BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $63,810
Market Capitalization: $1.28T
Hash Rate (90 days): 957.1 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,238,708
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 58.95%

What do these numbers mean?

The ceasefire is over "in no uncertain terms," and the peace talks are back on. Both statements came out of the White House in the same news cycle this week after two days of missile strikes, bombs falling near American bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Jordan, and a funeral for Khamenei that drew 40 million “mourners.” Oil jumped 6% before the public knew about the strikes, then quietly steadied. As Quinn Thompson documented, insiders front-ran the bombs across every asset class — and now "they are front-running the taco."

That is the market bitcoin is trading in right now: rudderless, headline-driven, and whipsawed by volatility that will not resolve until the Iran conflict does. Until then, bitcoin (the macro asset) will keep getting chopped up by news that insiders trade before it prints.

Bitcoin (the monetary asset) is another story. At 50% below the high, the obituaries are running again, but the doomsayers are reading the wrong signals. This cycle is compressed at both ends. There was no blowoff top at $125,000 on the way up, and there will be no -75% washout on the way down. The data points to a floor in the range of $50,000-$60,000; last cycle it was $15,700. The floor rises every cycle because the people buying at these levels are the digital gold thesis in action. Savers preserving purchasing power, not tourists chasing a 100x return. And nothing in the drawdown touched what actually matters, which is bitcoin’s hard money properties. The deficits got larger this week, and the debasement continued. Yet bitcoin blocks continue to be solved every ten minutes, the relentless march of math completely decoupled from human concerns.

Insiders can front-run a headline, but nobody can front-run what you already own. 1 bitcoin = 1 bitcoin, regardless of its price in dollars. Stay comfy holding spot bitcoin in your own custody for the long term, and go live life.

NEWS

The treasury company trade is no longer one-way: Strategy sells, BSTR renegotiates, K Wave exits

Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoins for approximately $216 million, its first sales under the BTC monetization framework announced two weeks ago, to fund preferred stock dividends and replenish its $2.55 billion USD reserve, trimming its stack to 843,775 coins.

The same week, Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company and Cantor Equity Partners scrapped their original July 2025 SPAC merger agreement to negotiate revised terms, and K Wave Media sold its bitcoin entirely to service debt and pivot to AI infrastructure.

The tourists leave, the model matures 

This is the treasury trade growing up, not dying: capital markets are now separating operators who can sustainably fund a bitcoin strategy from those who borrowed a slogan. Spare us the "insolvency" talk on Strategy – the company holds roughly $52 billion of bitcoin against liabilities nowhere close to that, and selling ~0.4% of its stack to secure two years of dividend runway is prudence, not capitulation. The deeper lesson: companies built around bitcoin carry two-way risk. Bitcoin itself has no dividend to pay, no par value to defend, and no debt to service.

Kraken wins $22 million from the auditor that abandoned it during Operation Chokepoint 2.0

Payward, Kraken's parent company, asked the Delaware Court of Chancery to enter final judgment against Mazars USA after winning a $22 million arbitration award over the auditor's abrupt 2023 resignation from a nearly complete audit — despite confirming in writing it had no disagreement with management, no integrity concerns, and no findings of fraud. Kraken placed the episode squarely within the debanking campaign that included the FDIC's pause letters, SAB 121, and the takedown of Silvergate and Signature.

Abandoning lawful bitcoin companies is no longer costless

The receipts from the debanking era are now public record. A House committee found regulators used vague rules and informal pressure to cut lawful firms off from banking. Kraken fought so that walking away from a politically disfavored company carries a price. The permanent fix is statute, not vibes – it is our position that passage of the Clarity Act is likely to prevent such an egregious miscarriage of justice from reoccurring.

Vanguard opens search for a head of digital assets

Vanguard, the $10 trillion asset manager that spent a decade as crypto's loudest institutional skeptic, opened a search for a head of digital assets. This senior role would oversee strategy across tokenization, stablecoins, custody, and blockchain settlement. Vanguard then told Eric Balchunas it has not "bent the knee" or been orange pilled – it just wants to make sure it is utilizing the tech.

Nobody has to bend the knee!

That is the beauty of it. Bitcoin does not require belief, conversion, or ideology. It only requires that institutions eventually respond to what their customers demand and what the technology does. The last great holdout is hiring for the job. Protest noted.

Bull Bitcoin asks France's highest court to annul DAC8 surveillance rules

Bull Bitcoin, the MiCA-licensed, bitcoin-only, non-custodial exchange, filed a challenge before the Conseil d'État seeking to annul the decree transposing the EU's DAC8 directive into French law, arguing the mandated reporting regime creates an unsecurable honeypot of user data. France, which is already an epicenter of physical attacks on bitcoin holders, saw its own secure-credentials agency breached this year, exposing sensitive data in about 19 million accounts.

“Know Your Customer becomes Kill Your Customer”

That is CEO Francis Pouliot's line, and it is the whole case. More than half of 2026's “wrench attacks” (a nickname for physical attacks on holders of passwords, private keys, or other secrets) targeted a family member of the key holder. Every database eventually leaks. The safest database is the one never built, and the safest bitcoin is held in self-custody by people whose balances aren't broadcast to bureaucrats and, eventually, criminals.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Strike launched bitcoin-backed loans with no margin calls and no price-triggered liquidations, backed by a $2.1 billion credit arrangement with Tether.

Polymarket turned on instant bitcoin deposits over the Lightning Network, crediting deposits in under a second while users keep their own keys via Spark.

Bitcoin miner TeraWulf signed a 20-year, $19 billion AI data center lease with Anthropic, the latest miner converting bitcoin-built energy infrastructure into contracted compute revenue.

Spot bitcoin ETFs snapped an eight-week outflow streak with $265.7 million of net inflows, with BlackRock's IBIT absorbing $209.4 million in a single session.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig urged the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, warning that the American crypto industry needs a federal standard before the August recess.

Federal agencies continued hashing out implementation of the U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, with the framework still a work in progress a year after its creation.

Hyperscale Data purchased another 115.9 bitcoins, growing the AI data center company's treasury to roughly 900 coins.

Strive bought 17.76 bitcoins at an average price of $59,850, continuing its accumulation straight through the drawdown.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Bitcoin and American economic statecraft

Last month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before the Economic Club of New York and defined "economic statecraft" as the disciplined use of America's economic power in service of its sovereignty. He organized the strategy around five principles: 1. Economic security begins with national capacity; 2. Openness must be matched by reciprocity; 3. America will write the rules of the next economy; 4. Financial leadership is a central instrument of statecraft; and, most important, 5. Statecraft must serve the American people.

The third principle should catch every bitcoiner's attention. "Standards can become strategy," Bessent said. The nation that fails to write the rules of the next economy will answer to those who did. And on money specifically, Bessent remarked that digital assets, tokenization, and new payment systems “will help to shape the future of money,” and the United States “should not consign itself to the sidelines while that future is built elsewhere.”

Bitcoin fits this vision better than any other asset. It is neutral, open, and market-based, precisely the kind of standard Bessent says America should champion against authoritarian and mercantilist alternatives. It is technology, and America is the technology superpower. And it serves his fifth principle directly: bitcoin is a form of money that no one can print, counterfeit, freeze, or manipulate. It connects national power to household prosperity – which is Bessent's own definition of the ultimate goal of American statecraft. Ordinary Americans storing their wealth in an asset beyond manipulation equals economic security, from the household on up.

The contrast with other national strategies is already drawn. China and its partners are accumulating gold – a neutral reserve asset, but a closed, analog one more suited to 19th century banking than a 21st-century AI dynamo. America holds a strategic bitcoin reserve, hosts the deepest bitcoin capital markets on earth, and commands the majority of hash rate. If the next monetary era is a contest of standards, America's advantage is the open, digital, incorruptible one. Statecraft means choosing your terrain. Bitcoin is America's.

COIN CHECK

President Andrew Jackson vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832, calling it a concentration of power that made "the rich richer and the potent more powerful." How did he then deliver the killing blow?

A. He defaulted on the Bank's government-held bonds
B. He removed all federal deposits and placed them in state “pet banks”
C. He persuaded Congress to revoke the charter four years early
D. He nationalized the Bank into the Treasury Department

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B. After his 1832 veto, Jackson ordered federal deposits withdrawn from the Second Bank in 1833 and redistributed to state-chartered “pet banks,” draining the Bank's power before its charter expired in 1836. The United States then operated without a central bank for 77 years, until the Federal Reserve was created in 1913.

Jackson's war on the Bank was a fight over a question every generation inherits: who controls the money? His answer was to kill the institution, but the fight simply returned decades later in a new charter. Bitcoin retires the question altogether. There is no charter to veto, no deposits to remove, and no board to capture. The monetary policy is mathematically fixed for all time, and no president, banker, or committee can change it.

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