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Welcome to The Node! This is Marc Hochstein to take you through the latest crypto news.

In today's news: Pump.Fun rakes in big bucks with 1M SOL in cumulative fees; Solana's crypto-governance hub, Realms, is under new management; Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen is flooding Kamala Harris' election effort with XRP; Buenos Aires adds ZK proofs to city app in bid to boost residents' privacy.

The Takeaway: SEC chair Gary Gensler has arguably been the individual with the greatest influence over the direction of U.S. crypto policies, but his days atop the agency are numbered, writes CoinDesk's Jesse Hamilton.👇

Pump.Fun Rakes in Big Bucks

Solana token issuer Pump.Fun is nearing 1 million SOL tokens in lifetime fees, with over 2.5 million tokens launched using the service since its early March release.

Over 5,550 addresses issued 7,500 tokens in the past 24 hours alone, data shows. Monday saw a record 31,000 tokens launched as artificial intelligence-themed memecoins - a niche kickstarted by GOAT - renewed a speculative frenzy.

Active addresses grew to 85,000, of which 37,000 were new wallets, indicative of strong demand. Meanwhile, Lookonchain data shows that Pump’s creators are raking in profits. A connected fee account sold over $6 million worth of SOL late Monday, taking its lifetime sales to over $78 million or 500,000 SOL.

Pump lets anyone issue a token for less than $2 in capital, after which they choose the number of tokens, theme, and meme picture to accompany it.

Solana's Realms Is Under New Management

Realms has been in the business of crypto-governance for nearly as long the blockchain it's built on – Solana – has been around. Its new leaders want to start turning a profit.

The hub for crypto apps' voting, decision-making and treasury is under new management, an entity called "Realms Today Trust." It's a big change for the project built by all-important Solana Labs to give its blockchain's many startups a place to manage their politics.

"We need to develop profit services, that way we can continue it," said Dean Pappas, a longtime Realms contributor and one of the four people leading the spinoff company.

Realms' new "mandate" won't affect the "public goods" that dozens of Solana-based decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) have come to rely on, continued Pappas. The governance tools that give projects' communities of token-holders a say in their operations will remain free.

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Ripple Exec Floods Kamala Harris With XRP

Ripple co-founder and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen said he'd added another $10 million in the Ripple-tied token XRP in an effort to boost Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democrat faces off against former President Donald Trump in next month's election.

Larsen has become the crypto sector's leading supporter for Harris, saying Monday in a post on X that he's pitching in with $10 million in XRP to the political action committee Future Forward. "It's time for the Democrats to have a new approach to tech innovation, including crypto," he wrote.

Federal Election Commission records show Larsen had previously donated $1.75 million to the PAC. He's also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democratic congressional campaigns.

While significant, his millions are dwarfed by the overall crypto industry's campaign involvement, led by the super PAC Fairshake. That VC-backed group's $169 million in donations has not only dominated the crypto sector's election involvement but has put it among the biggest sources of campaign cash in the 2024 elections.

Buenos Aires Adds ZK Proofs to City App

The city of Buenos Aires has launched a digital identity service designed to strengthen residents' privacy using zero-knowledge proofs, a type of cryptography that long predates but often bolsters cryptocurrencies.

The service, QuarkID, has been integrated into miBA, the city's seven-year-old app for accessing municipal services and documents. The idea, in short, is to give 3.6 million porteños – residents of Buenos Aires – greater control over their personal information. For example, residents will be able to pull up the app on their phone to confirm they are over a certain age (for the purpose of, say, buying alcohol) without showing their address or even full birthdate.

“The decision from the beginning was to create a self-sovereign identity system so that citizens can have privacy and security over the documents they acquire ownership of,” Diego Fernandez, Buenos Aires' secretary of innovation and digital transformation, told CoinDesk.

Zero-knowledge proofs do not require a blockchain to work, but QuarkID uses one: the Ethereum layer-2 network ZKsync Era. According to QuarkID's website, the blockchain serves as a "security anchor," meaning that it's there to prove a piece of data existed in a particular form at a particular time. "Relying solely on the issue date embedded within the credential data could be problematic, as a malicious issuer could backdate documents," Fernandez said.

The Takeaway: Goodbye Gary

By Jesse Hamilton

Someday soon, somebody besides Gary Gensler will be calling the shots at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and most of the crypto industry will rejoice.

More than any other figure in the U.S. government, this SEC chair played an unflinching antagonist to the industry's aims. That no-holds-barred opposition to the way crypto companies want to do business is likely to cease, one way or another, in the coming year, when the securities agency gets a new boss.

But the countdown for Gensler raises a number of questions, leaving one final chapter of drama in his reign over crypto (and the rest of securities regulation in the U.S.). And if there's a common feeling among those who watch the SEC closely, it's uncertainty.

Gensler's five-year SEC term expires on Jan. 5, 2026, but tradition suggests a chair will step away if the opposing party takes the White House. Still, they don't have to. A second term for President Donald Trump doesn't mark an automatic end to Gensler's tenure. If he decided to make a stand, he could finish out his term as a commissioner and maintain a Democratic majority at the agency for as long as it takes for the new president to make appointments and the Senate to confirm them.

When recently asked by a reporter whether he'd resign if Trump won, Gensler laughed quietly and said he wouldn't comment on the elections. But he added, "Elections have consequences."

A former Goldman Sachs banker and MIT professor who lectured on crypto, Gensler has a deep well of financial and digital-assets knowledge. And as the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission after the global mortgage implosion in 2008, he crafyed novel, high-stakes regulation. But when he took the helm of the SEC in 2021 and found crypto on his plate, he made a consequential call: The SEC didn't need new rules. Existing securities law gave plenty of leeway to police this space.

That's not the general sense of the SEC's overseers in Congress. A big majority of the House of Representatives passed a bill this year that would create rules specifically tailored for digital assets – including how the SEC should approach what would be a more explicitly defined array of crypto securities. And while that bill has languished because it still needs Senate approval, crypto did see a win in that chamber, too. A strong majority of senators voted this year to overturn a key SEC crypto accounting policy, showing they believed the agency was overreaching and rebuffing Gensler's arguments that the industry-targeting standard was a natural response to the crypto sector's investor-harming bankruptcies.

The lawmakers who make up next year's Congress, which will likely have at least two dozen members who can partly thank aggressive crypto campaign giving for their presence on Capitol Hill, is likely to be busy with digital assets. That's probably true no matter which party controls each chamber; Democrats look poised to have a majority in the House, according to electoral math and polling trends, while Republicans may win control of the Senate. But if the Democrats keep the Senate, crypto progress may remain challenged.

"I think there is a real chance that the legislation gets passed next year," Michael Piwowar, a former acting chair of the SEC, said during an interview with CoinDesk. That would create a "nice, legal regulatory framework" for crypto that puts the securities agency in a defined lane that leaves less room for the legal interpretations the SEC and crypto businesses are still fighting over in federal courts, he added. "There's not clear authority on some of these things, which is why Congress needs to get involved."

"Five years from now, we'll look back in the rearview mirror and say, 'Why couldn't we have done this sooner?'" Piwowar said.

Part of that answer – critics and allies would agree – is Gensler.

Read the rest.

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