I am going to do that now, because the fight itself is more interesting than the outcome. The outcome is almost certain. The fight tells you something important about how Bitcoin actually works, and why the asset you own has the properties it has. Understand this and you will understand your own investment better.

Let me walk you through it from the beginning.

The change nobody noticed in October

In October 2025, the main software that runs Bitcoin, called Bitcoin Core, released version 30. That release included a small change to a default setting that most people did not notice. The setting has an ugly name, so let me translate.

Bitcoin transactions carry money. But every transaction has a small optional field where a sender can attach a short message, or a small piece of data. Think of it like the memo line on a paper check. For most of Bitcoin’s history, that memo line was capped by default at 83 characters. The cap was not a hard rule of the network. It was a polite convention that the main software followed. Version 30 raised that default cap from 83 characters to essentially unlimited.

Why does that matter? Because ever since early 2023, a growing number of Bitcoin users have been using that memo line for things other than short messages. They have been using it to store images, tokens, and other non-monetary data directly on Bitcoin’s blockchain. You have probably heard of some of these systems by name. Ordinals. BRC-20. Runes. They all rely on stuffing data into places on Bitcoin that were not originally designed to carry it.

A vocal group of longtime Bitcoin users hates this. They believe Bitcoin was built to move money, not to store pictures. They believe that stuffing pictures into Bitcoin transactions is spam. They believe the memo cap of 83 characters was one of the last technical protections against that spam, and that Bitcoin Core just quietly removed it.

That is what BIP-110 is a response to.

The two sides in a sentence each

The purists want to lock the old 83-character cap back in place at the deepest level of Bitcoin, where no future software release can undo it.

Everyone else, including most miners, most developers, most exchanges, and both Michael Saylor and Adam Back, thinks that solution is worse than the problem it is trying to solve.

Now let me explain what each side actually means.

What BIP-110 would actually do

BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. Every proposed change to Bitcoin gets a BIP number assigned by an editor. This one is number 110. It was originally proposed under a different number in October 2025 under the pseudonym Dathon Ohm, with credit to longtime Bitcoin developer Luke Dashjr for the original draft. The editor who assigned the number, Mark Erhardt, described BIP-110 publicly as “a misguided and unusually careless softfork proposal.” He assigned the number anyway because the repository’s rules require it.

BIP-110 would do three things.

It would cap the memo field at 83 characters again, but this time as a rule of the network rather than a polite convention. Meaning no future software release can raise the cap without the entire network agreeing.

It would cap the size of most other data-carrying fields in a Bitcoin transaction. New transaction outputs would be limited to 34 bytes. Larger data pushes would be limited to 256 bytes. These are technical details, but the practical effect is to make it much harder for Ordinals, BRC-20 tokens, and Runes to function on Bitcoin the way they currently do.

It would sunset automatically after one year. That is unusual for a Bitcoin rule change. Most rule changes are permanent. BIP-110’s designers wrote it as a temporary trial period, presumably to make it more palatable to a network that might otherwise resist a permanent restriction. Bitcoin already owned before the change activates is fully grandfathered, meaning your existing bitcoin is completely unaffected by the rules.

Steelmanning the case for BIP-110

Before I explain why the fight ends the way it ends, let me give the strongest version of the pro-BIP-110 argument, because the people making it are not fools and their concerns are not unreasonable.

Bitcoin has a fixed maximum block size. That means block space is a scarce resource, permanently. Every image someone inscribes on Bitcoin using Ordinals takes up block space that a monetary transaction cannot use. Ordinals waves in 2023 and 2024 pushed Bitcoin transaction fees to historic highs and made small monetary transactions prohibitively expensive for a period of weeks at a time. The people who care about Bitcoin as money watched their base layer get clogged with what they saw as digital collectibles, and they were not thrilled about it.

The Core v30 change to raise the memo cap was, in their view, a policy shift disguised as a technical detail. They believe Bitcoin’s development team quietly moved in a direction the broader community never sanctioned. Their response is to put the old policy into consensus rules, where it becomes something the whole network enforces rather than something one software release can change on its own.

This is a real concern, articulated by serious people. It is not spam. It is not trolling. It is a coherent worldview about what Bitcoin is for and how it should evolve. I want to be clear about that up front, because the internet mostly is not.

Why Adam Back and Michael Saylor say no

I generally agree with Adam Back on this one, and I want to explain why.

Back is the closest thing Bitcoin has to a founding father who is still alive and building. His original invention, called Hashcash, is one of only a handful of technologies cited by name in the Bitcoin whitepaper. If anyone in the world has standing to explain what Bitcoin is for, it is him. On Saturday he published a long, empathetic essay directed at BIP-110 supporters. His core argument was simple.

Bitcoin’s decentralization is what makes it valuable. Decentralization means, among other things, that you cannot force your preferences onto other users of the network. You can modify your own software. You cannot modify anyone else’s. Any rule change to Bitcoin requires enormous, distributed, technical consensus. That is not a bug, and it is not an accident. It is the thing that makes Bitcoin resistant to capture by any single interest group, including well-meaning ones.

BIP-110, in Back’s framing, is at its heart a proposal to police what other people do with their bitcoin. It uses a mechanism designed to let users defend Bitcoin against captured miners, and it points that mechanism inward at other users. The purists who want to purge Ordinals see themselves as defending Bitcoin. Back sees them as attempting the same thing that captured miners would attempt, just with different intentions.

Michael Saylor, whose company Strategy now holds more than 843,000 bitcoin, posted a shorter version of the same argument on Saturday. His exact words: there are 110 things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam, and turning a spam dispute into a consensus change that would invalidate some currently valid, fee-paying transactions is a precedent that outweighs the problem it is trying to solve. Save your energy for threats that really matter.

Both are saying the same thing in different registers. Bitcoin’s value comes from the fact that its rules are extremely hard to change. Using that difficulty to solve a spam problem sets a precedent that makes the rules easier to change for the next fight, and the fight after that, and eventually a fight where the change actually is dangerous. Better to accept an imperfect status quo than to start pulling on that thread.

Why the math says BIP-110 fails

Bitcoin rule changes work through a process called signaling. Miners include a small flag in the blocks they produce that says whether they support a proposed change. For a soft fork like BIP-110 to lock in early through signaling, roughly fifty-five percent of blocks over a two-week period need to carry that flag.

The official BIP-110 signaling monitor showed 0.99 percent of blocks signaling as of Sunday. Twenty blocks out of just over two thousand in the current difficulty period. Cumulative signaling since May 1 has been 0.42 percent. Daily spikes have briefly touched above one percent but reverted immediately. The number required for early lock-in is fifty-five percent. No major mining pool has signaled support. The first block signaling for BIP-110 was mined on March 1 by a small operation called Barefoot Mining, running through the Ocean pool, which is affiliated with Luke Dashjr. Almost no one else has followed.

Node adoption is not much better. Nodes are the computers around the world that store a copy of Bitcoin’s ledger and enforce its rules. There are roughly 24,000 of them online. As of early 2026, about 2 to 3 percent were running software that would enforce BIP-110. Most of that support comes from an alternative Bitcoin software called Bitcoin Knots, maintained by Dashjr himself. It is not a mass movement.

The proposal has a fallback mechanism called mandatory signaling, which forces the issue on August 7 regardless of whether miners want to participate. On that date, any node running BIP-110 software will start rejecting Bitcoin blocks that do not carry the signaling flag. The projected activation date, if the signaling requirement is somehow met, is roughly September 1.

Here is the problem with mandatory signaling when you have 1 percent support. Nodes running BIP-110 will reject blocks. Miners will not care, because the miners produce more than 99 percent of blocks and their blocks will be accepted by everyone else. What happens instead is that BIP-110 nodes fork themselves off onto a separate, tiny chain with almost no mining activity, no exchange support, and no economic function. That chain will quietly fizzle, because a blockchain without meaningful hashrate takes forever to confirm transactions and has no security guarantees.

Adam Back described this outcome directly in his Saturday essay. His advice to BIP-110 supporters was to rejoin Bitcoin now, or later after watching the fork fail and understanding for themselves why the network rejected the proposal. He was not gloating. He was pleading with them not to disillusion themselves and leave.

What actually happens on August 7 and September 1

August 7 is a signaling deadline, not a Bitcoin event. What happens on that date is that a small subset of Bitcoin nodes, running BIP-110 software, will begin rejecting blocks that do not carry the signaling flag. Because more than 99 percent of miners do not carry that flag, these nodes will effectively stop seeing new Bitcoin blocks. They will be operating on a chain that has no active miners and no economic reality.

September 1 is the projected activation date if BIP-110 somehow met its signaling threshold. Given current numbers, this date is unlikely to matter. The BIP-110 chain will already have separated from Bitcoin’s main chain in early August, and its handful of nodes will be operating in their own quiet corner of the internet.

Sometime in mid-August 2027, the temporary soft fork was designed to expire on its own, meaning even the tiny BIP-110 chain would revert to standard Bitcoin rules. If the fork fizzles as expected, this sunset does not really matter either.

What this means if you own bitcoin

For the vast majority of Bitcoin holders, the honest answer is: nothing. Your bitcoin is fully grandfathered under BIP-110’s rules. Even in the unlikely scenario where the proposal activated fully, existing bitcoin would be unaffected. You do not need to move it. You do not need to change wallets. You do not need to do anything at all.

A very small number of people who use unusual, advanced Bitcoin wallet setups involving what are called pre-signed Taproot transactions could theoretically be affected by an edge case in the rules. If you do not know whether this describes you, it does not. If you are the kind of person who runs a custom multisig with pre-signed spending paths, you already know this and have already thought about it.

If any real chain split occurred, major exchanges would likely pause deposits and withdrawals briefly to sort out which chain they support, in the same way they did during previous forks. That is a nuisance, not a crisis, and it is highly unlikely to happen given the numbers.

The one thing worth watching in the next three weeks is whether any major mining pool defects and starts signaling for BIP-110. Foundry, Antpool, F2Pool, and MARA Pool between them produce the majority of Bitcoin’s hashrate. If any of them signals support, the numbers change and the story changes. None of them have shown any inclination to do so, but it is the one variable worth tracking.

The bigger point

Here is what I want you to take from all of this.

Bitcoin’s rules cannot be changed by any single person, company, developer, miner, or exchange. They cannot be changed by any government. They cannot be changed by any group with less than overwhelming, distributed support across every layer of the network. Miners, node operators, wallet developers, exchanges, and everyday users all have to substantially agree before anything moves.

That is why Bitcoin is what it is. It is why the asset you own has the monetary properties it has. It is why central banks cannot inflate it, why the Federal Reserve cannot suppress it, why no CEO can rewrite its supply schedule, and why no Congress can seize it by rewriting its rules. Bitcoin’s ability to resist change is not a limitation of the technology. It is the technology.

BIP-110 is going to fail because Bitcoin’s change-resistance mechanism is working exactly as designed. A well-meaning group of Bitcoin users is trying to push through a rule change without the consensus required, and the network is going to reject them. That is not a bug. That is the entire point.

Watch what happens over the next month. If BIP-110 fizzles the way the numbers say it will, understand that you just watched Bitcoin’s immune system in action. That immune system is exactly what makes your bitcoin worth holding.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Digital Assets Post Third Consecutive Quarter Of Losses, Longest Since 2022 Bear Market

Digital Assets Post Third Consecutive Quarter Of Losses In Q2 2026 As Institutional Capital Rotates To AI

A CoinDesk research report published this weekend showed digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, marking the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market. Bitcoin spot ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch, while institutional capital rotated meaningfully into AI-related equities across the same period.

Tokenized Real-World Asset DeFi Deposits Climb 200 Percent Year Over Year To $7.44 Billion

RWA DeFi Deposits Grow To $7.44 Billion In Q2 2026, Marking 200 Percent Year Over Year Growth

Real-world asset DeFi deposits climbed from $2.33 billion in Q2 2025 to $7.44 billion in Q2 2026, marking roughly 200 percent year-over-year growth even as overall DeFi total value locked declined by about 15 percent over the same period. Treasury products, tokenized funds, commodities, and credit-linked assets are increasingly being used as collateral and yield-bearing positions rather than passive holdings.

CLARITY Act Faces Vote Math Reality As Senate Return From Recess Nears

Crypto Legislation Faces Uncertain Path As Senate Return Nears

With the Senate scheduled to return from recess on July 21 and the August recess deadline looming, the CLARITY Act faces significant vote-count challenges given only two Democrats crossed over in the May committee vote. Industry advocates continue to push for a draft this month, but the unresolved ethics language and 60-vote floor threshold make passage before recess mathematically difficult.

Could $8 Billion Really Take Down Bitcoin? Duke Professor Explains

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For six years, the crypto industry has been waiting for the United States to define what it is legally allowed to do. It waited through the first Trump term, the entire Biden administration, and the first eighteen months of the second Trump administration. It is still waiting. This week, the SEC updated its 2026 regulatory agenda and formally slotted a proposal called Regulation Crypto for public release later this month. If it lands, it will do most of what the CLARITY Act was supposed to do, and it will do it under a legal instrument that is much harder to reverse than anything Congress has yet produced.

The story of how we got here starts on a Thursday morning in Chicago in February 2020.

The speech nobody listened to

On February 6, 2020, an SEC commissioner named Hester Peirce delivered a speech at the International Blockchain Congress. The speech was titled “Running on Empty: A Proposal to Fill the Gap Between Regulation and Decentralization.” In it, Peirce described what she called a regulatory Catch-22.

Networks that wanted to become decentralized could not decentralize, because doing so required getting tokens into the hands of enough people that no single group could control the network. But distributing those tokens was potentially illegal under existing securities laws, because the tokens were being sold to people who reasonably expected the founding team to keep working on the network. Which meant the tokens looked like investment contracts. Which meant the tokens were securities. Which meant the tokens could not be distributed until the network was already decentralized. Which was impossible without distribution.

Peirce proposed a solution. Give network developers a three-year grace period. During that period, the tokens would be exempt from registration under both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Exchange Act of 1934, as long as certain disclosure requirements were met. At the end of the three years, the developers would file an exit report describing whether the network had achieved maturity, defined as either genuine decentralization or genuine functionality. If it had, the tokens were no longer securities. If it had not, the securities laws applied normally.

It was a clean, workable framework. The industry loved it. The SEC ignored it.

The years in the wilderness

Peirce published a revised version, Token Safe Harbor Proposal 2.0, on GitHub on April 13, 2021. She released it one day before Gary Gensler was confirmed as SEC Chair. The 2.0 version incorporated feedback from securities lawyers, crypto founders, and the public. It defined specific 20 percent thresholds for how much of a network’s supply or consensus the initial development team could control while still qualifying as decentralized. It clarified the exit report requirements. It went further than the original in almost every way.

In October 2021, Rep. Patrick McHenry, then the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill called the Clarity for Digital Tokens Act, which was essentially Peirce’s Proposal 2.0 with a handful of de minimis variations. That bill went nowhere too.

What happened instead was regulation by enforcement. Binance, Coinbase, Ripple, and Kraken were sued. Founders were subpoenaed. Projects that could move offshore did. Electric Capital’s 2023 developer report found that the US share of active blockchain developers had dropped to twenty-four percent, down from forty percent in 2017. American crypto companies stopped launching tokens in the United States. American crypto users stopped having access to a growing share of what the industry was building.

Peirce dissented, publicly and repeatedly, from within her own agency. She kept updating the framework. In 2023, at a Georgetown fireside chat, she said the industry “would definitely need a 3.0 version” if the US wanted to keep crypto innovation alive. Nobody in a position of authority took her up on it.

For six years, this was the state of play. A commissioner named Crypto Mom kept quietly explaining that there was a clean solution to a difficult problem, and nobody with the votes to enact it was interested in listening.

The pivot

On March 17, 2026, SEC Chair Paul Atkins delivered a speech at the DC Blockchain Summit. He titled it “Regulation Crypto Assets: A Token Safe Harbor.” In his opening remarks, before he described a single element of what his agency was about to propose, he did something unusual for a sitting SEC chairman. He credited another commissioner by name.

His exact words: the proposal I will discuss today, my vision for Regulation Crypto Assets, traces its lineage directly to the framework Commissioner Peirce first introduced in February 2020 as the Token Safe Harbor. We would not be here today but for her efforts.

Six years. Same framework. Different administration. Same commissioner, still there, still right.

On July 7, 2026, less than four months after Atkins’ speech, the SEC updated its 2026 regulatory agenda. Regulation Crypto is now formally scheduled for public release this month, pending review by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

What is actually in the proposal

Regulation Crypto expands Peirce’s original framework into three components.

The first is a startup exemption. Early-stage crypto projects would qualify for a time-limited registration exemption of up to four years, one year longer than Peirce’s original three. During that window, projects could raise up to five million dollars per year without registering the offering as a securities transaction. Total capital raised under the exemption could reach up to seventy-five million dollars across the four years via qualifying crypto investment contracts. Projects would still owe disclosures to their investors during the exemption period. They would file notices with the SEC when they began relying on the exemption and when they exited.

The second is an investment contract safe harbor. Once an issuer had completed or permanently ceased all essential managerial efforts they had originally promised to their investors, the token itself would no longer be treated as a security. This provides a rule-based standard for the moment at which a crypto asset stops implicating federal securities laws. Peirce called this network maturity. Atkins calls it the same thing under a different name.

The third is a broader innovation exemption for DeFi platforms under the 1934 Exchange Act. The SEC is acknowledging, in writing, that traditional securities registration requirements are structurally incompatible with automated smart contract systems and decentralized protocols. You cannot register a smart contract the way you register a stock. The exemption gives DeFi platforms a framework to operate legally in the US without pretending to be something they are not.

Why a rule matters more than guidance

Here is the analytical spine of what is about to happen.

Everything the SEC has done for crypto since January 2025 has taken the form of staff guidance, interpretive releases, no-action letters, and public statements. All of those instruments can be reversed by a future SEC administration with a single memo. A future chair who wanted to unwind Atkins’ entire crypto agenda could do so in a morning. The industry would have no formal recourse and no legal footing to challenge the reversal.

A rule published in the Federal Register is different. Once Regulation Crypto is finalized, the only way to undo it is to open another full notice-and-comment rulemaking process, which takes years. The industry gets to participate. Courts can review the process. The rule becomes part of the actual regulatory infrastructure of the United States rather than the preferred policy of a particular administration.

This is why Atkins is racing to publish. His agency has been the most crypto-friendly SEC in the industry’s history, and everything it has done so far can be undone. He knows that. Peirce knows that. Everyone who worked on this framework for the last six years knows that. The only thing that survives a change of administration is a formal rule. That is what they are trying to lock in before the political winds shift.

Meanwhile, in the Senate

The CLARITY Act is not going to save the day. Every honest read of the Senate math tells you the same thing.

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill by 15-9 on May 14, but only two Democrats crossed over. To pass on the Senate floor, the bill needs 60 votes, which means at least eight Democrats have to come on board. The public conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions that most of the crypto-friendly Democrats have demanded are not in the current bill. The White House has publicly rejected the versions of those provisions that would specifically apply to the president or his family. Senator Warren has organized her caucus around opposing the bill on those grounds. Senator Gillibrand, one of the industry’s most reliable Democratic allies, has publicly called the current ethics language a non-starter.

The Senate returns from recess on July 21 and is in session for a narrow window before the August recess. If CLARITY does not get through the Senate floor before that recess, the November midterm election calendar takes over, and any legislation not signed into law is effectively pushed to 2027 at the earliest. Reports this week suggested a draft could arrive as soon as next week and a floor vote could follow later this month. Neither the draft nor the vote fixes the underlying arithmetic. The votes are not there for the bill as written.

Which means the SEC becomes the primary source of US crypto regulatory clarity for the foreseeable future. Not the co-author. The primary source. The rule Atkins is about to publish becomes the framework the entire industry operates under until Congress can find sixty votes for something else, whenever that may be.

What this means for founders

If Regulation Crypto lands as drafted, US-based crypto founders will have, for the first time since Bitcoin was born, a formal legal runway to launch a token in the United States without facing existential securities enforcement risk.

They will have four years to build. They will be able to raise capital under a defined framework with clear disclosure requirements. They will be able to distribute tokens to the users who need them without those distributions triggering the full weight of the 1933 and 1934 Acts. And when they reach network maturity, they will have a rule-based standard for when the token stops being a security, rather than the guessing game the industry has been playing since 2017.

That is genuinely new. That is the runway Peirce has been asking for since 2020. That is what could actually keep the next generation of crypto founders building in the United States instead of moving to Dubai, Singapore, or the Cayman Islands.

What this means for investors

Watch which projects use the safe harbor and how they perform. Watch which projects choose not to and why. Watch the exit reports at the four-year mark to see how the SEC evaluates network maturity in practice. Watch whether states like New York or California try to override the federal exemption with their own securities enforcement.

Also watch the opposition. Citadel Securities has publicly lobbied for the SEC to abandon the exemption approach and pursue full notice-and-comment rulemaking on every element of crypto instead. Their argument is that exemptions weaken regulatory oversight. Their real argument is that a formal exemption framework makes it harder for incumbents to keep new entrants out. Watch how hard they lobby and who else joins them.

Democrats will continue to push for conflict-of-interest and ethics provisions on the parallel CLARITY track. Some of those provisions have genuine merit. Some are political theater. Distinguishing between the two will be part of the analytical work of the next twelve months.

The catch

Regulation Crypto is still at OIRA. It has been under review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for months. Atkins first said this would be released in the “coming weeks” in March. It is now July. The July timeline is on the agenda, but agendas slip.

Even after the proposal is published, it enters a public comment period that could last sixty to ninety days. The final rule likely will not be adopted until late 2026 or early 2027. Between now and then, there are dozens of ways the framework could be watered down, delayed, or diverted. The Democratic minority on the Commission will push for amendments. Industry groups will push for expansions. Consumer protection groups will push for restrictions.

The rule that emerges twelve months from now will not be identical to the rule that gets proposed this month. But even the proposed version, once it is out for public comment, changes the political and legal terrain. Once the SEC has formally proposed a rule, walking it back becomes politically expensive. The industry knows what the framework looks like. Founders can start building toward it. Investors can start pricing it. Congress can decide whether to codify it or fight it.

The bottom line

Six years ago, one commissioner named Hester Peirce proposed a framework that would have solved most of what has been broken about crypto regulation in the United States. Nobody in a position of authority listened. The industry paid the price in enforcement actions, offshore migration, and stalled innovation.

Now, that framework is about to become the operational law of the land, in the form of a rule that survives a change of administration in a way that no piece of staff guidance ever could. Congress may still deliver CLARITY. The math suggests it probably will not. Either way, the regulator moved first.

Peirce won. Six years late. But she won.

I’ll see you Monday.

Bitcoin Thoughts And Analysis

Just a quick reminder that Bitcoin broke the 200 MA, but quickly recaptured it last week. Price tested it as support again this week and has currently held above. We will see where the week closes on Sunday.

Bitcoin has only remained below for more than a week in one period - after FTX and then again during the subsequent recovery. You can see that in the chart below, along with all of the other tests of the 200 MA.

Take a quick look at March, 2020. Bitcoin broke and close below the 200 MA, then broke back above the next week. That was the generational bottom. Price wicked down to almost $3000 on the move below the 200 MA.

I will be watching to see if this test ends up looking like that one…

CLARITY Act Draft Reportedly Landing Next Week With Senate Vote Later This Month

Crypto Clarity Act Draft Could Arrive As Soon As Next Week

Reports circulating Thursday suggest a formal CLARITY Act draft could reach the Senate floor as early as next week, with a floor vote reportedly targeted for later this month before the August recess deadline that industry advocates have flagged as the last realistic window for 2026 passage. The bill still faces significant vote-count challenges given the two-Democrat committee support in May and unresolved ethics language.

AscendEX Confirms It Is Winding Down Operations

AscendEX Announces Wind-Down As Exchange Contraction Continues

AscendEX, formerly known as BitMax, confirmed Thursday that it is winding down operations after nearly seven years, citing prolonged market conditions and structural pressure on smaller trading venues. The announcement adds to a broader industry contraction that has seen Zapper, YGG Play, and multiple 2025 IPO cohort names either shut down publishing operations, cut headcount, or postpone planned listings.

SEC Opens Review Of Spot Crypto ETF Approval Procedures With Confidential Filing Option

SEC Opens Comment Request To Review Spot Crypto ETF Approval Process

Alongside the Regulation Crypto proposal, the SEC has opened a formal comment request to review the approval procedures for US spot crypto ETFs and introduce a confidential filing process for initial applications. The move is part of what Chair Paul Atkins has described as building a durable regulatory architecture designed to survive changes in leadership, and follows earlier SEC action approving generic listing standards that shortened potential approval timelines from as long as 240 days to as little as 75.

Bitcoin Holds Strong As Tokenized Stocks EXPLODE To $3.4B

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Between May 2025 and January 2026, the public markets absorbed the largest wave of crypto initial public offerings in the industry’s history. eToro. Circle. Figure. Bullish. Gemini. BitGo. Six companies inside eight months, priced at the top of an extraordinary bull market, with retail investors piling in through the same Robinhood and SoFi retail allocations that had powered Coinbase in 2021.

Now most of them are in freefall.

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Gemini, founded by the Winklevoss twins and taken public at $28 a share in September 2025, opened its first trading day at $37.01 and briefly touched $45.89. The stock currently trades around $4. That is a decline of roughly 89 percent from the opening print and more than 90 percent from the peak. Multiple law firms are running securities class actions alleging the company’s IPO documents concealed material information about the business trajectory.

BitGo, the digital asset custodian that opened 2026’s crypto IPO calendar with a January debut at $18 a share and an opening trade of $22.43, currently trades in the low single digits. Its 52-week low was $5.42. Down 77 percent from the opening print. Analysts have shifted from covering it as a growth story to modeling it as an acquisition target.

Bullish, which went public in August 2025 at $37 a share, opened at $90 and briefly touched $118 in one of the most euphoric first-day pops of any crypto listing in history. It is down 71 percent from that $90 opening. Bullish also owns CoinDesk. The parent company of the largest crypto news outlet in the world has been cut by more than two-thirds in less than a year.

eToro, which listed in May 2025 at $52 and opened at $69.69, trades at roughly $41. Down 41 percent from the opening print. Unlike Gemini and BitGo, eToro is actually profitable. Q1 2026 net income of $82 million, up 37 percent year over year. The stock is still down 41 percent. Public markets did not care.

Figure, the blockchain-native capital marketplace that went public alongside Gemini in September 2025 at $25, has held up better than any of the crypto-native names, trading roughly at the opening level. Figure also happens to be profitable. Full year 2025 earnings of $62 million on $432 million of revenue. Notice the pattern.

Circle, which went public in June 2025 as the highest-profile crypto listing of the year, sits about six percent below its opening trade. That looks like resilience until you note the stock is still 77 percent below its June 2025 peak. The June peak was set during the euphoric window between GENIUS Act passage and the first real bear market of the post-election era. On a peak-to-trough basis, Circle looks a lot more like the rest of the class.

Then there is Coinbase, which is not part of the class of 2025 at all. Coinbase went public through a direct listing in April 2021 at $381. It has never traded above that level again. Currently down roughly 56 percent from the 2021 opening print. Coinbase is the reference case. Even the most successful crypto exchange in the United States, with the largest institutional client base, the deepest regulatory moat, and profitable operations, has not delivered a positive return to anyone who bought on day one across an entire crypto cycle. That is not a bug in Coinbase. That is a feature of what it means to be a publicly traded crypto exchange in a market that is honest about your business model.

And then, last week, Securitize joined the class. The tokenization platform priced its SPAC merger and began trading on the NYSE on July 2 at around $12.30. By end of trading yesterday, it was down roughly 40 percent from that debut. A crypto company that specifically went public on a wave of institutional tokenization enthusiasm, backed by BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, and VanEck, cut in half in seven trading days.

The pipeline behind these names has effectively frozen.

Payward, the parent of Kraken, paused its planned listing this spring. Grayscale, which had been targeting a 2026 debut, postponed its IPO preparations. Consensys, the Ethereum infrastructure firm behind MetaMask, similarly postponed. Ledger, the hardware wallet maker, has pushed back its planned public debut. CertiK confirmed IPO ambitions but has set no timetable. The list of firms actively pursuing US crypto listings in the near term is now shorter than the list of firms actively delaying them.

Here is what the class of 2025 exposed.

The public markets are not the private markets. Private crypto valuations reflected the vibe of a bull cycle. Public valuations reflect quarterly earnings, forward guidance, and the risk-free rate. Those are different accounting systems. A private crypto exchange can raise at ten times revenue based on a narrative. A public crypto exchange has to justify ten times revenue against a peer set that includes Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and the traditional retail brokers, none of which trade at those multiples. When the vibe fades, the multiple compresses. When the multiple compresses, the stock craters. That is not specific to crypto. It is what happens to any category that IPOs at peak euphoria into a market that does not stay euphoric.

The specific pattern inside the class is worth naming. Business models tied directly to crypto trading volume have been hit hardest. Gemini, BitGo, and Bullish are, at their core, exchanges or custody providers whose revenue scales with trading activity. When bitcoin runs, revenue runs. When bitcoin stalls, revenue stalls. When bitcoin drops, revenue drops faster than the price. Public markets can price that. Public markets do price that. The stocks reflect it.

Business models tied to fee income and infrastructure have held up better. Figure operates a lending marketplace where blockchain is the technology and consumer credit is the product. eToro is a diversified retail broker where crypto is one of many asset classes. Both are profitable. Both are down materially less than the pure exchange names. That is not coincidence. That is the market pricing the difference between an infrastructure business that happens to use blockchain and an exchange business whose fortunes rise and fall with bitcoin’s daily print.

For anyone reading this and holding one of these names, or considering an entry, the questions are the same as they were before the class of 2025 IPO’d, and the class of 2025 got them wrong.

Is the business profitable, and if not, when does the path to profitability actually close? Is revenue tied to bitcoin’s daily price action, or does it come from a recurring source that survives a two-year drawdown? What does the lockup expiration schedule look like, and how much insider selling has already flowed through? Have the securities class actions started piling up, and if they have, what specifically do they allege? Is the company still spending at the burn rate they set during the IPO roadshow, or have they cut aggressively enough to match the new revenue reality?

Those are unglamorous questions. They are also the only questions that matter when a category of stock is down between 40 and 90 percent from opening prints in less than a year.

The class of 2025 will not be the last cohort of crypto IPOs. There is a live pipeline building for 2027 and beyond, once these names either recover, get acquired, or find a floor. The next wave of crypto companies to go public will benefit from what this class exposed. Retail is not going to accept exchange-multiple valuations on unprofitable exchanges again. Institutional allocators are going to demand profitability disclosures, real forward guidance, and hard evidence of revenue durability across market regimes. That is a healthier bar than the class of 2025 had to clear.

For those holding the class of 2025 today, the honest read is directional. If bitcoin recovers and holds, some of these names will recover. Trading revenue comes back. Custody balances grow. The names most tied to volume will benefit most. If bitcoin does not recover, some of these companies will not survive as independents. Acquisitions, distressed capital raises, or reverse mergers will consolidate the space. That is not a prediction. That is what happens to unprofitable companies in prolonged sector downturns. It happened after 2018. It happened after 2022. It will happen again.

Everyone is watching bitcoin. The class of 2025 is telling you where the real damage is landing.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

SEC “Regulation Crypto” Safe Harbor Proposal Could Land This Month

SEC Crypto Safe Harbor: Regulatory Proposal Set For July 2026

The SEC’s updated 2026 regulatory agenda signals that its Regulation Crypto proposal, which would establish formal safe harbors and exemptions for DeFi and tokenized securities, could enter the public comment period as early as this month. The proposal contemplates letting startups valued under $5 million in their first four years raise up to $75 million through qualifying crypto investment contracts.

Tether Plans To Bring USDT Natively Back To Bitcoin Via RGB Protocol

Tether Confirms Native USDT Return To Bitcoin Base Layer Via RGB v0.11.1

Tether disclosed plans to bring USDT natively back to the Bitcoin base layer through the RGB protocol’s v0.11.1 release, with UTEXO leading the commercial rollout in the coming weeks. The move returns the world’s largest stablecoin to its original chain of issuance for the first time since Tether pivoted away from Bitcoin’s Omni Layer in 2019, and follows Visa data this week showing USDC widening its lead in adjusted on-chain volume.

Yield Guild Games Shuts Down YGG Play, Lays Off Thirty-Five Staff

Yield Guild Games Winds Down Publishing Arm As Crypto Gaming Downturn Deepens

Yield Guild Games announced it is winding down YGG Play, its game publishing arm, and cutting approximately 35 staff, citing a prolonged crypto downturn and a broader collapse in web3 gaming publishing economics. The shutdown reflects continuing consolidation across the play-to-earn category, where funded studios have burned through capital raised in the 2021 cycle without producing durable player retention.

Bitcoin DUMPS To $62K As Iran War Escalates – Matt Hougan Live

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By market capitalization, the number every article quotes, nothing has changed in the stablecoin race. Tether’s USDT sits near $184 billion. Circle’s USDC sits near $73 billion. A gap so wide it reads as settled. Tether wins. Move on.

Visa quietly disagrees. And Visa is worth listening to.

Visa’s on-chain analytics dashboard measures adjusted stablecoin transaction volume, the actual economic activity flowing through these tokens with bot loops, exchange internal transfers, and consolidation transactions filtered out. In June 2026 that number set an all-time record at $1.79 trillion, up 63 percent from May and 125 percent from June a year ago. First half of 2026 total: $8.82 trillion. The largest half-year of stablecoin activity ever recorded.

Of that record June number, USDC carried about $1.21 trillion. Sixty-seven percent share. USDT carried around $573 billion. Thirty-two percent share.

Across the full first half, USDC’s share ran near 70 percent. USDT’s ran around 25 percent. The widest gap ever recorded, in the biggest half-year the category has ever produced.

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The number that matters flipped. It flipped a while ago. And nobody framed it as the flippening because it happened in the wrong column of the spreadsheet.

Put the arc in context. In 2020, USDT accounted for nearly 90 percent of adjusted stablecoin volume. USDC accounted for less than 10 percent. By 2022, USDC had climbed to about 45 percent. In February 2026, adjusted volume set what was then a record at roughly $1.78 trillion, and USDC was already carrying about $1.26 trillion of that against USDT’s roughly $514 billion. June widened the gap further. Three eras, one direction. Across bull markets, bear markets, a depeg, and Circle’s IPO, the volume race stopped being a race, and the market is only now updating its mental model to match its own data.

What actually caused this is less about the tokens and more about the law.

Europe’s MiCA regime was the first sorting machine. Its reserve composition rules require a heavy share of reserves in bank deposits. Circle accepted those terms. Tether publicly refused, calling the rules dangerous for stablecoins and banking. The consequence rolled through 2025 and 2026 as an orderly expulsion. Exchange after exchange delisted USDT for European customers. Tether retired its own euro-denominated token. USDC inherited the regulated continent by walkover. Every institutional euro that now touches a dollar stablecoin flows through the compliant channel by law, not preference. The June volume data includes that annexation.

America’s GENIUS Act performed the same sort with different tools. Since it took effect last July, banks, payment processors, and corporate treasuries choosing where to route dollar volume have overwhelmingly picked the compliant column. BNY announced USDC custody in late June. Standard Chartered rolled out USDC settlement products. Every serious institution making a stablecoin decision in the last twelve months has made the same one, for the same reason. The regulated column is the safe column.

What is emerging is not a flippening in the classical sense of one token replacing another. It is a two-market structure. A regulated dollar in USDC used for institutional payments, settlement, and enterprise treasury. An offshore dollar in USDT used in emerging markets, OTC trading, and offshore exchange rails where the compliance premium does not matter. Both markets grew this year. Both are large. Neither is going away. And the interesting competition is no longer between the two of them. It is at the edges of each.

Which brings us back to where I was a week ago.

On July 1 I wrote about Open USD, the 140-plus company consortium that announced a competing stablecoin structure and cratered Circle stock by fifteen percent in a single session. The read at the time was that the consortium was engineered to capture the reserve income that GENIUS bars issuers from paying to holders. That analysis stands. But the volume data reframes why the consortium exists at all.

If you are Visa, Mastercard, BNY, BlackRock, Standard Chartered, or any of the other 140-plus names on that list, you are watching Visa’s own dashboard show record stablecoin volumes crossing your rails and going somewhere else. Every dollar of stablecoin payment activity is a dollar that used to be interchange revenue for a card network or an ACH float for a bank. That was tolerable when the stablecoin category was measured in billions. At $1.79 trillion a month and growing, it is not tolerable. It is existential.

OUSD is what the incumbents do when their lunch is being eaten in real time by data they themselves publish. They organize around a structure that lets them participate in the flow they are otherwise losing.

Both readings of Circle are correct at the same time.

If you price CRCL on issuer economics, on the reserve interest that funds the company’s bottom line, OUSD is a legitimate competitive threat and the fifteen percent drop last week is defensible. The economic model that supports the stock is being challenged.

If you price USDC on structural position, on which token actually moves the dollar volume that matters for the future of payments and settlement, the picture is different. The volume race has been won consistently for eighteen months across every market regime and continues to widen. Whatever happens to Circle’s reserve income, the network position it has built inside regulated global finance is durable and expanding.

Those two things do not need to reconcile. They just need to be priced separately. Market capitalization is the vanity metric. Volume is the health metric. If you use one to make decisions about the other, you will draw the wrong conclusion.

What investors should actually price is that the ecosystem’s long-run economic value accrues to whoever controls the compliant volume rails. Right now, that is Circle. Whether Circle also captures the profitable share of those rails is a separate question, and the answer depends on how OUSD executes, how CLARITY defines the yield-and-rewards perimeter, and how far the banking lobby pushes to close what remains of the loophole GENIUS left open.

Circle can win the volume race and still see its issuer margins compress. USDC can dominate settlement and still not turn that into the profit pool investors bought the stock for. Those are the risks around the position. They are worth pricing honestly.

But the position itself is real, and the June numbers make it undeniable. Two dollars out of every three moving through stablecoin rails in June moved through USDC. In the largest month of stablecoin activity the category has ever produced. Against a competitor that spent the last eighteen months publicly refusing to make the compliance moves the winning side made.

This is what happens when regulation is written and enforced. The market sorts itself along the lines the law draws. Firms that comply inherit the compliant volume by default. Firms that refuse retain the volume that does not require compliance. Both markets keep growing. The middle disappears.

There is no third dollar stablecoin visible in the June data at any material scale. Every other name combined accounted for less than half a percent of adjusted volume. The consortium coins have not shipped. The bank coins are still on paper. The stablecoin market at the top is a duopoly by structure and will remain one until either OUSD delivers something at meaningful scale or a fully bank-issued option gets to the market.

Watch for that. And in the meantime, understand what happened while everyone was watching the wrong column.

Circle won the stablecoin race. The market has not repriced for it yet. Whether it does is up to how the next twelve months of GENIUS and CLARITY implementation resolve the yield fight, and how quickly the consortium projects that were announced last week deliver anything at scale.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Vanguard Posts First-Ever Head Of Digital Assets Role

Vanguard Opens Search For Digital Assets Leader In Sign Of Evolving Crypto Strategy

The $12 trillion asset manager that spent years publicly refusing to touch crypto has posted its first-ever Head of Digital Assets role within its Personal Wealth division. The mandate spans a multi-year roadmap covering tokenization, stablecoins, custody, and blockchain-based settlement, reversing a stance under which Vanguard blocked spot bitcoin ETFs from its brokerage platform in January 2024.

Public Companies Now Absorbing Bitcoin At 2.8x The Mining Supply

Public Companies Holding Bitcoin Doubles Since 2025, Now Controlling Nearly 5 Percent Of Total Supply

Public companies holding bitcoin on balance sheet have doubled since 2025 and now control approximately five percent of total bitcoin supply, per BitcoinTreasuries.net data highlighted by Fidelity. Institutions have been absorbing bitcoin at roughly 2.8 times the rate of new mining supply since the halving, with May 2026 alone seeing corporate treasuries add a net 43,557 BTC to combined holdings.

Securitize CEO Says $400M War Chest Will Fund Tokenization Acquisitions

Securitize Wants To Build The Infrastructure Behind Tokenized Wall Street With $400M Acquisition War Chest

Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo said the tokenization platform intends to deploy the roughly $400 million balance sheet raised through its SPAC merger to fund acquisitions of businesses complementary to its institutional tokenization stack, rather than to acquire direct competitors. The firm, which has issued approximately $4.4 billion in tokenized assets including BlackRock’s $2.2 billion BUIDL fund, sees tokenized public equities as the next major growth vector.

Bitcoin Just RIPPED To $64K – AI’s $7 Trillion Debt Bomb Is Next

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Strategy filed a Form 8-K disclosing that it sold 3,588 bitcoin last week for $216 million. The average sale price sat around $60,000 per coin. The company’s cost basis is $75,476. That means Strategy sold at a material loss below what it originally paid.

By almost every conventional read, this should have been a bad day for MSTR, for STRC, and for bitcoin itself. The largest corporate bitcoin holder in the world was selling into weakness at a loss to fund preferred dividend obligations. The narrative practically writes itself: the treasury company is now consuming the treasury.

By end of Monday’s session, MSTR had traded higher. STRC had recovered ground. Bitcoin dipped on the initial disclosure and then closed higher than it opened.

That is not a random tape.

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Let me walk through what actually happened this week, because the mechanics matter here more than the headlines.

Last Monday, June 29, Strategy adopted what it calls the Digital Credit Capital Framework. Five pieces. First, a board-approved US dollar reserve policy setting a hard floor at twelve months of preferred dividend and interest coverage. Second, a fifty basis point increase to the STRC preferred dividend rate, bringing it to twelve percent. Third, a billion-dollar buyback authorization for the Digital Credit preferred securities. Fourth, a billion-dollar buyback authorization for MSTR common stock. Fifth, a Bitcoin Monetization Program authorizing up to $1.25 billion in bitcoin sales for defined purposes: funding the reserve, paying dividends and interest, and executing buybacks.

The framework was theoretical when Saylor announced it. Monday’s filing was the first execution.

Here is what actually ran this week.

Strategy sold bitcoin in two tranches. Roughly 1,363 coins were sold across the last two days of June for about $80.8 million. Another 2,225 coins were sold across the first five days of July for about $135.2 million. Both tranches went out at prices well below the company’s cost basis, which locks in a real economic loss on the coins that got sold.

Proceeds funded the second-quarter dividend payments on four preferred instruments and the June monthly payment on a fifth. Every distribution was made on time. Strategy has now met twenty-four consecutive preferred distributions on schedule.

Now the part that most of the coverage missed.

Strategy’s USD Reserve on June 28, when the framework was announced, stood at $2.55 billion. That reserve represented roughly seventeen months of preferred dividend and interest coverage against the newly established twelve-month floor.

Strategy’s USD Reserve on July 5, after paying quarterly dividends on four preferred instruments and the June monthly on STRC, still stood at $2.55 billion.

The reserve did not shrink. The dividends went out, the bitcoin sale proceeds came back in, and the reserve holding those obligations sat at the same level it started at. The framework did exactly what it was designed to do. It ran a full cash-flow cycle where a small share of the bitcoin stack converted to fund a quarter of Digital Credit obligations while the reserve backing those obligations stayed intact.

That is not a treasury being consumed. That is a designed conversion mechanism running as intended.

The share of the stack that got sold is worth pinning down. Strategy sold roughly 0.42 percent of its holdings this week. At that pace, and at current prices, the treasury would fund preferred dividend obligations for many years before running materially low. The math changes if bitcoin drops significantly further, because more coins would need to be sold per dividend cycle. But at current levels, the cycle is durable.

This is why Monday’s market reaction went the direction it did.

For preferred holders, the credit case just got quantified. Coverage sits comfortably above the twelve-month floor. The dividend rate went up by fifty basis points. The refill mechanism is now proven rather than theoretical. Combined with the $1.25 billion authorized monetization capacity, total coverage runs closer to twenty-six months on paper. That is a serious cushion for a variable-rate preferred instrument, and preferred markets responded accordingly.

For common holders, the tail risk on MSTR got answered. The framework does dilute the pure bitcoin exposure that MSTR was originally bought for. Every coin sold is a coin that common shareholders no longer own indirectly. That is a real trade-off, and it is fair for shareholders to price it that way. But the framework also caps and defines the tail risk that used to sit unbounded on the model. Before this week, the scenario “what happens if bitcoin drops and Strategy has to sell into weakness” was open-ended. Now it has a specific answer. Common holders get less pure bitcoin exposure and receive in exchange a materially quantified downside. Markets tend to reward quantified downside over open-ended downside.

For bitcoin itself, one of the largest overhangs on the price got made small. For years, the fear was that a Strategy forced-selling event would move billions of dollars of bitcoin into the market at scale. The disclosed monetization program caps that at $1.25 billion in authorized capacity, and the pace of execution suggests those sales would be spread across multiple quarters rather than delivered in a single shock. That is a materially smaller and more manageable overhang than what was previously priced.

None of this means the skeptics have no case.

JPMorgan flagged what it called “avoidable two-way risk,” pointing out that Strategy can now be both a buyer and a seller of bitcoin depending on which side of the cycle it sits. That is a fair observation. A capital allocator who is uncertain about their marginal role in the market is a different entity than one who was structurally locked into accumulation. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said financial engineering does not drive long-term value. He is right that engineering does not build durable enterprises on its own. Whether Strategy’s framework is engineering or infrastructure is genuinely contested, and reasonable people can land on different answers. TD Cowen cut its price target on MSTR. That is the market working, and analysts are supposed to reprice when the business model shifts.

There are also sell-side voices on the other side. Bernstein maintained its bitcoin and MSTR targets going into and out of the announcement. Benchmark reiterated a Buy rating. These are not Strategy cheerleaders. They are conventional sell-side desks reading the framework as a net improvement to the credit profile without a corresponding degradation to the equity thesis.

Here is what investors should actually take from Monday.

If you own MSTR because you wanted maximum leverage to bitcoin, you own something different today. The framework prioritizes preferred obligations above your equity claim and converts a small share of the bitcoin stack each quarter to fund those obligations. That is a genuine reduction in your leverage. Whether the reduction is worth the tail-risk cushion is your call.

If you own STRC because you wanted yield, the credit case just got substantially stronger. The dividend rate went up, coverage sits well above the board’s floor, and the refill mechanism ran a full cycle in real time.

If you own bitcoin directly, one of the largest overhangs on the price got quantified and capped. That is one fewer structural fear in the market.

And if you were watching the framework announcement last week wondering whether Strategy could actually execute what it described, the answer arrived on Monday. It could and it did. The reserve held. The dividends paid. The bitcoin position stayed almost entirely intact.

The Digital Credit business is now operating as a designed cash-flow cycle rather than as a promise. Whether the cycle stays durable depends on what bitcoin does from here. At current prices, the math is comfortable. If bitcoin drops materially, the math tightens. Investors should price both outcomes rather than betting on either.

The largest bitcoin treasury company in the world sold bitcoin at a loss below its cost basis on Monday. And the market voted that the model was better for having done so.

That is the story most of the coverage missed. And it is the one worth thinking about this morning as you decide what to do with your positions.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Trump Says Bitcoin Payments Should Not Trigger Capital Gains Tax

Trump Defends Crypto Fortune, Says Bitcoin Shouldn’t Be Taxed Like Stocks

President Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen in an Oval Office interview last week that bitcoin should not trigger capital gains tax when used as a payment method, using a coffee purchase as an example of the friction the current rule imposes. Trump also defended his 2025 crypto income, saying his family manages his business interests and that he is not personally involved in investment decisions.

New York Life’s $800 Billion Asset Manager Debuts Tokenized Fund

New York Life’s $800B Asset Manager Makes Tokenization Debut With Centrifuge Fund

New York Life Investments, the $800 billion asset management arm of the insurer, made its tokenization debut this week with a fund built on Centrifuge’s infrastructure. The move puts one of t

he largest traditional insurance-linked asset managers directly on-chain and adds to the wave of institutional tokenization launches that have accelerated through Q2, including Securitize’s NYSE listing and BlackRock’s continued BUIDL expansion.

Ledger Co-Founder Says $1 Million Bitcoin Would Signal Fiat Stress

Ledger Co-Founder Says $1M Bitcoin May Point To Fiat Stress

Ledger co-founder Éric Larchevêque said this weekend that a $1 million bitcoin price would not represent bitcoin’s success on its own terms so much as a signal of significant fiat currency dysfunction. The framing runs counter to the standard bull-market narrative and lands during a period when bitcoin is off materially from its October highs and macro liquidity conditions remain restrictive.

Bitcoin Needs to Hold Here as Saylor Dumps $216 Million - Macro Monday

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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The thesis is straightforward. For most of recorded history, wars were constrained by the supply of money used to fight them. That money was almost always gold or silver, the reserves were physically finite, and the natural exhaustion of those reserves served as a hard ceiling on how long and how aggressively any state could project violence beyond its borders. The abandonment of that ceiling in the twentieth century, in two distinct phases roughly fifty years apart, is directly responsible for the historically anomalous scale, duration, and human cost of modern warfare. The constraint that used to end wars no longer exists. The wars that used to end no longer do.

This is not fringe analysis. The historical record is overwhelming, the mechanism is well-documented, and the institutions that benefit most from the current arrangement, including the Federal Reserve, the State Department, and the IMF, all acknowledge the basic facts when they write about the period honestly. The reason the argument is not widely made is not that it is wrong. The reason is that the conclusion it points to is uncomfortable for the people who currently set monetary policy, namely that fiat money permits governments to fight wars longer than their populations would willingly pay for, and that the cost of those wars is paid invisibly by every holder of the currency, in the form of inflation, rather than visibly through taxation that voters could oppose or refuse.

I want to walk through the historical pattern, because once you see it, the implications become difficult to dismiss.

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For most of human history, war was paid for in gold, or silver, or whichever monetary commodity served as the local store of value. The mechanics were straightforward. A sovereign who wanted to wage war had to raise the necessary funds from one of three sources, and only three. He could tax his population, which was visible, immediate, and historically prone to provoking revolt when pushed beyond a particular threshold. He could borrow from creditors, foreign or domestic, who would extend credit only if they believed repayment was plausible, and whose collective judgment served as a real-time check on the scale of any borrowing campaign. Or he could debase the coinage by mixing precious metal with cheaper alloy, which raised funds in the short term and destroyed the credibility of the currency in the medium term, making every subsequent borrowing more expensive and every subsequent debasement less effective.

There was no fourth option. The supply of gold and silver in circulation at any moment was physically finite. The amount any sovereign could raise was bounded by the actual reserves of the state, plus whatever could be extracted through taxation, borrowing, or debasement before the political and economic costs became unbearable. When those reserves ran out, wars ended. Not because the sovereign preferred peace to victory, but because the means to continue fighting had been exhausted.

This pattern defined the outer limits of warfare for the better part of two thousand years. The Roman denarius began as a nearly pure silver coin under the Republic and was first systematically debased by Emperor Nero in 64 CE, who reduced its silver content from roughly 98 percent to 90 percent to help finance his rebuilding of Rome after the Great Fire and his ongoing military costs. The pattern, once started, accelerated. By the reign of Caracalla in the early third century, the denarius was under 50 percent silver. By 300 CE, the silver content had collapsed below 5 percent. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, issued in 301 CE, documented inflation across the period that economic historians now estimate at roughly 6,300 percent. The mechanism that produced that debasement was not abstract. The Roman state had no bond market and no real mechanism for deficit financing. When the conquests stopped delivering fresh tribute and the wars on the frontiers continued to demand pay for the legions, debasement was the only available answer. The currency was destroyed in slow motion to finance military operations the tax base could no longer support.

The Spanish Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was funded almost entirely by silver extracted from a single mountain in present-day Bolivia, the Cerro Rico at Potosí. Discovered in 1545, the mine produced an estimated 60 percent of the world’s silver during the second half of the sixteenth century. Peak production occurred in 1592, after which output entered a long decline driven by the exhaustion of the richest ore bodies, the rising cost of extracting from deeper veins, and the structural difficulty of maintaining production in a remote Andean location. By 1700, the existing silver mines produced roughly one-quarter of the silver per year they had yielded a century before. That decline tracks almost precisely with the second-half-of-the-seventeenth-century collapse of Spanish military and political power that historians have spent four centuries trying to explain. The “Pieces of Eight” minted from Potosí silver had financed not only Spanish wars but also, through global trade flows, the wars of the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires. When the silver became scarcer, every empire that had been drinking from that source had to confront the same arithmetic at roughly the same time.

The Napoleonic Wars provide the cleanest pre-modern example of what happens when a major power tries to fight a long war while still operating under hard-money discipline. Britain entered the war against revolutionary France in 1793 and, by 1797, faced a domestic banking crisis triggered by the wartime drain on Bank of England gold reserves combined with a French troop landing at Fishguard in Wales. On February 27, 1797, the Bank of England suspended specie payments to preserve its remaining bullion. On May 3, Parliament codified the suspension through the Bank Restriction Act, which was advertised as a temporary measure. The suspension lasted twenty-four years. Convertibility of Bank of England notes into gold was not restored until 1821, six years after Napoleon’s final defeat. The current historical consensus, expressed in publications including the European Review of Economic History, is unambiguous on the cause: the suspension was the direct product of Britain’s need to finance the war and the run on the Bank’s reserves that wartime spending had produced. The gold standard, in other words, did exactly what gold standards do. It made the war unaffordable at the pace Britain wanted to fight it. Britain chose to suspend the standard rather than slow the war.

That episode is the clearest pre-twentieth-century template for what would happen in 1914 on a continental scale, and then again in 1971 on a global one. Wars under hard money ended when the money ran out, or, when sovereigns refused to let them end, the money standard was suspended to allow the war to continue. That outcome was not a flaw of the system. It was the central feature of the system. It was the mechanism by which states were prevented from waging wars longer than their populations could actually afford to support, and the mechanism by which decisions to extend wars beyond that natural limit had to be made openly, through explicit suspension rather than through invisible inflation.

Then came 1914.

In the summer of that year, every major European power entered the First World War with the explicit expectation that the conflict would be resolved within months, certainly before Christmas. That expectation was not the product of military intelligence or strategic optimism. It was the product of basic arithmetic. The British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian governments had each calculated their gold reserves against the projected consumption rates of modern industrial warfare, and each had concluded, accurately, that their specie holdings could not sustain combat at the expected intensity for longer than a few months. The math was unambiguous. The war was supposed to be short because long was not financially possible.

What those governments did instead, within weeks of the outbreak of hostilities, was abandon the constraint. Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and France all formally suspended the convertibility of their currencies into gold in the opening weeks of August 1914. Britain maintained convertibility on paper but, through what the historical record describes as “frustrating procedural obstacles at the Bank and appeals to patriotism,” made conversion practically impossible. Each of these governments understood with full clarity what it was doing. The St. Louis Federal Reserve, in its own historical analysis of the period, states the case plainly: the war was very costly, tax revenue could not adequately fund the war effort, and so the belligerent nations resorted to inflationary financing of their debt, which could not be done while constrained by gold.

That sentence, from the central bank of the United States, is the entire argument compressed into a single line. The gold standard was not abandoned in 1914 because it had failed as a monetary system. The gold standard was abandoned because it was working exactly as designed, as a constraint on the ability of states to wage wars they could not pay for, and the constraint had become politically unacceptable to states that had already decided to fight regardless of cost.

The consequences are the part the historical record will not let us misinterpret. The First World War lasted four years rather than four months. The most credible academic estimates put total deaths in the range of fifteen to twenty million, including roughly nine million military deaths and six to thirteen million civilian deaths from starvation, disease, displacement, and the massacres of the period. The war dismantled four empires, redrew the political geography of Europe and the Middle East, and produced the conditions that led directly to the Second World War a generation later. The price level doubled in the United States and Britain during the war. It tripled in France. It quadrupled in Italy. In Germany, the suspension of gold convertibility, combined with postwar reparations and the French occupation of the Ruhr, produced the most famous hyperinflation of the twentieth century. The wartime money printing destroyed the savings of the German middle class and created the precise political vacuum that the Nazi party would subsequently fill. Every one of those outcomes flowed downstream from a single structural decision: the choice, in August 1914, to remove the gold constraint on wartime spending and to finance the war through monetary expansion rather than through the visible costs of taxation and borrowing.

The second chapter of this story is even clearer, because it played out in a more recent period with better documentation. The Bretton Woods system, designed in 1944 as the war was ending, attempted to reimpose a modified version of gold discipline on the postwar global economy by pegging the United States dollar to gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce and pegging every other major currency to the dollar. For roughly twenty-five years, the system functioned. The United States held more than half of the world’s official gold reserves at the end of 1944, the country emerged from the war with the only intact industrial base among major economies, and the system provided a credible if imperfect anchor for global trade and finance.

Then the United States went to war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War, combined with the simultaneous expansion of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society social programs through the mid-1960s, was financed almost entirely through deficit spending and accommodating monetary expansion, rather than through the tax increases that would have made the cost of the war visible to the population paying for it. The result was the predictable one. By the late 1960s, the volume of dollars circulating internationally exceeded the value of United States gold reserves at the Bretton Woods exchange rate. By August of 1971, the United States held approximately ten thousand tonnes of gold, less than half of the peak holdings achieved at the end of the Second World War, and foreign governments had begun aggressively redeeming their dollar positions for gold at the fixed rate before the inevitable devaluation occurred. The pioneer of this campaign had been France under Charles de Gaulle, who through the 1960s ordered the Bank of France to systematically convert its dollar holdings to gold and who famously called the dollar’s reserve-currency status an “exorbitant privilege.” De Gaulle died in November 1970. His successor, Georges Pompidou, escalated the policy. In early August 1971, Pompidou sent a French naval vessel to New York Harbor with orders to retrieve French gold from the vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and return it to Paris. Switzerland exited the Bretton Woods system on August 9. On August 11, the British government formally requested that three billion dollars in gold be physically transferred from Fort Knox to the New York Federal Reserve in preparation for British redemption. The Treasury and the Nixon White House understood that they would not be able to honor the request.

On August 13, 1971, President Nixon convened a secret meeting at Camp David with his senior economic advisors, including Treasury Secretary John Connally, Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, and Paul Volcker, then the Undersecretary for International Monetary Affairs. Notably absent from that meeting were Secretary of State William Rogers and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The absence is not difficult to interpret. The meeting was not about foreign policy. The meeting was about the fact that the gold reserves of the United States were no longer sufficient to honor the convertibility commitment at thirty-five dollars per ounce, and a decision had to be made among three options: end the war in Vietnam, raise taxes substantially enough to drain the excess dollars from circulation, or end the gold standard itself. Two days later, on August 15, Nixon went on national television and announced what is now known as the Nixon Shock. Convertibility of the dollar into gold was suspended. The measure was framed as temporary. The gold window has never reopened.

The State Department’s own historical account, which I am quoting verbatim, attributes the cause as follows: “By the 1960s, a surplus of U.S. dollars caused by foreign aid, military spending, and foreign investment threatened this system, as the United States did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce.” The IMF’s retrospective analysis, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nixon Shock in 2021, attributes the same cause: the United States, in the words of the IMF itself, “suffered such a balance-of-payments crisis, mainly due to its lax domestic monetary and fiscal policies as it sought to finance the costs of the Vietnam War and the ‘Great Society’ programs.”

In other words, the United States exited the gold standard in 1971 for precisely the same reason every major European power had exited it in 1914, and for precisely the same reason Britain had exited it in 1797. The cost of the war exceeded what the existing monetary system could support, and rather than end the war, the country ended the monetary system.

What followed the Nixon Shock is the natural experiment that confirms the argument.

Since 1971, the United States has been more or less continuously engaged in major military operations of one form or another. The remainder of the Vietnam War, through 1975. The covert and proxy conflicts of the late 1970s and 1980s across Central America, Africa, and Afghanistan. The Gulf War in 1991. The interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo through the 1990s. And then, beginning in September 2001, the so-called War on Terror, which produced two prolonged military occupations, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that ran for twenty and eight years respectively, alongside ongoing operations in Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere across the broader region.

The cumulative cost of this is staggering, and the source for the numbers I am about to use is not a fringe advocacy outfit. The Costs of War Project at Brown University, a respected academic research effort that has produced the most thorough public accounting of post-9/11 military spending, estimates the total cost of America’s post-September 11 wars at approximately eight trillion dollars through 2022. Of that figure, roughly $2.3 trillion went to direct military operations, $2.2 trillion is committed to veterans’ care over the next forty years, and over $1 trillion has already been paid in interest on the debt that financed the wars. By the project’s accounting, those operations are now among the most expensive military undertakings in American history. The Afghanistan War alone cost approximately $910 billion in direct military spending. The Iraq War cost approximately $1 trillion. By comparison, the Vietnam War cost $843 billion in 2019 dollars, the Korean War cost $390 billion, and only the Second World War, at $4.7 trillion in 2019 dollars, exceeded the combined cost of the post-9/11 conflicts.

The phrase the Brown report uses to characterize how those wars were financed is theirs, not mine. They call them “credit card wars.” Not a single dollar of the post-9/11 military spending was paid for through tax increases. The entire bill was financed through Treasury debt issuance, which the Federal Reserve has accommodated through monetary expansion across the same period. The cost of those wars has been paid not by the generation that fought them, and not by the politicians who authorized them, but by every dollar holder in the world, through the slow erosion of the value of the currency in which the cost was denominated.

This is the section of the argument that should land hardest, because it answers a question that almost nobody in contemporary American political discourse actually asks. The question is this: how is the United States able to sustain twenty years of continuous warfare, across multiple theaters, against multiple adversaries, with an entirely volunteer military, without ever raising taxes on the population to pay for it, and without ever encountering the kind of political accountability that would have ended such a war within months under any previous monetary regime in American history?

The answer is that the gold constraint was removed in 1971. The natural circuit breaker that ended Roman wars when the silver was debased, that ended the Napoleonic Wars when the British gold reserves were exhausted, that constrained the First World War to the duration that the suspended gold standard could politically sustain – that circuit breaker no longer exists. The United States cannot run out of dollars. It can produce additional dollars at will, in any quantity, on any timeline. The cost of doing so emerges later, distributed across the entire dollar-holding world, in the form of accumulated inflation. There is no political mechanism that translates that cost back into pressure on the war itself, because the cost is invisible at the moment of decision and only becomes visible decades later, after the war has ended and the consequences have been absorbed into the longer arc of currency debasement that nobody attributes to the original cause.

This is the argument. Wars that historically ended because the money ran out now continue indefinitely because the money cannot run out. The cost of fighting them is borne by every saver on the planet, slowly and silently, without any of those savers being granted a vote on whether the war was worth fighting. Sound money was not a perfect system. It produced its own injustices, and the historical record of states under hard-money regimes is not unblemished. But it accomplished one thing that fiat money cannot, which is that it gave the population whose savings were being spent on the war a direct, visible, immediate sense of the cost of that spending, and therefore the political leverage with which to apply pressure to end it.

I want to be careful with the framing here, because the argument can be easily misread as pacifism, or as anti-American sentiment, or as some variety of left-wing critique of military spending. It is none of those things. The argument is structural, and it applies with equal force to wars I would have personally supported and to wars I would have opposed. The question is not which wars should be fought. The question is who decides, and through what mechanism the cost of that decision becomes legible to the people who actually bear it. Under sound money, that question is answered by the population paying the bill, in real time, through visible costs to their own consumption and savings. Under fiat money, that question is removed from the population entirely and answered by political and military elites who face no direct financial consequence for getting the answer wrong, because the cost of getting it wrong is borne by everyone holding the currency rather than by the people making the decision.

Bitcoin’s relevance to this entire argument is the same as gold’s relevance to the historical period. Bitcoin is a monetary asset whose supply cannot be expanded by political decision, by central bank decree, or by executive order. There will only ever be twenty-one million coins. A government that wanted to fight a prolonged war financed by Bitcoin debasement could not do so, because no Bitcoin debasement is available. The same constraint that ended every major war in history before 1914 would reassert itself, not as a policy choice but as a mathematical property of the protocol. This is not a small thing. This is the single most consequential property a monetary system can possess, and the historical record on what happens when that property is removed is one of the clearest natural experiments the social sciences have ever produced.

I do not believe Bitcoin will replace the dollar within our lifetime, and I do not believe that the existence of Bitcoin alone is sufficient to restore the kind of monetary discipline that historically ended wars when the gold ran out. The world is more complicated than that, and the institutions invested in the current arrangement are powerful enough to ensure that any transition to a sound-money standard will be gradual, contested, and incomplete. But the actual argument for Bitcoin – the argument stripped of price predictions, hype cycles, and the speculative noise that surrounds it in most coverage – is the argument I have just walked through. It is the argument for a monetary system in which the population pays for its wars visibly rather than invisibly, in which the supply of money cannot be expanded by political decree, and in which the natural circuit breakers that constrained state violence for most of human history can begin to be restored.

The wars used to end when the money ran out. That fact is in the historical record, documented by the central banks themselves, acknowledged by the State Department, by the IMF, and by every academic historian who has examined the question. The wars no longer end, and the reason they no longer end is not strategic complexity, geopolitical necessity, or any of the other justifications offered by the foreign policy establishment. The reason they no longer end is that the money cannot run out, and the people paying for them cannot see what they are paying.

The next time you encounter the claim that the abandonment of the gold standard was a technical decision about monetary policy, ask the person making it to explain why Nixon’s economic advisors met in secret at Camp David in August 1971 to close the gold window while the country was fighting an undeclared war in Southeast Asia that the federal government could no longer afford to finance through any other means. The decision was not technical. The decision was about removing the final constraint on the government’s capacity to wage wars its citizens would not have voted to pay for.

That constraint mattered. It mattered enormously. And the case for restoring it, through Bitcoin, through gold, through any monetary system that cannot be debased by political decision, is the case for restoring the most fundamental democratic check on state violence that the modern world has ever surrendered.

The money used to run out. Now it does not. Almost everything that has gone wrong since 1971 traces back to that single change.

Securitize Rings NYSE Closing Bell As First Company To Tokenize Own Equity At Listing

Securitize Makes Market Debut As First Issuer To Tokenize Own Stock On Day One

Securitize completed its SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners II and began trading on the NYSE as SECZ on July 2, simultaneously making tokenized versions of its common stock available on Avalanche and Solana. The tokenization platform, which manages more than $4 billion in AUM including BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, rings the NYSE closing bell today to mark the listing.

CLARITY Act Misses White House July 4 Signing Target

CLARITY Act Stalls: Why Senate’s August Recess Puts US Crypto Rules At Risk

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act missed the White House’s July 4 signing deadline as the bill remained on the Senate legislative calendar without a scheduled floor vote. Polymarket 2026 passage odds have dropped from 82% in February to the mid-40s, with Senator Cynthia Lummis warning that failure before the August 10 recess could push comprehensive US crypto rules to 2030.

Trump Memecoin Buyers Down $3.8 Billion Per Nansen Data

Trump’s Crypto Token Buyers Are Down $3.8 Billion, Blockchain Data Shows

Analytics firm Nansen data shared with CoinDesk shows nearly 989,000 wallets that bought the TRUMP memecoin are collectively down $3.81 billion, roughly two-thirds of the 1.48 million wallets that have transacted since the January 2025 launch. TRUMP trades near $1.79, down 96% from its peak. Separately, 85% of secondary-market wallets holding WLFI are underwater per Nansen.

Fund Manager Who Outperformed Bitcoin By 100% Says Buy Before October - Matthew Sigel

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President Trump personally earned at least $1.4 billion from crypto ventures in 2025.

That is a conservative estimate.

Coinbase, the largest and most profitable publicly traded US crypto company, earned $1.26 billion in net income the same year.

Trump beat Coinbase by roughly $140 million. He beat CleanSpark, the next name on the list, by more than a billion dollars. Every US-listed crypto miner combined finished the year down more than half a billion dollars, while the sitting president personally cleared more than any company in the sector by any measure.

Source: Bloomberg, from corporate filings and financial disclosures

The composition of the number matters.

Roughly $594 million came from World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm his sons co-founded with the sons of Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. About $515 million of that was token sales. Another $65 million came from equity in the WLF holding company. Trump is listed as “co-founder emeritus.”

Another $636 million came from CIC Digital LLC, Trump’s memecoin business, in what the disclosure describes as royalties from a licensing agreement with “Celebration Coins.” That is the memecoin Trump launched days before his inauguration in January 2025.

The remaining $197 million came from an equity sale of Stablecoin Holdco LLC, a Trump-affiliated entity connected to the USD1 stablecoin World Liberty issues.

Nearly all of Trump’s crypto income came from one-time token and equity sales, not recurring operating earnings. This is the extractive phase of a token launch, monetized at scale.

In addition, retail lost a staggering 98% of what they invested in Trump crypto ventures - roughly $2.3B on paper at current valuations. That is exactly how much the entire Trump family made last year.

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The industry has real reasons to be grateful to this administration.

The Trump White House signed the GENIUS Act into law in July 2025, giving stablecoins the first comprehensive federal regulatory framework in US history. It appointed Paul Atkins to run the SEC and Michael Selig to run the CFTC, both actively pro-crypto regulators. It dropped or settled enforcement actions against Coinbase, Kraken, Consensys, Robinhood, OpenSea, Cumberland, Ripple, and Justin Sun. It approved the first spot altcoin ETFs and the generic listing standards that compressed digital asset ETP approval timelines from as much as 240 days to as little as 75 days. It approved domestic perpetual futures. It fast-tracked the CLARITY Act. It ended the banking-access dynamics that had crippled crypto companies during the prior administration. It signed executive orders establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a Digital Asset Working Group.

These are enormous, durable, industry-shaping policy wins. Every company on the chart above benefited from them. The industry should not be shy about acknowledging that fact.

Trump was asked Wednesday morning at Joint Base Andrews about the disclosure. He downplayed his personal involvement. “I don’t get involved in my personal – we have funds that run my money. What they do is, we gave it, I think it’s called a blind account. Basically, they take it, and I purposely, I never speak to any of the people that run the money.” Asked to respond to critics who say he is profiting from the presidency, Trump said, “Well, you know why I’m profiting is the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.”

The White House position is that Trump’s assets are held in a trust managed by his adult sons, that there are no conflicts of interest, and that pro-crypto policy has been in the American economic interest. The Trump Organization called the 927-page disclosure “one of the most comprehensive financial disclosure reports ever submitted” and framed it as a demonstration of transparency.

Here is what needs to be said clearly.

No prior US president has personally been the largest individual beneficiary of an industry they were actively regulating - and that donated tens of millions to get them elected.

LBJ’s family owned broadcast stations that benefited from FCC decisions, but the scale was smaller and the regulatory nexus was less direct. Herbert Hoover made his mining fortune before entering public service. The railroad barons and their political allies in the nineteenth century probably come closest to the current arrangement, and that era is not remembered as one of America’s prouder chapters.

This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural fact. The president is personally financially entangled with an industry he is actively shaping through executive orders, regulatory appointments, and legislation his administration is publicly championing. He has complied with disclosure requirements. He is not accused of illegality. The behavior is what it is: legal, disclosed, and unprecedented in scale.

Crypto’s biggest 2025 fact is not the passage of the GENIUS Act. It is not the appointment of pro-crypto regulators. It is not the wave of ETF approvals or the fast-tracking of CLARITY.

Crypto’s biggest 2025 fact is that its most prominent political ally is also its largest individual private beneficiary, in a period when almost everybody else was a loser.

That creates specific structural vulnerabilities investors need to understand.

First, the pro-crypto policy environment becomes tied to one administration’s brand rather than a durable bipartisan consensus. Every regulatory win of the past year is one election cycle away from potential reversal.

Second, it makes crypto a partisan issue in a way the industry has spent a decade trying to avoid. Bipartisan crypto policy was a real possibility in 2023 and 2024. It is much harder to imagine in 2027 and beyond, because the industry’s biggest policy champion is also its biggest individual beneficiary, and the opposing party will not forget that.

Third, it compresses crypto’s timeline to durable legitimacy. Every conflict-of-interest headline about Trump crypto profits is also a headline about crypto. The industry does not control that association and cannot escape it.

Fourth, and most concretely, it changes retail sentiment. Crypto has spent years fighting the perception that it is a rigged casino built to enrich insiders. The 2025 disclosure gives that argument its most powerful visual: a chart in which the sitting president outearns every publicly traded company in the sector.

None of this means sell your bitcoin. None of it means the policy wins are not real. They are.

It means the pro-crypto policy environment is significantly more politically fragile than the industry commentary has been willing to admit. It means the current regulatory tailwind is time-limited by the electoral calendar. It means the industry needs to be building durable bipartisan support with the same urgency it built partisan support in 2024, and probably with more.

It also means investors should be honest about what the chart shows. In a year when the industry got everything it wanted from Washington, the largest individual winner was not Coinbase. It was not Michael Saylor. It was not any of the founders or executives of any publicly traded crypto company. It certainly was not the Average Joe. It was the president of the United States, personally, from token sales and memecoin royalties on projects launched by his family.

The chart is not an attack. It is a mirror.

The industry now has to decide what kind of story it wants to tell about itself over the next four years, because the story the chart tells is not the story crypto has been telling about itself for the past decade.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

EU Is Already Rewriting MiCA On The Day It Fully Takes Effect

Europe Is Rewriting Its Landmark Crypto Rulebook MiCA As Hard July 1 Deadline Passes

European regulators launched a formal review of MiCA on the same day its hard July 1 enforcement deadline expired, admitting the framework needs updating for a market reshaped by stablecoins and tokenization since the rules were drafted in 2023. The review will examine whether the current stablecoin capital requirements, licensing regime, and disclosure rules remain fit for purpose.

EthLabs Launches As Ethereum Undergoes Biggest Leadership Transition In Years

EthLabs Launches As Ethereum Undergoes Its Biggest Leadership Transition In Years

A new entity called EthLabs launched this week to coordinate protocol development and ecosystem funding for Ethereum, arriving as the network goes through its biggest leadership transition in years. The launch consolidates functions previously handled across the Ethereum Foundation and independent research groups, and comes as Ethereum L1 revenue continues to face pressure from L2 activity.

Goliath Ventures CEO Pleads Guilty In $400 Million Crypto Ponzi Case

Goliath Ventures CEO Pleads Guilty In $400 Million Crypto Ponzi Case

Christopher Delgado, CEO of crypto fund Goliath Ventures, pleaded guilty this week to running a $400 million Ponzi scheme from 2023 to 2026, allegedly using investor funds for luxury properties, vehicles, and personal spending while telling clients their capital was deployed in yield-generating crypto strategies. The case follows a pattern of high-profile crypto fund fraud prosecutions accelerating under the new SEC and DOJ leadership.

Bitcoin CRASHES To 21-Month Low As Circle DUMPS 17%

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A stablecoin you had probably never heard of forty-eight hours ago was announced yesterday and dropped Circle’s stock between twelve and fifteen percent. The token itself does not exist yet. It will not exist for several months. Open Standard, the entity behind the project, has said only that Open USD will go live “later in 2026” without committing to a firm date.

The announcement alone was enough to take fifteen percent off Circle’s market capitalization.

That should tell you something about how much overhang sits on the existing stablecoin business model.

The announcement was backed by more than 140 companies including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA, DBS, US Bank, Ripple, Google, Shopify, Bybit, OKX, Solana, Gemini, Crypto.com, Adyen, SoFi, Klarna, IBM, Aave, MetaMask, Fireblocks, and Anchorage. Circle, Tether, and PayPal are not on the list. That last sentence is the most important sentence in this essay and we will come back to it.

The stablecoin is called Open USD. It will trade under the ticker OUSD. It is being operated by an independent company called Open Standard, with Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams as founding CEO. Bridge is the stablecoin infrastructure firm Stripe acquired in 2024 for $1.1 billion, so the operational backbone of OUSD has a credible build behind it. When the token does go live, it will launch natively on Solana and Tempo from day one, with later deployment to Stellar, Base, Polygon, and Plasma. Stripe President Will Gaybrick has already publicly named OUSD the default stablecoin for businesses on Stripe.

The mechanical innovation is straightforward. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD at zero cost with no volume caps. Nearly all the interest earned on the reserves backing OUSD will flow back to the participating companies after a small management fee, instead of being kept by an issuer. Governance is collective, run by a board composed of the partner companies, instead of being controlled by one company.

That structural choice is what made Circle stock drop fifteen percent before the token even exists.

Here is why.

Circle’s entire business model is reserve interest. The company holds the cash and short-term Treasuries that back USDC, and it keeps the yield those reserves generate. According to Circle’s own S-1, reserve interest income accounted for approximately 99 percent of Circle’s 2024 revenue. There is no second business line of meaningful scale. USDC is the product. The float is the business.

That model has been spectacularly profitable in a 4 to 5 percent interest rate environment. USDC has a market capitalization of roughly $73 billion. Even at conservative reserve yields, the interest income on $73 billion of cash and Treasuries is a very large number. The number is large enough that Circle paid Coinbase $908 million in 2024 alone under their existing distribution agreement and still went public with a healthy income statement.

OUSD is structurally designed to take that revenue model apart. Instead of one issuer keeping the float income, the float income is shared with the businesses that distribute the token. For a payments company like Visa or Stripe processing tens of billions in stablecoin flows, that revenue share is real money. For Circle, it is the entire profit and loss statement.

The Coinbase part of this is the substance.

Coinbase received $908 million from Circle in 2024 under the existing USDC distribution arrangement, an amount equal to roughly 54 percent of Circle’s total revenue that year. Under that arrangement, Coinbase receives 100 percent of the interest earned on USDC held on the Coinbase platform, and 50 percent of the interest on USDC held off-platform after distributions to other approved participants. The economics of that deal are extraordinarily favorable to Coinbase and have been a meaningful contributor to Coinbase’s total revenue for several years.

The Circle-Coinbase distribution agreement was signed in August 2023 for a three-year term. It is set to auto-renew in August 2026 for another three-year term unless either party chooses to terminate or modify it. That auto-renewal window was already going to be a difficult moment for Circle, because Coinbase has steadily increased the share of total USDC volume it controls. Coinbase now holds approximately 20 to 22 percent of USDC supply, up from 5 percent in 2022, and that growing share has been pushing Circle’s effective payout to Coinbase well above 50 percent of total reserve income.

As of yesterday, that conversation got dramatically more lopsided. Coinbase is now a partner in a consortium that explicitly offers distributors a better economic deal than the USDC arrangement provides. Coinbase has the optionality to threaten termination of the existing Circle agreement to extract better terms, or let it auto-renew while simultaneously building its OUSD position, or terminate entirely and shift its distribution focus. All of those options are good for Coinbase. Most of them are bad for Circle.

This is what asymmetric positioning looks like in real time. Coinbase has not yet had to choose. The mere fact that it has positioned itself to have a choice has cost Circle fifteen percent of its market capitalization in one day, on an announcement of a token that does not exist yet.

The other consortium members have their own logic. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express get participation in a stablecoin float revenue stream they were previously enabling but not capturing. BlackRock and BNY get infrastructure positioning as they build tokenized treasury businesses on the bet that programmable dollars are the next decade of finance. BNY’s decision to announce USDC custody on Monday and join OUSD on Tuesday is a hedge, and hedging is the rational position for the largest custody bank in the world. Stripe gets the natural extension of its Bridge acquisition, with Bridge’s former co-founder now running the operating company behind a consortium stablecoin that Stripe has already publicly named its default. The cost of joining is minimal. The upside is direct revenue participation.

The skeptic case on OUSD deserves a hearing.

Consortium products are historically very hard to ship. Governance disputes, conflicting priorities, and the inability to align a hundred-plus partners on operational decisions have killed many of these efforts. R3’s Corda. The Utility Settlement Coin. The early Libra consortium that became Diem and then died. The graveyard of multi-party financial infrastructure is large and well populated. USDC and USDT did not win their market share by being structurally elegant either. They won by being early, liquid, and integrated with the largest crypto trading venues. OUSD will need to replicate that operational reality, with the added difficulty of doing it through a consortium rather than through the focused execution of a single company.

There is a reason this consortium structure exists at all.

The GENIUS Act prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders. Section 4(a)(11) of the law makes it unlawful for any permitted payment stablecoin issuer, US or foreign, to pay a holder any form of interest in connection with simply holding the token. The statute closed one obvious door. It left another door wide open.

The law binds only the issuer. It does not bind affiliates, exchanges, or partner businesses that route reserve income among themselves. The OCC, FDIC, and Treasury have spent the year since GENIUS passed trying to determine which arrangements count as evading the statute. The regulatory consensus that has emerged is that circular arrangements get caught, where the issuer pays an affiliate and the affiliate pays the holder. Arrangements where partners keep the yield themselves do not.

Open USD is structured to fit perfectly inside that gap. Reserve income does not flow to the holders of OUSD. It flows to the companies that distribute OUSD. The holders are explicitly barred by federal statute from receiving any of it. The 140 companies in the consortium are not.

That structural choice is not accidental. It is the most efficient legal architecture available under current US stablecoin law. Issuers cannot legally pay yield to holders. Therefore the yield goes somewhere else. The OUSD consortium has organized itself to make sure it goes to them rather than to Circle or to Tether.

The banking lobby has been pushing for the CLARITY Act to close this gap. The current CLARITY draft, which passed the Senate Banking Committee 15 to 9 on May 14, bans passive yield from third parties and allows only activity-based rewards. More than forty banking associations, led by the American Bankers Association, want CLARITY tightened further to close even the activity-based path. Brian Armstrong supports the current CLARITY draft. Jamie Dimon wants more restrictions.

Here is what the OUSD announcement implicitly tells you about how that fight is likely to resolve.

One hundred and forty of the largest companies on earth do not publicly organize around a structure they expect the law to outlaw within twelve months. They have read the same draft text everyone else has read. They have lobbyists who know exactly where the lines are likely to be drawn. The fact that they announced this structure with their full corporate weight behind it tells you they believe one of two things. Either CLARITY will not pass with restrictive stablecoin language. Or CLARITY will pass but the activity-based exception will be drawn wide enough that distribution counts as activity. Either outcome preserves the OUSD model.

The 140 companies in this consortium are voting with their corporate brands on the legislative outcome. They expect their structure to survive.

There is an irony in this worth naming.

Bitcoin was designed as peer-to-peer electronic cash that would route around payment networks and banks. The early crypto ethos was disintermediation. Trust no one. Verify everything. Make the giants irrelevant.

The consortium that just announced Open USD includes Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. It includes BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA, DBS, and US Bank. It includes Google, Shopify, and IBM. The card networks the technology was supposed to disintermediate are now defining the rails. The banks the technology was supposed to make irrelevant are now writing the governance rules. The big tech firms that crypto skeptics warned would eventually capture the rails are sitting on the board.

The honest read on this depends on which version of the original thesis you signed up for.

If you came for the disintermediation, what is happening at the top of the stablecoin market right now is not what you signed up for. The biggest payment networks and banks in the world are using stablecoin infrastructure to extend their existing dominance, not to be disrupted by it. The technology has been absorbed by the system it was meant to challenge.

If you came for the utility, the consortium structure is arguably encouraging. OUSD with 140 backers is more likely to function at industrial scale than another single-issuer launch from a startup. The companies in the consortium have the regulatory relationships, the compliance infrastructure, and the customer bases to actually make programmable dollars work in the real economy. The technology has graduated from cypherpunk experiment to mainstream financial infrastructure.

Both reads are honest. The technology has matured to a point where the early ethos and the actual deployment trajectory point in different directions. The pioneers built the rails. The incumbents are now running on them. Depending on which side of that line you sit on, OUSD is either the most encouraging consortium announcement of the year or the clearest evidence that crypto is being repurposed by the very institutions it was meant to challenge.

The market does not care about that question. The market cares about who captures the float. Circle dropped fifteen percent because the float is shifting from issuers to distributors. Whether the original revolutionary frame survives is a separate question, and the answer to it does not show up on any stock chart.

The honest assessment is that Circle is structurally weaker today than it was on Monday. The market priced that correctly. CRCL is down fifteen percent on the announcement and roughly thirty-nine percent over the last month. Reserve interest is still 99 percent of the revenue, and now there is an organized, well-capitalized effort to make that revenue stream available to distributors instead of issuers. The August Coinbase decision is the immediate stress test.

What Circle has to do is straightforward to describe and difficult to execute. Renegotiate the Coinbase agreement at materially worse terms, or accept termination and find new distribution. Build secondary revenue streams beyond reserve interest. Lean into the regulatory positioning and the European footprint, where Circle is currently better positioned than OUSD will be when it eventually launches. None of those things are impossible. All of them are harder than the path Circle was on yesterday morning.

Jeremy Allaire published a detailed response to the OUSD announcement. His central arguments are substantive and worth naming. First, USDC’s network and liquidity moat is deeper than headline market cap suggests. Per third-party data from Artemis, USDC handled roughly $30 trillion in on-chain transactions in Q1 2026, representing 80 percent of all dollar stablecoin volume, with USDT at 20 percent and every other dollar stablecoin combined at less than half a percent. Second, Circle already shares the majority of its reserve income with distribution partners today, which makes OUSD’s revenue-share pitch closer to what Circle already does than the announcement made it sound. Third, and most usefully, Allaire is directly skeptical of the consortium approach on operational grounds. His words are that the track record of consortium products achieving scale is “absolutely dismal” and that Circle tried the consortium model in the early days of USDC and abandoned it. Coming from the founder of the market leader with direct experience of the model, that is a serious argument.

What Allaire’s response does not address is the regulatory architecture. The GENIUS Act loophole exists whether USDC’s network moat holds or not. If OUSD does not execute, another consortium product will. The economics have been re-engineered by law, and Circle’s network strength does not undo that engineering.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino was more direct, posting on X: “Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game.” That framing reads as competitive bravado, but it also acknowledges the structural challenge. Tether built itself in a market where there was effectively no competition for stablecoin distribution economics. That is no longer the market they operate in.

The bigger picture is that the economics of stablecoins are no longer fixed.

For most of the last several years, the assumption baked into stablecoin valuations was that issuers would capture the float income generated by the reserves backing their tokens. That assumption produced USDC at a $73 billion market cap and Tether at $145 billion, both running businesses with structural net margins higher than almost any other category in finance. OUSD is the first credible challenge to that assumption at scale. It says that the float belongs to distribution, not to issuance. If that proposition is right, the entire stablecoin profit pool migrates from Circle and Tether to the companies that move stablecoin volume.

Whether OUSD actually executes on that proposition is the open question. Whether the proposition itself is correct is no longer in doubt. The 140-plus companies that signed up to OUSD yesterday have publicly stated that they think the issuer-keeps-the-float model is wrong.

That is the part Circle cannot reverse. The argument is now in the market. Even if OUSD never ships, some other consortium product will, and the economics of stablecoin distribution will look different in 2028 than they did in 2024.

A law decided you cannot earn interest on the dollars you swap for stablecoins. The biggest firms in finance just built the machine to earn it instead of you.

The market priced that correctly yesterday.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Trump 2025 Disclosure Shows Over $1 Billion In Crypto Income

Trump Reports Over $1 Billion In Income From Crypto Ventures

The Office of Government Ethics released Trump’s 927-page 2025 financial disclosure Tuesday, showing crypto as his largest income source at over $1 billion. World Liberty Financial contributed $515 million in token sales plus $65 million in equity, while CIC Digital memecoin royalties added another $635 million.

UK FCA Cuts Stablecoin Capital Requirement To 1 Percent

UK’s FCA Cuts Stablecoin Reserve Requirement To 1 Percent, Halves Costs For Issuers

The UK Financial Conduct Authority finalized its crypto rulebook Tuesday and reduced the stablecoin issuer capital coefficient from a proposed 2 percent to 1 percent of issued value, deliberately undercutting the EU MiCA framework’s 2 percent requirement. The new regime opens for applications September 30, closes February 28, and takes effect October 25, 2027, positioning London to compete with Brussels and Washington for stablecoin issuance business.

Nasdaq Puts Its Flagship Market Data Feed On Pyth Network

Nasdaq Brings TotalView Market Data To Pyth Network Marketplace

Nasdaq announced Tuesday it will distribute its flagship TotalView market data feed through Pyth, becoming the first major traditional exchange to push depth-of-book equity data onto an on-chain oracle network. The move bridges the order book that institutional traders depend on with the programmable applications being built on blockchain rails, and signals that even Wall Street’s most established data providers now see crypto infrastructure as a real distribution channel.

Bitcoin At $58K Despite JPMorgan & White House Backing Clarity

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Yesterday I walked through the math on Strategy’s mNAV crossing below one across every measure. The flywheel that funded years of bitcoin accumulation had reversed. The model had hit its structural threshold. The question was what the company would do about it.

Today the company answered.

Strategy filed an 8-K this morning announcing the Digital Credit Capital Framework. The framework includes six structural changes to how the company manages its balance sheet. None of them are small.

The biggest change is the formal authorization of a Bitcoin Monetization Program. The board has authorized Strategy to sell up to $1.25 billion in bitcoin to fund cash reserves, preferred stock dividends, and security buybacks. The never-sell era is officially over. The shift had effectively begun in late May when Strategy sold 32 BTC to fund the STRC dividend, but today the company formalized what was previously an ad hoc action into a permanent capital allocation mechanism.

The second change is a $2 billion buyback authorization. The board approved $1 billion of preferred securities repurchases and $1 billion of common stock repurchases. Neither program obligates the company to actually execute, but the authorization gives Strategy the optionality to defend its securities prices when management deems it accretive. In practical terms, the preferred buyback addresses the STRC discount that has weighed on the company’s credit profile, and the common buyback addresses the mNAV compression I covered yesterday.

The third change is a formal U.S. dollar reserve policy. The board now requires management to maintain liquidity sufficient to cover at least twelve months of expected preferred stock dividends and interest obligations. The current reserve sits at approximately $2.55 billion, representing 17.4 months of coverage. Combined with the newly authorized bitcoin monetization capacity, total liquidity coverage rises to roughly 25.9 months. The number matters because it removes the most plausible distress scenario for the preferred securities. The dividends are now structurally funded for more than two years regardless of bitcoin price action.

The fourth change is the STRC dividend rate increase. The annual dividend on the Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock rises from 11.5 percent to 12 percent, effective for periods with record dates on or after July 1. Strategy stated the corporate objective is for STRC to trade in a range of $99 to $100, close to its $100 stated value. The 50 basis point increase is meant to support that target by improving the security’s yield relative to comparable credit instruments.

The fifth change is a new methodology for setting the STRC dividend going forward. Rather than following a fixed formula, management will review the dividend rate monthly based on trading levels, credit spreads, bitcoin price and volatility, and the broader state of the balance sheet. The shift gives the company flexibility to actively manage the security’s price toward the stated target rather than passively accepting whatever the market does to it.

The sixth change is an explicit pause in bitcoin accumulation. Strategy did not purchase any bitcoin during the week ending June 28, the first full week without an acquisition in months. The company still holds 847,363 BTC at an average cost basis of $75,651. The pause is consistent with the framework’s broader pivot from accumulation to active management.

Saylor’s statement framed the move as evolution rather than retreat. “Strategy remains committed to bitcoin as its primary treasury reserve asset. At the same time, Digital Credit requires liquidity, discipline, and active capital management. This framework is designed to strengthen credit quality and enable the company to reduce expected preferred stock dividend payments when accretive.”

That language is worth parsing. The treasury remains bitcoin-centric. The capital management approach is no longer purely accumulation. The company is now actively trading its own securities and, if needed, its bitcoin holdings to optimize the capital structure rather than only adding to it.

The market liked the framework on first read. MSTR was up nearly 13 percent during the day. STRC was up 9 percent. Bitcoin moved up 1 percent on the announcement.

There is a bull case for the framework and a bear case for the framework.

The bull case is that the company has acknowledged the dynamics of operating with sub-one mNAV and given itself the tools to manage through them. The buyback authorization is the most direct response to common share dilution. The preferred buyback addresses the STRC discount. The bitcoin monetization authorization removes the existential question that bears have been raising for months. The reserve policy provides the credit profile that allows future preferred issuances to price tighter. Taken together, the framework gives Strategy active capital management for the first time in its bitcoin treasury era. Active management is what mature financial entities do. The company is acting like one.

The bear case is that the framework formalizes what bears have been arguing all along. Strategy is now structurally a leveraged bitcoin holder that may have to sell its primary asset to service its capital structure. The never-sell thesis that drove much of MSTR’s premium has been retired. Whether the market continues to assign Strategy a premium to bitcoin once active selling becomes part of the model is an open question. The next earnings call will be the first time investors get to ask whether the framework’s optionality becomes actual selling, and at what bitcoin price.

For investors, the question separates as it did yesterday. The bitcoin price thesis and the Strategy treasury company premium reference the same asset but price different things. The framework announced today changes how the treasury company premium is calculated. It does not change the bitcoin thesis at all.

What it does change is the cleanest version of the bull case for owning Strategy specifically. The original pitch was that owning MSTR gave you levered bitcoin exposure plus the optionality of a CEO who would never sell. That pitch is now amended. Owning MSTR gives you levered bitcoin exposure plus active capital management that may include bitcoin sales when the board deems it accretive. Investors who chose MSTR specifically for the never-sell thesis have to decide whether the new framework is what they signed up for.

The math from yesterday has not changed. The mNAV crossed below one across every measure and the threshold matters. What has changed is how the company plans to operate inside that threshold. The framework is a real response to a real problem. Whether it works depends on bitcoin price action and broader sentiment over the coming weeks and quarters.

The never-sell era is over.

Active management has begun.

We will find out together what it actually looks like in practice.

I’ll see you Wednesday. With non-Strategy content. I promise.

BNY Adds USDC As First Stablecoin On Its Custody Platform

BNY Adds USDC Minting And Redemption To Institutional Custody Platform

BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank with $59.3 trillion in assets under custody, made USDC the first stablecoin supported on its Digital Asset Custody platform Monday, allowing institutional clients to custody, mint, and redeem the Circle stablecoin without leaving the bank’s infrastructure. BNY said it plans to expand the service to additional stablecoin issuers as institutional adoption deepens.

BlackRock Integrates Ethena Into Aladdin With $100M Liquidity Facility

BlackRock’s Aladdin Adds Ethena’s USDe With $100M BUIDL Liquidity Facility

BlackRock added Ethena’s synthetic dollar token USDe to its Aladdin risk management platform Monday and launched a $100 million liquidity facility through Securitize allowing eligible BUIDL holders to swap into USDC and USDtb outside traditional market hours. ENA was up 8 percent on the day as the largest asset manager deepened its DeFi infrastructure footprint.

JPMorgan Says Institutional Perpetual Futures Demand Stays Muted

JPMorgan Sees Limited Institutional Demand For Perpetual Futures

JPMorgan analysts said in a Monday report that institutional interest in perpetual futures remains limited despite the CFTC opening US derivatives venues to the product class, citing basis risk, the absence of a maturity structure, and clearing concerns as the primary barriers to adoption. Offshore perpetual trading remains dominated by a small number of large participants.

Bitcoin To $10K Or $20K? Schiff + McGlone Live (Macro Monday)

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That milestone needs context, because the mNAV conversation is messier than the headlines suggest.

There are at least three different ways to measure mNAV, and they have been telling different stories for some time.

The basic mNAV, which compares Strategy’s common share market capitalization to the value of its bitcoin holdings, has been below one for weeks. The most recent data puts it at roughly 0.58. The diluted mNAV, which adjusts for the convertible notes Strategy has issued, sits around 0.63. Both measures have been signaling that on a per-share basis, Strategy’s common stock trades at a meaningful discount to the bitcoin behind each share.

The enterprise mNAV is the measure that held above one until this weekend. It adds the value of Strategy’s debt and preferred stock to its market capitalization, subtracts cash, and compares the total to bitcoin value. The enterprise calculation is more favorable to Strategy because it credits the company for the capital it has raised through preferred stock issuances and convertible notes, which represent real claims on the bitcoin treasury but rank ahead of common equity. That measure crossed below one over the weekend.

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The structural point is that across every reasonable cut, the premium investors are willing to pay for Strategy’s bitcoin holdings now sits at or below the value of those holdings.

That matters because of how the business model actually works.

The flywheel that built Strategy’s current bitcoin position was simple. When the stock traded at a premium to underlying bitcoin, the company could issue new shares at that premium, use the proceeds to buy bitcoin, and end the day with more bitcoin per share than before. The premium funded the accumulation, and the accumulation reinforced the premium as long as bitcoin held up. Repeated across years, the loop produced a treasury that now holds roughly 847,000 bitcoin, worth approximately fifty-one billion dollars at current prices.

The flywheel reverses below one. Issuing equity at a discount to the underlying bitcoin means existing shareholders end up with less bitcoin per share, not more. Strategy has previously indicated internally that equity issuance becomes value-destructive on a per-share basis below an mNAV of roughly 1.22. Below one, the dilutive math is unambiguous, and the accumulation engine that drove the company’s growth essentially shuts off.

That is the structural threshold that has been crossed.

What Strategy has done in response is mostly continued operating as it has been. The company’s last large disclosed bitcoin purchase was 520 BTC on June 22 at an average price of roughly $67,000. Earlier in June, Strategy sold 32 bitcoin to fund the monthly dividend on its STRC preferred shares, a small transaction in absolute terms but the first BTC sale of substance in the company’s bitcoin treasury era. Saylor posted a chart on Sunday referencing additional bitcoin accumulation (although some believe it was a reference to more USD accumulation, we will see), a format the company has historically used in proximity to new purchases.

Whether any of those actions resolve the mNAV compression is largely outside the company’s direct control. The premium is a function of bitcoin price action, broader sentiment, and capital allocation choices that play out across the market, not just inside Strategy’s boardroom.

There is a bull case and a bear case here.

The bull case is that the premium has compressed before and recovered. In early January 2026, the enterprise mNAV briefly approached one before bitcoin price recovery lifted it back to comfortable territory. The bitcoin holdings themselves are not at risk in any near-term scenario. Strategy has multiple capital structure options available, including additional preferred stock issuances at terms that do not require an above-one mNAV. If bitcoin price action stabilizes and recovers, the historical pattern is that the equity premium follows.

The bear case is that this is the first sustained period where every measure of mNAV has sat below one simultaneously, and the surrounding conditions are not the conditions that previously resolved compression. Spot bitcoin ETFs recorded approximately $1.79 billion in net outflows in the five trading days ending June 26. The Fear and Greed Index sits in extreme fear territory. The Federal Reserve under Chair Warsh has effectively ruled out near-term rate cuts. Bitcoin closed below its 200-week moving average for the first time since August 2023. The macro and flows backdrop that previously resolved Strategy’s mNAV compressions is not currently present.

Other voices in the industry have used the moment to make broader arguments. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse described Strategy’s preferred-stock funding model as “financial engineering” in CoinDesk coverage published over the weekend, pointing to STRC’s recent price action. CryptoQuant analysts have urged Strategy to pause bitcoin purchases and rebuild cash reserves. Grayscale’s head of research has reportedly suggested Strategy should sell three billion dollars worth of bitcoin to cover two years of cash obligations. The merits of those arguments will resolve in price action over the coming weeks.

What this means for investors holding Strategy as bitcoin exposure deserves its own consideration.

The bitcoin price thesis and the Strategy treasury company premium are not the same thing. They are correlated but separable. Bitcoin can recover while Strategy’s premium continues to compress if the broader market remains skeptical of the treasury company structure. Strategy’s premium can recover while bitcoin trades sideways if specific company developments shift sentiment. They reference the same underlying asset but they price different things. Investors holding MSTR for bitcoin exposure have been getting two bets in one for years. The math of the last six months suggests those bets are diverging.

The broader bitcoin treasury company landscape is facing the same dynamics at different scales. Strive, OranjeBTC, Metaplanet, and the dozens of smaller treasury entrants that came to market during the 2024 and 2025 cycle highs are all subject to the same flywheel mechanics. Most of them are smaller than Strategy and therefore more exposed to the equity premium for funding. The Strategy mNAV print is the most public version of a question being asked across the entire treasury company cohort right now.

The honest read on Monday morning is that every cut of Strategy’s mNAV now sits at or below one. The threshold matters because the business model dynamics change at that line. The bull case requires the premium to return. The bear case is that the conditions that previously brought it back are not currently in place. What happens from here is a function of bitcoin price action and broader sentiment that will play out across weeks rather than days.

The math is the math.

The next move belongs to bitcoin.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Binance Suspends EU Services Tomorrow As MiCA Enforcement Hits

Binance Tells EU Users It Will No Longer Provide Services After Failing To Secure MiCA License

Binance notified customers in France, Italy, Poland, and Spain it will halt new orders, deposits, and staking products starting July 1 after withdrawing its Greek MiCA license application on June 24. Only 210 of more than 3,000 previously registered EU crypto firms have secured CASP authorization ahead of the hard deadline, with Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Crypto.com among those already licensed.

CFTC Crypto Perpetuals No-Action Relief Expires Tomorrow

CFTC Grants No-Action Relief For DCMs To Convert Digital Commodity Futures Into Perpetual Contracts

The CFTC’s no-action letter allowing designated contract markets to convert existing digital commodity futures into true perpetual contracts expires June 30, ending the time-limited window the agency opened in May to align US derivatives with global crypto market structure. The deadline tightens the path for onshore perpetuals trading just as MiCA pushes major exchanges out of EU access.

Meta Reportedly Building A Polymarket And Kalshi Competitor

Meta Reportedly Building “Arena” Prediction Markets App To Challenge Polymarket And Kalshi

Mark Zuckerberg has assigned a small internal team to build Arena, a standalone prediction markets app that would compete with Polymarket and Kalshi using a points-based system at launch rather than real-money wagering, per a New York Times report. Meta’s 3.56 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger would represent the largest potential distribution channel any prediction market platform has faced.

Bitcoin’s Next Buyer Isn’t Human - Yat Siu

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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10.83 million bitcoin are currently being held at a price below their acquisition cost. That is a record. It exceeds the post-FTX peak in late 2022. It exceeds every prior reading in the history of on-chain data. And it landed in the same week that long-term holder supply also hit a record, with 14.8 million bitcoin now sitting in wallets that have not moved in 155 days or more, which is the threshold Glassnode uses to classify a holder as long-term rather than short-term.

The headline read is straightforward. Maximum stress and maximum conviction at the same time. The largest cohort of bitcoin ever held at unrealized losses, sitting next to the largest cohort of long-term holders ever observed. That dual signal is real, and it is the story everyone is talking about today.

But the headline numbers are also misleading in a way that almost nobody is taking the time to address, and once you do the actual math, the picture gets significantly more interesting.

Here is the problem.

The Glassnode metrics, like every on-chain analytics framework, measure dormancy. They do not measure agency. A coin that has not moved in 155 days could be sitting in the cold storage of a patient investor who has every intention of holding through the cycle. It could also be sitting in a wallet whose owner died three years ago, whose seed phrase is in a hard drive at the bottom of a Welsh landfill, or whose private key was lost when an early miner reformatted their laptop in 2012. The coin looks identical in both cases from a chain analytics perspective. The wallet has not moved. The metric counts it. The human behind the wallet, if there ever was one, is gone.

This matters enormously when you are trying to read what the data actually says about market positioning.

Credible estimates of permanently lost bitcoin from the major analytics firms range from 2.3 million to 5 million coins, with most analysts settling around 4 million as a defensible midpoint. Chainalysis, which has done the most rigorous work in this area, has put the number at roughly 2.3 to 3.7 million in their most recent published estimates. Ledger and Bitget cluster their estimates at 3 to 4 million. More aggressive analyses from researchers like Timothy Peterson at Cane Island Digital have argued for 6 million or more, though those estimates include some coins that may be intentionally dormant rather than truly lost.

Then there is Satoshi Nakamoto, whose roughly 1.1 million bitcoin mined in 2009 and 2010 have never moved. Those coins are technically alive on the chain. In practice, every analyst working in this space treats them as functionally lost, because the consequences of them suddenly moving would be a generational event for the entire asset class, and the absence of any movement across sixteen years of price appreciation from worthless to ninety thousand dollars per coin strongly suggests the keys are not accessible to anyone.

Fidelity Digital Assets published research earlier this year, using Glassnode data, showing that 566 bitcoin per day are aging into the “ancient” category, which is the analytics term for coins that have not moved in over ten years. Daily mining issuance, after the 2024 halving, is roughly 450 bitcoin. The dormant pile is accumulating faster than the new supply is being created. Every year, the gap between total mined supply and actively-held supply widens.

For the purposes of this essay I am going to use 4 million as the working estimate of lost bitcoin, which is the defensible midpoint of credible analyst ranges. If anything I think that number is conservative. But I want to err on the side of the analysis being too cautious rather than too aggressive.

Now let me do the math the headline writers should have done before publishing.

Total bitcoin currently in circulation, based on the most recent halving and the issuance schedule, is roughly 20 million. Of that, 10.83 million is currently held at a loss. The remaining 9.17 million is held at a profit. Lost coins, almost by definition, sit in the in-profit bucket. They were acquired years ago at cost bases ranging from zero for Satoshi’s mined coins, to single dollars for early adopters who mined or bought in 2010 and 2011, to a few hundred dollars for mid-cycle holders who lost access in the 2013-2016 era. Almost no lost coins were acquired at the prices we are currently trading at, because the people who bought near current prices have had four to eighteen months to think about their keys, their backups, and their inheritance plans. The bucket of lost coins is therefore an in-profit phenomenon, not an in-loss phenomenon.

Once you subtract roughly 4 million lost coins from the in-profit bucket, the actively-held in-profit supply drops to about 5 million. The in-loss supply stays at 10.83 million. The total actively-held supply is about 16 million.

The ratio of actively-held bitcoin currently underwater is 10.83 divided by 16, which is roughly 68 percent.

More than two out of every three bitcoin where someone is actually making a choice to hold are currently sitting at a loss.

That is the number the headline should have led with.

The reason this framing matters more than the raw 10.83 million number is that the raw number includes a denominator with no agency. Counting Satoshi’s stash as “supply currently in profit” tells you almost nothing about how the market is positioned, because Satoshi’s stash was never going to be sold regardless of price. The relevant question, when you are trying to read whether bitcoin is in a bottoming process, is what the people who can actually sell are choosing to do. The 68 percent figure isolates that. It tells you that of every coin where the holder has the keys and the agency to act, two out of three are choosing not to sell at a loss.

That is the actual conviction signal that the raw number was diluting.

Now compare this to history.

The 10.5 million bitcoin in loss threshold has marked every prior bear market bottom in the modern on-chain era. In December 2018, at the end of the 2017-2018 bear, supply in loss touched roughly that level. In March 2020, during the COVID crash that took bitcoin to $3,800, supply in loss hit approximately 11 million, the all-time peak. In November 2022, at the FTX-induced low of $15,500, supply in loss came in just under 10.5 million. Each of those readings, in retrospect, was a generational buying opportunity.

When you do the lost-coin adjustment across those prior cycles, the picture sharpens further. Lost coins were a smaller pile in absolute terms during each of those earlier bottoms, because less time had passed for attrition to accumulate. By 2019 the lost pile was probably around 3 million. By 2020 maybe 3.3 million. By 2022 closer to 3.8 million. By 2026 we are at roughly 4 million.

The actively-held in-loss ratios at those prior bottoms were approximately 71 percent in 2019, 74 percent in 2020 at the COVID extreme, and 68 percent in 2022. Today we are at 68 percent.

Read that again.

Today’s reading, once you adjust honestly for lost coins, is sitting at the same structural level as the 2022 cycle bottom. It is below the 2020 COVID extreme but firmly inside the historical bear-market-bottom range. The unadjusted Glassnode print frames this as a record. The agency-adjusted analysis frames it as the structural signature of a market that has reached the same point where every prior cycle has eventually turned.

The long-term holder side of the math tells the same story from the opposite direction.

Glassnode’s headline figure of 14.8 million bitcoin in long-term holder wallets is a record. After adjusting for the roughly 4 million lost coins that sit inside that long-term holder bucket, the actively-held long-term holder supply is approximately 10.8 million. That figure is also at or very near an all-time high in the actively-held category. The people who can move their coins and have chosen not to, for at least 155 days, have never collectively held more bitcoin than they hold right now.

That is what makes the current setup structurally interesting.

Most bear market bottoms in bitcoin’s history have been characterized by either maximum stress or maximum conviction, but rarely both at the same time. The 2018 bottom was high stress coming off relatively low long-term holder accumulation. The 2020 COVID bottom was maximum stress but the crisis was so sudden that long-term holder positioning had not yet caught up. The 2022 bottom was high stress with reasonable but not record long-term holder accumulation. The current setup is the first time in bitcoin’s history that we have hit the agency-adjusted in-loss ratio characteristic of prior bottoms while simultaneously hitting record levels of actively-held long-term holder conviction.

That does not guarantee anything about the next move. Markets do not respect pattern recognition. They respect liquidity, sentiment, and the marginal seller’s willingness to absorb pain. There are scenarios where this setup gets worse before it gets better. The 200-week moving average, which has historically acted as the support floor at every prior bear market bottom, is being tested in real time this week. If it breaks decisively, the historical pattern breaks with it, and the structural read in this essay needs to be revised.

But for investors trying to figure out where we are right now, the honest read is this. The Glassnode data, properly adjusted for lost coins, says we are sitting at the structural signature of a bear-market bottom. The conviction stack, properly adjusted, says the people who have made it this far are not flinching. The two signals together are rarer than either one alone. And the people who are choosing not to sell at these prices, after watching their positions go underwater, are doing exactly what the people at every prior bottom did before the trend turned.

The job here is not to predict whether next week the price goes up or down. The job is to recognize the pattern. The pattern is consistent with the late stages of every prior bear market that has eventually resolved higher.

Two out of every three bitcoin where someone has the keys and the choice are underwater right now.

And the people holding them are choosing not to sell.

That is the signal nobody else is going to point out today.

I’ll see you Monday.

CoinEx Accused Of $3.84 Billion In Iran-Linked Crypto Flows

CoinEx Processed $3.84 Billion In Iran-Linked Crypto Flows, TRM Labs Says

TRM Labs published a report Wednesday alleging Seychelles-based exchange CoinEx processed over $3.84 billion in cryptocurrency flows tied to sanctioned Iranian entities since 2019, including roughly $2.7 billion with Iran’s largest domestic exchange Nobitex. CoinEx publicly disputed the findings and said it has initiated an exit from all Iran-related exposure.

Ripple’s RLUSD Stablecoin Just Went Live In Japan

Ripple’s RLUSD Stablecoin Launches In Japan After Regulatory Approval

Japan’s Financial Services Agency approved Ripple’s dollar-backed RLUSD as a Type 4 electronic payment instrument under the Payment Services Act, with distribution starting today through SBI VC Trade and the token now at a $1.7 billion market cap. RLUSD becomes the first US-issued stablecoin operating under regulated frameworks across the US, EU, and Japan simultaneously.

SBI Just Bought Bitbank For $289 Million

SBI Acquires Bitbank For $289M, Cementing Japan’s Largest Regulated Crypto Operator

SBI Holdings announced Thursday it will acquire bitbank for roughly $289 million, combining with SBI VC Trade to operate 2.92 million crypto accounts and approximately $6.8 billion in custody. The deal pairs with this week’s RLUSD launch and a new Visa-branded crypto card to position SBI as Japan’s vertically integrated digital asset conglomerate.

Bitcoin Just Flashed A Major Bottom Signal Last Seen In 2022

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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That is the security budget question. It is the single most cited long-term concern about Bitcoin in serious institutional discussions, and most attempts to answer it have been either dismissive or unconvincing.

Tuesday, Fidelity Digital Assets published a two-part research series taking the question seriously and answering it more completely than anything I have read this year. The series is good. It deserves to be engaged with.

Let me walk you through what Fidelity actually argues, what they get right, where the analysis could be more honest, and why this matters for how you should think about owning Bitcoin over the next two decades.

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The Concern, Stated Honestly

Bitcoin’s monetary policy is rules-based, not opinion-based. Every four years, by design, the network cuts the block subsidy paid to miners in half. The first halving in 2012 took it from 50 bitcoin per block to 25. The second in 2016 took it to 12.5. The third in 2020 took it to 6.25. The fourth in April 2024 took it to 3.125. The fifth in April 2028 will take it to 1.5625. By 2040, the subsidy will be around 0.195 bitcoin per block. By the year 2140, the subsidy will be zero.

That schedule was Satoshi’s design choice and it is one of the things that makes Bitcoin Bitcoin. Fixed supply. Predictable issuance. No discretion. But it creates a forward-looking question that serious investors actually wrestle with. Hash rate, the computational power that secures the network, is incentivized by the dollar value of the rewards miners receive. The subsidy is half of those rewards. Transaction fees are the other half. As the subsidy declines, fees have to make up the difference, or hash rate falls, or both. If hash rate falls enough, the cost of acquiring fifty-one percent of it drops. If that cost drops below the value an attacker could extract by attacking the network, the model breaks.

That is the structural concern. It is not unreasonable. The bear case treats it as Bitcoin’s eventual undoing. Most institutional research treats it as something to be hand-waved past. Fidelity just published the first piece I have read that takes it as seriously as the question deserves.

Part One: The Price-Appreciation Argument

The first major argument is straightforward. The security budget concern has not actually been a problem so far because price appreciation has more than offset the declining subsidy.

Over Bitcoin’s life, the bitcoin-denominated subsidy has declined by ninety-four percent. Over that same period, the USD-denominated revenue going to miners has increased by approximately one hundred fifty-seven thousand percent. Even as the network has paid out fewer coins per block, those coins have appreciated enough that the dollar value flowing to miners has gone up by orders of magnitude. The network currently operates at roughly one zettahash per second. That hash rate is being voluntarily contributed by mining operations because the dollar economics still work.

The piece includes a forward-looking exercise estimating what price bitcoin would need to reach to sustain current miner economics through future halvings. It is a deliberately rough model, not a price prediction. But the directional point is well taken. Within reasonable assumptions about adoption and price, miner economics keep working through the next several halvings.

The honest caveat, which the piece acknowledges, is that this argument is structurally dependent on bitcoin continuing to appreciate. If it does, the math holds. If it does not, the math gets harder. The piece does not pretend otherwise. But it makes the point that the security budget concern has, so far, been wrong in practice. The model has worked for sixteen years. That is not a guarantee. It is a track record.

What Fifty-One Percent Actually Buys You

Part one also walks through what fifty-one percent control of hash rate actually gives an attacker, and what it does not. This is the section I want every serious bitcoin holder to read because it corrects misconceptions I see repeated constantly.

A double-spend attack lets an attacker rewrite recent transaction history by producing a longer chain than the network’s honest chain. To execute it, the attacker needs majority hash rate, and the deeper they want to rewrite, the harder it gets. Satoshi addressed this in the original whitepaper using the Gambler’s Ruin formula. The math is unforgiving. With majority hash rate, you can rewrite shallow blocks. The deeper you try to go, the more energy you have to spend producing competing blocks faster than the rest of the network. Six confirmations, the standard most exchanges require for settlement, makes the attack effectively impossible.

A censorship attack lets an attacker exclude specific transactions from the blocks they produce. To work as a sustained attack, the attacker needs not just fifty-one percent but closer to ninety-nine percent of hash rate, because anything below that means honest blocks find their way into the chain and excluded transactions get included by competing miners. Below ninety-nine percent control, the censorship attack defeats itself within six blocks.

Fifty-one percent control also does not give an attacker authority over Bitcoin’s ruleset. The twenty-one million cap stays in place. The block reward schedule stays in place. The consensus rules stay in place. An attacker with majority hash rate can disrupt transaction finality and impose censorship over short windows. They cannot change what Bitcoin is.

Fidelity uses a recent real-world example to make the point. On March 23 of this year, the Foundry USA mining pool produced seven consecutive blocks, briefly creating a two-block chain reorganization that orphaned valid blocks from AntPool and ViaBTC. The episode was not an attack. It was statistical variance, the kind of thing that happens occasionally when one pool controls roughly a third of network hash rate. The longest chain won. The orphaned blocks’ transactions went back to the mempool and got included in subsequent blocks. The system worked exactly as designed.

Part Two: The Difficulty Adjustment Is The Underrated Security Mechanism

This is the more sophisticated argument and the one I think most security budget discussions miss entirely.

Bitcoin has a built-in mechanism called the difficulty adjustment. Roughly every two weeks, the network recalibrates how hard it is to produce a valid block, targeting an average block time of ten minutes. When hash rate rises and blocks get produced too quickly, difficulty goes up. When hash rate falls and blocks get produced too slowly, difficulty goes down. The adjustment is algorithmic, not discretionary. It happens automatically. It has been happening every two weeks since 2009.

The central insight in part two is that the difficulty adjustment is the underrated piece of Bitcoin’s security model. Most analyses focus on absolute hash rate as the measure of security. The actual measure of security is the cost of attacking the network relative to the cost of honest participation. The difficulty adjustment continuously recalibrates that ratio.

Here is the logic. Suppose bitcoin’s price falls and hash rate drops by half as miners turn off unprofitable rigs. In absolute terms, the network is less secure. But the difficulty adjustment also drops by roughly the same amount. The cost of acquiring fifty-one percent of the now-smaller hash rate is lower, but so is the cost of mining honestly. The ratio between attack cost and honest participation cost stays roughly the same. The economic incentive to attack rather than mine honestly does not improve.

Fidelity runs through four scenarios. In the early years before 2010, hash rate was low and attacks were technically feasible, but bitcoin had no value worth attacking. In the growth years from 2010 to 2019, hash rate scaled with price, and the cost of attack stayed ahead of the cost of honest mining. In the current consolidation phase, hash rate has concentrated among efficient operators, but the difficulty adjustment maintains competitive balance among them. In a hypothetical future where bitcoin’s price stalls, hash rate may stagnate but the difficulty adjustment keeps the attack cost above the honest mining cost.

The conclusion is that the difficulty adjustment is the mechanism that preserves Bitcoin’s security across vastly different market conditions. Not the absolute level of hash rate. Not the absolute size of the security budget. The relative cost of attacking versus participating, recalibrated automatically every two weeks for the next hundred and fifteen years.

The Concrete Data Point That Proves The Fee Market Thesis

The most useful single piece of evidence in the entire series is the data from block 840,000, the block in which the fourth halving occurred in April 2024.

Block 840,000 generated approximately 37.626 bitcoin in transaction fees. The block subsidy that day was 3.125 bitcoin. The fees were roughly twelve times the subsidy. Total dollar value of fees in a single block was approximately 2.4 million dollars.

The spike was driven by traders competing to inscribe content on the halving block for symbolic reasons. Demand for block space spiked. Fees auctioned upward in real time as users repriced their transactions to ensure inclusion. The auction lasted roughly four minutes before the block was mined. If it had lasted the full ten-minute average block time, fees would have gone substantially higher.

Fidelity uses this example to make a structural point about how fee markets actually behave under stress. The same dynamic that produced 2.4 million dollars in fees at block 840,000 is the dynamic that would produce escalating fees during any sustained censorship attack. Users excluded from blocks reprice their transactions. The fee auction escalates. The economic incentive for honest miners to claim those fees grows. Hash rate moves toward where the rewards are.

That is not theory. It happened. The fee market response to demand pressure has already been demonstrated in real conditions. The argument that fees can rise to defend the network is no longer purely hypothetical.

Where The Analysis Could Be More Honest

The series is genuinely good. It is also a piece of research published by an institution that benefits from Bitcoin being a successful asset class. That does not invalidate the analysis. But it does mean a reader should engage critically rather than just nod along.

Two points deserve more scrutiny than the series gives them.

First, the price-appreciation argument requires bitcoin to keep appreciating at a reasonable rate. The piece acknowledges this in passing, but the structural dependency deserves more weight. If bitcoin’s exchange rate compounds at meaningfully slower rates than it has historically, the math gets harder. The model has worked for sixteen years. The next sixteen years are unknown, and the next hundred years are deeply unknown.

Second, the difficulty adjustment argument is mathematically sound but it has a quiet assumption embedded in it. The argument is that the cost of attacking relative to the cost of mining honestly stays balanced through the difficulty adjustment. That is true if mining honestly remains broadly profitable. If at some point mining becomes broadly unprofitable and hash rate collapses to a level where the absolute cost of attack becomes trivial in dollar terms, the relative argument has less practical force. The piece acknowledges this by noting that the persistence-of-demand assumption matters. But the question of how much demand is enough is not really addressed.

These are not fatal critiques. They are honest qualifications any sophisticated reader should hold alongside Fidelity’s argument. The series is strong. It is not the final word.

Why This Matters Now

We are entering the years when the security budget question actually gets tested at scale. The April 2024 halving cut the subsidy to 3.125 bitcoin. The April 2028 halving will cut it to 1.5625. The 2032 halving will take it to 0.78125. By 2040, the subsidy will be around 0.195 bitcoin per block, less than a tenth of where it sits today. The transition from subsidy-dominated miner revenue to fee-dominated miner revenue will play out over the next decade and a half.

Fidelity’s argument is that this transition is structurally fine because of the difficulty adjustment and the demonstrated capacity of the fee market to respond to demand pressure. Block 840,000 is the most compelling data point. The four-scenario analysis is the most complete framework I have seen written about this question.

The investors who actually engage with this material will think about Bitcoin’s long-term resilience differently than the investors who do not. The security budget question is not going away. It will get asked at every dinner I have for the next decade. What has changed is that there is now a serious institutional answer worth pointing people toward when they ask.

Fidelity just made the strongest institutional case to date that Bitcoin’s security budget concern is overblown. The argument is structurally sound. It engages with the strongest version of the bear case. It uses real data. It acknowledges its own assumptions. It walks through forward scenarios with appropriate humility about what it can and cannot predict.

It does not close the question entirely. Nothing can, because we are projecting decades forward and the actual answer depends on facts about adoption, demand, and price that nobody can know with certainty. But it raises the bar for how seriously the concern should be taken, and it provides a framework that holds up to scrutiny.

This is the kind of institutional research Bitcoin has needed. More of it, please.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Bitcoin Thoughts And Analysis

As the critics write the Bitcoin obituaries for the 200th time, Bitcoin quietly sweeps the recent lows and forms a potential double bottom. A break above the $67,253 neckline would confirm.

Here are a few obituaries that I read this morning.

More importantly, the "it's over" posts came at the range lows, with nothing actually changing from a technical perspective. Classic panic at support.

Bitcoin is still sideways in June.

Binance Just Lost Its MiCA Application In Greece

Binance head of Europe says firm staying despite Greek MiCA setback

Binance’s bid to secure a passporting license through Greece has collapsed, head of Europe and UK Gillian Lynch told Reuters Tuesday. The exchange is now pursuing alternative regulatory pathways across the EU. Binance’s European fate has been the defining MiCA-era question for the largest exchange in crypto, and Greece was supposed to be the answer.

Chainlink Just Partnered With 47 Banks For Cross-Border Settlement

Chainlink teams up with 47 South Korean, European banks to speed up international money transfers

Chainlink announced Project Pangea Tuesday, an alliance with forty-seven South Korean and European banks aiming to use stablecoins to settle multimillion-dollar currency trades between the two regions in near real time. The project would compress settlement windows from days to minutes, replacing the correspondent-bank rails for a meaningful slice of EUR-KRW flow.

Hyperscale Data Just Took Its Bitcoin Treasury To 727 BTC

Hyperscale Data Bitcoin Treasury Reaches Approximately 727 Bitcoin

HPC infrastructure firm Hyperscale Data disclosed Tuesday that its bitcoin treasury holdings have reached approximately 727 BTC. The Nevada-based company has been quietly accumulating since 2024 as part of a treasury strategy explicitly modeled on the playbook Strategy made famous. The corporate treasury cohort continues to widen.

Bitcoin SHATTERED A $6B ETF Record – $10.6B Friday Expiry Hits

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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I have watched this exact cycle play out every quarter for years now. The pattern is reliable. A big notional number gets dropped in a headline. A max pain level gets named. A put-call ratio gets quoted. Conclusions get drawn about what is supposedly going to happen on Friday. Then Friday happens, the conclusions turn out to be wrong, and the next quarter we do it all over again with a different big number and the same broken framing.

Let me walk you through what is actually happening on Friday, what the misconceptions are, and what you should be paying attention to instead.

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Start with what an options contract actually is, because most coverage assumes you know and you might not. An options contract gives the buyer the right to buy or sell something at a fixed price on a specific date. Calls give the right to buy. Puts give the right to sell. The buyer pays the seller a premium for that right. The seller pockets the premium and takes on the obligation to make good if the buyer exercises. On the expiration date, every open contract settles. If the option is in the money, the buyer exercises. If it is out of the money, the contract expires worthless and the seller keeps the premium and goes home.

Friday is the day a huge slug of contracts written across the second quarter all reach that settlement moment simultaneously. Quarterly expiries are bigger than monthlies for a structural reason. Longer-dated contracts, the ones with three-month, six-month, and twelve-month horizons, all roll over on quarterly cycles. Traders writing positions for Q2 wrote them with June settlement in mind. So all of that positioning, accumulated over three months of trading, settles in one session.

For scale, the largest crypto options expiry on record was the Q4 2025 settlement on December 26, which cleared roughly twenty-seven billion dollars across BTC and ETH. The April 2026 expiry was just under ten billion. The May 2026 monthly was seven and a half. Friday’s quarterly will be larger than the recent monthly cadence because of the cyclical concentration.

That is the basic shape. Now to the three things people get wrong.

Misconception One: Max Pain Pulls Prices To The Strike

The first misconception is that max pain pulls prices to the strike.

Max pain is the strike level where, if the underlying asset settles there, the largest dollar value of open contracts expires worthless. It is the strike where the most money on the table is on the wrong side of the bet. Put differently, it is the level at which option sellers, mostly institutions and market makers, make the most money and option buyers, mostly retail and speculative funds, lose the most.

The idea has intuitive appeal. Big institutions sold a lot of these contracts. The institutions hedge their positions actively. If prices drift toward the max pain level, the institutions’ counterhedging activity could theoretically nudge prices there. The thesis sounds reasonable. The data does not consistently support it.

Academic studies that have looked at whether spot prices systematically migrate toward max pain in the days before expiry have produced mixed results. There is some statistical evidence of pin-risk dynamics in the final hours before a settlement when delta hedging by dealers is most active. There is much weaker evidence that max pain functions as a multi-day price target. The headline “max pain at one hundred thousand could pull bitcoin back to one hundred thousand by Friday” is the kind of confident causal claim that the actual data does not really support.

The honest read is that max pain is a useful reference point for where the largest concentration of dealer obligations sit. It is not a price prediction. If a publication tells you the price is going to a specific number this week because that is the max pain level, they are conflating an open interest snapshot with a forecast.

Misconception Two: A Large Expiry Means A Large Move

The second misconception is that a large expiry means a large move.

This is intuitive, and it is wrong. The relationship between expiry size and post-expiry volatility is actually inverse more often than it is direct. The reason is that large expiries are typically anticipated. Dealers position for them in advance. Hedges get layered in over weeks. Implied volatility tends to be priced into the expiring contracts well before settlement. By the time settlement actually happens, the surprise is usually gone.

The December 2025 expiry was twenty-seven billion dollars, the largest crypto options settlement in history. The actual settlement day was relatively orderly. Bitcoin moved in a contained range. The implied volatility going into the event had already pulled back from the panic levels of late November. The bigger move came in the days that followed, as dealers unwound their hedges and capital rebalanced into the next quarter.

Small unexpected expiries can produce larger moves than big anticipated ones. The thing that creates volatility is positioning surprise, not raw size. A ten billion dollar expiry that everyone has been positioning for since March is less destabilizing than a sudden two billion dollar expiry that nobody saw coming.

Misconception Three: The Put-Call Ratio Tells You Direction

The third misconception is that the put-call ratio tells you market direction.

The put-call ratio is the simple division of put open interest by call open interest. A ratio above one means more puts than calls, which is sometimes characterized as bearish. A ratio below one means more calls than puts, sometimes characterized as bullish. The framing gets repeated endlessly in crypto media.

The framing is incomplete. Put-call ratios aggregate every open contract regardless of strike, regardless of expiry, regardless of who is on which side of the trade. A put-call ratio of point seven sounds bullish until you realize that the calls are concentrated forty percent above the current price and the puts are concentrated five percent below it. In that configuration, the puts are functionally hedges by holders, not bearish bets, and the calls are speculative lottery tickets, not directional convictions. The aggregate ratio reads the same. The market implication is opposite.

The same critique applies to block trade flows, to skew metrics, and to most aggregate sentiment indicators in derivatives markets. The headline ratio is shorthand. The actual market structure is what matters, and that structure only gets revealed by looking at where the open interest is concentrated and which side of those positions is hedged.

What Actually Moves The Market Around An Options Expiry

The thing that actually moves the market around a major options expiry is dealer delta hedging in the final hours and post-expiry rebalancing in the days after.

Dealers who have sold options need to hedge their resulting exposure. If a dealer is short a hundred million dollars in call options that are now slightly in the money as expiry approaches, the dealer needs to buy spot bitcoin to neutralize the delta. If those calls move further into the money, the dealer needs to buy more. If the price reverses and the calls move out of the money, the dealer sells the bitcoin they previously bought. This active hedging in the final hours can create real mechanical price effects, particularly when open interest is concentrated at strikes near the spot price.

The technical term for this concentration is gamma exposure, often abbreviated as GEX. When dealers are net short gamma at a particular strike, their hedging activity tends to amplify moves. When they are net long gamma, their hedging tends to dampen moves. The exact GEX picture for Friday is something the public Deribit data will firm up over the next forty-eight hours, but the general principle is that strike concentration near spot creates real mechanical price effects.

The bigger move usually happens after expiry, not during it. Once the expiring contracts settle, the dealer hedges associated with those positions get unwound. Market makers who were short gamma and selling spot to hedge no longer need to maintain those positions. The capital that was tied up in the expiring contracts gets redeployed into the next series. That post-expiry repositioning is where most of the actual price discovery happens. Every quarterly options expiry through 2025 produced a price move of at least four percent within seventy-two hours of settlement. Three of those four quarterly events moved to the upside.

What To Actually Watch On Friday

The honest framework for Friday is not “what level does max pain say bitcoin goes to” or “what does the put-call ratio predict” or “how big is the expiry.” It is more like this.

First, watch the implied volatility going into Thursday close. If implied vol is well below where realized vol has been running, dealers are pricing in a calm expiry and the post-settlement move could surprise. If implied vol is elevated, dealers are pricing in turbulence and the actual settlement may be quieter than the market expects. The CoinDesk day-ahead this morning noted that bitcoin volatility looks cheap heading into Friday, which is interesting.

Second, watch the open interest concentration. Where are the largest dollar values of contracts sitting? Are they clustered near the current spot price, or are they out of the money in either direction? Concentration near spot means the final hours could produce real delta hedging flows. Concentration away from spot means most of the contracts are going to expire worthless without much mechanical effect.

Third, watch the seventy-two hours after settlement. Where does positioning move? Are dealers rebuilding short gamma at higher strikes, suggesting they expect a move higher? Are puts getting bought aggressively in the next series, suggesting they expect a move lower? That post-expiry repositioning is the actual signal.

Friday is going to clear a large slug of accumulated quarterly positioning. Dealer hedges will unwind. Capital will redeploy into the next series. The price action over the seventy-two hours that follow will tell you more about where the next leg goes than the settlement itself.

The expiry is not the trade. The repositioning after is the trade. If you remember nothing else about Friday, remember that.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Ripple Just Won Preliminary MiCA Approval From Luxembourg

Ripple targets EU, wins preliminary MiCA approval from Luxembourg financial regulator

Ripple won preliminary MiCA approval from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier Monday, enabling the company to passport stablecoin and crypto services across the European Union. Luxembourg is emerging as a competitive jurisdiction for crypto firms after Ireland and Malta tightened oversight earlier this year. The approval positions RLUSD as the first US-issued stablecoin with both US and EU regulatory footprint.

Hut 8 Just Settled A Class Action Over Its US Bitcoin Merger

Hut 8 to pay $2.35 million to settle investor suit over US Bitcoin merger

Bitcoin miner Hut 8 agreed Monday to pay 2.35 million dollars to settle a class action lawsuit brought by investors over its 2023 merger with US Bitcoin Corp. Plaintiffs alleged Hut 8 failed to disclose material weaknesses in financial reporting controls inherited from the merger. The settlement closes one of the longer-running shareholder disputes in the public-mining sector.

The Ethereum Foundation Just Cut 20% Of Staff And 40% Of Its Budget

Ethereum Foundation cuts 20% of workforce in ‘leaner’ reorganization

The Ethereum Foundation laid off 54 employees Tuesday, roughly 20 percent of its workforce, while Vitalik Buterin separately announced a 40 percent budget cut in a same-day post. The moves follow eight senior leadership departures over the past five months and conclude a months-long restructuring tied to the Foundation’s March 2026 Mandate document.

Bitcoin’s $59K Test Is Coming As Korea Crashes – Caitlin Long

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He ran the Federal Reserve for eighteen and a half years. Five terms, four presidents, two booms, one financial crisis that his policies are widely credited with helping to enable. He was confirmed two months before Black Monday. He stepped down two and a half years before Lehman.

He was also, by structural accident or by direct authorship, the architect of the monetary regime that bitcoin was designed to make impossible.

That is the harder thing to say on the day a hundred-year-old man dies. But it is the thing that is true.

The phrase “Greenspan put” was not Greenspan’s. It came from traders, and the moment that birthed it was October 20, 1987. That was the day after Black Monday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than twenty-two percent in a single session, the largest one-day percentage drop in market history. Greenspan had been confirmed as Fed Chair sixty-nine days earlier. He responded the next morning with a statement, the substance of which was that the Federal Reserve stood ready to serve as a source of liquidity to support the financial system.

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The market recovered quickly. Greenspan was praised. And from that moment forward, every sophisticated investor in the world understood the same thing. When markets fell sharply enough, the Fed would intervene to stabilize them. The downside was backstopped. The upside was not. That asymmetry, expressed across two decades of Fed policy, became the architecture of moral hazard in modern markets. Wall Street learned that taking risk against the floor was always cheaper than taking risk against the ceiling.

That asymmetry is the Greenspan put. It is the single most consequential policy innovation of his tenure, and his successors each inherited it, each used it, each extended its scope. Bernanke during 2008. Powell during 2020. The COVID intervention was the Greenspan put taken to its logical conclusion. The Fed will not let asset prices fall meaningfully without intervention. That is the operating assumption every portfolio manager in the world carries with them now. Greenspan built it.

Eighteen years into Greenspan’s tenure, the system he had managed began to come apart. The early 2000s housing market had been fueled by Fed funds rates held at one percent from June 2003 to June 2004, by the proliferation of mortgage-backed securities and derivatives Greenspan had publicly opposed regulating in 1998, and by a banking sector that had been progressively deregulated through the 1990s with Greenspan as one of its loudest advocates. He famously dismissed talk of a national housing bubble in real time, saying that while some local markets might be overpriced, there was no evidence of anything systemic.

The systemic problem became visible in March 2008 with the emergency Fed-backstopped acquisition of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan. It became undeniable in September 2008 with Lehman’s bankruptcy. By October the United States had passed a seven-hundred-billion-dollar emergency banking stabilization package. The United Kingdom had nationalized parts of its banking sector. The global financial system spent the next twelve months on life support.

On October 23, 2008, Greenspan testified before the House Oversight Committee. He admitted, in plain English, that he had been wrong. The exact quote was that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.”

That sentence is one of the most important in the modern history of American economic policy. It is the moment a man who had spent his career advocating that banks could regulate themselves admitted that the assumption underlying his advocacy was false. It does not undo the damage. But it does close out a particular intellectual era, and his honesty about being wrong is part of why a respectful obituary is appropriate today.

Bitcoin entered the world ten weeks after that congressional testimony. On January 3, 2009, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block of a system that did not depend on banks, did not depend on a central monetary authority, did not depend on the discretionary judgment of any individual or institution, and could not be debased by anyone.

Embedded in the coinbase transaction of that first block was a headline from the Times of London dated the same day. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The Chancellor was not Alan Greenspan. It was Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gordon Brown’s UK government, and the article was about a second round of British bank bailouts following the first round of October 2008. The genesis block headline was a statement about the fiat banking system globally. It was not a personal indictment of any individual American policymaker.

Satoshi, in the writings we have, never named Greenspan. In the first forum post introducing bitcoin to the public on February 11, 2009, the framing was institutional. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve.”

That is the case I think it is fair to make on the day Greenspan died. Bitcoin was not designed to be a referendum on Alan Greenspan personally. It was designed to be an alternative to the architecture Greenspan most prominently shaped. The Greenspan put taught markets the Fed would always backstop. The deregulation Greenspan championed allowed banks to take risks they did not understand. The low rates Greenspan held into the housing bubble fueled the credit expansion that produced 2008. The bailouts that followed were the bill arriving. Bitcoin was the response to the bill, not to the bill collector.

That framing is more honest than the one I have heard repeated in crypto circles for years. The genesis block was not written about Greenspan. But the system bitcoin was designed to be an alternative to was the system Greenspan built, and the bailouts the genesis block referenced were the consequence of that system reaching its breaking point.

Greenspan was not a villain. He was confirmed as Fed Chair two months before the largest single-day market crash in American history and steered the response with skill. He inherited the policy framework that had broken inflation under Volcker and maintained low inflation for nearly two decades. He guided the economy through the longest peacetime expansion in modern American history, from 1991 to 2001. He kept the financial system stable through the Asian and Russian crises of the late 1990s. He kept the economy moving after September 11, 2001. He was, for most of his tenure, regarded as possibly the best central banker who had ever lived.

The maestro framing was not invented by sycophants. It was earned in real time by a man whose decisions appeared to consistently produce strong outcomes for the economy he managed. The criticism came later, and from outcomes he did not live through while he was still in the chair. The honest read on Greenspan is not that he was bad at his job. It is that the model of central banking he embodied, with the central banker as the named arbiter of asset prices, turned out to have costs that took eighteen years to compound and become visible. By the time those costs were visible, he had already retired. The man got the credit for the boom. His successors got the bill for the bust.

Twenty years after Greenspan stepped down, the world he managed is being deliberately unwound by his successors. The current Fed Chair has explicitly rejected the discretionary forward-guidance model in favor of a rules-based one, with one-hundred-thirty-word FOMC statements and no dot plot. Bitcoin is now a roughly one-point-three-trillion-dollar asset class. The iShares Bitcoin Trust alone holds more than fifty billion dollars in customer assets. The Digital Credit asset class survived its first leverage stress test last Thursday. Capital B in France just got shareholder approval to raise one hundred five billion euros for bitcoin acquisition. The institutional infrastructure that did not exist when Greenspan ran the Fed now exists at massive scale.

That infrastructure is not just a different financial product. It is a structural alternative to the model Greenspan exemplified. Bitcoin has rules instead of rulers. It has a fixed supply instead of a discretionary one. It has no backstop and no put and no maestro deciding when to intervene. It is, in every structural dimension, the inverse of what the Federal Reserve under Greenspan was. That inversion is not a coincidence. It is the entire point of the asset class.

The investor takeaway is not that Greenspan was wrong. The investor takeaway is that the model he embodied carries documented costs, that those costs were borne by the next generation rather than his own, and that a rules-based alternative to that model has been built and is being adopted at scale. Whether or not you own bitcoin, the structural critique it represents is a critique that the events of the past eighteen years have substantially validated.

Greenspan was one of the most consequential public servants of the twentieth century. He served his country for decades. He admitted his mistakes publicly. He died at a hundred. He deserves the respectful obituaries he is getting.

But he was also the maestro of a system that bitcoin was designed to be an alternative to, and on the day after his death that is the thing this newsletter should say. The man deserves to be remembered. The system he built deserves to be understood for what it was. Bitcoin exists in structural response to that system, not to that man. The distinction matters, and now that Greenspan is gone, it is worth getting right.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

The Bank Of England Just Abandoned Its Strict Stablecoin Holding Limits

Bank of England backs down on strict stablecoin holding limits, sets $50 billion issuance cap

The Bank of England Monday abandoned its proposed retail stablecoin holding limits in favor of an aggregate forty-billion-pound issuance cap, and softened yield restrictions on token issuers ahead of a planned 2027 market launch. The reversal positions the UK closer to the US GENIUS Act framework and represents a meaningful retreat from one of the most restrictive stablecoin regimes proposed by any major central bank.

Taiko Just Halted Its Ethereum Layer 2 After A Bridge Got Drained

Taiko halts its Ethereum layer-2 network after a bridge exploit, token dives

Ethereum layer 2 network Taiko paused operations Monday after an attacker forged withdrawal proofs to drain roughly 1.7 million dollars from its bridge. The exploit follows the same architectural pattern as several of this year’s biggest bridge hacks, and the TAIKO token sold off sharply on the news. Cross-chain bridge security remains the unsolved problem of the layer 2 ecosystem.

Eighty-Nine Percent Of Central Banks Expect Gold Holdings To Rise

World Gold Council survey shows 89% of reserve managers expect official gold holdings to rise

The World Gold Council’s 2026 central bank survey, published this week, found that eighty-nine percent of reserve managers expect official gold holdings to rise over the next twelve months, the highest reading in the survey’s history. The data lands as the dollar index hovers near 100 and central banks continue to diversify away from US Treasuries. Bitcoin’s case as the digital version of the same trade has rarely been more topical.

Why Bitcoin Needs The Dollar To Die – Brent Johnson

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That ended over the past eight weeks. I am not sure most readers have processed what just happened.

Let me lay out what is actually in the market or about to be in the market, because I think the synthesis is more important than any single launch.

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On June 16, last Tuesday, BlackRock listed the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF on Nasdaq under the ticker BITA. The fund holds spot bitcoin and shares of BlackRock’s flagship IBIT spot Bitcoin ETF, and writes monthly covered call options on roughly twenty-five to thirty-five percent of its net asset value. The option premiums are distributed to investors as monthly income. The fund targets fifteen to twenty-five percent annual yield while retaining roughly seventy percent of bitcoin’s upside. The expense ratio is sixty-five basis points. BlackRock filed the final 8-A on June 11 and launched five days later, racing to get to market roughly two weeks ahead of Goldman Sachs, whose structurally similar Bitcoin Premium Income ETF was filed in April and is expected to become effective around July 1 under the standard SEC seventy-five-day registration clock.

Read those numbers again. The largest asset manager in the world, the issuer of the largest spot Bitcoin ETF on earth, just built and launched a structured income product directly on top of their own spot Bitcoin ETF. Two weeks later, Goldman Sachs is launching the same type of product. These are the two most consequential names in institutional asset management. They are not making sequential decisions about whether bitcoin is real. They are racing each other to the next product layer.

The same Tuesday that BlackRock launched BITA, Coinbase rolled out the largest product update in its history. The exchange now offers stock and ETF trading. Options on stocks and crypto. Pre-IPO perpetual futures on SpaceX, with OpenAI and Anthropic to follow. A registered AI advisor. A USDC credit card with five percent bitcoin rewards on travel spending. A user can now allocate a portfolio across stocks, ETFs, options, crypto, pre-IPO derivatives, and stablecoin payments without leaving the application.

Three days later, on Friday June 19, Franklin Templeton, a one-point-seven-trillion-dollar asset manager, filed two new ETFs with the SEC. The Franklin US Equity Bitcoin DRIP Index ETF and the Franklin US Innovation Bitcoin DRIP Index ETF would each hold a basket of large-cap US stocks weighted at roughly ninety-five percent of net asset value, with the remaining five percent in bitcoin exposure. Dividends from the underlying equity holdings would be systematically reinvested into bitcoin rather than back into the equity portfolio, with quarterly rebalancing trimming the bitcoin allocation back to four-and-a-half percent when reinvestment pushed it above five, and a hard twenty percent cap on bitcoin between rebalancing dates. Target effective date is September 1, 2026. This is a product category that did not exist a month ago. It is not a bitcoin ETF or a stock ETF. It is an equity income vehicle that automatically converts traditional corporate cash distributions into bitcoin exposure on a quarterly basis. The structure is a genuinely new wrapper, and one of the largest asset managers on earth is the one filing for it.

In the same eight-week window, Digital Credit, the asset class built around Strategy’s STRC and Strive’s SATA preferred stock complexes, just had its first major stress event. STRC traded as low as eighty-two dollars and fifty cents intraday last Thursday before recovering. SATA went from par down to the low nineties before bouncing equally hard. Matt Cole, the Strive CEO, published a thread on X explaining the dynamics as a leverage liquidation rather than a credit event, and the asset class largely survived its first real test. I wrote about it Friday. The point I want to make today is different. The fact that there is now an asset class called Digital Credit, with multiple issuers, billions of dollars of outstanding paper, and enough institutional participation to produce a real leverage cascade, is itself a maturation event. Eighteen months ago this asset class did not exist as a category. Today it is generating its own boom-bust cycles.

The Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, FinCEN, and NCUA jointly proposed customer identification program rules for payment stablecoin issuers on the same Thursday, implementing the GENIUS Act. That is six federal agencies producing coordinated rulemaking around a payment-rail infrastructure that did not have any federal framework eighteen months ago. The rules are not the product. The product is the regulatory clarity that allows institutional capital to build products on top of the rails. The product, in other words, is the green light.

And underneath all of that, the stablecoin market itself continued its quiet build-out. Tether Gold options launched on Bybit. Ledn added Tether Gold to its lending platform. Drift Protocol continued its transition to USDT as its core settlement layer after the April exploit. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s stablecoin issuer guidelines went into effect. The plumbing kept building while everyone watched the price.

I want to step back from the inventory and make the structural argument, because the synthesis is the point.

Every mature asset class develops a predictable product stack over time. The arc looks roughly the same in every case. Spot exposure comes first. Then derivatives, including futures and then options. Then ETFs. Then leveraged and inverse ETFs. Then income overlays, including covered calls, defined-outcome funds, and structured notes. Then yield-bearing wrappers. Then automated allocation vehicles like target-date funds and DRIP products. Then synthetic exposure through baskets, indices, and tokenized wrappers. Each layer is built on top of the prior layers. Each layer expands the addressable investor base, because each layer matches a different investor’s specific need for yield, tax treatment, risk profile, or operational simplicity.

US equities took roughly a century to build that full stack. Gold took roughly fifty years from the launch of gold futures on COMEX at the end of 1974 to the current product complex. Bitcoin just compressed the same arc into roughly the last eighteen months, with the most consequential product layers built in the last eight weeks.

That compression is the story.

The reason it matters is that asset class maturation changes the question every investor faces. For most of bitcoin’s history, the question was binary. Do you own it or not. That was the question because spot ownership was the only meaningful way to express the view. The presence of a futures market or a single ETF did not really change the question. It just changed the wrapper. What has changed in the last eight weeks is that there are now genuinely different ways to express a bitcoin view that produce structurally different outcomes for different investor types. Income-oriented investors can buy BITA and capture fifteen to twenty-five percent yield from bitcoin’s implied volatility while still participating in roughly seventy percent of the upside. Tax-sensitive investors can hold IBIT in their taxable accounts and a bitcoin DRIP product in their retirement accounts to manage tax lots differently. Conservative investors who want bitcoin exposure but cannot stomach spot volatility can hold the equity-dividend wrappers that smooth their entry. Aggressive investors can lever Digital Credit preferreds for enhanced carry, and now have an idea of what happens when that leverage stack unwinds.

The question is no longer whether to own bitcoin. The question is which wrapper, in what size, for what tax treatment, with what yield overlay, in which account, with what counterparty risk profile, paired with what hedges. That is the same question sophisticated investors ask about US equity exposure. It is the same question sophisticated investors ask about gold exposure. It is the question sophisticated investors ask about every mature asset class, because every mature asset class offers enough different wrappers that the wrapper choice itself becomes the alpha.

I want to be honest about the complications, because this is not a victory lap.

The first is that product proliferation is not the same thing as product quality. The early years of any asset class involve products that look genius in good times and break in stress. Last Thursday’s Digital Credit leverage flush was the first real example in this cycle. There will be others. The covered-call income ETFs sound terrific in sideways markets and look meaningfully worse in sharp upside moves where the call options cap the upside on the hedged portion of the book. The equity-dividend wrappers are elegant in theory and untested in practice. Some of these products will not be in the market three years from now. Investors should treat the new wrappers with appropriate skepticism even as they treat the asset class with appropriate seriousness.

The second is that compression carries risk. The reason it took US equities a century to build a comparable product stack is that each layer was tested by multiple market cycles before the next layer was added. Bitcoin has not had that luxury. The product stack is being built in real time, with real capital, and many of the structural vulnerabilities will only be discovered the next time the market hits real stress. Friday’s leverage flush in Digital Credit is one early example. There will be more.

The third is that institutional product proliferation can change the underlying asset’s character. Bitcoin’s appeal for many of its long-time holders was specifically that it sat outside the traditional financial system. A bitcoin held in self-custody has no counterparty. A bitcoin held in BITA has BlackRock as the issuer, a regulated custodian holding the underlying assets, Nasdaq as the listing venue, and a network of options market makers writing the calls. That is not the same instrument. Both can be true at once. Bitcoin the protocol remains exactly what it has always been, while bitcoin the financialized exposure becomes increasingly indistinguishable from any other Wall Street product. The reader who internalizes this distinction has a clearer picture of what they are actually owning when they buy each wrapper.

The honest read is that bitcoin spent more than a decade being treated as a speculative instrument because the practical product stack to express the view differently did not yet exist. It is now an asset class. The investors who recognize that distinction position differently than the investors who do not. The investors who recognize it will think about wrapper selection, tax treatment, yield overlays, and counterparty risk the way they think about every other line item in their portfolio. The investors who do not recognize it will keep arguing about price.

The pattern is in the data. BlackRock launched the first major income wrapper last Tuesday. Goldman is two weeks behind. Franklin Templeton filed the first DRIP wrappers last Friday. Coinbase rebuilt itself as a multi-asset platform the same day BITA launched. Digital Credit survived its first stress test on the day before. The Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, FinCEN, and NCUA produced coordinated stablecoin rulemaking inside the same week. The plumbing kept building.

This is what asset class maturation looks like from the inside. It rarely announces itself with a single headline. It accumulates as a series of individual launches that each look small in isolation and add up to something structural when viewed together. Eighteen months from now most of these products will be normalized portfolio components, and the conversations will be about the next layer.

For now, the data point worth holding onto is this. Eight weeks ago, the bitcoin product stack was thin enough that the question for most investors was still whether to own it. Today, the product stack is rich enough that the question is how. That is a meaningful change. It happened while you were watching the price.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Capital B Just Got Approval To Raise €105 Billion For Bitcoin Purchases

Capital B shareholders approve €100B debt capacity to expand Bitcoin treasury

Europe’s first dedicated Bitcoin treasury company, Capital B, won shareholder approval Wednesday for up to €105 billion in financing capacity, including €5 billion in equity and €100 billion in credit instruments. The France-listed firm currently holds 3,139 BTC and targets 15,000 by 2027. Strategy’s corporate playbook just got formally adopted across the Atlantic.

The CFTC Just Permanently Banned Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky

CFTC permanently bans Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky from U.S. commodity markets

The CFTC entered a consent order Thursday permanently banning Alex Mashinsky from trading or registering with the agency, closing its 2023 enforcement action over the Celsius collapse. Mashinsky is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence for fraud. The order resolves the regulator’s first enforcement case against a digital asset lending platform.

Microsoft Just Warned About Crypto Wallet Malware Spreading Via USB Sticks

Microsoft found malware that hijacks crypto wallets and spreads through USB sticks

Microsoft Threat Intelligence warned Thursday about new Windows malware that monitors clipboards to swap copied crypto wallet addresses for attacker-controlled ones, harvests seed phrases, and captures screenshots. The Trojan:Win32/CryptoBandits.A strain has infected endpoints since February and spreads via USB drives using Tor for command-and-control.

Bitcoin Just Hit Its $28 Trillion Tipping Point - Ex-CFTC Insider Caroline Pham

“I’m Buying Bitcoin Like Crazy” - Grant Cardone

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The Crypto Advisor - My weekly newsletter for registered investment advisors, combining macro trends, Wall Street insights, and crypto – all in one place..

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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Matt Cole, the CEO of Strive, answered that question publicly in a long thread on X that I think will be remembered as one of the best in-flight explanations any CEO has given in this asset class.

Cole’s framing is that what happened today was a leverage liquidation, not a deterioration in underlying credit quality. He drew the parallel to traditional finance directly, pointing to the long history of hedge fund blowups that involved highly leveraged positions in US Treasuries. Not because Treasuries became poor credits, he wrote, but because investors became overextended while trying to earn additional yield on assets that appeared safe and stable. That, he argued, is the dynamic that played out today in Digital Credit. He noted that Strive’s dividend reserves remain intact, that the company is not under stress, and that the creditworthiness of the issuers is substantially unchanged from where it was before the volatility began.

I want to walk through why Cole’s framing is right, why it matters for the broader Digital Credit asset class going forward, and what the honest read on the road ahead actually looks like.

Start with the mechanics, because the mechanics matter.

Digital Credit instruments like STRC and SATA were designed to do something specific. They are variable-rate perpetual preferred stocks engineered to trade with low volatility near par, paying dividends in the high single digits to low double digits, and giving bitcoin treasury companies a way to raise capital without selling bitcoin. The structure is elegant on paper. The issuer locks in a relatively stable funding source. The investor gets predictable income at a yield meaningfully above Treasuries with downside protection that, at least in theory, looks closer to fixed income than to equity.

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The problem with predictable income at yields above Treasuries is the same problem income markets have always had. When sophisticated investors find an instrument that throws off reliable carry with manageable volatility, the math on borrowing against it to enhance returns becomes irresistible. Someone earning eleven and a half percent on STRC at par decides that posting it as collateral and borrowing against it to lever the position is the obvious next step. The new position now yields the original carry plus whatever spread the leverage creates. Multiply that across enough sophisticated holders and you have built a structure that is stable as long as price action cooperates and dangerous as soon as it does not.

What happened today was that price action stopped cooperating, and the leverage stack unwound the way leverage stacks always unwind. STRC dropping below ninety triggered margin calls for holders who had borrowed against it. Those holders had to sell to meet the calls. The selling drove the price lower. Lower prices triggered more margin calls. The cycle fed on itself for a few hours until buyers showed up at distress levels and the price recovered.

This is exactly the dynamic that has played out in every major fixed-income blowup in TradFi history. Long Term Capital Management collapsed in 1998 because it was leveraged twenty-five to one on positions that looked uncorrelated at the time and turned out to be highly correlated when liquidity dried up. The 2007-2008 mortgage securities collapse had a similar structure underneath the credit story. Bear Stearns lost its hedge funds in mid-2007 because of forced selling in mortgage paper that was still paying its coupons. The Archegos collapse in 2021 happened because Bill Hwang was running roughly five to one leverage on equity total return swaps. In every case the underlying assets were either intact or only modestly impaired. The blowup came from the leverage layer, not the asset layer.

Cole’s LTCM parallel is the right one. Today was the same structural event in a much smaller and newer market.

The reason this matters beyond today’s price action is that Digital Credit is genuinely a new asset class. Strategy’s preferred stock complex, Strive’s SATA, and the other issues in development collectively represent the first real attempt to build a fixed-income instrument backed by a bitcoin treasury. There is roughly fifteen billion dollars of issuance outstanding across the various preferred classes today, which sounds large in isolation but is small relative to the trillions of dollars in traditional fixed-income markets. The asset class is at the stage where its structural vulnerabilities have not yet been mapped because not enough time has passed and not enough stress events have occurred to map them.

Today provided one of those stress events. The fact that it resolved in a V-shape rather than a cascade lower tells you something important about the demand side. There were buyers at the intraday lows. Cole noted this explicitly in his thread, calling the sharp recoveries an encouraging sign for the health of the asset class. He is right to call attention to it. A leverage flush that drives prices ten or fifteen percent below par and then gets met by aggressive buying is structurally a healthier outcome than the alternative, where the cascade continues until intervention is required. The Digital Credit asset class just took a real punch and stayed on its feet.

I do want to be honest about what today also revealed, because there are uncomfortable implications that the bull case has to engage with.

The first is that the “stable income near par” pitch is going to need refinement. STRC was designed to trade near par through monthly dividend rate adjustments. Today it traded at $82.50 intraday. Whatever the technical explanation for that price action, the lived experience of a holder watching the position move from par to the low eighties in a single session is not the experience the instrument was sold to deliver. The structure may still be working as designed for issuers and long-term holders. It is not working as advertised for retail investors who bought into the pitch about low volatility and stable income. That is a real gap between marketing and reality, and the asset class needs to close it or accept that the addressable investor base is smaller than initially modeled.

The second is that the leverage incentive is structural and persistent. Cole is correct that the leverage layer caused today’s volatility and that the underlying credit quality is intact. He is also correct that the road to hell is paved with carry. The thing about that road is that it does not get rebuilt voluntarily by the people walking down it. As long as Digital Credit instruments offer attractive carry relative to alternatives, someone will lever them. The lesson learned today by a portion of the leveraged base will be unlearned in the next quiet stretch by a new portion of the leveraged base. The asset class will see this dynamic again. The question is whether the next iteration is smaller because lessons were learned or larger because the asset class itself has grown.

The third is that issuers can do things to make the structure more resilient, and the next eighteen months are going to test whether they will. Tighter monthly rate-reset mechanisms. Clearer prospectus language about the volatility profile. Possibly some form of issuer-side market support program at distress levels, though that introduces its own problems. The point is that Digital Credit is still being engineered in real time, and today’s stress event is the data point that will inform the next generation of the structure.

What you should take from today is closer to Cole’s framing than the panicked framing you will see on other parts of crypto Twitter. A leverage liquidation event is not a credit event. The companies behind these instruments are operationally fine. The dividend reserves are intact. The structural innovation that Digital Credit represents is still a real innovation, and the bid that appeared at distress levels is the strongest evidence we have that the asset class is being taken seriously by capital that knows what it is doing.

Cole closed his thread with a line that I think is worth sitting with. He wrote that “a liquidation event and a credit event are not the same thing.” That distinction is the entire piece. If you are a holder of any of these instruments, the question to ask yourself tonight is which one you are actually exposed to. If your position is unlevered, today was an opportunity to add at distress prices. If your position is levered, today was the reminder that the leverage is the risk, not the asset.

Digital Credit just had its first real stress test. The asset class survived it. The investors who were levered into it did not all survive it. That is the actual story.

Read Cole’s full thread on X. It is the cleanest in-flight explanation any CEO has given in this asset class, and the framing it provides is going to be referenced for years.

I’ll see you Monday.

Five Federal Agencies Just Proposed Bank-Style KYC Rules For Stablecoin Issuers

Federal Reserve Moves To Close Stablecoin Loopholes With New Customer ID Rules

The Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, FinCEN, and NCUA jointly proposed customer identification program rules for payment stablecoin issuers Thursday, implementing the GENIUS Act. Public comment runs 60 days. Fed Governor Michael Barr warned the GENIUS Act framework still does not adequately address illicit finance risks in secondary stablecoin markets.

The Drift Exploit Just Claimed Another Casualty With Pyra Shutting Down

Solana’s $1B USDC mint collides with DeFi app shutdown as users face unfinished Drift recovery

Crypto payments platform Pyra announced Thursday it has stopped accepting new users and canceled existing payment cards, with withdrawals available through a web portal until September 15. The shutdown is fallout from the April 1 Drift Protocol exploit that drained $285 million. Pyra will also distribute future Drift recovery tokens through the portal.

Aster Just Popped 10% On A Token Buyback And Burn Upgrade

Aster popped over 10% on radical “buyback and burn” upgrade. But gains were short-lived

Aster Chain’s ASTER token jumped more than 10% Thursday after the protocol announced a “buyback and burn” mechanism for fee revenue. The rally faded as the hawkish Fed backdrop overwhelmed protocol-specific bullish news, a now-familiar pattern of token-level catalysts losing to macro this week.

Bitcoin TANKS To $64K After Warsh Goes Full Hawk

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Then he abstained from the dot plot.

Then he announced five new task forces, beginning work within the next “couple of weeks,” that will review the Fed’s approach to communications, its inflation framework, its data sources, the balance sheet, and productivity.

I want to walk through what this all means, because almost every piece of analysis you will read in the next forty-eight hours is going to focus on the rate decision, which was a foregone conclusion priced at ninety-seven percent before the meeting opened. The actual story is what happened to how the Fed will communicate going forward, and the implications for any investor whose strategy depends on Fed forward guidance are larger than any single rate move would have been.

Start with the historical context, because it matters.

The Federal Reserve became a forward-guidance institution in stages. Alan Greenspan ran the central bank with a famously opaque style for nineteen years, on the theory that deliberate ambiguity gave the Fed maximum operational flexibility. Ben Bernanke broke with that approach beginning in 2003 with the introduction of formal forward-guidance language, and significantly expanded the practice during the 2008 crisis when conventional rate tools were exhausted and the Fed needed communication itself to function as a policy tool. The dot plot, formally known as the Summary of Economic Projections, was added in 2012 as part of that expansion. Janet Yellen embraced forward guidance further. Jerome Powell turned it into the central pillar of how the Fed communicated with markets during the 2020 pandemic response and the 2022 inflation fight. By 2025, market participants had been trained for roughly thirteen years to treat Fed communication as the dominant signal driving rate-sensitive asset prices.

Warsh has been on record opposing this expansion for the entire duration. He left the Fed Board in 2011, before the dot plot was even introduced, and spent the following fourteen years in op-eds, Hoover Institution work, and congressional testimony arguing that the Fed should communicate less, not more. He believed forward guidance reduced the Fed’s flexibility, created false certainty among market participants, and turned the institution into something closer to a market-management agency than a monetary policy authority. Wednesday was the first day he had operational power to act on those views, and his very first action as Chair was to make the institution substantially less communicative on every measurable dimension.

This is not a stylistic preference. It is a regime change.

The downstream implications for how markets function are significant. Equity strategists have spent the better part of two decades building frameworks that parse Fed statement language, dot plot shifts, and press conference tone for directional signal. Algorithmic trading models execute trades within milliseconds of FOMC releases based on changes in specific phrases. Rates desks build positioning around expected communication patterns. None of those tools become wrong overnight. They become structurally less useful, because the input data they were calibrated against is now being deliberately reduced.

The MOVE index, which measures expected volatility in the Treasury bond market, is the cleanest single measure of how the market processes this kind of regime change. A Fed that deliberately says less should mechanically widen the range of plausible rate paths the market has to price, which means higher rate volatility, which means a higher MOVE. If the MOVE index does not move materially over the next two to three weeks, the market does not yet understand what changed on Wednesday. The repricing will come later and harder. If the MOVE moves now, the smart institutional money has already started to position.

For the specific audience reading this newsletter, the implications for bitcoin are worth pulling out separately.

Galaxy Digital and Ark Invest have spent the past eighteen months arguing publicly that Fed communications uncertainty is structurally bullish for bitcoin as a non-sovereign store of value. The thesis goes like this. When the Fed reaction function is highly legible, market participants can confidently model out the expected path of monetary policy and price risk assets against that model. When the reaction function becomes less legible, the variance of plausible outcomes widens, and assets whose investment case does not depend on a predictable central bank gain a relative premium. Bitcoin’s investment thesis is structurally independent of the Fed’s communications approach, because bitcoin’s monetary policy is fixed by protocol. The asset benefits not just from Fed easing, which has historically been the most-cited bull case, but from any erosion in the market’s confidence that the Fed’s actions can be reliably anticipated.

This argument has been theoretical for two years. Warsh just made it operational. The market has not yet repriced this implication, and the lag is itself the opportunity.

I want to be honest about the complications, because they are real and the bull case I just laid out is not the only read.

The first complication is that less forward guidance also means less ability to manage market expectations during stress events. The Fed used forward guidance to prevent cascading liquidations in March 2020 and to anchor inflation expectations during the 2022 hiking cycle. Both interventions worked because the market believed the Fed’s communicated reaction function. A Warsh Fed that systematically refuses to telegraph its reaction function will, by construction, have less ability to deploy this kind of stress-event credibility. The next financial crisis will test whether Warsh’s communications restraint is the right call. It is possible the restraint is correct in normal times and very expensive when liquidity stress hits.

The second complication is the political dimension. Warsh was confirmed in May by a vote of 54-45, the most partisan confirmation of a Fed chair in the institution’s history. President Trump publicly and repeatedly pushed for lower rates throughout the spring. Warsh’s first action as Chair was to hold rates unanimously, to release a dot plot showing nine of eighteen committee members projecting hikes rather than cuts in 2026, and to abstain personally from the projection altogether. None of that is what Trump wanted. The political pressure question that dominated his confirmation hearing got an early answer, and the answer was that Warsh’s Fed will not be doing what the White House asked. How that plays out over the next twelve months is one of the more important macro questions in markets, and one nobody can answer yet.

The third complication is the task forces. Warsh announced five of them on Wednesday, beginning work within two weeks, covering communications, inflation framework, data sources, balance sheet, and productivity. The communications task force is the most consequential because it codifies what we just saw in Wednesday’s release as the start of an institutional process, not a one-off chairmanship choice. The inflation framework task force is the second most consequential because it sets up the possibility of formal changes to the Fed’s two percent target – though Warsh himself said he does not believe in revisiting the target until it has actually been reached, which is a notable signal that the framework review will be process-oriented rather than goal-revisionist in the near term. The other three task forces matter at the operational level. Together, they confirm that Wednesday was the start of a deliberate institutional overhaul, not a single Chair making a stylistic choice on his first day.

What you should watch from here is whether the next round of Fed speeches over the coming weeks stays disciplined. Individual regional Fed presidents have historically been the source of off-message signaling between FOMC meetings. If Warsh has imposed institutional discipline, those speeches will become less informative. If individual presidents continue to signal their personal rate preferences publicly, the regime change is operating only at the FOMC level, which is a meaningfully weaker version of what Wednesday’s actions implied.

The dot plot was the symbol. The 130-word statement was the substance. The task forces are the durable infrastructure. None of it changes the rate decision. All of it changes how the market should be processing the rate decision and every rate decision to come.

This is a structural change to the information environment in which every rate-sensitive asset trades. Markets accustomed to forward guidance are about to trade an information vacuum they have not had to trade in fourteen years. Investors who adapt quickly will price the change correctly. Investors who keep trading off a Powell-era framework are about to be wrong-footed in ways that show up first in volatility and second in cross-asset correlations.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Strategy’s STRC Preferred Stock Hit A Record Low Below Par

Strategy’s STRC preferred stock hits a record low below par

Strategy’s variable-rate STRC preferred stock closed at $89 Wednesday, 11% below its $100 par value and a record low since its July 2025 launch. The company has paused the at-the-market issuance program that uses STRC sales to fund bitcoin purchases. STRC dividends prompted Strategy’s first BTC sale in years earlier this month.

Greece Looks Set To Reject Binance’s MiCA Application

Binance Could Face EU Exit as Reports Say Greek Regulator is Set to Reject MiCA License

Reuters reported Tuesday that Greece’s Hellenic Capital Market Commission is preparing to deny Binance’s pan-European MiCA license application. Binance disputed the account and said its application was deemed compliant, with an update promised before June 30. Without MiCA, Binance loses EU access on July 1.

Standard Chartered Just Set A $100 Price Target On Uniswap

Uniswap price surges 25% as Standard Chartered’s $100 UNI call sparks breakout

Standard Chartered initiated coverage on Uniswap with a $100 price target by 2030, a 40x projection that bets tokenized assets in DeFi grow 37x over the decade. UNI surged 22% Tuesday and hit $3.70 intraday Wednesday. The token is up 42% over the past week.

Bitcoin Faces Major FED Decision - Should We Be Concerned?

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The mechanism that got him there is also the most interesting story in capital markets this week, and almost nobody is framing it correctly.

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 12, raising $75 billion in the largest initial public offering in financial history. Demand topped $350 billion. Retail investors alone placed more than $100 billion in orders. BlackRock requested at least $5 billion worth of shares. The offering was more than four times oversubscribed. The stock closed its first trading day at $161, then ripped through $180 on Monday, then touched $225 intraday on Tuesday before settling lower. At that intraday high, SpaceX’s market capitalization briefly approached $3 trillion, overtaking both Microsoft and Amazon and briefly making it the world’s fourth-largest public company. Three trading sessions. Sixty seven percent above the IPO price at the peak. That is the surface story.

Here is the part nobody is talking about.

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Morningstar published a research note pegging SpaceX’s fair value at $63 per share. Their valuation implies a roughly $780 billion enterprise value, which is roughly a 53% discount to the IPO price and roughly a 72% discount to Tuesday’s intraday high. The analysts arrived at the $63 figure by probability-weighting three scenarios, including two scenarios that assume SpaceX successfully commercializes data centers in space and achieves rapid Starship reusability. Even with those bullish assumptions baked in, Morningstar concluded the stock should trade for roughly a quarter of where it’s trading now. CFRA has a Sell rating on the name. Of the five major analysts who have published 12-month targets since the IPO, four believe the stock is worth less today than it costs to buy.

The fundamental backdrop matters here. SpaceX posted $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and a net loss of approximately $4.9 billion. The company reported a $4.3 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone. Long-term debt sits at $29.1 billion. At Tuesday’s close, SPCX trades at well above 130 times trailing revenue. That is not a forward earnings multiple, because there are no earnings. It is a sales multiple, on a company that loses billions of dollars a quarter, at a valuation that briefly placed it ahead of every public company on earth except three.

This is where Jim Cramer enters the story, and where you should pay attention even if you have spent the last decade making fun of him.

Cramer flat-out called SpaceX a meme stock on CNBC last week. His specific concern was not the fundamentals, which any analyst can see. It was the trading mechanics. He pointed out that retail investors were placing market orders rather than limit orders, that there were “no sellers of size” to absorb the buying pressure, and that the price action was being driven by inexperienced participants chasing the largest IPO in history without any real price discipline. That is the textbook definition of meme stock dynamics. It is also the textbook condition under which a stock can trade at three or four times its fundamental fair value for an extended period without any single trigger forcing a repricing.

I want to acknowledge the obvious objection here, which is that Cramer’s track record on calls like this is famously inverse. He called bitcoin “monopoly money” before it ran. His bearish calls are an entire trading meme. Discounting his concern entirely on those grounds is the easy move, and it is also the wrong move. The Cramer-as-reverse-indicator trade works when his calls are driven by personal taste or general market direction. It does not work when his observation is about specific market microstructure that you can verify independently. The question is not whether you trust Cramer. The question is whether you can look at the actual trading data and see what he is describing. Retail order flow dominating the tape, market orders driving prints, no sellers of size, fundamental analysts pegging the stock at a quarter of where it trades. All of that is verifiable. None of it depends on Cramer being right about anything.

For our specific audience there is also a crypto button on this story that the broader financial press is mishandling. SpaceX disclosed in its IPO prospectus that it holds 18,712 bitcoin. Tesla, the other Musk-affiliated public company, holds approximately 11,509 bitcoin. Together, Musk-linked companies control more than 30,000 bitcoin. Public investors are getting their first regulated equity wrapper exposure to that combined position through SPCX, which means a non-trivial slice of every dollar flowing into the IPO is implicit bitcoin exposure. Whether the buyers know that or not is a separate question.

What does it all add up to?

The largest IPO in history, on the most highly anticipated company in private markets, has resolved into a trading pattern that looks indistinguishable from the meme-stock dynamics that defined GameStop and AMC. The valuation gap to fundamentals is wider than any institutional-quality asset of this size in recent memory. The buying pressure is being supplied by retail investors using market orders, which is the exact mechanism that produces price action untethered from underlying value. And the resulting valuation, multiplied by Musk’s 42% ownership stake plus his option grants, has minted the first trillionaire in human history.

I am not telling you the bull case is wrong. Musk himself posted on X over the weekend that SpaceX “might be able to reach approximately” $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030, up from $18.7 billion in 2025. That is a 54-fold revenue increase in five years. If he delivers, the current valuation looks reasonable in retrospect, and the bears look foolish. The bull case is real and the optionality on the company is genuine. I am also not telling you the bear case is wrong. Morningstar’s $63 fair value is the output of disciplined valuation work that already credits the company for difficult engineering wins they have not yet achieved. The bear case is also real.

What I am telling you is that the dynamics underneath SPCX’s price are momentum dynamics, and the line between “meme stock” and “credible institutional asset” has blurred to invisibility. The investors who think they are buying a sober institutional name may actually be buying into the same retail-driven momentum trade that defined the last three years of equity speculation, just at a scale that has never been attempted before. That distinction matters for sizing, for risk management, and for how the position behaves the first time the broader market decides to reprice risk assets.

The largest IPO in history is trading like a meme stock. The richest man in history just got richer than every bitcoin on earth combined on the strength of it. The numbers stopped making sense. Whether you buy, sell, or stay flat is your decision. But pretend you know what you are buying.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Japan Just Raised Rates To 1 Percent For The First Time Since 1995

BOJ raises policy rate to 1%: Why crypto traders are watching Japan

The Bank of Japan raised its short-term policy rate by 25 basis points to 1.0% Tuesday, the highest since 1995, in a 7-1 vote that takes effect Wednesday. Yen shorts sit at a nine-year high. Every BoJ rate hike since March 2024 has produced an 18% to 32% Bitcoin drawdown.

Coinbase Just Launched Stock Options, Pre-IPO Perps, And An AI Advisor

Coinbase introduces AI advisor, stock options and pre-IPO markets in finance push

Coinbase rolled out its biggest product update in years Tuesday: stock and ETF trading, options for stocks and crypto, pre-IPO perps for SpaceX with OpenAI and Anthropic on deck, an SEC-registered AI advisor, a USDC credit card, and 5% bitcoin rewards on travel. The “everything exchange” just became literal.

Investors Just Bought 259,000 Bitcoin Between $59K And $67K In 10 Days

259,000 Bitcoin Bought In 10 Days: Is This What A Market Bottom Looks Like?

Investors bought a net 259,298 BTC between $59,000 and $67,000 over the past 10 days. Glassnode’s Accumulation Trend Score has held at 1.0, the highest possible reading, for more than two weeks. Buying is broad-based across every wallet cohort. The strongest reading of the entire drawdown.

Bitcoin Is Going To $7M – Saylor Says “It’s Inevitable”

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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I want to walk through what has actually happened, because the sequence matters and most of the industry’s attention has been elsewhere.

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Start with May 29. On that single day the CFTC took a coordinated set of actions that established the regulatory framework for perpetual contracts in US derivatives markets. The Commission approved KalshiEX’s BTCPERP contract, making it the first regulated bitcoin perpetual futures product ever listed on a US designated contract market. The Commission issued a Policy Statement explaining how it would supervise these instruments going forward. The Commission’s Market Participants Division issued Letter Number 26-17, which permits Coinbase Financial Markets to treat certain Deribit perpetuals as foreign futures under Regulation 30.1, with no-action relief for posting digital commodities and payment stablecoins as margin through an affiliated foreign broker. In one day, the agency built a path for both domestic listing and offshore access.

Two days later, on June 1, Kalshi filed to self-certify perpetual futures contracts on twelve additional digital assets. The full list includes Ethereum, Ripple, Solana, Dogecoin, Stellar, Chainlink, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Sui, Shiba Inu, Polkadot, and Hedera. The filing was a clear statement that the company intended to build the broadest regulated crypto perp lineup in the United States.

Three days after the filing, Kalshi launched Ethereum perpetual futures on June 4. Six days after that, the platform launched Solana perpetual futures on June 10. According to the company, additional contracts on Stellar, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, and Hedera are expected in the coming days. A separate filing for Hyperliquid perpetuals has been submitted, with no launch date announced. The product expansion is happening on a roughly weekly cadence under a CFTC framework that allows case-by-case review.

Two days after the Solana launch, the June 12 no-action letter dropped, opening a faster path for other registered exchanges to do what Kalshi has been doing. Bitnomial and Coinbase Derivatives, both CFTC-registered, are now positioned to convert their existing perpetual-style products into true perpetual futures without the multi-month review cycle that would otherwise apply.

In parallel with all of this, the industry is staffing up in a way that signals where it believes the regulatory tailwind is coming from. Backpack US, the recently launched US arm of the Backpack exchange, announced last Tuesday that former SEC Acting Chairman Michael Piwowar was joining its board. He joins former CFTC Acting Chair Mark Wetjen, who is already Backpack US president. Two former senior regulators at one US-based crypto exchange before that exchange has even posted meaningful trading volume. This pattern is happening across the industry as crypto firms position themselves for what they expect to be a sustained period of regulated US derivatives expansion.

Let me name what this all adds up to.

Perpetual futures are the single most actively traded financial product in global crypto markets. Bitcoin perp open interest globally sits at roughly fifty five billion dollars. Ethereum perps add another thirty one and a half billion. Solana perps another five and a half billion. Ripple perps another three billion. The vast majority of that activity has historically lived on offshore exchanges based in jurisdictions with comparatively light regulatory oversight. Binance has dominated. OKX has had a major slice. Bybit, BitMEX, and Deribit have had their cuts. None of those venues have been accessible to most US institutional capital. The institutional money managers, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and registered investment advisors who collectively control the largest pools of capital on earth have been structurally blocked from the most active part of the crypto market.

The CFTC’s recent actions change that calculus. A regulated, US-domiciled perpetual futures lineup gives institutional capital a legitimate venue. It gives prime brokers something to clear. It gives compliance officers something to approve. It gives counterparty risk officers something they can underwrite. None of those things were true of the offshore perp market. All of them are about to be true of the onshore one.

I want to be careful about overclaiming here. The June 12 no-action letter is narrow, temporary, and conditional. The Kalshi product launches are real but the open interest on those products is currently a fraction of what trades offshore. Institutional adoption of new derivatives products historically takes quarters to develop, not weeks. The path I am describing is not going to manifest in trading volumes by July. It is the kind of structural shift that becomes visible over six to twelve months and reshapes the market over two to three years.

But the direction is unmistakable and the speed is faster than almost anything the industry has seen on the regulatory side. Five years ago, anyone arguing that the CFTC would have a published framework for regulated crypto perpetual futures by mid-2026 would have been treated as a fantasist. Today the framework exists and is being executed against in real time.

The piece that I find most underappreciated is how this interacts with the CLARITY Act fight that I wrote about last Thursday. The CLARITY Act is structurally stuck on the ethics provisions question. The bill might pass in the next eight weeks. It might not. The crypto industry has built its 2026 regulatory strategy around CLARITY as the central deliverable. What the CFTC is doing in parallel reduces the cost of CLARITY failing. If the bill dies in the Senate this year, the spot side of the market still has the same regulatory ambiguity it has now. But the derivatives side has a framework. And institutional capital often cares more about the derivatives side than the spot side, because derivatives are where the leverage, hedging, and risk management infrastructure lives. A world where CLARITY dies but the CFTC perpetual framework expands is materially better than the consensus expectation of what failure looks like.

What you should be watching over the next sixty days is whether other US-registered designated contract markets file to use the June 12 conversion path before it expires on June 30. Whether Bitnomial and Coinbase Derivatives launch true perpetual products under the relief. Whether Kalshi gets its remaining altcoin perp approvals stamped. Whether other exchanges that historically operated offshore announce US-regulated derivatives plans. And whether the major institutional intermediaries, the prime brokers and FCMs and execution platforms, start advertising the ability to access these products to their clients.

The CLARITY Act fight will determine the regulatory environment for crypto spot markets in the United States for the next decade. That fight is important and uncertain and deserves the attention it gets. But the most consequential regulatory expansion in crypto over the past three weeks did not happen in Congress. It happened in a series of staff letters and no-action positions issued by a Commission that almost nobody is watching. The United States is quietly building the regulatory infrastructure to be the dominant venue for institutional crypto derivatives globally, and the industry that has spent eighteen months waiting on Congress is going to look up in six months and realize the bigger story was happening at the agency level all along.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Trump’s Iran Ceasefire Drove A Monday Crypto Rally

Bitcoin recovers to $66,000, but one analyst warns of a ‘dead-cat bounce’

Bitcoin jumped 3.95% Monday and crypto markets added nearly $40 billion in value after President Trump announced Sunday that the US reached a complete ceasefire with Iran. A signing ceremony is scheduled for June 19 in Switzerland. Traders are watching whether the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens to commercial traffic.

Polymarket Just Beat Hyperliquid In Daily Revenue For The First Time

Polymarket surpasses Hyperliquid in 24-hour revenue, pulling in $1.18M to Hyperliquid’s $815K

Polymarket pulled in $1.18 million in 24-hour revenue, surpassing Hyperliquid’s $815K, driven by World Cup trading and recently introduced taker fees on Polygon markets. The platform’s flagship World Cup Winner contract has surpassed $2.34 billion in cumulative volume. Polymarket is now the third-largest crypto revenue generator after Tether and Circle.

AERO Jumped 22% On Aerodrome’s Predictive Allocation Reveal

AERO Price Jumps 22% as Aerodrome Unveils Predictive Allocation Model

Aerodrome, the largest DEX on Coinbase’s Base network, announced Sunday it will replace its weekly voting system with a new mechanism called Predictive Allocation, launching in July. The system rewards participants for accurately forecasting where liquidity will be needed next. AERO surged 22% Monday on the announcement as derivatives volume jumped 266%.

Bitcoin RIPS Past $66K On Trump’s Iran Deal – Macro Monday

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I want to walk through this carefully because the historical record on capitulation as a bottoming indicator is strong, the current signal is real, and the structural story underneath this particular cycle is different from every prior one in a way that matters for what comes next.

Start with the historical record.

The largest downward difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin’s history happened in July 2021, when China’s mining ban forced large portions of the global hashrate offline almost overnight. The adjustment came in at negative twenty seven point nine four percent. Bitcoin was trading around thirty three thousand dollars in the days following. Four months later, Bitcoin printed an all-time high near sixty nine thousand. That is a one hundred ten percent rally from the post-capitulation level to the cycle peak, all in the four months immediately following the largest miner capitulation in Bitcoin’s history.

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The second relevant precedent is December 2022, the bottom of the FTX-driven bear market. Bitcoin was trading around sixteen thousand dollars. The network registered a roughly ten percent downward difficulty adjustment as older-rig operators were squeezed below break-even and powered down. The capitulation signal fired. Bitcoin then rallied roughly four times that level over the following eighteen months, eventually printing new all-time highs in early 2024.

VanEck published research in December noting that Bitcoin has historically posted positive ninety-day forward returns sixty five percent of the time when hashrate is shrinking. During the 2018 bear cycle, miner capitulation lasted seventy two days and was followed by a three hundred percent rally. The pattern is not perfect. Capitulation is not sufficient on its own. But the base rate strongly favors bullish forward returns once the signal has fired.

That is the case for treating Saturday’s adjustment as a meaningful bottom signal. Now let me walk through the part of the story that is genuinely different this cycle.

The biggest publicly traded Bitcoin miners are not pivoting to survive the squeeze. They are pivoting out of the business.

IREN Limited, formerly Iris Energy, has executed the most aggressive transition of any miner in the public markets. The company signed a five-year, nine point seven billion dollar AI cloud contract with Microsoft last November and has since stacked additional multi-billion-dollar agreements with NVIDIA and Dell to support the buildout. IREN currently holds zero bitcoin. It is no longer a Bitcoin miner. It is an AI infrastructure operator that retains some legacy mining revenue while the transition completes.

Core Scientific announced in April that it is converting three hundred megawatts of bitcoin mining capacity at its Pecos, Texas campus into AI infrastructure. To fund the transition, Core Scientific sold one hundred seventy five million dollars worth of Bitcoin in March, dropping its holdings from two thousand five hundred thirty seven coins down to roughly six hundred thirty.

Hut 8 told investors on its fourth quarter earnings call that bitcoin is no longer a long-term strategic focus for the company. MARA Holdings, which has been the loudest HODL advocate among public miners for years, softened its stance and now sells newly mined bitcoin opportunistically, with roughly twenty eight percent of its holdings either loaned or pledged. CleanSpark said on its Q1 2026 earnings call that Bitcoin mining investment does not make a lot of sense at current hashprices compared to the returns available in AI infrastructure.

Across Core Scientific, Bitdeer, Riot Platforms, and Bitfarms alone, public miners have sold roughly fifteen thousand bitcoin from their treasury holdings since the start of the year, with the proceeds going almost entirely to fund AI pivots. The miners are not just shutting down rigs because they can no longer afford to run them. They are shutting down rigs because they have found something they would rather do with the power.

The honest complication on top of this is Texas 4CP season. The four-coincident-peak mechanism in Texas creates a strong incentive for large ERCOT consumers, which includes most of the major US-based public miners, to voluntarily curtail during the four peak summer demand intervals because those four intervals set transmission costs for the following year. The 4CP season began in June. TheEnergyMag and others have noted that the recent hashrate rebound suggests some of the early June reduction may have been temporary curtailment rather than permanent shutdown. So a portion of what looks like capitulation in the data is in fact rational seasonal optimization by miners who plan to come back online the moment the peak demand windows close. The actual capitulation signal is buried inside a noisier dataset than usual.

So what does it all add up to?

The honest read is that Saturday’s drop is composed of real capitulation by smaller operators squeezed below break-even, seasonal Texas curtailment that is temporary, and structural exit from the business by the largest public miners reallocating to AI. The first two are reversible. The third is not.

For the bottom thesis, this composition is actually more bullish than a pure capitulation read would be.

A pure capitulation cycle leaves the same miner base behind, smaller and more efficient. When the price recovers, those miners turn back on and the next cycle ratchets hashrate back up. A structural exit cycle removes capacity permanently. The megawatts that IREN converted to a multi-year Microsoft lease are not coming back to Bitcoin mining. The Core Scientific Pecos buildout is the same story. Every public miner that retasks a gigawatt of power to AI is permanently reducing the long-term supply pressure on Bitcoin’s price from new issuance, because the bitcoin those miners would have produced over the next decade will not be produced by them.

The marginal seller of newly-mined bitcoin in a hypothetical 2027 to 2028 bull market is going to be a smaller and more concentrated set of operators than it was in 2024 to 2025. The miners who remain will be the ones who deliberately chose to stay in the business after observing the AI alternative, which selects for the structural HODLers and the operators with the lowest cost basis.

I want to be honest that this is a structural argument, not a short-term call. Capitulation has historically marked cycle lows. The current capitulation is real on the smaller-operator end. Bernstein projected a sixty thousand dollar bottom range and we are inside that range. Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick called the cycle low in on Friday. Spot ETF flows turned positive Friday for the first time in two weeks. These are all consistent signals that the cyclical bottom may be in. The AI pivot story does not contradict any of them. It adds a separate piece of structural support underneath them.

What you should watch from here is whether the hashrate recovers in the next two-week epoch. If most of the drop was Texas curtailment, hashrate will rebound quickly and the next adjustment around June 27 will be flat or positive. If the recovery is partial and slow, genuine capitulation is doing real work. Either outcome is consistent with the AI pivot accelerating. The Texas story is short-term noise. The AI pivot is the durable signal.

Capitulation has fired. The base rate says positive forward returns ninety days out. The miners not capitulating are leaving the business by choice. The supply picture is structurally tighter going forward than at any prior cycle bottom. The bull case for bitcoin from these levels is not a price prediction. It is a structural setup.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Bitcoin Thoughts And Analysis

Last time I shared charts, it was to make the argument that Bitcoin was likely “bottoming.” This was based on multiple ideas, notably that price was visiting the 200 weekly MA for the 4th time in history. It has only traded below it for more than a week in 2022, after FTX (9 months). We also had oversold conditions here for the 4th time ever, all bottoms. For the second time ever, we now have bullish divergence coming out of oversold RSI on the weekly chart.

Since we last spoke, we have 2 candles wicking below the 200 MA and closing above, all while sentiment is in the dumps and narrative about complete collapse are rampant.

I remain cautiously optimistic that the the path is up.

SBF Just Lost His Appeal And The Pardon Is His Only Path Left

Appeals court upholds FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud conviction and 25-year sentence on Friday, calling the prosecution’s evidence “robust.” The ruling closed his last legal path the same week he filed a presidential pardon petition with Trump. The pardon math is now the only math that matters.

Mastercard Just Built A Payment Rail For AI Agents

Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines to Unlock Super-Fast, Always-On Payments

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) on June 10, a payment network for autonomous AI agents to transact at machine speed. The launch included 30+ partners including Coinbase, Ripple, Stripe, and OKX, with credentials recorded on Polygon, Solana, and Base. The machine economy now has card-network rails.

Blockworks Just Bought Messari At 95 Percent Off

Blockworks Acquires Messari In Deal Highlighting Crypto’s Data Consolidation Race

Blockworks acquired Messari on Friday for just over $10M according to WSJ — a 95% discount from Messari’s $300M valuation in its 2022 Series B. The deal combines crypto’s two largest data platforms and signals broader industry consolidation as crypto M&A has hit 144 deals worth $11.8B year to date.

Bitcoin Just Got A $4 Trillion Catalyst - Carlos Domingo

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Promote your brand with The Wolf of All Streets. For sponsorship and partnership opportunities, contact info@thewolfofallstreets.io.

The Wolf Pack - My Telegram group where I share daily market updates, real-time observations, and ongoing discussions with the community. There’s a dedicated channel and group chat, and it’s completely free to join.

The Crypto Advisor - My weekly newsletter for registered investment advisors, combining macro trends, Wall Street insights, and crypto – all in one place..

X - I spend most of my time on X, contributing to CryptoTownHall every weekday morning, sharing random charts, and responding to as many of you as I can.

YouTube - Home of the Wolf Of All Streets Podcast and daily livestreams. Market updates, charts, and analysis!

The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this e-mail constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

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