PM buoyed by relaxation of COVID travel rules ahead of White House meeting
US President Joe Biden will welcome Boris Johnson to the White House later.
The prime minister will travel from the UN General Assembly in New York to Washington for the Oval Office meeting which would, in all likelihood, have happened well before now had it not been for the pandemic.
It has been just three months since the Prime Minister and the President last met at the G7 in Cornwall. But what a long tricky summer it has been since then.
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Kerry ‘confident’ of $100bn climate target
Trans-Atlantic relationships have been strained. The worth of NATO has been questioned by the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The pandemic endures, with global vaccination efforts faltering. And November’s high stakes Climate Change summit in Glasgow is ever closer with the risk of it falling short of the pledges made.
The prime minister will arrive in the West Wing of the White House with two unexpected boosts.
The news on Monday that the US will, in November, scrap the COVID-related travel ban for EU and UK travellers was as surprising as it was welcome.
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PM: Rich countries must ‘step-up’
And the hints by President Biden’s climate envoy to Sky News that America will commit to funds for developing countries, as called for by Mr Johnson, is a positive move.
“It will make a huge difference and I think it will send a massively powerful signal to the world that we in the industrialised west really do take it seriously,” Mr Johnson said.
With Mr Johnson and Mr Biden both in New York, their meeting could easily have been there too.
But holding it at the White House, in the Oval Office, carries much more weight.
The so-called special relationship looks that much more convincingly special with the Oval Office backdrop.
The last time a UK Prime Minister was hosted at the White House was in 2017
The optics of these monuments through the years are of course important, but it is the results that matter.
On climate, Mr Johnson may get something to take with him to the Glasgow conference he is hosting.
But on that all-important post Brexit US/UK trade deal, do not hold your breath.
Before the Oval Office meeting, there will be other key diplomatic moments to watch through the day too.
President Biden has numerous strained relationships to mend following the Afghanistan withdrawal and he is expected to hold talks with France’s President Macron amid the most extraordinary spat over the supply of nuclear powered submarines to Australia.
Former US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler renewed his warning to investors about the risks of cryptocurrencies, calling most of the market “highly speculative” in a new Bloomberg interview on Tuesday.
He carved out Bitcoin (BTC) as comparatively closer to a commodity while stressing that most tokens don’t offer “a dividend” or “usual returns.”
Gensler framed the current market backdrop as a reckoning consistent with warnings he made while in office that the global public’s fascination with cryptocurrencies doesn’t equate to fundamentals.
“All the thousands of other tokens, not the stablecoins that are backed by US dollars, but all the thousands of other tokens, you have to ask yourself, what are the fundamentals? What’s underlying it… The investing public just needs to be aware of those risks,” he said.
Gensler’s record and industry backlash
Gensler led the SEC from April 17, 2021, to Jan. 20, 2025, overseeing an aggressive enforcement agenda that included lawsuits against major crypto intermediaries and the view that many tokens are unregistered securities.
Related: House Republicans to probe Gary Gensler’s deleted texts
The industry winced at high‑profile actions against exchanges and staking programs, as well as the posture that most token issuers fell afoul of registration rules.
Under Gensler’s tenure, Coinbase was sued by the SEC for operating as an unregistered exchange, broker and clearing agency, and for offering an unregistered staking-as-a-service program. Kraken was also forced to shut its US staking program and pay a $30 million penalty.
The politicization of crypto
Pushed on the politicization of crypto, including references to the Trump family’s crypto involvement by the Bloomberg interviewer, the former chair rejected the framing.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, arguing it’s more about capital markets fairness and “commonsense rules of the road,” than a “Democrat versus Republican thing.”
He added: “When you buy and sell a stock or a bond, you want to get various information,” and “the same treatment as the big investors.” That’s the fairness underpinning US capital markets.
Related: Coinbase files FOIA to see how much the SEC’s ‘war on crypto’ cost
ETFs and the drift to centralization
On ETFs, Gensler said finance “ever since antiquity… goes toward centralization,” so it’s unsurprising that an ecosystem born decentralized has become “more integrated and more centralized.”
He noted that investors can already express themselves in gold and silver through exchange‑traded funds, and that during his tenure, the first US Bitcoin futures ETFs were approved, tying parts of crypto’s plumbing more closely to traditional markets.
Gensler’s latest comments draw a familiar line: Bitcoin sits in a different bucket, while most other tokens remain, in his view, speculative and light on fundamentals.
Even out of office, his framing will echo through courts, compliance desks and allocation committees weighing BTC’s status against persistent regulatory caution of altcoins.
Magazine: Solana vs Ethereum ETFs, Facebook’s influence on Bitwise — Hunter Horsley
New figures reveal a 70% year-on-year increase in Cayman Islands foundation company registrations, with more than 1,300 on the books at the end of 2024, and over 400 new registrations already in 2025.
These structures are increasingly being used as legal wrappers for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and as ecosystem stewards for major Web3 projects.
According to a news release from Cayman Finance, many of the world’s largest Web3 projects are now registered in the Cayman Islands, including at least 17 foundation companies with treasuries over $100 million.
Why DAOs are choosing Cayman
The Cayman foundation company has emerged as a preferred tool for DAOs that need to sign contracts, hire contributors, hold IP and interact with regulators, all while shielding tokenholders from personal liability for the DAO’s obligations.
The legal wake‑up call for many communities came in 2024 with Samuels v. Lido DAO, in which a US federal judge found that an unwrapped DAO could be treated as a general partnership under California law, exposing participants to personal liability.
The Cayman foundation company is designed to plug that gap, offering a separate legal personality and the ability to own assets and sign agreements, while giving tokenholders assurance that they are not partners by default.
Add tax neutrality, a legal framework familiar to institutional allocators and an ecosystem of companies that specialize in Web3 treasuries, and it becomes clear why more projects have quietly redomiciled their foundations to Grand Cayman.
Elsewhere, policymakers have made big promises but delivered patchwork. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet,” but at the entity level, only a handful of states explicitly recognize DAOs as legal persons.
Switzerland remains the archetypal onshore Web3 foundation center, with the Crypto Valley region now hosting over 1,700 active blockchain firms, up more than 130% since 2020, with foundations and associations representing a growing share of new structures.
Related: Switzerland’s Crypto Valley hits $593B with 17 unicorns in 2024
From light‑touch haven to compliance player
The surge in Web3 foundations coincides with a shift in Cayman’s own regulatory posture — the arrival of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Crypto‑Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), which the Cayman Islands has now implemented via new Tax Information Authority regulations that take effect from Jan. 1, 2026.
CARF will impose due diligence and reporting duties on Cayman “Reporting Crypto‑Asset Service Providers” (entities that exchange crypto for fiat or other crypto, operate trading platforms or provide custodial services), requiring them to collect tax‑residence data from users, track relevant transactions and file annual reports with the Tax Information Authority.
Legal professionals note that CARF reporting under the current interpretation applies to relevant crypto-asset service providers, including exchanges, brokers and dealers, which likely leaves structures that merely hold crypto assets, such as protocol treasuries, investment funds, or passive foundations, off the hook.
“The key question is whether your entity, as a business, provides a service effectuating exchange transactions for or on behalf of customers, including by acting as a counterparty or intermediary or by making available a trading platform.”
In practice, that means many pure treasury or ecosystem‑steward foundations should be able to continue benefitting from Cayman’s legal certainty and tax neutrality without being dragged into full reporting status, so long as they are not in the business of running exchange, brokerage or custody services.
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