Republican U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis took aim at two federal agencies on behalf of the crypto industry this week, just days before the wide-reaching transition of the federal government when President-elect Donald Trump again takes office.Lummis warned the U.S. Marshals Office to slow down its crypto asset sales and she cautioned officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that anybody who gets rid of evidence about whether the agency directed banks to drop digital assets clients will be prosecuted, touching on two of the sector's most prominent issues.Keeping the idea of a U.S. bitcoin reserve top-of-mind as a new Congress starts work and Trump returns to the White House next week, the Wyoming Republican sent a letter this week to the director of the U.S. Marshals Office cautioning that the department should slow down its process for liquidating the crypto assets seized in the Silk Road case. The sales of bitcoin (BTC), including current holdings of almost 70,000 bitcoin worth about $6.9 billion, are inappropriate, she argued, considering Trump's interest in a U.S. bitcoin strategic reserve."The Department continues to aggressively push forward with liquidation plans despite pending legal challenges, demonstrating an unusual urgency to dispose of these assets," Lummis wrote. "This rushed approach, occurring during the presidential transition period, directly contradicts the incoming administration's stated policy objectives regarding the establishment of a National Bitcoin Stockpile."On its own, there's little authority the Marshals Office would have to change course from the predetermined liquidation plans already in motion, and it can't make decisions based on a hypothetical government stockpile. The president and Congress would have to move to formally establish a reserve and a process by which the U.S. could redirect seized or purchased tokens into that fund. Crypto markets also noted on Thursday the reports that Trump may be interested, too, in reserves of other, U.S.-based tokens. Lummis also sent a letter to the FDIC on Thursday, saying that agency insiders have reported that there's an internal effort to conceal evidence of what the crypto industry knows as Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — a campaign to sever digital assets activities from U.S. banking. She said any effort to keep such materials from scrutiny would be "illegal and unacceptable."U.S. Regulator Told Banks to Avoid Crypto, Letters Obtained by Coinbase RevealA spokeswoman for the FDIC declined to comment on the letter.The Senate Banking Committee has established a subcommittee focusing on digital assets this year, and Lummis is said to be leading it. She and Senator Tim Scott, the chairman of the full committee, will have a chance to run the panel's crypto agenda in this new session, though they'll be countered by its ranking Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Scott issued a plan for the committee this week, including the crafting of a U.S. regulatory framework for digital assets. He said he'd "foster an open-minded environment for new, innovative financial technologies and digital asset products, like stablecoins, that promote financial inclusivity."

Idle, a credit and yield protocol launched in 2019, is entering the private credit space, enabling institutions to borrow onchain and deploy funds off-chain. The yield-bearing solution was spun up through a partnership with crypto-native fund Maven 11’s credit unit and a prominent prime broker. 

While a litecoin (LTC) exchange-traded fund is still only theoretical, investor demand for the product could soar as high as $580 million if Wall Street adopts it at the same rate it did LTC’s better-known cousin bitcoin.That calculation is based on the roughly 6% of bitcoin’s total supply now locked up in a variety of ETFs. Similar performance by a LTC product would yield more than $500 million of inflows for the token, which has a similar Proof of Work consensus mechanism to that of BTC.These possibilities came into focus Thursday as market participants began sizing up the likelihood that LTC might become the third crypto asset to get its own ETF in the U.S., after BTC and ETH.Canary Capital, a new digital asset-focused investment firm founded by former Valkyrie Funds co-founder Steven McClurg, is best positioned to issue such a product.It got the ball rolling on a litecoin ETF in October. On Thursday, Nasdaq stock exchange filed a 19b-4 document with the Securities and Exchange Commission, officially putting the regulator on the clock to make a decision.Bloomberg’s Balchunas expects LTC to garner SEC approval given industry chatter he said he’s been hearing. Litecoin’s similar tech specs to bitcoin may also prove a factor, assuming their reliance on proof of work consensus mechanism spell better likelihood of being considered a commodity.The question is whether there is enough investor demand to make a litecoin fund a success or not.“Even if demand is comparatively low, it could still see some demand,” said James Seyffart, ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Just because the success won’t be as crazy as the bitcoin or even the ethereum ETFs doesn’t mean that it can’t be successful. The market and investors will make that determination.”The bitcoin ETFs set unprecedented records in their first year of trading, with the BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Fund (IBIT) becoming the most successful launch in the history of U.S. ETF launches.“The key question here remains the uncertainty of investor demand for additional products and whether new crypto ETP launches will matter,” JPM analyst Kenneth B. Worthington wrote in a note on Monday.Worthington believes that tokens beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana oftentimes lack depth as they “may capture incremental attention for a limited time.”About 6% of bitcoin total market capitalization, which stands at a whopping $1.97 trillion, is locked up in the ETFs, according to a report by JPMorgan earlier this week. In comparison, the ethereum (ETH) ETFs comprise about 3% of ether’s $401 billion market cap.He used this so-called “adoption rate” to determine how much inflows the proposed XRP (XRP) and Solana (SOL) ETFs could attract which Worthington concluded could add up to a combined AUM of up to $14 billion.When applying this calculation to Litecoin, which stands at a $9.6 billion market cap, Canary Capital’s fund could attract anywhere between $290 to $580 million in the first year of trading, depending on how well investors will adopt the fund.While $290 million seems disappointing compared to the $108 billion that the spot bitcoin ETFs have gathered or the $12 billion that the ether ETFs currently hold, it is a larger amount than most ETFs in the U.S. handle.According to Seyffart, only about 1,330 out of roughly 4,000 ETFs in the U.S. have an AUM greater than $300 million.

OKX-BTC/USDT is currently trading at $100074.40, with a 24-hour increase of 0.21%. Please be aware of market fluctuations.

The US stock market closed down, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 0.16%, the Nasdaq falling 0.89%, and the S&P 500 index falling 0.21%.