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Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto founder serving a twenty-five year federal sentence, has formally filed a clemency petition with the Trump administration. It's a long-shot bet on a president with a documented soft spot for crypto figures — though Trump himself has already signaled Bankman-Fried shouldn't hold his breath.
Meanwhile in Europe, the debate over crypto regulation is intensifying. Ledger's chief technology officer is among the industry voices warning that the European Union's MiCA framework is effectively pricing early-stage Web3 startups out of existence. The compliance costs, they argue, don't just raise the bar — they remove the ladder entirely.
And on a very different frontier, NASA's experimental X-fifty-nine aircraft broke the sound barrier for the first time on June fifth, two thousand twenty-six. Test pilot Jim Less took the aircraft to roughly Mach one point one over Edwards Air Force Base in California, completing an eighty-one minute flight that sets the stage for demonstrating quieter supersonic travel later this year.
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