BITCOIN BOX SCORE

Exchange Rate: $59,910
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?

Bitcoin’s dollar exchange rate is down, and it might go lower. 70%, even 80% drawdowns have occurred many times. So how should you think about it? Months ago, legendary investor Hugh Hendry wrote a masterpiece on exactly this, "bitcoin and the problem of hardness," and anyone stomaching the recent price action should read it.

Hendry's insight is that the drawdowns are not a flaw but a consequence of hardness. Bitcoin supply is fixed and cannot respond to demand. Even the supply of gold, which is very scarce, can do this – if the price goes high enough, capital investment in new gold mining and refining businesses become viable, which affects supply. On the other hand, no matter how much people want (or don’t want) bitcoin, its supply is what it is. The only thing that can change is price.

This is a feature of bitcoin and by design: “There is a tradeoff between exchange rate volatility and money supply certainty, bitcoin maximizes the latter,” as Pierre Rochard puts it. That is why the falls are so violent – and why the market is not really pricing the mathematics. The code will hold (even through the emergence of quantum computing). The price really says more about we humans and whether we have the willpower to hold on through the ups and downs.

Bitcoin has already permeated the system too deeply to be dislodged, and it will only go further. The extreme discipline that bitcoin imposes pays off in many other domains. "We invent our technologies and then we turn around and use our technologies to reinvent ourselves," Paul Saffo wrote. 

Bitcoin will reinvent us — either because we are too weak for it, or because we are worthy of it.

NEWS

Triller straps a leveraged SpaceX bet to its balance sheet

Triller Group (Nasdaq: ILLR) announced it is acquiring $411 million of indirect SpaceX exposure as a “strategic treasury asset” bought through a stack of Bahamas special-purpose vehicles and financed almost entirely with secured debt. The stock rocketed nearly 600% intraday before sliding back.

The treasury trade eats itself

This is the “_____ treasury company” playbook a year past its peak, stripped of the one thing a bitcoin treasury actually offered: a bearer asset with no counterparty. Triller shareholders own a company that owns a fund that owns a fund that owns locked-up SpaceX shares, mostly with someone else's money. You really can’t make this stuff up.

Crypto's super PAC goes 38-2 in the primaries

Fairshake, the crypto industry's leading super PAC, has won 38 of the first 40 congressional primaries it has spent in this year, most recently lifting backed candidates to victory in Maryland, Utah and New York. The group entered the month with more than $135 million on hand as the Senate weighs the industry-backed Clarity Act.

Money talks, Washington listens

For years bitcoiners were told their interests would never get a seat at the table; a nine-figure war chest and a near-perfect batting average is one way to pull up a chair. The caveat worth keeping in mind: this money backs "crypto" broadly, and most of what it funds is not bitcoin. bitcoin's case rarely needs a lobbyist — it just needs to keep working. TFTC outlined an especially expensive race in Alabama:

Strategy stock hits a 2-year low as bitcoin falls below $60,000

Strategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) fell more than 10% to a 2-year low near $92 as bitcoin crashed below $60,000, dragging its average cost basis underwater and prompting CryptoQuant to urge the company to halt purchases and rebuild cash. The stock now trades at roughly 0.80x the value of the bitcoin it holds, breaking the premium that powered the accumulation engine.

The flywheel spins both ways

Saylor built a machine that converts a stock premium into bitcoin; run in reverse, that same machine stalls. But notice what is not happening: the bitcoin itself is fine. 847,363 coins sit on the balance sheet exactly as they did, unmoved and undiluted. Financial engineering can wobble, but the underlying asset does not.

The data-center boom is fueling a "third wave" of inflation

Apple raised Mac and iPad prices 15% to 25%, with Tim Cook calling the jump in memory and storage costs "unlike anything he had seen in any area in over 40 years," as an estimated $741 billion of hyperscaler capex this year pushes up prices on everything from chips to electricity. 81% of economists surveyed by the NABE expect the AI build-out to add to inflation over the next year.

Print the money, raise the prices

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh argues AI will eventually be disinflationary as productivity compounds, and he may be right. But the bridge to that future will almost certainly be paved with more elastic money to cushion the transition to an agentic economy. An asset whose supply cannot be expanded to "help" is the cleanest way to actually keep some of that productivity for yourself.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

SBI Holdings agreed to acquire Japanese exchange Bitbank for $287 million, creating Japan's largest regulated bitcoin and crypto group with $6.8 billion in assets under custody.

Bitcoin Suisse secured a MiCAR license in Liechtenstein, handing the CHF 6 billion Swiss custodian an EEA passport to expand regulated bitcoin services across the European Union.

Strive (ASST) CEO Matt Cole said the firm is buying bitcoin “hand over fist” through the downturn, lifting its treasury to 19,864 bitcoins – the seventh-largest corporate position in the world.

South Korea's Bitplanet signed an MOU with Nasdaq-listed Antalpha to deploy $10.8 million of bitcoin mining equipment at sites in Oman and Paraguay, targeting more than 80 coins mined per year.

BlackRock added its IBIT fund to its model portfolios for the first time and issued guidance recommending a 1% to 2% bitcoin allocation across standard advisor portfolios.

Franklin Templeton filed two “DRIP” bitcoin ETFs that automatically route the dividends from a U.S. stock portfolio into bitcoin, targeting a launch as early as September.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

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

Dormancy is not abandonment

Can someone sue their way into owning Satoshi's coins? Three anonymous plaintiffs are trying. In a New York case (Index No. 153119/2026) — dissected in an excellent report by Alex Thorn and Galaxy Research — a pseudonymous “Noah Doe” and two Wyoming shell LLCs have asked the court to declare them legal owners of 39,069 long-dormant bitcoin addresses holding roughly 3.8 million bitcoins, including 1.1 million coins tied to bitcoin's creator.

The theory is creative to the point of absurdity. The plaintiffs invoke New York's lost-and-found statute, which is the same law that governs an umbrella handed in to the police. To fit it, an unnamed expert valued each address at "under $10," the threshold that unlocks the statute's one-year fast track, even though the median address holds 50 bitcoins worth millions of dollars. They "served" the owners with dust transactions carrying an OP_RETURN link, a method most bitcoin wallets filter as spam.

Here is the point, and why it matters: even a total victory hands the plaintiffs a piece of paper, not a single private key. They cannot move one satoshi. Bitcoin is a wonderful object lesson in the primacy of science and mathematics over legalistic constructs. The only real risk is that a paper “title” could one day be waved at a custodian if any of these coins ever surfaced at a regulated venue.

Some of the coins are already moving. It’s not clear if they are moving because of the case or for any other reason the owner has decided.

The deeper lesson is in Galaxy's own words: dormancy is not abandonment. Many, if not most of the coins siting still on the bitcoin blockchain are serving a purpose by lying dormant. Bitcoin ownership is defined by cryptography, not by who files the cleverest complaint. The right response is to stop trying to weasel one’s way into wealth and go build something that is valued by others.

COIN CHECK

In October 2009, a website called New Liberty Standard published the very first bitcoin-to-dollar exchange rate. Roughly how many bitcoins did it take to buy a single U.S. dollar?

A. 13
B. 130
C. 1,309
D. 13,090

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

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ANSWER

Answer: C.

New Liberty Standard set bitcoin's first published price at 1,309.03 bitcoins to the dollar, meaning a single coin was worth roughly $0.0008. The number wasn't arbitrary; rather, it was calculated from the cost of the electricity used to mine the coins, dividing a year of a computer's mining output into its power bill. It's a useful anchor for weeks like this one. The same dollar that fetched about 1,309 bitcoins in 2009 buys a tiny sliver of one coin today, and the people who understood why are the reason there's a price at all.

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