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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.

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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.

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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 🧵

1/6 pic.twitter.com/b69e4RUdZG

— 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.

Firm offers bespoke managed account solutions to help institutions generate BTC-denominated returns while preserving ownership, custody and institutional governance. As digital asset treasury companies have successfully acquired Bitcoin, the focus has evolved to improving yield generation on these assets.

LONDON, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Annamite Capital, the institutional digital asset investment manager founded by Tom Geary and Lucas Gaylord, has announced the launch of its institutional treasury management platform, designed to help publicly traded Bitcoin holders transform dormant treasury holdings into productive assets, while maintaining institutional standards for custody and risk management. 

As public and private companies continue to adopt Bitcoin as a strategic treasury asset, many organizations face a common challenge: how to diversify returns on balance-sheet Bitcoin holdings while maintaining prudent risk and governance controls. 

Annamite’s Bitcoin Treasury Management platform addresses this need through customized Separately Managed Accounts (SMAs), where clients retain ownership of their Bitcoin, while gaining exposure to Annamite’s multi-manager, multi-strategy Bitcoin yield program. 

The platform seeks to generate Bitcoin-denominated returns through a diversified portfolio of specialist market-neutral investment strategies, including arbitrage, quantitative trading and other systematic approaches. Capital is allocated across independent specialist managers with the objective of maximizing diversified sources of idiosyncratic alpha along the efficient frontier, while minimizing directional exposure and counterparty risk. SMA mandates are bespoke to meet each client’s risk, return and liquidity objectives. The platform targets attractive risk-adjusted BTC returns while seeking to achieve limited drawdowns. 

“Corporate Bitcoin adoption has entered a new phase,” said Tom Geary, CFA, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Annamite Capital. “Balance sheet-based industries tend to evolve along a shared arc. In the 90s, insurance firms who turned their balance sheets into professionally managed portfolios thrived into the successful firms they are today. We are seeing the same pattern evolve in the corporate BTC space.

“Many treasury companies have successfully accumulated Bitcoin and other digital assets. The next challenge is transforming those holdings into productive assets. Our approach is the same as traditional allocators: multi-manager, market-neutral investment frameworks to improve resilience and diversify sources of alpha. Our goal is to help generate BTC-denominated returns while maintaining institutional standards.” 

Through the SMA structure, clients retain legal ownership of their Bitcoin throughout the investment process. Assets remain with qualified custodians or in approved tri-party arrangements, while trading activity occurs through delegated authority and off-exchange settlement infrastructure. This separation of custody from execution materially reduces exchange counterparty risk while enabling full transparency for the investor. 

The treasury management platform is available to qualified institutional investors globally. Customized mandates are structured based on each client’s liquidity requirements, custody preferences, risk tolerance, and treasury objectives. While initially focused on Bitcoin, the platform also supports customized treasury mandates for and other digital assets such as Ether and XRP, enabling institutions to generate native asset-denominated returns while retaining ownership and custody.

About Annamite Capital

Annamite Capital is a regulated institutional digital asset investment manager specializing in multi-manager, market-neutral investment strategies and digital asset treasury management. The firm combines institutional portfolio construction, crypto-native trading infrastructure and purpose-built risk management to deliver customized investment solutions for institutions, corporate treasuries, family offices and long-term digital asset holders. Founded by executives from Citadel, UBS, Brevan Howard, Cambridge Associates, Morgan Stanley, ConsenSys and leading digital asset infrastructure companies, Annamite Capital is focused on helping institutions generate long-term native asset-denominated returns while maintaining institutional standards for governance, custody and risk management.

For more information, visit www.annamite.com or contact [email protected]. 

SOURCE Annamite Capital

In brief Shareholders voted by more than 90% to sell the company's 668 BTC, return capital, and cancel its London Stock Exchange listing This marks the end of a Bitcoin treasury experiment in under twelve months. Satsuma raised £163.6 million in August 2025 but expects to return only £26.8 to £30 million after wind-down costs. The shareholders of Satsuma Technology, a U.K.-based Bitcoin treasury company, have voted to liquidate the company's entire Bitcoin position and shut down the business, overruling four of its six board members.

More than 90% of votes cast backed the dual resolutions to sell 668 BTC—worth roughly $43.5 million—and cancel the company's London Stock Exchange listing, per a Monday filing. The move unwinds the digital asset treasury, or DAT for short—the latest such company to call it a day after the DAT trend picked up steam in 2025.

Satsuma started life as TAO Alpha, a small AI firm, before rebranding and hiring Mark Moss in August 2025 as its Chief Bitcoin Strategist. Moss is an American Bitcoin commentator with over 700,000 YouTube subscribers known for advising institutions on how to buy and hold Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset—essentially, a company's rainy-day fund, but in crypto.

The same month, Satsuma raised £163.6 million ($218 million) through convertible notes—debt instruments investors can either reclaim as cash or convert into company shares—led by ParaFi Capital, with Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, and Kraken joining in. Investors contributed 1,097 BTC directly in place of roughly $97 million in cash.

The stock peaked around £14 per share, roughly £66 million in market cap, in June 2025. Bitcoin then hit its $126,000 all-time high in October before entering a months-long slide in what became the current crypto winter, dragging the rest of the market—including Satsuma’s stock—with it.

By December, Satsuma was already selling assets to stay solvent: 579 BTC went for £40 million to ensure it had enough cash to repay noteholders who chose not to convert their debt into shares by year-end.

The unravelingThe company’s CFO departed in February 2026; the CEO followed in March. By April, shares had lost more than 99% of their June 2025 value—trading at fractions of a penny—and Pantera Capital, holding about 6.7% of Satsuma's stock, began pushing publicly for full liquidation.

The logic was direct: Satsuma's market cap—the total combined dollar value of all its shares—had fallen well below the value of the Bitcoin sitting on its own balance sheet, the point where owning the stock is strictly worse than owning the coin directly. A group of shareholders representing more than 20% of issued capital formally put the resolution to a vote.

The board split hard. Four of six directors opposed the liquidation, arguing Satsuma was still a viable listed Bitcoin vehicle. Two sided with shareholders pushing to wind down. Shareholders overruled the board majority by a wide margin.

The wind-down runs through a "B Share Scheme," a U.K. legal mechanism for distributing cash assets back to shareholders. Satsuma expects to return between £26.8 million and £30 million after estimated termination costs of £2.7 million—legal fees, severance, delisting charges, and run-off insurance.

Combined with the £40 million from the December BTC sale, total capital recovered lands around £66–£70 million against the £163.6 million originally raised. And because convertible note holders rank above common equity in any payout structure—meaning they get paid first—ordinary shareholders could walk away with considerably less than even those numbers suggest.

Satsuma is currently the second-largest U.K.-listed Bitcoin treasury company by holdings. The first is The Smarter Web Company, which holds 2,878 BTC and has not suggested it’s winding down.

U.K. High Court hearings to approve the capital return are set for August and September 2026. The delisting is expected mid-September, with shareholder payments due by late September.

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Tether International announced on Tuesday that Twenty One Capital has appointed Raphael Zagury as its chief executive, succeeding Jack Mallers, who is leaving the role to focus on Strike, the Bitcoin payments company he founded.

The companies said the transition will be managed through an orderly transfer of responsibilities and confirmed they are no longer proceeding with plans unveiled in April to combine Twenty One Capital, Strike and Elektron Energy. Strike will continue as an independent company.

The abandoned proposal would have created a single Bitcoin-focused company with exposure to mining, payments and capital markets. Mallers had been expected to remain CEO of the combined business, while Zagury was slated to become president.

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The transaction was also expected to increase Twenty One Capital’s Bitcoin holdings by incorporating Strike’s Bitcoin treasury but those plans have now been shelved.

The leadership change comes after Mallers oversaw the creation and public listing of Twenty One Capital, helping establish the firm as one of the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin holders. Twenty One Capital currently holds 43,514 Bitcoin worth approximately $2.9 billion.

“I’m grateful to everyone at XXI and everyone who believed in what we built,” Mallers stated. “Serving Bitcoiners has always been the mission, and that doesn’t change. Strike is where I carry it forward.”

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, I would like to thank Jack for his vision and leadership in founding Twenty One Capital, and for guiding the company through its business combination and successful listing on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated. “He took conviction in Bitcoin and turned it into a public company, and we’re grateful for that.” 

The company said it will now build on that foundation by expanding into Bitcoin-focused financial services, lending, capital markets products and educational programs, with further details on its strategic direction expected in the coming months.

Zagury, who currently heads the team managing Elektron Energy, has served on Twenty One Capital’s board and will remain a director after assuming the CEO role. His background includes senior positions at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, as well as leadership roles at fintech lender OpenCo and investment bank One Partners.

“Now that we embark on the next chapter, Rapha is one of the best operators in this industry, with a track record of building businesses with strong cash flows and disciplined execution. He brings exactly the operating standards XXI needs as it enters its next phase of growth,” Ardoino added.

Zagury said his focus will be on applying institutional standards of governance, operational rigor and disciplined capital allocation to maximize the value of the company’s Bitcoin-backed balance sheet.

“Twenty One holds one of the largest Bitcoin balance sheets in the public markets,” Zagury commented on the move. “My job is to build the operating company around it, with the discipline, governance, and executional rigor of an institution. I believe our business will perform best when we also focus on the cash flow we generate and the rigor with which we allocate capital, not only by the Bitcoin we hold.”

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

Washington is finally doing something about crypto regulation, and Bitcoin is noticing. Crypto markets have started moving again after months of sideways action, with the catalyst being renewed signals from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is on a real legislative timeline.

Bessent has been vocal about urgency, pushing for Senate passage this summer before the August recess. Hearings are scheduled around the week of July 20, which means the window is narrow and the pressure is real.

What the Clarity Act actually does The bill’s formal name is the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, or the CLARITY Act, filed as H.R.3633. Here’s the core problem it solves: for years, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and essentially every other digital asset have existed in a regulatory no-man’s land between the SEC and the CFTC. The CLARITY Act draws a cleaner boundary, defining which assets fall under SEC oversight and which belong to the CFTC.

The House already passed the bill on July 17, 2025, by a vote of 294 to 134. That’s a comfortable bipartisan margin, not the kind of partisan squeaker that tends to die in the Senate.

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Where the Senate stumbles Senate negotiations have snagged on two specific issues: stablecoin yield provisions and DeFi regulations. Stablecoin yield language determines whether interest-bearing stablecoins get treated like money market funds or something else entirely, which has enormous implications for products that crypto companies are already building.

A breakthrough on the stablecoin yield language was reportedly reached in March 2026, clearing one of the bigger obstacles. The DeFi provisions and Republican vote-securing remain the outstanding work.

Bessent published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on April 8, 2026, framing inaction as a competitive risk. His argument was direct: if the US doesn’t establish clear rules, capital and talent will flow to jurisdictions that have. Europe’s MiCA framework is already operational.

Why markets are reacting now Bessent signaling a real summer timeline changes the probability calculus. Institutional players who have been waiting for a cleaner legal environment now have a specific window to watch. If the Senate moves before the August recess, the regulatory environment for crypto in the US looks materially different in Q4 than it did six months ago.

For Bitcoin specifically, Bitcoin’s regulatory status as a commodity has been relatively settled for some time, meaning the CLARITY Act’s direct impact on Bitcoin is less about its own classification and more about the ecosystem around it. More institutional infrastructure, cleaner on-ramps, and a more stable regulatory environment for exchanges and custody providers all feed into Bitcoin demand indirectly.

The broader market, including assets whose commodity-versus-security status remains genuinely contested, stands to benefit more directly from the bill’s classification framework. A token that gets a clean CFTC designation under the new rules faces a fundamentally different compliance burden than one stuck in SEC limbo.

Watch the week of July 20 closely. If Senate hearings produce meaningful committee progress before the August recess, expect that to function as a positive catalyst. If negotiations stall and the bill gets pushed to September or later, some of the optimism currently priced into the market will need to unwind.

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

Summary

Senate negotiators settled the ethics dispute that had stalled the CLARITY Act for weeks. Bitcoin climbed toward $67,000 as spot ETFs extended a multi-day streak of net inflows. Republicans still need several Senate Democrats to cross over before a floor vote can happen. Prediction markets raised their odds on passage but still see the timeline as tight. Bitcoin climbed toward $67,000 on Tuesday after Senate negotiators reached a compromise on the ethics language that had frozen the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act for weeks. Senator Cynthia Lummis, Senator Bernie Moreno and White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt finalized an agreement that hands enforcement of new conflict-of-interest rules to the Department of Justice rather than to individual state attorneys general. Traders read the deal as the clearest signal yet that a Senate floor vote could arrive within days. Bitcoin’s price reaction, a move from the low $64,000s to a fresh local high near $66,872, reflected that shift in expectations before the political story even finished developing.

Crypto in America host Eleanor Terrett first reported the agreement Monday night, citing multiple industry sources briefed on the language. Witt confirmed his own continued involvement hours later, thanking the president and White House adviser David Sacks for the chance to see the effort through.

How a Justice Department Clause Broke a Weeks-Long Standoff The CLARITY Act itself was never really the sticking point. The bill hands primary oversight of spot crypto markets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, leaves securities-like tokens under the SEC, sets formal bankruptcy protections for exchange customer funds, and carves out safe harbors for DeFi developers. That package had broad support months ago. What stalled it was a single clause. Democrats led by Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Ruben Gallego wanted guardrails preventing the president, vice president and members of Congress from using their offices to profit off personal digital asset holdings, a provision aimed squarely at Trump, whose 2025 disclosures showed $1.4 billion in crypto-related income through World Liberty Financial and a string of personalized memecoins.

The fix that unlocked the deal was procedural rather than substantive. Instead of letting individual state attorneys general enforce the ethics rules, which risked fifty different interpretations and years of litigation, the DOJ takes sole enforcement authority. That gives the bill one federal standard instead of a patchwork, which is precisely what institutional players wanted before committing capital to products built around the new rules.

ETF Buyers Were Already Positioning Before the Political News Broke The legislative breakthrough triggered Tuesday’s price spike, but the money underneath it had been arriving for days. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $226.92 million in net inflows on Monday alone, extending a five-day streak that now totals $727.3 million. BlackRock’s IBIT, Fidelity’s FBTC and Grayscale’s GBTC led the buying. That run has pushed year-to-date net outflows back below $5 billion, clawing back a meaningful chunk of the $7.5 billion that left the ETF complex during the brutal mid-May to late-June downturn. Total ETF market capitalization has rebounded from a low of $75 billion to $79 billion.

Monday Net Inflow

$226.92M

5-Day Streak Total

$727.3M

YTD Net Outflows

Below $5B

ETF Market Cap

$79B

up from $75B low

Leading funds: BlackRock IBIT, Fidelity FBTC, Grayscale GBTC

A Triangle Nearing Its Breakout Point The weekly chart adds a layer Tuesday’s rally doesn’t show on its own. Bitcoin has spent months carving out a symmetrical triangle, a descending line off the $130,000 peak converging against an ascending line off the $60,000 lows, and price is now trading right at that apex. That’s typically where a breakout happens, not further consolidation, since the range between the two trendlines has narrowed to almost nothing.

The 50-week moving average, sitting near $89,700, tells the more sobering part of the story. Price remains well below it, and the weekly RSI at 32.89 stays under the neutral 50 mark, both consistent with a market still working through a correction rather than confirming a fresh uptrend. None of that erases Tuesday’s move. It does mean the CLARITY Act news and ETF inflows are landing on a chart that hasn’t broken out of its longer-term downtrend yet, so the triangle’s resolution in the coming weeks, not any single day’s headline, is what will show whether this rally has real follow-through.

$97,900
Prior resistance / SMA rollover zone

$89,700
50-week SMA

$66,855
Current price

32.89
Weekly RSI, below neutral 50

The Seven Democrats Standing Between the Bill and a Vote Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. Breaking a filibuster requires 60 votes, meaning at least seven Democrats need to cross the aisle, and as of Tuesday not one has publicly signed onto or even reviewed the finalized text. Advocacy groups including Indivisible are already campaigning against the bill, framing it as a deregulation vehicle built to benefit crypto holders in office rather than protect consumers. Senator Moreno has called the new ethics framework the strongest of any bill Congress has passed, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune could bring it to the floor within days if he chooses to. Whether he does remains the open question.

Polymarket puts implied odds on 2026 passage at 43%, up from 32% within hours of the ethics deal. Kalshi caps the probability of the bill becoming law this year at 36%, citing the narrow runway before the August 8 recess. Dan Gambardello remains cautious, pointing to the absence of any public Democratic commitment to the finalized text. What Would Actually Change if Thune Schedules a Vote This Week A scheduled floor vote, on its own, becomes the next catalyst regardless of how the count eventually lands. Markets have already shown they will move on the possibility of a vote, not just its outcome. If Thune sets a date and the released text shows real bipartisan concessions, the bull case points to a run through resistance toward $74,300, the midpoint of this year’s consolidation range, with room to extend toward $84,000. If Democrats reject the DOJ provision as toothless, or the Federal Reserve delivers a hawkish hold at its late-July meeting, the bear case opens a retest of $58,000 with a deeper slide toward $51,000 on the table.

Two forces sit underneath either outcome. A proposed 10-day ceasefire reviving the US-Iran interim deal has pulled oil prices lower, easing inflation pressure and adding to risk appetite, while Russia’s push to legalize crypto for cross-border trade settlement is adding pressure on Washington to finish its own framework before lawmakers leave for August recess. Working against the rally, the Coinbase Premium Index, which tracks US institutional demand against retail, remains negative at -0.062, and roughly $2.3 billion in stablecoin liquidity has left Binance and Bybit over the past month, leaving less capital sitting on exchanges ready to absorb a sudden swing in either direction. Thune’s calendar, not the vote count itself, is what traders will be refreshing first.

The bitcoin treasury company lifted its cash reserve to a $3.225 billion as its 843,775 BTC stack sits about $9 billion underwater.

Strategy Inc (NASDAQ: MSTR) sold 2,732,318 shares of its Class A common stock between July 13 and July 19, generating net proceeds of $263.5 million under its at-the-market offering program, according to an 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 20.

The company made no bitcoin (BTC) purchases during the period, the second consecutive week without an acquisition. Its holdings remain at 843,775 BTC, bought for an aggregate $63.69 billion at an average price of $75,476 per coin.

No Preferred Sales, No BuybacksThe filing showed no sales under any of Strategy's four preferred-stock ATM programs — STRF, STRC, STRK and STRD — during the week, and no repurchases under its share buyback programs. The common-stock sale was the sole capital-markets activity.

Strategy said $23.53 billion remains available under its MSTR common-stock offering, which reflects combined capacity including a $21 billion increase announced in March. Its US dollar reserve, held to cover preferred dividends and debt interest, stood at $3.225 billion as of July 19.

Holdings Sit Below Cost BasisStrategy's average purchase price of $75,476 per bitcoin is above the token's recent trading level. Bitcoin was changing hands near $64,200, according to CoinGecko, which puts the position's market value around $54 billion — below the roughly $63.7 billion the company has paid. MSTR shares edged about 0.5% higher in pre-market trading Monday.

The second straight week without a bitcoin purchase, funded entirely by equity sales rather than preferred issuance, suggests Strategy is prioritizing liquidity over accumulation at current price levels.

https://yayimages.com/51168546/facade-of-the-state-duma-parliament-building-of-russian-federation-landmark-in-central-moscow.html

Russia’s State Duma is poised to conduct final readings on the “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights” bill, a significant piece of legislation that seeks to regulate the country’s cryptocurrency sector. Scheduled for July 21, the bill focuses on licensing exchanges and brokers under the oversight of the Bank of Russia. It classifies cryptocurrency as property and permits crypto use for cross-border settlements while maintaining restrictions on domestic payments. The legislation introduces purchase caps and risk-awareness tests for non-qualified retail investors, allowing them to engage only with highly liquid assets such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and USDT. Market participants appear to interpret these measures as limiting long-term BTC demand, suggesting a potential impact on future price predictions.

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Key Takeaways Russia’s crypto bill appears to limit long-term Bitcoin demand by focusing on licensed turnover and restricting domestic crypto use. The bill introduces regulatory measures such as purchase caps and risk tests for retail investors, suggesting a controlled market environment. Market pricing suggests a moderate decrease in the likelihood of Bitcoin reaching $200,000 by the end of 2026. What to Watch Observers will be closely monitoring the Duma’s final readings and any amendments that might affect the bill’s provisions. The potential impact on global Bitcoin markets could become clearer as the bill moves closer to implementation, expected on September 1, 2026. Watch for any shifts in pricing that might indicate changing sentiment towards Bitcoin’s long-term prospects, especially in light of regulatory developments in other countries.

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Term Structure

Contract Odds Δ since publish Volume 24h December 31 2.2% — — View market → December 31 2% — — View market → December 31 2.6% — — View market → December 31 3.5% — — View market → December 31 5% — — View market → January 1 2027 8% — — View market → January 1 2027 21.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 4.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.2% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.1% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.6% — — View market → January 1 2027 4% — — View market → January 1 2027 6.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 45.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 10.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 1.4% — — View market → January 1 2027 2.6% — — View market → January 1 2027 31.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 16.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 9.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 4.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 1.9% — — View market → January 1 2027 1.9% — — View market → January 1 2027 1.4% — — View market → January 1 2027 1% — — View market → January 1 2027 11.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 22.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 33.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 52.5% — — View market → January 1 2027 76% — — View market →

Bitcoin Japan, a subsidiary of Asia’s answer to Strategy, Metaplanet, has announced it entered into a financing agreement to start buying the leading cryptocurrency for its treasury. 

The Tokyo-based, publicly-listed company said Thursday that it had approved a convertible bond deal with EVO Fund to raise 9.66 billion yen ($59.5 million). The deal will see the company spend over 662 million yen — or over $4 million — on its first Bitcoin transaction. 

Bitcoin Japan works on Bitcoin-related media, data platforms and events to promote the understanding of the leading cryptocurrency in Japan and “contribute to the development of its ecosystem globally,” according to its website. 

Its parent company, Metaplanet, is a publicly-traded company following in the footsteps of Nasdaq-listed Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — by buying and holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It first started buying the asset in 2024. 

Metaplanet is one of the biggest Bitcoin treasuries in the world, with 43,000 digital coins worth over $2.8 billion in its coffers. Its stock is currently down over 50% year-to-date. 

JUST IN: 🇯🇵 Japan Public company Bitcoin Japan Corporation has raised $60 million through convertible bonds, allocating $4.08 million to make its first buy for their BTC treasury 👀

BULLISH 🚀 pic.twitter.com/gn7hihxJ68

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 17, 2026 Treasury woes  Bitcoin Japan’s announcement comes as treasury companies see their stock slide. Last year, the business model of buying and holding Bitcoin and other digital assets with spare cash suffered with a plunge in crypto prices. 

Strategy, the biggest and oldest Bitcoin treasury, has seen its Nasdaq-listed stock nosedive by nearly 80% over the past year. 

Little known publicly traded companies in 2025 rushed to announce they were buying digital assets in a hope to boost their stock prices. The strategy worked but since the market downturn, a number of firms in the space have had to sell a portion of their holdings as the price of Bitcoin has slumped. 

But companies are still accumulating during the downturn — and firms like Bitcoin Japan are seeing the current market price of the leading asset as an opportunity to start a crypto treasury. 

Regulatory push  While Japan has long been a hub for crypto enthusiasts — former major Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was based in Tokyo before a 2014 hack and its subsequent closure — lawmakers are now working on regulating the asset class. 

Japan’s parliament last week passed a law amendment to designate ‌cryptocurrency assets as “financial assets,” making the assets subject to stricter regulations, eventually paving the way for products like Bitcoin exchange-traded funds to debut in the Asian nation. 

The regulation is likely to come into effect within a year, Reuters reported, citing NHK news. 

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.

World’s largest corporate Bitcoin holder Strategy has no plans to slow down its Bitcoin buying. After surprising the market with a $216 million BTC sale, CEO Phong Le says the company is “not going anywhere.” 

While Michael Saylor’s latest post has sparked speculation that another massive Bitcoin buying could be announced today.

Strategy CEO Says More Bitcoin Buying Is ComingStrategy President and CEO Phong Le has assured the investors that the company’s recent Bitcoin sale does not signal a change in its long-term strategy.

Speaking after Strategy sold 3,588 BTC worth about $216 million, Le said the transaction had little impact on the market.

“We sold about $200 million of Bitcoin, but it did not move the market. In fact, the market moved up during that period of time. So we’re not going anywhere.”

Le added that Strategy remains the largest identified corporate holder of Bitcoin and wants to continue expanding that position.

“We’re the largest identified holder of Bitcoin. My objective would be to be the largest buyer of Bitcoin for the foreseeable future. We’re not going anywhere.”

His comments come just days after many investors questioned whether Strategy had started reducing its Bitcoin exposure.

$3 Billion Cash Reserve Gives Strategy More FlexibilityFurther, when asked why Strategy recently increased its cash reserves instead of immediately buying more Bitcoin.

Lee said it was built after preferred shareholders requested a stronger liquidity position.

“We accumulated $3 billion in cash because we listened to our preferred shareholders… Building up the U.S. dollar reserve was a big part of that.”

According to Le, Strategy remains financially comfortable and does not see debt becoming a concern unless Bitcoin falls much further.

“When Bitcoin gets down closer to $8,000 to $10,000, that’s when we have to consider some of the risks associated with our debt. Until that point in time, we feel very secure about the balance sheet.”

He also confirmed that once the company’s preferred shares recover, Strategy expects to issue more shares and continue buying Bitcoin.

Michael Saylor’s Post Sparks Bitcoin Buying SpeculationAdding to the excitement, Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor recently posted “What’s Next?” on X.

The post included the company’s orange dot chart, which has historically appeared before major Bitcoin purchase announcements. Because of that pattern, many investors believe Strategy could soon announce another Bitcoin acquisition this week.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin is trading around $64,212, down slightly over the past 24 hours. From a technical perspective, analysts say BTC is approaching the breakout point of a W pattern on the daily chart. 

If confirmed, Bitcoin could rally toward $71,334, potentially creating another buying opportunity for Strategy.

Story Ends Here

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Read the Next News

BIP 110 reached “Complete” status on June 25, 2026, proposing a one-year restriction on Bitcoin transaction data. Miner signaling for the proposal sits at 0.86%, far below the 55% threshold needed for early lock-in. Mandatory signaling begins at block 961,632, expected around August 7, with full enforcement targeted for September 1. Mining pool Foundry opened an internal vote that could shift the outcome before the deadline arrives. Bitcoin’s BIP 110 proposal, a one-year softfork that would reimpose strict limits on how much arbitrary data miners can embed inside transactions, advanced to complete status on June 25, 2026. Weekend signaling data puts miner backing at just 0.86%, a fraction of the 55% threshold needed for miners to lock the rule in early and guarantee it takes effect. The shortfall matters less than it might elsewhere in Bitcoin’s governance history, because BIP 110 does not need miner consent to take effect. Its mandatory signaling phase starts automatically at block 961,632, expected around August 7, and full enforcement follows on September 1 regardless of how many miners have opted in by then. Signaling works by having miners mark the blocks they produce to show whether they support the change, similar to a running vote tallied block by block.

A Rule Core Wrote Into Existence Itself The proposal exists because of a decision Bitcoin Core made months earlier. In late 2025, Core developers removed the historical 80-byte limit on OP_RETURN, a small text field Bitcoin lets users attach to a transaction to store non-payment data, like a short note, an image reference, or a token record, aiming to push data-heavy users toward prunable storage rather than methods that permanently bloat the UTXO set, the ledger of unspent coins every node has to hold. BIP 110 reverses that call and goes further, capping data pushes at 256 bytes and OP_RETURN itself at 83 bytes across seven distinct consensus restrictions new rules that every computer running the Bitcoin software would have to follow. Node-level support runs between 7% and 15%, carried almost entirely by users on Bitcoin Knots rather than Core. Knots has served for years as the client of choice for operators who want tighter limits on which transactions their computer accepts and passes along before miners confirm them, and this fight has turned it into the technical base camp for developers like Luke Dashjr and channels such as Bitcoin University, who treat inscriptions, Ordinals, and Runes as spam bloating storage costs for every full node operator.

None of that miner math is settled, though. Foundry controls between 25% and 30% of global hash rate, and it opened an internal vote over the weekend letting individual rig owners direct their share of the pool’s power toward signaling BIP 110. A meaningful swing from Foundry’s base could pull support well above 0.86% before block 961,632 arrives, though nothing guarantees that happens in time.

Date or Block Height Milestone Status June 25, 2026 BIP 110 reaches “Complete” status Confirmed Weekend of July 18-19, 2026 Miner signaling measured at 0.86% Below the 55% threshold needed for miners to approve it early Block 961,632 (~August 7, 2026) Mandatory signaling begins (enforced by node software, not by a miner vote) Automatic, independent of miner support September 1, 2026 Full enforcement target Pending Timeline table showing BIP 110 milestones from completion in June through enforcement in September 2026.

The Ordinals Camp Answers With DOG Mode’s Relaxed Rules Ordinals advocate Leonidas proposed a counter on July 16 and 17: DOG Mode, an alternative Core client that relaxes local relay policy instead of tightening consensus rules, permitting transactions near the full block size and cutting the dust limit to 1 satoshi. Backers say that frees up roughly $25 million in bitcoin that currently sits below the dust limit, the smallest payment size a node will bother forwarding because the fee to move it would cost more than the payment itself. The distinction that matters here is structural. DOG Mode only changes the mempool, the waiting room where unconfirmed transactions sit before a miner picks them up, and the relay policy a node uses to decide what to pass along to other nodes. It leaves the rules for what makes a block valid completely alone. That means DOG Mode needs just one cooperating miner willing to include the relevant transactions, rather than the network-wide agreement BIP 110 requires.

Aspect BIP 110 / Bitcoin Knots DOG Mode Type of change Consensus rule (network-wide) Local settings on individual nodes OP_RETURN cap 83 bytes Unrestricted, per Core v30 Dust limit Unchanged Cut to 1 satoshi Activation requirement Network-wide node adoption One willing miner Comparison table of consensus and policy differences between BIP 110 and the DOG Mode alternative client.

Blockstream CEO Adam Back spent the weekend spelling out the downside case. If nodes running BIP 110’s rules start rejecting blocks once mandatory enforcement hits, while miners without majority backing keep mining under the old rules anyway, the network splits into two chains that stop recognizing each other’s blocks. Back called the likely loser a “Pompeii chain,” a minority network frozen at the moment of the split, and mocked BIP 110’s backers on X for failing to line up real financial backing behind the effort.

MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor took the opposing position furthest in a weekend essay titled “110 reasons BIP-110 is a bad idea.” His argument: money cannot distinguish valid transactions from spam by design, and encoding that distinction into consensus hands developers a censorship tool. He warns that tool could later be pointed at privacy features or corporate custody arrangements once the precedent exists. He pairs it with an economic warning – suppressing data-heavy transactions cuts fee demand precisely as block subsidies, the fixed reward miners earn for each block, keep shrinking on a preset schedule, pushing miners to rely more on fees to stay profitable.

Seeking Alpha downgraded its near-term Bitcoin outlook from Strong Buy to Tactical Buy over the weekend, citing governance risk tied to the August deadline rather than any shift in the long-term monetary case. MicroStrategy alone holds 843,775 BTC, and treasury firms in that position value Bitcoin specifically for a rule set that doesn’t move without overwhelming consensus – a softfork activating on sub-1% miner backing, purely because nodes enforce it regardless, is exactly the governance uncertainty that kind of holder has avoided since 2017’s Blocksize Wars. What happens next hinges on Foundry’s vote closing before block 961,632 and on whether Knots adoption grows past its current 7% to 15% share in the weeks remaining.

Cover image via depositphotos.com Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.

Strategy founder Michael Saylor posted a fresh chart of the company's crypto reserves on social media with the brief caption, "What's next?" — a teaser that immediately sparked discussion about the next steps of the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holder. 

The situation is particularly intriguing because the company, which built its reputation on aggressive Bitcoin purchases, is now in a vulnerable position measured in billions of dollars in losses.

Billions in the red versus a fiat cushion: Strategy's capital scenariosAccording to the latest data from Strategy Tracker, the company holds 843,775 BTC on its balance sheet — an enormous 4% of Bitcoin's total global supply. The portfolio is worth $54.28 billion, but due to the high average purchase price of $75,653, the position is now sitting on an unrealized loss of nearly 15%, or around $5 billion, with Bitcoin currently trading near $64,000.

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Saylor's question about "what comes next" has divided the expert community into two camps, with the more optimistic side of the market predictably interpreting the post as an announcement of another buy-the-dip purchase financed through new debt. Investors are now awaiting the opening of trading on Monday and fresh SEC filings.

On the other hand, management's recent actions differ from the familiar "buy and never sell" slogan. Strategy has made no new purchases since June 22 and recently broke its own taboo by selling 3,588 BTC, with the latest transaction involving 2,225 BTC on July 6, used to pay dividends to shareholders and build a $2.55 billion reserve.

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Saylor's teaser appeared at a turning point, as the company is forced to balance its status as Wall Street's leading Bitcoin bull with the strict necessity of servicing its obligations during a market downturn.

Whether the next step will mark a return to aggressive purchases or a continuation of cautious maneuvering supported by a fiat safety cushion will become clear in the coming reporting days.

Blockchain

19 July 2026 | 11:31 Cardano’s Pogun initiative targets Bitcoin liquidity through a credit market, yield layer and trust-minimized bridge, but the project remains unfinished after its treasury request expired and its first deadline passed.

Key Takeaways Pogun plans to combine a non-margin credit market, a yield application and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge on Cardano. The widely cited $1.6 trillion figure represents Bitcoin’s total market value, not capital already committed to the project. Pogun’s request for ₳12.29 million from the Cardano Treasury expired without receiving the required approval. The original Q2 credit-market deadline has passed, while Pogun’s official website still describes the platform as coming soon. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is backing Pogun, a development initiative intended to bring Bitcoin liquidity into Cardano-based credit and yield markets.

Led by Omer Husain and the team behind Input Output’s open-source Cardinal bridge specification, Pogun plans to combine a non-margin credit market, a yield application and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge.

The project’s central test is not whether Cardano can advertise access to Bitcoin’s market value. It is whether Pogun can launch a useful credit market, attract borrowers and lenders, and give BTC holders a reason to cross the bridge when it becomes available.

The $1.6 Trillion Bitcoin Claim Needs Context Pogun’s official proposal describes Bitcoin as a vast pool of capital that is “almost entirely idle.” The phrase refers to Bitcoin’s limited use in native decentralized lending and credit markets, not to every BTC sitting unused.

Some coverage has rounded the opportunity to $1.6 trillion, while Pogun’s own governance proposal described Bitcoin as a roughly $1.5 trillion asset. Either figure is a time-sensitive estimate of Bitcoin’s total market capitalization which as of 19 July, 2026, is around $1.3T, not an amount that Pogun has secured or expects to move into Cardano in full.

Bitcoin is already used through self-custody, exchanges, corporate treasuries, exchange-traded products and centralized lending arrangements. Pogun’s argument is narrower: only a relatively small portion of that capital participates in decentralized credit and yield markets without relying on a centralized custodian.

Pogun is therefore competing for the subset of Bitcoin holders willing to use BTC as collateral or deploy it into financial strategies. It is not integrating Bitcoin’s entire market value into Cardano.

Pogun Plans to Build the Market Before the Bridge Pogun’s published roadmap contains three connected stages:

Q2 2026

Non-margin credit market

Bilateral, fixed-term loans without automatic price-based liquidations

Q3 2026

Yield application

An interface connecting user capital with strategies built on the credit market

Q4 2026

Bitcoin bridge

A trust-minimized route for deploying BTC in Cardano-based applications

Pogun’s sequence is deliberate. The credit market is intended to establish demand, the yield application would make that market easier to access, and the bridge would then introduce Bitcoin as additional collateral and liquidity.

That gives incoming BTC an intended use from the beginning, but it also creates dependency between the milestones. Delays or weak adoption in the first two products could reduce the reason for Bitcoin holders to use the bridge when it arrives.

The First Roadmap Deadline Has Passed The proposal stated that the non-margin credit market would launch on Cardano’s mainnet in the second quarter of 2026 after completing a formal security audit.

That quarter ended on June 30.

As of July 19, Pogun’s official website continues to describe the platform as “coming soon.” The official project pages reviewed for this article do not provide a public mainnet announcement, deployed contract address or completed audit report.

That does not establish that development has stopped. It means the Q2 milestone cannot yet be treated as publicly delivered based on the evidence currently available.

In a June 11 video, Hoskinson said work had not been paused after the project failed to secure treasury funding and described Pogun as a commercial initiative that could continue without the proposed community investment.

His comments indicate that development is continuing, but they do not establish that the credit market has launched publicly or completed the formal audit described in the original proposal.

The Cardano Treasury Did Not Fund Pogun Pogun requested ₳12.29 million from the Cardano Treasury, valued at approximately $2.95 million when the proposal was prepared.

The proposed funding was divided into milestone-based tranches. Later bridge funding would have depended on verified progress in the credit market, while the proposal included provisions for returning undisbursed funds if milestones failed, the team dissolved or the bridge was found to be technically infeasible.

Pogun also proposed returning 20% of EBITDA to the Cardano Treasury until the original investment had been repaid, followed by 5% of EBITDA from Cardano-related products in perpetuity.

That arrangement was never activated.

The onchain governance action expired on May 24, 2026, without receiving the support required for ratification. No ₳12.29 million treasury withdrawal was approved for Pogun.

The failed vote did not remove money that had already been granted. It meant that this specific treasury withdrawal was never authorized.

If Pogun continues as a privately funded commercial initiative, the Cardano Treasury will not automatically receive the proposed revenue share unless a separate agreement is approved in the future.

How Pogun’s Credit Market Is Supposed to Work Pogun’s first planned product differs from the pooled, overcollateralized lending markets commonly found across DeFi.

Borrowers and lenders would negotiate loan terms directly, including: The amount being borrowed; The interest rate; The repayment period; The collateral requirements; The conditions that constitute default. Smart contracts would enforce those agreed terms. According to Pogun, the model would not depend on external price oracles or automatic margin calls, meaning temporary market volatility would not by itself liquidate a borrower’s collateral.

The structure resembles fixed-term private credit more closely than a continuously rebalanced DeFi lending pool.

Active loan positions would be represented by transferable Bond Tokens issued as Cardano native assets. That could allow a lender to transfer or sell exposure before a loan matures, creating the foundation for a secondary market in tokenized debt positions.

Removing automatic price-based liquidation does not remove financial risk.

A borrower can still default, collateral can lose value before it is recovered, and Bond Tokens may have little secondary-market liquidity. Smart-contract vulnerabilities, weak borrower assessment and disputes involving real-world counterparties could add further risk.

The model exchanges the danger of rapid oracle-driven liquidation for longer-duration credit, liquidity and enforcement risks. Its usefulness will depend on how clearly those risks are disclosed and priced.

The Bridge Is Trust-Minimized, Not Trustless Pogun’s final stage is intended to move Bitcoin into the Cardano environment without placing the underlying BTC under the control of a single custodian.

The roadmap describes a 1-of-N security model. Under that design, a fraudulent withdrawal can be blocked as long as at least one verifier in the operator set remains honest and available.

Although the proposal labels the component a BitVM-powered bridge, a later technical explanation from Input Output says the team moved toward a custom implementation based on BABE after identifying production constraints in the BitVM family of designs.

The architecture described by Input Output combines several systems: A custom implementation based on BABE, which uses witness encryption for Bitcoin-side verification; Recursive Halo2 proofs intended to attest to Cardano state through the Mithril certificate chain; Groth16 proofs that package the result into a smaller form for the Bitcoin-side mechanism; An N-party transaction graph designed to support multiple operators and changes to the operator set. At a high level, the design is intended to prove what happened on Cardano, compress that evidence into a smaller cryptographic proof and make the result verifiable through a Bitcoin-side mechanism without giving one custodian control of the underlying BTC.

Mithril certificates allow external systems to verify authenticated information about Cardano without independently replaying the entire blockchain. Pogun intends to use proofs built over that certificate chain to establish what occurred on Cardano before a corresponding Bitcoin-side action is accepted.

The architecture is technically detailed, but a design document is not proof of production security.

Bridge implementations can be exposed to software bugs, proof-system failures, operator outages, configuration errors and weaknesses in the applications holding bridged assets. Public code, independent audits, testnet performance and the composition of the verifier set will matter as much as the cryptographic design.

Calling the bridge trust-minimized is therefore more accurate than calling it trustless.

Why Cardano Sees an Architectural Fit With Bitcoin Cardano argues that it is a natural environment for Bitcoin-based finance because the two networks share a related accounting structure.

As Cardano’s official documentation explains, Bitcoin and Cardano both use versions of the Unspent Transaction Output model. Bitcoin transactions consume existing outputs and create new ones, while Cardano extends that structure through its EUTXO model to support programmable conditions, native assets and smart contracts.

That shared lineage can make some financial logic easier to express across the two systems. It does not mean that Cardano can control native Bitcoin directly or that other smart-contract networks cannot support Bitcoin-based applications through different architectures.

Pogun still requires a bridge to connect two separate ledgers. Its success will depend on implementation quality, security and market demand rather than the UTXO connection alone.

What Pogun Could Mean for Cardano and ADA Pogun is partly an attempt to expand Cardano’s relatively small DeFi economy.

At the time of writing, DefiLlama records approximately $72 million in total value locked across Cardano applications. Even a modest amount of BTC deployed into Cardano-based credit markets could therefore be material relative to the ecosystem’s present size.

That possibility should not be confused with a guarantee that billions of dollars will arrive.

Claims that Pogun could push Cardano’s TVL to $10 billion or $15 billion are not supported by the project’s formal proposal. Its own end-of-2027 scenarios projected approximately:

$100 million in Pogun TVL under a bearish scenario; $450 million under its base scenario; $765 million under its bullish scenario. Those are project forecasts rather than assured outcomes. Actual adoption will depend on bridge security, borrowing demand, available returns, liquidity, regulatory access and competition from other Bitcoin DeFi platforms.

The effect on ADA also needs careful framing.

Under Cardano’s current rules, ADA is accepted as payment for network fees. Pogun activity executed on Cardano could therefore generate additional transaction-fee demand.

The scale of that effect would depend on transaction volume, fee levels and whether applications require users to hold ADA directly or abstract the payment process on their behalf. Bridged Bitcoin sitting inactive in a contract would not create the same recurring network demand as an actively used credit market.

Pogun could add utility to Cardano, but publishing a roadmap does not by itself create substantial or sustainable demand for ADA.

What Would Confirm the Bitcoin DeFi Thesis The strongest evidence will come from delivered products and measurable usage rather than the total market value of Bitcoin.

The thesis would become more credible if Pogun provides: • A publicly verifiable mainnet deployment for the credit market;

• A completed independent security audit and accessible report;

• Contract addresses and documentation that allow users to verify the system;

• Measurable loan volume, borrower activity and repayment data;

• A yield application with clear risk disclosures and sustained deposits;

• A functioning bridge testnet followed by an independently audited mainnet release;

• Transparent information about operators and the assumptions behind the 1-of-N model;

• Measurable BTC collateral, Cardano TVL and transaction growth after launch.

For now, Pogun remains a development initiative rather than evidence that significant Bitcoin liquidity has entered Cardano.

The next decisive proof point is a publicly verifiable launch of the credit market, followed by its audit results and measurable lending activity. Only then will the planned yield layer and Bitcoin bridge have an operating market to connect to.

This article is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice.

Author

Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coindoo and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.