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Crypto enforcement, Newsletter

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Crypto enforcement, Newsletter

This week’s key events presented by senior financial reporter Jack Schickler.

Key diary dates

  • Monday 24 – Tuesday 25 June: .7th European Nuclear Safety Conference.

  • Thursday 27 – Friday 28 June: European Summit of heads of state in Brussels to set strategic agenda and EU top jobs.

  • Sunday 30 June: EU law on cryptocurrency takes effect.

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In spotlight

The EU’s landmark cryptocurrency law takes effect this week, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be smooth sailing.

The Markets in Crypto Assets regulation, MiCA, was finalised last year after years of haggling – and represents a world-first.

MiCA adapts financial laws to apply to those trading bitcoin and its ilk, offering a modicum of consumer protection in a sector prone to scams and manipulation.

But industry figures complain the rules are still unclear after being finalised late.  With just days to go until the rules take effect, we haven’t identified a single crypto player that succeeded in being authorised under the provisions set to take effect next Sunday.

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The toughest part of the law covers stablecoins, cryptocurrencies which seek a fixed value against assets such as the dollar, which will apply as of 30 June.

EU finance ministers took fright when Facebook announced its own stablecoin, Libra, in 2019. They didn’t want US big tech firms introducing their own currencies that could come to supplant the euro.

Their fears were largely upheld in spring 2022 when another stablecoin, Terra, proved not so stable, sending a tsunami across the sector thanks to a spectacular crash.

Brussels has boasted its new law will keep people safe while promoting innovation – something the bloc sorely needs as it faces up to competition from the US and Asia.

But complying with bank-style laws was always going to be an uphill struggle for an industry that previously faced few regulatory constraints.

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Crypto’s had a tough few years, and many of its figureheads are now in jail for charges including fraud and money laundering.

Optimists hope that crypto’s newfound regulatory credibility will draw a line under those scandals, even encouraging more cautious firms from the traditional financial sector to jump on board.

If nobody succeeds in complying, of course, regulation might just kill the sector outright.  

Policy newsmakers

Dutch Hungarians in government

Zsolt Szabó, the candidate for state secretary for digitalisation in the incoming Dutch right-wing government, touted centralised AI as a priority of his mandate last week. Szabó, who has Hungarian roots, was nominated by the far-right Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, but today told lawmakers that “IT isn’t left-wing or right-wing”. Like Szabó, incoming Economy Minister Dirk Beljaarts has a Hungarian mother. Beljaarts told Dutch media last week that he has renounced his Hungarian passport. Szabó said he only has Dutch nationality. Wilders has criticised politicians holding dual nationality in the past.

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Data brief

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2026 Won’t Be About Cycles — Research Shows What Will Actually Drive Crypto Prices

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2026 Won’t Be About Cycles — Research Shows What Will Actually Drive Crypto Prices
Crypto markets are shedding their four-year cycle as ETFs, concentrated liquidity and investor attention reshape price discovery, with Wintermute research pointing to 2026 as the moment digital assets begin trading like global financial instruments.
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3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks With More Potential Than Any Cryptocurrency | The Motley Fool

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3 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks With More Potential Than Any Cryptocurrency | The Motley Fool

SoundHound AI, Lemonade, and CoreWeave will all profit from that secular trend.

Over the past few years, many growth-oriented investors with a high tolerance for risk have pivoted toward the cryptocurrency market. Several of the top tokens — like Bitcoin (BTC 2.52%) and Ether (ETH 3.84%) — generated impressive gains within a short time. However, many of the smaller altcoins and meme coins fizzled out during the last crypto winter.

Instead of chasing those volatile tokens, which are usually driven by supply and demand, it might be smarter to invest in the market’s more speculative artificial intelligence (AI) plays. Let’s take a look at three of those promising tech stocks — SoundHound AI (SOUN +1.65%), Lemonade (LMND 0.97%), and CoreWeave (CRWV +6.55%) — and see why they could have more growth potential than the market’s hottest cryptocurrencies.

Image source: Getty Images.

SoundHound AI

SoundHound AI develops AI-powered voice and audio recognition tools. Its namesake app can identify songs by hearing just a few seconds of recorded audio or a few hummed bars. However, it generates most of its revenue and growth from Houndify, its developer-oriented platform for creating customized voice recognition apps for a wide range of industries.

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SoundHound AI Stock Quote

Today’s Change

(1.65%) $0.18

Current Price

$11.10

SoundHound has been acquiring smaller companies to expand its presence in the restaurant and customer service chatbot markets. It already serves automakers like Stellantis, restaurants like Chipotle, and credit card giants like Mastercard, and it should attract more customers who want to develop their own voice recognition services without sharing their data with larger tech companies.

From 2025 to 2027, analysts expect SoundHound’s revenue to grow at a 30% CAGR, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) turning positive in the final year. With an enterprise value of $4.5 billion, it might seem pricey at 20 times this year’s sales. However, its early mover’s advantage in the growing voice recognition services market should justify that higher valuation. Over the next decade, it should continue to expand and evolve as it acquires more companies and rolls out more agentic AI tools.

Lemonade

Lemonade sells homeowners, renters, term life, pet, and auto insurance policies. It’s popular with younger and first-time insurance customers because it simplifies the byzantine buying process with a streamlined AI-powered app.

Using AI chatbots instead of human representatives can quickly onboard new customers and process claims in a few seconds. From the end of 2020 to the third quarter of 2025, its customer base nearly tripled from 1.00 million to 2.87 million.

Lemonade Stock Quote

Today’s Change

(-0.97%) $-0.78

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Current Price

$79.41

From 2025 to 2027, analysts expect Lemonade’s revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at a CAGR of 44%, with adjusted EBITDA turning positive in the final year. The expansion of its newer pet and auto insurance businesses, its overseas growth (especially in Europe), and its rollout of more AI features should drive those gains.

With an enterprise value of $6.2 billion, Lemonade still looks reasonably valued at five times this year’s sales. However, it could command a much higher valuation if it scales up its business and pulls millions of customers away from traditional insurance companies.

CoreWeave

CoreWeave was once an Ethereum miner, but it abandoned that business model after the 2018 cryptocurrency crash. It subsequently repurposed its mining GPUs to remotely process machine learning and AI tasks, acquired more than 250,000 high-end data center GPUs from Nvidia, and expanded its business from three data centers at the end of 2022 to 33 data centers today.

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CoreWeave Stock Quote

Today’s Change

(6.55%) $6.22

Current Price

$101.23

CoreWeave claims its dedicated cloud-based GPUs can process AI tasks 35 times faster and 80% more cost-effectively than other cloud infrastructure platforms. Those strengths make it a popular choice for companies which don’t want to expand their own infrastructure to support their latest AI applications. As it locks in more AI customers — including Microsoft and OpenAI — analysts expect its revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at a CAGR of 95% and 109%, respectively, from 2025 to 2027.

CoreWeave is growing like a weed, yet it has an enterprise value of only $87.9 billion — which equates to 7x this year’s sales and 11x adjusted EBITDA. The high costs of opening new data centers are likely compressing its near-term valuations, but it could have plenty of room to grow over the long term as the cloud and AI markets expand.

Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Ethereum, Lemonade, Mastercard, Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoundHound AI. The Motley Fool recommends Stellantis and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft, short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft, and short March 2026 $42.50 calls on Chipotle Mexican Grill. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

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XRP Drops Hard as Key Zone Breaks During Broad Crypto Sell-Off

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XRP Drops Hard as Key Zone Breaks During Broad Crypto Sell-Off
XRP slid sharply below key support as a broad crypto sell-off intensified, wiping out leveraged positions, driving extreme oversold signals, and exposing mounting macro and regulatory stress that continues to weigh on digital asset prices.
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