A high-stakes meeting is set to take place soon, which could be a turning point in the crypto industry. Ripple’s Executive Chairman and co-founder, Chris Larsen, is all set to meet with the new SEC Chair, Paul Atkins, on May 2, 2025.
With crypto rising as a priority under the Trump administration, the meeting could be a key development for Ripple, XRP, and the crypto industry.
BREAKING:
RIPPLE’S CHRIS LARSEN TO MEET SEC CHAIRMAN PAUL ATKINS TOMORROW, MAY 2.
Atkins, who has been the former SEC Commissioner, has already expressed his support for blockchain innovation. At a recent roundtable conference on April 25, he said that the SEC should stop holding back crypto growth and should work on developing clear, supportive rules.
What To Expect From the Meeting?
The agenda for the meeting is not confirmed yet, however, a settlement or resolution of the SEC vs Ripple case is expected. This could set a precedent for how other digital assets are treated in the future.
The possible outcomes could include clarifications on whether XRP is a security, which has been a long-debated issue. There could also be a discussion on how blockchain can improve global payments, which would increase XRP’s adoption.
The pro-crypto SEC Chair has also expressed interest in creating a regulatory sandbox for crypto, which will allow companies to test new ideas without strict rules, helping more blockchain projects grow in the U.S.
XRP ETF Approval Chances Rise to 85%
With the crypto market recovering after the recent tariff turmoil, excitement around ETFs is growing. Recently, Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas shared a report suggesting that XRP has an 85% chance of ETF approval by the SEC in 2025.
XRP could be set for a breakout ahead. It is currently trading at $2.23, up over 3% in the past 24 hours.
The BNB Chain has officially completed the Lorentz mainnet hard fork, marking a significant technical leap forward for both BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and OpBNB.
With the upgrade, the network reduces BSC block times to 1.5 seconds, while OpBNB now boasts 0.5-second blocks. This makes it one of the fastest Layer-2 (L2) networks.
BNB Chain Completes Lorentz Hard Fork
The Lorentz upgrade is expected to significantly improve transaction confirmation speed, enable more responsive decentralized applications (dApps), and enhance the overall user experience.
“Welcome everyone to experience a faster and smoother BNB Chain,” the network stated.
The Lorentz upgrade builds on momentum from the Pascal hard fork, which laid the groundwork for this new era of performance improvements.
These upgrades aim to position BNB Chain as a top-tier ecosystem for developers and users seeking high throughput and low latency.
“Lorentz at 1.5s blocks? Solana already does 0.4s. But Maxwell is at 0.75s… BNB’s roadmap is evolution on crack,” one user quipped.
Despite this news, BNB’s price is up by a modest 0.29% in the last 24 hours. As of this writing, it was trading for $608.22.
While BNB Chain enjoys smooth progress, Ethereum’s upcoming Fusaka hard fork is mired in internal controversy. Specifically, the now-scrapped EVM Object Format (EOF) upgrade has become contentious.
Originally slated to be part of Fusaka, EOF aimed to modernize Ethereum’s virtual machine (EVM) architecture. This could make future upgrades easier and improve developer tooling.
However, in a post on Monday, April 28, Ethereum Foundation executive Tomasz Kajetan Stańczak clarified that EOF would not be part of the upcoming May 7 Pectra upgrade. Further, its inclusion in Fusaka is under debate.
“The Pectra upgrade does not include EOF, nor intended to include EOF. Everything on Pectra is going as planned for the May 7th release,” Stańczak articulated.
Fate of Ethereum’s EOF on the Balance
In a follow-up post, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko confirmed EOF’s removal from Fusaka, citing concerns over complexity and potential delays.
“EOF was removed from the Fusaka network upgrade today,” Beiko stated.
The decision followed contentious developer calls. Strong disagreements emerged over whether the EOF was technically necessary or merely a symbolic improvement.
“EOF is probably dead due to a lack of rough consensus. This is a massive milestone… symbolic of Ethereum evolving toward maximal consideration of user impact,” said Storm, a data researcher at Paradigm.
Some developers voiced concerns that EOF added too much complexity and risked future maintainability. Others argued that dropping EOF represents a shift toward prioritizing user-centric governance over rigid adherence to prior technical roadmaps.
Supporters of EOF believe it would have made Ethereum’s core system cleaner and more modular. Such an outcome would align with the Ethereum Foundation’s broader vision of the platform as the “world computer of humanity” and an “infinite garden” that supports sustainable, decentralized growth.
Still, with Fusaka now targeted for Q3 or Q4 2025, likely in September or October, the Ethereum community will continue debating what constitutes necessary innovation versus over-engineering.
In the short term, the contrast between BNB Chain’s aggressive technical advancements and Ethereum’s philosophical debates reflects two approaches to blockchain evolution. While one focuses on speed and optimization, the other targets resilience and social consensus.
The Litecoin network has attracted significant attention from institutional investors globally in the recent past.
LTC price has approached the final major resistance in its journey towards retesting the all-time high.
Litecoin (LTC) price opened the third week of May 2025 in a bullish outlook, after rallying more than 23 percent last week. The veteran altcoin, with a fully diluted valuation of about $7.77 billion, gained around 2.4 percent in the last 24 hours to trade about $102 on Monday, 2025 during the late North American trading session.
Amid the heightened crypto volatility, which led to over $709 in net liquidations today, nearly $2 million involved LTC leveraged trades. Furthermore, Litecoin’s futures open interest surged over 9 percent in the last 24 hours to hover about $691 million at the time of this writing.
Litecoin Records Robust Fundamentals
As one of the top-tier altcoin that is secured through the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, the Litecoin network has attracted significant attention from both retail and institutional investors. According to on-chain data analysis, the Litecoin network continued to process over 1 million transactions per week, thus having processed over 25 million transactions year-to-date.
Meanwhile, institutional investors, led by fund managers, continue to press to offer regulated Litecoin’s investment products such as ETFs and ETPs. Last week, Valor Inc., a digital asset management wing firm for DeFi Technologies, unveiled LTC’s ETP on Sweden’s Spotlight Stock Market.
In the United States, several fund managers, led by Canary Capital, continue to pressure the U.S. SEC to approve Litecoin ETFs soon.
LTC Price Eyes ATH
Following a successful rebound from a multi-year rising logarithmic trend in the past few weeks, LTC price has approached a crucial liquidity zone of around $107. Since the Litecoin network undertook its third halving on August 2, 2023, LTC price has mostly consolidated below $107 to date.
However, LTC’s macro-bullish momentum has gained significant traction in the recent past. In the weekly timeframe, LTC’s MACD line is almost crossing the Signal line amid growing bullish histograms.
A consistent close above $107 will propel LTC price toward its all-time high in the subsequent weeks. However, a possible rejection at about $107 will lead to another correction towards the support level of about $81.
The post Litecoin Price Analysis and Short-Term Prediction appeared first on Coinpedia Fintech News
The Litecoin network has attracted significant attention from institutional investors globally in the recent past. LTC price has approached the final major resistance in its journey towards retesting the all-time high. Litecoin (LTC) price opened the third week of May 2025 in a bullish outlook, after rallying more than 23 percent last week. The veteran …
Ethereum developers have officially announced a new deadline for the upcoming Pectra upgrade. The core developers made the final decision in a recent call after passing the third and last testnet implementation without any problems.
The upgrade, previously delayed by bugs encountered in previous test runs, had successfully run its third and last testnet implementation.
Key Improvements In The Ethereum Pectra Upgrade
The Pectra update has a bundle of 11 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) intended to enhance the usability and effectiveness of the network. All the changes will be made at the same time to tackle a number of elements within the Ethereum environment.
One of the standout additions is adding “smart contract” functionality to wallets. This will make wallets simpler to use and recover. This will alleviate a widespread issue for Ethereum users who have previously had issues with wallet recovery and management options.
For validators in Ethereum, EIP-7251 introduces a dramatic shift in the staking process. In this proposal, the upper limit of ETH that can be staked will be raised from the current threshold of 32 ETH to a much higher value of 2,048 ETH.
This adjustment is tailor-made to enhance staking efficiency for those running several validators. It will enable them to organize their activities in a single node instead of operating separate nodes per validator.
Pectra’s Testing Journey And Implementation Timeline
The road to Pectra’s mainnet launch has been met with several challenges. The upgrade went through three separate testnet implementations before developers felt confident enough to set a mainnet launch date.
Even though the final test on the Hoodi testnet proceeded without any issues, the two earlier test runs encountered bugs that forced developers to delay the upgrade. These technical challenges brought forth more testing and tweaks prior to proceeding with the mainnet deployment plan.
In the call among the core developers, the group approved the May 7 target date following an assessment of the successful Hoodi testnet.
Now that the May 7 date has been finalized, users, developers, and validators all have a set schedule by which to ready themselves for the changes. Node operators and staking services in particular will need to update their software to remain compatible with the network once Pectra goes live.
Ethereum Struggles At $1,700
Ethereum’s price has been underperforming on all time frames leading up to the Pectra upgrade announcement. The data indicates ETH has dropped 6.2% over the last 24 hours, with deeper declines of 12.6% in the last seven days and 14.7% in the last 30 days. Ethereum price has also dropped 47.1% in the last 12 months.
Currently trading in the $1,700 range, ETH has not seen a positive market reaction to the upgrade news. Analysts have mixed views on Ethereum’s price outlook.
Ito Shimotsuma pointed to potential bullish signals, noting on X: “ETH is forming a bullish divergence on the 12H timeframe. RSI is slowly reaching neutral territory while price is going down. On top of that, a lot of shorts are building up, which is always a good signal if you hold an Altcoin.”
$ETH is forming a bullish divergence on the 12H timeframe.
RSI is slowly reaching neutral territory while price is going down.
On top of that, a lot of shorts are building up, which is always a good signal if you hold an Altcoin.
Taking a much more optimistic long-term view, analyst CryptoElites stated: “Ethereum to $10K by 2025—minimum! The path is clear, just stay focused and trust the process!”
The announcement is coming just after Trump announced the reciprocal tariffs, and the upgrade could provide a bullish outlook for ETH. Inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs have surged once again as investors chose to look past the Trump reciprocal tariffs. As per the data, net inflows across all US ETFs for Bitcoin stood at $220 million yesterday.