BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $63,400
Market Capitalization: $1.27T
Hash Rate (90 days): 966.8 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 19,182,911
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 58.67%

What do these numbers mean?

Bitcoin's dollar exchange rate fell further this week, with many attributing the drop to liquidity rotating out of "risk" assets ahead of the SpaceX IPO. That's fine and normal. SpaceX is a once-in-a-lifetime company:

But red candles are back, and as Johan Bergman writes, bitcoin is a conviction-testing machine: weeks like this are exactly when people forget what it's actually about.

Per usual, Marty Bent raised a great point in his newsletter. Too many bitcoiners have grown complacent, assuming the ETFs, banks, and treasury companies will take care of making sure ‘number go up.’ Yet Satoshi designed bitcoin to separate money from the state and to give individuals a monetary good that can't be printed, manipulated, or seized without their private keys. Today's bitcoiners must continue to bring more sovereign individuals online. Bent's goal is to create 100 million humble sat stackers.

That's the market structure that lasts.

In the "Wild West" macro era Lyn Alden described this month, defined by fiscal dominance, fragmentation, and self-reliance, bitcoin makes sense, and more people need to learn that.

NEWS

Polymarket resolves "NO" on a Strategy bitcoin sale that actually happened

Galaxy Research detailed how Polymarket resolved its recurring "MicroStrategy sells any bitcoin by May 31?" market to NO even though Strategy disclosed that it sold 32 bitcoins between May 26 and 31. YES odds spiked from ~10% to ~80% on the filing before Polymarket posted "additional context" declaring that confirmation outside the window "does not qualify," crashing YES below 1 cent and sending the $301 million contract to a disputed UMA vote that finalized NO.

Truth by committee is no truth at all 

A prediction market exists to price what will happen; when it resolves against what demonstrably did happen, it stops pricing events and starts pricing how a committee will read its own rules after the bets are in. It appears that prediction markets, once heralded as a way to monetize information asymmetry and reward accurate forecasts, were just as corruptible as traditional financial instruments.

Zcash could have minted "unlimited" counterfeit coins

A white-hat researcher disclosed a critical flaw in Zcash's Orchard shielded pool that allowed the creation of unlimited, undetectable counterfeit ZEC, a bug that has been live in production since May of 2022. It was patched on June 1st, causing the price of ZEC to plummet 31% in a day. Taylor Hornby found the bug using Anthropic's newly released Opus 4.8 model. Nobody will ever know whether a hacker quietly discovered it first.

The whole point of bitcoin is verifiable scarcity

The one thing money must guarantee is that nobody is secretly printing it. For four years, Zcash harbored an inflation bug deep within its complex cryptographic protocol. In contrast, bitcoin's 21 million limit needs no trusted setup and no exotic cryptography to audit; anyone running a bitcoin node can verify the entire supply in seconds, which is precisely why bitcoin's conservatism, so often mistaken for stagnation, is its finest feature.

15-year-old physical bitcoin redeemed for $1.78 million 

A “Casascius” physical bitcoin minted in December 2011 was peeled and swept on-chain for the first time on Tuesday, unlocking the 25 bitcoins sealed behind its tamper-evident hologram — coins collectively worth under $100 at creation and about $1.78 million today. It was the 236th of 345 "Series 1" 25-BTC coins to be redeemed since developer Mike Caldwell began manufacturing them as a bitcoin conversation piece.

Below is an interesting video of Casascius coins being bought out of a vending machine way back when.

A bearer asset that actually bears 

A private key pressed into a brass coin in 2011 can still be used in 2026 with no software updates needed, no account to reopen, and no permission required — same key, same protocol, a more than 17,000-fold change in value. Try peeling a hologram off a 15-year-old "crypto" token with an admin key and see whether the “foundation” that issued the token still honors it.

A single seller dumps $1.3 billion of IBIT at a $29.5 million "urgency premium"

 NYDIG dissected a block trade where someone sold 29.21 million IBIT shares worth $1.26 billion, accepting a 2.3% discount worth about $29.5 million in exchange for immediate execution. The absence of any matching CME futures activity, plus a universe of holders too small to include anyone but a handful of giants, led NYDIG to conclude this was a directional long exiting a concentrated position, not a basis-trade unwind.

A whale leaves and the market shrugs 

One holder paid $29.5 million purely for the privilege of exiting now rather than bleeding out over multiple sessions, and IBIT absorbed the billion-dollar block and recovered within a minute. That is the bullish tell hiding inside a bearish print: the spot-and-ETF complex is now deep enough to swallow a sophisticated whale's full exit, and every coin a nervous institution sheds lands with a buyer who has a longer time horizon.

Crypto industry races to sell the Clarity Act as the clock winds down

 The Blockchain Association held a town hall this week arguing the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would strengthen, not weaken, law-enforcement tools against illicit finance. U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis warned that if the bill misses this year's narrow window it may not get another shot until 2030. Democratic concerns over the illicit-finance provisions remain the chief obstacle, with fewer than eight weeks of Senate floor time left before the midterm recess.

Bitcoin above it all

Bitcoin barely benefits from the Clarity Act because it's the one digital asset that everyone already agrees is a commodity rather than a security, which is exactly why the bill's hardest fights are over the thousands of tokens that aren't.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Texas Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock named a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Advisory Committee and set the state on a path to move its $10 million reserve out of BlackRock's IBIT and into directly-custodied bitcoin, with vendor bids due June 15.

French-listed Capital B asked shareholders to authorize up to €5 billion in new equity and a large pool of credit instruments to fund future bitcoin buys, after growing its stack to 3,139 coins.

The CFTC approved the first U.S. regulated bitcoin perpetual futures, clearing a “BTCPERP” contract on Kalshi and greenlighting perps at Coinbase's CFM unit, bringing the offshore market's most-traded product onshore.

CME Group launched cash-settled bitcoin volatility futures tied to its new BVX index, giving institutions a regulated, VIX-style way to hedge bitcoin volatility separately from price.

South Africa's Gauteng High Court ruled that bitcoin is both "money" and "capital" under the country's exchange-control regime, folding cross-border bitcoin transfers into the same rules that govern the rand.

Lightning Labs released "run-litd," a Claude Code skill that automates the full setup of a Lightning node — installing binaries, writing config files, creating wallets, and standing up background services, shipping it alongside a dozen other agent skills in its Lightning Agent Tools repo.

Lava launched the Lava Card, a secured Visa that funds spending from cash or stablecoins and pays bitcoin rewards on every purchase — 3% back for U.S. users and up to 5% at partner merchants, routing stablecoin balances through standard Visa rails with no annual or foreign-transaction fee.

Bitwise Europe published a model pegging bitcoin's fair value near $224,000 and framing it as a hedge against rising sovereign-default risk, as record Japanese bond yields and global borrowing costs climb.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

Learn one key idea about bitcoin each week. This week:

Nobody has to think about bitcoin

After weeks of red candles and bearish gloom, here's some welcome positive vibes: a glimpse of where all of this is headed. In an essay from Bitcoin Magazine's "2036" print issue, Lightspark CEO David Marcus imagines bitcoin a decade from now — not as a headline, but as plumbing nobody thinks about.

A coffee shop in Lagos, a manufacturer in São Paulo, and a freelancer in Bangalore all move money in seconds, and none of them are thinking about bitcoin. It has become, in his words, "the TCP/IP of money" — the invisible settlement layer everything else runs on top of.

The mechanism he describes inverts how bitcoin maximalists assumed adoption would happen. For twenty-five years, the vision was that people would want to use bitcoin as money, if only the infrastructure were available. In contrast, Marcus's prediction is that bitcoin lets people build smarter, safer digital wallets, regardless of whether they even know bitcoin is the basis.

The sequence goes like this. A single non-custodial wallet holds stablecoins and bitcoin on one address. You spend the stablecoins; the bitcoin sits there. Year after year, the fixed-supply balance outperforms the local currency beside it, so people save in bitcoin not because they read the whitepaper or believe in the ideals of sound money, but because one of their two balances keeps going up. The rails create the savers, and the savers become spenders.

Then comes the twist no one priced in: AI agents. Booking travel, settling invoices, and netting obligations across borders millions of times a day, they converge on bitcoin on their own. It may turn out that humans save in bitcoin, and agents spend it.

COIN CHECK

This week a 15-year-old Casascius physical bitcoin was redeemed for $1.78 million. Creator Mike Caldwell stopped selling coins pre-loaded with bitcoin in late 2013. Why?

A. The U.S. Mint sued him for minting a competing currency
B. FinCEN told him that funding the coins made him an unlicensed money transmitter
C. A flaw in the holograms was leaking private keys
D. He lost the private key to his minting wallet

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B

In late 2013, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) informed Caldwell – a Utah software engineer who hand-minted the coins as a "conversation piece" – that embedding bitcoin into the coins he sold made him a money transmitter requiring federal licensing. Rather than register, he stopped loading coins with bitcoin and sold them empty.

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