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Michael Saylor has warned that changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules pose a greater long-term threat than rival cryptocurrencies, governments, or external competition.

Summary

Saylor called internal rule changes Bitcoin’s “gravest threat” after the asset gained broad market recognition. He argued that consensus rules protect property rights, scarcity, settlement, and limits on power. Saylor said proposals such as BIP-110 could weaken block-space scarcity and miners’ fee revenue. Strategy recently joined eight companies pledging $15 million toward Bitcoin security research. Saylor warns against capturing Bitcoin consensus Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor issued the warning in a series of X posts on Tuesday, describing Bitcoin’s consensus rules as its constitution. Those rules determine how ownership is recognized, how scarcity is maintained, how transactions settle, and what network participants can change.

Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory.

Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within: factions that invent pretexts, rewrite the rules, and seize economic rights until freedom becomes permission and law becomes loot.

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) July 28, 2026 “Bitcoin has won. Now it must survive victory,” Saylor wrote. “Its gravest threat is not an enemy at the gates, but corruption from within.”

He argued that changing the protocol to serve one group would infringe on the economic rights of miners, developers, investors, companies, custodians, and other users. Once one faction gains enough influence to rewrite the rules, he warned, competing groups may pursue changes through the same process.

That outcome could make protocol disputes permanent, according to Saylor. He said prolonged governance conflicts would drive away capital, slow development, weaken security, and leave Bitcoin with only a fraction of its potential.

Saylor expects Bitcoin could grow 100-fold and become part of the infrastructure supporting global capital markets. From that perspective, he argued that a poorly designed rule introduced today could restrict financial products, technologies, and economic activity that do not yet exist.

Why Saylor opposes BIP-110 Saylor’s latest comments extend his opposition to Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110, a proposed temporary soft fork intended to reduce arbitrary data stored on the blockchain.

BIP-110 supporters argue that limiting some forms of data would ease storage and verification burdens for node operators. They also want Bitcoin to remain focused on monetary transactions rather than inscriptions, tokens, or file storage.

Saylor accepts that some on-chain data may have little value or could be linked to harmful activity. However, he argues that Bitcoin cannot reliably determine the purpose behind transaction data and should not use consensus rules to decide which valid, fee-paying transactions deserve block space.

“Bitcoin does not need guardians of purity,” Saylor wrote in his July 18 article. “It needs guardians of neutrality.”

His latest X thread widened that argument beyond BIP-110. Saylor also criticized proposals that add covenant functionality or increase block capacity, saying each approach creates different risks for Bitcoin’s base layer.

Bitcoin fee market and network security at stake According to Saylor, restrictions on valid transactions could reduce competition for block space and weaken the fee market. Larger blocks, meanwhile, could dilute block-space scarcity while raising the bandwidth and hardware costs required to operate a node.

He also argued that covenants would make Bitcoin’s consensus rules more complex and introduce additional attack surfaces. These claims represent Saylor’s assessment of the proposals rather than an established consensus among Bitcoin developers.

Transaction fees will become increasingly important to miners as the block subsidy falls by half roughly every 210,000 blocks. Saylor warned that suppressing fee demand could reduce the income available to miners and weaken the financial incentives protecting the network.

His preferred approach is to keep the base layer simple, neutral, scarce, and secure. Developers can then build new functions through second-layer networks and applications, where adoption remains voluntary and failures have a more limited effect.

Strategy backs $15 million security effort Saylor’s stance carries added relevance for US investors because Strategy has built its corporate model around holding Bitcoin and promoting enterprise adoption. He recently argued that companies are necessary for Bitcoin to develop into a global monetary network, placing corporate participation at the center of its next stage.

Strategy also joined Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy in forming the Bitcoin Security Consortium.

The nine firms pledged a combined $15 million over three years to support developers and researchers working on Bitcoin security, including preparations for potential quantum-computing threats. Members will direct their funding independently, while the consortium says it will neither control Bitcoin development nor take positions on individual protocol changes.

Saylor said upgrades should remain rare, conservative, and driven by necessity. His latest intervention places protocol restraint alongside corporate adoption and security funding as central parts of his long-term Bitcoin strategy.

Core Scientific has signed a major deal with chipmaker AMD to lease its AI infrastructure starting next year as the company pivots from Bitcoin mining. The CORZ stock climbed on the back of this deal, which could also see AMD purchase the miner’s common stock.

Core Scientific Signs Deal To Lease AI Infrastructure To AMD In a press release, the firm and AMD announced a deal that would see the latter secure up to 2.5 gigawatts of data center capacity starting in 2027 to support end customer deployments of AMD AI solutions. As part of the agreement, both companies revealed that they will collaborate on physical infrastructure design and the deployment of AMD Instinct™ GPUs, EPYC™ CPUs, and ROCm™ software.

This agreement comes as Core Scientific pivots from Bitcoin mining to building AI infrastructure, including data centers. As CoinGape reported, Core Scientific sold 1,900 BTC earlier this year to provide liquidity as it makes this transition.

The company still holds 547 BTC, according to BitcoinTreasuries data. The miner noted that it still derives revenue from earning crypto from the company’s own account and from crypto mining hosting services. However, it is in the process of repurposing its remaining facilities to support its high-density colocation services.

Core Scientific is just one of many Bitcoin miners pivoting to provide AI infrastructure. Bitcoin Miner MARA recently expanded its AI infrastructure with a Texas site acquisition. Meanwhile, TeraWulf signed a 20-year data center deal with Anthropic earlier this month.

CORZ Stock Drops At Market Open CORZ stock has dropped over 3% at the market open today amid the announcement of Core Scientific’s deal with AMD. The stock surged over 5% in premarket trading but has now slipped as the stock market sell-off deepens.

Core Scientific stock is also down over 12% over the past week. However, the stock is up over 40% year-to-date (YTD) amid the pivot from Bitcoin mining to providing AI infrastructure as AI demand increases.

Meanwhile, Core Scientific revealed that AMD will also receive market-priced warrants to purchase its common stock, subject to certain commercial conditions as part of the agreement.

For more on Bitcoin mining, please check out our page on Top 6 Best Crypto Mining Hosting Services In 2026

Hyperscale Data, Inc. announced another Bitcoin buy, bringing its holdings up to 1,106 digital coins — worth $69.7 million at today’s prices.

NYSE-listed Hyperscale added just 18.594 Bitcoin to its stash since last week’s buy of 51.5 coins.

Hyperscale shares (GPUS) were trading nearly 4% lower Tuesday morning in New York. 

“Every Bitcoin we acquire further strengthens Hyperscale Data’s balance sheet and expands our financial flexibility,” Milton ‘Todd’ Ault III, Hyperscale Data’s executive chairman, said. 

“A stronger and larger Bitcoin treasury gives us additional options to finance growth, pursue strategic opportunities, and create long-term value for our stockholders. We intend to continue building our Bitcoin position over time.”

The holdings are split across the company’s wholly owned subsidiaries, Sentinum, Inc. and Ault Capital Group, Inc. (ACG). 

The buildout is part of the company’s goal of establishing a $100 million digital asset treasury and reaching full parity between its Bitcoin holdings and market capitalization. 

Hyperscale is following in the footsteps of Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — by using spare cash to buy Bitcoin. 

Under the leadership of Michael Saylor, Strategy shifted from a traditional software business to buying Bitcoin and allowing investors to get exposure to the asset via its shares which trade on the Nasdaq. 

This model has inspired other corporations to add the leading cryptocurrency to their treasuries — though Hyperscale’s case is unusual in that its holdings now exceed its entire market cap, a situation more commonly seen in deeply discounted treasury plays.

Mathew Di Salvo

Mathew is a reporter who's covered the space since 2019, reporting on everything from Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele's Bitcoin bet to crypto exchange FTX's bankruptcy.

Clear Creek Financial Management, a Wall Street investment advisory firm with over $1.5 billion in assets under management (AUM), has revealed its crypto ETF investments. It has products pegged to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP and Solana (SOL) in its latest filing of Form 13F with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Wall Street Firm Discloses Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, SOL Holdings The filing reflects the firm’s biggest crypto investment as the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF. It holds 304,155 shares, which valued at $9.69 million at the close of the reporting period. Clear Creek also held shares in the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, holding $477,412 worth of the fund, and the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF, which has $248,539 worth of holdings.

Ethereum was also the second largest allocation of the firm’s crypto ETF. The filing revealed 337,162 shares of the Bitwise Ethereum ETF valued at $3.80 million. It also had 14,336 shares worth $170,455 of the iShares Ethereum Trust and 21,374 shares of the Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, valued at $321,251.

In addition to the two biggest cryptocurrencies, Clear Creek also had stakes in XRP and Solana ETFs. According to the filing, the firm held 11,621 shares of the Bitwise XRP ETF, which currently have a value of $135,501.

The investment manager stated he had 11,258 shares of the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF with a value of $112,693 in addition to 28,144 shares of the Grayscale Solana Staking ETF valued at $155,636 worth.

The filing comes as institutional interest in crypto ETFs expands. Moreover, the latest 13F filing reveals that Clear Creek Financial Management has a crypto strategy beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum as it is also holding XRP and Solana investment products.

OranjeBTC, the largest public corporate Bitcoin treasury holder in Latin America, has added another 6 BTC to its balance sheet. The purchase brings the company’s total stash to 3,918 BTC, worth north of $250 million at current prices.

The quiet accumulator OranjeBTC trades under the ticker OBTC3.SA on Brazil’s primary stock exchange. The company went public through a reverse merger with roughly 3,650 BTC already on its books.

Since then, it’s been adding incrementally. In late June 2026, the company purchased 74 BTC. In early July, it grabbed another 8 BTC. Now this latest 6 BTC buy pushes the total to 3,918.

The math tells an interesting story. OranjeBTC has added roughly 268 BTC since listing, growing its treasury by about 7.3% in less than a year. Not exactly MicroStrategy pace, but consistent enough to rank among the top 25 public corporate Bitcoin holders globally.

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The company’s average acquisition cost basis sits above $100K per BTC. It means OranjeBTC has been buying at what many would consider elevated price levels, signaling genuine conviction rather than opportunistic bottom-fishing.

There was one brief interruption to the buying spree. In late October 2025, the company paused Bitcoin purchases to conduct a share buyback of approximately 99,600 shares for around $220K.

Why a Brazilian Bitcoin treasury matters In Brazil, the calculus shifts. The Brazilian real has experienced significant depreciation over the past decade against the dollar. For a company operating in that currency environment, holding Bitcoin isn’t just a speculative bet. It’s a hedging strategy against local currency weakness.

OranjeBTC’s focused approach, holding only Bitcoin rather than diversifying across multiple crypto assets, mirrors the playbook that Michael Saylor popularized but applies it to a market where the treasury hedge argument arguably makes even more sense.

What this means for investors For Bitcoin bulls, the steady accumulation at a cost basis above $100K reinforces the narrative that sophisticated corporate buyers see current price levels as reasonable entry points.

The risk side of the ledger deserves attention too. An average cost basis exceeding $100K per BTC means OranjeBTC’s entire treasury strategy is underwater if Bitcoin revisits the sub-six-figure range for an extended period. The company went public with 3,650 BTC and has been adding at prices that leave minimal margin for error on the downside.

Investors watching OBTC3.SA should also pay attention to the company’s approach to capital allocation. The brief pivot to share buybacks in October 2025 showed management is willing to toggle between Bitcoin accumulation and equity management depending on market conditions.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

Apple is facing a lawsuit from three customers who say a fraudulent Bitcoin wallet application on its App Store cost them a combined $1.8 million. The complaint, filed on July 24 in a California federal court, names plaintiffs James Ramirez, Christopher Ellis, and Jalen Delgado.

How the Scam Worked The three plaintiffs say the malicious application impersonated the legitimate Sparrow Bitcoin wallet and instructed them to enter their seed phrases, after which their Bitcoin was transferred to wallets controlled by the scammers.

The scam worked in part because the legitimate Sparrow Wallet is a desktop application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and does not offer an iOS version. Any Sparrow-branded app on the App Store is therefore fraudulent by definition. The complaint also alleges Apple ranked the fake app into curated crypto collections, lending it additional credibility.

Ramirez allegedly lost Bitcoin worth about $875,000, Ellis lost around $840,000, and Delgado lost approximately $120,000, with thefts occurring between May and August 2025.

A Pattern Apple Was Warned About The lawsuit argues Apple had prior notice and failed to act. Sparrow Wallet developer Craig Raw publicly addressed Apple's slow response to multiple fake versions of his app appearing in the App Store, noting as early as January 2024 that a scam listing had persisted despite weeks of reports. Raw later attempted to protect users by submitting a placeholder app containing screenshots stating that Sparrow Wallet is desktop-only, only for his Apple Developer account to be flagged for termination due to "dishonest activity," a decision Apple later reversed.

The lawsuit alleges that even when victims reported fraud, Apple often took little to no action, and says other fake Sparrow apps remain in the App Store. The plaintiffs argue the fraud succeeded precisely because Apple had spent years marketing the App Store as a uniquely safe and trusted environment.

In response, Apple said it has taken swift action to remove any apps impersonating Sparrow Wallet on the App Store and to terminate developer accounts associated with those apps. The company also pointed to its own analysis showing that in 2025 it rejected more than 371,000 submissions that copied other apps, were spam, or otherwise misled users. The plaintiffs are seeking damages covering all funds lost through the fraudulent application.

Sources
BleepingComputer: Apple sued over fake App Store crypto wallet app stealing $1.8M in Bitcoin
MacRumors: Apple Responds to Lawsuit Over Fake Bitcoin Wallet Scam in App Store
TechCrunch: Apple sued after alleged App Store crypto scam cost users $1.8M

Tether holds 97,141 bitcoin, enough to rank second among corporate holders if it were listed anywhere. It is not. There is no share, so there is no multiple, no premium, no discount, and no market referee on the largest private Bitcoin position in existence, funded by a business that earns more per employee than any company on earth.

Summary

Tether holds 97,141 BTC, worth roughly $6 billion at current prices, accumulated under a 2023 policy of allocating up to 15% of realized quarterly operating profits to Bitcoin, most recently an 8,888 BTC transfer on New Year’s Day. If Tether were public, ranking services place it second among corporate holders behind Strategy’s 672,497 BTC. It is private, so every metric built to value Bitcoin treasuries, mNAV above all, simply does not compute. The funding model inverts the treasury-company template: Strategy and its imitators raise capital to buy Bitcoin, while Tether buys with retained profits from a reserve business that reported over $10 billion in net income for 2025. Bitcoin is one leg of a diversified reserve: roughly 116 metric tons of gold worth more than $17 billion, around $135 billion in US Treasuries by the issuer’s account, against approximately $185 billion of USDT in circulation. The same diversification cuts both ways: S&P downgraded USDT to its lowest stablecoin rating in December, citing disclosure gaps and a rising share of high-risk assets, meaning the accumulation that makes Tether a Bitcoin power is what a rating agency counts against it. Every large corporate Bitcoin position in the world has a price attached to it, and not the price of the coins. Strategy has an mNAV. So does every listed treasury company, tracked in real time across a hundred names by analytics platforms that publish thirty metrics apiece: enterprise value over Bitcoin net asset value, premium or discount, diluted variants, debt-adjusted variants, the entire apparatus a market builds when it needs to decide what a pile of Bitcoin inside a corporate wrapper is worth. That apparatus has one conspicuous blind spot, and it happens to contain the second-largest corporate stack on earth. Tether holds 97,141 BTC, roughly $6 billion at current prices, accumulated quarter after quarter since 2023 under a policy of committing up to 15% of realized operating profits to the asset. Ranking services note that if Tether were a public company it would sit second behind Strategy, and then they file it on a separate page for private companies, holdings listed, valuation column blank, because there is no share, no float, no enterprise value, and therefore no multiple to compute. The most-watched metric in corporate Bitcoin cannot be applied to one of corporate Bitcoin’s largest holders. This piece is about that gap: what Tether actually holds, how the accumulation is funded, why the absence of a market price is more consequential than it sounds, and what a rating agency sees when it looks at the same balance sheet.

The position, itemized Start with the stack and the pattern, because the pattern is more informative than any single figure.

The current disclosed holding is 97,141 BTC. The most recent visible additions trace a consistent rhythm: an 8,888.8 BTC transfer to the treasury wallet on January 1, worth roughly $778 million at the time and described by the chief executive as the Q4 2025 profit allocation, taking holdings above 96,000, followed by a smaller addition in April that brought the total to its present level. The policy behind the rhythm dates to May 2023: up to 15% of realized quarterly operating profits committed to Bitcoin, executed as periodic purchases and consolidated near quarter-end, a mechanical program, not a discretionary trade.

Bitcoin is one leg of a three-legged reserve strategy, and the other two are larger. Gold: roughly 116 metric tons as of the third quarter of 2025, valued above $17 billion by early this year, a position that makes Tether one of the largest private gold holders in existence. US government debt: approximately $135 billion by the chief executive’s own framing, which he described as positioning the company as the seventeenth-largest holder of US debt, with later reporting citing exposure figures around $141 billion. Against those reserves sits roughly $185 billion of USDT in circulation, and around the whole structure, per its Q3 2025 attestation, approximately $184.5 billion in stablecoin reserves against $215 billion in total assets, with roughly $23 billion in retained earnings and about $30 billion in group equity.

The scale comparison worth holding onto: Strategy’s 672,497 BTC is nearly seven times Tether’s stack, built with more than $50 billion of raised capital at an average cost around $75,000 per coin, and it constitutes that company’s entire reason for existing. Tether’s 97,141 BTC is a side position, roughly 3% of its total assets, accumulated from spare profit by a company whose actual business is something else entirely. That difference in kind, not the difference in size, is what makes the valuation problem interesting.

The machine that funds it The accumulation model is the inverse of the sector it is usually grouped with, and the inversion explains why Tether can keep buying when the treasury companies cannot.

The digital asset treasury template, which this publication has covered from Strategy’s flywheel through the newer entrants, runs on capital markets. A company issues equity or convertible debt, buys Bitcoin with the proceeds, and depends on trading above its net asset value so that each issuance is accretive rather than dilutive. When the premium compresses, as it has across the sector this year, the machine stalls: raising becomes value-destroying, purchases stop, and the equity story unwinds. It is a leveraged bet on both Bitcoin and continued market enthusiasm for the wrapper.

Tether buys with cash it already earned. The reserve business generates income by holding predominantly short-term US government debt against tokens the public holds without interest, which produced more than $10 billion in net profit for 2025 and, on the company’s own account, roughly $500 million a month from Treasury holdings alone at one point last year. Fifteen percent of realized profits into Bitcoin is an allocation decision made after the money is in the door. No premium is required, no issuance, no market permission. The purchases continue at $63,000 exactly as they continued at $100,000, because the input is profit, not sentiment, which is why Tether kept accumulating through a drawdown that stopped much of the treasury-company sector cold.

That funding structure also makes Tether the clearest single illustration of stablecoin economics that this publication’s stablechain coverage has traced from the other direction. The float pays for everything: the Bitcoin, the gold, the chain investments, the venture portfolio, and the free-transfer subsidies underwriting the purpose-built USDT networks. A business that earns on other people’s dollar balances converts monetary demand into a balance sheet, and the Bitcoin position is simply the most visible artifact of that conversion.

The metric that cannot be computed Now the gap, which is the piece’s actual subject.

For public treasury companies, mNAV is the governing number. It divides enterprise value, market capitalization plus debt and preferred equity, by the market value of the Bitcoin held. Above 1.0 means the market pays a premium for the wrapper, its strategy, its access to capital, its operating business. Below 1.0 means the market discounts even the coins. Analytics platforms track it across more than a hundred companies with real-time variants for dilution and capital structure, and the ratio has become the sector’s price-to-earnings equivalent, the number that decides whether a treasury company can raise, whether it should buy back, and whether its strategy is working.

Apply that to Tether and every input goes missing. There is no market capitalization, because there is no traded share. There is no enterprise value, because there is no market to compute it. There is no premium or discount, because nobody is bidding for a claim. The company has moved toward the edges of price discovery, a share buyback program was initiated last autumn and reporting has described interest from major investors in a private placement raising up to $20 billion, which would imply a valuation, but a negotiated private round is not a market price. It is one number agreed by a few parties under confidentiality, revealed selectively, and untested by anyone who might disagree.

The consequences are more than academic, and they run in both directions. Nobody can express a view: an investor who believes Tether’s Bitcoin is worth more than the market credits, or that the whole structure is worth less than claimed, has no instrument to trade. Nobody can be corrected: without a price, the company’s own attestations, disclosures, and framings are the primary information, and there is no continuously updated second opinion of the kind a share price provides. And nothing is disciplined: public treasury companies discovered this year that a compressing mNAV forces strategy changes, halted purchases, buybacks, defensive disclosure, because the market votes daily. Tether faces no such vote. The largest private Bitcoin position on earth is, in the most literal sense, unmarked, and the only external referees are the attestation firms and the rating agencies, which is where the story turns uncomfortable.

Tether extends Bitcoin bet with 8,888 $BTC Q4 purchase above $96k

— crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) January 1, 2026 What the rating agency sees S&P Global looked at the same balance sheet in December and reached a conclusion the accumulation narrative rarely mentions: it downgraded USDT to 5, the weakest grade on its five-point stablecoin stability scale, citing persistent gaps in disclosure and a rising share of high-risk assets in the reserves. The high-risk assets named include Bitcoin, gold, corporate bonds, and secured loans.

Sit with the symmetry, because it is the sharpest fact in this piece. Every headline celebrating Tether as a top-tier Bitcoin holder is describing, in the rating agency’s framework, the growth of the reserve component least suitable for backing a dollar-pegged liability. Both readings follow from the same asset. The company’s case, argued publicly by its chief executive against the downgrade, is that excess reserves and group equity absorb the volatility: roughly $7 billion in excess reserves and about $30 billion in group equity stand between a Bitcoin drawdown and the tokens, meaning the volatile assets are funded by capital rather than by the money backing USDT. That is a real argument and, on the disclosed figures, a substantially cushioned position.

The counter is equally real. The cushion is disclosed by the company and verified by attestation rather than by audit, a distinction this industry has debated for a decade; a Bitcoin drawdown of the severity Bitcoin has repeatedly produced would consume a large share of the stated excess in a single quarter; and the correlation problem is the one nobody models publicly, since the conditions that would trigger mass USDT redemption are precisely the conditions in which Bitcoin and gold would be falling and least convenient to sell. A reserve that is diversified in normal times can be concentrated in the only scenario that matters. That is not a prediction of failure. It is the reason a rating agency’s job exists, and the reason the missing market price matters: for a public company, a market would price that tail risk continuously and visibly. Here, one agency’s letter grade and the issuer’s rebuttal are the entire public debate.

What would make it pricable Three developments would convert this position from an unmarked holding into a valued one, and each is at least plausible.

A completed private placement at scale, the reported raise of up to $20 billion with institutional participation, would produce a negotiated valuation for the whole enterprise. It would not be a market price, but it would be the first external number against which the Bitcoin, gold, and Treasury legs could be measured, and it would create shareholders with an interest in eventual liquidity.

Regulatory convergence is the second. The US stablecoin framework and its implementation, covered across this publication’s regulatory reporting, is steadily raising the disclosure floor for issuers serving American users, and Tether’s domestic-market vehicle brings part of the group inside that perimeter. Disclosure requirements are how private balance sheets become legible, and legibility is the precondition for valuation.

And a listing, the possibility every private financial company of this scale eventually faces, would resolve everything at once: a share price, an enterprise value, and finally an mNAV for the second-largest corporate Bitcoin holder in the world. There is no indication one is planned. But the buyback program, the private placement discussions, and the group-equity disclosures are the standard sequence of a company assembling the furniture a valuation event requires.

Until one of those lands, the situation stands as described: 97,141 bitcoin, roughly $6 billion, inside a company earning more than $10 billion a year, sitting on a spreadsheet somewhere with no multiple attached, in a sector that has built an entire analytical apparatus for exactly this question and cannot point it at the biggest private target in the field.

What to watch The quarterly transfer. The 15% allocation makes each quarter’s profit-driven purchase a schedule, and the size of each transfer is a live read on the reserve business’s profitability, one of the few genuinely informative numbers a private issuer emits.

The next attestation. Excess reserves and group equity are the cushion the entire high-risk-asset debate turns on. Watch whether both grow with the Bitcoin position or lag it, since the ratio between them is the honest version of the risk question.

Any rating movement. S&P’s grade is the closest thing to an external referee. An upgrade on improved disclosure, or a further downgrade, moves the only public scorecard that exists.

The raise. Confirmation, size, and valuation of the reported private placement would supply the first external number for the enterprise, and with it the first opportunity to ask what the market thinks all that Bitcoin is worth inside this particular wrapper.

One final calibration, because Tether is not quite alone in this category and the comparison sharpens the point. Ranking services list at least one private entity with a larger claimed Bitcoin position, a technology company whose holdings, unlike Tether’s, cannot be verified on-chain at all, which produces a three-tier structure of corporate Bitcoin knowledge worth naming. Public companies disclose in filings and are priced continuously by markets. Tether discloses in attestations and is verifiable on-chain but priced by nobody. And a third tier claims holdings that are neither audited nor observable, existing purely as assertion. The industry’s data infrastructure, the trackers, the leaderboards, the dashboards with thirty metrics per company, handles the first tier well and quietly degrades across the other two, which means every statement about how much Bitcoin corporations own carries an error bar that grows as you move away from the listed names. That is worth remembering the next time a leaderboard is cited as though all its rows were equivalent evidence. Tether’s row is unusually good by the standards of private disclosure, on-chain verifiable, regularly attested, publicly discussed by its chief executive, and it still lacks the single thing that makes a corporate holding legible to markets: someone, somewhere, willing to state a price and be wrong about it in public.

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Holdings, reserve figures, and profit numbers reflect company statements, attestations, and third-party reporting that cannot be independently verified against audited financials, and asset values change continuously. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 26, 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions How much Bitcoin does Tether hold? 97,141 BTC, worth roughly $6 billion at current prices. The position was built under a policy adopted in May 2023 of allocating up to 15% of realized quarterly operating profits to Bitcoin, with recent additions including 8,888.8 BTC transferred on January 1 as the Q4 2025 allocation and a smaller purchase in April.

Where does that rank among corporate holders? Second, if it counted. Ranking services note Tether would sit behind only Strategy’s 672,497 BTC if it were a public company, but list it separately because it is private. Strategy’s position is nearly seven times larger and constitutes that company’s entire business model, while Tether’s is roughly 3% of total assets.

How is Tether’s accumulation different from a treasury company’s? Funding. Treasury companies raise equity or convertible debt to buy Bitcoin and depend on trading above net asset value for issuance to be accretive, so purchases stall when the premium compresses. Tether buys with retained profits from its reserve business, which reported more than $10 billion in net income for 2025, so its purchases continue regardless of market sentiment toward any wrapper.

What is mNAV and why can it not be applied to Tether? mNAV divides a company’s enterprise value by the market value of its Bitcoin, showing whether investors pay a premium or discount for the wrapper. It requires a traded share price, which Tether does not have. With no market capitalization, no enterprise value, and no float, every input is missing, so the sector’s governing metric simply does not compute for one of its largest holders.

Why does the absence of a market price matter? Because a price is a continuous external opinion. Without one, no investor can express a view on whether Tether is over- or undervalued, no daily second opinion checks the company’s own disclosures, and no market discipline forces strategy changes the way a compressing mNAV has forced them across the public treasury sector this year. Attestations and rating agencies are the only external referees.

What else is in Tether’s reserves? Predominantly US government debt, around $135 billion by the company’s own account, described by its chief executive as making Tether the seventeenth-largest holder of US debt, plus roughly 116 metric tons of gold valued above $17 billion, against approximately $185 billion of USDT in circulation. Bitcoin is the smallest of the three headline legs.

Why did S&P downgrade USDT if the reserves are diversified? S&P cut USDT to 5, the weakest grade on its stablecoin scale, in December, citing persistent disclosure gaps and a rising share of high-risk assets including Bitcoin, gold, corporate bonds, and secured loans. The agency’s framework treats volatile assets backing a dollar-pegged liability as a risk, so the same accumulation celebrated as treasury strength counts against the stability rating. Tether’s response points to roughly $7 billion in excess reserves and about $30 billion in group equity as the buffer.

Could Tether ever be valued publicly? Possibly, through three routes: the reported private placement of up to $20 billion, which would produce a negotiated enterprise valuation; regulatory convergence raising disclosure requirements as US stablecoin rules are implemented; or an eventual listing, which would supply a share price and, finally, an mNAV. None is confirmed, though a share buyback program and private-placement discussions are the customary preliminaries. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.

Strategy, known as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, has paused its Bitcoin acquisition streak for four consecutive weeks. This marks the firm’s longest break from BTC purchases in nearly two years as it moves to strengthen its cash position before the release of its second-quarter earnings report.

Michael Saylor’s post triggers speculation on Bitcoin acquisitionOn July 26, Michael Saylor, Executive Chairman of Strategy, posted a Bitcoin purchase chart on X, captioned, “We’re gonna need another color.” This message fueled speculation among followers, with many anticipating another major Bitcoin acquisition. The anticipation was further elevated by a similar post a few days prior, in which Saylor hinted at purchasing more Bitcoin but instead oversaw a substantial BTC sale. These posts echo a longstanding pattern of Saylor hinting at upcoming Bitcoin buys, usually followed by a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure.

In Saylor’s words on X, “We’re gonna need another color,” many interpreted the statement as a nod towards further BTC accumulation.

Recently, however, this historical pattern has shifted, with the company departing from routine BTC purchases after such announcements. At the same time, Strategy’s latest public filings indicate a directional change in capital management strategy.

To date, Strategy has conducted 113 Bitcoin purchases for treasury management, holding a total of 843,775 BTC. These were acquired at an average price of $75,476 per Bitcoin, totaling $63.69 billion in investment.

At the current market price of $65,373.96 per Bitcoin, the company’s BTC holdings are now valued at $55.1 billion. This reflects a notional decline of approximately $8.6 billion compared to the initial investment amount.

HoldingTotal BTCAverage Purchase PriceTotal InvestmentCurrent ValueDifferenceStrategy843,775 BTC$75,476$63.69B$55.1B-$8.6BStrategy has also encountered valuation pressure. Since late June, the firm’s market Net Asset Value (mNAV) has fallen below 1, indicating that its market capitalization has dropped beneath the market value of its Bitcoin holdings. As a result, issuing additional shares to fund more BTC acquisitions has become less attractive.

Mini dictionary: mNAV, or market Net Asset Value, compares a company’s market capitalization with the value of its underlying assets. A mNAV below 1 implies that the firm’s market value is less than the value of the assets it holds.

Capital management shift: Building cash reservesInstead of continuing aggressive Bitcoin buying, Strategy has opted to boost its cash holdings. Between July 13 and July 19, the firm sold more than 2.73 million shares of MSTR, generating approximately $263.5 million in net proceeds. According to a July 20 SEC filing, the company’s cash balance now stands at roughly $3.225 billion.

Despite this buildup, Strategy retains the option to sell an additional $23.53 billion in common stock via existing at-the-market programs. The company has also approved a $1 billion buyback for both digital credit securities and its common stock, and can liquidate up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin if needed.

CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno suggested that the company’s annualized dividend commitments have almost quadrupled to $1.2 billion, while cash reserves have dropped 38% in 2026. Dividend coverage fell rapidly, prompting Moreno to recommend ending automatic BTC buys and focusing on rebuilding liquidity.

On July 23, Strategy updated its mNAV calculation, with representatives clarifying that figures before this change are no longer directly comparable. The firm’s leadership appears to be prioritizing a more conservative approach to capital allocation in light of increased financial obligations.

In June, CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno urged Strategy to scale back Bitcoin purchases and replenish cash, highlighting that the ability to cover dividends from reserves had sharply declined over the past six months. Moreno emphasized the need for any future BTC purchases to follow an investment-driven philosophy rather than an automatic acquisition policy.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

In major XRP news today, $3.6 billion AUM EverSource Wealth Advisors has disclosed significant holdings in XRP ETFs along with investments in Bitcoin ETFs. The financial advisor also reported stock holdings in Evernorth Holdings’ SPAC, Strategy (MSTR), and other crypto stocks.

EverSource Wealth Advisors Reveals Exposure in XRP ETFs EverSource Wealth Advisors has disclosed exposure in multiple XRP ETFs, according to the latest 13F filing with the US SEC. The firm has joined other tradFi companies exploring crypto ETFs due to rising confidence amid growing regulatory clarity.

EverSource Wealth Advisors holds 1,777 shares of ProShares Ultra XRP ETF. In addition, the firm revealed small holdings in Franklin XRP ETF. The small position likely followed after Wall Street giants such as Bank of America’s XRP ETF exposure.

The financial advisor also disclosed 250 shares held in Ripple-backed Evernorth Holdings’ SPAC Armada Acquisition Corp II (XRPN) stock. The buy comes as Evernorth Holdings moved closer to a merger with Armada Acquisition Corp II, as CoinGape reported earlier.

Moreover, institutional interest in XRP is rising amid RWA tokenization, XRP Ledger (XRPL), and Ripple’s partnerships with Wall Street and global companies. Recently, Ripple launched Ripple Mint to enable institutions to mint, redeem, and manage RLUSD through APIs and web access.

Meanwhile, spot XRP ETFs saw net inflows of $8.15 million last week, according to SoSoValue data. As a result, the cumulative inflows to date have increased to $1.49 billion. Also, total assets under management across five XRP ETFs have reached $1 billion.

Holdings in Bitcoin ETFs, MSTR, Other Crypto Stocks Holding EverSource Wealth Advisors also revealed holdings in multiple spot Bitcoin ETFs including BlackRock Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), Fidelity’s FBTC, Ark 21Shares’ ARKB, Grayscale’s GBTC, and Bitwise’s BITB.

The firm holds 100,108 shares worth over $3.3 million in BlackRock Bitcoin ETF and 88,591 shares in ARKB. These two mark the firm’s largest holdings in spot Bitcoin ETFs.

In addition, EverSource has holdings in Strategy (MSTR), Trump family-backed American Bitcoin Corp (ABTC), Robinhood (HOOD), and other crypto stocks. Notably, the firm has 43,674 shares of MSTR and 16,355 STRK perpetual shares.

As CoinGape reported recently, Farmers & Merchants Investments disclosed XRP ETF, Bitcoin ETFs, and Robinhood holdings. ETF holdings 261 shares of BlackRock Bitcoin ETF and 475 shares of Robinhood Markets, according to the SEC filing.

While institutions purchase traditional shares, on-chain traders can access fractionalized equities directly through the best platforms to trade tokenized stocks.

Spot ETFs tied to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP collectively attracted more than $152 million in net inflows during the week of mid-July 2026. Bitcoin did the heavy lifting, as usual, but the quieter story is the steady capital trickling into newer products like Solana and XRP funds.

On July 21 alone, Bitcoin spot ETFs pulled in $203.2 million. Ethereum followed with $37.5 million, while Solana and XRP added $5.8 million and $5.66 million respectively, according to data tracked by SoSoValue.

Bitcoin still dominates, but the field is widening Bitcoin has had a spot ETF since 2024, giving it a massive head start in accumulating assets under management. Ethereum launched its own spot product the same year. Together, they account for the overwhelming majority of crypto ETF capital.

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Solana spot ETFs have now amassed over $1.14 billion in total inflows as of late July 2026.

XRP spot ETFs tell a similar story. Since launching in November 2025, these funds crossed $1 billion in cumulative inflows by the end of December 2025. The fact that positive inflows have continued well into 2026 suggests this wasn’t just a launch-day sugar rush.

What this means for investors Solana’s $1.14 billion in cumulative inflows positions it as a legitimate institutional-grade asset.

XRP’s rapid accumulation of over $1 billion in its first two months was notable in its own right. The token has historically carried regulatory baggage, but the existence of an approved spot ETF effectively signals that the regulatory cloud has cleared enough for major asset managers to participate.

The daily numbers fluctuate considerably, as the gap between Bitcoin’s $203.2 million single-day haul and Solana’s $5.8 million illustrates.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

After nearly 3,080 Bitcoin [BTC] left Kraken, attention has shifted back to whale accumulation. The two transfers included 1,265 BTC worth approximately $81.3 million and 1,815 BTC valued at about $116.6 million, bringing the combined value close to $198 million. 

Rather than signaling imminent selling, the movements pointed toward coins leaving an exchange for unknown wallets. Such a  pattern often reflects long-term holding instead of immediate distribution. However, the transfers arrived while Bitcoin traded within a well-defined recovery structure, making the timing especially notable. 

Investors also viewed the withdrawals alongside broader on-chain indicators instead of treating them as isolated events. As a result, the latest whale activity reinforced the argument that large holders continued reducing readily available exchange supply despite recent market volatility.

Scarcity returns to Bitcoin’s favor Bitcoin’s Stock-to-Flow Ratio strengthened considerably and reached 46.5K as of writing, posting a remarkable 350.01% increase over the previous 24 hours. The sharp rise suggested that Bitcoin’s scarcity profile improved after weakening in earlier sessions. 

Since the metric compares circulating supply against annual issuance, higher readings generally reflected tighter supply conditions. This shift aligned well with the latest exchange withdrawals because both indicators pointed toward fewer coins remaining available for immediate selling. 

However, scarcity alone did not determine future price direction. Market participants still required sustained demand to capitalize on reduced supply. Even so, the improvement suggested that Bitcoin’s long-term supply dynamics remained supportive. 

Investors therefore gained another fundamental signal that complemented the growing accumulation narrative driven by large holders.

Source: CryptoQuant Miner behavior eased another source of supply Bitcoin miners also reduced selling pressure during the latest trading session. At press time, the Miners’ Position Index (MPI) dropped to -1.2389 after declining 128.44% over the previous day. 

Negative MPI readings historically indicated that miners sold fewer coins relative to their one-year average. That behavior reduced another potential source of market supply after whale withdrawals already removed substantial holdings from exchanges. 

Instead of increasing distribution into strength, miners appeared to retain a larger share of newly mined Bitcoin. Such positioning usually reflect greater confidence in future valuations rather than urgency to secure profits. Nevertheless, miner activity represented only one part of Bitcoin’s broader supply picture. 

However, reduced miner selling complemented improving scarcity metrics and strengthened the broader case that immediate selling pressure remained relatively contained.

Source: CryptoQuant Can Bitcoin’s channel support fuel another advance? Bitcoin traded near $64,368 after retreating toward the lower boundary of its ascending channel at the time of writing. 

BTC’s price respected support around $63,824, keeping the broader recovery structure intact despite the recent pullback. Meanwhile, resistance remained established near $66,835, with another significant barrier positioned around $73,000. 

The Relative Strength Index (RSI) eased to 50.85, while its moving average stood at 53.66. Those readings showed cooling buying strength rather than aggressive bearish control. The indicator stayed above the oversold region, suggesting sellers had not gained complete dominance. 

If buyers defended the channel support, Bitcoin could revisit $66,835 before attempting another move toward $70,000 and eventually $73,000. However, losing $63,824 would likely expose the next major support around $60,000, shifting short-term sentiment back in favor of sellers.

Source: TradingView Conclusively, the latest Kraken withdrawals, stronger Stock-to-Flow Ratio, and subdued miner selling all strengthened Bitcoin’s supply outlook. Although price cooled near channel support, the broader structure remained constructive. 

Moreover, current conditions suggest accumulation continues to outweigh distribution. Yet the next decisive move would likely depend on whether buyers maintain control above the $63,824 support level.

Final Summary Bitcoin whales removed nearly $198 million from Kraken, easing immediate exchange selling pressure. BTC still holds ascending channel support while scarcity and miner activity favor stronger supply conditions.

A coalition of major financial institutions and Bitcoin-focused firms has formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium, committing substantial resources to bolster the cryptocurrency network’s long-term defenses. Strategy (NASDAQ:MSTR), the company formerly known as MicroStrategy and led by Michael Saylor as executive chairman, is among the nine founding members.

The group also includes Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy.

Together they have pledged a combined $15 million over the next three years to support open-source developers and researchers working on Bitcoin’s security infrastructure.

The consortium’s primary aim is to reinforce the resilience of the Bitcoin network without interfering in its decentralized development process.

Members will independently direct their contributions to engineers and organizations of their choosing, focusing especially on efforts to prepare the system for potential future risks posed by quantum computing.

While large-scale quantum computers capable of breaking current cryptographic standards do not yet exist and are widely estimated to remain years away, the initiative treats post-quantum cryptography as an important long-term priority already being pursued by the technical community.

Phong Le, chief executive officer of Strategy, underscored the motivation behind the effort.

As long-term holders of Bitcoin, the participating organizations have a strong interest in ensuring the network remains secure across generations.

Providing financial support to those performing this specialized work, while also helping clarify public discussions around it, represents a practical form of contribution, he noted.

BlackRock’s global head of digital assets, Robert Mitchnick, similarly highlighted the value of the work done by Bitcoin Core developers.

He expressed satisfaction that his firm and the other members would now supply meaningful additional funding to address the network’s extended security requirements.

Coordination of the consortium’s day-to-day activities will be handled on a volunteer basis by Mike Schmidt, executive director of Brink, a nonprofit that already funds and assists Bitcoin open-source developers.

The structure deliberately mirrors established models in which industry participants support open-source software they rely upon by offering resources and raising awareness, while refraining from controlling the underlying code or development decisions.

Organizers emphasized that the consortium will neither create nor dictate changes to Bitcoin’s protocol, nor take positions on specific technical proposals.

It will not claim to represent Bitcoin or its developers.

Protocol evolution will continue to rest with the global, decentralized community of contributors.

In addition to funding, the group plans to publish and maintain informational materials on Bitcoin’s security posture, updating them as circumstances evolve, and to serve as a reliable reference point for investors, the public, and the media.

The formation of this alliance reflects growing institutional involvement in Bitcoin and a recognition that its security constitutes a shared responsibility.

By channeling resources toward existing technical efforts rather than attempting to centralize control, the consortium seeks to strengthen the open ecosystem that has sustained Bitcoin through previous challenges. Over the coming months, participants intend to expand support for developers while fostering clearer communication about the network’s defensive readiness, including preparations for a possible quantum computing environment.

The honeymoon is officially over for spot Bitcoin ETFs. After a record-breaking debut in January 2024 and two years of near-uninterrupted capital inflows, the products have hit a wall in 2026, with net flows turning negative for the majority of the year so far.

The numbers tell an uncomfortable story US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $5.4 billion in net outflows during the first half of 2026, marking the first negative half-year since the products launched.

To put that in context: these same funds had accumulated $56.6 billion in cumulative net inflows over their first two years of existence.

June 2026 was particularly rough. The month produced roughly $4.5 billion in outflows, the largest single-month exit on record for spot Bitcoin ETFs.

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BlackRock’s IBIT was a significant contributor to the selling. In one reported week alone, IBIT saw $1.34 billion in redemptions.

By mid-July, year-to-date net flows had crossed into negative territory for the first time. There were occasional bright spots: a three-day stretch produced a $510 million rebound. But brief recoveries have not been enough to reverse the broader trend that has defined the year.

Why the money is leaving The most straightforward explanation is Bitcoin’s own price performance. ETF wrappers made it easier than ever to buy Bitcoin exposure, and that convenience works in both directions.

The second factor is competition from AI-related assets. Capital rotation is a real phenomenon, and the narrative around artificial intelligence has been loud enough in 2026 to pull institutional dollars away from crypto.

What this means for Bitcoin markets and investors Second, the outflow trend from IBIT specifically is worth watching. BlackRock’s fund became the dominant venue for institutional Bitcoin exposure in a remarkably short time. When the largest player in a product category starts seeing consistent redemptions, it tends to get noticed by other institutional allocators who benchmark against each other.

Third, the $56.6 billion in cumulative inflows that built up over 2024 and 2025 represents a large pool of capital sitting at various cost basis levels. Some of that capital is profitable and may be taking gains. Some may be underwater and holding on.

A $5.4 billion outflow in a half-year is significant, but it lands against a backdrop of $56.6 billion in prior inflows. The question worth asking is not whether the outflows are large in absolute terms, because they are, but whether they represent a temporary correction in enthusiasm or a more durable structural shift in how institutions want to hold Bitcoin.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

US-listed spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) logged $70.62 million in net outflows on Friday, ending a five-day inflow streak.

Ethereum funds saw $211.25 million in net inflows over the previous five sessions from July 17 to Thursday, according to SoSoValue data. They still posted $103.9 million in net inflows for the week ended Friday.

Despite the outflows, Ethereum ETFs extended their weekly inflow streak to three straight and have attracted $337.74 million in net inflows so far in July.

Spot crypto ETF flows have become one of the market’s most closely watched gauges of demand for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) through traditional investment products. 

Although other jurisdictions, including Hong Kong, have launched similar funds, US-listed ETFs account for the vast majority of assets and trading volumes.

Daily spot Ethereum ETF net flows from July 17 to July 24. Source: SoSoValue

Bitcoin ETFs also end week with outflowsThe reversal followed a similar pattern in Bitcoin ETFs, which ended a seven-day inflow streak on Thursday and recorded another $240.08 million in net outflows on Friday.

Bitcoin ETFs also extended their net inflow streak to three consecutive weeks, adding $103.90 million during the week ended Friday and $233.96 million so far in July. They followed a record June, when $4.5 billion flowed out of the funds. 

BTC traded just under $64,000 at the time of writing, tumbling from the week’s high of $66,892 on Tuesday, according to CoinGecko. ETH traded at $1,837, down from Wednesday’s weekly high of $1,954.

Japan’s crypto reforms fuel $18.4 billion Bitcoin ETF forecastFollowing Japan’s recent overhaul of its crypto regulations, which is widely viewed as laying the groundwork for future spot Bitcoin ETFs, crypto management platform XWIN estimated that a mature Japanese spot Bitcoin ETF market could reach about $18.4 billion, equal to roughly 0.13% of the country’s $14.6 trillion in household financial assets.

In an analysis posted at CryptoQuant, XWIN said the estimate assumes demand from existing crypto holders, new retail investors using brokerage accounts and institutional allocators. 

The report pointed to the US market as an example, noting that spot Bitcoin ETFs excluding Grayscale’s GBTC have accumulated roughly 1 million Bitcoin, demonstrating how regulated ETF products can connect traditional finance with digital assets.

“The key is access,” XWIN said, adding that a Japanese spot Bitcoin ETF would allow investors to gain Bitcoin exposure through familiar brokerage and custody systems. It characterized the $18.4 billion figure as “an achievable upper-end market scenario.”

Magazine: A quantum roadmap would push Bitcoin much higher: Charles Edwards

This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph's Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.

Table of contents

Michael Saylor didn’t just announce a dashboard. He published a balance sheet with an address. Strategy’s new MSTR-BTC interface, unveiled Thursday, is less a tool for shareholders and more a declaration: corporate Bitcoin holders no longer get to hide behind opaque treasury disclosures. The numbers, pulled straight from the blockchain, are unambiguous. The company holds 843,775 BTC valued at $54.88 billion, priced at $65,035 per coin, according to the original report.

This isn’t a marketing splash. It’s a structural shift in how public companies can verify digital asset reserves. The dashboard doesn’t rely on quarterly attestations or delayed SEC filings. It ties the treasury directly to on-chain data and capital structure metrics, displaying gross reserves of $58.1 billion, net reserves of $35.88 billion, and a market-based net asset value (mNAV) ratio of exactly 1.00x. For CFOs watching from the sidelines, that level of granularity changes the conversation.

A Corporate Treasury Built on Public Verification Strategy’s move arrives at a moment when institutional Bitcoin adoption is accelerating, yet regulatory uncertainty still hangs over how companies account for digital assets. The dashboard’s numbers tell a specific story: year-to-date BTC yield sits at 5.8%, representing a gain of 39,325 BTC — roughly $2.56 billion in dollar terms since January. That’s not paper profit from a rising price; it’s net Bitcoin accumulation relative to diluted shares outstanding.

Saylor has spent years framing Bitcoin as a superior treasury reserve asset. Now the company is proving the thesis with data that anyone can audit. The dashboard scrubs away the vagueness that once made corporate Bitcoin holdings a black box. If more firms follow this model, the market’s understanding of treasury risk shifts from trust-me filings to verifiable on-chain proof.

But this transparency cuts both ways. A 1.00x mNAV tells investors the market values Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings at their spot price, with zero premium for the operating business or future acquisitions. That’s a signal the market is pricing the company purely as a levered Bitcoin play — not a software firm. For longtime bulls, that’s validating; for those waiting for a diversification narrative, it’s a reality check.

The Transparency Standard Nobody Asked For Corporate Bitcoin treasuries are still a niche. Tesla, Block, and a handful of public miners hold significant positions, but none publish a live dashboard with this level of detail. Strategy is essentially setting the benchmark without any regulatory mandate, creating a market expectation that could pressure other firms to follow. If a company holds over $1 billion in Bitcoin and doesn’t provide comparable on-chain verification, that silence might start to look strategic.

This dynamic parallels what happened with stablecoin reserves a few years ago. Transparency became a competitive advantage, then a baseline requirement. In the corporate treasury arena, Strategy is doing the same. The dashboard’s timing also matters. A recent push for clearer crypto accounting rules in the U.S. has been stalled by banking interests, a conflict detailed in our coverage of the biggest crypto bill facing Senate resistance. Until legislation resolves, voluntary transparency becomes the strongest signal.

The dashboard doesn’t just list holdings; it connects debt structure to Bitcoin assets. Net reserves subtract obligations, giving bondholders and equity investors a clearer view of leverage. That’s especially relevant as tokenized real-world assets expand, with on-chain RWA markets crossing $20 billion and blurring the line between traditional finance and crypto collateral. When a corporate Bitcoin treasury is that transparent, using it as collateral becomes easier — and more dangerous if over-leveraged.

The Parts the Dashboard Can’t Show What’s missing from the MSTR-BTC interface is a volatility adjustment for the underlying asset. Bitcoin’s price at $65,035 gives a clean valuation, but anyone who watched the 2022 drawdown knows that $54.88 billion can quickly become $35 billion without any change in Strategy’s conduct. The dashboard’s elegance might obscure the fact that the reserve value is a moving target, not a stable number.

There’s also a governance question. The dashboard assumes Bitcoin is a permanent treasury asset, but strategy shifts happen. If a future board decides to sell part of the stack, the real-time nature of the interface could amplify market panic. Transparency is a double-edged sword when the underlying asset is that volatile and that liquid.

Still, for an asset class still fighting for legitimacy among corporate treasurers, Strategy’s move is aggressively normalizing. It’s borrowing the language of public company investor relations and applying it to an asset that many still dismiss. And it’s happening while institutions are quietly building out infrastructure — from institutional staking surges on networks like Sui to tier-one banks testing tokenized settlement. The dashboard fits into that larger picture, whether regulators are ready or not.

Strategy didn’t invent corporate Bitcoin holding. But with one interface, it just made holding it quietly look like a decision not to be transparent. That might be the dashboard’s biggest impact: not the data it shows, but the standard it imposes on everyone else.

AUTHOR

Max delves deep into the cryptocurrency realm, with a passion for altcoins and NFTs. Convinced of crypto's transformative potential, he envisions a decentralized financial future. Max's background in the financial sector grants him unique insights into global monetary systems. In his leisure, Max embraces the thrill of adventures and is an avid sports enthusiast, finding balance and rejuvenation away from work.

Since the October 2025 peak, Bitcoin has failed to sustain an uptrend, falling 48% from its ATH. Amid this extended market weakness, long-term holders, especially institutions, have seen their losses skyrocket. 

 The rising losses have pushed many of these firms to a breaking point, and they are not only capitulating but also walking away. 

KULRTech dumps $9 million in Bitcoin Treasuries that rushed to accumulate Bitcoin [BTC] from late 2024 and 2025, fearing they would miss out, have found themselves operating at a loss. 

Others were pushed to capitulate to avoid more losses, and one such Bitcoin treasury company is KULRTech.

KULRTech has been aggressively dumping its BTC over the past months. According to Arkham data, KULRTech transferred 145.8 BTC worth $9.45 million to Coinbase Prime.

Source: Arkham After multiple transfers, its holdings of 1,021 BTC worth $101 million now have only 100 BTC worth $6.47 million left.

In its selling spree, the company has mostly exited at a loss. AMBCrypto earlier reported that KULR Bitcoin holdings saw over $18 million in losses. 

Now with only 100 BTC left, it seems the company is on the verge of completely exiting its position. Thus, if weakness continues, the company is likely to sell and exit the market entirely.

Source: Yahoo Finance Even more impactful for KULRTech, the company’s stock value was hit the hardest by extended Bitcoin poor performance. 

Yahoo Finance data showed that the company’s stock declined 78% from its ATH of $43 recorded after it announced its BTC investment. As of this writing, the firm’s stock value was around $2.7.

Treasuries holdings value plunges $47 billion from 2025 peak KULR Technology Group, Inc is one of the many Bitcoin treasury companies operating at a loss. Also, it joins a long list of these firms aggressively selling.

Interestingly, while Treasury companies have increased their holdings in 2026, they have yet to reclaim peak value.

Source: CoinGlass In 2025, Bitcoin treasury companies held 1.02 million BTC worth approximately $128.5 billion at the peak. Now, these firms hold 1.25 million BTC worth $81.5 billion, marking a $47 billion drop from the 2025 peak.

Thus, although holdings have increased by 230k BTC, the value remains extremely low, signaling rising losses. For example, Strategy is currently operating on $9 billion in losses.

With these major investors holding at a loss and continually selling, the Bitcoin market still remains at extreme risk. Thus, fear from treasuries could drive continued market weakness, further reducing the capital that BTC relied on significantly for the 2024-2025 rally.

Final Summary KULR Technology Group transferred 145.8 BTC worth $9.45 million to Coinbase Prime, reducing total holdings to 100 Bitcoin.  Bitcoin treasuries have increased holdings by 230k BTC since October 2025, but value dropped from $128 billion to $81 billion. 

There’s roughly $1.6 trillion worth of Bitcoin sitting in wallets doing essentially nothing. Cardano’s development company, Input Output Group (IOG), thinks it has a solution: a platform called Pogun that “mirrors” Bitcoin onto the Cardano blockchain, giving holders access to lending, yield, and stablecoins while they keep custody of their own coins.

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, publicly outlined the initiative on May 3, 2026. The core pitch is straightforward. Bitcoin holders get DeFi access. Cardano gets the liquidity. And nobody has to hand their keys to a centralized intermediary to make it work.

How mirroring actually works Instead of wrapping Bitcoin in a tokenized form, Pogun clones the representation of Bitcoin assets onto Cardano’s chain. The original Bitcoin stays put. The mirrored version on Cardano can interact with DeFi protocols.

The key technical ingredient arriving later in the roadmap is BitVM-powered mirroring, which aims to minimize the trust assumptions baked into most cross-chain bridges today.

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The platform is being built on top of interoperability groundwork Cardano has already laid, including atomic swaps between the two chains.

What makes Pogun genuinely different from the crowded field of Bitcoin DeFi experiments is its credit market design. The platform operates without traditional oracles or collateral pools. There are no margin calls. Instead, transactions rely on bilateral agreements between counterparties.

The rollout timeline The non-margin credit market is slated to hit Cardano’s mainnet by Q2 2026. A yield-generating application follows in Q3 2026. The trust-minimized BitVM mirroring implementation is planned for Q4 2026.

The project is led by Omer Husain and sits within a broader package of nine IOG proposals requesting nearly $50 million in funding for 2026. That funding encompasses network scalability upgrades and performance improvements beyond just the Pogun platform itself.

All transactions within Pogun require ADA fees. Revenues from the project flow back into the Cardano treasury.

What this means for investors The competitive landscape includes Stacks, Babylon, and several other projects also vying for Bitcoin’s idle capital. Cardano’s eUTXO model shares architectural DNA with Bitcoin’s own transaction model.

The $50 million funding request across nine proposals signals that IOG is making a substantial bet on cross-chain interoperability as Cardano’s growth strategy. The Q4 2026 BitVM implementation is the linchpin, and trust-minimized bridges have proven extraordinarily difficult to ship securely.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

In brief Strategy published new and updated investor metrics, saying its shift from convertible debt toward preferred-equity "digital credit" requires fresh yardsticks. The centerpiece, "net Bitcoin per share," measures the Bitcoin left for common shareholders after $22.3 billion in debt and preferred claims The firm also redefined mNAV under a new metric that restored it to its 1.0x par and recast "amplification" as a roughly 1.5x equity multiplier. Strategy has overhauled the metrics it uses to value its Bitcoin, rolling out a set of new "net" measures that strip out debt and preferred-stock claims to show how much of its stash actually belongs to common shareholders.

New and updated market metrics are live at https://t.co/yIv7IimRdf. As Digital Credit becomes a larger portion of our balance sheet, we've sharpened our precision based on investor feedback. This video walks through what's new and why.
00:00 - Intro to Strategy's new and updated… pic.twitter.com/ndCoDc9PDW

— Strategy (@Strategy) July 23, 2026

In a 30-minute video posted to its investor site, the company's head of investor relations Chaitanya Jain said the metrics had to "evolve" as the business moved "from an era of convertible debt to now a focus on digital credit," and pointed to investor demands for clarity. Executive chairman Michael Saylor put it more grandly, tweeting that, "Bitcoin Capital Markets require a new financial language."

The centerpiece is "net reserve," about $35 billion—what is left after subtracting $22.2 billion in senior claims ($15.5 billion of preferred stock and roughly $6.8 billion of out-of-the-money convertible debt) from Strategy's $57 billion Bitcoin pile (843,775 BTC) and $3.2 billion of cash. Dividing that residual by a new fully diluted share count gives "net Bitcoin per share," which the firm says has risen from $13 (44,000 sats) at the end of 2020 to $95 (143,000 sats)—a 43% compound annual growth rate, against Bitcoin's 16%.

The company also redefined mNAV as MSTR's share price divided by net Bitcoin per share, with the accretion threshold now fixed at 1.0x, and recast "amplification" as an equity multiplier—Bitcoin reserve over net reserve—of about 1.5x. New credit gauges frame the debt-fueled model's sustainability, with a "hurdle rate" of about 10.8% marking Strategy's effective cost of credit, a break-even rate near 3.2%, and a "flow rate" of about −11% that estimates how far Bitcoin could fall before reserves stopped covering debt and dividends.

The overhaul arrives with MSTR under pressure: the stock traded around $93 on Friday, down slightly on the day and far below its 2024 peak, days ahead of second-quarter earnings on July 30. Under the new formula, its mNAV reads right at 1.02x. Measured the old way—against Strategy's gross Bitcoin per share—the stock had looked to trade at a discount; dividing instead by net Bitcoin per share, after the roughly $22 billion of senior claims is stripped out, lifts the same share price to parity. It is Strategy's latest guidance tweak during a bear market that began last October; its flagship preferred share, STRC, still trades below its $100 “par value.”

The firm’s "digital credit" framing traces to a late-June pivot, when Strategy approved a framework for "active capital management" that, for the first time, authorized selling up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin to top up its cash reserve, cover preferred dividends, and fund buybacks—a formal break from Michael Saylor's long-held "never sell" stance. In the weeks since, the firm has raised cash by selling MSTR stock rather than Bitcoin, sparing its 843,775 BTC stack while diluting common holders.

For now, Strategy's own math says the structure holds—as long as Bitcoin, currently around $64,000 and about 50% below its high, doesn't fall more than roughly 11% a year through the early 2030s.

Daily Debrief NewsletterStart every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.

The crypto market ended the week higher even as U.S. equities slipped.

Summary

Bitcoin gained 4.16% as total crypto capitalization rose 2.30% to $2.22 trillion during the week. CLARITY Act passage odds improved despite resistance over ethics, enforcement powers and political conflict concerns. Bridge attacks drained AFX and Allbridge while BitMEX scheduled its September exchange shutdown for users. CoinMarketCap’s six-part recap placed total crypto capitalization at $2.22 trillion, up 2.30%, with Bitcoin gaining 4.16% and Ether rising 2.98%. The S&P 500 lost 0.53%, while the Nasdaq Composite barely moved. Altcoins also posted selective gains during the week.

CMC Market Pulse: Crypto Market Seeks Clarity

BTC +4.16%, ETH +2.98%. Market cap climbs to $2.22T as crypto decouples from weak equities. All eyes on the CLARITY Act as a potential market catalyst.

Let's break down this week's top crypto narratives 🧵

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— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) July 24, 2026 CoinMarketCap described the week’s theme as “crypto market seeks clarity.” Liquidations remained contained, with shorts closing earlier and longs later. Funding rates stayed near neutral, suggesting leverage had not reached levels seen during sharper market swings.

Bitcoin leads while policy returns to focus Bitcoin and Ether led the recovery as traders watched the latest U.S. market structure bill. Senator Cynthia Lummis released updated CLARITY Act text on July 22 after Senate Banking and Agriculture committees merged their work. The draft covers regulator duties, developer protections, stablecoin rules, ethics, anti-money laundering controls and law enforcement provisions.

Lummis called the coming weeks the “last real chance” to pass the legislation for years. However, Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats criticized its ethics language and enforcement structure. As crypto.news previously reported, disputes over political conflicts, decentralized finance protections and crime investigations have repeatedly slowed the bill, even as prediction-market estimates for passage rose.

Corporate balance-sheet activity added another signal. Strategy increased its U.S. dollar reserve by $225 million to roughly $3.2 billion after selling common shares, while keeping 843,775 BTC. The reserve supports preferred-stock dividends and debt interest rather than new Bitcoin purchases.

Shutdowns and project changes reshape the sector BitMEX announced that it will close on Sept. 23 at 04:00 UTC after reviewing its business and the wider market. The derivatives platform stopped new registrations and will block new positions from Aug. 26. Users can reduce positions and withdraw assets before the final shutdown.

The closure ends an 11-year run for a platform that helped popularize perpetual swaps and high-leverage crypto derivatives. As crypto.news reported before the announcement, BitMEX replaced senior executives in June while reports of a possible sale continued. The shutdown added pressure to smaller centralized exchanges competing for liquidity and paying higher compliance costs.

Other projects also changed direction. CoinMarketCap’s project update said Hyperliquid outlined permissionless HIP-4 outcome markets requiring 500,000 HYPE in staking support. Pump.fun introduced BOOST Mode for new launches, while ENS DAO activated a two-year security council able to stop transactions considered malicious.

Bridge attacks bring security risks back into view Several cross-chain systems reported attacks. AFX Trade lost about $24.15 million in USDC after attackers obtained enough validator signatures to approve a bridge withdrawal. Arbitrum said the attack did not affect its native bridge. AFX paused operations while investigators reviewed the compromised signing setup.

Allbridge also halted its core bridge after a $1.65 million flash-loan attack on Solana liquidity pools. The attacker manipulated pool balances, withdrew assets at favorable rates and moved proceeds toward Ethereum. Across Protocol faced a separate Solana incident, but the project said the loss affected a Risk Labs-operated relayer rather than customer funds. It later restored Solana deposits.

The incidents returned bridge design and key management to the center of DeFi security. As crypto.news reported in earlier coverage, attacks have continued through 2026, including losses involving Kelp DAO and Axelar routes connected to Secret Network.

Institutional capital and tokenization continue expanding Institutional deals provided a different market narrative. Crypto.com announced a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation. The company said it will use the funding to expand tokenized securities, derivatives and other asset classes across a planned 24/7 financial platform.

S&P Dow Jones Indices and Pantera Capital also launched the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index. The benchmark uses a rules-based method focused on productive blockchain assets and companies with measurable use or revenue, rather than relying only on token popularity or price momentum.

Meanwhile, xStocks moved beyond U.S. shares by adding tokenized exposure to Hong Kong-listed equities through Payward and GTN. The companies plan to consider U.K., European and South Korean securities after securing required approvals. Tokenized equity value and trading activity have expanded as exchanges and traditional firms build around-the-clock products.

The week combined a market rebound with unresolved policy talks, security failures and infrastructure investment. Bitcoin and Ether finished higher, but stronger prices did not remove operational risks. The next market test will depend on the CLARITY Act’s Senate path, responses to bridge attacks and whether institutional funding converts into sustained trading and settlement activity. Traders will also watch funding rates and liquidation pressure closely.

Singapore-based Bitcoin mining pool Poolin and two of its US affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a New Jersey court on Wednesday.

Poolin’s court filing shows that the mining pool operator has estimated liabilities of $100 million to $500 million, assets of $1 million to $10 million and 10,001 to 25,000 creditors.

Poolin and its affiliates are also seeking court approval to sell two West Texas mining sites to Thor CALAP LLC under a proposed $52 million stalking-horse bid. This includes $37 million for the Tarbush assets, including assumed liabilities, and $15 million for the Pyote site, including the power rights, equipment and all other assets tied to the mining facilities.

The proposed sale would be subject to a court-supervised auction, with a bid deadline of Sept. 8 under the proposed bidding procedures.

Poolin was once the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool in 2019. It now ranks as the 17th largest mining pool operator by hashrate, with a 0.2% market share, according to Hashrate Index.

Bitcoin miners increasingly turn to restructuring and AIBitcoin mining operations are facing growing financial constraints due to rising electricity costs, forcing some operations to shut down while others are seeking new revenue sources.

In February, NFN8 Group and two of its affiliates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Western District of Texas. 

Other miners have sought to diversify into AI infrastructure. In November 2025, Bitfarms initiated a complete wind-down of its Bitcoin mining operations to pivot to AI and high-performance computing data centers.

On Monday, Bitcoin mining companies Hut 8 and IREN announced major AI infrastructure deals. Hut 8 announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for its AI data center campus and IREN disclosed $2.8 billion in cloud services contracts with AI developers. Earlier in July, MARA Holdings announced plans to acquire a Texas site with up to 2 gigawatts of capacity to expand its AI and digital infrastructure business.

Wealth management company Bernstein said that deals with third-party providers, such as Bitcoin miners, will be necessary for AI companies seeking to address the computing power limits of AI data centers.

Magazine: Bitcoin nearing late stages of bear market: Jamie Coutts, Real Vision

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Gemini Trust Company, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange co-founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, has contributed $10 million in Bitcoin to a super PAC backing US President Donald Trump, according to financial filings released this week.

Major Bitcoin donation tied to CFTC case developmentsThe contribution was disclosed in MAGA Inc. Super PAC’s July report to the Federal Election Commission. The filing reveals that Gemini sent two separate Bitcoin donations, each exceeding $5 million, on June 19. MAGA Inc., a political action committee supporting Trump, can use the funds for independent expenditures during the 2024 presidential campaign.

This significant donation was recorded just weeks after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Gemini jointly requested a federal court to consider reversing a $5 million settlement reached in January 2025. The case centers on allegations that Gemini provided false or misleading statements.

Michael Selig, CFTC Chair and the agency’s only current commissioner, has asserted that previous enforcement actions against Gemini were politically motivated under former President Joe Biden’s administration, targeting the Winklevoss brothers.

The CFTC, led by Selig, claimed that the Biden administration “politically targeted” the Winklevosses through enforcement, highlighting tensions surrounding regulatory action in the crypto sector.

Beyond the $10 million donation, the Winklevoss twins previously contributed $1 million each to Trump’s 2024 campaign and have shown vocal support for his presidency on social media. After Trump’s return to office in January 2025, the brothers appeared at the signing ceremony for the GENIUS Act, a stablecoin payments bill, and backed his sons’ crypto mining venture, American Bitcoin. They have also contributed $21 million in Bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, aimed at advancing crypto-friendly policies.

Ongoing court proceedings and political reactionsNo final decision has been made public regarding the joint CFTC-Gemini request, which was filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in May. The CFTC stated in June that if the court grants reversal, the $5 million penalty will not be returned to Gemini.

Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to CFTC Chair Selig in June, raising concerns that the joint motion and recent actions suggest the agency may be influenced by political pressures and wealthy insiders, warning of risks to market integrity and investor protection.

As of June 30, MAGA Inc. reported total receipts exceeding $397 million.

RecipientAmountAssetDateMAGA Inc. Super PAC$10 millionBitcoin (BTC)June 19, 2025Trump 2024 Campaign$2 millionUSDPrior to June 2025Digital Freedom Fund PAC$21 millionBitcoin (BTC)Prior to June 2025Selig’s unique position and crypto regulationMichael Selig, a Republican who was confirmed as CFTC Chair in December 2025, is currently serving as the sole commissioner on the panel, which is traditionally composed of five bipartisan members. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is responsible for regulating US derivatives markets, including those related to digital assets.

Lawmakers from both parties have urged President Trump to nominate additional commissioners to restore the commission’s normal composition, especially as Congress debates the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act. The pending bill would expand the CFTC’s authority over digital asset markets, establishing clearer rules and oversight mechanisms.

As of the latest updates, the White House had not put forward new nominations for the CFTC, meaning Selig continues to manage the agency’s regulatory agenda.

Mini dictionary: Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent US government agency that regulates derivatives markets, including futures, options, and swaps, and increasingly digital assets. It plays a key role in establishing legal frameworks for crypto-related trading.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not constitute investment advice. Investors should be aware that cryptocurrencies carry high volatility and therefore risk, and should conduct their own research.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy and eight financial firms, including ARK Invest, BlackRock, and Coinbase, have launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium to support the network’s long-term security. The founding members have also pledged $15 million to support Bitcoin developers as they seek to address quantum threats.

Strategy Announces Launch of Bitcoin Security Consortium In a press release, the Bitcoin treasury firm announced the launch of the Consortium to support the Bitcoin network’s long-term security, with members pledging an aggregate of $15 million over the next three years.

Founding members of the Bitcoin Security Consortium include Strategy alongside Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Galaxy Digital. The Bitcoin treasury firm noted that these are a cross-section of the institutional BTC ecosystem.

BlackRock, Fidelity, and ARK Invest are notably Bitcoin ETF issuers; Anchorage Digital and the top crypto exchange Coinbase offer custody services to these ETF issuers. Meanwhile, Block, Blockstream, and Galaxy offer Bitcoin-related services.

Strategy revealed that Mike Schmidt, Executive Director of Brink, will coordinate the day-to-day work in a volunteer capacity. Schmidt also confirmed in an X post that he is receiving no compensation from the Bitcoin Security Consortium.

Today nine institutions including BlackRock, Fidelity, Coinbase, and Strategy announced the Bitcoin Security Consortium (@BTCconsortium), pledging $15M toward Bitcoin security work over the next three years. I’ve agreed to help coordinate the group’s work as a volunteer.

I said…

— Mike Schmidt (@bitschmidty) July 23, 2026

“I continue to run Brink, independent of any Consortium member. I’ve committed to a year in this role, maybe I’d do two, but ultimately I see it as a seat that should rotate to other participants over time. My commitment is to Bitcoin, and that doesn’t change,” he said.

How The $15 Million Funding Will Work The Bitcoin Security Consortium will fund and support developers and researchers already working on Bitcoin’s security. This will include the long-term work of securing the network against potential quantum threats.

Strategy also revealed that each founding member will direct its own funding independently to the developers, researchers, and organizations it chooses. Schmidt mentioned in his X post that there will be no Consortium positions on protocol changes.

He also noted that Quantum is the first focus but that if the Bitcoin Security Consortium works out well, there is room to support other security efforts too. Data from the top crypto prediction platform Polymarket shows that there is only a 14% chance that Quantum Computing breaks Bitcoin by December 2027.

Source: Polymarket

Kazakhstan has laid out a plan to build a national strategic crypto reserve fed by its bitcoin miners, part of a two-step push by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to pull the country’s large mining industry into a regulated, state-supervised system.

A presidential decree signed July 7 sets the frame, and a government resolution approved July 18 supplies the mechanism. The government cleared the rules for strategic digital mining under Government Resolution No. 638, published in the PRG.kz legal database.

Together the two measures aim to route mining output and crypto trading through Kazakh infrastructure, with the state taking a share of mined coins for a sovereign reserve.

The reserve sits at the center. Under the July 18 resolution, the Kazakhstan government created a program of “strategic digital mining,” in which miners receive electricity quotas at capped tariffs on 10-year contracts from listed power producers. In exchange, they must hand over part of what they mine, according to local reporting.  

A formula sets the transfer at 10% of mined digital assets after the cost of electricity and grid services, paid each month to the state-linked Astana Hub fund, which passes the coins to the National Investment Corporation of the National Bank for management inside a “national strategic crypto reserve.”

The first approved power source is the Ekibastuz GRES-1 coal plant, with a 300-megawatt quota. To qualify, a miner must run a data center of at least 150 megawatts, with rigs that each clear 150 terahashes per second, among other conditions.

The resolution defines its reserve as a vehicle to invest in digital assets, in derivatives tied to those assets, and in the shares of companies that build or invest in crypto. 

Rather than hold coins alone, the structure gives the state a spread of exposure to the sector it now seeks to grow, with the National Bank’s investment arm at the controls.

The design turns Kazakhstan’s cheap power and mining base into a channel for state accumulation, an approach that echoes the reserve strategies spreading among governments. Kazakhstan had floated a $1 billion crypto reserve built in part on seized assets and state-mined coins, and its central bank moved to invest up to $350 million in crypto-linked funds. 

The United States established a strategic bitcoin reserve from forfeited coins last year, a model other states have weighed.

Kazakhstan as a bitcoin mining hub Kazakhstan ranks among the world’s largest bitcoin mining hubs, fifth by mining activity in the Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report from April 2025, a status built on cheap coal power that drew miners after China’s 2021 ban, though the country moved to tighten its mining rules over grid strain. 

The new program reads as an attempt to harness that base rather than curb it, and the decree directs the Kazakhstan government to tap associated petroleum gas, natural gas, and renewable output for mining.

Other crypto tasked  The July 7 decree reaches past mining. It sets up a Committee on Digital Assets and Payment Systems under the National Bank, and orders work on tokenization platforms, exchange and custody services, and crypto-fiat channels tied to the financial system.

It calls for stablecoins to settle cross-border trade for export and import, tokenized government securities by the end of 2026, and rules that isolate customer assets from a bankrupt provider’s estate.

To pull activity onshore, the decree offers a plan to exempt individuals from personal income tax on crypto gains earned through Kazakh providers from the start of 2026 through the end of 2028, plus a window for holders to disclose coins acquired or mined in the past if they move them into regulated infrastructure. 

The government also plans a National Cryptocurrency Analysis Center by mid-2027 to track transactions and flag illicit schemes, along with a review of DeFi platforms.

Micah Zimmerman

Micah first discovered Bitcoin in 2018 but remained a skeptic on the sidelines for too long. Since 2021, he has covered crypto and business and now works as a news reporter for Bitcoin Magazine, based in North Carolina.

Japan could launch its first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund as early as 2028 as regulators prepare rules that would allow investment trusts and ETFs to hold crypto assets directly.

Summary

Japan could approve its first Bitcoin ETF by 2028 as financial rules continue evolving nationwide. Major Japanese asset managers are preparing crypto funds while regulators work toward broader ETF access. Retail investors may drive demand, with projected Bitcoin ETF inflows reaching ¥3 trillion by 2028. A July 23 Nikkei report said the Financial Services Agency plans to revise investment-fund rules after lawmakers approved amendments that bring crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act framework. The change moves Japan toward treating crypto as a financial investment product rather than regulating it mainly as a payment asset.

Meanwhile, the legal change does not mean a Bitcoin ETF can launch immediately. Japan still needs detailed rules and changes to its investment-trust framework before fund managers can offer products that hold crypto as a primary investment target. 

The FSA’s materials confirm that crypto regulation is moving from the Payment Services Act into the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, alongside new disclosure and market conduct requirements.

As crypto.news reported on July 15, Japan has passed legislation that creates a pathway for domestic crypto ETFs, although individual products will still require regulatory approval. An earlier report said Japan Exchange Group was considering listings as early as 2027, while the latest Nikkei report points to 2028 as a possible launch date. 

JPX chief executive Hiroki Yamamichi previously said an ETF “can be done anytime once the legal framework is in place and the tax treatment is clarified.”

Financial groups prepare for Bitcoin ETFs Several of Japan’s largest financial firms are studying products that could enter the market once regulators complete the rules. As previously reported, SBI Securities and Rakuten Securities are preparing crypto investment trusts through their own groups. Nomura, Daiwa, SMBC-linked firms and Asset Management One are also examining possible products.

The planned market could extend beyond Bitcoin ETFs. SBI Global Asset Management has considered funds focused on liquid crypto assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Meanwhile, Osaka Exchange has discussed launching Bitcoin futures in 2028 if spot ETFs become legal. These plans show that traditional financial firms are preparing products before regulators complete the final framework.

Institutional interest is also rising. Nomura Holdings’ 2026 survey found that 79% of respondents who were considering crypto investment over the next three years planned to invest. Among them, 60% expected to allocate between 2% and less than 5% of their portfolios. The survey also found that 65% viewed crypto assets as a way to diversify their investments.

Retail investors could become the main source of demand Japan’s Bitcoin ETF market may develop differently from the U.S. market, where institutional investors have become major participants in spot Bitcoin ETFs. Japan has a smaller pool of institutions making large crypto allocations, while households continue to keep a large share of their financial wealth in cash and deposits. Bank of Japan data has placed the cash and deposit share at around half of household financial assets.

That structure could make individual investors a major source of demand. The July 23 Nikkei report estimated that Japanese Bitcoin ETFs could attract as much as ¥3 trillion by fiscal 2028. 

The FSA has also reported more than 14 million domestic crypto accounts, while about 70% of account holders earn less than ¥7 million annually. A regulated ETF could allow investors to gain Bitcoin exposure through securities accounts without directly managing crypto wallets.

The same retail focus is visible among financial groups preparing new products. Rakuten plans to make crypto investment trusts available through smartphone services, while other brokerages are studying products that could fit into existing investment platforms used by individual customers.

Pension interest adds another route for crypto exposure Institutional adoption remains limited, but some Japanese pension managers have begun testing small crypto allocations. The National Business Pension Fund in Okayama, which represents about 1,200 small and medium-sized businesses, plans to allocate about 1% of its assets to crypto-related funds during fiscal 2026.

Aiyu Kiguchi, the fund’s executive director of investment management, explained the diversification strategy by saying, “It’s because its price movements have a low correlation with the U.S. dollar.” The fund manages about ¥21.5 billion and plans to gain exposure through funds managed by major overseas hedge funds rather than buying crypto assets directly.

The move also comes as broader investor interest grows. Nomura’s survey found stronger demand for crypto as a diversification tool, while financial firms continue preparing investment trusts and possible ETFs. Japan Exchange Group has also said asset managers are showing interest in crypto-linked products.

Japan’s next steps will depend on how quickly the FSA completes its investment-trust rules and how exchanges set listing requirements. For now, the regulatory changes, asset-manager preparations and growing investor interest have moved the country closer to a domestic Bitcoin ETF market. The latest reported timeline places the first launch as early as 2028, with retail investors potentially providing a large share of demand.

Bitcoin [BTC] spot ETF net flows have measured a cumulative $930.39 million since July 14. Data from SoSoValue showed that the BTC spot ETFs have seen net inflows since the 14th of the month.

It was the first time since May that the inflows streak was maintained for over five successive days.

Pessimism reigns supreme despite ETF flow shift Technical indicators flashed a long-term buy signal for Bitcoin. Yet, liquidity posed a serious challenge to any attempt at recovery, AMBCrypto reported.

A price breakout without fresh liquidity in the form of stablecoin netflows was not indicative of a macro bottom for BTC.

Source: CryptoQuant Crypto analyst Darkfost observed that the Coinbase Premium Gap has been negative since the 6th of May. This represented the highest level of pessimism in two years.

Coinbase premium refers to the difference in Bitcoin prices between Coinbase Advanced, where institutions and professionals trade, and Binance, which is retail-dominated.

A negative trend implies steady selling pressure from smart money, despite the attempted rallies toward $70k over the past month.

The analyst concluded that investors would choose to limit risk when macroeconomic or geopolitical factors were unstable, as they have been in recent months.

Leverage is gradually leaving the Bitcoin market The price of Bitcoin has gradually been rising since July 1, when the price reached a swing low of $57,800. The gains since then have been accompanied by a decline in realized volatility.

Source: Axel Adler Jr. Crypto analyst Axel Adler Jr. used the 1-week realized volatility, smoothed by the 30DMA, compared to Bitcoin’s price and its 200DMA.

Since 2016, 92% of trading days have seen higher realized volatility than the current levels.

The falling realized volatility alongside rising prices meant that the most recent price bounce came without any sharp price swings.

Source: Axel Adler Jr. The Open Interest to market capitalization ratio measures if the derivatives share is rising or falling compared to price trends. It shifted negatively in early July and has been negative for 21 consecutive days.

The decline suggests derivatives leverage has continued falling even as Bitcoin recovered, reducing the immediate risk of a large liquidation-driven move. Compared to a month ago, the threat of a liquidation cascade was lower due to these factors.

The analyst concluded that the market is in a low-activity phase. A sustained price move beyond $66k-$72k, alongside further derivatives reduction, is needed to give a major signal of market recovery.

Final Summary Bitcoin ETF inflows were improving, and its realized volatility was falling. The derivatives leverage was in decline as prices advanced higher, but a breach of $66k-$72k is needed to majorly reduce the threat of further bearishness in the long-term.