A group of MPs has condemned the government’s plan to maximise oil and gas production in the North Sea as “political theatre”, warning it contradicts agreements made on the international stage.
At the weekend, 30 cross-party MPs and peers wrote to the energy security secretary, asking her “in the strongest possible terms to withdraw” the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill, which is to be debated in the commons later.
Sir Alok Sharma, the former cabinet minister who ran the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021, did not sign the letter, but today also criticised the bill.
Speaking on the Today programme, he called it a “smoke and mirrors” exercise that reinforces the perception that the UK is “rowing back from climate action”.
Caroline Lucas MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change (Climate APPG), which organised the letter, said the bill would “do nothing to deliver energy security, or reduce household bills, but will threaten the delivery of our climate and nature targets”.
According to government figures, 80% of oil extracted in the UK is exported.
The bill would require the industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), to run annual licencing rounds for new oil and gas projects.
The government says this would increase investor confidence and make the UK more energy-independent, as well as generating funds for public services or the switch to cleaner energy.
But the NSTA in September said the bill was “not necessary”.
It already has the power to issue licences as often as it likes – and there have been annual licensing rounds for most of the past decade.
The letter today called the bill – announced last year as the government re-set its climate stance – a piece of “political theatre”.
The signatories said the government should instead be “increasing the supply of low-cost renewables and implementing energy efficiency measures, both of which would genuinely lower consumer bills and have strong public support”.
“New oil and gas licensing rounds will have very little impact on the UK’s energy supply and security, primarily because most of the UK’s gas has already been burned,” it said.
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‘Those in power don’t give a s***’
Offshore bill ‘diametrically opposed’ to COP28 pledge
The letter is signed largely by MPs from the Labour party, which has pledged to stop granting new oil and gas projects.
Former Conservative environment Minister Zac Goldsmith, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper MP, and former government net zero tsar, Chris Skidmore MP also added their names to the list.
Chris Skidmore announced on Friday he would resign early over the bill, saying: “I can no longer stand by. The climate crisis that we face is too important to politicise or to ignore.”
In December, as the UK rounded out its second-warmest year on record, the UK signed a pledge at the COP28 climate summit to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
“But this bill, and the government’s commitment to “max out” the North Sea’s declining oil and gas reserves, is
diametrically opposed to that agreement,” the letter added.
The government’s climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said in June that although the UK “will need some oil and gas” until it reaches its net zero emissions target, “this does not in itself justify the development of new North Sea fields”.
A department for energy security and net zero (DESNZ) spokesperson said the UK will “still need oil and gas for decades to come, even when we reach net zero in 2050”.
They added: “It makes sense to make the most of our domestic supply, rather than shipping in liquefied natural gas with four times the emissions than domestically produced gas.”
“These new licenses will not increase carbon emissions above our legally binding carbon budgets, but will provide certainty for industry, support 200,000 jobs and bring in tens of billions of tax that we can invest in the green transition and support people with cost of living. “
Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch
Institutional players have been closely watching decentralized finance’s growth. Creating secure and compliant DeFi platforms is the only solution to build trust and attract more institutions.
Clear waters attract big ships
Over the past four years, institutional DeFi adoption has gone from 10% of hedge funds to 47%, and is projected to rise to 65% in 2025. Goldman Sachs is reaching their arms to DeFi for bond issuance and yield farming.
Early adopters are already positioning themselves in onchain finance, including Visa, which has processed over $1 billion in crypto transactions since 2021 and is now testing cross-border payments. In the next two years, institutional adoption will speed up. A compliant regulatory framework that maintains DeFi’s core benefits is necessary for institutional adoption to engage confidently.
DeFi’s institutional trilemma
It is no secret that many DeFi security exploits happen every year. The recent Bybit hack reported a $1.4 billion loss. The breach occurred through a transfer process that was vulnerable to attack. Attacks like these raise concerns about multisignature wallets and blind signing. This happens when users approve transactions without full details, rendering blind signing a significant risk. This case calls for stronger security measures and improvements in user experience.
The threats of theft due to vulnerabilities in smart contracts or mistakes by validators make institutional investors hesitate when depositing large amounts of money into institutional staking pools. Institutions are also at risk of noncompliance due to a lack of clear regulatory frameworks, creating hesitation to enter the space.
The user interface in DeFi is often designed for users with technical expertise. Institutional investors require user-friendly experiences that make DeFi staking possible without relying on third-party intermediaries.
Build it right, and they will come
Institutional interest in bringing traditional assets onchain is enormous, with the tokenized asset market estimated to reach $16 trillion by 2030. To confidently participate in DeFi, institutions need verifiable counterparties that are compliant with regulatory requirements. The entry of traditional institutional players into DeFi has led some privacy advocates to point out that it can counter the essence of decentralization, which forms the bedrock of the ecosystem.
Recent: Securitize to bring BUIDL tokenized fund to DeFi with RedStone price feeds
Institutions must be able to trust DeFi platforms to maintain compliance standards while providing a safe and seamless user interface. A balanced approach is key. DeFi’s permissionless nature can be achieved while maintaining compliance through identity profiles, allowing secure transactions. Similarly, transaction screening tools facilitate real-time monitoring and risk assessment.
Blockchain analytics tools help institutions to maintain compliance with Anti-Money Laundering regulations and prevent interaction with blacklisted wallets. Integrating these tools can help detect and prevent illicit activity, making DeFi safer for institutional engagement.
Intent-based architecture can improve security
The relationship between intent-based architecture and security is evident; the very design is built to reduce risks, creating a more reliable user experience. This protects the user against MEV exploits, a common issue of automated bots scanning for large profitable trades that can be exploited. Intent-based architecture also helps implement compliance frameworks. For instance, restricting order submissions to clean wallets and allowing resolvers to settle only the acceptable orders.
It’s well understood that in traditional DeFi transactions, users rely often on intermediaries like liquidity providers to execute trades or manage funds. This leads to counterparty risk, unauthorized execution and settlement failure. The intent-based architecture supports a trustless settlement that ensures users commit only when all conditions are met, reducing risk and removing blind trust from the picture.
DeFi platforms must simplify interactions and UX for institutional investors. This system bridges the gap between. Through executing offchain while ensuring security, the intent-based architecture makes DeFi safer and more efficient. However, one of the challenges to this includes integrating offchain order matching while maintaining onchain transparency.
Late adopters of DeFi will struggle to keep up
For the early adopters of DeFi, there is a competitive advantage in liquidity access and yield advantages, whereas late adopters will face more regulatory scrutiny and entry barriers. By 2026, the institutional players that have failed to adopt DeFi may struggle to keep up. This is seen in the examples of early adopters like JPMorgan and Citi’s early tokenization projects. TradFi leaders like them are already gearing up for onchain finance.
The way forward
Regulatory bodies, supervisory agencies and policy leaders must provide clear, standardized guidelines to facilitate broader institutional participation. Uniform protocols underpinning wider institutional involvement are underway. DeFi platforms must be prepared beforehand to provide all the necessary pillars of compliance and security to institutional players who want to embrace mainstream adoption. Executing this shall require combined efforts from regulators, developers and institutions.
Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Prediction marketplace Kalshi has started taking Bitcoin (BTC) deposits in a bid to onboard more crypto-native users.
The company that lets users bet on events ranging from election outcomes to Rotten Tomatoes film ratings has seen a strong uptake among crypto traders, Kalshi told Cointelegraph on April 9. For instance, event contracts for betting on Bitcoin’s hour-by-hour price changes have seen $143 million in trading volume to date, a spokesperson said.
Kalshi is a derivatives exchange regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). As of April 9, it listed some 50 crypto-related event contracts, including markets for betting on coins’ 2025 highs and lows, as well as on headlines such as US President Donald Trump’s proposed National Bitcoin Reserve.
Kalshi has doubled down on crypto event contract markets. Source: Kalshi
The platform started accepting crypto payments in October when it enabled stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) deposits.
Kalshi relies on ZeroHash — a crypto payments infrastructure provider — for off-ramping BTC and USDC and converting the deposits to US dollars. The exchange accepts BTC deposits only from the Bitcoin network.
Most Kalshi traders no longer expect core tokens to earn positive returns this year. Source: Kalshi
Related: Kalshi traders place the odds of US recession in 2025 at over 61%
More accurate than polls
Launched in 2021, Kalshi rose to prominence ahead of the US’s November elections.
It became a top venue for trading on 2024 political events after winning a lawsuit against the CFTC, which tried to block Kalshi from listing contracts tied to elections.
The regulator argued that political prediction markets threaten the integrity of elections, but industry analysts say they often capture public sentiment more accurately than polls.
For instance, prediction markets, including Kalshi, accurately predicted Trump’s presidential election win even as polls indicated a tossup.
“Event contract markets are a valuable public good for which there is no evidence of significant manipulation or widespread use for any nefarious purposes that the Commission alleges,” Harry Crane, a statistics professor at Rutgers University, said in an August comment letter filed with the CFTC.
As of April 9, Kalshi traders peg the odds of the US entering a recession at 68%, according to its website.
In March, Kalshi partnered with Robinhood to bring prediction markets to the popular online brokerage platform. Robinhood’s stock rose some 8% on the news.
Kalshi competes with Polymarket, a Web3-based prediction platform. Polymarket processed more than $3 billion in trading volumes tied to the US presidential election despite being off-limits for US traders.
Magazine: Bitcoin heading to $70K soon? Crypto baller funds SpaceX flight: Hodler’s Digest, March 30 – April 5
Politics
No crypto project has registered with the SEC and ‘lived to tell the tale’ — House committee hearing
United States securities laws are not flexible enough to account for digital assets, as evidenced by the parade of crypto-native companies that have tried and failed to get into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) good graces, Rodrigo Seira, special counsel to Cooley LLP, told a House Committee hearing on April 9.
The hearing, titled American Innovation and the Future of Digital Assets Aligning the U.S. Securities Laws for the Digital Age, featured Seira, WilmerHale partner Tiffany J. Smith, Polygon chief legal officer Jake Werrett and Alexandra Thorn, a senior director at the Center for American Progress.
“It is clear that the current securities regulatory framework is not a viable option to regulate crypto. It fails to achieve its stated policy goals,” Seira said in his opening remarks. “[T]he idea that crypto projects can come in and register with the SEC is demonstrably false.”
Cooley LLP special counsel Rodrigo Seira addresses the committee on April 9. Source: House Committee on Financial Services
Seira acknowledged that crypto promoters who raise capital for a new enterprise should be subject to federal securities laws.
“In practice, however, virtually no crypto projects have successfully registered their tokens under federal securities laws and lived to tell the tale,” he said, adding:
Projects that tried to comply with [the] SEC’s current regulatory requirements expended significant resources and effort only to fail or survive in a state of regulatory uncertainty. Moreover, registration is not a simple one-time process. Registering a token in the same manner as a stock triggers an obligation to operate as a publicly reporting company […].”
Related: Crypto has a regulatory capture problem in Washington — or does it?
Righting the ship
In introducing the witnesses, Representative Bryan Steil, who heads the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, acknowledged regulatory roadblocks, which he said were put in place by the previous administration.
Congressman Bryan Steil addresses the hearing on April 9. Source: House Committee on Financial Services
Under President Donald Trump, lawmakers are attempting to right the ship by passing sensible legislation, said Steil.
One of the first steps occurred last week when the House Financial Services Committee advanced the STABLE Act, which is designed to regulate payment stablecoins tied to the US dollar and other fiat currencies.
Source: Financial Services GOP
A month earlier, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the GENIUS Act, which aims to regulate stablecoin issuers by establishing reserve requirements and requiring full compliance with Anti-Money Laundering laws.
The next step is “advancing the second half of this agenda: comprehensive digital asset market structure legislation,” said Steil.
Representative Ro Khanna told a digital asset conference last month that a market structure bill will cross the finish line this year.
The purpose of such legislation is to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital assets, including their legal categories and the enforcement jurisdiction of agencies such as the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
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