Exchange Rate: $84,040
Market Capitalization: $1.69T
Hash Rate (90 days): 911.9EH/s
Transactions (30 days): 20,509,977
Network Fees (economy): 1 sat/vB
Bitcoin Dominance: 59.06%

We publish a 4-minute weekly newsletter about agentic AI called Agents at Work. It’s just getting started, and we’d love if you’d subscribe and tell us what you like, what you don’t, and what you want to see more of.

Subscribe to Agents at Work →

In 1846, a French mathematician named Urbain Le Verrier found a planet without ever looking through a telescope.

The orbit of Uranus was wobbling, and the math suggested something big and unseen was pulling on it. He did the calculation, mailed the coordinates to colleagues in Berlin, and found Neptune sitting there that very night.

Le Verrier didn't invent Neptune. He discovered something that was already there.

That distinction came to mind this week. On Wednesday, the 30-year Treasury yield closed at its highest level since June 2004, and the 10-year pushed past 5.1%. This came in the same month the Treasury tripled its long-bond buybacks to $6 billion, in part to relieve pressure on the long end of the curve. Japan's 10-year also hit its highest since 1996.

When one Wall Street strategist was asked about the buybacks, he called it “tinkering on the periphery.” The much bigger problem is a national debt that crossed $40 trillion in August.

Policymakers can do plenty around the edges, but none of it changes the arithmetic.

Meanwhile, one of the better arguments for owning another cryptocurrency took a hit. For years, Zcash's pitch has been privacy: bitcoin, but with hidden transaction details. On Thursday, a research group called alloc init published Shielded Bitcoin, a design for Zcash-style private transfers that runs on top of bitcoin without a soft fork.

If it proves to be viable, it means that bitcoin can be made to be more private without changing the protocol. Similar approaches to the one taken by Shielded Bitcoin could even be used to make bitcoin transactions faster, smart contracts safer and more reliable, and other features.

All of these features could be added to other blockchain protocols, but there's one thing no protocol can copy – being first. Bitcoin's scarcity works on two levels. The first is technical: a fixed supply, secured by proof-of-work that requires real-world energy to produce. Technically, any project can replicate that. The second way in which bitcoin is scarce is historical. Bitcoin is the original discovery of digital scarcity, and there can only ever be one original. You can fork the code as many times as you like, but you can't fork the history. The genesis block, with an unbroken chain of work since 2009, is where digital scarcity began. A clone can match bitcoin's rules, but never its provenance. In that sense, Bitcoin's claim to be the only truly scarce digital asset is self-fulfilling. Every copy is, by definition, a copy, and each one only confirms which came first.

Satoshi didn't just come up with another feature in 2009. He found a way to create digital money with a fixed supply that no person or company controls. 17 years later, nobody has managed to recreate bitcoin's history, network or distribution from scratch.

Le Verrier could tell you where Neptune was. He couldn't make another one!

Bitwise's first institutional report surveyed pensions, endowments and sovereign funds. Every one that owns crypto holds bitcoin as its largest position, several bought more during the slump, and most allocations sit at just 1–2% (the range ran from 0.5% to 13%). The same institutions described bitcoin as a store of value alongside gold, while treating ether and solana as venture bets with explicit exit conditions.

The most conservative money in the world sat through the dip, and the amount of conservative money that is has found its way into bitcoin is tiny compared to what is to come.

In an important speech, the outgoing SEC commissioner Hester Peirce urged regulators to collect less personal data and instead to use zero-knowledge proofs to verify customer identity. Such a system, she said, can tell a counterparty "'Yes, this person meets your requirement' without that counterparty knowing your name, income, or address."

A day later, Brazil's central bank ordered exchanges to report every self-custody withdrawal over $10,000 starting October 1, and barred licensed firms from dealing with unlicensed platforms and peer-to-peer traders.

One regulator wants a smaller haystack, and another is building a bigger one.

Bitcoin broke $85,000 on Monday, its highest since January, and briefly topped $87,000. The same day, spot bitcoin ETFs took in $998.95 million, their biggest day in 11 months, which pushed 2026 flows back into positive territory. About $648 million in bets against bitcoin were liquidated in 24 hours, and the funds went on to add $2.65 billion over five straight sessions, led by BlackRock's IBIT.

A week after a failed Senate bill and a Fed hike, the buyers showed up anyway.

A New York suit by a plaintiff called "Noah Doe" seeks ownership of 39,069 dormant wallets holding about 3.8 million bitcoins, arguing under New York's lost-property law that the coins were abandoned. The case has been on hold since June. This month, four of the long-quiet wallets moved $161 million in bitcoin, including 100 coins from an address tagged in the suit on Saturday and 600 coins on Tuesday that hadn't budged since 2012. None of it went to an exchange.

The only proof of ownership that counts is a signature, and the owners just produced theirs.

Raiffeisen Bank International is rolling out bitcoin trading across its banks in 11 Central and Eastern European countries through Bitpanda, reaching 18.8 million customers inside their existing banking app.

Jack Dorsey's Block joined the x402 Foundation and brought Lightning to its payment standard for AI agents, so software can pay for data and services in sats. The standard is backed by Google, Visa and Mastercard, and until now it has run almost entirely on stablecoins.

X added a "Trade" button to cashtags like $BTC, sending U.S. users straight from a post to Coinbase, Kraken or Gemini to buy.

Coinbase launched fixed-rate loans against bitcoin through Morpho, adding locked-in rates and set repayment dates to a variable-rate program that already has $1.4 billion outstanding.

Circle opened bitcoin-backed USDC borrowing to its institutional clients, letting companies raise dollars against their bitcoin without selling it.

Fidelity's director of global macro Jurrien Timmer, noting that bitcoin held $60,000 support for nearly a year, wrote on Saturday that he's "sensing that a new 4-year cycle bull market is underway."

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

This week, Bloomberg reported that Washington is weighing a plan to promote dollar stablecoins abroad, in part to create more demand for U.S. debt. To understand the logic, start with how a stablecoin works.

A stablecoin like Tether’s USDT is essentially a dollar IOU. You give Tether a dollar and receive a digital token worth one dollar. Tether then invests much of the money backing those tokens in U.S. Treasury bills, bonds, and other, mostly dollar-linked assets, earning interest on the reserves.

That means stablecoin adoption can create a new source of demand for U.S. government debt. If someone in Lagos or Buenos Aires moves their savings into USDT, some of that money ultimately finds its way into Treasuries. For the person buying USDT, the appeal is obvious: the dollar has historically held its value far better than currencies like the naira or peso.

For Washington, the appeal is obvious too. Stablecoins can extend the dollar’s reach to anyone with a smartphone while creating more buyers for the debt needed to finance federal spending.

But they don’t fix the underlying problem. The U.S. government is running persistent deficits and adding to a debt load that has already passed $40 trillion. Finding more buyers for that debt may make it easier to finance, but it doesn’t reduce the debt itself or the deficits creating it.

And if those debts eventually lead policymakers to tolerate more inflation, stablecoin holders are along for the ride. One USDT may still equal one dollar, but that dollar can buy less. Stablecoins can make dollars easier to access and move around the world. They can’t make the dollar itself harder.

There is also an interesting irony here. Tether puts part of its profits into bitcoin, and now holds nearly 99,000 bitcoins. Saifedean Ammous has argued that this makes Tether a kind of Trojan horse: more USDT means more reserves earning interest, which means more profits that can potentially be used to buy bitcoin.

That creates a strange dynamic. Stablecoins may help extend the dollar system around the world while one of their largest issuers quietly converts some of the proceeds into an asset designed to be outside that system.

Stablecoins may be very good at making the dollar more useful. They can’t change what a dollar is.

On Wednesday, the U.S. 30-year Treasury yield closed at its highest level since which year?

A. 1998
B. 2004
C. 2008
D. 2011

Check your answer at the end of the page.

Follow us on X for more fresh content

Answer: B. The 30-year yield closed around 5.47% on Wednesday, its highest since June 2004. That's despite the Treasury buying back up to $6 billion of long bonds to hold it down

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.