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President Trump recently promised to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” And his administration is working hard to make that pledge a reality. White House officials have established a working group on digital asset markets and directed federal agencies to craft a strategy to cement U.S. leadership. The president’s legislative team, meanwhile, helped push the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act),through Congress earlier this summer, thus creating the first federal framework for stablecoins. And they’re working to pass the Clarity Act (Digital Asset Market Clarity Act), which would finally settle disputes over which regulator oversees digital assets. It’s refreshing to see our political leaders working to bring digital assets into the financial mainstream, especially after years of hostility from the prior administration. But the work is far from finishedand achieving universal legitimacy will require not just favorable laws and regulations, but also behavioral changes at leading crypto firms. Conflicting guidance For more than a decade, crypto innovators faced a patchwork of state regimes and conflicting federal guidance. The lack of clear regulation led to a proliferation of scams and bad actorsand kept many investors on the sidelines. Big banks and other legacy financial institutions hesitated to adopt cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology they’re based on, even as top financiers acknowledged blockchain’s potential to reshape the entire industry. The GENIUS Act represents Washington’s first serious attempt to genuinely regulaterather than ignore or suppressone of the leading forms of cryptocurrency. The new law requires stablecoin issuers to maintain dollar-for-dollar reserves and submit to audits. Far from rejecting this level of regulation, crypto leaders practically begged for it. They recognized that federal oversight and transparent standards are needed to transform what the public previously viewed as a speculative product into a reliable payment instrument. That’s why industry leaders are also working with the White House and Congress to finalize the Clarity Act, which would define the boundaries of authority between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, delivering the kind of predictability that underpins every functioning capital market. Cultural shift But better regulation alone won’t bring about the mainstream approval that industry leaders seek. Only an internal cultural shiftand rigorous self-policingcan deliver that. Every blockchain transaction depends on various forms of intellectual propertyfrom patents on mobile crypto wallets and bitcoin mining data centers to trade secrets in proprietary trading algorithms, and copyrights protecting exchange software to trademarks that build consumer trust. Coinbase, for instance, holds nearly 200 active patents. But most of the intellectual property powering today’s blockchain activity belongs to third parties outside the crypto industry. Yet even as leading platforms generate billions in revenue, the industry remains reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of IP rights. This reluctance is playing out in court. In May, Bancor’s nonprofit arm sued Uniswap, alleging that the leading decentralized exchange built its multibillion-dollar business on Bancor’s patented automated market maker technology without authorization. And earlier this summer, Malikie Innovations filed suits against Core Scientific and Marathon Digital, claiming their bitcoin mining operations infringe on Malikie’s patents for elliptic curve cryptography. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a cryptographic technique developed and patented by Certicom years before crypto went mainstream, was licensed by companies like Cisco and Motorola as well as the National Security Agency. Cases like these highlight the tension: Crypto companies depend on IP to function, but too many are willing to disregard the IP rights of others, even as they clamor for legitimacy. Not how respectable companies operate This simply isn’t the way respectable companies in mature industries operate. Spotify and Apple Music wouldn’t enjoy their positive reputations if they refused to pay royalties to artists and record labels. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu would be pariahs if they pirated films. Banks would be shunned by investors alike if they treated software licenses as optional. If leading crypto firms want to be seen as respectable, investable pillars of the global economy, they need to meet those same standards when it comes to intellectual property. Digital assets are here to stay. But universal legitimacy will come only from a combination of comprehensive regulation and a cultural shift within the industry itself.
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E-Commerce
If you slip a tiny wearable device on your fingertip and slide it over a smooth surface like a touchscreen, you can feel digital textures like denim or mesh. The device, designed by researchers at Northwestern University, is the first of its kind to achieve human resolution, meaning that it can more accurately match the complex way a human fingertip senses the world. In previous attempts at haptic devices like this, once you compare them to real textures, you realize theres something still missing, says Sylvia Tan, a PhD student at Northwestern and one of the authors of a new study in Science Advances about the research. Its close, but not quite there. Our work is trying to just get that one step closer. [Photo: Northwestern University] The wearable, made from flexible, paper-thin latex, is embedded with tiny nodes that push into the skin in a precise way and can move up to 800 times per second. Past devices had low resolutionthe touch equivalent of a pixelated image or an early movie from the 1890s with so few frames that the movement looks jerky. Using nodes and arranging them in a particular density improves that resolution. [Photo: Northwestern University] Earlier devices were also bulky. The ultrathin new technology, which weighs less than a gram, is designed to be comfortable to wear. A big goal was to make it very lightweight so you arent distracted by it, Tan says. And [to make] something that we call ‘haptically transparent’that means that even when youre wearing it, you can still perceive the real world, so you can perform everyday tasks. [Photo: Northwestern University] In the study, users could identify fabrics like corduroy or leather with 81% accuracy. The technology is still in development, but in the future, it could make it possible to feel products as you shop online. It could also have more immediate uses for people who are visually impaired, like making it possible to feel a tactile map or translating text on a screen to braille without a large, expensive device. On devices like microwaves, where physical buttons have often been replaced by flat touchscreens, the wearable could help a visually impaired person know where to push. It could also help improve human-robot interfaces. “In the medical field, the Da Vinci robot has very good kinesthetic force feedback,” Tan says. “But getting a surgeon to feel exactly what’s happening at your fingertip as you move the angle of your finger is not quite there. And that’s very important for high-skill workers.”
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E-Commerce
Heres a sad story: The other day, my wife and I woke up and realized we were out of coffee. Honestly, if you want to throw a wrench into the Murphy household and hamper our routine, take away the coffee. Anyway, the story ends much better; I threw on a baseball hat and drove to the supermarket down the road. But it also reminded me of a study Ive wanted to share here, led by researchers at Tulane University who analyzed data on 40,725 Americans and their coffee-drinking habits over nearly a decade. In short, they found something remarkable about when people drink their coffee. Drink it in the morning The study, supported by the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, was published in January in the European Heart Journal. It determined that people who drink coffee primarily in the morning had significantly lower mortality rates than people who either dont drink coffee at allor who drink it throughout the entire day. Examples: Morning coffee drinkers had a 16% lower risk of dying from any cause during the study period compared with non-coffee drinkers. They also had a 31% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease specifically. People who drank coffee all day long, by contrast, showed no significant reduction in mortality risk compared with non-coffee drinkers at all. Research so far suggests that drinking coffee doesnt raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, and it seems to lower the risk of some chronic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes, said Lu Qi, who led the study at Tulane Universitys School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Given the effects that caffeine has on our bodies, we wanted to see if the time of day when you drink coffee has any impact on heart health. Morning type versus all-day type The study included adults from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2018. Researchers identified two distinct patterns of coffee drinking among participants: Morning-type drinkers (36% of participants): People who consumed most or all of their coffee in the morning hours. All-day-type drinkers (14% of participants): People who spread their coffee consumption throughout the day and evening. The remaining 50% of participants either didnt drink coffee or didnt fit cleanly into either pattern. Over a median follow-up period of 9.8 years, researchers recorded 4,295 deaths from all causes, 1,268 deaths from cardiovascular disease, and 934 deaths from cancer. After adjusting for factors like total caffeine intake (both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee), sleep hours, diet, and other lifestyle variables, the morning-type pattern emerged as significantly protectivewhile the all-day-type pattern did not. More coffee, better resultsbut again, only in the morning Heres where it gets even more interesting. Among morning coffee drinkers, the protective effect increased with the amount of coffee consumed. People who drank moderate amounts (two to three cups per day) or heavy amounts (more than three cups per day) in the morning showed the strongest associations with lower mortality risk. But among all-day coffee drinkers, no such association appeared. Drinking more coffee throughout the day didnt provide any measurable mortality benefit at all. Coffee drinking timing significantly modified the association between coffee intake amounts and all-cause mortality, the researchers wrote. Higher coffee intake amounts were significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in participants with morning-type pattern but not in those with all-day-type pattern. Why timing might matter The researchers proposed two potential mechanisms to explain their findings. First, consuming coffee in the afternoon or evening may disrupt circadian rhythms. A previous clinical trial found that heavy coffee consumption in the afternoon or evening reduced peak nighttime melatonin production by 30% compared with controls. Lower melatonin levels have been linked to higher oxidative stress, elevated blood pressure, and increased inflammationall risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Second, coffees health benefits come largely from anti-inflammatory compounds. Pro-inflammatory markers in the blood follow a circadian patterntheyre typically highest in the morning and gradually decline until reaching their lowest levels around 5 p.m. Therefore, drinking coffee when inflammation is naturally highest may amplify its anti-inflammatory benefits more effectively than spreading consumption throughout the day. Not the first time We should acknowledge that this study shows correlation, not causation. Its possible that morning coffee drinkers have other habits or characteristics researchers didnt identify that contribute to their longevity. That said, this study takes its place alongside a growing body of research suggesting that coffee consumption is associated with significant health benefits. Among them: A 2018 study of 500,000 people in JAMA Internal Medicine found a clear across-the-board increase in longevity among people who drink lots of coffee. A 2025 study of 47,513 women from Harvard found that drinking at least one cup of coffee daily was associated with significantly higher odds of healthy agingdefined as reaching 70 or older with good mental and physical health, no memory problems, and freedom from 11 major chronic diseases. Every additional cup increased those odds by 2% to 5%. A study published in 2022 following 171,616 people in Great Britain found that both men and women between ages 37 and 73 who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee each day had up to a 30% lower chance of dying from any cause during the seven-year study period. A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association that followed 12,583 participants over 20 years found that those who drank copious amounts of coffee were twice as likely to avoid becoming physically frail as they aged into their 70s. Perhaps most intriguingly, a 2019 study from the University of South Australia analyzing 347,077 coffee drinkers found that health benefits increase with consumptionbut only up to about five cups per day. Beyond that, the risk of heart disease starts to increase. Head to the market Im not ging to suggest you should race out and start pounding five cups of coffee before noon. But for those of us who already drink coffee in the morningand I dont think the Murphy household is a rarity at all in thisits reassuring. Just dont run out. Thats when the drama starts. And keep a baseball cap near the door, in case you forget and have to make an early shopping trip. Bill Murphy Jr. This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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