Why Did Congress Shelve Its Own Biggest Crypto Bill?

The US Senate quietly put the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act to one side this week, choosing to spend its limited time before the August recess on a Russia sanctions bill and a batch of judicial nominations instead. In plain terms: not enough political will, not enough hours in the day, and other things jumped the queue. It now looks very unlikely the bill gets a vote before Congress breaks for summer, which pushes any real decision further into the year.

That matters because the Clarity Act is the single piece of legislation that would finally tell everyone — banks, exchanges, and ordinary investors — exactly how Bitcoin and other crypto assets are regulated in America. Right now nobody has that clarity, hence the name. Bitcoin dipped below $65,000 over the weekend as investors absorbed the news that certainty was, once again, being pushed back.

The Twist: Wall Street Wants This Bill More Than Washington Does

Here is the part that makes this week genuinely interesting rather than just another delay. BlackRock — the largest asset manager on the planet, running trillions of dollars — has formally endorsed the Clarity Act, joining a growing list of major financial firms publicly pressing the Senate to pass it. Samara Cohen, BlackRock’s Global Head of Market Development, called the bill “an important step toward establishing a regulatory framework for digital assets that puts investors first,” arguing it would support innovation while keeping the transparency and investor protections her clients expect.

It is worth understanding why BlackRock in particular cares so much. Its Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, has pulled in over $63 billion since launch — one of the fastest-growing ETFs Wall Street has ever seen. Every dollar in that fund sits inside a regulatory grey area for as long as Congress refuses to spell out clearly which US regulator actually oversees Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market long term. Clear rules do not just sound nice to a company like BlackRock. They protect a genuinely enormous and fast-growing business line from the risk of a future regulator deciding, after the fact, that the rules were something different all along.

When a bill gets shelved despite the world’s biggest financial institution actively pushing for it, that tells you the holdup has nothing to do with whether serious money wants this. It has everything to do with politics.

And the politics are genuinely stuck. Senate Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal and Chris Van Hollen, held a public forum this week specifically examining President Trump’s personal crypto investments, which reportedly generated $1.4 billion for his family businesses last year. The core disagreement holding up the bill is whether the new rules should stop government officials from issuing or promoting their own crypto products while they are the ones writing the rules for everyone else. Until that gets resolved, BlackRock can lobby all it likes.

The Fed Decision Everyone Is Waiting On

The Federal Reserve announces its interest rate decision on July 29, and most people expect rates to stay exactly where they are. But the odds of a surprise rate hike have crept up to around 37% this week, driven by inflation concerns that refuse to go away. That uncertainty alone was enough to spook some investors, contributing to $465 million leaving Bitcoin ETFs on Thursday and Friday — even after three straight weeks of money coming back in overall.

The pattern should feel familiar by now. Higher rates make cash and bonds pay more, which makes an asset like Bitcoin that pays no interest look less attractive by comparison. Nothing has changed about that relationship. What has changed is that the market is currently pricing in slightly more chance of a hawkish surprise than it was a few weeks ago.

A UK Bitcoin Company Just Voted to Give Up

Away from Washington, there was a much smaller but genuinely important story this week. Shareholders of Satsuma Technology, a UK-listed company that had built its entire business around holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet, voted overwhelmingly to sell its entire 668 Bitcoin holding — worth around $43.5 million — and shut the company down.

This is the first time we have seen a public Bitcoin treasury company actually unwind completely, rather than just pause buying or sell a small slice to cover costs. Reports suggest as many as twenty public companies globally are quietly stepping back from the “buy Bitcoin and hold it forever” strategy that became fashionable over the last two years. Satsuma is the clearest example yet of what happens when that strategy meets a falling share price: shareholders eventually decide the risk of holding a volatile asset on a company balance sheet is not worth it, and vote to cash out.

This does not mean the corporate Bitcoin treasury idea is finished. Strategy, the largest of these companies, still holds 843,775 Bitcoin. But Satsuma is a real, concrete example of the downside risk we have discussed in the abstract in previous articles — and a useful reminder that not every company copying this playbook has Strategy’s scale or staying power.

Speaking of Strategy, It Has Stopped Buying

Strategy confirmed this week that it made no new Bitcoin purchases between July 20 and July 26 — the fourth week in a row without adding to its stack. Instead of buying more Bitcoin, the company raised $544.5 million by selling shares.

Four weeks without a purchase is a genuinely long pause for a company that built its entire reputation on buying Bitcoin relentlessly, in good times and bad. It does not necessarily mean Saylor has lost conviction. Raising cash rather than spending it can just as easily mean the company wants a bigger safety buffer before committing more, especially with Bitcoin’s price sitting well below its highs. But after weeks of covering dividend payments and rebuilding reserves, a fourth straight week of silence on the buying front is worth noting plainly rather than explaining away.

Quick Hits

The EU tightens the net. Brussels adopted its 21st sanctions package against Russia this week, which for the first time includes a transaction ban on fourteen named crypto platforms operating out of places like the UAE, Panama, and Georgia. There is also a new mechanism allowing the EU to ban entire countries’ crypto services if they are found to be helping Russia dodge sanctions. Any crypto business wanting to keep access to European customers now has a strong incentive to tighten its compliance.

Minnesota bans Bitcoin ATMs. From August 1, operating a cryptocurrency kiosk in Minnesota becomes illegal, with existing machines required to be removed by the end of the year. The stated reason is fraud and scam prevention, and Minnesota now joins Indiana and Tennessee in restricting this increasingly common on-ramp into crypto for cash-based customers.

Uphold cuts staff. Crypto platform Uphold laid off 85 people — about 17% of its workforce — as it shifts focus away from everyday retail customers and towards banks and larger institutional clients. It is another small data point in a pattern we have flagged before: retail trading interest has cooled considerably in 2026, and platforms built around retail volume are having to adapt or shrink.

And Finally…

The Pizza That Still Haunts Everyone

A viral clip made the rounds again this week retelling the story of the man who once paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas back in Bitcoin’s earliest days. At Bitcoin’s 2025 peak, those two pizzas would have been worth roughly $690 million. As the caption dryly put it: he got the pizzas, he did not keep the Bitcoin. Somewhere out there, another meme is doing the rounds of two people on a small boat, one much older than the other, captioned “if Bitcoin fails, my retirement plan is Doris.” Gallows humour, but it does capture the mood of anyone still waiting for their portfolio to turn a profit.

Quick Questions

Q: Is the Clarity Act dead?

A: No, just delayed again. It has been pushed behind other Senate priorities and is unlikely to get a vote before the August recess, but it has not been cancelled or rejected.

Q: Does BlackRock lobbying for the bill mean it will pass?

A: Not on its own. BlackRock wanting clear rules adds pressure, but the actual holdup is a political disagreement between parties over ethics rules for government officials’ crypto holdings, which BlackRock cannot resolve by lobbying alone.

Q: Should I be worried that a Bitcoin company just liquidated?

A: Not about Bitcoin itself. Satsuma’s collapse is a lesson about the risks of a single company holding a volatile asset on its balance sheet, not a sign that Bitcoin as an asset is in trouble. Bitcoin held directly by you is unaffected by one company’s business decisions.

Why Did Bitcoin Whipsaw This Week?

Two forces pulled in opposite directions, and neither one won cleanly. On one side, the big US Bitcoin ETFs took in fresh money for a second week running, a sign that institutional investors are cautiously stepping back in. On the other side, the conflict between the US and Iran flared up again, oil prices jumped, and investors did what they usually do when the world looks shakier: they sold anything that felt risky, Bitcoin included. The result was a choppy week where good news and bad news kept cancelling each other out, and Bitcoin ended up bouncing between roughly $62,600 and $65,000 without ever really settling.

The ETF Money Is Coming Back, Slowly

The thirteen US spot Bitcoin ETFs — the funds that let ordinary investors own Bitcoin through a normal stock market account, without ever touching a crypto exchange — pulled in $75.7 million in the week to July 19. That followed $197.4 million the week before. Put together, that is two straight weeks of money coming in, after a long stretch where it had mostly been going out.

It is worth being honest about the scale here. $75 million sounds like a lot until you remember these funds have tens of billions of dollars in them already. This is a trickle returning, not a flood. But trickles matter, because they tell you which way sentiment is turning. Two weeks of inflows after months of outflows is the kind of small signal that often shows up before a bigger shift, not after one.

Why Did an Argument Thousands of Miles Away Move the Price?

Bitcoin fell to around $62,600 on July 14 as tensions between the US and Iran escalated, and dipped again to roughly $63,130 a few days later. The mechanism is simple once you see it. Iran sits next to a major oil shipping route, so any escalation there raises fears about oil supply. Oil prices went up. Higher oil prices tend to push inflation up too, because energy costs feed into the price of almost everything else. And when inflation fears rise, investors worry the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates higher for longer, which makes risk assets like Bitcoin less attractive by comparison to safer options like cash and government bonds.

The interesting part is what this tells you about how Bitcoin is currently being treated. In theory, an asset with a fixed supply that no government controls should be a hedge against exactly this kind of geopolitical chaos. In practice, this week it traded like a nervous tech stock, selling off right alongside broader risk markets rather than acting as a safe haven. That gap between the theory and the current behaviour is one worth watching over time.

The Clarity Act Is Still Going Nowhere

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — the bill that would finally give America clear rules for who regulates what in crypto — remains stuck in the Senate. The sticking points have not changed in weeks: disagreement over ethics rules for government officials who hold crypto, and unresolved questions about anti-money-laundering provisions. With the Senate’s August recess approaching fast, the window to get this done in 2026 keeps shrinking.

One widely shared post on X this week asked whether Bitcoin touching a 30-day high meant the Clarity Act was about to pass. It was not. That is worth flagging plainly: price movement is not legislative news, and no vote has been scheduled. The honest state of play is exactly where it was last time we covered this — stuck, waiting, and running out of runway before the summer break.

There is one fresh, if unconfirmed, development worth flagging. Odds on prediction market Polymarket for the Clarity Act passing this year jumped to 43%, up from a record low the week before, after unverified reports suggested President Trump had agreed to a key ethics provision — the rule covering whether officials can hold crypto while writing the laws that govern it. No bill text has actually appeared, and nothing is confirmed. But a jump like that in a prediction market is a signal worth watching, even if it is not proof of anything yet.

Strategy Builds a Bigger Cushion

Strategy, the company run by Michael Saylor that holds more Bitcoin than any other on earth, announced on July 20 that it had increased its US dollar cash reserve by $225 million, bringing it to $3.2 billion. Its Bitcoin holdings stayed exactly where they were: 843,775 coins.

This is a different story to the one we have been following over the past month, where Strategy was selling Bitcoin to cover dividend payments on its various preferred stock products. Building a bigger cash buffer, rather than reaching for the Bitcoin pile again, is the company signalling that it wants more breathing room before it needs to touch its core holding. It is a small but meaningful shift from selling under pressure to preparing in advance.

Michael Saylor vs. a Mining Proposal Called BIP-110

Away from the price chart, one of the more heated arguments in Bitcoin this week had nothing to do with money at all. Foundry, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pool operators, opened a vote among its mining clients on a proposal called BIP-110.

Here is what that actually means. Bitcoin miners are the computers around the world that process transactions and keep the network running, and changes to how the network operates sometimes need their support to move forward. BIP-110 is a proposed temporary rule change that would restrict certain non-financial data — things like images or messages — from being embedded inside Bitcoin transactions. Supporters call it basic housekeeping to stop the network being clogged with data it was never designed to carry. Critics, including Michael Saylor, publicly pushed back this week, framing any restriction on what can go into a Bitcoin transaction as a step towards letting someone decide what content is acceptable on the network — which cuts against Bitcoin’s core idea that no one is in charge.

Nothing has changed yet. Foundry’s pool defaults to voting “No” unless more than 51% of the mining power voting actively supports the change before an early-August deadline. This is a live governance process, not an approved upgrade, and it is worth watching precisely because it puts an abstract debate about Bitcoin’s principles into an actual, countable vote.

Bitcoin Keeps Getting Easier to Buy the Traditional Way

Three separate announcements this week all point the same direction: more ways to gain exposure to Bitcoin through completely ordinary financial products.

T. Rowe Price, a US asset manager looking after $1.89 trillion of client money, launched an actively managed crypto fund on the New York Stock Exchange on July 16, giving its enormous client base a regulated way to get exposure to Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies in one product. CoinShares launched a Bitcoin mining fund on Germany’s Deutsche Börse, built specifically to meet the rules European pension funds and insurers have to follow — meaning large, conservative European investors who could not previously touch anything crypto-related now have a compliant route in. And in Russia, a comprehensive crypto law is now just two votes away from passing parliament, replacing years of ambiguity with an actual licensing system for exchanges and brokers, albeit with real restrictions on ordinary retail investors.

None of these are Bitcoin itself becoming more valuable overnight. What they represent is the plumbing — the boring, unglamorous infrastructure work — quietly getting built out in more places, by more serious institutions, in more countries. That is usually how lasting adoption actually happens: slowly, then all at once.

Bitcoin Miners Are Feeling the Squeeze

Bitcoin spent the week consolidating around $63,700, sitting about 14% below its 200-day average price — a common measure of the longer-term trend. Investment firm VanEck reported that daily mining revenue has fallen to a level where less efficient mining equipment is now operating at or below breakeven.

In plain terms: mining Bitcoin costs electricity and hardware, and when the price stays low for long enough, the miners running older or less efficient machines start losing money on every coin they produce. If that continues, some may be forced to sell their existing Bitcoin holdings to cover costs, or shut down entirely. That is not a crisis today, but it is exactly the kind of quiet pressure that can build into a bigger story if prices do not recover.

And Finally…

The Universal Crypto Confession

One post doing the rounds this week summed up a feeling almost everyone in crypto quietly shares: pretending to understand every acronym thrown around in conversation, then secretly opening five browser tabs the moment nobody is looking to figure out what on earth was just said. It is, as the original poster put it, a bit like sitting at a dinner where everyone else somehow knows the secret recipe. If that sounds familiar, you are in exactly the right newsletter — explaining the acronyms properly, so you never have to fake it, is rather the whole point of Just Bitcoin.

Quick Questions

Q: Did the Clarity Act nearly pass this week?

A: No, though the odds moved. A viral post asked whether Bitcoin hitting a 30-day high meant the Clarity Act was close to passing — that was just speculation. But separately, unverified reports that Trump agreed to a key ethics provision pushed prediction market odds up to 43%. Nothing is confirmed and no vote is scheduled, but it is worth watching.

Q: Is BIP-110 now part of Bitcoin?

A: Not yet, and it might never be. It is a proposed temporary rule change that mining pools are currently voting on. Unless more than half of the voting mining power backs it before an early-August deadline, it does not go ahead.

Q: Should I be worried about Bitcoin miners going under?

A: Not urgently. Some older, less efficient mining machines are currently running at a loss, which could eventually force some miners to sell Bitcoin or shut down. It is a pressure point worth watching, not an emergency happening right now.

A Promise With Small Print

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The headline commitment was simple: Bitcoin the government seizes goes into the reserve, and Bitcoin in the reserve is never sold. It was, at the time, one of the most pro-Bitcoin things any government on Earth had ever put in writing.

On Monday this week, government wallets moved roughly $288 million in seized Bitcoin and Ether onto Coinbase Prime — a platform built for institutions that need to trade or liquidate large positions. Blockchain trackers spotted it within hours. The obvious question followed immediately: is the government about to break its own promise?

The honest answer is more nuanced than the headlines suggest, and the nuance is worth understanding properly.

What Actually Moved, and Why It Is Not (Quite) a Broken Promise

The Bitcoin in question — roughly 3,800 to 3,940 coins, depending on which snapshot you use — came from two sources: Ryan Farace, a dark web dealer known as "Xanaxman," and the long-defunct exchange BTC-e. The Ether, a separate $53 million, was linked to a money laundering case involving a former Oracle employee.

Here is the detail almost every early headline missed. The executive order’s no-sell rule only applies to Bitcoin that has completed the final forfeiture process and been formally deposited into the reserve. Coins tied to active or recently resolved criminal cases sit outside that vault until the legal process is fully finished — and some of this week’s transfer falls into exactly that grey zone. Moving it to a custodian is not automatically a breach of the reserve rule, because it may never have been reserve Bitcoin in the first place.

There is a second layer worth knowing. The order’s "never sell" language applies specifically to Bitcoin. Ether and every other token the government seizes sit in a separate bucket called the Digital Asset Stockpile, which comes with no such promise. The Treasury has explicit authority to manage — including sell — assets in that stockpile as it sees fit. So the Ether moved this week was never protected to begin with. Only the Bitcoin portion raises any real question, and even that depends on where exactly those specific coins sat in the legal process.

None of this means the transfer is definitely innocent. Coinbase Prime is a custody platform, but it is also a trading desk. Large holders who intend to keep coins for decades typically leave them in cold storage rather than routing them through fresh intermediary wallets into an exchange’s deposit address — which is exactly what happened here with the Bitcoin, moved in two hops rather than sent directly. That routing pattern is unusual enough that several blockchain researchers flagged it as looking preparatory, even if custody alone would not require it.

Why It Matters Either Way

Zoom out and the specifics of this one transfer matter less than what it reveals about the reserve itself. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve exists only by executive order. It is not law. A future president could unwind it with a single signature, and even under this administration, Treasury and Commerce are reportedly still arguing over who actually controls the assets inside it.

A bill called the American Reserve Modernization Act, introduced back in May, would fix exactly this problem — turning the reserve into statute with a mandatory 20-year holding period that no single administration could quietly reverse. It has not passed. Until it does, "the government will never sell its Bitcoin" remains a policy preference, not a legal guarantee.

Even after this week’s transfer, the government still holds around 324,552 Bitcoin — among the largest state holdings on the planet, and this movement represents well under 1% of it. Nobody is suggesting Washington is about to dump its entire stack. But a government that is simultaneously the world’s largest sovereign Bitcoin holder and unable to say with total legal certainty what its own custody rules actually mean is a genuinely interesting position to be in.

The Institutional Retreat Continues

This is not the only story this week about big holders and Bitcoin under pressure. Strategy sold roughly $218 million of Bitcoin so far in 2026 to fund dividends and rebuild its cash reserves, and in late June authorised up to $1.25 billion more in potential sales alongside a share buyback. We have covered this pattern closely over the past month, and this week brought a milestone that made the pressure official: Strategy’s mNAV — the ratio of its market value to the actual worth of its Bitcoin holdings — fell below 1 for the first time.

In plain English, the market is now valuing Strategy at less than the Bitcoin it holds is worth. For years, Strategy traded at a premium precisely because investors believed Saylor’s financial engineering added value on top of the raw Bitcoin. That premium has now gone negative. Other digital-asset treasury companies, including Nakamoto, have also been selling. The leveraged treasury flywheel that powered so much of the last two years of institutional buying can, it turns out, run in reverse.

Bitcoin itself fell more than 2% this week to around $62,380, with two-year Treasury yields climbing to 4.29% and traders raising the odds of a July rate hike from roughly 10% to 50% after hawkish comments from Fed Governor Christopher Waller. Renewed tension between the US and Iran, including a blockade near the Strait of Hormuz, pushed oil back toward $80 a barrel — reviving the same inflation fears that drove the summer’s macro turbulence in the first place.

Quick Hits

The Clarity Act.

A merged Senate draft may finally surface as soon as next week, with possible floor action around July 20. It still lacks the Democratic votes needed to pass, with unresolved fights over ethics rules for officials’ crypto holdings and vacancies at both the SEC and CFTC. The window is narrow and getting narrower.

The quantum threat, updated.

We covered the quantum computing risk to Bitcoin a few weeks back, and this week brought another round of "quantum computers could break Bitcoin" headlines worth treating with the same scepticism. New unpublished research estimates roughly 35% of circulating Bitcoin could theoretically be exposed — down from the 50% figure some earlier research suggested. That sounds alarming in isolation, but it is worth remembering two things. First, this is not a Bitcoin-specific problem: the same cryptography protects almost the entire Internet, from online banking to government systems, so the whole world is racing to solve it together, not Bitcoin alone. Second, Bitcoin has a working, tested process for upgrading its own rules, and developers have already been building the post-quantum replacement for months, well ahead of any actual threat materialising. The closer a real quantum computer gets to being dangerous, the faster that upgrade gets finished and rolled out. Industry engineers are also warning against migrating too early, since a rushed switch could introduce fresh vulnerabilities of its own. The risk is real and worth watching. It is not, however, an emergency, and it is very much not unique to Bitcoin.

India leans further towards a ban.

Government documents reviewed by Reuters show India’s central bank has reasserted a policy stance "leaning towards prohibition," recommending banks be barred from any crypto exposure at all. Nothing is law yet, but with nearly 39 million Indian crypto holders and nearly $2.1 billion at stake, it is a significant signal in the wrong direction from one of the world’s largest crypto markets.

The Clarity Act could see floor action the week of July 20. I’ll cover it the moment anything moves. Make sure you’re subscribed.

And Finally…

Somewhere out there, a hobbyist plugged in a credit-card-sized Bitcoin miner called a Bitaxe — the kind of thing you might mistake for a phone charger — and let it run for eight hours at a whisper-quiet 15 to 21 watts. Eight hours later, it found block 957,382 all by itself and earned 3.1382 Bitcoin, worth around $200,000 at current prices.

The odds of a solo miner with that little computing power finding a block are estimated at roughly one in 18,000 years. Twelve solo miners have managed it in 2026 alone, and 24 over the past twelve months — up 41% year on year, helped along by mining difficulty dropping more than 15% since mid-June. Somewhere, a $150 gadget the size of a deck of cards just outperformed most hedge funds’ entire year. Bitcoin remains, among many other things, the world’s most expensive lottery ticket that occasionally actually pays out.

Bitcoin Rallies on Bad News

Two weeks ago Bitcoin was sitting below $58,000 and the mood was grim. This week it staged its best rally since March, climbing nearly 10% to touch $64,000. The trigger was surprisingly mundane: a weak June jobs report showing the US economy added just 57,000 jobs, far below expectations.

Weak jobs data sounds like bad news. For Bitcoin, it was rocket fuel. A soft labour market makes it harder for the Federal Reserve to justify keeping interest rates high, which raises the odds of a rate cut. Traders who had bet against Bitcoin scrambled to cover their positions, and over $450 million in short bets got liquidated in the process — forced buying that pushed the price up even faster.

The rally got a second boost from the ETF market. After ten straight days of outflows through late June, Bitcoin ETFs suddenly reversed course, pulling in $221.7 million on July 3 and $295 million on July 8 — the strongest single day since May. Institutional money that had been heading for the exits turned around and came back in.

Then, right on cue, the Fed reminded everyone that nothing is settled. Minutes from the June meeting, released July 8, revealed nine of eighteen Fed officials are still projecting a rate hike later this year, not a cut. Bitcoin pulled back slightly to around $63,300 on the news. The rally is real. So is the uncertainty underneath it.

Saylor Breaks His Own Rule. Again. Bigger This Time.

Regular readers will remember the moment in late May when Michael Saylor did something he had sworn never to do: sell Bitcoin. It was a tiny amount — 32 coins, about $2.5 million — and Saylor framed it as a show of commitment to preferred stockholders rather than a retreat. The market reacted badly anyway, and the sale became a symbol of how fragile confidence in Strategy’s model had become.

This week, Strategy did it again. This time the number was not small. The company sold 3,588 Bitcoin for roughly $216 million — about a hundred times larger than the May sale, and the biggest single disposal in Strategy’s history.

The proceeds went towards dividend payments across Strategy’s full lineup of preferred stock products: STRF, STRE, STRK, STRD, and STRC, which together make up what the company calls its Digital Credit business. Saylor confirmed the sale covered second-quarter payments on four of those instruments plus the full June payment on STRC specifically.

Here is the detail that matters. None of these preferred products are actually backed by Strategy’s Bitcoin. Each one is simply a claim on whatever assets are left over if the company ever wound down. The dividends have to be paid in cash, and Strategy’s actual software business does not generate anywhere near enough cash to cover them. Grayscale’s head of research estimated the annual dividend bill across all five products at $1.5 billion. When the cash reserve runs low, there are only two options: raise fresh capital, or sell Bitcoin. This week, Strategy chose the second.

Strategy still holds 843,775 Bitcoin and $2.55 billion in cash as of July 5. The sale worked out to roughly $60,201 per coin — notably below where Strategy has been buying, and a reminder of how far Bitcoin has fallen since Strategy’s cost basis of around $75,700 per coin was set. The company is currently sitting on an $8.32 billion unrealised loss for the quarter.

And yet, in the same breath, Strategy keeps buying. After May’s sale, the company turned around and bought 1,550 Bitcoin — nearly fifty times the size of what it had just sold. The pattern is consistent: sell a little to cover the dividend bill, then keep accumulating with fresh capital raised elsewhere. Bernstein’s analysts estimate Strategy has around 17 months of cash coverage for its obligations and still rate the company as unlikely to face forced liquidation. Their year-end Bitcoin price target remains $150,000.

And here is the detail that suggests the conditioning worked. When the small May sale broke news, Bitcoin and STRC both fell sharply — the market read it as a sign of weakness. This time, a sale a hundred times larger landed and STRC did not collapse. It is still below its $100 par value, trading around $88 to $90 this week, but that is a recovery from a low below $75 in late June, not a fresh crash. The board also raised the dividend rate to 12% to help pull it back towards par. A much bigger disposal, absorbed calmly, is exactly the outcome the small first sale was designed to make possible.

Washington Runs Out of Summer

The most important piece of crypto legislation in US history has stalled again. The Clarity Act failed to reach a Senate vote before the July 4 recess, and prediction markets have marked the odds of passage in 2026 down to just 46%.

The sticking points are the same ones we have covered for months: how stablecoins should be regulated, how DeFi protocols should be treated, and — increasingly contentious — what ethics rules should apply to government officials who hold crypto assets while writing the laws that govern them. That last point got considerably more awkward this week.

A financial disclosure revealed that President Trump personally made $1.4 billion from crypto ventures last year, including $636 million from the $TRUMP memecoin alone. In the same week, blockchain analysis showed that close to a million retail investors have collectively lost $3.8 billion buying that same token. Democratic lawmakers, already pushing for stronger ethics provisions in the Clarity Act, now have a very specific and very large number to point to.

If the bill does not move before the Senate’s August 7 recess, the window closes for the year. Midterm politics take over after that, and the odds of anything passing before 2027 or later start to look thin.

Miners Become AI Landlords

Away from the price drama, one of the more interesting long-term trends kept building this week. Bitcoin miner TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic — the AI company behind Claude — to build a 401 megawatt data centre campus in Kentucky. The deal is expected to generate roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue over its lifetime. TeraWulf shares jumped more than 10% on the news.

This is part of a broader pattern we have touched on before. Bitcoin miners sit on enormous amounts of cheap energy infrastructure, and AI companies are desperate for exactly that. Rather than betting everything on Bitcoin’s price, miners are increasingly renting out their power capacity to AI firms for guaranteed, long-term revenue. It is a hedge against Bitcoin volatility that has nothing to do with believing in Bitcoin any less — it is just good business.

The UK Quietly Wins the Regulation Race

While the US Senate argues, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority quietly published its final crypto rules this week — covering capital requirements, stress testing, and market abuse standards. Firms can apply for authorisation from September 2026, with the full regime taking effect in October 2027.

It is a slower timeline than some in the industry wanted, but it is a genuine, finished rulebook — something the US still does not have. Combined with the FCA’s recent moves on crypto ETNs in pension funds, the UK is positioning itself as a place where the rules are simply settled, while Washington remains stuck in negotiation.

It is worth pausing on how much this represents a genuine turnaround. Not so long ago, the UK’s stance on crypto looked cautious at best — a retail ETN ban that only lifted in October 2025, years of the industry treated as an afterthought while the US and EU built out their frameworks. British politics generally feels like a mess right now, but on this specific issue, the UK has gone from laggard to having a complete, settled rulebook faster than the country that was supposed to be leading the way. Sometimes the quiet regulator gets there first.

The Clarity Act has one more shot before the August 7 recess. I’ll cover it the moment anything moves. Make sure you’re subscribed.

And Finally…

Coinbase’s AI Predicted the World Cup Score Before the Match Started. It Was Wrong.

Coinbase’s new AI-powered notification system this week confidently informed users that Norway had beaten Brazil 3-2, complete with two goals from Erling Haaland. The only issue: the match had not kicked off yet. When the final whistle actually blew, Norway had indeed won — 2-1, with Haaland grabbing both goals just as predicted, plus a late Neymar penalty the AI apparently did not see coming. CEO Brian Armstrong had to publicly step in to investigate his own algorithm’s fortune-telling habit. Half right is still not a passing grade for an AI that was not supposed to be predicting anything in the first place.

Dave Portnoy Has a New Bitcoin Strategy: Stop Trying.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, who bought Bitcoin near its $100,000 all-time high, announced this week that he is done trying to time the market. His new plan is to hold “all the way down to zero” if necessary. His reasoning is refreshingly honest: “every time I sell it, it goes nuclear.” A lot of retail investors will recognise that particular flavour of pain.

The President Who Promised to Sign Everything Just Blocked the CBDC Ban

Cast your mind back to last week. The CBDC ban had passed the Senate 85 votes to 5, tucked inside a bipartisan housing bill. It was heading to the President’s desk. We called it practically unstoppable. Then Trump announced he will not sign the housing bill until Congress first passes his SAVE America Act — separate legislation focused on requiring ID for voting.

The SAVE America Act is, in isolation, a perfectly reasonable debate to have. Requiring ID to vote is standard practice in most democracies and a legitimate position to hold. But using it as a lever to block crypto-friendly legislation that had already passed with overwhelming bipartisan support is a different matter entirely. The CBDC ban had nothing to do with voter ID. The housing bill had nothing to do with voter ID. Trump has essentially picked up the digital dollar ban and announced he’s holding it hostage until he gets what he wants on a completely unrelated issue.

The crypto industry — which has invested enormous political capital in Trump over the past two years, including over $135 million in donations during the 2024 election cycle — is watching the President they backed use their legislative wins as bargaining chips in unrelated political fights. For now, frustration is being expressed quietly. But if the Clarity Act goes down as collateral damage, it will not remain quiet.

The Clarity Act: The Window Is Closing

Regular readers will remember our piece on the missing diary entry — the Clarity Act waiting on Tim Scott to schedule a Senate Banking Committee markup. That piece turned out to be more prophetic than we intended. The bill made it out of committee, but it never found its momentum, and now it is in genuine danger.

The July 4 deadline that had been widely cited as the target for Senate passage has come and gone. The Senate is heading into recess. When lawmakers return on July 13, they will have a narrow window of perhaps two to three weeks before the August break consumes the calendar. Three disputes remain unresolved: government ethics provisions — including whether officials can hold crypto assets while writing the laws that govern them — law enforcement access concerns, and market structure rules. Galaxy Research has downgraded the odds of passage in 2026 to 50/50, and those odds feel generous given the current state of play.

The Trump CBDC situation makes everything harder in a specific way. Senate Democrats who voted 85-5 for the housing bill are not feeling cooperative right now. Political goodwill is a finite resource, and the President just spent some of the Clarity Act’s share on an unrelated standoff. If this bill dies in August, the realistic next window — given midterm dynamics, a potential change in House majority, and Senator Lummis leaving in January 2027 — may genuinely be years away.

Why Bitcoin Sat at $60,000 While Everything Else Surged

The US and Iran formally de-escalated this week. Oil prices fell sharply. The Nasdaq surged and the S&P 500 closed out its best quarter since 2020. Global risk appetite returned in a way that, in almost any previous cycle, would have pulled Bitcoin higher with it. Instead, Bitcoin sat stubbornly around $60,000 and barely moved.

The reason is a supply overhang of historic proportions. In June alone, Bitcoin ETFs sold 71,600 BTC while corporate treasuries absorbed just 7,500. Add in newly mined coins and the market is facing a net surplus of roughly 77,000 Bitcoin that buyers are simply not absorbing at current prices — a $4.4 billion imbalance.

June has now officially become the worst month on record for US spot Bitcoin ETFs, with over $4 billion in net outflows, eclipsing the previous record set in February 2025. When supply exceeds demand by that margin, positive macro news does not lift the price. It just slows the fall.

The AI rotation we identified two weeks ago — institutional investors selling liquid assets including Bitcoin ETFs to fund positions in the SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic listings — remains the primary driver. The mega-IPO pipeline is gradually clearing, but June’s outflow record suggests the rotation has not finished. Until ETF inflows return to absorb the excess supply, Bitcoin is effectively decoupled from the broader equity market rally, regardless of how good the macro news gets.

STRC and SATA: Now a Market Problem, Not Just a Strategy Problem

Two weeks ago we wrote that the STRC collapse was a Strategy-specific problem, and that SATA — Strive’s almost identical product — was sitting calmly at $100 as evidence. That picture has changed, and it is worth an honest update.

STRC hit an all-time low of $71.25 on June 26 before recovering slightly to around $74–76 as of June 29–30 — still roughly 25% below its $100 par value. Strategy has maintained its dividend rate at 11.50% for five consecutive months despite the stock trading well below par, which the market is increasingly reading as a signal that management is reluctant to acknowledge the problem formally. Analysts now expect Strategy to raise the rate to 12% or 12.50% at the next reset in order to attract buyers back toward par.

SATA, meanwhile, has also fallen from its $100 par value and is currently trading around $84–85. That is an important development. Last time we wrote, SATA being at par while STRC was at $82 made the story clearly about Strategy’s specific financial decisions. Now that both products are trading well below par, it is harder to sustain that argument. The common factor is Bitcoin’s price. Both products’ capital bases are ultimately tied to Bitcoin treasury strategies, and with Bitcoin down roughly 50% from its October all-time high, the market is repricing the risk across the entire category. SATA is still in better structural shape than STRC — its 18-month cash reserve and debt-free structure remain genuine advantages — but it is no longer immune.

Strategy has responded to the pressure with a new capital management framework: a $2.55 billion US dollar reserve ring-fenced for preferred dividend payments, plus authorisation to sell up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin if needed. Analysts have broadly welcomed the transparency, even if the prospect of Strategy selling Bitcoin adds to the supply overhang. A company with a clear plan is less dangerous than one that appears to be improvising.

MiCA Lands. 83% of European Crypto Firms Aren’t Ready.

July 1 marked the full enforcement date for MiCA — the EU’s comprehensive crypto regulatory framework. For UK readers this matters both as a signal of where UK regulation is heading and because several platforms you may use operate across European markets.

The numbers are sobering: out of over 1,200 registered crypto entities in Europe, only around 210 have achieved full MiCA authorisation. The remaining 83% face service suspensions. Binance has already suspended new registrations and restricted services in France, Italy, and Spain after failing to secure its licence.

The short-term disruption is real, but the longer-term picture is more interesting. MiCA creates the world’s first unified crypto regulatory framework across 27 countries. Compliant firms now have passport access to the entire EU single market. The 17% who passed the test are in an extraordinarily strong competitive position. The 83% who did not have a compliance problem, not a business problem — which is a very different and more fixable situation. For UK firms, the FCA is watching closely. The UK’s own framework is expected in 2027, and the European failure rate is a warning shot for anyone moving slowly.

And Finally…

CZ Wants to Make America the Capital of Crypto. His Exchange Just Got Kicked Out of Europe.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao — founder of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange — gave an interview this week declaring his personal mission to make the United States the “capital of crypto.” On the same day, Binance was suspending services across France, Italy, and Spain after failing to secure its MiCA licence, effectively being shown the door by 27 European countries simultaneously. The dual headlines ran side by side across crypto news sites. Social media was not subtle about the irony.

CZ attributed the 2026 crypto bear market to artificial intelligence pulling in investment capital, global geopolitical tension, and the Bitcoin halving cycle — which are all genuinely reasonable factors. What he did not mention was the world’s largest crypto exchange failing a regulatory compliance test in the world’s largest trading bloc in the same week. America as the capital of crypto is a fine ambition. Getting a licence in Europe might be a useful warm-up act.

The Clarity Act returns from recess on July 13 with a two-to-three week window before August. That is the next critical date for the most important piece of crypto legislation in US history. I’ll cover it as it develops. Make sure you’re subscribed.

The STRC Story: When ChatGPT Didn’t Model This Scenario

Last week we explained in detail how STRC works — Strategy’s preferred stock product designed to trade at $100 per share and pay an 11.5% annual dividend, with every dollar raised going straight into buying Bitcoin. This week, STRC hit an all-time low of $82.53. For investors who bought at $100 believing the par value was stable, that is a painful and confusing development.

The detail that caught everyone’s attention: Saylor reportedly designed STRC with help from ChatGPT. In a recent interview he described using the AI to engineer the financial structure. Which raises an obvious question — did nobody ask it what happens if Bitcoin drops 50% and your cash reserves run dry at the same time?

Because that is essentially what happened. In May, Strategy used $1.5 billion from its dedicated cash reserve to buy back its own convertible bonds at a discount — sensible housekeeping on paper, but it drained the cushion that was supposed to cover STRC dividends. Coverage fell from 24 months to six. Then Bitcoin slid below $60,000 in early June. CryptoQuant published a formal warning this week saying dividend coverage has since collapsed to just 14 months, cash reserves are down 38%, and annual dividend obligations have quadrupled to $1.2 billion in six months. Their conclusion: Saylor needs to stop buying Bitcoin and rebuild cash.

Strategy currently holds 846,842 Bitcoin at an average cost of $75,656. With Bitcoin at $62,500, that’s an unrealised loss of around $11 billion. Not a crisis in itself — unrealised losses only matter if you’re forced to sell — but enough to rattle markets.

The collapse accelerated for a reason beyond the fundamentals. When STRC first dipped into the $90s, traders spotted what looked like a sure-thing trade. STRC is designed to return to $100. Buy at $95, collect the dividend, sell at $100. Many used leverage to amplify the bet. When STRC kept falling instead of recovering, those leveraged positions got force-liquidated automatically — every sale pushing the price lower, triggering more liquidations, pushing it lower still. A textbook cascade that turned a manageable dip into an 18% collapse.

One can only wonder if Saylor is quietly wishing he’d had access to Claude’s Fable — Anthropic’s most advanced frontier model, which was pulled back because it was simply too smart to release to the public — to stress-test the model before launch. ChatGPT, it seems, didn’t quite run this scenario.

So Why Is SATA Still at $100?

SATA — Strive’s almost identical product, paying 13% — also experienced volatility in mid-June. But it bounced back to par. STRC didn’t. The difference is structural design.

Strive built SATA with an explicit 18-month cash reserve, sized to cover all dividend obligations even through Bitcoin’s worst bear markets. Their CEO pointed to the 2022-2023 crash — when Bitcoin fell from $69,000 to under $16,000 over 18 months — as the stress test benchmark. SATA is engineered to pay through that without selling a single coin. Strategy didn’t maintain the same discipline, and spent down its reserves at the wrong moment.

SATA is currently trading at $99 to $101, raising around $8 million per day in new capital, buying Bitcoin daily. This is not a Bitcoin problem. It is a Strategy-specific problem caused by a specific financial decision. The asset is fine. One product structure had a flaw the market has now found.

The CBDC Ban Nobody Is Talking About

While the STRC drama consumed most of the oxygen this week, something quietly significant happened in the US Senate that deserves more attention than it got.

On June 22, the Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by 85 votes to 5. It is a bipartisan housing supply bill — the kind of legislation that passes without much fanfare. But buried inside it is a provision that bans the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through December 31, 2030.

In plain English: Congress just made it illegal for the US government to create a digital dollar for the next four years.

A CBDC — central bank digital currency — would be a government-issued digital version of the dollar, where every transaction is visible to the state, and the government could theoretically program money to expire, restrict what it can be spent on, or freeze it entirely. For many Bitcoin holders, it represents the dystopian alternative to everything Bitcoin stands for. And it just got banned.

The reason it matters so much: attaching the ban to a must-pass housing bill dramatically increases the odds it actually becomes law. The House had already passed a standalone Anti-CBDC measure. House Republican leaders have signalled an expedited vote on the Senate-amended bill. This is very close to landing on the President’s desk.

A four-year CBDC moratorium removes a potential government competitor to Bitcoin and private stablecoins. It signals clearly that Congress’s preference is private-sector digital money — which is exactly what the GENIUS Act and Clarity Act are building the framework for. And it passed 85-5. That is not a partisan squeaker. That is a consensus.

BlackRock Says the Next Rally Won’t Be About Crypto

One more story from this week worth holding onto, especially if the short-term price action is getting you down.

Robert Mitchnick — BlackRock’s head of digital assets at the firm managing $14 trillion — gave an interview this week stating that Bitcoin will likely see renewed upward momentum around the 2026 midterm elections. His reasoning had nothing to do with crypto-specific developments. No ETF flows, no halving cycles, no on-chain metrics.

His argument: mounting investor fear about US debt, deficit spending, and the risk of currency debasement will drive the next move. The same forces that historically drove demand for gold — distrust of government money — will drive demand for Bitcoin. He also acknowledged that the AI investment boom has been pulling capital away from Bitcoin, but framed it as temporary.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager. When they build a public narrative around their IBIT ETF during a period of record outflows, they are not doing it for fun. They are signalling to their institutional clients how to think about Bitcoin’s next phase. “Bitcoin wins if Washington cannot fix its deficit problem” is a very specific and credible thesis — and given what we know about Washington’s deficit problem, it is not an outlandish one.

The Clarity Act July 17 hearing is the next major regulatory milestone. A $10.6 billion Bitcoin options expiry hits on Friday June 26 — with 80% of positions currently out of the money. I’ll cover both as they develop. Make sure you’re subscribed.

And Finally…

Apple Nearly Banned the Man Fighting Bitcoin Scammers. The Scammers Were Fine.

Craig Raw is the solo developer behind Sparrow Wallet — widely considered the best Bitcoin desktop wallet in existence. This week he received a notice from Apple threatening to terminate his developer account by June 30. His crime: he built a placeholder app warning users that Sparrow is desktop-only and that the dozen-plus fake “Sparrow” apps on the App Store are scams. Apple’s automated systems classified this as “dishonest activity.” The actual scam apps, which have been stealing users’ savings for years, were untouched. The story went viral, Apple reversed course after a community uproar, and Craig’s account was saved. The scam apps remain on the App Store. Nothing to see here.

The Problem With Bitcoin, According to Wall Street

Ask a traditional investor why they haven’t bought Bitcoin and you’ll usually get one of two answers.

The first is volatility. Bitcoin moves 10%, 20%, 30% in a matter of weeks. For someone whose job is to protect capital and generate predictable returns — a pension fund manager, a retiree, an income-focused investor — that kind of movement is terrifying. The upside is attractive. The ride is not.

The second is yield. Bonds pay interest. Dividend stocks pay quarterly income. Property pays rent. Bitcoin pays nothing. It just sits there. For a huge portion of the investing world, an asset that doesn’t generate income isn’t really an asset at all. It’s a speculation.

BlackRock just solved both of those problems in a single product. And it launched this week.

Meet BITA: Bitcoin That Pays You

The iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF — ticker BITA — started trading on Nasdaq on June 16. It is the first Bitcoin income product from a major asset manager, and it works in a way that is worth understanding properly.

Here is the plain English version.

BITA holds two things: direct spot Bitcoin, and shares of BlackRock’s own spot Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, which already has over $100 billion in assets. The direct Bitcoin holding is there for tax efficiency — it allows capital losses to pass through to investors. The IBIT shares are the portion used for the options strategy. Either way, you buy BITA, you own Bitcoin exposure. The fund charges a 0.65% annual fee — higher than IBIT’s 0.25%, but lower than competing income Bitcoin products.

But then it does something clever with that Bitcoin. Every month, BITA sells what are called call options against a portion of its holdings — roughly a quarter to a third. A call option is essentially a contract that gives someone else the right to buy Bitcoin from you at a set price. In exchange for selling that contract, BITA receives a payment upfront. That payment is the income.

Think of it like renting out a room in your house. You still own the house. You still benefit if the house goes up in value. But every month, someone pays you rent, and that rent becomes your income. The trade-off: if house prices rocket above a certain level, the tenant has the right to buy at the agreed price and you miss some of the upside. You gave up a slice of the big gain in exchange for steady monthly payments.

BITA targets a 15 to 25% annual yield from this strategy. To put that in context: the average UK savings account currently pays around 4–5%. A ten-year US Treasury bond pays around 4.5%. BlackRock is offering Bitcoin income that could be three to five times that. The catch is that if Bitcoin goes on a massive run, BITA holders will capture less of it than someone holding Bitcoin directly. But for an investor who needs income rather than speculation, that trade-off is entirely rational.

Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said the quiet part out loud. “A significant share of our clients are interested in Bitcoin, but they are also highly focused on generating income.” BITA was built for exactly those clients. And BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer Rick Rieder said on Bloomberg that he thinks “Bitcoin is ultimately going considerably higher.” The world’s largest asset manager is not hedging its view.

One more detail worth knowing: Goldman Sachs was building a near-identical product. BlackRock filed its paperwork on June 11, got SEC approval on June 15, and listed on June 16 — beating Goldman to market. In the race to own the Bitcoin income category, BlackRock moved first and fast.

Who Is This Actually For?

BITA is not for everyone. If you are a long-term Bitcoin holder who believes Bitcoin is going to $200,000, $300,000, or beyond, you probably do not want to cap your upside in exchange for monthly income. Just hold Bitcoin directly and go about your day.

But BITA opens a door for a completely different type of investor who has never been able to own Bitcoin before.

Pension funds have mandates that require income-generating assets. Endowments and foundations need to generate regular distributions to fund their operations. Retirees living off their portfolios need monthly cash flow. Wealth managers running income-focused client portfolios need yield. For all of these investors, Bitcoin with a 15–25% income yield is a fundamentally different conversation than Bitcoin with no yield.

As we recently covered, the UK FCA proposed allowing mainstream investment funds to hold up to 10% of their assets in crypto products. UK authorised funds manage trillions of pounds. BITA-style products are exactly the kind of structured, income-generating Bitcoin exposure that fund managers in those vehicles would actually be allowed to use. The timing is not a coincidence. The infrastructure is being built for a wave of institutional demand that is still arriving.

How Does BITA Compare to STRC and SATA?

If BITA sounds familiar, it should. Two products have been doing something similar for over a year: Strategy’s STRC — the brainchild of Michael Saylor, who has bought more Bitcoin than any other corporate operator on earth — and Strive’s SATA. The principle across all three is the same: use Bitcoin as the engine, build yield on top of it, and attract income investors who wouldn’t otherwise touch crypto. But they work differently, and the risks are different too.

STRC — Strategy’s Stretch product — pays an 11.5% variable annual dividend. It has raised over $8.5 billion and is now the largest preferred stock by market cap in the world. Every dollar raised goes straight into buying Bitcoin.

SATA — Strive’s almost identical product — works the same way but pays 13%, a higher rate that compensates for Strive being a smaller, less liquid company. It now holds over 19,000 Bitcoin and as of June 16 became the first listed security in US capital markets history to pay daily cash dividends rather than monthly. Both STRC and SATA are preferred shares in companies. When you buy them, you are essentially lending money to Strategy or Strive respectively, trusting them to keep buying Bitcoin and paying your dividend. If either company ran into serious trouble, you would be a preferred creditor — ahead of common shareholders, but still exposed to that company’s balance sheet.

BITA works differently. It holds both direct spot Bitcoin and shares of IBIT — not as a company treasury, but inside a regulated ETF structure. The yield comes from selling options on the IBIT portion, not from anyone’s creditworthiness. There is no corporate balance sheet between you and the asset. If BlackRock’s ETF business somehow failed, the underlying Bitcoin would still be there, although since Strategy’s and Strive’s entire business model is Bitcoin accumulation, this is more of a structural difference than a practical one.

The trade-off cuts both ways, and it’s worth being honest about it. STRC pays 11.5% and SATA pays 13% regardless of what Bitcoin does — if Bitcoin doubles, your yield stays the same. But here’s the equally important flip side: if Bitcoin halves, your STRC and SATA dividend still arrives. Both products are actively managed to trade at or near $100 per share at all times, regardless of the Bitcoin price. Your capital position is stable. You put in $100, you expect to get roughly $100 back, and you collect the income on top. It behaves more like a bond than a Bitcoin investment in that respect. You are exposed to company risk, not Bitcoin price risk.

BITA has no such mechanism. Your capital moves with Bitcoin — roughly 70% of every price swing, up or down. And this creates a subtlety that is easy to miss: the percentage yield and the actual cash you receive are two very different things.

Of course, the reverse is also true. If Bitcoin doubles from your entry point, your BITA holding grows to around $17,000, and 18% of that is a very attractive income. STRC holders are still collecting 11.5% on their stable $10,000. In a strong Bitcoin market, BITA wins on both the capital and the income. In a falling market, it loses on both.

In simple terms: STRC and SATA are stable capital, predictable income, company risk. BITA is Bitcoin exposure with an income layer on top — the income and the capital move together with the Bitcoin price. Neither is better. They are different tools for different investors with different needs. All three are targeting income investors who could not justify owning Bitcoin before. Together they represent the beginnings of an entirely new asset class — Bitcoin-native income products engineered for the traditional finance world. (Not financial advice.)

While That Was Happening, the SEC Quietly Did Something Huge

BITA was the headline. But something equally significant happened the same week that received almost no mainstream coverage — and it matters far beyond Bitcoin.

Right now, if you want to buy a share of Apple, your trade settles in two business days. The stock exchange is open Monday to Friday, roughly 8am to 4.30pm. If something dramatic happens to Apple on a Saturday night, you cannot do anything about it until Monday morning. And the paperwork behind every trade runs through a chain of brokers, clearinghouses, and custodians that was built in the 1970s and has barely changed since.

Blockchain fixes all of that. Stocks on a blockchain settle in seconds, not days. Trading is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The entire chain of intermediaries collapses into code. Costs fall dramatically. Errors are eliminated. Global investors can access any market at any time without going through a web of middlemen.

The technology has existed for years. The problem has been legal. One rule, written in 2005, has been making it almost impossible to do legally in America. Until this week.

On June 11, the SEC proposed scrapping Rule 611 of Regulation NMS — the trade-through rule that has governed US stock market trading for twenty years. Here is why it has been such a problem.

When you buy a share on the New York Stock Exchange, Rule 611 says your trade must execute at the best available price across all US exchanges simultaneously. The intention was good — protect investors from being ripped off. But blockchain trading uses automated systems called liquidity pools that cannot pause a trade to check what every other exchange in America is quoting at the same moment. Under Rule 611, every single trade on a blockchain-based stock market would technically be illegal.

As Galaxy Digital’s head of research Alex Thorn put it, the rule meant any blockchain trading platform would be “committing trade-throughs constantly and arguably be an illegal trading center.”

Christopher Perkins of 250 Digital Asset Management summed up what the change means: “It’s a whole new ballgame.”

The SEC proposal replaces Rule 611 with a simpler “best execution” standard — brokers must try to get the best price for clients, without the rigid mechanical requirement that makes blockchain trading impossible. A final vote is expected by early 2027.

Citi has already launched a platform for tokenised shares of private companies. Nasdaq and the DTCC — the plumbing of the US stock market — are actively building tokenised settlement infrastructure. Citi projects the tokenised asset market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030. The legal blocker just moved out of the way.

The Bigger Picture: Two Steps Toward the Same Place

BITA and the Rule 611 proposal look like separate stories, but they aren’t.

Both are steps in the same direction: the merger of traditional finance and Bitcoin.

BITA brings Bitcoin into the income-investing world — making it accessible to pension funds, endowments, and retirees who couldn’t justify owning it, or couldn’t legally access it. Rule 611’s removal opens the door for stocks, bonds, and other traditional assets to move onto blockchain infrastructure — making them faster, cheaper, and more accessible globally.

The direction of travel is toward a financial system where Bitcoin and traditional assets occupy the same rails. Where your pension fund owns Bitcoin exposure as part of a yield strategy. Where the Apple shares in your ISA settle on a blockchain in seconds rather than two business days. Where the distinction between “crypto” and “finance” stops making sense because they have become the same thing.

That world is not here yet. BITA is one product. Rule 611 is a proposal, not a law. The Clarity Act is still working its way through the Senate. There is plenty of road still to travel.

But the direction has never been clearer. And the speed has never been faster.

Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud in 2017. BlackRock — the firm that manages more money than any other on earth — launched a Bitcoin income product this week paying three to five times what his bank’s savings accounts offer. The SEC is dismantling twenty-year-old rules to let stocks trade on blockchain around the clock.

Something fundamental is changing. And this week, you got to watch two more pieces of it fall into place.

The Clarity Act is pushing for a Senate floor vote before the August recess. The FCA consultation on Bitcoin in UK pension funds closes July 13. I’ll cover both as they develop. Make sure you’re subscribed.

Two Very Different Stories, Same Asset

Depending on which numbers you look at this week, Bitcoin is either in serious trouble or sitting in one of the best buying windows in years. The strange thing is both are true.

The price is down more than 50% from its all-time high. The people who bought Bitcoin ETFs after Trump won the election have made nothing — all those gains have been wiped out. Inflation just hit a three-year high. The Federal Reserve is now more likely to raise interest rates than cut them. Google searches for “Bitcoin to zero” just broke their all-time record. And this week, the biggest stock market listing in history launched, pulling enormous amounts of money away from Bitcoin and into a rocket company.

At the same time: the wealthiest, most sophisticated Bitcoin investors just bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth at the low and locked it away in cold storage. The UK’s financial regulator proposed opening the door for mainstream pension funds and ISAs to hold Bitcoin. Japan’s three largest banks announced they’re building a stablecoin together. The most important piece of US crypto legislation in history still has a 60% chance of passing this year. And Michael Saylor — the man who has bought more Bitcoin than anyone on earth — says the selloff has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself.

So what is actually going on? Let’s take each side seriously.

Why the Money Left: Rockets, Robots, and the Biggest IPO Ever

Michael Saylor released a video on June 4 explaining his view of what’s been happening. His argument was simple: this isn’t a Bitcoin problem. It’s a competition for cash problem.

Think about what’s been happening in the technology world this year. Every major company on the planet is pouring money into artificial intelligence. Building data centres the size of small towns. Buying computing chips by the shipload. Wiring up AI infrastructure at a pace and scale the world has never seen. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta alone have committed to spend over $600 billion in 2026, most of it on AI. That money has to come from somewhere.

Then, on top of that, three of the most hyped companies in a generation all decided to go public at the same time. SpaceX — Elon Musk’s rocket company, which we wrote about recently after it disclosed $1.3 billion in Bitcoin on its balance sheet — priced its IPO on June 11. The largest stock market listing in recorded history. Four times more demand than shares available. Then OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — filed its paperwork. Then Anthropic. All three targeting listings worth hundreds of billions of dollars each.

When opportunities like that arrive, big institutional investors — pension funds, hedge funds, asset managers — need to raise cash quickly to participate. And to raise cash, you sell whatever you’re already holding. Stocks. Bonds. And yes, Bitcoin.

Saylor’s point is that investors aren’t selling Bitcoin because they’ve stopped believing in it. They’re selling it because they need the money for something else right now. It’s like selling your gold to buy a house. The gold hasn’t become worthless. You just need the cash today.

He warned it could continue for a while yet. OpenAI and Anthropic still haven’t listed. The AI spending wave shows no sign of slowing. “This is going to be the biggest year of IPOs and equity issuance in our lifetime,” he said.

There is one small irony worth mentioning. Saylor made this argument in the same week his own company, Strategy, sold a small amount of Bitcoin for the first time since 2022 — not out of panic, but to cover a routine dividend payment. The amount was tiny. But the market reacted as though the world was ending, triggering a wave of forced selling that sent Bitcoin crashing below $60,000. Strategy bought the dip the following week. But the episode showed how fragile the market had become, and how much it had been leaning on Saylor as a permanent buyer.

Why the Smart Money Is Buying: Whales, the FCA, and Japan

Here’s the thing about panic. It creates opportunities for people who aren’t panicking.

While retail investors were selling and Google was filling up with “Bitcoin to zero” searches, a different group was doing the opposite. On-chain data — which tracks what’s actually happening on the Bitcoin network in real time — tells a striking story. In the five days after Bitcoin hit its low near $60,000, the largest and most sophisticated Bitcoin holders accounted for more than 60% of all the buying. They then took roughly $700 million worth of Bitcoin off exchanges and moved it into cold storage — meaning they have no intention of selling it any time soon.

This pattern has appeared near every major Bitcoin bottom since 2018. The small investors panic and sell. The big investors quietly buy everything they can. It doesn’t tell you exactly when the recovery comes. But it tells you very clearly who thinks prices are cheap right now.

While that was happening, two pieces of regulatory news arrived that barely made a ripple in the mainstream coverage.

The first was from the UK. The Financial Conduct Authority — the FCA, the body that regulates financial products in Britain — published a proposal this week that would allow mainstream investment funds to hold up to 10% of their assets in crypto products. We’re talking about the funds that sit inside your pension, your ISA, your workplace savings scheme. If this proposal goes through, every mainstream fund manager in the UK could put a slice of your retirement savings into Bitcoin exposure.

To understand how significant that is, consider the timeline. Just eight months ago, the FCA lifted a four-year ban on retail investors even accessing crypto products. Then in April this year, Bitcoin products became eligible to hold inside tax-free ISAs. Now they’re proposing to open the entire mainstream fund sector. The speed of that progression is remarkable. The consultation closes July 13 — so this is very live right now.

The second piece of news came from Japan. The country’s three largest banks — institutions that together manage more money than most countries’ entire economies — formally agreed this week to launch a joint digital yen stablecoin by March 2027. This isn’t a research paper. It’s a signed agreement with a commercial launch date. The world’s financial infrastructure is quietly being rebuilt around digital assets, week by week, regardless of what the price chart is doing.

The Lawsuit That Woke Up 14-Year-Old Bitcoin

There’s one more story this week that’s either completely irrelevant or potentially the most dramatic legal event in Bitcoin’s history. Nobody knows which yet — but it’s worth knowing about.

Back in March, someone filed a lawsuit in New York trying to claim legal ownership of roughly 3.8 million Bitcoin — worth around $285 billion — sitting in tens of thousands of wallets that haven’t been touched in years. The argument: the coins have been abandoned, so lost property law should apply.

This week, a wallet that had been completely untouched since 2011 — back when Bitcoin was worth less than a dollar — suddenly moved its coins. Then another dormant wallet moved. Both owners had apparently been notified about the lawsuit via an unusual method: tiny amounts of Bitcoin sent to their wallets with a legal message embedded in the transaction.

The lawsuit is almost certainly going nowhere. Courts aren’t designed for this. But the fact that people who haven’t touched their Bitcoin in 14 years are now moving it to protect it tells you something interesting: those coins aren’t lost. The owners are still out there. Still watching. Still very much not interested in giving them up.

So Which Way Does the Elastic Snap?

The things pushing Bitcoin down right now are mostly temporary. The AI fundraising wave will eventually slow. The mega-IPO queue will clear. The Iran conflict will eventually resolve — one way or another — and oil prices will come off the boil. When inflation eases, the Fed gets room to cut rates. When rates fall, the conditions that drove Bitcoin to its all-time high of $126,000 come back.

The things building beneath the surface are not temporary. The FCA opening UK pension funds to Bitcoin doesn’t reverse. Japan’s stablecoin infrastructure doesn’t get unbuilt. The Clarity Act, if it passes, doesn’t get unpassed. Strategy’s 845,000 Bitcoin doesn’t get unsold. The whales who bought $700 million at $60,000 and locked it in cold storage aren’t selling at $62,000.

The gap between what Bitcoin’s price says right now and what its structural story says has rarely been wider. That gap is the elastic. The price is depressed by temporary forces. The underlying demand is building from permanent ones.

The Fear and Greed Index hit its lowest reading in months this week — lower even than during the FTX collapse in 2022. Every time it has been this low in previous cycles, it has marked the territory where the pain was closest to ending. Not the exact bottom. Not immediately. But the zone where patient buyers are eventually proved right.

The elastic is stretched. Something has to give.

Three things to watch over the next three weeks: the Fed decides on rates on June 17, the FCA consultation on Bitcoin in pension funds closes July 13, and the Clarity Act is pushing for a Senate floor vote before the August recess. I’ll cover each one as it happens. Make sure you’re subscribed.

Bitcoin dropped below $62,000 this week. Your phone is probably full of notifications. People are panicking. And somewhere, someone who bought the dip last Tuesday is now staring at a loss wondering what went wrong.

So let’s slow down and actually look at what happened. Because if you understand the moving parts, the panic starts to look a lot less scary — and a lot more familiar.

The Spark That Wasn’t What It Seemed

On June 1st, Strategy — the company run by Michael Saylor that holds more Bitcoin than any other public company on earth — disclosed in a regulatory filing that it had sold some Bitcoin. The headline spread instantly. “Saylor Sells Bitcoin.” Markets reacted. Bitcoin dropped.

Here’s what people missed: Strategy sold 32 Bitcoin. At around $77,000 each, that’s $2.5 million. Out of an 843,706 Bitcoin stack worth roughly $64 billion. That is 0.004% of their holdings. You could cover it from a decent year’s salary.

So why sell at all?

This is where it gets interesting. Strategy has issued something called preferred stock — specifically a product called STRC — which pays investors a regular dividend, currently at 11.5% per year. That’s a contractual cash obligation. Every month, Strategy must pay it.

Now, Strategy does hold a $900 million USD cash reserve specifically for this purpose. By most calculations they have around 18 months of dividend coverage sitting in dollars. But here’s the thing — that reserve exists precisely to not be touched on a routine basis. Its job is to sit there and signal stability to STRC holders. Every time they draw it down for a monthly payment, that signal weakens.

So why not just use the cash? Because a pile of Bitcoin that you refuse to ever sell isn’t actually cash. If Saylor stood up and said “we will never sell a single coin under any circumstances,” rating agencies and credit analysts would have a very reasonable question: then what exactly backs these dividend obligations? An illiquid asset you’ve promised never to liquidate isn’t collateral. It’s a museum exhibit.

By selling 32 BTC — a number so small it’s almost comical — Strategy sent a clear signal to the financial world: this Bitcoin stack is real, it is sellable, and we will sell it when we need to. As one Wall Street analyst put it after the filing, investors can now view the Bitcoin holdings as a “viable backstop” for dividend funding. That’s actually a stronger case for STRC holders, not a weaker one.

Saylor himself telegraphed this months ago. At Strategy’s Q1 2026 earnings call, he told investors that Bitcoin only needs to appreciate 2.3% per year for the entire BTC stack to cover STRC obligations in perpetuity — without selling common stock. He also said the company expects to buy ten to twenty Bitcoin for every one they sell. This wasn’t a change of conviction. It was a compliance move dressed up as a bombshell by people who didn’t read past the headline.

When Panic Becomes a Cascade

Once the headline hit, something very predictable happened. Traders who had borrowed money to bet on Bitcoin going up — using what’s called leverage — suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a price move.

Think of it like this. You borrow money to bet that Bitcoin goes to $90,000. Bitcoin drops to $72,000 instead. Your lender doesn’t wait to see if you’re right eventually. They close your position automatically and sell the Bitcoin to recover what they’re owed. You don’t get a say. That’s a liquidation.

When enough of those happen at once, the forced selling pushes the price down further, which triggers more liquidations, which pushes the price down further. The cascade continues until the system flushes itself out.

This week, more than $1.6 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in a single day. The vast majority were long positions — people who had borrowed money betting Bitcoin would rise. They were right about the direction. Wrong about the timing. And leverage doesn’t give you time.

This is one of the oldest lessons in markets, and it never seems to stick. Leverage amplifies gains when you’re right, and amplifies ruin when you’re wrong. In a volatile asset like Bitcoin, it is a particularly dangerous game.

The ETF Outflows: Rotation Story or Something Else?

On top of all of this, US spot Bitcoin ETFs — the products that let Wall Street investors buy Bitcoin exposure through their normal brokerage accounts — have just recorded their worst week since launching. Eleven consecutive days of net outflows. $3.45 billion pulled in a single week.

The official explanation? Institutional investors are rotating money out of Bitcoin and into AI stocks. Nvidia up 6% in a week. Alphabet up 10%. AI and semiconductor companies are printing extraordinary earnings numbers and drawing capital from everywhere. When one trade is hot, other trades get trimmed. That’s real. That’s happening.

But it’s worth understanding exactly how ETF outflows affect Bitcoin’s price — because it isn’t just sentiment.

When an investor sells their IBIT shares (BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF), those shares are redeemed through what are called authorised participants — large banks like JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs. Those banks need to hedge their exposure in real time, which means selling actual Bitcoin on the spot market. Immediately. Not at end of day. The arbitrage mechanism between the ETF price and Bitcoin’s underlying price operates in milliseconds. By the time the daily flow numbers get published — and by the time the crypto media reports them as the reason Bitcoin dropped — the price impact has already happened, hours earlier.

That’s the mechanism. Now here’s the question worth sitting with.

The same institutional fund managers who can decide to redeem billions in IBIT shares also manage capital on behalf of clients who benefit from being able to buy Bitcoin at lower prices. The firms executing these trades have full visibility of what they’re about to do, and therefore what effect it will have on the spot price — before anyone else does.

Some analysts have pointed to a $1.29 billion dark pool IBIT block sale in late May, noting that the net redemption that day was only around $192 million. That gap suggests the bulk of that enormous sale may have been bought back by other parties — potentially including the same seller re-entering at a lower price.

Is that what happened? There’s no public evidence confirming it. The official explanation — AI rotation — is entirely plausible and probably true in large part. But the structure of the market means that large institutions operating in IBIT have an informational advantage over everyone else in the system. They know what they’re about to do before the rest of us do. And what they’re about to do moves the spot price.

Make of that what you will.

Everything Else Hitting at Once

It’s rarely one thing. This week had several.

Iran. The US Treasury sanctioned Nobitex, Iran’s largest crypto exchange, while US-Iran ceasefire negotiations are stalling. Geopolitical tension is a risk-off trigger. When people are uncertain about the world, they reduce exposure to volatile assets.

Mt. Gox. The ghost of the 2014 Bitcoin exchange hack refuses to fully disappear. This week, 10,422 Bitcoin worth around $739 million moved to a new wallet as a creditor repayment deadline approaches. Whenever Mt. Gox coins move on-chain, the market flinches — there’s a persistent fear that creditors, who have waited twelve years to get their Bitcoin back, will sell the moment they receive it.

Prediction markets. Traders on decentralised prediction platforms are now pricing a 66% chance Bitcoin falls below $55,000 before year-end. That’s a meaningful data point about crowd sentiment, even if no one knows whether they’re right.

All of it hitting in the same week, on a market already skittish from the Strategy headline and still digesting weeks of ETF outflows, is how you get a 16% weekly drop.

The Other Side of the Picture

Here’s what the panic tends to drown out.

Despite Bitcoin’s worst week of the year, social media sentiment around Bitcoin just hit its most bullish ratio of 2026 — 2.23 positive comments for every bearish one. Retail conviction is, by that measure, exceptionally strong even as institutional capital exits.

The US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve blueprint is due in July. If Congress authorises the Treasury to actively purchase Bitcoin — rather than simply hold the 328,000 coins already seized from criminals — that would represent a structural, permanent floor on demand that no ETF outflow could easily offset.

And the leveraged positions that just got liquidated? That’s the market cleaning itself out. A reset. Every long position that gets forced closed is one less source of future forced selling. Markets that flush this way often recover more cleanly than markets that grind down slowly.

What Should You Actually Do?

Nothing, if you own Bitcoin for the right reasons. (Not financial advice.)

The people being hurt this week are primarily those using leverage, or those who bought with money they can’t afford to keep locked up. If neither of those describes you, a price drop is noise, not signal.

Bitcoin has dropped 16% in a week before. More than once. It has recovered every time. The reasons for owning it — as a fixed-supply, decentralised, un-censorable store of value — haven’t changed because Nvidia is having a good quarter or because a hedge fund needed to raise cash.

What’s worth doing is understanding what actually happened. Because next time a headline says “Saylor sells Bitcoin,” you’ll know whether to read the number first.

Not financial advice. Stay curious, keep learning, and happy stacking.

Three Stories. One Moment.

Sometimes the news arrives in a trickle. Sometimes it arrives all at once.

In the space of a few days in late May 2026, three things happened that individually would have been significant stories. Together, they represent something bigger: the moment Bitcoin went from being a financial asset that institutions were considering to one that governments and the world’s most ambitious companies are already holding.

1. The US government is about to make a formal announcement on its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

2. Congress has introduced legislation to buy 200,000 Bitcoin a year by law.

3. And SpaceX — preparing for what could be the largest IPO in history — quietly disclosed it has been holding 18,712 Bitcoin on its balance sheet the whole time.

Let’s take each one in turn.

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: From Executive Order to Reality

Cast your mind back to March 2025. President Trump signed an executive order establishing a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. At the time, many dismissed it as symbolic. The government would hold its seized Bitcoin — coins confiscated through criminal and civil asset forfeiture proceedings — rather than selling them. No new purchases. No formal framework. Just an order not to sell what they already had.

The US government currently holds an estimated 328,372 Bitcoin — worth around $25 billion at current prices. That makes America the largest known sovereign holder of Bitcoin on the planet. More than China’s estimated 190,000 BTC. More than the UK’s 61,000 BTC. More than El Salvador’s entire stack.

For fourteen months after the executive order, the details remained vague. How was it being custodied? What were the legal authorities? Was it truly a reserve or just a holding pattern?

Last week, Patrick Witt — Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets — changed that. Speaking at Consensus Miami and then again at the Bitcoin 2026 conference, he confirmed the administration has cleared a major legal hurdle. “We’ll have an announcement,” he said. “It’s a breakthrough as far as getting everything in place, legally sound, properly safeguarding the assets.”

The announcement is expected within weeks. What markets want to know: will it include active accumulation — the government actually buying Bitcoin in the open market — or just formalising custody of what they already hold? That distinction matters enormously for price. Witt has not confirmed either way. But the direction of travel is unmistakable.

There’s an irony worth noting. The US Marshals Service — the agency responsible for managing seized assets including Bitcoin — suffered a security breach involving a contractor who allegedly stole funds. Witt cited this as proof that the reserve’s security mandate is urgent. The largest sovereign Bitcoin holder on earth was, until recently, not properly safeguarding its stack. That is now being fixed.

ARMA: Congress Wants to Buy Bitcoin by Law

Executive orders can be reversed by the next president. Laws cannot — at least not without Congress voting to undo them. That’s the significance of ARMA.

On May 21, 2026, Congressman Nick Begich of Alaska and Congressman Jared Golden of Maine introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act — bipartisan legislation to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in statute, not just executive order. Thirteen co-sponsors signed on at introduction.

The headline number: ARMA would authorise the US Treasury to purchase up to 200,000 Bitcoin annually for five years. Budget-neutral strategies — meaning funded through existing government mechanisms rather than new spending — would be used to acquire up to one million Bitcoin over the life of the programme. If passed, the Treasury’s first open-market Bitcoin purchase is projected for Q4 2026.

Think about what that means in supply terms. The entire global Bitcoin mining network produces roughly 450 blocks a day, yielding around 6,750 new Bitcoin per week — or about 27,000 per month. The US government, under ARMA, would be authorised to buy more than seven times the monthly mining output every single month for five years.

That is not a rounding error. That is a structural shift in demand that would make Strategy’s buying look modest by comparison.

ARMA is still a bill, not a law. It faces the same legislative gauntlet as the Clarity Act. But it has something important going for it: bipartisan support in a political environment where crypto has become genuinely popular on both sides of the aisle. The crypto industry’s investment in the 2024 election cycle — over $135 million spent on political donations — is paying dividends that are hard to ignore.

The most likely vehicle for codifying the reserve into law is the late 2026 National Defense Authorization Act — the annual defence spending bill that almost always passes. That timeline would lock the reserve into federal law before the midterm election cycle dominates everything.

SpaceX: The Disclosure Nobody Expected

On May 20, 2026, SpaceX filed its S-1 with the SEC — the document required before a company can go public. The filing confirmed what Elon Musk had hinted at years ago but never quantified: SpaceX has been holding Bitcoin.

The number buried in the filing: 18,712 Bitcoin, carried at a fair value of $1.29 billion as of March 31, 2026. Cost basis: $661 million. Average purchase price: around $35,324 per coin. That position has roughly doubled in value on paper.

This makes SpaceX one of the largest corporate Bitcoin holders in the world — behind Strategy’s 843,738 BTC and ahead of Tesla’s 11,509 BTC. It places Bitcoin on the balance sheet of a company targeting a $1.75 to $2 trillion IPO valuation. If successful, SpaceX would immediately rank among the ten most valuable publicly traded companies on earth, alongside Apple and Nvidia.

What makes the SpaceX disclosure particularly significant is what it signals about corporate treasury strategy. SpaceX is not a crypto company. It is a capital-intensive aerospace and infrastructure business. It generates $18.7 billion in annual revenue from rocket launches and Starlink satellite Internet. It is loss-making at the operating level — spending heavily on Starship development. And yet it chose to put $661 million of its treasury into Bitcoin at an average price of $35,000.

That decision was made quietly, without announcement, without press releases. It emerged only because going public legally requires disclosing what is on the balance sheet. How many other major private companies have been quietly accumulating Bitcoin without anyone knowing? SpaceX tracked wallets showed only 8,285 BTC before the disclosure — the real holding was more than double what analysts had estimated.

There is also a practical implication for public investors. When SpaceX lists under the ticker SPCX on Nasdaq, buying shares in SpaceX will mean owning indirect exposure to Bitcoin. For millions of investors who can access stock markets but not crypto exchanges — pension funds, retirement accounts, institutional mandates — that creates a new channel for Bitcoin exposure to flow through.

The Pattern Behind the Three Stories

Taken individually, each of these stories is significant. Taken together, they reveal a pattern.

Bitcoin is becoming a reserve asset. Not a speculative trade. Not a retail investment. A reserve asset — something held by governments, by major corporations, by institutional managers — because it performs a function that other assets cannot: fixed supply, no counterparty risk, no central authority that can debase it.

The US government holds 328,000 BTC and is about to formalise the framework. Congress is proposing to buy a million more over five years. Over 140 public companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. Strategy alone holds 843,000 BTC. SpaceX has had $1.29 billion sitting on its books without telling anyone. BlackRock’s IBIT ETF has pulled in billions in consecutive weeks of inflows.

The supply picture makes this even starker. There are 21 million Bitcoin. Ever. Around 19.8 million have already been mined. Roughly 3 to 4 million are estimated to be permanently lost. The effective circulating supply is shrinking. Exchange reserves have hit seven-year lows. And into that tightening supply, the US government, Congress, and the largest private company in the world are all signalling they want more.

This does not guarantee any particular price outcome in the short term. Markets are messy. Macro headwinds are real — rising bond yields just triggered a billion dollars in ETF outflows in a single week. The Clarity Act still has hurdles to clear. ARMA is a bill not a law.

But the structural direction is clearer than it has ever been. The question of whether Bitcoin would achieve mainstream institutional adoption has been answered. The question now is how fast, and at what price.

What This Means for You

If you already hold Bitcoin, these three stories are validation of the thesis you already believed. The institutions that spent years calling Bitcoin a fraud, a bubble, a Ponzi scheme are now either holding it, buying it, or passing laws to buy more of it.

If you have been watching from the sidelines, this week is a useful moment to ask why. The macro environment is difficult — inflation, war, high rates. Bitcoin’s price has been volatile. None of that has changed the structural story. If anything, the structural story just got stronger.

The US government does not put $25 billion into a reserve asset because it is speculating. SpaceX does not put $661 million onto its balance sheet on a whim. Congress does not introduce bipartisan legislation to buy 200,000 Bitcoin a year without serious conviction.

Something fundamental has changed. And it happened, as these things often do, while most people were looking somewhere else.

The Clarity Act is heading for a Senate floor vote in the coming weeks. I’ll have a full update the moment something significant happens. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get it first.

The Headline That Went Everywhere

No — quantum computers cannot crack Bitcoin in 9 minutes, and none capable of threatening Bitcoin exist yet. Google’s research paper only estimated what it would take: a machine with 500,000 stable qubits, nearly 5,000 times more than Google’s current 105-qubit chip. That’s the real story lost in the panic headlines — and Bitcoin’s developers are already building the fix.

Here’s what Google actually said. Their researchers published a paper estimating that a quantum computer with around 500,000 stable physical qubits could theoretically break the cryptography protecting Bitcoin wallets. Not that it had happened. Not that such a machine exists. That IF you built one, here is roughly what it would cost in computing terms.

For context: Google’s current most powerful quantum chip — the Willow chip — has 105 qubits. The gap between 105 and 500,000 is not a software update. It is years, possibly decades, of engineering that nobody has solved yet.

The paper’s actual value is precise: it tightened the resource estimates so defenders can plan more accurately. It said “here is what you need to build to break this.” It did not say anyone has built it, or when they will.

Why Quantum Computers Are Different

To understand the threat, you need to understand one thing about how Bitcoin security works.

Every Bitcoin wallet has two keys. A private key — your secret, never shared, the thing that lets you spend your Bitcoin. And a public key — mathematically derived from the private key, visible to the network when you make a transaction.

The security of Bitcoin rests on one mathematical fact: you can go from private key to public key easily, but you cannot go backwards. Not in any reasonable timeframe. A classical computer trying to reverse-engineer a private key from a public key would take longer than the age of the universe.

Quantum computers change that equation. They run a process called Shor’s algorithm, which can solve the specific type of maths underlying Bitcoin’s cryptography exponentially faster than any classical machine. In theory, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive your private key from your public key in minutes.

In theory. On a machine that does not exist yet. With qubits that are stable enough to sustain the calculation — a problem nobody has solved at scale.

But Here’s What the Headlines Miss

This is not a Bitcoin problem. It is an Internet problem.

The same cryptographic systems that protect Bitcoin wallets protect your online banking. Your email. HTTPS — the padlock in your browser. SWIFT transfers. Stock exchanges. Military communications. Every encrypted message sent by every government on earth.

If a quantum computer capable of breaking Bitcoin’s cryptography were built tomorrow, the first targets would not be crypto wallets. They would be bank servers, government databases, and financial infrastructure. The stakes for those institutions dwarf the entire crypto market.

Which means every government, every bank, every military, and every major technology company on the planet has a massive incentive to solve this problem before it becomes real. And they are all working on it. Google committed in March 2026 to transitioning its entire infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. NIST — the US standards body — has already finalised post-quantum cryptographic standards. The world is not sitting still.

The Number That Should Get Your Attention

In April 2026, an independent researcher named Giancarlo Lelli did something that made the crypto security community sit up. He broke a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography key using publicly available quantum hardware, winning a 1 BTC bounty from quantum security firm Project Eleven.

Before you panic: Bitcoin uses 256-bit encryption. A 15-bit key versus a 256-bit key is not a small gap. The difficulty scales exponentially, not linearly. Breaking a 15-bit key is impressive in a research context. Breaking a 256-bit key would require a machine roughly a billion times more powerful than anything that currently exists.

But here is why it matters. This result represents a 512-fold improvement over the previous public demonstration from September 2025. The curve is moving in one direction. Bernstein, the Wall Street research firm, put it plainly: Bitcoin and the broader crypto ecosystem have a three to five year window to complete a transition to post-quantum security before the risk becomes acute.

What Bitcoin Developers Are Actually Doing About It

This is where the story gets genuinely interesting — and where most of the media coverage has fallen short.

Bitcoin’s developer community has been working on this problem for years. Satoshi Nakamoto himself acknowledged in early forum posts that if quantum computing became practical, Bitcoin could migrate to stronger signature schemes. The upgrade flexibility was always part of the design philosophy.

In February 2026, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 — BIP-360 — was officially published. It introduces a new address type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), which removes the specific part of Bitcoin’s current architecture that is vulnerable to quantum attack. Any Bitcoin moved into a BIP-360 address will be quantum-resistant. BIP-360 is already in testnet implementation. New addresses starting with “bc1z” will be the quantum-hardened option when it activates.

Then in April 2026, Jameson Lopp — one of the most respected names in Bitcoin security — and five co-authors published BIP-361, titled “Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset.” This is the more controversial proposal, and it deserves plain English treatment.

The Satoshi Coin Problem

Here is the uncomfortable reality that BIP-361 is trying to address.

Approximately 6.7 million Bitcoin — roughly a third of all coins that will ever exist — currently sit in address formats that expose their public keys directly on the blockchain. This includes an estimated 1.1 to 1.7 million Bitcoin widely believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, currently worth around $74 billion. These coins have never moved. Their public keys are visible. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive the private keys and drain them.

BIP-361 proposes a structured solution: give holders years to migrate to quantum-safe addresses. Those who migrate lose nothing. Those who do not migrate by a defined deadline would have their coins frozen — permanently inaccessible, removed from circulating supply.

The debate this has ignited is fierce. The Bitcoin community is deeply principled about property rights. The idea that anyone — even the network itself — could effectively confiscate coins that have not been moved is deeply uncomfortable for many long-term holders.

The counter-argument: those coins are either lost forever anyway, or they represent a ticking time bomb. If a quantum attacker drains Satoshi’s wallet and dumps 1.1 million Bitcoin onto the market, the effect on price and confidence would be catastrophic. Freezing them removes the risk and, as Satoshi himself once noted, permanently lost coins function as a donation to the rest of the network by making everyone else’s coins slightly more scarce.

BIP-361 is still a draft. It has no activation parameters defined. It will face an extended, contested debate before anything happens. But the fact that serious Bitcoin developers are proposing it tells you something important: the quantum timeline is being treated as real.

A Word on Quantum Marketing

Before we get to what you should actually do, it is worth pausing on something that happened at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas. A company called Qastle was announced as the Official Quantum Wallet of The Bitcoin Conferences through 2032 — a six-year exclusive deal with BTC Inc. Their claim: the world’s first quantum-secured hot wallet.

The Qastle wallet uses quantum random number generation to create keys, and applies post-quantum cryptographic methods to protect the wallet itself. That is genuinely better than nothing. Stronger key generation is a real improvement.

But here is what it does not solve, and what the marketing does not make clear. The quantum threat to Bitcoin is not about how your wallet generates keys. It is about what happens to your public key once it is on the blockchain.

When you broadcast a Bitcoin transaction — regardless of which wallet you use — your public key is exposed to the entire network. That is how the protocol works. A quantum attacker is not targeting your wallet soIf you found this useful, share it with someone who saw the scary headlines and assumed the worst. And if you’re not yet subscribed, this is what you get every week — the story behind the headline, in plain English.ftware. They are looking at public keys sitting on the blockchain and using Shor’s algorithm to reverse-engineer the private key from the public one. No wallet-side protection changes that. The attack surface is on-chain, not in your app.

Think of it this way. Imagine you have a very secure safe at home. Quantum-grade locks, unbreakable. But the key to that safe is printed on a public noticeboard. Someone with the right tools can copy the key from the noticeboard and walk straight past your safe. The safe’s security is irrelevant to that attack vector.

The real fix is what BIP-360 is building: a new address type at the protocol level that keeps public keys off-chain entirely, so there is nothing for a quantum attacker to work with. That requires a Bitcoin network upgrade — a soft fork that every node and wallet on earth adopts together. No single wallet company can do that alone, no matter how good their key generation is.

When you see “quantum-resistant wallet” marketing, it is worth asking exactly which threat they are protecting against. Securing the wallet itself is useful. Claiming to solve the on-chain public key exposure problem without a protocol-level upgrade is a different thing entirely.

What Should You Actually Do?

Calm down. You do not need to do anything drastic right now. But you should understand a few practical points.

Your Bitcoin address is not the same as your public key. In most modern wallet setups, your public key only becomes visible when you spend Bitcoin from an address. If you have never spent from a particular address — you only received into it — your public key is not yet exposed. This is a meaningful layer of protection that most coverage misses entirely.

Do not reuse addresses. Every time you spend from an address, your public key becomes visible. Using a fresh address for each transaction is good security practice anyway. It limits your exposure significantly.

Move away from legacy address formats. If your wallet uses addresses starting with “1” (the oldest format), consider moving to modern addresses starting with “bc1”. The 2026 consensus among security researchers: migrate to native SegWit or Taproot addresses. Ledger and Trezor have already released updated firmware making this straightforward.

Watch for BIP-360 activation. When quantum-safe addresses become available on mainnet — likely within the next one to three years if development continues at current pace — moving your long-term holdings there will be the right call. You will have plenty of time and warning before that matters.

Bitcoin has survived every existential headline thrown at it for fifteen years. The quantum threat is the most technically serious long-term challenge it has faced. But it is also the most anticipated, the most studied, and the one the entire global technology industry has a shared interest in solving. The window is three to five years. The tools are being built.

The Bigger Picture

There is something worth stepping back to appreciate here.

Bitcoin was designed to be upgraded. Satoshi built the upgrade mechanism in from the start, specifically acknowledging that cryptographic standards would need to evolve. The Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process exists precisely for moments like this. The fact that serious proposals are being debated openly, that testnet implementations are already running, that the timeline is measured in years rather than months — all of that is the system working as intended.

The alternative — a protocol that could not adapt to emerging threats — would be far more worrying. What we have instead is a global community of security researchers, developers, and cryptographers working openly on a known problem with a clear timeline.

That is not a crisis. That is engineering.

Q: Can quantum computers steal Bitcoin right now?

A: No. Breaking Bitcoin’s encryption would need a quantum computer roughly a billion times more powerful than the biggest one that currently exists.

Q: How long until quantum computers are a real threat to Bitcoin?

A: Security researchers estimate a three-to-five-year window before the risk becomes serious, based on the pace of recent quantum hardware demonstrations.

Q: What is Bitcoin doing to protect against quantum computers?

A: Developers have proposed BIP-360, a new quantum-resistant address format (addresses starting “bc1z”), already in testnet — plus BIP-361, a more contested proposal to migrate old, exposed coins like Satoshi’s.

If you found this useful, share it with someone who saw the scary headlines and assumed the worst. And if you’re not yet subscribed, this is what you get every week — the story behind the headline, in plain English.

The Moment Nobody Saw Coming

On April 21, 2026, Admiral Samuel Paparo — a four-star US Navy admiral and commander of US Indo-Pacific Command — sat before the Senate Armed Services Committee and said something nobody expected.

The US military is running a live node on the Bitcoin network.

Not studying it from a distance. Not reviewing academic papers about it. Running a node. Participating directly in the peer-to-peer network. Conducting operational tests to secure and protect military communications using the Bitcoin protocol.

He told Congress the military has a node on the Bitcoin network right now, running operational tests to secure and protect networks, describing Bitcoin as showing incredible potential as a computer science tool.

Then he said something even more striking. He called Bitcoin a tool for American power projection. Anything that supports all instruments of national power for the United States of America, he said, is to the good.

A sitting US military commander, in front of Congress, describing Bitcoin as an instrument of national power. Not a speculative asset. Not a payment method. A strategic tool in the competition with China.

Why a Bitcoin Node, Specifically?

To understand why this matters, it helps to know what a Bitcoin node actually does.

When you run a Bitcoin node, you download and independently verify the entire history of every transaction ever made on the network. You become your own source of truth. You do not trust anyone else’s version of events — you check it yourself. That is the zero-trust architecture Paparo was referring to.

In military communications, trust is an existential problem. Traditional systems rely on centralised authorities — trusted servers, certificate authorities, central verification points — all of which create single points of failure. A sophisticated adversary who compromises one of those points can manipulate everything downstream.

Bitcoin’s architecture solves this differently. There is no central point to compromise. There are tens of thousands of nodes distributed around the world, each independently verifying the same truth. To alter it, you would need to simultaneously control 51% of all the computing power in the network — a feat requiring more energy than most countries use annually.

That is what Paparo means by proof-of-work imposing cost. Attack attempts are not just technically difficult. They are prohibitively expensive in the physical world. That property is genuinely useful for military communications and network security.

The China Dimension — and the Iranian Twist

The hearing was not happening in a vacuum. Senator Tommy Tuberville asked Paparo directly: could US leadership in Bitcoin give America an edge against China in the Indo-Pacific?

Paparo did not deflect. He said Bitcoin supports all instruments of American national power and referenced dollar dominance approvingly.

China has been building its own digital currency — the digital yuan — for years. The design is the polar opposite of Bitcoin: centralised, government-controlled, every transaction visible to the state. Beijing has been running cross-border payment projects specifically designed to settle international trade without touching the US dollar or the SWIFT system. Several nations are participating. The dollar’s grip on global trade is the target.

And here is the extraordinary detail that nobody in mainstream media is connecting. Iran — the country whose conflict with the US and Israel has been driving oil prices up 60% and causing the inflation that has made the Fed’s life impossible — is now demanding Bitcoin for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The same strait. The same oil shock. The same inflation driving up energy bills everywhere. And Iran is pricing access to it in Bitcoin, not dollars, not yuan.

A US military commander is running a Bitcoin node. Iran is accepting Bitcoin for Hormuz toll payments. Taiwan is reportedly considering Bitcoin as a reserve asset. The geopolitics of Bitcoin have changed completely in the space of months.

From Fraud to National Security Asset

It is worth taking a moment to appreciate how far this has come.

In 2017, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud and threatened to fire any trader caught buying it. The SEC spent a decade suing crypto companies rather than writing rules for them. The US government position as recently as 2022 was essentially: dangerous speculative bubble, regulate it out of existence.

In April 2026, a four-star admiral tells Congress it is a tool of national power. SEC Chair Paul Atkins became the first sitting US securities regulator to address the annual Bitcoin conference, announcing Project Crypto, a Commission-wide initiative to modernise rules for digital assets. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is executive policy. JPMorgan customers can buy Bitcoin through the app.

The establishment did not just accept Bitcoin. It recruited it.

Trump, the Banks, and a Deadline

While Paparo was testifying in Washington, something equally significant was happening in Palm Beach.

On April 25, President Trump addressed a private gathering at Mar-a-Lago that included Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, billionaire Tim Draper, and several hundred of the top holders of his $TRUMP memecoin. He used the platform to deliver a direct warning to the banking lobby.

He said he would not allow banks to block the Clarity Act. He pledged to sign it immediately if Congress sends it to his desk. He described crypto as having become mainstream and framed the Clarity Act as essential for keeping the industry onshore. Banks need to make a deal, he said. They do not get to veto this.

This matters because the banking lobby has been the Clarity Act’s main obstacle for months. Banks have been fighting the stablecoin yield provisions — the rules that would allow regulated platforms to offer returns on dollar stablecoins. Their stated concern: it would pull deposits out of the banking system. Their real concern: competition from a product paying 10-12% when their savings accounts pay 0.07%.

The Clarity Act missed its April Senate Banking Committee markup deadline. The window is now May — specifically the week of May 11, the first possible date after the Senate returns from recess. Senator Moreno has said it must clear Congress by end of May or risk waiting until 2030. Lummis confirmed at the Bitcoin 2026 conference that the markup will happen in May. Moreno has gone further, saying he expects Trump to sign it before July 4th.

Prediction market odds have recovered to around 60-69% following the stablecoin yield compromise and Trump’s direct intervention. Galaxy Research still puts it closer to 50-50. The honest answer: the next three weeks will decide it.

What It All Means

In the space of a few days in late April 2026, Bitcoin moved from being a financial asset debated in Senate committee rooms to being described as an instrument of military power, a tool of dollar dominance, and a direct challenge to Chinese geopolitical ambitions.

None of that changes what Bitcoin actually is. The protocol has not changed. The 21 million coin supply cap has not changed. The decentralised architecture that makes it resistant to control by any single party — including the US military — has not changed. One government node out of 15,000 to 20,000 publicly reachable nodes does not give anyone control of anything.

But the way the most powerful institutions in the world are talking about Bitcoin has changed completely. And when a four-star admiral tells the US Senate that Bitcoin is a tool of national power in the same week the President is threatening banks to get out of its way, that is not a moment to scroll past.

Jamie Dimon called it a fraud in 2017. His customers can buy it through his app today. The US military is running a node on the network. Iran is using it to charge tolls on the world’s most strategically important waterway.

The fraud is doing rather well.

The Clarity Act markup is expected in the week of May 11. Full breakdown as soon as it happens. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get it the moment it lands.

What Bitcoin 2026 Told Us About Who’s Really Buying

I just got back from Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, and I want to share what it actually felt like on the ground — because the vibe told a story that no price chart can.

Walk the exhibition floor at an event like this and you can read the room very quickly. Some stands were buzzing. Others were quiet. And once you noticed the pattern, it was impossible to unsee.

The busy stands? Financial products. Bitcoin lending, institutional-grade custody, structured investment vehicles, tradfi integrations. The quiet ones? Hardware wallets. Consumer-facing security products. Retail kit.

That contrast tells you almost everything you need to know about where we are in this cycle.

Not everything on the floor was institutional, of course. The Bitcoin Bazaar — the more eclectic end of the exhibition — had its own energy. My unexpected highlight was Panties for Bitcoin, an Italian underwear brand doing exactly what the name suggests - and no, live models were not present at the stand in case you were wondering. A special mention must go to Coin Vigilante, who were showing off some genuinely impressive Bitcoin-themed watches. If nothing else, it proved that the Bitcoin rabbit hole leads to some wonderfully unexpected places.

The Consumer Is Sitting This One Out — But Which Consumer?

It’s easy to forget — when you’re deep in the Bitcoin world — that most people are not in a position to invest right now. Inflation has eaten into savings. Fuel is expensive. Unemployment is rising. The economic mood in most Western households is cautious, not adventurous.

Phase 1 retail are the OGs. The people who bought Bitcoin directly, set up hardware wallets, took self-custody seriously, and learned what a seed phrase was before most people had heard the word blockchain. They accumulated on-chain, they understood what they owned, and they cared deeply about the independent, self-sovereign side of Bitcoin. For them, it was never about fiat returns — it was about accumulation. Stack sats, hold the keys, trust no-one.

The problem is, many of them are tapped out. They’ve been buying through multiple cycles, they’re either fully allocated or running low on fresh fiat, and with the broader economy squeezing household budgets, there isn’t much left to deploy. The quiet hardware wallet stands at Bitcoin 2026 weren’t a sign that Phase 1 retail has lost interest. They’ve just run out of ammunition for now.

Phase 2 retail is a different animal entirely. This is old money — people who’ve never thought about self-custody and never will. They don’t want to manage seed phrases or worry about hardware wallets. What they heard was their broker say something like: “You should probably put a few percent of your portfolio into Bitcoin.” Neither of them fully understood it. Both of them said yes. And so the money went in — through an ETF, through a brokerage account, as a line item in a portfolio review. Phase 2 retail isn’t buying Bitcoin because they believe in sound money. They’re buying because they want fiat returns, and the number has been going up.

Phase 1 was about accumulation. Phase 2 is about performance.

So when people say retail is sitting out this cycle, what they really mean is Phase 1 retail. And the likely reason the quiet stands were quiet is that the Phase 1 crowd — the self-custody, hardware wallet, on-chain buyers — are either already fully in or simply waiting until they have more cash to deploy.

When they do? They’ll be back.

In the meantime, there’s actually an interesting thought worth exploring — and we’ll come back to it later in this article. (Not financial advice.)

Wall Street Showed Up

Institutional money has been accumulating throughout that dip. BlackRock’s iBit ETF and its peers have been steadily absorbing supply into what are essentially paper portfolios — Bitcoin held on behalf of institutional and retail investors through traditional brokerage accounts. That flow has been consistent and significant.

But it’s one company that has really been driving the demand conversation in 2026, and it’s not a fund. It’s Strategy — better known by its former name, MicroStrategy — run by Michael Saylor.

Strategy alone, through just one of its products, has been buying more Bitcoin per week than the entire network produces through mining. Let that sink in. One company, one product, outpacing the entire global supply of new Bitcoin. That kind of sustained buy pressure has only one likely effect on price over time.

But the more interesting question isn’t how much Bitcoin Saylor is buying. It’s how.

Saylor Took Apart the VCR

Here’s an analogy that might help.

When you were a kid, maybe you pulled apart an old piece of electronics — a VCR, a radio, whatever — just to see what was inside. Most people put it back together (more or less). A few geniuses looked at the components and thought: what if I could use these parts to build something entirely new?

Michael Saylor did that to the traditional financial system. Except he didn’t just take it apart and put it back together. He studied every component, identified what each one was capable of, and then rebuilt the whole thing with Bitcoin at the centre — turning the old VCR into something that runs at 8K with 3D surround sound.

He studied the existing capital markets — the bond market, the preferred stock market, the convertible note market — not to plug back into them in the usual way, but to identify every pool of capital that was sitting trapped in low-yield, legacy instruments. Pension funds earning 4% on bonds. Money market investors getting 5%. Fixed income portfolios desperate for yield but constrained by mandates that say they can’t just buy Bitcoin outright.

Then he built products specifically designed to unlock each of those pools and pipe that capital directly into Bitcoin.

The product getting the most attention right now is STRC — nicknamed “Stretch.” It’s a perpetual preferred stock that pays a variable dividend currently running around 11.5%. To put that in context: the US bond market pays around 4–5%. Money market funds are similar. STRC is offering roughly double that, backed by Bitcoin as collateral.

In just nine months, STRC scaled to $8.5 billion in notional value — making it, by Saylor’s own account, the largest preferred stock by market cap in the world. He put annual growth for the programme at around 350%, with April inflows alone pointing toward $38 billion a year when annualised.

Strategy isn’t just buying Bitcoin. It’s building a flywheel. STRC attracts fixed income capital. That capital buys Bitcoin. More Bitcoin on the balance sheet improves the collateral coverage. Better coverage attracts more conservative investors. More capital buys more Bitcoin. Repeat.

The capital pools Saylor is targeting are enormous. The global corporate bond market is estimated at around $100 trillion. US money market funds hold over $6 trillion. These aren’t niche pools — they’re oceans. And right now, most of that capital has no direct path into Bitcoin. Saylor is building the pipes.

The BTC Loan Market Is Coming

One of the quieter but more significant themes at the show was the emergence of Bitcoin-backed lending.

The basic concept is simple: if you hold Bitcoin and need liquidity — cash for a house purchase, a business investment, a tax bill — you currently face an uncomfortable choice. Sell your Bitcoin (and lose your position, and probably trigger a taxable disposal), or sit tight and stay illiquid.

Bitcoin lending changes that equation. You lock your Bitcoin as collateral and borrow against it. You get the cash you need. You keep your Bitcoin. And critically, you haven’t sold — so there’s no disposal event, which means no capital gains tax to pay.

Remember those Phase 1 retail buyers sitting on the sidelines with no fresh fiat to deploy? A Bitcoin-backed loan is one way to unlock liquidity from what they already hold, without giving up their position. Worth knowing about. (Not financial advice.)

Several companies at Bitcoin 2026 were building in this space, and the energy around their stands was notably different from the consumer products area. The interest was serious, and more than a few of them hinted that the current product offering is just the beginning. There’s more coming — enough that this topic probably deserves a whole article of its own.

Lightning Hit the High Street — Sort Of

And then there was the moment that actually made me smile.

Jack Dorsey’s Block — the company behind Square payment terminals and the Bitkey hardware wallet — made a series of announcements at the conference. The one that landed for me was the Square tap-to-pay for Bitcoin Lightning.

I made my first ever Lightning payment at the event. Bought a Bitcoin 2026 t-shirt. It was fast, it was simple, and it felt genuinely different from the usual crypto payment experience — no waiting, no fee theatre, no uncertainty.

The only friction I hit was muscle memory. I instinctively went to tap my phone, as you would with Google / Apple Pay but it didn’t work. I had to use the QR code instead, which was ok, but the experience wasn’t quite there yet.

Then the next day, Block announced on the main stage that Square is on track to make Bitcoin payments at the point of sale as seamless as Apple Pay — using NFC hardware with no QR codes required, zero processing fees through 2026.

They’d literally announced the solution to the exact problem I’d encountered the day before. I’ll take that as a sign.

When you can tap your phone to pay in Bitcoin the same way you tap for your morning coffee, the “it’s too complicated” objection disappears. That moment is getting closer.

What This All Means

Bitcoin 2026 painted a picture of an asset class in transition. The retail chapter of this cycle isn’t over — it hasn’t really started yet. Consumer participation typically comes later, once prices have moved and FOMO kicks in. That’s the historical pattern.

What’s happening now is the institutional foundation being built beneath the market. Wall Street is accumulating. Saylor is engineering new pipes for trillions of stuck capital to flow through. Bitcoin lending is creating new ways for holders to access liquidity without selling. And Lightning is getting close enough to Apple Pay that “too hard” stops being a valid excuse.

The quiet stands and the busy ones told the same story. The money that moves markets is already here. The money that moves culture — everyday people buying, holding, and spending Bitcoin — is still on its way.

It might be arriving sooner than the exhibition floor suggested.

The Stars Have Never Been More Aligned

Cast your mind back to two years ago. The SEC was suing crypto companies. The CFTC and SEC were fighting each other over who got to regulate Bitcoin. Banks were banned from holding digital assets. The idea of a pro-crypto White House felt like a distant fantasy.

Now look at where things actually stand.

The President signed an executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and has promised to make America the crypto capital of the world. The SEC chair endorsed the Clarity Act publicly and jointly confirmed with the CFTC that Bitcoin is a commodity, not a security. The CFTC chair signed a formal agreement with the SEC to harmonise crypto regulation. The Treasury Secretary posted on social media demanding the Senate Banking Committee pass the bill. The House already did its part — 294 votes to 134 in July 2025. And the main sticking point that held the Senate up for months, the stablecoin yield dispute, now has a compromise framework that’s broadly holding.

Every lever that needed to move has moved. This is the most favourable environment for Bitcoin legislation America has ever seen.

And the bill is still sitting on Tim Scott’s desk waiting for him to put a date in his diary.

What the Clarity Act Actually Does

We’ve covered the Clarity Act in detail in a previous piece, but here’s the short version of why it matters so much right now.

The March 17 joint SEC-CFTC interpretation already confirmed that Bitcoin is a commodity — not a security. That was a huge step. But it’s regulatory guidance. The next administration could reverse it. A hostile SEC chair could reinterpret it. It’s written in pencil.

The Clarity Act writes it in permanent marker. It makes Bitcoin’s commodity status federal law. No future regulator can undo it without Congress acting. That distinction matters enormously to the institutional money that’s now sitting on the sidelines wondering whether to commit.

But that’s just the start. Without the Clarity Act:

• Bitcoin payments remain dead in the water. Every time you spend Bitcoin it’s a taxable disposal, triggering capital gains reporting regardless of the amount. The technology to spend Bitcoin instantly and cheaply exists — Jack Dorsey’s Square is rolling it out to millions of merchants right now. The tax reporting burden is the wall. The Clarity Act creates the framework for a de minimis exemption that could finally fix this. Without it, there’s no route forward.

• Stablecoin yield stays in legal limbo. The GENIUS Act already banned stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly to holders. The unresolved question is whether third-party platforms — exchanges like Coinbase — can offer yield on stablecoins. That matters enormously. Yield is the incentive that makes people hold stablecoins rather than just use them to move money. Without yield, the digital petrodollar thesis weakens significantly. People in Turkey or Argentina will use dollar stablecoins to transact. But will they store their savings in something that pays nothing when alternatives exist? The Clarity Act is supposed to resolve this. Without it, the grey zone continues and the opportunity shrinks.

• Bitcoin’s legal status stays fragile. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has over $50 billion in assets. Strategy just crossed 815,000 Bitcoin — adding 34,164 BTC in a single purchase on April 20 alone. The entire institutional infrastructure built around Bitcoin’s commodity status is technically built on regulatory guidance that could be challenged. The probability of reversal is low given the weight of money now behind it — but low isn’t zero. Only the Clarity Act makes it permanent.

The Clock

Here’s the brutal arithmetic of where things stand today.

The Senate returned from Easter recess on April 13. The Banking Committee has two working weeks left in April before the Senate calendar gets consumed by other business. Senator Moreno has said publicly that if the bill doesn’t reach the Senate floor by May, midterm election dynamics effectively kill it for 2026. Senator Lummis — the bill’s most committed champion — has gone further, warning the window may not reopen until 2030.

Tim Scott, the Banking Committee chairman, told Fox Business on April 14 that the markup may not happen in April at all. He named three remaining issues: stablecoin yield language, DeFi provisions, and securing all Republican votes on the committee. He said each could be resolved within two weeks. The industry took that as a May timeline at the earliest.

Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who predicted in February that he’d give 80-90% odds of passage by end of April, revised his forecast on April 13 to end of May — and described himself as “less optimistic than before.” Prediction market odds have fallen from 82% to around 61%.

What’s Still Being Fought Over

Tim Scott named three issues on Fox Business on April 14. Here’s what they actually are, in plain English.

1. Stablecoin yield. A compromise text exists — ban passive yield on stablecoin balances, allow activity-based rewards tied to payments and platform use. The banks can live with it. But Coinbase and Stripe told Senate staff they can’t accept the March 23 draft as written — it landed too close to the bank position. Lummis says it’s 99% resolved. The White House says the compromise is holding. It’s not fully done.

2. DeFi provisions. Decentralised finance — the world of lending, trading and earning yield through software protocols rather than companies — is a particular concern for Senate Democrats who worry it enables money laundering. The bill tries to draw a line: if you control people’s funds, you’re regulated. If you’re just software that nobody controls, you’re not. Democrats aren’t fully satisfied with where that line is drawn. The Blockchain Association sent 21 executives to meet with 24 Senate offices specifically to argue the DeFi case — which tells you how much is still being contested.

3. Republican unity — and a side deal. The committee is 13-11 Republican. Scott can’t afford a single defection if Democrats vote as a block. Republicans are also negotiating to attach community bank deregulatory provisions to the Clarity Act in exchange for the House accepting a Senate housing package. Classic Washington horse-trading that has nothing to do with crypto but could delay or derail the vote entirely.

4. There’s also a fourth issue Scott didn’t name: Democrats want an ethics provision barring senior government officials from personally profiting from crypto assets while in office. Given that the President’s family has launched their own stablecoin — USD1 — and the Trump family’s broader crypto interests are well documented, this is pointed. It hasn’t been agreed.

There’s a rich irony here worth acknowledging. Politicians trading stocks while writing the rules that govern them has been an open scandal for years. Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades became a cultural moment — her portfolio’s uncanny ability to outperform the market while she sat on committees overseeing the very industries she was invested in raised questions that were never properly answered. The ethics problem in Washington isn’t crypto-specific. It’s a systemic one that crypto has simply made more visible. If the Clarity Act delivers an ethics provision that only covers digital assets, it will be better than nothing — but it will also be a reminder of how selectively accountability gets applied in American politics.

None of these issues are insurmountable. Scott himself said each could be resolved within two weeks. But could be and will be are different things in Washington — and the clock doesn’t care about the distinction.

Why Timing Is Everything

To understand why the 2030 warning isn’t pessimism, you need to understand how Washington’s calendar works.

The Senate has roughly six to eight weeks of usable legislative time before the summer recess. After that, midterm election campaigning dominates everything. Senators from competitive seats stop taking political risks. Complex legislation with multiple stakeholder disputes — exactly what the Clarity Act is — gets shelved.

Then November arrives. And here’s where it gets genuinely precarious. Midterm elections historically punish the incumbent party. Republicans currently control the House. If they lose it — and history suggests they might — the entire legislative picture flips. A new Democratic House majority that has been consistently hostile to crypto regulation takes the gavel. You’d have a pro-crypto White House and a Congress that doesn’t want to play ball. Nothing passes.

Even if Republicans hold the House, a new Congress means starting the Clarity Act from scratch. New committee assignments. New negotiations. New political dynamics. The bill that passed 294-134 in July 2025 doesn’t carry over — it has to be reintroduced and re-passed.

And in January 2027, Cynthia Lummis leaves the Senate. She has been the single most committed advocate for Bitcoin-specific legislation in Congress for years. The stature, the relationships, the willingness to go to the mat on technical provisions — that leaves with her.

The 2030 estimate isn’t a dramatic prediction. It’s what happens if you map the realistic political calendar: lose the House in November, new Congress in January, new negotiations, another election cycle in 2028, potentially new administration. The next window where a crypto-friendly White House, Senate majority, and House majority all align simultaneously could genuinely be that far away.

The Petrodollar Stakes

We’ve written about why Trump signed the GENIUS Act the way he did — as a strategic move to extend dollar dominance into the digital age. Dollar stablecoins as the new petrodollar. The dollar of the Internet.

The Clarity Act is the second half of that strategy. Without it, the stablecoin market has rules but no yield resolution, no clear framework for platforms, and a legal grey zone for the products trying to build on top of it. Stablecoins already have basic de minimis treatment from the GENIUS Act — but Bitcoin gets nothing. The incentive structure that makes people choose to hold dollar stablecoins over alternatives — particularly for savings rather than just transactions — never gets properly built. And the dollar of the Internet never reaches its potential.

Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, currently earns billions annually from the spread between the yield on its Treasury holdings and the zero it pays to holders. Without yield competition from regulated US issuers, that margin stays wide — which is good for Tether’s profits in the short term. But here’s the counterargument: if regulated competitors could offer yield, adoption would explode. A smaller percentage of a vastly larger market could easily generate more dollars in real profit than a large margin on today’s volume. Tether might be protecting its margin while missing the bigger opportunity. Meanwhile, without Clarity, the regulated US players — the ones who would build the dollar’s dominance story — can’t compete properly, and the unregulated offshore player keeps winning by default.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

The Clarity Act is not dead. The odds still favour passage eventually. But “eventually” and “2026” are increasingly different things.

What makes this genuinely maddening — and the reason the diary entry framing is so apt — is that the political alignment needed to pass this bill has never existed before and may not exist again for years. The substantive arguments have been resolved. The institutional support is overwhelming. The President wants it. The regulators want it. The industry wants it. Even some banks have quietly accepted the yield compromise.

All that’s needed is Tim Scott to put a date in his calendar for a committee vote.

Senator Lummis posted three words on X the day the Senate returned from recess. The word “Clarity” was capitalised. The double meaning was not subtle.

Whether it lands before May or slips into the midterm void is now the most consequential open question in American crypto policy. And the answer depends entirely on a scheduling decision that hasn’t been made yet.

I’ll be covering this as it develops. If the markup gets scheduled this week, that’s the unlock the market has been waiting for. If it doesn’t, the clock gets louder. Make sure you’re subscribed so you get the update the moment it breaks.

The Federal Reserve has two jobs. Keep inflation at 2%. Keep unemployment low.

Right now, doing one makes the other worse. That’s the whole problem. And until something breaks — the war, the inflation, the political pressure — Bitcoin stays trapped in the crossfire.

Here’s how we got here, why it matters, and what it likely means for Bitcoin short and long term.

First, Understand the Lever

Interest rates are the Fed’s main tool. Raise them, and borrowing gets expensive — people spend less, businesses invest less, inflation cools. Cut them, and money becomes cheap — people borrow more, spend more, the economy gets moving. Two recent examples show exactly what happens when the lever moves.

2020 — rates go to zero. COVID hit. The Fed slashed rates overnight. Borrowing became almost free. Money flooded into anything with upside. Bitcoin went from $5,000 in March 2020 to nearly $69,000 by late 2021. A 1,300% rise in eighteen months. Stocks hit record after record. Cheap money works — until it doesn’t.

2022 — rates go to 5.25%. All that cheap money fed into real-world inflation. Prices hit 9%. The Fed raised rates hard and fast. Mortgage rates doubled almost overnight. The housing market froze. Businesses pulled back. Crypto crashed 70%. Anyone with a variable rate loan felt it immediately. The medicine worked eventually but the side effects were brutal.

One lever with dramatic results in either direction. It’s straightforward enough when you’re dealing with one problem at a time.

…but 2026 is not one problem at a time, it’s everything at once.

The Trap

Going into 2026, the mood was cautiously optimistic. The Fed had already cut rates from 5.25% to 3.5% since late 2024. Inflation was cooling toward the 2% target. The consensus on Wall Street: more cuts coming, looser conditions, risk assets heading higher. Bitcoin hit $126,000 in October 2025 partly riding that wave of expectation.

Then on February 28, the US and Israel struck Iran.

Iran sits next to the Strait of Hormuz — the narrow waterway through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows every day. The moment war broke out, oil markets went haywire. The shifting outlook from the White House on the war’s progress doesn’t give markets any certainty either. Prices surged over 60%. Energy costs jumped 10.9% in March alone, with petrol up 21.2% in a single month. Inflation — which was almost back under control — roared back.

Wells Fargo economists put it plainly: the two-year trend of falling inflation was over. Their forecast: headline inflation peaking at 3.7% in Q2 2026, staying sticky in the 2.7–3.1% range for the rest of the year.

For the Fed, this was a nightmare. You can’t cut rates when inflation is rising. So the cuts everyone was counting on were gone. The Fed held rates at 3.5–3.75% at its March meeting. The minutes released April 8 made it worse: the number of officials willing to consider a rate hike this year had actually increased since January.

Three months ago, markets were pricing in cuts. Now the Fed is discussing going the other way.

The Impossible Position

Here’s the bind, spelled out plainly. The Fed needs to fight inflation. It also needs to protect a fragile economy. Those two things require the opposite tool.

Cut rates: inflation gets worse. Oil is already pushing prices up. Cheaper borrowing adds more fuel. The Fed loses credibility it spent years rebuilding after the 2021–22 spike. Not happening.

Raise rates: the economy takes a hit it can’t absorb. The housing market, already under pressure after years of elevated borrowing costs, freezes further. Unemployment rises. People feel it immediately.

Hold steady: that’s what they’re doing. But holding rates while a war drives up energy prices and erodes purchasing power is its own slow squeeze. The economy doesn’t crash, it just doesn’t breathe. Inflation keeps grinding while savings keep losing value. Nothing actually improves.

There is no clean option. The Fed’s March statement acknowledged it directly, noting that “the implications of developments in the Middle East for the US economy are uncertain.” That’s central bank language for: we’re not sure what to do, so we’re doing nothing and hoping something changes.

Then There’s the Political Circus

Jerome Powell’s term as Fed Chair expires May 15. His replacement — if Senate confirmation goes smoothly, which is not guaranteed — is Kevin Warsh.

When Trump announced Warsh on January 30, Bitcoin dropped 6% that day, then fell another 8% over the following ten days. Gold crashed 9% in its worst session since the early 1980s. Markets were spooked.

Why? Because Warsh’s track record is hawkish. During the 2008 financial crisis, he was raising inflation concerns while the global economy teetered on the edge of collapse. He opposed the Fed’s $600 billion bond-buying programme in 2010–11, arguing it would fuel inflation and asset bubbles. His instinct, historically, has been tighter money, higher real interest rates, less central bank intervention. Those are precisely the conditions that drain liquidity from risk assets like Bitcoin.

But there’s a twist most people missed. Warsh has invested in Bitwise, the firm behind a spot Bitcoin ETF. He called Bitcoin “the new gold” for younger investors in a 2021 interview. More recently he’s argued that the AI productivity boom gives the Fed room to cut rates without reigniting inflation — and some economists now predict he cuts by 1% in the second half of 2026 once he’s confirmed. J.P. Morgan’s chief US economist said outright: Trump didn’t pick Warsh to maintain the status quo.

Trump has been demanding rates at 1%. He attacked Powell relentlessly. The relationship deteriorated so badly the DOJ launched an investigation into Powell, which Powell called a “pretext” to pressure him into cutting rates. His advice to his successor, delivered publicly: “Stay out of elected politics.”

Warsh’s confirmation isn’t even certain. Senator Thom Tillis has said he’ll block all Fed nominations until the DOJ investigation into Powell is resolved. The Senate Banking Committee is 13–11 Republican, meaning a single defection kills the vote. If confirmation stalls past May 15, Powell stays on as acting chair — the first time that would have happened since the 1940s. Add this uncertainty to the war and you wonder why the markets are on edge.

The War Bill Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in mainstream coverage. When this war ends, the US government has to pay for it.

Governments don’t raise taxes to fund wars — not enough to cover the real cost. What actually happens: they borrow heavily, then the central bank quietly accommodates that debt while keeping rates low. The cost gets spread across the economy through currency debasement — your money buying a little less every year. It happened after Vietnam. After the Gulf War. After 9/11.

The Iran war is weeks old and the check hasn’t hit the table yet. When it does, the political pressure on the Fed to keep money cheap — to make the debt affordable to service — will be enormous. That pressure is already building. It’s a slow-moving force, but it’s moving.

And here’s the part that matters for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins. No government can print more of it to pay for a war. No central bank can debase it. The very mechanism that funds military spending — printing money — is the mechanism Bitcoin was designed to make obsolete.

What This All Means for Bitcoin

Short term: uncomfortable.

Inflation elevated. Rates on hold or possibly rising. New Fed chair unknown. War unresolved. In this environment investors favour cash and bonds — assets that actually pay a return while you wait. Bitcoin, which pays nothing just for holding it, loses that competition. Price stays under pressure until something shifts. The honest answer: nobody knows exactly when that shift comes. If the Bitcoin 4 year cycle is still in play we could still be going sideways until October.

There’s an irony worth noting here though. The same high-rate environment that pushes investors toward yield is also fuelling one of the most powerful Bitcoin buying machines ever created. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) issues a preferred stock product called STRC that pays investors an 11.5% annual dividend. In a world where cash actually yields something, that kind of return attracts serious capital. Investors buy STRC for the yield and Strategy takes every dollar raised to buy Bitcoin. In March 2026 alone, Strategy accumulated 46,233 BTC — while the entire global mining network produced just 16,200. One company absorbed nearly three times the world’s new Bitcoin supply in a single month with just one of their products, funded almost entirely by yield-hungry investors. The high-rate environment is hurting Bitcoin on one side of the ledger. On the other it’s creating an unlimited buy bid while quietly filling Strategy’s war chest.

Long term: the argument gets stronger, not weaker.

Everything causing Bitcoin short-term pain is accelerating the long-term case for it. War spending leads to money printing. Money printing leads to debasement. Debasement is the exact problem Bitcoin was built to solve.

The dollar’s share of global reserves has fallen from 73% in 2000 to around 57% today. Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace since World War II. The petrodollar system that guaranteed global dollar demand for fifty years is eroding. These are slow forces — but they’re moving in one direction.

When rates do eventually come down — and they will, the debt load requires it — the liquidity conditions that drove Bitcoin to $126,000 in October 2025 come back, probably stronger than before. The banking infrastructure is bigger, the regulatory framework is clearer and the institutional money is already positioned.

The one thing to watch: oil.

If the Iran conflict de-escalates, oil falls, inflation eases, the Fed gets room to move. That’s the unlock for everything. If the conflict drags on, the squeeze continues.

Nobody knows which way it goes. What we do know: the forces building the long-term case for Bitcoin are being accelerated, not undermined, by exactly this environment. The short term is uncomfortable. The long term hasn’t looked like this before.

Next week: the SEC and CFTC held their April 16 roundtable on the Clarity Act. Full breakdown of what happened and what it means for Bitcoin’s legal status in America. Make sure you’re subscribed.

Let’s be honest — if you’ve been watching Bitcoin lately, the price chart looks pretty rough.

Down around 23% from the start of the year. Down roughly 47% from its all-time high of around $126,000 back in October 2025. Meanwhile, all the news has seemed so positive. New laws. Clearer rules. Big institutions piling in. Everything pointing in the right direction.

So what’s going on?

Here’s the short answer: the good news is real — but the world got messy at exactly the wrong time. A war broke out, inflation got stubborn again, and the interest rate cuts everyone was counting on got pushed back into the unknown.

But underneath all that noise, some genuinely huge things are happening that most people aren’t paying attention to. Let’s get into it.

A War Nobody Saw Coming

At the end of February 2026, the US and Israel launched military strikes on Iran. Markets felt it immediately — and not in the way most people expected.

The obvious assumption when a war breaks out is that people panic-buy safety. Gold, silver, the classic “safe haven” assets. And sure enough, gold spiked briefly. So did silver.

Then they both absolutely fell off a cliff.

Gold dropped roughly 25% from its January high of around $5,600 an ounce, down to around $4,100. That’s its worst monthly performance since 2008. Silver was even more brutal — it fell roughly 50% from its peak. Silver’s worst month since 2011.

Bitcoin dropped too — but only around 23% from its January levels. Which, when you compare it to the “safe” assets, looks almost dignified.

So why didn’t gold and silver do what they’re supposed to do?

The Weird Economics of War and Inflation

Here’s the thing people miss. Wars are inflationary. When a conflict disrupts oil supply — and Iran sits right next to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows — energy prices spike hard. And when energy prices spike, everything else gets more expensive. Food. Transport. Manufacturing. That’s inflation.

When inflation rises, central banks keep interest rates high to try to cool it down. High rates make cash and bonds attractive because they’re actually paying decent returns. And that makes “non-yielding” assets like gold, silver, and Bitcoin less attractive by comparison — because they don’t pay you anything just for holding them.

But here’s the backstory that makes this even more frustrating for investors. Going into 2026, almost everyone expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates several times this year. That wasn’t a fringe view — it was the Wall Street consensus. Investors had already started repositioning. Moving out of cash. Moving into other assets. Bitcoin, gold, and stocks were all riding that wave of anticipation.

Then the Iran war hit and yanked the rug. Oil prices surged — up over 60% since the conflict began. Inflation, which was already proving hard to shake, got worse. Suddenly those expected rate cuts looked a lot less certain, and investors scrambled back into cash and bonds as fast as they’d left.

Rate cuts aren’t gone forever — they will come eventually, because they have to. The economy needs them. But the question of when is now completely open, and that uncertainty alone is enough to keep a lid on markets.

So the war that was supposed to drive people toward safety actually did the opposite. It made cash king again, at least for now.

And Then There’s the War Bill

Here’s a question that isn’t getting nearly enough attention: when this war ends, how does the US government pay for it?

History has a pretty consistent answer. Governments don’t raise taxes to fund wars — not enough to cover the real cost, anyway. What they actually do is borrow heavily and then, quietly, print money to cover the gap. You probably heard the term “quantitative easing” or QE during COVID, when the US printed trillions of dollars in a matter of months. Wars have been funded the same way going back generations.

When more money gets printed, each dollar in your pocket buys a little less. That’s called currency debasement, and it’s been happening slowly for decades. The difference is the scale keeps getting bigger.

This is exactly where Bitcoin’s core argument lives. Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, written into its code from day one. No government, no central bank, no president can print more of it to fund a war or a stimulus package or anything else. It cannot be debased.

So here’s the strange irony of the current moment: the very things causing Bitcoin’s short-term pain — war, inflation, money printing — are the exact reasons Bitcoin was built in the first place. The short-term is messy. The long-term argument just got stronger.

Next week we’ll dig into the Federal Reserve’s impossible position right now — caught between stubborn inflation and enormous pressure to cut rates — and what it likely means for Bitcoin short and long term. Worth reading before the rest of the market figures it out.

Wait — Gold Fell More Than Bitcoin?

Yes. Take a moment with that.

Gold is the asset that has been the definition of “safe” for literally thousands of years. Central banks hold it. Governments hold it. Your grandparents probably told you to hold it. And in this conflict — against a backdrop of war and global uncertainty — it fell harder than Bitcoin.

Silver, same story. Down 50% from its peak while Bitcoin is down 23%.

Now, gold isn’t finished. Central banks are still buying it structurally, and long-term analysts still have high price targets for when the war dust settles. But the simple story of “gold safe, Bitcoin risky” just took a serious hit.

Bitcoin held up better than the traditional safe havens in a genuine geopolitical crisis. That’s not nothing.

Meanwhile, The Banks Are Quietly Moving In

While everyone’s focused on the price chart, something much bigger is happening in the background — and it’s moving fast.

According to research from River, a Bitcoin financial services firm, nearly 60% of the 25 largest banks in the United States are now either already offering Bitcoin products or actively building them. Let that sink in for a second.

Here’s what that actually looks like right now:

• Bank of America advisors can now proactively recommend Bitcoin ETFs to clients. The bank officially suggests a 1–4% Bitcoin allocation may be appropriate for some portfolios.

• JPMorgan Chase — America’s largest bank — has partnered with Coinbase so Chase customers can buy and hold Bitcoin directly through the app. Chase Ultimate Rewards points can now be converted into crypto.

• PNC Bank has launched spot Bitcoin trading for clients, powered by Coinbase infrastructure.

• Citibank is launching institutional Bitcoin custody services.

• Morgan Stanley filed for a Bitcoin Trust and is preparing to let its 15,000 brokers recommend spot Bitcoin ETFs.

• BNY Mellon — one of the oldest banks in America — launched a digital asset custody platform and is rolling out tokenised deposits.

Now here’s where it gets good. Because you need to understand how insane this shift actually is.

That’s not a gradual softening of views. That’s a complete reversal in under a decade — driven by client demand and a regulatory environment that finally gave banks permission to act. When the CEO of the world’s most powerful bank goes from “I’ll fire you for touching it” to “here’s how to buy some,” something fundamental has changed.

One Company Is Buying More Bitcoin Per Week Than The Entire World Mines

You’ve probably heard of MicroStrategy — the company that started buying Bitcoin in 2020 and never stopped. They’ve since rebranded as Strategy, and what they’re doing right now is on a completely different scale to anything before.

They currently hold over 762,000 Bitcoin. That’s more than 3.6% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist.

But it’s the how that’s the real story.

Strategy created a financial product called STRC — nicknamed Stretch — which is essentially a high-yield instrument paying investors an 11.5% annual dividend. Investors buy STRC. Strategy takes that money and buys Bitcoin. Simple as that.

In just one week — March 9 to 15 — Strategy purchased 22,337 Bitcoin, spending roughly $1.57 billion in seven days. The entire Bitcoin network mines around 6,750 coins per week. Strategy bought more than three times that amount in a single week, funded almost entirely through STRC.

They’ve publicly stated they want to hold one million Bitcoin by the end of 2026. That would require acquiring around 5,700 Bitcoin every single week for the rest of the year.

You don’t need to buy STRC or own Strategy shares for this to matter to you. When one company is consistently absorbing supply at that rate, week after week, it puts real structural pressure on how much Bitcoin is available in the market. The demand is real. The numbers are real.

So Why Is the Price Still Down?

Fair question. With all of this going on — banks piling in, institutions buying, regulations improving — why isn’t the price reflecting it?

Because in the short term, fear beats fundamentals. Every time.

When investors are scared, they sell everything and move to cash. It doesn’t matter how strong the underlying story is. The Fear and Greed Index for Bitcoin — a simple measure of how nervous or confident the market is feeling — recently hit its lowest level since the FTX collapse in 2022. Sixty consecutive days in “extreme fear” territory.

That kind of sentiment puts a lid on prices regardless of what’s happening beneath the surface.

But sentiment doesn’t stay in one place forever. When it shifts, it tends to shift fast.

The Bigger Picture

Step back from the day-to-day noise and here’s what you actually see:

• Bitcoin is down from its highs — but less than gold, and far less than silver.

• The regulatory environment in the US is the most favourable for Bitcoin it has ever been.

• Nearly 60% of America’s biggest banks are building Bitcoin products.

• The CEO of the largest bank in America once called it a fraud. His customers can now buy it through his app.

• One company is buying more Bitcoin every week than the entire network produces.

• Historically, April is one of Bitcoin’s strongest months — it’s closed higher nine out of thirteen Aprils since 2013.

None of that is a guarantee. Bitcoin is still volatile. The war is still ongoing. Nobody knows exactly when rate cuts arrive. Anyone telling you they know what happens next is guessing.

But “Bitcoin is down — something must be wrong” is not the right read on this moment. The right read is: Bitcoin is navigating one of the most complicated macro environments in years, holding up better than the assets that were supposed to be safe, while the most powerful financial institutions in the world quietly build the infrastructure to bring millions of new buyers in.

The chaos is real. So is the progress.

Imagine paying for your morning coffee with Bitcoin and then having to file a capital gains report with the IRS because of it.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the law right now.

Every time you spend Bitcoin on anything — a coffee, a taxi, a takeaway — it counts as a disposal of property under US tax law. You have to calculate how much you paid for that Bitcoin, what it’s worth today, and report the difference as a capital gain. Even if the gain is a few cents.

It’s absurd. And it’s the single biggest reason Bitcoin hasn’t become a mainstream payment method despite the technology being more than ready for it.

The fix has a name: the De Minimis exemption. And it’s been agonisingly close to passing for years. But a new development in Congress has just thrown a spanner in the works — and if you hold Bitcoin, you need to know about it.

First, Let’s Understand the Problem Properly

Bitcoin is treated as property under US tax law. Not as currency. Property.

That means every single time you spend it, you’ve technically “sold” a piece of property. And selling property triggers capital gains tax on any increase in value since you bought it.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Say you bought one Bitcoin when it was worth $10,000. It’s now worth $100,000. You want to spend $10 at Pret a Manger.

That $10 of Bitcoin originally cost you $1. So you just realised a $9 taxable capital gain. On a sandwich. You now need to record the date, the amount spent, your cost basis, the current price, and the gain. For a sandwich.

Multiply that across every coffee, every grocery run, every small purchase, and you can see why almost nobody actually spends Bitcoin at the till — even when merchants accept it. The accounting burden alone makes it impractical.

This isn’t Bitcoin being broken. The technology works fine. The Lightning Network — a payment layer built on top of Bitcoin — can process transactions instantly for fractions of a penny. Square, co-founded by Jack Dorsey, has been rolling out Lightning support to millions of merchants.

What a De Minimis Exemption Would Actually Do

De Minimis is Latin for “concerning minimal things.” In practice, it means: small transactions don’t count.

Congress already uses this logic elsewhere. If you travel abroad and make a small profit on foreign currency conversion — say the pound goes up slightly while you’re in London — you don’t have to report that as a capital gain. There’s a $200 de minimis threshold for personal foreign currency transactions. It would be bureaucratic madness to track every holiday purchase.

Bitcoin deserves the same treatment. A De Minimis exemption would mean: spend Bitcoin on everyday purchases below a set threshold, no tax calculation required, no IRS reporting needed. Treat it like cash for small payments.

Senator Cynthia Lummis has been the loudest voice pushing for this. In July 2025, she introduced a standalone bill proposing a $300 per-transaction threshold with a $5,000 annual cap. Below $300 a time, up to $5,000 a year in total — no capital gains reporting required. The Joint Committee on Taxation reviewed it and found it would actually be revenue-positive, generating around $600 million over ten years, because more people would use Bitcoin and pay tax on larger transactions.

The White House backed it. Treasury Secretary Bessent personally offered to have his Office of Tax Policy work with Lummis’s team on guidance. Bipartisan support existed. It seemed like it might finally happen.

Then Congress did what Congress does.

The Twist: A New Bill That Fixes It for Stablecoins but Not Bitcoin

In late March 2026, a new draft bill appeared in the House. Called the Parity Act, it was introduced by Representatives Max Miller and Steven Horsford with a de minimis exemption baked in.

Sounds good. Here’s the catch.

The Parity Act’s de minimis exemption applies to stablecoins only. Not Bitcoin. Not any other cryptocurrency. Just dollar-pegged stablecoins like USDC and USDT.

Think about what that actually means. Stablecoins are pegged to the dollar. They don’t appreciate. If you hold USDC and spend it, there’s no capital gain to calculate anyway — it’s worth $1 today, it was worth $1 when you bought it. So what is the Parity Act actually doing? In practice, it’s removing the reporting requirement for a disposal that always results in a gain of zero. The IRS technically still requires you to log every crypto disposal even when the gain is nothing. The Parity Act means you no longer have to file that paperwork for stablecoin transactions — but the paperwork always said $0 anyway. The bill also includes a clause saying stablecoins that deviate within 1% of their $1 peg are treated as having no gain, closing a technical micro-loophole for the rare moments USDC trades at $0.998 or $1.002. Useful for large businesses processing thousands of stablecoin transactions. Barely noticeable for anyone else.

Meanwhile, nobody spending Bitcoin on a coffee has been worrying about $0 disposal forms. They’ve been worrying about the very real $9 gain on that sandwich — and the Parity Act does absolutely nothing about that.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute — the main advocacy group pushing for Bitcoin tax reform — put it bluntly: “Rather than promoting parity, this draft picks winners and losers.” Their former counsel called it a bill that “sets America and Bitcoin back.”

Pierre Rochard, board member at Bitcoin treasury company Strive, was equally direct: “The number one impediment to Bitcoin payments adoption is tax policy, not scaling technology.” And yet the bill that’s actually moving through Congress addresses everything except the actual problem.

Why Would Congress Do This?

Follow the money — and the lobbying.

Stablecoin issuers and the exchanges that benefit from stablecoin volume have significant lobbying power in Washington right now. The GENIUS Act just passed, legitimising the stablecoin market. There’s momentum around stablecoins as part of America’s dollar dominance strategy.

Bitcoin, by contrast, competes with nothing. No company profits when you spend Bitcoin on coffee. There’s no corporate lobby pushing hard for Bitcoin’s spending use case in the way there is for stablecoin adoption.

The situation got messy enough that Jack Dorsey — a prominent Bitcoin advocate — publicly asked Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong to address allegations that Coinbase had lobbied against a Bitcoin de minimis exemption. Coinbase executives denied it. But the fact that the question was being asked publicly tells you something about the temperature in Bitcoin circles right now.

The UK Picture Isn’t Much Better

If you’re reading this from the UK, the problem is slightly different but the frustration is the same.

The UK gives you an annual Capital Gains Tax allowance of £3,000. Anything below that in total gains across the year is tax-free. But it’s a yearly limit, not a per-transaction one. You still need to track every Bitcoin spend throughout the year to know where you stand against that allowance. The record-keeping burden doesn’t disappear.

And unlike the US, there’s no serious legislative push underway for a UK de minimis exemption. The US at least has politicians actively fighting for it.

Meanwhile, countries like the UAE, El Salvador, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland have either zero crypto tax or highly favourable treatment for long-held assets. The competitive pressure on the US and UK to get this right is real.

The Clock Is Ticking

Here’s where things stand right now.

Update — July 2026: Bitcoin still has no de minimis exemption. Lummis’s standalone $300/$5,000 bill remains stuck in committee; Senator Daines has pointed to August 2026 as a fresh target. The Parity Act, still stablecoin-only, is described by its own sponsor as “a work in progress.” Nothing has changed for anyone spending Bitcoin at the till.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute has been working with 19 Congressional offices to build support for including Bitcoin in any de minimis exemption. They’ve identified a window between now and August 2026 to get something passed before midterm election pressures consume the Senate calendar entirely.

Senator Lummis — the bill’s most committed champion — leaves the Senate in January 2027. If nothing passes before she goes, the advocates warn the opportunity may not return for years.

The irony is that all the ingredients for a solution exist. There’s bipartisan support for the concept. The White House has backed it. The Joint Committee on Taxation confirmed it wouldn’t cost revenue. The technology to spend Bitcoin is ready. The only missing piece is a law that says: small Bitcoin purchases don’t need to be reported to the IRS.

That’s it. That’s all it takes to unlock Bitcoin as a genuine payment method for everyday life.

Why This Matters More Than It Seems

Most people think of Bitcoin as something you hold and hope goes up. And right now, that’s mostly how it’s used — as a store of value, a hedge, a long-term bet.

But Bitcoin’s design has always pointed toward something bigger: a global, permissionless money that anyone can use, anywhere, without a bank. The Lightning Network makes that technically feasible today. Jack Dorsey’s Square is already bringing it to millions of merchants.

Tax policy is the last major non-technical barrier. Fix that, and Bitcoin stops being something you hold in a wallet and starts being something you actually spend — at the coffee shop, the market, online. That shift changes how the world thinks about it.

The Parity Act getting traction without Bitcoin in it isn’t just a policy disappointment. It’s a signal of how the lobbying battle for crypto’s future is being fought — and who’s winning it right now.

The next few months will tell us whether Bitcoin gets treated like money, or whether it stays in a category of its own while stablecoins quietly take the payments lane.

Q: Do I have to pay tax every time I spend Bitcoin in the US?

A: Yes, currently — every Bitcoin purchase counts as a taxable “disposal,” even a $5 coffee, unless a de minimis exemption becomes law.

Q: What is the de minimis exemption Congress is debating?

A: A proposed rule — championed by Senator Lummis — that would exempt small Bitcoin purchases (under $300 per transaction, up to $5,000 a year) from capital gains reporting. As of July 2026 it still hasn’t passed.

Q: Does the Parity Act fix this for Bitcoin?

A: No — it only removes paperwork for stablecoins, which don’t gain value anyway. It still leaves the real Bitcoin tax problem untouched.

What do you think? Is a De Minimis exemption enough, or should everyday Bitcoin spending be treated like cash? Let me know in the comments.

President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18, 2025 — America’s first ever piece of federal crypto legislation — because the US dollar’s 50-year grip on the world economy, the “petrodollar” system, is quietly cracking, and stablecoins are Washington’s plan to hold it together. This isn’t a story about protecting crypto investors. It’s about America’s plan to stay the dominant economic power on the planet, using digital dollars instead of oil.

Let’s start at the beginning.

The System That Made America Untouchable

For fifty years, the United States has had an extraordinary financial superpower that most people have never heard of. It’s called the petrodollar system.

Here’s how it worked. Back in the 1970s, America struck a deal with Saudi Arabia. The Saudis would price their oil in US dollars — and only US dollars. In return, America would provide military protection and security guarantees.

The effect of that deal rippled across the entire planet. Because oil powered everything — factories, ships, planes, heating, transport — every country on Earth needed oil. And to buy oil, they needed dollars. That meant every nation on the planet had to hold US dollars in reserve, just to keep their economies running.

The result? Permanent, structural global demand for the US dollar. America could run enormous deficits, borrow cheaply, and effectively export its inflation to the rest of the world. It was, as one analyst put it, the greatest financial arrangement in modern history.

And it’s been quietly falling apart.

The Cracks Nobody Wanted to Talk About

The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has fallen from 73% in 2000 to around 57% today. That’s not a blip. That’s a structural shift playing out over two decades.

Saudi Arabia — the linchpin of the entire petrodollar arrangement — let its 50-year agreement with the United States quietly expire in 2024. It has since signed a strategic defence agreement with Pakistan and begun settling some oil trades in Chinese yuan. It hasn’t abandoned the dollar entirely, but it’s shopping for alternatives.

China has slashed its US Treasury holdings from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to around $682 billion by late 2025. Brazil doubled its gold reserves in 2025 while cutting dollar assets to a record low. Central banks globally have been buying gold at the fastest pace since World War II.

The renewable energy transition adds another layer. As solar, wind and electric vehicles erode oil’s monopoly on global energy, the very foundation of petrodollar demand weakens. The world is gradually needing less oil — which means it needs fewer dollars to buy that oil.

None of this means the dollar is about to collapse. It’s still the world’s dominant reserve currency by a wide margin. But the direction of travel is clear, and anyone paying attention in Washington has known it for years.

Trump saw it. And he had an answer.

The New Petrodollar

If oil created the demand for dollars in the 20th century, what creates that demand in the 21st?

Trump’s administration believes the answer is digital dollars. Stablecoins. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it explicit at the White House’s first-ever Digital Asset Summit in March 2025:

Trump himself told an audience of crypto leaders: stablecoins “will help expand the dominance of the US dollar.” His son Donald Jr. went further, calling them “the saviour of dollar hegemony.”

This isn’t rhetoric. There’s a clear mechanical logic behind it.

Today’s stablecoin market is worth over $315 billion. Around 99% of all stablecoins are dollar-denominated. And here’s the critical bit: every dollar-backed stablecoin in circulation must be backed by real US dollars or short-term US Treasury bonds. That means every time someone anywhere in the world holds a USDT or USDC, they are — indirectly — funding American government debt and holding dollar-denominated assets.

Stablecoin transaction volume in Q1 2026 exceeded $28 trillion. That’s more than Visa and Mastercard combined. And roughly 90% of USDT transactions happen outside the United States.

People in countries with weak or unstable currencies — Turkey, Argentina, Nigeria, Pakistan — are already using dollar stablecoins as their savings account and spending money. No bank required. No exchange required. Just a phone and an internet connection. Standard Chartered estimates that by 2028, two thirds of all stablecoin activity will come from emerging markets.

That is the new petrodollar. Not tied to oil. Tied to the internet.

But There Was a Problem

Here’s the thing. Before the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin market was a regulatory grey zone. Anyone could create a stablecoin and claim it was backed by real dollars. Some were. Some weren’t.

The TerraUSD collapse in 2022 wiped out $40 billion in days when its peg broke. Billions of dollars worth of supposedly stable coins turned out to be backed by nothing more than confidence. People lost their savings.

If the US government was going to bet its dollar dominance strategy on stablecoins, it needed them to be trustworthy. It needed the world to know that a dollar stablecoin was genuinely backed by a real dollar. No exceptions.

That’s what the GENIUS Act does.

What the GENIUS Act Actually Says

In plain English, the law creates the first ever federal rulebook for who can issue stablecoins in America and what they have to prove.

• Every stablecoin must be backed 1-to-1. For every $1 of stablecoin in circulation, the issuer must hold $1 of real assets — actual dollars, insured bank deposits, or short-term US Treasury bills. No creative accounting. No fractional reserves.

• Only approved companies can issue them. You have to be a licensed, regulated entity. A bank subsidiary, a federally licensed issuer, or a state-regulated body that meets federal standards.

• Monthly transparency is mandatory. Issuers must publicly show exactly what’s in their reserves every month. Anyone can check.

• Strong anti-money laundering rules apply. The same requirements that banks follow.

• Stablecoins are their own legal category. Not securities. Not bank deposits. Not commodities. A clean new framework that removes years of legal uncertainty.

The law also drew one important line that banks lobbied hard for: stablecoin issuers cannot pay you interest directly. A stablecoin that offers you 10-12% yield when your bank account pays 0.07% would pull deposits out of the banking system overnight. The Act bans that at the issuer level. Whether third-party platforms can offer yield on top of compliant stablecoins is still being contested — expect more noise on that through 2026.

The Race America Doesn’t Want to Lose

There’s another dimension to this that the White House is acutely aware of: China.

While America was debating stablecoin regulation for years, China was building its own digital currency — the digital yuan, or e-CNY. By late 2025, the Chinese government reported 16.7 trillion yuan in cumulative digital yuan transactions. Beijing is also running cross-border payment projects designed to settle international trade without touching the US dollar or the SWIFT system.

Saudi Arabia is participating in a Chinese-led central bank digital currency project. The EU is pushing what ECB President Christine Lagarde called a “global euro moment.” Countries across the developing world are building payment systems specifically designed to reduce dollar dependency.

The GENIUS Act is America’s answer to all of it. Not a government-controlled digital dollar — Trump specifically opposed a central bank digital currency — but a private-sector, dollar-backed digital money system that can spread organically across the world because people actually want to use it.

The key difference: China’s digital yuan is controlled by the state. Dollar stablecoins are issued by private companies, usable by anyone, and spreading through genuine demand. In countries with collapsing local currencies, people are choosing dollar stablecoins voluntarily. That’s not coercion. That’s network effects.

Where Things Stand Right Now — April 2026

The GENIUS Act is law. The detailed rules that make it work in practice are being written right now.

In February 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued its proposed implementation rules. The Treasury followed in April 2026. Public comments on the OCC’s proposals close May 1, 2026. Regulators are targeting July 2026 to finalise everything, after which the Act fully kicks in 120 days later.

What that means practically: the first bank-issued stablecoins — backed by FDIC-supervised reserves — could appear by late 2026 or early 2027. That’s a very different market from today’s Tether and Circle duopoly.

USDC is already gaining ground on USDT. Its supply surged 220% since late 2023 to around $78 billion, driven by institutional use and the regulatory confidence that comes with Circle’s compliance-first approach. As the GENIUS Act framework takes full effect, that shift toward regulated, transparent issuers is likely to accelerate.

Why Does Any of This Matter for Bitcoin?

Safer, more trusted stablecoins make the whole ecosystem more stable. They’re the on-ramps and off-ramps to Bitcoin. When you buy Bitcoin on an exchange, you’re often using USDT or USDC to do it. When you take profits, you park them in stablecoins. The more trustworthy those rails are, the more confidently people can move in and out of Bitcoin.

But there’s a bigger point. The GENIUS Act normalises the idea that crypto can be regulated sensibly, without being destroyed. Every piece of legislation that passes cleanly builds the political and regulatory confidence for the next one. The Clarity Act — which covers Bitcoin’s legal status directly — is still working through the Senate. The GENIUS Act just showed it’s possible.

And perhaps most importantly: a world where digital money is normal, trusted, and globally used is a world where Bitcoin makes more sense to more people. The GENIUS Act is laying the foundation for that world.

Leave your thoughts in the comments — especially if you hold Bitcoin!

Q: What is the GENIUS Act, in plain English?

A: It’s the first US federal law regulating stablecoins — digital tokens pegged 1-to-1 to the dollar. Issuers must hold real dollars or Treasury bills in reserve, prove it every month, and be a licensed, regulated company.

Q: Does the GENIUS Act affect Bitcoin directly?

A: Not directly — it only covers stablecoins. But safer stablecoins mean safer on-ramps and off-ramps for buying and selling Bitcoin, and it builds political momentum for Bitcoin-specific laws like the Clarity Act.

Q: Why do stablecoins help the US dollar stay dominant?

A: Every dollar-backed stablecoin must be backed by real dollars or US Treasuries. So every person worldwide holding USDT or USDC is indirectly funding US government debt — creating the same kind of global demand that oil once created for the dollar.

The Bitcoin Clarity Act is the bill that would make Bitcoin’s legal status as a ‘digital commodity’ permanent US law — settling, once and for all, the decade-long fight between the SEC and CFTC over who regulates crypto. It passed the House of Representatives in July 2025 by a huge bipartisan 294–134 vote. It has been stuck in the Senate ever since, and as of July 2026 still hasn’t had a floor vote.

Update — July 2026: The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act 15–9 on May 14, 2026. It missed its July 4 target and still needs a full floor vote. Lawmakers are now treating August 10, 2026 — the start of the August recess — as the last realistic window before midterm politics take over. If it doesn’t pass by then, it likely doesn’t return until 2027.

The Problem It’s Trying to Solve

To understand the Clarity Act, you need to understand one fight that’s been dragging on for years: the SEC vs the CFTC.

These are two different US government regulators. The SEC — Securities and Exchange Commission — watches over stocks, bonds, and investments. The CFTC — Commodity Futures Trading Commission — oversees commodities like gold, oil, and agricultural products.

Both of them looked at crypto and said: “that’s ours to regulate.”

The result was a decade of confusion, contradictory rulings, enforcement actions instead of clear guidance, and a legal environment so murky that serious institutional money stayed away rather than risk getting it wrong. Crypto companies didn’t know which regulator to register with, what rules applied to them, or whether their product would be legal tomorrow even if it was fine today.

That’s not a market. That’s a minefield.

The Key Distinction: Security vs Commodity

The whole debate comes down to one question: is a crypto asset a security or a commodity?

It sounds technical. It isn’t.

Bitcoin is the clearest possible example of a commodity. There’s no CEO. No headquarters. No promises from a team. Its value comes from its fixed supply, its network, and global demand. It’s digital gold.

The problem is that without a law saying so explicitly, the SEC could still argue it has jurisdiction. And it did, for years. That uncertainty has a real cost — it kept institutional investors cautious, slowed product development, and drove crypto businesses to friendlier jurisdictions overseas.

What the Clarity Act Actually Does

In plain English, the bill draws the lines that should have been drawn a decade ago.

• Bitcoin and most major cryptocurrencies get classified as digital commodities. Regulated by the CFTC. Lighter touch. Clear rules for exchanges, brokers, and custodians.

• The SEC keeps jurisdiction over digital securities. New crypto projects raising money from investors — where someone is making promises about returns — stay under SEC oversight. As they should.

• A clear path for new projects to decentralise. A token can start as a security when it’s early and founder-led, then graduate to commodity status once the project is genuinely decentralised. No more permanent legal limbo.

• Clear rules for exchanges and custodians. Firms that hold or trade crypto get a defined registration framework. No more guessing which regulator to call.

• DeFi gets protected. Developers building decentralised protocols who don’t control customer funds are carved out from registration requirements. A huge relief for builders who’ve been operating in legal grey zones.

• No government digital currency. The bill explicitly blocks the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency — a government-controlled digital dollar that could surveil every transaction. Controversial but popular in crypto circles.

The overall effect: companies know what rules apply to them. Institutions can enter the market confidently. Bitcoin’s status as a commodity becomes law, not just an assumption.

JPMorgan analysts have described passage as a “positive catalyst” for digital assets, predicting it could trigger an institutional inflow cycle comparable to — and potentially broader than — what followed the Bitcoin ETF approvals in January 2024.

So Why Is It Still Stuck?

Because four different groups all have different definitions of what “winning” looks like — and any one of them can block progress.

The crypto industry wants a federal framework that gives firms a workable path into US regulation without the SEC’s enforcement-heavy approach.

Banks and their allies are worried about stablecoins paying yield. We covered this in the GENIUS Act piece — if a stablecoin can pay you 10-12% while your bank account pays 0.07%, the banks have a problem. They’ve lobbied hard to ban any form of yield on stablecoins.

Senate Democrats want ethics rules that prevent government officials and their families from holding or profiting from crypto while writing the laws. Given that a sitting president’s family has launched their own stablecoin, that’s not an unreasonable concern and it’s proved surprisingly hard to resolve.

Structural critics worry the bill creates bespoke exemptions that weaken existing investor protections. Their argument has slowed the debate on legitimacy, because it touches a real nerve in Washington about crypto getting special treatment.

A compromise on stablecoin yield was reportedly reached in late March — platforms can offer activity-based rewards but not passive interest on balances. The market didn’t love it. Circle dropped 20% and Coinbase fell 10% on the news. But the deal may be enough to unlock the vote.

The Big News: A Partial Answer Already Arrived

While the Clarity Act has been stuck in the Senate, regulators have been doing something interesting. They’ve been acting as if it already passed.

On March 17, 2026, the SEC and CFTC jointly issued a landmark interpretation — their first ever — clarifying how federal securities laws apply to crypto. In plain English: they confirmed that Bitcoin and most major cryptocurrencies are commodities, not securities. Mining, staking, and most airdrops are not securities transactions. And crucially, a token can transition from security to commodity status as it decentralises.

The two agencies called this a “bridge” while Congress works on the full law. What it really is: a signal that regulators have broadly accepted the same framework the Clarity Act is trying to codify. The bureaucratic fight is largely over. What’s left is the political fight.

That’s actually encouraging. It means the core question — is Bitcoin a commodity? — has already been answered. The Clarity Act passing would make that answer permanent law rather than regulatory guidance that a future administration could reverse.

The Clock Is Ticking

Here’s where things stand in April 2026, as clearly as I can put it.

The Senate Banking Committee is expected to hold its markup session between April 13 and 20. That’s the critical vote — the committee deciding whether to advance the bill.

If that happens, the bill still needs to be reconciled with a parallel version from the Senate Agriculture Committee, then pass a full Senate vote, then be reconciled with the House version before going to the President’s desk. That’s a lot of steps.

If the Banking Committee markup doesn’t happen by late April, the bill misses the window before the summer recess. After that, midterm election pressures dominate the Senate calendar. Senator Moreno put it starkly: if it doesn’t move by May, digital asset legislation may not move forward for years.

The prediction markets currently price the odds of the bill passing in 2026 at around 72%. Senator Lummis says negotiations are “99% resolved.” Ripple’s CEO puts passage odds at 80-90%.

None of that means it’s certain. Washington has a talent for finding new ways to stall things that seem inevitable.

Why This Matters for Bitcoin Specifically

If the Clarity Act passes, Bitcoin’s status as a digital commodity becomes permanent US law. That’s not just symbolic.

It opens the door to new Bitcoin financial products regulated through the CFTC — a lighter, more innovation-friendly framework than the SEC. It gives institutions the legal certainty they need to build products, hold Bitcoin on balance sheets, and offer it to clients without fear of regulatory reversal.

It also sends a signal to the rest of the world. America just passed the GENIUS Act for stablecoins. If it follows up with the Clarity Act for Bitcoin and digital commodities, the US is no longer just crypto-friendly in rhetoric. It’s crypto-friendly in statute.

And as we’ve seen with the GENIUS Act, the rest of the world does tend to follow what America does.

Leave your thoughts in the comments — especially if you hold Bitcoin!

Q: Has the Clarity Act passed yet?

A: Not yet, as of July 2026. It passed the House in 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May 2026, but still needs a full Senate vote — August 10, 2026 is being treated as the last realistic deadline before the political calendar fills up.

Q: Is the Clarity Act the same as the GENIUS Act?

A: No. The GENIUS Act (already law) covers stablecoins only. The Clarity Act is the separate, broader bill that would make Bitcoin’s status as a commodity permanent.

Q: Why does it matter whether Bitcoin is a “commodity” or a “security”?

A: It decides which regulator oversees it. Commodities get the lighter-touch CFTC; securities get the stricter SEC. Commodity status gives institutions like banks and pension funds the legal certainty to hold and offer Bitcoin products.

(Updated April 6, 2026 — things change fast, so check official sites for the newest updates.)

Event Details

• Dates: April 27-29, 2026

• Location: The Venetian, 3355 South Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, NV

• Purpose: The conference aims to unite builders, thinkers, and believers in the Bitcoin community to explore the future of Bitcoin, focusing on innovation, financial freedom, and the adoption of sound money.