BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $79,470
Market Capitalization: $1.59T
Hash Rate (90 days): 984.7 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 17,811,334
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 60.80%

What do these numbers mean?

Two notable macro events converged on the same day.

Japan's 30-year government bond yield breached 4% for the first time in its 26-year history, while the 10-year JGB hit a 29-year high. The world's largest creditor nation is losing control of its yield curve as a weakened yen drives imported energy costs higher. U.S. 2- and 10-year Treasury yields also hit 12-month highs on hot April CPI and PPI prints.

This happened at the same time that Kevin Warsh received Senate confirmation as the next Fed Chair, the first in history with personal exposure to bitcoin.

Warsh inherits 62 consecutive months of inflation above target, $1.27 trillion in annual U.S. interest expense, and a meltdown in Japan's bond market.

There are only two exits from this trap. Cut spending – functionally impossible, as DOGE proved. Or, debase the currency. The bond market is the largest wealth destruction vehicle ever built. Bitcoin is the alternative.

And if that weren't bullish enough for bitcoin: Strive announced its bitcoin-backed SATA preferred will become the first U.S.-listed security ever to pay cash dividends every business day, at a 13% annualized rate.

NEWS

Bitcoin policy institute to challenge Basel's "toxic" risk weighting of bitcoin

The Bitcoin Policy Institute announced it will submit a public comment to the Federal Reserve pushing back on the 1,250% risk weighting that the Basel framework assigns to bitcoin on bank balance sheets, a classification BPI managing director Conner Brown calls a “category error” and the “most punitive” treatment in the entire capital framework. The Fed, led by Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, is expected to release its Basel implementation proposal in the coming weeks.

Regulators treat the hardest money as the riskiest asset

Under Basel, cash, physical gold, and U.S. Treasuries carry a 0% risk weight while bitcoin carries 1,250%. This means banks must back any bitcoin position dollar-for-dollar with approved collateral – which they will never do. It would have been more honest if the technocrats who wrote the Basil framework just came out and banned bitcoin. BPI does a great job educating people who work in the legacy system about the nature of bitcoin as a financial asset, and we hope this initiative bears fruit.

Bitcoin stalls below 200-day average as Treasury yields surge

2 and 10-year U.S. Treasury yields hit 12-month highs on hotter-than-expected April CPI and PPI prints, with markets now pricing a 44% chance of another Fed hike by December. Bitcoin remains pinned below its 200-day moving average near $82,000 as capital rotates into yield-bearing dollar instruments.

The squeeze can't last

The Trump administration is going to extraordinary lengths to push yields lower – it has pressured Powell, installed dovish Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, and skewed Treasury issuance toward the short end of the curve. With more than $36 trillion in federal debt and interest expense now one of Washington's largest line items, the structural pressure to drive rates down is enormous. When it breaks through, a fixed-supply bearer asset is what you might want to hold…

Clarity Act clears Senate Banking Committee in a bipartisan 15-9 vote

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 bipartisan vote, ending four months of partisan stalemate and clearing a major hurdle for U.S. crypto market structure legislation. The bill now merges with a similar version from the Senate Agriculture Committee before heading to a full Senate floor vote, likely by August.

Bitcoin is the regulatory baseline

Bitcoin has been classified as a commodity by both the CFTC and SEC for years; its regulatory status was never in question. The Clarity Act is really an attempt to define every other token relative to bitcoin's baseline and create a market structure framework around it. However, its passage is likely a bullish catalyst for bitcoin as well.

Braiins acquires commodity hedge fund CAMMS Capital

Bitcoin mining software pioneer Braiins acquired CAMMS Capital, a CFTC-registered multi-strategy commodity hedge fund trading agriculture, energy, metals, freight, and systematic strategies — one of the first instances of a bitcoin-native infrastructure firm absorbing a traditional commodity trading platform.

Digital oil meets the oil pit

Bitcoin mining is a commodity business. Miners convert energy into bitcoin, and the spread determines survival. By bringing a 30-year commodity trading desk in-house, Braiins is doing what every major oil company eventually did: build a trading arm to monetize its own balance sheet volatility.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Strive's SATA preferred stock will become the first U.S.-listed security ever to pay cash dividends every business day, at a 13% annualized rate starting June 16.

Seven of the largest bitcoin mining pools – Foundry, Antpool, F2Pool, Spiderpool, Block, MARA Foundation, and DMND – joined the Stratum V2 working group, bringing roughly 75% of total network hashrate behind an open standard that lets individual miners construct their own block templates.

Dartmouth College's endowment disclosed a $7.7 million position in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin ETF as part of a $14 million bitcoin ETF allocation, an unusual public disclosure for an Ivy League endowment.

Spiral, the open-source bitcoin development arm of Jack Dorsey's Block, launched Loupe, a free AI-powered vulnerability scanner built specifically for open-source bitcoin projects.

Moon Inc. partnered with BitGo to scale bitcoin-powered card products across Asia, leveraging institutional-grade, regulated custody infrastructure.

Strategy purchased an additional 535 bitcoins for $43 million, bringing its total treasury to 818,869.

South Korea's Hana Bank acquired a $670 million stake in Dunamu, the operator of the country's largest bitcoin and crypto exchange Upbit, in the biggest digital-asset investment ever made by a Korean commercial bank.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Bitcoin is the central bank

Tyr Capital recently published the final essay in a sharp three-part series on what bitcoin treasury companies (BTCTCs) need to do to build an institution that lasts. The argument is that BTCTCs are not "the new central banks," as a growing chorus on X likes to claim. Bitcoin itself is the central bank – and the distinction matters.

The piece anchors itself in Friedrich Hayek's 1976 book, The Denationalization of Money. Hayek argued that the state's monopoly over money inevitably leads to debasement and the politicization of every economic question. His proposed solution was competition: private issuers, separate from government, could compete on the strength of their currencies' purchasing power. The most trusted issuers would win; reputation for "financial righteousness," he wrote, would become their most jealously guarded asset.

Hayek couldn't have imagined bitcoin in the 1970s, but he was reaching for it. Tyr draws a distinction between uppercase Bitcoin (the protocol – the rules, the enforcement, the settlement network) and lowercase bitcoin (the asset – the monetary unit those rules govern). Uppercase Bitcoin functions like a central bank in the narrow sense that it sets the issuance schedule and enforces settlement. But unlike any modern central bank, it is incorruptible. It cannot print, bail out, be lobbied, or cater to any constituency. Bitcoin replaces the issuer with rules and reputation with verifiability.

An aside: we lowercase bitcoin in this newsletter because we think, just as email matured from E-Mail, bitcoin has earned the same subdued style. But Tyr's distinction is still illuminating.

That is why "BTCTC as central bank" is the wrong frame. Bitcoin already solved the problem of credibly neutral monetary issuance. Reintroducing discretionary monetary power on top of it, even with good intentions, is a regression. BTCTCs can be excellent fintechs, asset managers, or operating companies, but they should not pretend to be issuers of money.

COIN CHECK

Under the Basel framework, what risk weight do bank regulators assign to bitcoin held on a bank's balance sheet?

A. 0% – same as cash and U.S. Treasuries
B. 100% – same as an unrated corporate loan
C. 150% – same as a past-due unsecured loan
D. 1,250% – the most punitive in the entire capital framework

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: D. Basel requires banks to back any bitcoin position with approved collateral dollar-for-dollar – a treatment so extreme that no bank will ever take it. Cash, physical gold, and U.S. Treasuries get 0%, and the hardest money ever invented gets the harshest treatment in the book.

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