BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $77,290
Market Capitalization: $1.55T
Hash Rate (90 days): 972.3 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 18,250,482
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 60.72%

What do these numbers mean?

We wanted to pause this Memorial Day to remember those people who gave their lives to the United States as a key reason this country became a safe haven for the sound money of the Old World, and the birthplace of digital gold, Bitcoin.

After two world wars, financial institutions and governments in Europe viewed the U.S. as the most defended, technologically advanced, and trustworthy location to hold their gold reserves. It was a calculation about rule of law, property rights, and a political order stable enough to honor its obligations across decades. The gold that made its way here in the early 20th century still sits in New York vaults today on behalf of foreign nations precisely because that calculation has held.

That same order of ordered liberty created the conditions for Bitcoin to be born here rather than anywhere else. A country that protects innovators and free thinkers at the highest level of their capacity produces breakthroughs that reorder the world. Bitcoin is one of those breakthroughs: a bearer asset with no counterparty, a monetary system with no central issuer, and a form of money that cannot be inflated by decree. It is no coincidence that such a radical idea emerged in a place where the state does not presume to own the future and where individuals can still build systems that outlast governments.

The men buried in Arlington and in thousands of other cemeteries across this country made that environment possible. We therefore owe them our wealth, our freedom, our happiness, and even Bitcoin itself. Sound money is the monetary expression of the same principles they defended with their lives. On Memorial Day we recognize that the gold in those vaults and the code running on nodes around the planet both trace back to the same source: a country worth dying for, and the men who did.

NEWS

In Gold We Trust report 2026 names bitcoin a "co-architect" of the monetary future

The annual In Gold We Trust report, entitled "Back to the Monetary Future," dedicates its bitcoin chapter to the argument that bitcoin and gold are complementary hard assets, not competitors, and that the next monetary system will be anchored "in collateral that cannot be printed." Incrementum's Ronald-Peter Stöferle and Mark Valek frame bitcoin at "the threshold of adulthood," cataloging three maturing risk categories: systemic, governance, and market structure.

The divergence is the point

Gold trounced bitcoin over the past year, and the bears used it to pronounce "digital gold" dead. In our view, Stöferle and Valek's rebuttal is sharp and well substantiated. Bitcoin and gold are two different types of scarce assets with different buyers (for now). Central banks prefer gold, and almost everyone else would do better to hold bitcoin. Low correlation in the purchasing power of the two is precisely what makes holding both so powerful.

Bitcoin's long-term holder supply nears a record 16.3 million, breaking a 2.5-year downtrend

Long-term holder supply has surged past 16.3 million bitcoins, up more than 2 million coins during the current bear market – including roughly 200,000 in the past month alone – approaching the all-time high set in January 2024 ahead of the spot ETF launch.

Smart money buys weakness

Long-term holders are the cohort that historically accumulates into price weakness and distributes into strength, and they just broke a downtrend that had persisted for two and a half years. While the headlines fixate on a lackluster dollar price, the holders with the best track record in the market are quietly pulling coins off the table.

Iran turns to bitcoin to insure shipping through the Strait of Hormuz

Iran's Ministry of Economy launched "Hormuz Safe," a state-backed maritime insurance platform that issues cryptographically verifiable policies for vessels transiting the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz and settles them in bitcoin, projecting up to $10 billion in annual revenue. Whether the platform reaches operational scale is far from certain – sanctions exposure makes participation risky for global shipowners, and there are no confirmed users yet.

Neutral money works

Western commentators waved it off as sanctions evasion, but that misses what actually happened. A sovereign under maximum financial pressure, locked out of the dollar system, weighed gold, yuan, and euros — and placed its billion-dollar bet on bitcoin. Whether Hormuz Safe ever scales, an adversary state just validated bitcoin's defining property: it settles without anyone's permission.

Tether buys out SoftBank's stake in bitcoin treasury firm Twenty One Capital

Tether International acquired SoftBank's roughly 26% stake in Twenty One Capital (XXI), the bitcoin treasury company it controls, with SoftBank's board representatives stepping down. Tether called XXI "one of the most important opportunities to build a public company around bitcoin from the ground up."

Conviction, consolidated

SoftBank lent XXI institutional credibility at formation; Tether, sitting on one of the largest corporate bitcoin stacks and profit pools in the world, just deepened its bet by buying the exit. A vertically integrated bitcoin holding company spanning treasury, mining, and payments through Strike keeps taking shape on the public markets.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

SpaceX's IPO filing disclosed a long-held 18,712 bitcoin position worth roughly $1.45 billion, untouched since 2024 and large enough to rank it among the biggest corporate holders.

Strategy added 24,869 bitcoins for about $2.01 billion, funded largely through its STRC preferred stock,lifting its treasury to 843,738 coins.

The $33 billion New Jersey Police & Firemen's Retirement System made its first bitcoin-linked investment, buying roughly $220,000 of Strive, a treasury company that holds bitcoin on its balance sheet.

Mixin launched bitcoin Lightning Network support, giving every user a free Lightning address for instant, low-fee payments inside its wallet.

BitGo added Lightning Network support to its Crypto-as-a-Service platform, letting banks, exchanges, and fintechs embed instant, low-fee bitcoin payments.

London-listed trading giant IG will expand spot bitcoin trading across Europe through a partnership with MiCA-licensed Bitpanda, building on the bitcoin trading it launched for UK retail clients a year ago.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

What a budget-neutral bitcoin reserve actually looks like

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was back in the headlines this week: Representatives Nick Begich and Jared Golden introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act, bipartisan legislation that would codify the reserve into law and direct a formal study of "budget-neutral" ways to grow it — that is, without new taxes, deficit spending, or added debt.

But what would budget-neutral actually look like in practice?

In the bitcoin chapter of the 2026 In Gold We Trust report, Bitcoin Policy Institute Head of Research Sam Lyman, a former senior advisor and chief speechwriter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, lays out his answer.

A reserve, he argues, was the easy part; funding it without spending a dollar is the hard part. He is skeptical that revaluing U.S. gold reserves to buy bitcoin has much appetite inside Treasury, and points instead to a more politically feasible path: monetizing stranded energy on federal lands and waterways by mining bitcoin.

The blueprint already exists. Bhutan has mined bitcoin with surplus hydropower since 2019, earning enough to help double its civil servants' salaries, with mining now roughly a third of its GDP. Norway monetized its oil; Bhutan monetized its hydropower; America, Lyman notes, has yet to monetize its stranded methane, hydro, and wind. He envisions a public-private model in which established miners bid for contracts to mine federal energy (much as defense firms bid for Pentagon work) and share the proceeds, so the reserve effectively pays for itself. Implementation, he expects, may run through Commerce rather than Treasury.

A national reserve that grows without a single taxpayer dollar, by turning energy that would otherwise be vented or wasted into the best way to transfer value across space and time ever discovered.

COIN CHECK

Which country has mined bitcoin with its surplus hydropower since 2019, and, by some estimates, generates roughly a third of its GDP from bitcoin block production?

A. El Salvador
B. Paraguay
C. Bhutan
D. Iceland

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: C. Bhutan. The landlocked Himalayan kingdom has quietly mined bitcoin with its abundant hydropower since 2019 through its sovereign investment arm, Druk Holding & Investments. The earnings have been large enough to help double civil-servant salaries, and the operation now functions as a de facto sovereign wealth fund.

As Sam Lyman argues in this year's In Gold We Trust report, Bhutan is the proof of concept for a budget-neutral Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: take energy that has no local market — stranded hydro, vented methane, curtailed wind — and convert it into the hardest money on earth. It's a blueprint the United States, flush with exactly that kind of stranded energy, has yet to follow.

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