BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $78,210
Market Capitalization: $1.57T
Hash Rate (90 days): 908.5 EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 19,848,380
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 60.00%

What do these numbers mean?

“If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn't a crisis. It is an invoice.”

So wrote Stanley Druckenmiller in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, dressing down his former protégé Scott Bessent over last week’s long-bond buybacks. “This wasn't liquidity management, it was price management.”

(Side note: with Druckenmiller writing full articles in a respectable newspaper that were obviously written by AI, perhaps the shame of having AI do your writing for you is coming to an end.)

Long-term yields, he wrote, are “the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left,” and “every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination.”

Then on Friday, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole speech to warn that inflation is still too high. He said that if it isn’t falling “clearly and at sufficient speed,” then “we have work to do.”

So Treasury is buying the long end while the Fed threatens to hike the short end. The government is effectively bidding against itself over the price of its own debt, with $40 trillion outstanding and a $2 trillion annual deficit.

Markets see right through this. Bitcoin posted its second-best week in five years, running from $62,000 to $81,000 before Warsh knocked it back under $80,000; gold ran to a three-month high near $4,700, and the two are now moving together at their tightest correlation since 2020, a full reversal from the spring.

As Marty Bent wrote, the move “looked more like panic buying by large balance sheets trying to get in front of a monetary transition.”

The invoice is coming due. Bitcoin is how avoid being the one who helps pay it off.

NEWS

Bitcoin nonprofit takes out a full-page Wall Street Journal ad: “The fringe phase is officially over”

The Nakamoto Project, a Wyoming-based bitcoin education nonprofit, launched a 12-week campaign on Tuesday built around full-page and quarter-page ads in the print Wall Street Journal, a new site at gettingbitcoin.org, and six essays by leading thinkers, starting with Lyn Alden.

The opening ad declares that bitcoin’s “fringe phase is officially over,” citing the roughly 1 in 6 Americans who own it, spot ETFs, and SpaceX and Tesla holding it on their balance sheets, then boils the whole thesis down to one line:

“Money that can't be printed out of thin air. And a payment network that can't be stopped.”

Bitcoin is buying the front section now

For 15 years, bitcoin’s marketing budget was zero, and its press coverage frequently consisted of exhuberant obituaries. Now a nonprofit is bringing top-quality bitcoin education directly to institutional readers.

Fannie Mae-conforming mortgages backed by bitcoin go live nationwide

Coinbase and Better Mortgage announced general availability of the first conforming, Fannie Mae-eligible home loans that let borrowers pledge bitcoin as collateral for the down payment instead of selling it. Pledge roughly $250,000 in bitcoin to cover a $100,000 down payment; the coins sit in Coinbase Prime custody, price swings trigger no margin calls, liquidation only happens after 60 days of missed payments, and Coinbase One members get a 1% rebate up to $10,000. A Michigan couple closed the first one in June; the waitlist has already produced about $260 million in projected loan demand.

The American Dream, collateralized in bitcoin

Look closely – the most important number in this story is the zero capital-gains tax exposure for a family that keeps its bitcoin and its private keys.

Strategy raises $2 billion and buys zero bitcoin; Strive buys 1,110

Strategy sold about $2 billion of MSTR stock between August 17 and 23, and for the first time bought no bitcoin with it. Instead, $136 million went to buying back STRC preferred shares, $300 million topped up its USD Reserve to $5.1 billion, and $1.59 billion seeded a new “USD Cash” pool earmarked for dividends, debt service, buybacks, and future bitcoin purchases.

The company’s 840,447 coins, about 4% of all the bitcoin that could ever exist, went from $9.9 billion underwater to $2.6 billion in the black in a single week as price crossed its $75,385 average cost. Strive (ASST), meanwhile, bought 1,110 bitcoins for $81.5 million the same week at an average of $73,409, funded by its SATA preferred, lifting holdings to 21,356. Per Strive CEO Matt Cole: “One year ago, Strive held zero Bitcoin. Today, we own more than 1 of every 1,000 Bitcoin that will ever exist.”

Two treasury models, one direction

Bears spent the bear market promising Strategy would be a forced seller; instead it holds enough cash to cover nearly three years of preferred dividends without touching a coin, while Strive’s preferred is already back above par and converting into sats every week. The largest corporate holder is fortifying, the fastest-growing one is buying, and neither one is selling.

Bitcoin ETFs log eight straight days of inflows as August tops $3 billion; BlackRock cuts its bitcoin-for-IBIT swap minimum to $1 million

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $232 million on Wednesday, their eighth consecutive positive session, pushing August past $3 billion and on track for the best month since October 2025, with IBIT taking roughly 62% of the flow and total assets near $99 billion. Separately, BlackRock has lowered the minimum for swapping bitcoin directly into IBIT shares from $25 million to $1 million, with Bitwise cutting its threshold from $100 million to $3 million; IBIT alone has now absorbed more than $5 billion of coins this way.

The flows came back, and this time they're unleveraged

Futures open interest sits at a five-month low while price is up 30%; the buyers this month are spot buyers, not leverage. And whales handing coins to BlackRock in exchange for a ticker are changing custodians rather than selling off their assets, which is exactly what the BPI’s survey says everyday Americans want (more on this below).

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Euronext-listed Capital B, Europe’s first bitcoin treasury company, raised €21 million from Adam Back and TOBAM to add roughly 270 bitcoins to its 3,145-coin stack.

South Korea’s Mirae Asset, with $1 trillion under management, unveiled a plan to build a 150 trillion won ($109 billion) digital asset business around Digital X, the former Korbit exchange it bought in July.

Japan Bitcoin Industry launched Aurora, a self-custodial Lightning payments platform letting anime fans worldwide pay Japanese creators in bitcoin, a market worth ¥2.17 trillion outside Japan and growing 26% a year.

Former Binance CEO CZ told Bitcoin Asia that $1 million bitcoin “will happen” and “much quicker” than 25 years, and that nations skipping bitcoin face the same strategic risk as nations skipping AI.

New Zealand’s ACT Party, the country’s fourth-largest political party, pledged zero tax on bitcoin gains for personal holdings kept longer than 12 months as part of a six-point digital economy plan.

Bitcoin’s Coinbase Premium turned positive on Friday for the first time since May, a sign that U.S. buyers, not offshore leverage, are driving the bid.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute named Conner Brown, former counsel to Senator Cynthia Lummis, as its new executive director.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

What actually resonates about bitcoin?​

Two notable projects to explain bitcoin to ordinary Americans landed this week, and they are in agreement about how to effectively communicate about bitcoin to the general public.

The first is the Nakamoto Project, (covered above), a Wyoming nonprofit that runs an annual survey of 3,500 Americans on how they perceive bitcoin. On Tuesday it launched a 12-week Wall Street Journal campaign: six full-page ads, 24 quarter-page ads, six essays (Lyn Alden’s "“A Protocol of Value” ran first), and a plain-English site at gettingbitcoin.org. The copy reads like a casual explainer written by your smart friend, rather than being overly technical or esoteric. “Bitcoin is not a company. It is a protocol. No CEO. No headquarters. No one to hack, influence, or shut down. That's not a bug. That's the point.” And the whole pitch in two sentences: “Money that can't be printed out of thin air. And a payment network that can't be stopped.”

The second is a study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, pollster Cygnal, and Neighborhood Bitcoin. They ran eight focus groups, then surveyed 1,000 registered voters in order to test 19 messaging strategies. Four themes won:

• Control: “the only money you truly own,” and “you decide how much is right for you.”

• Proven performance: “Every bitcoin holder who has held for four years has come out ahead.”

• Security: a major U.S. brokerage means “the same security and compliance rules,” and pensions and the largest banks already hold it.

• Ease: buying it “is simpler than most people think.”

Notice what’s missing from both: cryptography, halvings, Austrian economics, and “digital gold,” which ranked near last and “confused focus group participants.” Most Americans don't own gold; the comparison explains one abstraction with another.

The messenger matters too. Respondents trusted financial advisors (33%), retirement planners (25%), and friends and family who own bitcoin (23%) far above influencers or CEOs. And the messages seem to work – after hearing them, respondents reporting they were “not interested at all” fell from 39% to 32%, “very or extremely interested” rose from 19% to 24%, and two-thirds wanted to learn more.

The Nakamoto Project’s data indicates that Americans are curious. BPI’s tells you what to tell them: it’s yours, it works, it’s safe, it’s easy, and you don't have to go all-in.

COIN CHECK

According to this week’s Bitcoin Policy Institute / Cygnal survey of 1,000 registered voters, which source did Americans say they trust most for information about bitcoin?

A. Social media influencers
B. Financial advisors
C. News media
D. Elected officials

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: B. Financial advisors, at 33%, followed by retirement and financial planning experts (25%) and friends or family who already own bitcoin (23%). Media figures and public officials trailed far behind. The study's conclusion: “trusted peers and local professionals carry the most weight.”

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