New Fire Research Institute: The new Federal Reserve Chair holding Bitcoin has just taken office, and Bitcoin has surged strongly this morning.

ME News message, May 15 (UTC+8). Bitcoin rebounded from yesterday’s low of approximately $79,300 and briefly broke through $81,500, with a 24-hour gain of more than 2%. Market sentiment has clearly improved, driven by the “dual positive” from U.S. regulation and macro policy.

First, on May 13, the U.S. Senate officially confirmed Kevin Wosch to succeed Jerome Powell as the Chair of the Federal Reserve with a vote of 54:45. This is the most fiercely partisan-divided confirmation vote for a Fed Chair in modern history, and it also means that U.S. monetary policy is entering a new stage. The market widely believes that, compared with Powell, Kevin Wosch is more open to digital assets and market innovation. Several media outlets have noted that he is the first Fed Chair who holds and has direct investment ties to crypto assets, and he has publicly said that Bitcoin is “a mechanism of policy constraint.”

More importantly, major breakthroughs have also emerged in the U.S. crypto regulatory framework. On May 14, local time, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee formally passed the CLARITY Act, with a final vote of 15:9. The bill will be submitted to the full Senate for a vote in the next step. Worth noting is that all three relatively stringent regulatory amendment proposals put forward by the conservative-leaning Senator Elizabeth Warren were rejected. This has been interpreted by the market as mainstream U.S. regulators shifting from “restricting crypto” to “accepting and incorporating it into the system.”

Specifically: Amendment No. 52 was rejected, meaning the original provisions of the bill are retained, allowing traditional large banks to legally hold, trade, and provide services related to crypto assets in the future. This will bring larger-scale institutional funds and liquidity to the industry; Amendment No. 64 was rejected, meaning the Treasury Department cannot temporarily expand sanctions directly on Tornado Cash–type DeFi/mixing tools, indicating that regulatory pressure on decentralized finance ecosystems is being eased in phases; Amendment No. 74 was rejected, meaning the industry does not need to add special processes for crypto investor protection, lowering compliance hurdles and business promotion costs.

From the outcomes, all three amendments toward more stringent regulation were rejected, which is equivalent to U.S. regulators sending a clear “loosening” signal to the market—especially benefiting banks entering the market, the stablecoin system, and the DeFi ecosystem.

The Xinhuo Research Institute believes that this uptrend is not just a short-term sentiment rebound, but a reflection of structural changes beginning to emerge in the U.S. crypto policy framework. In the past few years, the biggest suppressor of the crypto market has not been technology, but uncertainty. Now, the U.S. is seeing two main lines of change at the same time: first, the Federal Reserve is entering a new cycle, and the market is starting to reprice future liquidity expectations; second, Congress is for the first time substantively pushing forward legislation on the structure of digital asset markets, meaning crypto assets are gradually moving from “gray-area innovation” to the “mainstream financial system.” For the market, this means Bitcoin is gradually shifting from a “high-risk fringe asset” to a new type of global asset with policy legitimacy and institutional allocation logic. The Xinhuo Research Institute continues to maintain its previous view: the current market is still in a strategically advantageous allocation zone with good value for money. (Source: Xinhuo Group)