Bitcoin Staged a Comeback While the UK Quietly Won the Regulation Race
Saylor sold 100x more Bitcoin than his tiny May sale that tanked the market — and this time nobody flinched. The Clarity Act missed its summer window. A very busy week.
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.