missing bridge between traditional finance and blockchain rails. This is expected to be reflected in the price action of the altcoin moving forward. 

However, the analyst noted that it might take time for institutions to actually deploy liquidity until the CLARITY ACT and DNAOnChain’s zk-credential system go live. Nonetheless, the first permissioned offer has already been created on the XRP DEX.

Cardano’s price may be in a downward action due to a weakening crypto environment, but there has been a resurgence in buying activity from both retail and institutional investors across the sector. This resurgence in buying activity is indicated by the steady purchase by Grayscale, one of the leading treasury companies in the world.

Grayscale Makes More Cardano Allocations

Despite its persistent pullback in price over the past few months, institutional interest in Cardano (ADA) appears to be strengthening once again. According to a recent report from Dave, a crypto enthusiast, Grayscale Investments has increased its exposure to ADA after a fresh purchase.

With its steady allocation move, the ADA weighting in the company’s Smart Contract Fund now sits at over 20.12% from its prior level of 19.50%. This marks another consecutive rise and signals that investors are once again confident in the altcoin’s long-term fundamentals, as they attentively examine high-conviction holdings in the cryptocurrency market.

As ADA secures a larger share within the firm’s holdings, the allocation can also be seen as strategic positioning for what’s ahead. It is worth noting that the latest allocation was conducted just a week after the previous one. 

During the period, the firm’s ADA allocation moved from 19.50% to 19.55% in the smart contract fund. There are speculations that the move could be linked to recent rapid momentum and integration work around Bitcoin Decentralized Finance (DeFi) within the Cardano ecosystem. 

Dave highlighted that this is taking place as Cardano bolsters its push into the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. The purpose of his move is to restore external BTC liquidity on the network via non-custodial Collateral, stablecoin-based credit, and lending structures built to avoid fragility driven by liquidation. 

Furthermore, Cardano’s smart contract layer makes this possible, and this approach clarifies why large asset managers would be covertly expanding their exposure. Thus, institutions that need predictable, non-liquidating borrowing, and retail users looking for high-quality yield on idle Bitcoin could be able to utilize the network.

The Projects On The Leading Network Are Just Real Ones

Currently, the activity across the Cardano ecosystem is decreasing at a remarkable pace. Mintern, a market expert and Chief Meme Officer (CMO) of Minswap, has reported a sharp drop in the number of projects launched on the network since 2021.

In 2021, the number of projects on the network skyrocketed with more than 100 projects within the year, signaling confidence in the network’s scalability, governance model, and long-term roadmap. Meanwhile, in 2026, the projects have fallen, leaving only the real ones. 

Mintern noted that the network is now advancing with Midnight building privacy-focused rails for long-term adoption, not short-term speculation. Amid the reduced network activity, the main question circulating across the community is who is still building in 2026.

A staggering $117 million worth of XRP has just shifted hands on the Ripple blockchain in a transaction that has left even seasoned crypto watchers wondering about the wallets involved. According to data publicly shared by crypto analyst Ripple Bull Winkle, on-chain records include timestamps, exact amounts, hashes, and transaction fees, but nothing about the identities of the sender or receiver.  

Analyst Reveals Under-The-Radar XRP Transfer

A massive 81 million XRP, valued at roughly $117 million, was transferred on the Ripple network, and the identities behind it remain unknown. Ripple Bull Winkle revealed the move in a post on X, sharing screenshots of on-chain data from Whale Alert showing millions of the token shifting between two crypto wallets with no labels, no exchange involvement, and no public trace. 

Notably, the large-scale transfer took place on Tuesday, February 17, drawing the crypto community’s attention for its sheer scale and anonymity. According to Ripple Bull Winkle, transactions of this size never happen by accident. He suggested that the movement was deliberate, hinting at strategic positioning rather than a routine transfer. 

The analyst also noted that the lack of identifiable wallets also fuels speculation that a whale may be accumulating XRP ahead of an event or market shift, though nothing is certain yet. He further remarked that “someone knows something,” implying that insiders or large holders may be acting on information not yet visible to the broader crypto market. 

Interestingly, Ripple’s blockchain logs confirm the transfer and provide the wallet addresses involved, but reveal nothing about who orchestrated the substantial transfer. The timing of the transaction amid the broader decline in the XRP price adds another layer of intrigue. Notably, the altcoin has been in a pronounced downtrend for months, dropping from 2025 highs above $3 to under $1.5 at the time of writing. This steep decline has been driven by a combination of market factors, including sell-side pressure. 

Commenters on Ripple Bull Winkle’s post have speculated that the 81 million XRP transfer could signal upcoming selling. At the same time, they also caution that the move may have no deeper significance and could simply be a wallet-to-wallet transfer for security or operational purposes.

The Trend Remains Largely Bearish

In a more price-focused analysis, market analyst Crypto Tony stated that XRP’s current trend is “most certainly bearish.” This assessment comes as the cryptocurrency continues to break key support zones and trade below former resistance levels. 

Crypto Tony indicated that the altcoin’s price could continue its downtrend, potentially declining further toward $1.38. At its current price of 1.42, this would represent a significant correction of approximately 2.8%. Notably, the analyst has highlighted a resistance level above $1.5 on his accompanying chart, suggesting XRP could revisit this area if it regains bullish momentum.