Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the Department of Commerce will begin issuing GDP and other economic statistics on blockchain during a White House cabinet meeting on Aug. 26.

Positioning the technology as a government-wide data distribution tool, Lutnick told President Donald Trump:

“The Department of Commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain, cause you [Trump] are the crypto president, and we are going to put the GDP on the blockchain so people can use the blockchain for data distribution.”

Lutnick said the Commerce Department plans to make blockchain-based statistics “available for the entire government” while working through implementation details.

The announcement represents the most prominent federal blockchain deployment under the Trump administration’s crypto-friendly policies.

Existing federal programs

The Commerce initiative builds on existing blockchain pilots across federal agencies.

Treasury tested a grant distribution system using blockchain to track drawdowns with automatic reconciliation and audit trails, though it never launched publicly.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission operates a pilot program evaluating tokenized collateral and stablecoin-based financial transactions in regulated markets.

At the same time, the Small Business Administration has evaluated blockchain for monitoring fraud and performance metrics in loan programs, according to Government Accountability Office reports.

The Department of Defense and Homeland Security are exploring the use of blockchain for parts tracking, supply chain authentication, and digital documentation.

The Navy and the Defense Logistics Agency collaborate with SIMBA Chain to track high-value parts through blockchain ledgers, thereby reducing manual data entry in defense supply chains.

Customs and Border Protection previously ran blockchain trials to verify intellectual property data on imports and spot counterfeit goods.

Congressional support

The blockchain push aligns with pending congressional legislation. The “Deploying American Blockchains Act of 2025,” sponsored by Rep. Kat Cammack and passed by the House on June 23, moved to the Senate on June 24.

The bill directs the Secretary of Commerce to promote US competitiveness in blockchain deployment and applications.

The legislation would establish a Commerce Department Blockchain Deployment Program and create advisory committees that include federal agencies, private sector representatives, and blockchain infrastructure operators.

The program would examine how federal agencies can benefit from distributed ledger technology while addressing concerns related to cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.

The Commerce Department’s GDP blockchain initiative represents the latest federal commitment to distributed ledger technology for core government functions.

Mentioned in this article

Scammers are reportedly posing as bank fraud investigators to steal money from unsuspecting victims.

According to WPLG Local 10, the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) in Florida has issued a warning about the scheme and is urging the public to be vigilant amid rising cases of bank-related phone scams.

WPLG reports that the BSO Pompano Beach District has already received more than a dozen complaints from residents who were tricked into handing out thousands of dollars to the scammers.

Deputies say that one victim lost $15,000 to the scheme. A couple was also tricked into giving up their debit cards and personal identification numbers (PINs), resulting in more than $9,000 in fraudulent charges.

The bad actors typically contact their prospective victims, pretending to work for the fraud department of the victim’s bank.

The scammers then claim there are suspicious activities on the victim’s account that require immediate action to protect the funds. They then tell the victims to withdraw large sums of money or hand over their debit cards and PINs.

In some cases, the scammer arranges for an Uber to pick up the money or the debit card, instructing the victim to place the envelope containing these items in the backseat and not speak to the driver.

The police say that legitimate banks will not tell their clients to withdraw money and send it through a ride-share service, nor will they ask to hand over debit cards and PINs to a third party.

Follow us on X, Facebook and Telegram

Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inbox

Check Price Action

Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

&nbsp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.

Generated Image: Midjourney

The third-largest bank in the US is signaling intentions to enhance its digital asset capabilities and offerings.

In an earnings call for the second quarter of 2025, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser says stablecoins are the “next evolution in the broader digitization of payments, financing and liquidity.”

According to Fraser, the trillion-dollar bank intends to, among other things, issue a stablecoin and offer custody services for crypto assets.

“So four main areas that we’re exploring [are] reserve management for stablecoins, the on and off ramps from cash and coin, backwards and forwards. We are looking at the issuance of a Citi stablecoin.

But probably most importantly is the tokenized deposit space where we’re very active. And then also providing custodial solutions for crypto assets. So this is a good opportunity for us.”

According to the Citigroup CEO, the third-largest US bank’s potential stablecoin will have a cost advantage when used for making payments.

“So if you keep in mind right now, stablecoins about 88% of all stablecoin transactions are used to settle crypto trades.

There’s only 6% which is payments. In a traditional offering, if you are moving from cash to stablecoin and back to cash, right now, you’re incurring as much as a 7% transaction cost. I mean, that’s just prohibitive. So this is where Citi Token Services is so exciting because it enables the client to move from physical fiat to the digital and back again without incurring that transaction cost.”

Follow us on X, Facebook and Telegram

Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inbox

Check Price Action

Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

&nbsp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.

Generated Image: Midjourney

At the BTC Prague conference this week, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) co-founder Michael Saylor stated that Bitcoin treasury companies can grow as quickly as they can issue equity and credit to purchase Bitcoin.

Delving into the business model of Bitcoin treasury companies like Strategy, Saylor explained how corporate investment in BTC can far outpace individual investments.

Business model of Bitcoin treasury companies

Several major companies have announced plans or are mulling the launch of a Bitcoin treasury. For instance, earlier this week, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, hinted at launching a BTC treasury. The $2.3 billion Trump Media, which is majority owned by President Donald Trump, raised to buy BTC was effectively approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this month.

Saylor explained that BTC treasury companies, which have been growing in popularity over the past few months, have a very simple yet ‘elegant’ business model.

Saylor explains this with an example. Let’s say a dentist buys about $200,000 worth of BTC every year. In 20 years, the dentist would have bought about $2 million worth of BTC.

However, a public corporation can buy BTC at a much faster rate. A company can issue credit in the form of anything from convertible bonds, junk bonds, to preferred stocks, and buy $2 million worth of BTC in a month.

According to Saylor, companies buying BTC can become immediately profitable, allowing them to issue securities and buy large amounts of BTC every month. He said:

“…the simplicity in the business model is I’m just going to issue billions and billions and billions of dollars of securities and buy billions and billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin.”

This model, Saylor believes, will transform the equity and capital markets from being cash-based to Bitcoin-based.

“…that’s I think, what we see right now in the market, that we are going into a BTC-denominated world.”

BTC Treasury companies can grow as fast as they can issue equity

Saylor noted that the “rate at which a company can issue equity or credit,” and use it to buy BTC, is “exponential.” A Bitcoin treasury company’s growth rate is, therefore, significantly faster than traditional business cycles. Saylor said:

“You can grow literally as fast as you can issue the security and buy the Bitcoin. And that is an investment cycle which is 1,000 times faster than a physical real estate cycle or a business cycle. So it’s faster, it’s homogeneous.”

According to Saylor, credit or equity is valued based on expected future cash flows—investors buy security and lend money to the company based on how much the firm can earn in the future. In the long term, the value of the cash can also decline. This means that there is a long “heterogeneous equity risk,” Saylor said.

But Bitcoin treasury companies are valued based on their ability to buy Bitcoin rather than via operations, which calls for special metrics to value Bitcoin-backed equity.

Mentioned in this article

Ethereum’s core developers are pushing for a major technical change that could reshape how quickly the network processes transactions.

On June 21, Barnabé Monnot, one of Ethereum’s core contributors, suggested a new proposal, EIP-7782, which would halve the block slot time from 12 seconds to 6 seconds.

According to him:

“Shorter slot times make Ethereum a better confirmation engine, which is arguably one of its main value propositions for apps and rollups settling on Ethereum L1. Everyone benefits directly.”

EIP-7782 benefits

He explained that the proposed changes would improve confirmation speed, reduce trading costs on decentralized platforms, and create better conditions for cross-chain protocols.

The proposal also includes adjustments to the timing of several core blockchain operations, such as attestation and aggregation windows.

Under EIP-7782, the block proposal slot would shrink from 4 seconds to 3. Attestations and aggregations would move even faster, cut from 4 seconds to 1.5 each.

Monnot has proposed that the EIP should headline Ethereum’s upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. He said:

“There are multiple slot restructuring proposals already made for Glamsterdam (EIPs 7732 and 7886), focused more on scaling We want to use our Glamsterdam proposal as a place to highlight the value of shorter slot times, and progress the conversation towards their implementation.”

Meanwhile, this push for faster slot times aligns with the Ethereum Foundation’s broader goal of enhancing the network’s Layer 1 performance and refining user experience.

Considering this, Storm Slivkoff, a research partner at Paradigm, supports the proposal. He noted that reducing latency could be the most valuable upgrade included in Glamsterdam, especially as transaction fees drop below $0.10.

In such an environment, increasing block size yields diminishing returns. Instead, improving block quality becomes more critical.

Ethereum’s ecosystem growth

The proposal comes as Ethereum’s activity hits new highs amid rising institutional adoption.

According to GrowThePie data, more than 20 million active addresses interacted with the network last week, setting a record. However, most of that activity happened on layer-2 networks, such as the Coinbase-backed Base.

So, as Ethereum’s Layer-1 developers now propose making the core network faster and more efficient. If successful, the proposed slot time cut could improve performance where speed, cost, and usability matter most.

Mentioned in this article

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and TD Bank are disclosing data breaches that are placing some customers’ accounts and personal information at risk.

In new filings with the Massachusetts state government, Chase says at least four customers in the state are affected by multiple breaches.

In two incidents, Chase says employees improperly accessed customers’ credit and debit card information and triggered fraudulent transactions, prompting the bank to close the affected cards, issue replacements, and reimburse the customers.

In the other two incidents, the bank says it mistakenly posted transaction details, including names, addresses, account numbers, and transaction amounts, to other customers’ accounts. At this point, no misuse due to those errors has been detected.

Meanwhile, Bank of America says documentation relating to at least one customer’s savings bonds was lost in transit on February 14th.

Attempts to recover the documentation, according to the North Carolina-based lender, have proved unsuccessful.

“According to our records, the information involved in this incident was related to your Savings Bonds and included your first and last name, address, Social Security number, and account number.”

The lender says it is monitoring the customer’s banking account for any suspicious activity and is committed to resolving any unauthorized transactions.

Lastly, TD Bank says a former employee improperly accessed a customer’s personal information between December of 2024 and January of 2025.

The information may have included the customer’s name, address, phone number, social security number, account number, and transactional data.

TD Bank says it’s monitoring the account for fraud and is offering the customer a complimentary two year membership to an identity theft protection and recovery service.

Follow us on X, Facebook and Telegram

Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inbox

Check Price Action

Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

&nbsp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.

Generated Image: Midjourney

Google says an API management issue is behind Thursday’s massive Google Cloud outage, which disrupted or brought down its services and many other online platforms.

Google says the cloud outage started around 10:49 ET and ended at 3:49 ET, after causing issues for millions of users worldwide for over three hours.

Besides Google Cloud, the incident also impacted Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Cloud Search, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Tasks, Google Voice, Google Lens, Discover, and Voice Search.

However, it also caused widespread issues for third-party platforms that rely on Google Cloud, including but not limited to Spotify, Discord, Snapchat, NPM, Firebase Studio, and a limited number of Cloudflare services relying on the Workers KV key-value store.

“We are deeply sorry for the impact to all of our users and their customers that this service disruption/outage caused. Businesses large and small trust Google Cloud with your workloads and we will do better,” Google said.

While it’s still working on publishing a full incident report, Google revealed today the root cause of what caused an increased number of 503 errors in external API requests during yesterday’s three-hour-long outage.

As the company explained today, its Google Cloud API management platform failed due to invalid data, an issue that wasn’t discovered and remediated promptly because it lacked effective testing and error-handling systems.

“From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected. To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours,” the company added.

“However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region. Several products had moderate residual impact (e.g. backlogs) for up to an hour after the primary issue was mitigated and a small number recovering after that.”

Cloudflare services taken down by Google’s outage

After successfully restoring its own impacted services, Cloudflare also revealed in a post-mortem that yesterday’s incident was not caused by a security incident and that no data was lost.

“The cause of this outage was due to a failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by our Workers KV service, which is a critical dependency for many Cloudflare products and relied upon for configuration, authentication, and asset delivery across the affected services,” Cloudflare said.

“Part of this infrastructure is backed by a third-party cloud provider, which experienced an outage today and directly impacted the availability of our KV service.”

Even though it didn’t share the name of the cloud provider behind the Thursday outage, a Cloudflare spokesperson told BleepingComputer yesterday that only Cloudflare services relying on Google Cloud were affected.

In response to this incident, Cloudflare says it will migrate KV’s central store to its own R2 object storage to reduce external dependency and prevent similar issues in the future.

Leading crypto firms Uniswap, Jump Trading and the Blockchain Association will soon issue a joint statement supporting the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), according to crypto reporter Eleanor Terrett.

Terrett tells her 238,200 followers on the social media platform X that the statement is “imminent.”

“NEW: I’m hearing that a joint statement is imminent from the eight leading crypto trade associations, along with Uniswap and Jump, expressing their support for the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) being included in the latest version of the CLARITY Act.”

The BRCA aims to provide clarity and certainty for developers, miners, and other innovators in the non-custodial crypto ecosystem.

According to Terrett, the eight groups are the DeFi Education Fund, Coin Center, Solana Institute, Chamber of Digital Commerce, Blockchain Association, Crypto Council, Bitcoin Policy Institute and Paradigm, who say that the legislation is critical for protecting software developers and infrastructure providers who do not custody customer funds.

“The amendment, originally introduced by GOP Majority Whip and now with bipartisan support from Rep Ritchie, is being viewed by many in the industry as a foundational policy safeguard for DeFi developers.

‘It’s critically important that we don’t treat open-source developers like traditional financial institutions,’ one policy lead told me. ‘The BRCA draws that line clearly and protects innovation.’

The joint statement urges lawmakers to include the BRCA in the CLARITY Act, the House’s digital asset market structure bill, which is expected to be marked up next week.”

At time of writing, no statement has been issued.

Follow us on X, Facebook and Telegram

Don’t Miss a Beat – Subscribe to get email alerts delivered directly to your inbox

Check Price Action

Surf The Daily Hodl Mix

&nbsp

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed at The Daily Hodl are not investment advice. Investors should do their due diligence before making any high-risk investments in Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or digital assets. Please be advised that your transfers and trades are at your own risk, and any losses you may incur are your responsibility. The Daily Hodl does not recommend the buying or selling of any cryptocurrencies or digital assets, nor is The Daily Hodl an investment advisor. Please note that The Daily Hodl participates in affiliate marketing.

Generated Image: DALLE3