Six stories from this week. Legal AI, home batteries, platform accountability, crypto taxes, prediction markets, and staking infrastructure.

All Chicago, all worth your attention.

Mayor Johnson is suing Airbnb and one of its largest Chicago hosts, claiming repeated violations of the city's Shared Housing Ordinance.

The city says the host broke the rules more than 200 times between 2024 and 2025, and that Airbnb continued processing bookings for unregistered units while refusing to share data that would help enforce the law.

On the surface, this is about short term rentals.

I think it's really about platform accountability.

Airbnb will likely argue it doesn't own the properties. The city argues that if you're the infrastructure powering the transactions, you can't ignore repeated violations happening on your platform.

We've seen versions of this debate with Uber, Facebook Marketplace, and plenty of other platforms.

The bigger question is: where does platform responsibility begin and end?

That's going to become one of the defining policy questions of the next decade as AI agents, stablecoins, and automated systems become the infrastructure behind more of the economy.

Harvey, the AI legal company, will officially open their Chicago office next month, saying Chicago’s diversity of industries and deep legal market is an edge.

They're hiring aggressively here. Multiple open roles for Legal Engineers, a new kind of job: former practicing lawyers who lead product demos, run discovery, and translate real legal work into AI-powered solutions for law firm and in-house teams.

Harvey currently has 20+ open roles in Chicago, making it one of their fastest-growing offices outside SF and NYC.

Our city is home to some of the country's largest law firms and corporate legal departments.

If you're a lawyer curious about what's next, check open roles on OneTwoLoop.com

Base Power launched in Chicago this week.

For $95 upfront, homeowners get a 40 kWh backup battery plus electricity priced at roughly 25% below the standard ComEd rate. The tradeoff is a 12 year agreement, with a $500 fee if you leave early.

What's interesting isn't just the consumer offer. It's why they picked Illinois.

ComEd already allows homeowners to get paid market rates for sending power back to the grid during periods of high demand.

Instead of waiting years for new transmission or interconnection, Base installs batteries behind the meter, one home at a time, then aggregates them into a virtual power plant.

The bigger opportunity may not even be residential. If enough homes join, that distributed capacity becomes valuable infrastructure. Base is already talking with data center operators about buying access to that aggregated power.

Illinois could become the first state in the country to tax the movement of digital assets.

Under current law, a new 0.2% tax on digital asset transfers is set to take effect on January 1, 2027. State Rep. John Cabello has introduced legislation to repeal it, arguing that the language could even apply to transfers between your own wallets.

I don't think the biggest issue is today's crypto use case. It's tomorrow's.

If the future of commerce runs on stablecoins and autonomous software, millions of machine-to-machine payments could happen every day without a human ever clicking "send."

A 0.2% tax that looks insignificant on a retail crypto trade starts to look very different when it's applied across automated financial infrastructure.

Chicago is already home to companies like zerohash, Coinflow, Aeropay, and others building the next generation of payments. That's an ecosystem we should be trying to grow, not making more expensive to build.

Big week for event-based trading, and Chicago companies are right in the middle of it.

CME sued the CFTC and its chairman over the agency's decision to allow Kalshi and Coinbase to list perpetual futures. CME argues these contracts are actually swaps, not futures, and that the approval didn't follow the proper legal process.

At the same time, Cboe is exploring launching its own perpetual Bitcoin and Ether futures. Trading Technologies also announced it's bringing prediction markets to its platform.

Kalshi's crypto perpetual futures have already surpassed $8.5 billion in trading volume just weeks after launch.

For decades, Chicago became the global capital of futures and options.

The next chapter could be perpetuals and event-based markets.

The interesting question isn't whether this market grows. It already is.

It's who ends up owning it: incumbents like CME and Cboe, challengers like Kalshi, or a combination of both.

Chicago-based zerohash launched Staking-as-a-Service this week, letting banks, brokerages, and fintech platforms offer native crypto staking through a single integration.

Staking is how crypto holders earn yield on assets they already own. Instead of letting tokens sit idle, you lock them up to help validate a blockchain network and earn rewards in return. Think of it like a savings account, but for crypto.

Until now, most banks and brokerages couldn't offer it without building the infrastructure themselves. zerohash handles all of that in the background.

Interactive Brokers, Public, and BitMart are first in. Ethereum live now, Solana coming soon.

51% of high-net-worth investors have already moved assets away from advisors who don't offer crypto. zerohash is selling TradFi the infrastructure to catch up.

Edward Woodford, zerohash’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at Chicago Builds: Future of Money on July 22.

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