BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $62,5
Market Capitalization: $1.20T
Hash Rate (90 days): 957.1 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,050,191
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 58.81%

What do these numbers mean?

This Saturday, America turns 250. Reflecting on the milestone, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas put it this way:

Ends and means. The Declaration names our natural rights; the Constitution protects them from concentrated power via separation of powers, federalism, and a Bill of Rights.

The founders understood that rights on paper need teeth. The Second Amendment paired the right to liberty with a means of defending it. It is no accident that countries without it, like the United Kingdom, now police speech itself, arresting thousands of its own citizens for expressing themselves online.

Bitcoin is built the same way. Its “end” is a sovereign monetary network that no state can debase. Its “means” is a decentralized protected by hard power (energy) – the teeth that make the right to sound money self-enforcing.

The parallel runs deeper. When the revolution was won, George Washington walked away from power. Twice. Satoshi did the same thing. He built the protocol, anointed no successor, and disappeared – relinquishing the fame and power that would come with being known as the inventor of bitcoin.​

This Independence Day, remember that the declaration, like bitcoin, is enforced daily by citizens and nodes.

NEWS

Strategy rallies double digits as bitcoin reclaims $60,000

Bitcoin climbed back above $60,000 after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said inflation pressures had moderated, with Strategy (MSTR) surging as much as 13% intraday and Strive (ASST) jumping more than 10%. The rally follows Strategy's new Digital Credit Capital Framework, which raised the STRC preferred dividend to 12%, authorized up to $2 billion in buybacks, and established a $2.55 billion dollar reserve required to cover at least 12 months of dividends and interest at all times.

The playbook goes global

A week ago the headlines were about Strategy trading below the value of its coins. This week, the machine is being re-engineered to survive any market, and the model keeps spreading. Tokyo-listed Metaplanet added 2,823 bitcoins to reach 43,000, becoming the world's third-largest corporate treasury.

Three years in, Europe is already rewriting its crypto rulebook

Europe's MiCA framework is undergoing a full review – colloquially "MiCA 2.0" – with Brussels weighing centralized supervision under ESMA, redesigned stablecoin reserve requirements, and how to handle multi-jurisdiction issuance. The once-pioneering regime, built mainly for spot crypto, has been outrun by stablecoin and tokenization adoption in just three years.

Rules of men, rules of math

MiCA needed a rewrite after three years. Bitcoin's monetary rulebook hasn't needed one in seventeen: 21 million coins, blocks every ten minutes, no consultation period. Committees redraw frameworks; the protocol just keeps ticking.

Trump reports at least $1.4 billion in 2025 crypto earnings, $50 million in cold storage bitcoin

President Trump disclosed at least $1.4 billion in income from cryptocurrency and memecoin ventures last year, according to federal financial disclosures released Tuesday. The same filing revealed more than $50 million in bitcoin held in self-custodied cold storage.

The scam-caller becomes a cold-storage holder

Six years ago Trump called bitcoin "a scam." Today he holds eight figures of it in self-custody, and (credit where due!) his administration ended the previous administration's relentless campaign of debanking, enforcement-by-lawsuit, and regulatory strangulation of the industry. Just remember the distinction the disclosure itself draws: the memecoins and tokens are revenue schemes with issuers and insiders. The bitcoin is simply held. One of these is money.

140 firms including Visa, Mastercard, and BNY launch "Open USD" stablecoin

More than 140 businesses partnered to launch Open USD, a consortium stablecoin offering free minting and redemption at scale, reserve earnings shared among partners, and a board drawn from members including BNY, Stripe, Coinbase, and all three major card networks. BNY projects stablecoins will hold $1.5 trillion in value by 2030.

The dollar goes multiplayer on rails bitcoin built

Nic Carter notes the stablecoin duopoly is ending, and Christian Catalini's take is worth reading too. When Visa, Mastercard, and America's oldest bank race to issue bearer-style digital dollars, they are conceding that bitcoin's settlement architecture won the argument. But a committee coin with 140 partners is still a committee coin. It remains freezable, permissioned, and political. Bitcoin will always remain the layer of final settlement above any sovereign currency because it is the only ledger beyond the reach of sovereigns themselves.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Wavespace launched a MiCA-compliant self-custodial bitcoin debit card powered by Lightning and Nostr Wallet Connect letting Europeans spend from their own keys.

Standard Chartered and LMAX Group executed the first live digital asset prime brokerage trades, with the bank intermediating institutional bitcoin trades on its own balance sheet.

Anchorage Digital and Binance launched off-exchange settlement for institutional trading, letting institutions trade on Binance while assets stay in segregated custody at a federally chartered bank.

Taiwan passed its first comprehensive bitcoin and crypto law, creating a licensing regime and stablecoin framework for the island's digital asset industry.​

Bitcoin-backed preferred shares have grown into a roughly $13 billion market, becoming treasury companies' financing tool of choice.

JPMorgan publicly backed the Clarity Act as the Senate eyes a floor vote before the August recess.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said she expects the Clarity Act to pass this summer, as Chairman Atkins reaffirmed the push to make America the global crypto hub.

Bitcoin and crypto firms account for 37% of a record $517 million in corporate spending on the 2026 midterms, already surpassing the full 2024 cycle.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Bitcoin is not inevitable, and neither was America

In 1776, 56 men signed a declaration, and a fraction of settlers of the New World engaged in violent revolution against a global hegemon. Independence was not inevitable. It was chosen by a small group willing to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to an idea most of their neighbors doubted.

Jeff Booth makes the same point about bitcoin. Asked what the world looks like in 2036, he refuses to prophesy a bitcoin utopia. The better future "can exist for them right this second," he says. "The question is: do people move their time and energy to this new system?"

Booth's warning is that bitcoin fails if we treat it as just another asset inside the broken system – a trade, a ticker, a store of value held in custody on your “behalf” by financial kings. If that happens, few people will benefit from the qualities of bitcoin that advance individual liberty. Bitcoin succeeds only if enough people see it as their preferred form of money to earn, spend, build upon, and defend — and act accordingly. "If there are enough hyper-vigilant people focused on the issues, bitcoin stays secure," he says. "We are the change. We always have been."

That is how the American founding worked, too. The Constitution is parchment; what keeps it alive is each generation deciding to enforce it. Not everybody has to risk it all for the revolution, only an intransigent minority do. A small group that will not cheat and will not take the bribe holds the line and forces a foundation from which everyone else benefits.

56 signatures were enough to change the world forever. This July Fourth, ask yourself how many private keys held by sovereign individuals are enough to advance the cause of liberty even further.

COIN CHECK

Under the Coinage Act of 1792, one of the first laws passed by the new United States Congress, what was the penalty for a Mint officer caught debasing the nation's coinage?

A. $10,000
B. Ten years' imprisonment
C. Permanent banishment from public office
D. Death

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: D. Section 19 of the Coinage Act of 1792 made it a capital offense (punishable by death!) for any officer of the Mint to debase or embezzle the coinage. The founders considered sound money so essential to the republic that corrupting it ranked among the gravest crimes against the state.

250 years later, debasement is no longer a crime. It is a hum-drum policy that prints trillions of dollars per year out of thin air. Bitcoin's answer to this problem is better than capital punishment. It instead uses mathematics to birth a money whose supply cannot physically be debased by anyone. No law – and no executioner – is needed to keep it honest.

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