The Beluga Brief
Posts
🐳 Weekly Edition: Legislators Leave Crypto Regulation to the Agencies

🐳 Weekly Edition: Legislators Leave Crypto Regulation to the Agencies

The crypto industry is stuck in the vortex of bureaucracy as the SEC and CFTC decide who rules over what, meanwhile another hardware wallet exploit has hit the self-custody maxis

Beluga & Will McKinnon
August 14, 2026

The Senate has officially left for its 5-week recess without a floor vote on the Clarity Act, leaving the SEC and the CFTC to compete for jurisdiction over the crypto industry until the matter is finally settled.

If the SEC were still under Gary Gensler’s stewardship the prospect of their rule over crypto continuing would be a scary one; the new Chair Paul Atkins, however, is taking a far more amicable approach, outlining a framework that would include a decentralization safe harbor from securities classification and a startup exemption for raises up to $5m.

24 Hour Crypto Heatmap, Source: CoinMarketCap

Today was meant to be the day the SEC would vote on actually publishing “Regulation Crypto,” however an unspecified “scheduling issue” led to its cancellation with no replacement date announced so far. In other words, regulation for the crypto markets is still stuck in the grinding gears of bureaucracy.

This week also marked yet another disaster for self-custody maxi’s, as the Coldcard exploit continues to bleed Bitcoin and Trezor disclosed a major data breach involving names, emails and addresses of almost 12,000 customers who recently purchased devices. Renowned blockchain sleuth ZachXBT called all hardware wallets “complete garbage” earlier this year, and at this point I’m going to have to agree with him.

The risk-reward for having custody of your own digital assets becomes worse by the day, which is a little depressing considering that was one of the main reasons crypto was created in the first place. Either hardware wallet companies pull their act together, or we may end up seeing the majority of crypto owners holding the ETFs instead of the coins.