• Treasury removes crypto broker rule.

• HSBC tests digital HKD.

• Caldera introduces $ERA.

• Path to a zkEVM on Ethereum L1.

ETH is up 11% in the last 24 hours, currently trading above $2,900 at the time of writing.

The U.S. Treasury and IRS removed a crypto broker rule, issued during the Biden Administration, which would have required certain decentralized finance protocols to report digital asset sales similarly to centralized exchanges. Since Congress and the President disapproved the rule under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), it has no legal force or effect and is treated as though it never took effect. As a result, the Treasury and IRS are reverting the regulations to their prior form. DeFi protocols that facilitate digital asset sales are no longer required to collect and report information to the IRS about their users.

HSBC, a major global bank, conducted an experiment under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Project e-HKD+ to explore technical and commercial possibilities for a digital Hong Kong dollar. The experiment tested how digital money could operate on public networks such as Ethereum, Arbitrum, Linea, and Polygon, as well as a private blockchain developed on Hyperledger Besu. The tests focused on storing, transferring, and settling tokenized assets, exploring scalability, and examining privacy and security solutions using Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) and Decentralized Identity. HSBC recently launched Hong Kong’s first bank-led tokenized deposit service for its corporate clients.

Rollup-as-a-service infrastructure provider Caldera introduced $ERA, its native token for gas fees, staking, security, and governance. $ERA has a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with 7% of the supply allocated for an initial airdrop. Eligible users must pre-register before July 16, 2025, to receive their allocation. $ERA will serve as the gas token for the Metalayer, Caldera’s interoperability protocol that unifies chains, enabling shared liquidity and secure, intent-based cross-chain bridging. Caldera supports custom rollup deployments on Arbitrum Orbit, OP Stack, and ZKsync through its modular Rollup Engine. Chains deployed via Caldera collectively secure over $400 million in TVL.

Ethereum researcher Sophia Gold published a post on paths to deploying a zkEVM on Ethereum L1. The post outlines proposed standards from the Ethereum Foundation’s zkEVM team, which defines real-time proving as achieving proof generation within 10 seconds for 99% of mainnet blocks. She believes several zkVM projects could achieve real-time proving before Devconnect ARG in November 2025. The proposed standards aim to make it feasible to run zk provers at home. L1 zkEVM would allow Ethereum to significantly raise the gas limit and support native zk-rollups, without sacrificing censorship resistance.

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Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.