Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Magazine

BitGo Launches Lightning Earn to Let Institutions Put Bitcoin to Work on Lightning Network

BitGo, an OCC-regulated digital asset trust bank, has introduced Lightning Earn, a new product that allows corporate bitcoin treasury companies and institutional allocators to deploy their bitcoin as liquidity on the Lightning Network and earn bitcoin-denominated routing fees.

The offering is built on an integration with Amboss Technologies’ Rails product, a Lightning infrastructure platform that enables participants to capture routing fees by routing payments and leasing liquidity across the network. BitGo, a subsidiary of BitGo Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: BTGO), said the integration gives institutional clients access to Lightning Network infrastructure without sacrificing custody or governance standards.

Through the BitGo-Amboss integration, clients deploy bitcoin into Lightning Network channels. Those funds then route payments across the network and provide liquidity to new payment destinations. 

In return, participants receive fees denominated in bitcoin — not a token, synthetic instrument, or third-party yield product.

BitGo said its existing security controls, operational workflows, and governance infrastructure carry over into the Lightning Earn product, giving institutions the compliance framework they require to participate.

BitGo commits its own treasury

The bank has deployed a portion of its own bitcoin treasury into Amboss Rails, a move the company described as a direct expression of confidence in the product.

“We believe Rails gives our clients a credible way to deploy their bitcoin without compromising on custody or governance,” said Mike Belshe, CEO and Co-founder of BitGo. “We’ve allocated a portion of our own treasury to Rails, and we are excited to bring this capability to the institutions we serve.”

The decision to commit company funds signals that the company views Lightning Earn as more than a client-facing product. It also positions the firm alongside its clients in exposure to Lightning Network routing economics.

Amboss CEO Jesse Shrader said the partnership marks a turning point for institutional participation in the Lightning Network. 

“BitGo’s integration of Rails sends a clear signal that Lightning is fit for institutions,” Shrader said. “With the capital brought by BitGo and their clients, Bitcoin can serve instant payments at enterprise scale while capturing the benefits of Lightning’s proliferation.”

Amboss builds data, software, and infrastructure products for the Lightning Network, with Rails serving as its primary institutional infrastructure offering.

This post BitGo Launches Lightning Earn to Let Institutions Put Bitcoin to Work on Lightning Network first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin Executive Says Education — Not Products — Is Wall Street’s Real Obstacle

When Morgan Stanley created a firmwide Head of Digital Asset Strategy role in January 2026, it handed the job to Amy Oldenburg — a 26-year veteran of the bank who spent much of her career in emerging markets, trading foreign exchange and equities in places where formal banking infrastructure was either unreliable or absent. 

That background, she said in a recent interview on the Coin Stories podcast with Natalie Brunell, shapes everything she believes about where Bitcoin is headed.

“Where were the first users of a lot of this?” Oldenburg said, pointing to cross-border and international markets — regions where people were not rejecting the traditional banking system out of ideology, but because that system had already failed them. 

On the podcast, she described watching M-Pesa, Safaricom’s mobile money service, spread across East Africa in 2007, with women loading cash onto flip phones in villages with no reliable electricity and dirt roads. The parallel to Bitcoin’s decentralized value proposition was not lost on her.

Morgan Stanley’s entry into Bitcoin has been methodical, and Oldenburg explained why. The bank is a global systemically important bank, or G-SIB, and unlike BlackRock — an independent asset manager — Morgan Stanley is owned by a bank holding company governed by the Federal Reserve. 

That distinction meant the firm faced capital treatment requirements and regulatory constraints that independent asset managers did not, forcing it to watch peers roll out crypto products years before it could.

The regulatory environment was not the only obstacle. Morgan Stanley had built a plan years in advance to launch spot crypto trading on its E-Trade platform, but by 2024, several of the vendors the bank had shortlisted for partnerships had collapsed — a casualty of the same industry shakeout that took down FTX and a wave of smaller firms. The bank had to rebuild its strategy from the ground up.

When the firm finally launched the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust — ticker MSBT — on April 7, 2026, it became the first spot Bitcoin ETF issued by a U.S. chartered bank. The debut was the strongest first-day ETF launch in Morgan Stanley’s history, taking in over $33.8 million and landing in the top 1% of all ETF debuts by volume, according to Bloomberg senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas. 

The fund carries an expense ratio of 0.14%, making it the cheapest Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. market — undercutting BlackRock’s IBIT by 11 basis points.

The use gap between the products and advisors

The product exists. The challenge now, Oldenburg said, is getting the people inside Morgan Stanley’s own wealth machine to use it. 

The firm manages roughly $9.3 trillion in client assets, and in October 2025 its Global Investment Committee formally recommended a 2% to 4% crypto allocation for moderate to aggressive growth portfolios, describing Bitcoin as a scarce asset comparable to digital gold. Yet advisor uptake has been slow.

Oldenburg attributed this directly to an education gap. Many financial advisors still cannot cleanly distinguish Bitcoin from the broader crypto category — let alone explain the structural differences between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana to a client who just wants to know if it belongs in their retirement account.

The problem runs in both directions: clients who came of age watching crypto exchanges collapse understandably associate all digital assets with FTX-era chaos, while advisors with fiduciary responsibility are reluctant to recommend an asset that still moves in lockstep with risk equities rather than as an independent inflation hedge.

“It’s not all fitting together yet,” Oldenburg said, comparing the current moment to the early days of the BlackBerry — a technology where she knew something was there, but the use case had not crystallized for most people.

This sentiment echoes Oldenburg’s comments at The Bitcoin Conference, where she argued that bitcoin remains widely misunderstood and that investor education is the key obstacle to broader adoption. She said the firm is training advisors, expanding crypto access, and believes regulatory progress could eventually make bank-held bitcoin “not out of the question.”

What would move Bitcoin higher

On the question of what would push Bitcoin toward a more decisive breakout, Oldenburg gave an answer that reflected her experience watching systems under stress. She suggested it may take a crisis — not necessarily a dramatic one, but a slow grind that breaks confidence in traditional financial infrastructure and makes Bitcoin’s properties as a decentralized, borderless store of value viscerally clear. 

She has seen that dynamic play out in emerging markets, in Russia and Ukraine, where people she knew personally lost access to their banking assets overnight.

For U.S. banks to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets, she said the path runs through capital treatment reform — specifically the removal of the punitive regulatory burden that makes Bitcoin less efficient to hold than other assets from a balance sheet perspective.

The bank is pursuing an OCC digital trust charter that would let Morgan Stanley custody crypto directly, a step that would bring its digital asset ambitions further in-house.

This post Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin Executive Says Education — Not Products — Is Wall Street’s Real Obstacle first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Traditional Finance is Rushing Into Crypto as Institutions Buy Bitcoin’s Dip: Axios

Traditional financial institutions are shedding their skepticism toward crypto, and the shift is accelerating in 2026.

Banks, brokerages, and exchanges are racing to offer crypto products as demand from retail investors, institutions, and wealthy clients reaches a tipping point. 

David Ripley, co-CEO of crypto exchange Kraken, told Axios that “nearly all traditional financial services companies are gonna offer crypto, bitcoin, ethereum to their customers” — a development he called “a big story of 2026.”

The turning point reflects a broader collision of mega-trends reshaping financial markets. Stablecoins, tokenization, AI, and extended-hours trading are converging to create a financial system that is more digital, more global, and increasingly around the clock.

Ripley said the rise of stablecoins — blockchain-based versions of traditional assets — has primed investors for what comes next: tokenized public equities. 

“The next most significant place where we see tokenized equity or tokenized assets will be public equities,” he said.

The stakes are high. Kraken recently announced plans to offer tokenized IPO shares to retail investors, targeting ordinary Americans who Ripley says have been “entirely locked out” of major wealth-creating companies until late in their growth cycles.

The IPO market itself is preparing for a historic wave. SpaceX is targeting a Nasdaq debut this week, seeking to raise about $75 billion at a $1.7 trillion valuation — which would make it the largest IPO on record. 

Nasdaq CFO Sarah Youngwood told Axios the U.S. market has the depth to absorb a pipeline of trillion-dollar offerings, including OpenAI and Anthropic, without structural changes.

Nasdaq is pushing into extended-hours trading, aligning with crypto markets that never close. 

Coinbase Executive: Institutions are buying

These comments to Axios come as bitcoin fights near $60,000, but its 50% decline from the all-time high have not deterred major institutional investors, according to Coinbase’s head of institutional strategy, John D’Agostino, who says sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and other large investors are actively buying the dip. 

Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, increased its exposure to BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF for a fourth consecutive quarter, while Bitcoin ETFs collectively still hold roughly $100 billion in assets despite the market downturn. 

D’Agostino attributed the selloff to a combination of macroeconomic uncertainty, elevated interest rates, regulatory delays, geopolitical tensions, and concerns sparked by Strategy’s sale of 32 BTC. Even so, he said institutions remain confident in Bitcoin’s long-term value, a view reinforced by Strategy’s subsequent purchase of 1,550 BTC for $101 million.

This post Traditional Finance is Rushing Into Crypto as Institutions Buy Bitcoin’s Dip: Axios first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Dan Loeb Reveals DOJ Threat to Trump Over Ross Ulbricht Commutation in Final Hours of First Term

Hedge fund manager Dan Loeb has publicly claimed that the Department of Justice threatened President Donald Trump in the final hours of Trump’s first term in January 2021, warning it would “go after” him if he commuted the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Bitcoin-powered Silk Road marketplace. After the reported threat, Trump withdrew the commutation, forcing Ulbricht to serve four additional years in prison before receiving a full pardon in January 2025 during Trump’s second term.

Loeb, founder and CEO of Third Point LLC, made the revelation on the All-In Podcast while discussing his role in criminal justice reform and Ulbricht’s clemency efforts. “On the last day of Trump’s 45th term, we were certain that he was going to get out,” Loeb stated. “And the Justice Department, for whatever reason, said, ‘If you commute his sentence, we’re going to go after you,’ to the president. So he, as I understand, he withdrew the commutation.”

This account is the first public report of such a direct threat from the DOJ during the closing days of Trump’s first presidency. It has not been independently corroborated by other sources to date, and no specific DOJ official has been named as delivering the warning. The claim rests on Loeb’s recollection, likely conveyed through the advocacy chain that included crypto figures like Riva Tez, Charlie Kirk, and then-White House counsel David Warrington.

DOJ Leadership in January 2021

Jeffrey A. Rosen served as Acting Attorney General after William Barr’s departure in late December 2020. Richard Donoghue was Acting Deputy Attorney General. The Office of the Pardon Attorney, a DOJ unit that reviews clemency petitions and issues recommendations, operated under their oversight. Presidents, including Trump, frequently bypassed standard OPA processes for politically sensitive cases.

The alleged threat appears to have gone well beyond typical DOJ advisory input on issues such as sentence proportionality, victim impact, or enforcement priorities. Ulbricht had been serving a double life sentence plus 40 years following his 2015 conviction on charges including operating a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics distribution via the internet, money laundering, and hacking. Contrary to popular belief and widely publicized insinuations by the mainstream media, Ulbricht was never prosecuted on any charges related to murder for hire. 

Silk Road, which relied primarily on Bitcoin for transactions, represented one of the earliest large-scale experiments in the use of an alternative currency to the dollar, making the case and its history foundational to the Bitcoin community.

A warning framed as potential retaliation against the President himself would constitute an extraordinary escalation in tensions between the executive branch and the Department of Justice over clemency authority. Such pushback likely stemmed from institutional concerns about appearing soft on major drug trafficking and money laundering cases tied to the early Bitcoin economy.

Four-Year Delay and Political Impact

The reported DOJ intervention in the final days of Trump’s first term cost Ulbricht four more years behind bars. As Loeb recounted, Charlie Kirk later took the lead on the clemency effort. “This was his only ask of the president,” Loeb said, referring to Kirk. Kirk’s advocacy helped turn Ulbricht’s release into Trump’s primary promise to libertarians and the crypto community during the 2024 campaign. Trump delivered on that promise with a full and unconditional pardon early in his second term.

Ironically, the delay strengthened the “Free Ross” movement. What began as advocacy for clemency in a case viewed by many in Bitcoin circles as emblematic of government overreach evolved into a potent political force. The campaign highlighted issues of disproportionate sentencing, self-custody, privacy tools, and resistance to broadly unpopular and ineffective war on drugs, core themes in Bitcoin’s ethos of financial sovereignty and of high importance to the libertarian voting block. This momentum and Trump’s promise to pardon Ulbricht are widely considered to have earned Trump the libertarian and crypto vote in 2024.

Broader Context for Bitcoin

Loeb framed his involvement in Ulbricht’s case as part of broader criminal justice reform, linking it to his broader philanthropy efforts on education and concerns over opportunity and income inequality. He highlighted three categories for clemency: the wrongly convicted, the rehabilitated, and those with disproportionately harsh sentences. Ulbricht, who acknowledged wrongdoing on Silk Road while denying murder-for-hire allegations, fit the latter category in Loeb’s assessment.

The episode highlights ongoing tensions between law enforcement, Bitcoin innovation, and the libertarian culture that makes up a large part of the U.S. public. Silk Road, one of the earliest Bitcoin marketplaces, remains a reference point in debates over decentralization, privacy, and regulatory overreach. Similar cases continue to draw attention in the Bitcoin community, including Bitcoin activist Ian Freeman, the developers of the Samourai Wallet privacy tool, and Roman Storm of Tornado Cash—all facing charges viewed by many as attacks on Libertarian leaders, the freedom of commerce, self-custody and financial privacy tools.

This post Dan Loeb Reveals DOJ Threat to Trump Over Ross Ulbricht Commutation in Final Hours of First Term first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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Full Text of Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Bill Officially Published, Revealing 20-Year Lock-Up, Proof-of-Reserve Mandates

The complete legislative text for bitcoin-favorite bill H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026, has been made public on the U.S. Congress website, offering lawmakers, industry stakeholders, and the public their first detailed look at the mechanics behind a bill that would permanently codify a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve into federal law.

The bill, introduced May 21 by Rep. Nick Begich (R-AK) alongside co-lead Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) and more than 20 co-sponsors, was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services upon introduction. 

While the legislation’s broad contours — consolidating federally held Bitcoin under Treasury oversight and building on President Trump’s March 2025 executive order — were known at introduction, the full text reveals a sweeping architecture of custody rules, transparency requirements, and acquisition guardrails that go well beyond the executive action it seeks to codify.

Central to the bill is a mandatory 20-year holding period on all BTC deposited into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, during which no holdings may be “sold, swapped, auctioned, encumbered, or otherwise disposed of for any purpose”. 

That lock-up clock resets with each new deposit, meaning BTC seized through criminal or civil forfeiture proceedings — designated in the bill as “qualifying Bitcoin” — would be essentially untouchable for two decades upon transfer to the reserve. 

After that period, the Treasury Secretary may recommend offloading no more than 10% of reserve assets during any two-year window, subject to Congressional review.

Proof of Reserves for U.S. Bitcoin 

The full text also mandates a “Proof of Reserve” system requiring quarterly public cryptographic attestations of all holdings, independent third-party audits, and Comptroller General oversight — a level of on-chain transparency unprecedented for a federal financial program. 

Non-Bitcoin digital assets acquired by the government, such as Ethereum or other forfeited cryptocurrencies, would be held in a separate Digital Asset Stockpile, with proceeds from any dispositions directed toward expanding the Bitcoin reserve or reducing the national debt.

Perhaps notably, the bill explicitly prohibits the government from using any new borrowing, new taxes, or deficit spending to acquire BTC. 

Instead, it directs the Treasury and Commerce Departments to jointly study budget-neutral acquisition pathways within 180 days of enactment — including conversion of non-Bitcoin stockpile assets, Federal Reserve surplus remittances, and gold certificate revaluations.

The bill also opens a voluntary state participation program, allowing states to store their own BTC holdings in segregated Treasury accounts, while affirming that no provision may be construed to authorize seizure of privately held Bitcoin.

The bill now awaits action in the House Financial Services Committee.

This post Full Text of Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Bill Officially Published, Revealing 20-Year Lock-Up, Proof-of-Reserve Mandates first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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The Hyperinflation of 1971 at the Kindergarten

I’m pretty sure it was 1971, but it could have been 1972. In any case, it was in kindergarten, and I was five years old. Our teachers had set up a system to motivate us kids to behave well. They had hung a big board on the wall, with all of our names listed. If you were particularly well-behaved, kind, helpful, or polite, they drew a black dot next to your name. Misbehave, and they gave you a red one. It was all about following the kindergarten rules, and the absolute transparency of it motivated most of us to try our best.

At some point, an extra prize was introduced for exceptionally good behavior: a small piece of fabric. From the group’s standpoint, that was worth much more than the top ranking in a row of black dots. And it was tangible. You could prove your elite status, even out in the sandbox.

Eventually, a trading system developed between us kids. For a scrap of fabric, you could get a bucket of sifted sand. For two, you could get a piece of candy. Suddenly, we could trade labor (sifting sand) for status symbols or sweets.

Then one day, a new teacher arrived. For whatever reason, she much more generously handed out those scraps of fabric. She simply changed the rules governing their distribution. All of a sudden, everyone had them, and you had to spend four for a piece of candy instead of two. Some of the kids started to complain. Their hard-earned scraps of fabric were now worth less, and they demanded more of them.

As you’d expect, the fabric scraps were given out more and more freely. Before long, anyone could take as many as they wanted. Eventually, they were lying around all over the place. They were worthless. No one wanted them anymore. You couldn’t trade them for anything. And so, at just five years old, I experienced genuine hyperinflation.

What does this have to do with Bitcoin?

In kindergarten, the rules were simply changed. The new teacher wanted to be nice, we kids whined, and suddenly more and more fabric scraps were handed out.

The rules of Bitcoin simply cannot be changed.

It’s a completely different story with our fiat currencies. They too have rules. The problem is that no one can ensure those rules are actually followed. Here is an example: the European Central Bank is not allowed to permanently finance governments through bond purchases, yet it does so anyway, brazenly and with no one doing—or even being able to do—anything about it. And who would intervene anyway?

Here’s another example. The Maastricht Treaty’s Stability and Growth Pact stipulated that the budget deficits of EU member states could not exceed 3% of their GDP, although permissible exceptions were built in. However, between 2000 and 2010, the Stability Criteria were repeatedly violated without sanctions—not only by Greece (11 times) but also by larger countries such as Italy (seven times), France (six times), and Germany (five times). According to the Maastricht Treaty, there are clear sanctions for countries that unlawfully fail to adhere to the deficit limit. But not once has such a sanction been imposed. No attempt was ever even made.

This may have been politically expedient and justified for whatever reason, but it shows how difficult it is for us to adhere to the rules. It’s like the New Year’s resolutions that we make with the greatest of convictions, but then usually don’t stick to for very long. The result is what matters. Currencies inflate and, sooner or later, become worthless. The U.S. dollar has lost 97% of its value over the last hundred years. The British pound, which originally represented a pound of silver, has suffered the same fate. All because more and more new dollars, euros, or pounds have been created, or to put it differently, printed.

The outcome is the same: when the fabric scraps become worthless, everyone who holds them loses their wealth.

This cannot happen with Bitcoin. Its rules are fixed, and no one controls the system nor can they simply change those rules.

Discover more in Bitcoin: The Honest Money!
This excerpt is just the beginning. Dive deeper into how inflation devalues your money, your savings, and your time in Bitcoin: The Honest Money by Alex von Frankenberg, Ph.D. The paperback is available now.

Order your copy here!

This post The Hyperinflation of 1971 at the Kindergarten first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Alex v. Frankenberg.

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Bitcoin’s Pullback Tests Institutional Adoption Narrative as Pompliano Stays Bullish

Bitcoin’s recent price decline is testing one of the asset’s most prominent bullish narratives: that institutional adoption will stabilize volatility and support long-term growth.

Despite the downturn, ProCap Financial CEO Anthony Pompliano thinks that the broader trajectory remains intact, framing the current weakness as a natural phase in Bitcoin’s maturation into a mainstream financial asset.

Speaking on CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” Pompliano said Bitcoin’s integration into traditional finance is accelerating, pointing to growing interest from major institutions such as BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. 

According to Pompliano, this shift represents the realization of a long-anticipated transition from a niche, ideologically driven asset to a widely held portfolio allocation.

“Bitcoin is maturing into a traditional finance asset,” Pompliano said, adding that institutional demand signals “what mass adoption looks like.”

Bitcoin has come under pressure in recent weeks, with prices retreating amid broader risk-off sentiment and capital rotation into equities, particularly in high-growth sectors like artificial intelligence and newly listed public companies. 

The downturn has revived concerns that Bitcoin’s adoption cycle may be nearing saturation, limiting its ability to deliver the outsized returns seen in prior cycles.

Some argue that Bitcoin’s earlier growth was driven largely by rapid user adoption and speculative inflows — dynamics that may be harder to replicate now that the asset has reached a more mature phase. 

As the CNBC host noted, the “adoption story” may have already peaked.

At the same time, some market participants, including Strategy’s Michael Saylor, have suggested capital could be rotating out of crypto into other high-momentum opportunities, including upcoming IPOs and AI-linked investments.

Pompliano: Rotation from bitcoin is natural, not structural

Speaking with CNBC, Pompliano pushed back on the idea that capital outflows signal structural weakness. Instead, he characterized the movement as typical portfolio rebalancing behavior.

“Capital chases momentum and returns,” he said, noting that Bitcoin’s liquidity makes it a convenient source of funds when investors pursue new opportunities.

The current market environment highlights a tension in Bitcoin’s evolution. While institutional adoption has broadened its investor base, it has also tied Bitcoin more closely to macroeconomic trends and cross-asset flows.

As a result, Bitcoin increasingly behaves like a risk asset during periods of market stress, declining alongside equities rather than acting as an uncorrelated hedge. This dynamic has complicated the narrative of Bitcoin as “digital gold,” particularly in the short term.

Still, Pompliano maintains that Bitcoin’s core fundamentals remain unchanged. He pointed to the network’s continued operation, decentralization, and predictable issuance schedule as evidence that the asset’s long-term value proposition is intact.

“Show me what has changed,” he said. “The network continues to do everything it is designed to do.”

Bitcoin as a ‘Savings Technology’

Pompliano reiterated his long-held view of Bitcoin as a hedge against fiat currency debasement, arguing that persistent government spending and monetary expansion underpin its long-term case.

He described Bitcoin as a “savings technology,” highlighting its historical compound annual growth rates — approximately 60% over the past decade and over 30% in the last three years — as evidence of its ability to preserve and grow capital over time.

In his view, Bitcoin’s role is less about short-term speculation and more about long-term wealth protection, akin to gold or real estate for previous generations.

This post Bitcoin’s Pullback Tests Institutional Adoption Narrative as Pompliano Stays Bullish first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Michael Saylor Calls Bitcoin’s Drop a ‘Capital Rotation’ to AI as BTC Slides Below $62,000

Bitcoin fell to as low as $61,400 overnight before trimming losses to $62,400 in premarket hours Thursday, down 7% over the past 24 hours and more than 14% over the past week. Strategy and Michael Saylor’s MSTR is down nearly 15% in 5 trading days.

The drop has pushed bitcoin into a technical bear market, with bitcoin now off 22.7% from its four-week high, wiping out more than $600 billion in total crypto market value.

At the center of the debate is Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, who took to X on Thursday morning to offer his read on the selloff. 

“Capital markets are funding the AI buildout at historic scale: ~$400B over 6 months,” Saylor wrote. “Bitcoin ETFs have seen ~$4B of outflows since May 14, pressuring BTC. This is a capital rotation, not a Bitcoin impairment. Volatility creates opportunity.”

Saylor’s thesis holds that institutions are pulling money from bitcoin and redirecting it into artificial intelligence infrastructure — a trade, not a verdict on the asset. The AI spending figures give his argument weight. Wall Street consensus puts combined hyperscaler capital expenditures above $600 billion for 2026 alone, with CreditSights estimating roughly $450 billion of that flowing into AI hardware, servers, and networking gear.

Saylor sells some bitcoin 

But Saylor’s words arrived with a footnote that bears found hard to ignore. Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder in the world with 843,706 BTC, disclosed in a June 1 Form 8-K that it sold 32 bitcoin between May 26 and May 31 at an average price of $77,135 per coin, raising $2.5 million net of expenses. The stated purpose: to fund dividend payments on the company’s STRC preferred shares.

In dollar terms, the sale is a rounding error against a position worth roughly $61 billion. In psychological terms, the market treated it as a break in character. 

Strategy had not sold a single bitcoin since late 2022, and Saylor’s identity as an unwavering bitcoin accumulator had become a market signal in its own right. Analysts said the move deepened bearish sentiment and accelerated the price decline.

Two weeks ago and one week before the sale, Strategy shifted its focus from buying bitcoin to strengthening its balance sheet, repurchasing $1.5 billion of its 0% convertible notes due 2029 for approximately $1.38 billion in cash—an 8% discount that reduced its debt obligations by roughly $120 million. 

The move lowered the company’s outstanding convertible debt from $8.2 billion to $6.7 billion while leaving it with an $871 million cash reserve. At the time, Strategy held 843,738 BTC at the time and said it planned to rebuild its liquidity buffer through future capital raises.

This post Michael Saylor Calls Bitcoin’s Drop a ‘Capital Rotation’ to AI as BTC Slides Below $62,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin ATMs: The Canary in the Coal Mine

State regulators have been quietly banning Bitcoin ATMs. An entire subsection of the Bitcoin ecosystem is being deemed illegal and shut down. And since there’s not much of a cross-section between people who are chronically online and cash bitcoin buyers, it’s not getting a lot of attention. But the Bitcoin ATM ecosystem represents $3.63 billion, with a B, dollars going into bitcoin every year, and that’s just in the United States. 

Beyond the financials, Bitcoin ATMs are vital to maintaining self-sovereignty in the system. A Bitcoin ATM enables something no other service in the financial industry can: it lets you walk up with cash, no bank account, no credit check, no exchange account, and walk away with bitcoin in a wallet only you control. 

Perhaps it’s the self-sovereignty the regulators don’t like. Alas, they’re blaming the boogeyman, Fraud. 

Total bans, making Bitcoin ATMs illegal, have already been enacted in Indiana, Tennessee and Minnesota. De facto bans are also in place, creating limits that make it impossible to operate with any net profit in California, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Virginia. 

All of the bans and regulations are, of course, done under the guise of “protecting the consumer,” but legislation is not stopping fraud. The chain of fraud is easy to track, and Bitcoin ATM operators are doing just that, joining forces to form a coalition and fight back. 

No other industry is more heavily scrutinized than a fully licensed MSB (money services business) carrying MTLs (money transmission licenses) operating cash businesses subject to FinCEN’s AML KYC regulations. 

The fraud argument is selectively applied to Bitcoin ATMs because it’s politically easy. It’s also caught in the crosshairs of the AARP’s two-billion-dollar operating budget. But the facts don’t support the narrative. Across the broader financial industry, the standard rate of fraud is somewhere between 3 – 5%. It’s only 1.2% at Bitcoin ATMs. In other words, 98.8% of Bitcoin ATM transactions are legitimate. 

Why aren’t the states banning Western Union or Visa gift cards? Or robocalls, for that matter? 

The median Bitcoin ATM transaction is $300; 80% of all transactions are under $1,000. The average ATM customer is someone putting $50, $100, or $500 at a time into an appreciating asset, the same way someone DCAs on an exchange. The repeat purchase average is every 24 days, and the average lifetime spend per customer is $12k. Per the Federal Reserve’s own research, Bitcoin ATM’s primary users are the 24.6 million unbanked and underbanked Americans who are “disproportionately Black, Hispanic, immigrant, rural, low-income.” They’re moving $20–$100 at a gas station because they don’t have a bank account. States aren’t banning speculative tools; they’re banning legitimate financial access for people who already have the fewest options.

The “fraud” is just a Trojan horse. The banning won’t stop with ATMs. “A canary in a coal mine” is a metaphor for an early warning sign of impending danger or failure. While the President tries to claim the USA as the “Bitcoin capital of the World” his own justice department has put industry developers in prison. Another trend we cannot allow. 

In order for Bitcoin to succeed, we need all sections of the Bitcoin ecosystem to thrive. Similarly, in order for the industry to thrive here in the United States, we need the States to maintain their rights. 

If the banning is allowed to stand, it will not stop with just ATMs. This is a test case for “ban first, ask questions never.” Both the current and previous administrations have proposed a litany of bills that would similarly ban other parts of the ecosystem, encroaching on the rights of nearly everyone interacting with the bitcoin network in one way or another. 

A short list of some of the bills that came close: 

S.5267 — Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2022: explicitly named wallet providers, miners, validators and others as MSBs (triggering KYC/AML law). 

S.2669 — Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2023: reintroduced the same general approach of treating digital asset providers/facilitators as BSA financial institutions. S.2355 — CANSEE Act: targeted DeFi facilitators/backers and sought to apply AML/sanctions obligations to DeFi-style activity. 

S.3867 — Digital Asset Sanctions Compliance Enhancement Act: targeted transaction facilitators and platforms for sanctions-related prohibitions. 

And H.R.3684 — Infrastructure Act: which was enacted and sparked a debate around the definition of “exchanges and brokers” which initially included miners, node operators and software developers despite the fact that the required reporting would have been technically impossible. The Treasury and IRS eventually narrowed their scope before the bill was implemented. But how many in the industry knew how close this was to becoming law? 

We cannot let them define self-custody wallets as “money laundering tools,” P2P exchanges as “unlicensed money transmission,” Lightning nodes as “unregulated payment processing,” or Bitcoin ATMs as “fraudulent activity.” 

The entire promise of Bitcoin is that no one can stop you from holding and transacting with your own money. The Bitcoin ATM is where that promise meets physical reality. A person with cash and a cell phone can participate in a global, censorship-resistant financial network without asking anyone’s permission. 

Let’s keep it that way. 

If the state can eliminate the only way to go from cash to self-custody, then the self-custody right is theoretical. It exists only for people who already have bank accounts and exchange

relationships, which is to say, people who already have permission. The bitcoin ATM is the canary. If it dies and nobody notices, the coal mine is next.

This is a guest post by Michelle Weekley. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Bitcoin ATMs: The Canary in the Coal Mine first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Michelle Weekley.

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The 2036 Issue: Nobody Even Noticed

A coffee shop in Lagos accepts payment in seconds. A manufacturer in São Paulo settles an invoice with a supplier in Ho Chi Minh City. A freelancer in Bangalore receives her weekly pay from a startup in Austin. All of this moves on top of Bitcoin. None of them are thinking about Bitcoin. 

This is 2036. And the most important thing about how money works today is that almost nobody understands how it works. 

Ten years ago, I wrote that Bitcoin would become the TCP/IP of money, an open settlement layer that everything else runs on top of, invisible to the people using it. That comparison turned out to be almost literally correct. 

Trillions of dollars move across the Bitcoin network every day. Most of it is denominated in dollars, euros, reais, naira, pesos, rupees — stablecoins pegged to local and reserve currencies, routed over Bitcoin’s settlement infrastructure. The businesses and individuals on either end of these transactions mostly don’t know. They see their bank, their wallet, their payment app. The protocol underneath is as invisible to them as TCP/IP is to someone checking their email. 

This didn’t happen overnight. It happened the way all protocol adoption happens: driven by necessity in places the existing system failed, then all at once, as the tooling caught up and the economics became obvious. 

The structural shift started with wallets. When Spark made it possible to hold dollars, local currencies, and bitcoin all on a single address in a non-custodial way, it removed the last meaningful friction between these three things. One wallet. One address. Dollars for spending, bitcoin for saving, local currency when you need it. No separate apps, no bridge transactions, no counterparty holding your money overnight. 

That design choice changed the math on global custody. Today a double-digit percentage of all deposits worldwide sit on infrastructure where the depositor holds the keys. This happened because people and businesses were never asked to choose between convenience and ownership. The wallet just worked. The custody model was built into the protocol, not bolted on as a feature. 

Banks used to hold your money because there was no practical alternative. Now the alternative is better. It’s faster, cheaper, and you actually own what’s in your account. The shift was less an ideological revolution than a product one. Better wallets won.

Because all of this runs on Bitcoin’s settlement network, something happened that most people didn’t predict: Bitcoin became the default savings layer for billions of people who were just trying to use dollars. 

The logic was straightforward. You have a wallet. It holds stablecoins and bitcoin. You spend the stablecoins. The bitcoin sits there. Over the past decade, anyone who left money in bitcoin watched their savings outperform any local currency and most investment products. Not because of speculation — because of sustained demand for the only monetary asset with a fixed supply running the protocol layer underneath the global money grid. 

So people saved in bitcoin. Hundreds of millions of them. Then billions. Not because they read the whitepaper or attended a conference. Because their wallet had two balances, and one of them kept going up relative to everything else. The decision to save in bitcoin became as unremarkable as the decision to send money in dollars. Same wallet. Same rails. 

Businesses followed the same path. Corporate treasuries started holding bitcoin alongside their operating stablecoins. First small companies in emerging markets, where currency devaluation made the case urgent. Then larger ones. Then multinationals. The adoption curve tracked the same pattern as enterprise internet adoption in the late 1990s. Once the infrastructure proved reliable, the only question was how much exposure, not whether. 

The newest development is that people are starting to use bitcoin itself for transactions. It’s still early. But the trend became visible this year, and the direction is clear. 

When your savings are in bitcoin and you’re paying someone who also holds bitcoin, denominating the transaction in bitcoin is just simpler. No conversion. No intermediary currency. The payment stays on the network where both parties already hold their money. 

It started in pockets: high-value B2B settlements, freelancer payments, commerce between people who keep most of their wealth in bitcoin. A small fraction of total volume. But when the infrastructure makes it equally easy to send bitcoin or stablecoins, the question of which one to use becomes about which money you trust, not a technical constraint. 

For most of Bitcoin’s first twenty-five years, the maximalist vision was aspirational. People wanted to use bitcoin as money but the infrastructure wasn’t there. Now the infrastructure is there, and the adoption is coming from a direction no one expected. People aren’t starting with Bitcoin ideology and working toward usability. They’re starting with a great wallet that happens to run on Bitcoin, discovering that their savings do better in bitcoin, and then choosing to transact in it because that’s already where their money lives.

The rails created the savers. The savers are becoming the spenders. 

There’s another force accelerating this, and it has nothing to do with human preference. 

Most commerce in 2036 involves AI agents acting on behalf of people and businesses. Your agent books travel, negotiates vendor contracts, pays invoices, manages subscriptions. Millions of these agents transact with each other continuously, and they’ve converged on bitcoin as their preferred settlement asset. Not because someone programmed them to. Because when agents optimize for speed, finality, and minimal counterparty risk across jurisdictions, they arrive at bitcoin on their own. 

The math is simple from an agent’s perspective. When two agents are settling value between their principals, converting through fiat rails adds cost, delay, and trust dependencies. Bitcoin settles in minutes on a global network with no intermediary. Agents figured out what took humans a decade to accept: if both sides already hold bitcoin, there’s no reason to route through anything else. 

Net settlement between agents now accounts for a growing share of daily bitcoin transaction volume. An agent handling purchasing for a German automaker and an agent managing receivables for a Korean battery supplier don’t need dollars or euros or won as an intermediary. They net the obligations and settle the difference in bitcoin. Faster. Cheaper. Final. 

The result is that bitcoin is becoming the native money of machine commerce the same way it became the native savings asset for humans. Both happened for structural reasons, not ideological ones. The protocol is neutral, programmable, and globally accessible. For agents optimizing across millions of transactions a day, that’s all that matters. 

The global monetary system is being rebuilt from the protocol layer up. Open infrastructure. Self-custodial by default. Bitcoin settling everything underneath. Stablecoins as the interface layer. And increasingly, bitcoin as the currency of choice for people who understand where this is going. 

Most people still don’t think about any of this when they send money. They don’t need to.

Don’t miss your chance to own The 2036 Issue — featuring articles written by many influential figures in the space pondering the challenges of the next decade!

This piece is featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The 2036 Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

This post The 2036 Issue: Nobody Even Noticed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by David Marcus.

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Charles Schwab Sets Mid-2027 Target for Advisor Bitcoin and Crypto Spot Trading 

Charles Schwab, the country’s largest custodian for registered investment advisors, is on track to roll out spot cryptocurrency trading, transfers, and custody services for its advisor channel by mid-2027 — a move that could reshape how trillions of dollars flow into digital assets through professional wealth management.

The disclosure came at Schwab’s Advisor Services Midyear Media Roundtable on May 28, where Jalina Kerr, Managing Director and Head of Advisor Experience, confirmed the timeline. 

The advisor product is distinct from what Schwab rolled out to retail clients this spring. In April 2026, the bank announced Schwab Crypto, a spot Bitcoin trading service for individual brokerage account holders, built through Charles Schwab Premier Bank and executed via sub-custodian Paxos. 

That product launched at 75 basis points per trade, triggered debate about whether advisors would find it cost-efficient relative to crypto ETFs, and was restricted from New York and Louisiana residents.

The 2027 advisor build is a different animal. Registered investment advisors require custody infrastructure — the ability to hold client assets in segregated accounts with full record-keeping, reporting, and compliance integration. 

That means Schwab is not just adding a trading button. The firm needs to wire spot crypto into the same custody rails its 16,000+ advisory firms already use for equities, fixed income, and alternatives. 

Kerr noted that advisors currently route client crypto exposure through exchange-traded products on the platform, but demand for direct spot access has risen sharply.

Why the Schwab advisor channel changes everything

The retail crypto story has been told for years — apps, wallets, exchanges, ETFs. The advisor channel is where the next phase of institutional adoption plays out. RIAs collectively manage assets that dwarf most retail platforms, and their clients tend to be higher-net-worth, longer-term holders who want crypto held inside the same account view as their stock and bond portfolios. 

Schwab’s platform custodies roughly $10 trillion in assets across its advisory network, making even a modest allocation shift toward spot crypto a flow event of significant scale.

The competitive dynamic is also shifting fast. Fidelity Digital Assets already offers crypto custody and trading solutions for wealth managers, giving it a meaningful head start. Anchorage Digital has pushed into the RIA market through its acquisition of Securitize For Advisors. Coinbase Prime has built institutional infrastructure that Schwab’s entry would challenge. 

Kerr herself pointed to a core friction: digital assets are not regulated the same way as traditional brokerage and securities products. Every step of the custody chain — from deposit to withdrawal — requires careful legal and compliance review. 

The bank has to define which digital assets qualify, establish safekeeping standards, and satisfy bank-level and broker-dealer-level rules simultaneously, given that Charles Schwab Premier Bank serves as the custodial entity for the retail product.

The mid-2027 target reflects this reality. It is a committed internal roadmap, not exploratory language — a meaningful distinction from the “monitoring the space” posture large banks held for years. 

CEO Rick Wurster has previously discussed Schwab’s appetite for crypto acquisitions if valuations align with strategic goals, and floated the possibility of a stablecoin, suggesting the 2027 advisor launch sits within a larger digital asset build-out rather than a standalone initiative.

This post Charles Schwab Sets Mid-2027 Target for Advisor Bitcoin and Crypto Spot Trading  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Coinbase Exec Sees Path to Crypto’s ‘Dodd-Frank Moment’ as CLARITY Act Heads for Senate Floor

The fate of America’s current crypto market may hinge on a Senate vote expected this month, and few people are watching it closer than Coinbase Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad.

In an interview on Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria earlier today, Shirzad made the case that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — known as the CLARITY Act — represents the most significant financial regulatory legislation since Dodd-Frank, and that passage is within reach.

“This will be the biggest financial regulatory bill that Congress has done in quite some time, certainly since Dodd-Frank,” Shirzad said. “What this does is it creates clarity for the crypto sector.”

The stakes are high. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis issued a blunt warning on X on May 29, telling lawmakers this Congress represents the final window for action. “The next window for digital asset legislation after this Congress is likely 2030,” Lummis wrote. “Until then, developers remain exposed with no legal protections, and law enforcement remains without the tools to hold bad actors accountable. The CLARITY Act solves both.”

The bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote on May 14, with Democratic Senators Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland crossing party lines to support it. But the full floor vote is a different math problem. The bill needs 60 votes to clear the Senate, and with November’s midterm elections compressing the legislative calendar, the window for passage is measured in weeks.

Shirzad expressed confidence that the numbers are there.

 “The Republican caucus is pretty unified,” he said. “The president’s been putting a shoulder into this, and there’s a very large group of Democrats who want to get this done. We’ve got about 80 Democrats in the House who voted for this, and I think we’ll get a proportional number in the Senate.” 

U.S. government’s pro-crypto legislation

President Trump has made crypto legislation a White House priority, posting on Truth Social with a pledge to codify a “future-proof” digital asset market — and his team is targeting a July 4 signing.

Shirzad framed the bill not as a crypto-versus-banks fight, but as an expansion of opportunity for the traditional financial sector. 

“This will be the first piece of legislation since the 90s that gives banks new authorization to get into the crypto space,” he said. “I know JPMorgan wants to get into it. Every other big bank wants to get into the crypto sector. We welcome their entry.”

Coinbase’s confidence extends beyond legislation. The exchange scored a significant regulatory win on May 29, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued guidance that cleared Coinbase Financial Markets to connect U.S. institutional clients to global crypto derivatives markets. 

Coinbase Financial Markets became the first CFTC-regulated futures commission merchant to offer domestic clients access to global crypto perpetuals and options — instruments that account for roughly 80% of all global crypto trading volume. The exchange acquired derivatives platform Deribit, which holds over $31 billion in Bitcoin options open interest, and began institutional onboarding immediately. Retail access is planned for a later date.

“This is a big regulatory unlock,” Shirzad said. “It shows that U.S. regulators are trying to execute on what the president has said — which is to bring the crypto markets onto U.S. soil.”

On the state of the broader crypto market, Shirzad pushed back against any notion that the big trades are behind investors. 

“We’re even more bullish about crypto as a technology,” he said, pointing to the integration of blockchain-based infrastructure across major banks and financial services firms. “Crypto is now the accepted upgrade of the financial system.” 

He described the coming era as “tokenized” — financial applications built on blockchain rails — with the CLARITY Act providing the legal foundation that would unlock participation from both crypto-native firms and legacy institutions.

One live issue remains the stablecoin rewards provision. Senators Thom Tillis and Angela Alsobrooks brokered a compromise in May that bars rewards on stablecoins that are economically or functionally equivalent to bank deposit interest, while preserving activity-based incentives. Shirzad said the language is settled. 

“The key architects of that compromise — Senator Tillis and Senator Alsobrooks — have been clear that the language is fixed,” he said. “This is the compromise they intend to defend with their colleagues.”

Dimon calls Coinbase’s Armstrong “full of sh*t” 

On May 28, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon sat down with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business and fired a direct shot at the bill — and at Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

In the interview and in remarks at the Reagan National Economic Forum, Dimon called Armstrong’s characterization of the banking industry’s position on the bill dishonest, using language that circulated widely across social media.

Armstrong responded with a hockey-themed meme that drew broad support from across the crypto industry.

Dimon’s core objection centers on the stablecoin rewards provision — the same one Coinbase spent months fighting to protect. He argued that allowing crypto platforms to offer yield-like rewards on stablecoins gives those platforms a structural advantage over chartered banks, which operate under a different set of rules.

“If you want to be a bank, be a bank,” Dimon told Bartiromo. He also cited concerns about anti-money laundering compliance and Bank Secrecy Act enforcement, calling the bill unenforceable in its current form and saying banks would not accept it without changes.

The standoff is not without irony. Coinbase uses JPMorgan as its own bank — a point Shirzad made unprompted.

“JP Morgan is our bank, and they’ve worked with us and stayed by our side, even through the Biden administration,” Shirzad said. 

This post Coinbase Exec Sees Path to Crypto’s ‘Dodd-Frank Moment’ as CLARITY Act Heads for Senate Floor first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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The Business Owner’s Guide to Vertical Integration with Bitcoin

While Bitcoin is often viewed strictly as a financial asset, a growing number of 2026 operators are treating it as something entirely different: a stack of operational capabilities to vertically integrate.

In traditional manufacturing, vertical integration is one of the oldest competitive moves in the playbook. A car company that owns its tire factory is vertically integrated; Apple, by owning its silicon, operating system, storefront, and device, is the modern textbook case. The structural advantages, lower costs, fewer dependencies, and tighter control over quality, are now being claimed by companies integrating Bitcoin into multiple stages of how they produce, hold, move, and earn money. The businesses furthest along this path aren’t necessarily those with the largest treasuries, but those that treat Bitcoin as a core infrastructure.

This article is the operator’s guide to that decision. We define the vertical integration of Bitcoin in concrete terms, lay out the four stages every integrated company moves through, provide a diagnostic to figure out how far you should climb, and deliver a sequenced roadmap for getting there.

What “vertical integration” means when applied to Bitcoin

In the classical sense, vertical integration means owning multiple stages of your supply chain rather than renting them. A vertically integrated business produces its own inputs, makes its own product, and controls its own distribution. Each stage feeds the next. Each stage adds margin that would otherwise leak to a vendor.

Applied to Bitcoin, vertical integration means owning multiple stages of how your business interacts with Bitcoin, rather than renting any single piece of it. The four stages are:

1. Accept: taking Bitcoin from your customers as payment, instead of (or alongside) cards and ACH
2. Hold: putting Bitcoin on your balance sheet as a treasury reserve asset, instead of (or alongside) cash
3. Produce: generating Bitcoin yourself by mining, converting electricity and hardware into BTC at cost
4. Build: offering Bitcoin products, infrastructure, or financial instruments to other businesses or to investors as a revenue line

A company that does all four owns the full operational stack. A company that does two has integrated partially. A company that does one is using Bitcoin but not yet integrated. None of these are wrong. But the deeper the integration, the more durable the strategic position, because each stage feeds the next. Payments fund reserves. Reserves enable productive deployment and underwrite financial products. Financial products attract capital that funds more reserves. Productive deployment generates more Bitcoin. The flywheel runs in this direction for a reason.

Stage 01: Accept

The first stage is taking Bitcoin from your customers. For most businesses with a payment terminal or a checkout flow, accepting Bitcoin via the Lightning Network is the lowest-friction entry into the integrated stack. The economics are not subtle. Credit card processing typically costs 2.5% to 3.5% per transaction, settles in two to three business days, and exposes the merchant to chargeback risk. Lightning settles in seconds, costs less than 0.1%, and is final on receipt.

The clearest case study is Steak ‘n Shake. The chain enabled Lightning payments across all U.S. locations in May 2025. At the Bitcoin 2026 Conference, executive Michael Boes reported that the company saves approximately 50% on processing fees when customers pay with Bitcoin compared to traditional credit card transactions, and that universal Bitcoin adoption among its customer base would translate to roughly $6 million in annual savings. Same-store sales rose 11% in Q2 2025 and accelerated to 15% in Q3.

What makes Steak ‘n Shake an integration case rather than just a payments case is what happens after the customer pays. Bitcoin payments do not get auto-converted to dollars. They flow into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve on the company’s balance sheet, which underwrites a $0.21-per-hour Bitcoin bonus paid to hourly employees and helps fund a menu overhaul that includes 100% grass-fed beef. Stage 01 (Accept) is wired directly into Stage 02 (Hold). The savings on the payment rail do not sit in a P&L line. They become inventory in the strategic reserve.

This is the first principle of vertical integration applied to Bitcoin. A move taken in isolation is just a feature. A move wired to another stage is integration.

For many operators, Stage 01 is no longer a project. As of March 30, 2026, Square switched on Bitcoin Lightning payments by default for eligible merchants globally, covering approximately 4 million businesses. Bitcoin payments through Square are free through 2026, with a 1% flat fee applying from 2027. The first stage of the integrated stack is effectively the default for most merchants. The integration question is whether you wire the inflow to the next stage or let it auto-convert to fiat and disappear.

A side-by-side, on a $100 transaction:

Stage 02: Hold

The second stage is putting Bitcoin on your balance sheet. Where Stage 01 is a payments decision, Stage 02 is a treasury decision. The question every CFO has had to answer for a century is where to park retained earnings.

The default answer of cash and short-term Treasuries is a slow leak when measured against a fixed-supply asset. Stage 02 says a portion of the company’s reserves should be denominated in something that cannot be diluted by anyone, including its issuer.

Try the Bitcoin Treasury Simulator with any stock ticker.

The canonical example is the work Michael Saylor began in August 2020, when his company (then MicroStrategy, now Strategy) became the first major public corporation to declare Bitcoin its primary treasury reserve asset. As of June 1, 2026, Strategy holds 843,706 BTC at an average cost basis of approximately $75,500 per coin, an aggregate position of $60.4 billion that represents nearly 4% of all Bitcoin in existence. Saylor’s argument was never that Bitcoin would go up. It was that cash was going down, and the right unit of account for a long-duration corporate treasury was the asset with the most credible scarcity.

Strategy is the deepest expression of Stage 02 in existence, but it is not the only shape this stage can take. Mining companies like Marathon and Riot hold mined production rather than selling it. Metaplanet in Japan has built a similar accumulation strategy in the Asian market, providing yen-denominated Bitcoin exposure through a Tokyo-listed structure. Block holds 8,997.89 BTC in its corporate treasury, separated from a further 19,357 BTC held in custody for Cash App customers, and verifies the distinction on-chain through quarterly Proof of Reserves disclosures.

Most operators will not run a 100% Bitcoin treasury. They do not have to. Even a 1% to 5% allocation of retained earnings is a meaningful hedge, and the policy decision to denominate a slice of the balance sheet in Bitcoin is more important than the size of that slice. The board resolution comes first. The accumulation comes after.

A note on custody, which is part of this stage and not separable from it. Holding Bitcoin without controlling the keys is not actually holding Bitcoin. Operators integrating Stage 02 should set up institutional multi-signature cold storage from day one to maximize balance sheet sovereignty. The cost of getting custody wrong is total. The cost of getting it right is a one-time setup fee and a quarterly verification routine.

Stage 03: Produce

The third stage is generating Bitcoin yourself, by mining. This is the most operationally intense stage in the stack and the most niche, but it is also the one that gives the integrated operator the deepest cost advantage. The cost basis of mined Bitcoin is your cost of power and amortized hardware, typically far below the market price of BTC itself. For the right kind of business, that gap is structural margin that no competitor can replicate without similar inputs.

Stage 03 is not for most operators. It requires industrial-scale operations, low-cost electricity (often dedicated power purchase agreements or stranded energy), and operational expertise in data center management. The pure-play public-market exemplars are Marathon Digital (MARA), with roughly 50,000 BTC accumulated almost entirely through self-mining, and Riot Platforms, with approximately 19,000 BTC. Their cost basis is not a market price. It is electricity, hardware depreciation, and operational scale.

What makes Stage 03 integrated rather than isolated is the connection to Stage 02. Both Marathon and Riot retain the majority of their mined production rather than selling it on the open market. The mining operation feeds the treasury directly. Each block reward is inventory for the strategic reserve, denominated in the same asset the company is accumulating long-term.

What makes Stage 03 newly accessible in 2026 is who else is moving into it. Block, through its Proto division, is developing an open-source 3-nanometer custom ASIC chip and a complete mining system designed to make industrial-grade mining accessible to operators who are not themselves miners. The strategic implication is that production is becoming a primitive any sufficiently committed operator can adopt, particularly those with stranded power assets, surplus electricity, or operational synergies with existing energy businesses. A power utility, a data-center operator, an industrial real-estate holder, or a company sitting on cheap behind-the-meter power can now consider Stage 03 in a way that would have been unrealistic five years ago.

For most readers of this article, Stage 03 will not be the right move to integrate. The capital and operational requirements are too specific to most business models. But for the subset whose existing business already produces or controls the inputs, this is the stage with the largest structural margin advantage and the most defensible moat.

Stage 04: Build

The fourth and deepest stage is offering Bitcoin products, infrastructure, or financial instruments to other businesses or to investors, capturing fees, network effects, distribution, or capital as a result. Where the first three stages are about using Bitcoin internally, Stage 04 is about selling Bitcoin-related services and products externally. It is the stage that converts the integrated operator from a Bitcoin user into a Bitcoin business.

Four sub-categories matter inside Stage 04, and they map to different kinds of businesses.

Custody products. Bitkey (a Block product), Casa, and Unchained sell secure Bitcoin storage as a service. The market exists because every Stage 02 operator needs a custody solution and few want to build one in-house. The business model is subscription, hardware sales, and institutional service fees.

Network infrastructure. LQWD Technologies (TSXV: LQWD) is the clearest example. The company holds 262 Bitcoin, with no debt or convertible obligations against the position, but the Bitcoin is not in cold storage. It is deployed as liquidity across a global network of enterprise-grade Lightning nodes, where it earns routing fees on every transaction it helps settle. CEO Shone Anstey has noted the Lightning Network now processes over $1 billion in monthly transaction volume, and LQWD’s own infrastructure has routed more than two million transactions and over 2,012 Bitcoin since launch. The novelty is that the same Bitcoin functions simultaneously as a Stage 02 balance-sheet asset and as Stage 04 productive infrastructure earning fees in the same asset, without selling, lending, or staking it.

Consumer products. Cash App is the most-used Bitcoin on-ramp in the United States, with millions of consumers buying, sending, and now automatically earning Bitcoin through routine app activity. Strike serves a parallel function with a Lightning-first design and global remittance focus. River targets long-term Bitcoin accumulators with low-fee dollar-cost averaging and account-level Lightning support. The strategic point of consumer distribution is moat. A company that owns the on-ramp does not just earn fees, it shapes how an entire generation forms its relationship with the asset.

Bitcoin-backed financial products. This is the fastest-growing sub-category and the one most operators have not yet recognized as part of Stage 04. Strategy is the canonical case. Beginning in 2024 and accelerating through 2026, Strategy has built a full preferred stock suite designed to give institutional and retail investors exposure to Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury thesis without holding Bitcoin directly. The suite currently includes STRF (10% perpetual strife preferred), STRC (variable rate perpetual stretch preferred, currently yielding 11.50% annually paid monthly), STRK (8% perpetual strike preferred), STRD (10% perpetual stride preferred), and STRE. Together, these products represent over $30 billion in remaining issuance capacity under active at-the-market programs.

Saylor describes the category as “digital credit” — an emerging asset class of income instruments built on Bitcoin treasury balance sheets. STRC in particular, with its variable rate, monthly cash payment, and par-targeting mechanism, is designed to compete directly with money market funds and short-duration fixed income.

View the STRC Tracker for live data on Strategy’s Bitcoin accumulation.

The $43+ billion Strategy has raised across equity, preferred, and convertible debt in less than two years has been deployed into Bitcoin acquisition. The reflexive flywheel is the part worth studying closely: the larger Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury grows, the stronger the collateral story behind the preferred stock, the better the preferred stock prices, the more capital it raises, the more Bitcoin Strategy can buy. Stage 04 (Build) and Stage 02 (Hold) reinforce each other directly. This is the integration.

The same model is now being adapted by other operators. Bitcoin-collateralized lending products, structured notes, exchange-traded products, and ABCP-style facilities using Bitcoin treasury equity as underlying collateral are all extensions of the digital credit thesis. For operators with sufficient Bitcoin treasury scale, Stage 04 financial products can become the dominant mechanism by which Stage 02 funds itself.

How to decide how far to integrate

Not every business should integrate all four stages. The right depth depends on what the business already does, what assets it already controls, what kind of capital it can access, and what kind of operational complexity its leadership can absorb. The diagnostic below is the simplest version of the question every operator should answer before choosing how deep to go.

Question 01. Do customers pay your business directly?
If yes, Stage 01 is available immediately and produces measurable value from the first transaction. If most revenue is invoiced or B2B, Stage 01 still applies but the implementation shifts toward Bitcoin invoicing rather than point-of-sale. If the business has no customer payment flow, integration starts at Stage 02 instead.

Question 02. Does your business carry retained earnings or cash reserves on its balance sheet?
If yes, Stage 02 is available at any size from 1% to 100% of reserves. If the business runs lean with no meaningful cash position, Stage 02 is premature and integration begins or ends at Stage 01.

Question 03. Do you control cheap electricity, stranded energy, or capital scale that could support an industrial mining operation?
If yes, Stage 03 becomes feasible and adds the deepest cost-basis advantage in the stack.
If no, Stage 03 should be skipped, not deferred. Most operators will integrate Stages 01, 02, and 04 without ever touching Stage 03.

Question 04. Do you have a technology or platform business, or a balance sheet large enough to support Bitcoin-backed financial products as new revenue?
If yes, Stage 04 is the natural extension of existing capabilities, and the relevant sub-category (custody, infrastructure, consumer, financial products) should match your existing competencies. A fintech goes to consumer products. An infrastructure company goes to network operations. A hardware firm goes to custody devices. A capital-markets-active operator with significant Bitcoin treasury goes to financial products.

Most operators reading this article will land in one of five integration patterns:

The two Pragmatist patterns are worth studying side by side. Both are two-stage integrations. Both wire one stage into another to create a flywheel. But the flywheels run on different inputs and produce different outputs. Steak ‘n Shake’s flywheel runs on customer payments and produces a growing reserve. Strategy’s flywheel runs on capital markets and produces a growing reserve. The destination is the same. The mechanism is different.

Each pattern is a legitimate integration posture. The deeper the integration, the larger the structural moat, but also the larger the operational complexity. Most operators reading this article will and should land in one of the two Pragmatist patterns or in the Builder pattern. Few will be Maximalists. That is the correct distribution.

Three integration patterns, in practice

To make the patterns concrete, here are three companies that exemplify three different shapes and depths of integration in 2026:

Block: the Maximalist. Block owns all four stages. Square (Stage 01), an 8,998 BTC corporate treasury verified on-chain (Stage 02), Proto mining hardware (Stage 03), and Bitkey, Cash App, and Spiral (Stage 04). The total company-wide Bitcoin position, including custodied customer assets, is 28,355 BTC. Block is the working proof that vertical integration of Bitcoin can live inside a single corporate structure across all four stages, and that the integration produces compounding strategic advantages no single-stage competitor can replicate. The takeaway for most operators is not to copy Block. It is to recognize that the integrated maximalist position is now demonstrably possible, which means none of the four stages are theoretical anymore.

Steak ‘n Shake: the Operations Pragmatist. Steak ‘n Shake owns Stages 01 and 02, wired tightly together. Bitcoin sales at the point of payment flow directly into the company’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which underwrites both employee compensation and product reinvestment. Same-store sales rose 18% heading into 2026. Steak ‘n Shake is the practical case for most operators with customer-facing payment flows: pick the two stages your business model already supports, engineer the connection between them, and let each one strengthen the other. The integrated effect is more than additive. The reserve gives the payments program a strategic purpose, and the payments program gives the reserve an organic accumulation engine.

Strategy: the Capital Markets Pragmatist. Strategy owns Stages 02 and 04, wired into a reflexive flywheel that has raised over $43 billion in less than two years. The 818,334 BTC reserve (Stage 02) underwrites the credibility of Strategy’s preferred stock suite (Stage 04), and the preferred stock suite raises capital that funds further Bitcoin acquisition for the reserve. STRC alone, with $30+ billion in remaining ATM issuance capacity across the full preferred stack, demonstrates that Bitcoin-backed financial products can scale to institutional volume. Strategy is the practical case for capital-rich operators with the balance sheet to issue financial products: pick Hold and Build, wire them together, and let capital markets compound the reserve faster than operating cash flow ever could.

The pattern across all three is that vertical integration in Bitcoin does not require maximalism. What it requires is intentionality. Each stage has to be chosen because it fits the business, and each connection between stages has to be engineered deliberately. The operators who get this right end up with structural advantages their competitors cannot easily replicate. The operators who treat Bitcoin as a single decision (buy or don’t) miss the architecture entirely.

A reference map

A sequenced integration roadmap

Vertical integration is not built in a single quarter. It is sequenced. The order of operations matters because each stage builds on the one before it, and each stage requires organizational and operational learning that the next stage assumes. The roadmap below is the path most successfully integrated operators have followed, and the order most operators starting today should follow.

Quarter 1 to 2 — Adopt Stage 01. Enable Bitcoin Lightning payments through Square or a comparable processor. For Square merchants, this is now a setting rather than a project. Decide whether incoming Bitcoin is auto-converted to fiat or held in a wallet. Most operators should auto-convert at first while custody and treasury policy are being formalized.

Quarter 2 to 4 — Build the foundation for Stage 02. Set up institutional multi-signature custody before any meaningful Bitcoin position accumulates. Draft and pass a board policy that defines Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset and authorizes a target allocation, even if the initial allocation is 1% of retained earnings. Maintain 6 to 12 months of operating expenses in fiat as a buffer.

Quarter 4 onward — Wire Stage 01 to Stage 02. Stop auto-converting incoming Bitcoin payments. Route them directly into the strategic reserve. This is the moment integration becomes real. The payments program is no longer a cost-savings initiative. It is an organic Bitcoin accumulation engine that the operator does not have to fund externally. At this point, the operator has reached the Operations Pragmatist pattern.

Year 2 — Evaluate Stage 04 if applicable. For technology, financial, or platform businesses, the second year is the right time to evaluate whether Bitcoin can become a revenue line and which sub-category fits. For operators whose Bitcoin treasury has grown large enough to anchor capital markets activity, financial products become a credible Stage 04 path. For most other operators, integration concludes at the Operations Pragmatist pattern.

Year 3+ — Evaluate Stage 03 if applicable. Mining is the last stage to consider because it requires the most capital, the most operational expertise, and the most clarity about long-term Bitcoin commitment. For operators with energy assets or stranded power, the calculus may justify earlier entry. For most others, Stage 03 is permanent skip rather than deferred consideration.

By Year 3, an operator who has followed this roadmap has built a vertically integrated Bitcoin position that no competitor can replicate without making the same multi-year commitment. The integration is the moat. The Bitcoin position is the byproduct.

The bottom line

Vertical integration of Bitcoin is not a maximalist posture. It is a strategic posture. It can be expressed at any depth from one stage taken seriously to four stages fully wired together, and the patterns vary by which two stages an operator chooses to pair. Steak ‘n Shake pairs Accept with Hold. Strategy pairs Hold with Build. Both are two-stage integrations. Both produce reflexive flywheels. The mechanisms are different. The strategic posture is the same.

What separates an integrated Bitcoin operator from one who has merely bought Bitcoin is the connection between stages. Payments feed reserves. Reserves underwrite financial products. Financial products attract capital that funds more reserves. Productive deployment generates more Bitcoin. The flywheel runs in this direction because each stage produces inputs the next stage consumes.

For most operators in 2026, the right path is the Operations Pragmatist pattern. Stages 01 and 02, tightly coupled, executed over four to six quarters. Steak ‘n Shake is the template. For capital-rich operators with significant Bitcoin treasury and capital-markets capability, the Capital Markets Pragmatist pattern is the more powerful play. Strategy is the template. The companies that will define the next decade of corporate finance are not the ones with the largest Bitcoin holdings. They are the ones that turned Bitcoin into an integrated operating model, picked the right two stages for their business model, and let the connections between the stages compound into a structural advantage their competitors cannot match.

Pick your pattern. Build the connections. Let the integration do the work.

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.

This post The Business Owner’s Guide to Vertical Integration with Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

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U.S. Treasury: The United States Has Seized Nearly $1 Billion of Iran’s Crypto

Speaking at the Reagan National Economic Forum, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that the U.S. has seized roughly $1 billion in Iran-linked cryptocurrency as part of a broader campaign to choke off Tehran’s financial networks.

The disclosures come amid one of the most intense military confrontations the Middle East has seen in decades.

On February 27, 2026, the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a coordinated airstrike campaign targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and Revolutionary Guard command centers. 

Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes across the region, hitting Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. A fragile ceasefire was brokered in early April and is still in the works, but the economic war never stopped.

Enter Operation Economic Fury. Ordered by President Trump and executed by the Treasury Department, the campaign is designed to systematically dismantle every financial lifeline Tehran has left. 

Since its launch, OFAC has sanctioned over 1,000 Iran-linked entities, frozen bank accounts held by Revolutionary Guard-affiliated businesses, and — according to Bessent — reached directly into crypto wallets. 

The largest single action came in late April, when Tether confirmed it froze $344 million in USDT across two Tron blockchain addresses linked to the IRGC, after blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis identified on-chain patterns consistent with known Iranian military wallets. One wallet held roughly $213 million; the other, $131 million.

The total seizure figure has since climbed past $500 million — and Bessent’s most recent comments suggest the running total is approaching $1 billion.

“We will track the funds that Tehran is urgently attempting to transfer abroad and target all financial avenues linked to the regime,” Bessent said.

Bitcoin as a means of payment in Iran

Back in April, Iran reportedly planned to require ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz to pay transit tolls in Bitcoin during a temporary ceasefire with the U.S.

The policy aimed to bypass sanctions and traditional banking rails, giving Iran a way to collect revenue while maintaining control over a critical global oil chokepoint.

The move pushed bitcoin into a geopolitical spotlight, raising operational and legal risks for shipping firms while highlighting how digital assets could be used in sovereign-controlled trade routes.

This post U.S. Treasury: The United States Has Seized Nearly $1 Billion of Iran’s Crypto first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Retired Couple Loses $76,000 Life Savings to Bitcoin ATM Scam, Sues Bitcoin Depot in Federal Court

A class action filed in Idaho accuses the now-bankrupt crypto ATM operator of profiting from fraud while leaving vulnerable consumers unprotected.

A retired Idaho couple has filed a federal class action lawsuit against Bitcoin Depot Inc., alleging the company’s ATM network served as a pipeline for scammers who drained their entire retirement savings — $76,000 — over five consecutive days in August 2025.

Karen and Robert Lacey, named plaintiffs in Lacey et al. v. Bitcoin Depot Inc., et al. (Case No. 1:26-cv-00288-DKG), say fraudsters posing as Norton customer service representatives and FBI agents convinced them their accounts were tied to child pornography and illegal gambling investigations. 

The scammers directed the couple to deposit cash at Bitcoin Depot ATMs between August 9 and August 13, 2025. To reinforce the deception, the fraudsters caused wireless networks labeled “FBI” to appear on the Laceys’ phones — signals that remained visible for months after the deposits.

The 43-page complaint, filed May 11, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, charges that Bitcoin Depot processed each transaction “without meaningful intervention” despite what it calls clear warning signs: first-time users making large cash deposits while on phone calls with unknown parties. 

The lawsuit further alleges the company charges fees of up to 50% per transaction and relies on on-screen warning stickers — a safeguard the plaintiffs call “demonstrably ineffective”.

After Karen and Robert’s son filed a federal crime complaint, Bitcoin Depot issued two $1,000 refund checks — an amount the lawsuit states did not cover even the fees the company collected. Karen Lacey, who was retired when the fraud occurred, has since returned to the workforce, now working rotating hospital shifts.

The complaint cites Bitcoin Depot’s own SEC filings, which state its services “may be exploited to facilitate illegal activity such as fraud” and that its risk management “may not be sufficient”. 

Federal Trade Commission data show Bitcoin ATM fraud losses increased nearly tenfold between 2020 and 2023, with a median victim loss of $10,000. By 2025, the FBI reported Americans lost $333 million to Bitcoin ATM fraud — more than 10,000 victims in a single year.

Bitcoin Depot filing for bankruptcy 

The lawsuit arrives as Bitcoin Depot’s corporate position collapses. The company filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 18, 2026, and shut down its entire network of more than 9,000 ATMs across North America. The company had earlier disclosed a $3.6 million Bitcoin theft from its own wallets in March 2026 and reported a 49.2% revenue decline in Q1 2026.

Plaintiffs seek a jury trial, injunctive relief, compensatory and punitive damages, restitution of fees paid, and attorney’s fees. 

This post Retired Couple Loses $76,000 Life Savings to Bitcoin ATM Scam, Sues Bitcoin Depot in Federal Court first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Anonymous Plaintiff Seeks Legal Title to $293 Billion in Dormant Bitcoin, Without Holding Any Private Keys

A pseudonymous individual calling himself “Noah Doe,” along with two Wyoming LLCs, has filed suit in New York Supreme Court seeking a court declaration that they are the legal owners of 39,069 dormant Bitcoin addresses holding roughly 3.8 million BTC — worth an estimated $293 billion at current prices. 

The case, filed March 11, 2026, and amended May 1, 2026 (Index No. 153119/2026), is believed to be the first attempt in U.S. history to claim title to Bitcoin under a lost-and-found property statute.

The legal vehicle is New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, a statute designed for tangible lost objects — a wallet found on a sidewalk, say, or jewelry left in a cab. The law says a finder who reports lost property to police, makes reasonable efforts to locate the owner, and receives no response within a set period can eventually take legal title to the item. 

Noah Doe’s complaint argues that dormant Bitcoin addresses are “lost property” under that framework, that his USB drives of address data delivered to the NYPD 17th Precinct satisfy the deposit requirement, and that title to all 39,069 addresses vested in him across three dates: December 26, 2025, March 31, 2026, and April 14, 2026.

The statute has never been applied to cryptocurrency. Article 7-B was written for physical objects that a finder picks up and hands to authorities. The plaintiff never held private keys to any of these addresses and could not have transferred the coins to the police or to any owner who came forward. 

A Bitcoin address, unlike a lost wallet, remains fully accessible to its original owner regardless of whether someone else has identified it — the coins do not move unless the true keyholder signs a transaction.

What the bitcoin lawsuit targets

The 39,069 addresses named as defendants are not a random sample of dormant Bitcoin. 

According to blockchain research firm Galaxy Digital, which published a detailed analysis of the case in May 2026, roughly 21,923 of the defendant addresses carry what researchers call the “Patoshi” nonce pattern — an onchain fingerprint widely attributed to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Those addresses alone hold approximately 1.096 million BTC, worth around $84.7 billion.

Also on the defendant list: one address holding 79,957 BTC stolen in the 2011 Mt. Gox hack — coins that have been actively tracked by investigators for over a decade — and one address that is a Counterparty “burn” address, meaning it is provably unspendable and was never controlled by any person. The Mt. Gox coins are the subject of ongoing recovery proceedings and are not, by any conventional definition, abandoned.

The median defendant address holds 50 BTC, currently worth approximately $3.86 million. The average holds 97.25 BTC, worth around $7.5 million. 

According to Galaxy’s onchain data, 99.9% of the defendant addresses hold BTC worth considerably more than $10.

That $10 figure is central to the case’s architecture. The complaint relies on an unnamed expert’s opinion that each address was worth less than $10 “as is” at the time of finding, on the basis that recovering the contents is uncertain. 

That single valuation places all 39,069 addresses into Section 257(2) of Article 7-B — the statute’s fastest track, which vests title in the finder just one year after the find date, with no multi-year police holding period required.

The $10 figure is the legal linchpin of the lawsuit, because it is the number the plaintiffs use to argue that the wallets qualify for New York’s fastest lost-property title path, even though the coins themselves are worth far more on the market.

If the addresses were valued closer to their market prices, they would fall into the statute’s top bracket, which carries a three-year police holding requirement. The one-year shortcut the complaint relies on would not be available. 

The complaint’s three title-vesting dates correspond exactly to the three found dates plus one year — a timeline that only works if the sub-$10 valuation holds. The expert behind that valuation is not named anywhere in the filings.

The connection to the 2025 Dusting Campaign

The defendant addresses did not emerge from nowhere. Galaxy Research identified all but one of them in an October 2025 report on a blockchain “dusting” campaign — a practice where tiny amounts of BTC are sent to addresses, often to track wallet activity.

Between June and July 2025, over 39,000 addresses received OP_RETURN messages — a Bitcoin data field used to embed text — claiming the sender had taken constructive possession of the coins. 

Galaxy’s research showed those messages appeared to be groundwork for a legal abandonment claim. That report won Best Crypto Research for 2025 from the Association of Cryptocurrency Journalists and Researchers.

Galaxy’s May 2026 analysis traced the funding for both the 2025 dusting campaign and the 2026 court-ordered onchain service to a single Bitcoin address, which Galaxy calls the “Bankroll” address. The firm found that 99.6% of the 2025 dusting transactions were funded within two hops from that address, and the same address funded the 2026 service operation.

Because the defendants are anonymous Bitcoin addresses, the court authorized alternative service under CPLR § 308(5): each address received a 546-satoshi payment (roughly 4 cents) carrying an OP_RETURN message linking to a website hosting the pleadings. Galaxy confirmed 98 batch transactions across Bitcoin blocks 950,446 to 950,576, reaching all 39,069 addresses between May 21–22, 2026.

Whether that constitutes adequate legal notice is an open question. Onchain service has precedent in Ethereum cases, where wallets are account-based and tokens dropped into an address tend to surface in wallet software. 

Bitcoin operates differently — wallets are built around unspent transaction outputs, and most Bitcoin wallet software does not display OP_RETURN payloads at all. Many wallets filter incoming dust transactions as spam by default.

What a win would — and would not — mean

Crypto legal observers across the industry agree that even a complete plaintiff victory would not allow Noah Doe to move a single coin. Without private keys, a court declaration confers no ability to transact on the Bitcoin network. The protocol does not recognize court orders; only a valid cryptographic signature moves BTC.

The practical concern, as Galaxy and legal commentators have noted, is different. A court declaration could function as a “cloud on title” — a legal document the plaintiffs could present to a regulated exchange or custodian if any of the listed coins appeared at a centralized venue. 

That could trigger asset freezes and force original owners to surface and prove ownership, potentially at the cost of their anonymity. It is that leverage over regulated intermediaries, rather than any ability to seize coins directly, that gives the case its potential significance.

Because the defendants are pseudonymous addresses that will not appear in court, a technical default is possible around late June 2026, approximately 30 days after service. A motion for default judgment would likely follow. 

The court retains discretion to hold a hearing before issuing a declaration of title, and legal observers note that the novelty of the theory and the scale of the claim are factors that tend to invite judicial scrutiny. 

This post Anonymous Plaintiff Seeks Legal Title to $293 Billion in Dormant Bitcoin, Without Holding Any Private Keys first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Price Falls 5.5% in 5 Days to Below 73,000 as Spot ETF Outflows Accelerate 

Bitcoin price has fallen more than 5.5% over the past week, sliding from above $77,000 to around $72,600 on Thursday as risk sentiment weakened. The move extends a broader pullback from early May’s highs above $82,000, leaving bitcoin price trading near 6–7% lower week-on-week as surging spot ETF outflows and US‑Iran tensions pressure prices.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust recorded $527.84 million in net outflows on Wednesday, its second-largest single-day withdrawal since the fund launched in January 2024 — falling short of the all-time record by roughly $500,000. The figure lands within a broader retreat across the U.S. spot bitcoin ETF complex, which together shed $733.43 million that day, the largest combined daily outflow since late January.

Despite the headline numbers, context matters. IBIT remains up more than $2 billion in year-to-date flows and has accumulated $64 billion in lifetime net inflows since launch, placing it in the top 2% of all ETFs by cumulative flows. Wednesday’s $528 million draw represents less than 1% of that total.

The outflow did not occur in isolation. Bitcoin price fell through the $73,000 level during Asian trading hours Thursday, declining 3.4% over 24 hours to $72,978. The immediate catalyst was a fresh round of U.S. airstrikes on an Iranian military site near the Strait of Hormuz, reigniting geopolitical risk that markets had begun to discount.

As investors redeemed ETF shares, BlackRock and other issuers were forced to sell underlying bitcoin to settle those exits, feeding the price decline and the outflow data in a loop.

Alongside IBIT, Grayscale’s GBTC shed $104.76 million and Fidelity’s FBTC lost $60.30 million on the same day. Morgan Stanley’s MSBT was the only spot bitcoin ETF to post positive flows, drawing in $4.3 million, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data.

The massive Bitcoin block trade

One factor feeding Wednesday’s outflow number was a transaction that took place Tuesday. A single investor sold $1.29 billion of IBIT shares in a dark-pool block trade — a privately negotiated transaction designed to let large players move substantial size without tipping off the broader market. Bitcoin price was around $78,000 at the time.

Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas flagged the trade, noting it involved 29.2 million IBIT shares and helped push total bitcoin ETF volume on Tuesday to $4.4 billion, the highest since April 17.

A dark-pool sale is not the same as a net outflow. Buyers absorb the other side of the transaction, so the fund itself does not necessarily see redemptions. IBIT’s actual net outflow on Tuesday came to $192.44 million — large, but separate from the block trade headline. The two events together point to institutional players reducing bitcoin exposure, whether through direct redemptions or secondary market exits.

The outflow data reflects a trend that has been building through May. Net ETF accumulation across the year had thinned to approximately 4,500 BTC, and May flipped from the steady buying seen in March and April into net distribution. 

Bitcoin price has fallen from above $82,000 on May 6 to under $73,000, and the ETF channel that drove much of the 2025 bull run has spent the past several weeks pulling capital in the opposite direction.

Bitcoin price debasement 

JPMorgan added another layer to the picture Wednesday, noting that the pandemic-era “debasement trade” — the thesis that bitcoin and gold serve as hedges against currency erosion — appears to be cooling. 

The bank suggested that institutional futures positions and ETF outflows in both assets reflect investors pricing in a potential U.S.-Iran resolution before one materializes.

IBIT has weathered extended outflow streaks before during this cycle without a permanent reversal, with capital returning each time the macro backdrop cleared. Whether this episode follows that pattern depends on the trajectory of Middle East tensions and whether the rotation out of crypto into equities proves short-lived or structural.

At the time of writing, the bitcoin price is near $72,800.

This post Bitcoin Price Falls 5.5% in 5 Days to Below 73,000 as Spot ETF Outflows Accelerate  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Casa Launches Four Security Features to Combat Rising Social Engineering Attacks on Bitcoin Holders

Bitcoin security firm Casa has released a suite of four features targeting social engineering, the attack vector responsible for the bulk of crypto theft in 2025. The features are live now for Casa customers, arriving as the FBI reports crypto fraud losses climbed 22% year over year to more than $11 billion last year.

Social engineering — where scammers manipulate victims into sending funds or handing over wallet access — now dwarfs other forms of crypto theft. For every physical attack on a crypto holder reported in 2025, there were more than 2,000 phishing attacks filed with the FBI. 

Casa CEO Nick Neuman said the firm treats attacks on its clients as a direct challenge. “Social engineering is the lowest of the low,” Neuman wrote. “People are trying to trick others into losing their life savings. We will not stand for it.”

Guardian Mode

The first feature, Guardian Mode, adds a human checkpoint to every transaction. When enabled, the Casa Recovery Key will not sign a transaction until two Casa Advisors complete a live video verification call with the account holder. 

After that call, a 48-hour hold activates before the signature is applied. The window gives users the ability to reverse course if they acted under pressure. Disabling Guardian Mode follows the same process — a verification call plus a 48-hour delay — so an attacker cannot strip the protection and strike in the same session. 

Guardian Mode is opt-in and available to Premium and Private Client members.

Whitelisting Addresses

Whitelisting restricts vault withdrawals to a list of pre-approved addresses. Any new address added to the list enters a 48-hour waiting period before it becomes active. During that window, Casa sends an email alert to the account holder. 

The delay is designed to interrupt a core element of social engineering: the manufactured urgency that pushes victims to send funds before they reconsider. Turning off Whitelisting carries its own 48-hour hold, preventing an attacker from disabling the feature and draining funds in a single move.

Suspicious Account Activity

The third feature monitors login locations and flags sessions that are physically impossible given the timing of prior logins. Casa records city-level location data at sign-in but does not store IP addresses; location data is deleted after 48 hours. If a login from Tokyo follows a login from Montreal by 20 minutes, the system sends an email alert. 

The feature is built to catch unauthorized account access without building a surveillance profile on the user.

Phone Call Detection

The fourth feature addresses the role phone calls play in social engineering. Casa found that 20% of such attacks begin with an unexpected call, where the attacker uses real-time conversation to manufacture urgency and override the victim’s judgment. 

The Casa app now detects an active phone call on the device and, when a user attempts to send funds mid-call, requires them to enter a Casa Advisor Verification Code before the transaction proceeds. 

A legitimate Casa advisor will have the code. The app checks call state only and does not access audio, caller ID, or call content.

Casa said the features are part of a broader five-week campaign with industry experts to raise awareness about social engineering. AI tools and data breaches, the company noted, have made these attacks more targeted and convincing than before.

This post Casa Launches Four Security Features to Combat Rising Social Engineering Attacks on Bitcoin Holders first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Smarter Web Company Adds 10 Bitcoin, Lifts Holdings to 2,869 BTC Amid Treasury Push

London-listed The Smarter Web Company (LSE: SWC) disclosed on May 26 that it acquired 10 Bitcoin at an average price of £55,786 per coin, equivalent to roughly $74,904. The purchase totaled £557,865 and brings the company’s aggregate Bitcoin holdings to 2,869 BTC.

The firm’s cumulative investment in Bitcoin now stands at £232.48 million, with an average acquisition cost of £81,032 ($109,000) per BTC, highlighting that the latest purchase was executed well below its overall cost basis. 

The company has leaned into Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, positioning it as a core component of its capital allocation framework.

Management said the company has achieved a quarter-to-date Bitcoin yield of 15.43%, a metric it uses to measure the change in Bitcoin holdings relative to its fully diluted share count. The KPI reflects the company’s emphasis on accretive BTC accumulation rather than short-term price movements.

The latest acquisition follows continued use of a credit facility arranged with Coinbase, under which the company has drawn £18 million to date. This represents an approximate leverage ratio of 12.19%, underscoring the firm’s willingness to use debt financing to scale its Bitcoin exposure.

The Coinbase facility is secured against the company’s existing BTC holdings and carries a variable interest rate ranging from 6.75% to 7.25%. Notably, the loan can be repaid at the company’s discretion without penalty, providing flexibility in managing leverage depending on market conditions.

Bitcoin as a treasury asset

The Smarter Web Company, which provides web design, development, and online marketing services, began accepting BTC payments in 2022 and has since integrated the asset into its broader corporate strategy. Alongside organic growth, the company is also pursuing acquisitions aimed at expanding its client base and recurring revenue streams.

The move places The Smarter Web Company among a growing cohort of publicly traded firms adopting BTC-centric treasury models, echoing strategies pioneered by companies such as Strive and Strategy. 

Just today, Strive’s SATA preferred stock absorbed roughly 453 bitcoin — exceeding the entire daily mining supply — marking a record-setting surge in demand that underscores its rapid rise as a major BTC accumulation vehicle and a growing challenger to Strategy’s dominance in treasury growth.

Over the last two weeks, Strategy (MSTR) shifted focus from buying bitcoin to repurchasing $1.5 billion of its convertible debt at an 8% discount, reducing liabilities while conserving capital. At the same time, the company continued growing its BTC position through equity issuance, bringing total holdings to 843,738 BTC as it actively rebalanced its balance sheet.

This post Smarter Web Company Adds 10 Bitcoin, Lifts Holdings to 2,869 BTC Amid Treasury Push first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Manna Wallet + Branta Guardrails: Self-Custodial Bitcoin Payments Now Show Verified Merchant Details

Branta, a Bitcoin security company, recently announced integration with Manna Wallet, a self-custodial payments app. Users will now see the logos and company details of merchants they make payments to on Manna before they make a payment, letting them make the purchases with confidence. “Bitcoin payments give users anxiety. Every single time,” said Adam Simecka, CEO of Manna in the announcement, a key fact that to him, explains why Bitcoin adoption is lagging.

“Manna now automatically ensures your payments are going to who they say they are with Branta. When you pay a Branta integrated business, you will see their details and a link to verify yourself. Don’t trust. Verify.” Simecka, announcing the integration. Branta’s software is open source and privacy-centric, using zero-knowledge proofs to avoid knowing anything about the payment addresses or invoices involved, while guaranteeing the connection between client and merchant is authentic. “We went way out of our way to make sure the process met high standards of privacy.”  Keith Gardner, co-founder of Branta told Bitcoin Magazine. 

Demo The Technology

Branta’s Guardrails service was designed to eliminate risks like human error or man-in-the-middle attacks between users and merchants in Bitcoin. Such attacks of this sort have become very popular in other blockchains, such as Ethereum, called “poisoned address”, created to mimic recipients that a client makes regular payments to.

Users in this example might be tempted to grab the recipient address from their blockchain history, which attackers have dusted with the poisoned address, tricking the user. While poison address attacks are more difficult in Bitcoin, other ways to trick users exist. Human error is also a possibility that experienced Bitcoin users know well, sometimes joking about it online. 

Branta Guardrails works as a “side channel” to authenticate the connection between sender and recipient. Merchants can join the growing network of Branta merchants and platforms, and integrate their technology via a wide range of Bitcoin invoicing software already supported, such as a BTCpay server plugin and Zaprite’s suite of merchant tools.  

A live demo can be tested with some of the wallets like Manna and Arkade. Scanning supported QR codes brings up the merchant logo on the user wallet and clickable link to verify recipient details. Phil Geiger, advisor to Branta, showcasing that demo, X.com saying it “Makes me feel much more confident before sending an immutable bitcoin payment!” 

According to Gardner, merchants love the idea of having their logo show up on client wallets, and it makes sense. Company logos accumulate massive amounts of capital and goodwill deployed by companies; they represent the company’s purpose and history, and establish a bond with their customers. Making sure users feel comfortable and confident in their purchases is thus essential to business operations, and the merchant logo fulfills that purpose, in a similar way to the green lock browser icon that brought HTTPS to the mainstream in the early 2000’s. 

This post Manna Wallet + Branta Guardrails: Self-Custodial Bitcoin Payments Now Show Verified Merchant Details first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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SEC Delaying Plan to Allow Crypto Versions of US Stocks: Report

The Securities and Exchange Commission has pumped the brakes on its highly anticipated “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks, pushing back the release of the framework as it weighs input from traditional stock exchanges and other market participants wary of the plan’s sweeping implications, according to Bloomberg reporting.

The SEC, under Chair Paul Atkins, was preparing to release the so-called innovation exemption as soon as this week.

The framework would create a new regulatory pathway allowing digital tokens linked to publicly traded company shares to trade on decentralized crypto platforms — 24 hours a day, seven days a week — bypassing the constraints of traditional stock exchanges. 

The exemption is part of Atkins’ broader “Project Crypto” initiative, which aims to relax existing crypto restrictions in line with the Trump administration’s pro-crypto agenda.

The SEC was reportedly leaning toward permitting third-party tokens — digital representations of stocks like Apple, Nvidia, or Tesla — to be issued and traded without the consent of the underlying public companies. 

This means outside actors, not the issuers themselves, could create blockchain-based wrappers tracking a company’s share price and list them on decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms.

These tokens may not carry traditional shareholder rights like voting or dividends, though the SEC is reportedly considering requiring platforms to provide those rights or risk delisting.

Why the SEC is delaying

The timing of the exemption’s release has been pushed back as the agency weighs feedback from stock-exchange officials and other market participants who met with SEC staff in recent days. 

The World Federation of Exchanges — whose members include Nasdaq, Cboe, and CME Group — previously warned the SEC in a November 2025 letter that such exemptions could “dilute” existing investor protections and “distort” competition by giving crypto exchanges a regulatory shortcut unavailable to traditional markets. 

The group cautioned that granting legitimacy to tokenized stocks before full compliance implementation would “undoubtedly have negative — potentially acute — consequences” for U.S. markets.

The tokenization debate is unfolding against a backdrop of competing visions for the future of U.S. equity markets. Nasdaq, which received SEC approval in March 2026 for its own tokenized securities proposal, is pursuing a different model: one that keeps all trades on-exchange with full shareholder rights intact, built on the DTCC’s enterprise blockchain. 

The innovation exemption, by contrast, would sanction a parallel, crypto-native market running alongside the existing system — potentially fragmenting liquidity across dozens of third-party token issuers for the same underlying stock.

This post SEC Delaying Plan to Allow Crypto Versions of US Stocks: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Trump Media (DJT) Moves to Sell Bitcoin as Losses Reach $455 Million

Trump Media & Technology Group (Nasdaq: DJT), the parent company of the Truth Social platform, has transferred another 2,650 Bitcoin worth approximately $205 million to the exchange Crypto.com, a move widely interpreted as preparation for a potential sale of the company’s digital asset holdings.

The transfer, confirmed by on-chain data tracked by blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain, occurred in two transactions between roughly 1:22 a.m. and 2:22 a.m. GMT on May 22, originating from wallets labeled as Trump Media accounts by Arkham Intelligence.

The company has yet to issue any official statement confirming or denying the intent behind the move.

Trump Media originally purchased 11,542 BTC for approximately $1.37 billion at an average acquisition price of $118,522 per coin. 

With Bitcoin trading around $77,000 to $77,300 at the time of the transfer — well below that cost basis — the company is now estimated to be sitting on roughly $455 million in unrealized losses on its cryptocurrency holdings. Following the transaction, Trump Media’s visible on-chain holdings stand at an estimated 6,889 to 6,892 BTC, valued at approximately $533 million at current prices.

This is not the first time the company has moved Bitcoin off its books. 

Four months ago, Trump Media shifted 2,000 BTC valued at roughly $175 million — at the time, with Bitcoin trading near $87,378 — in what the company later characterized as a collateral movement.

Trump bitcoin ETF withdrawal

The latest crypto transfer comes just days after Trump Media withdrew its applications for a spot Bitcoin ETF and a combined Bitcoin-Ethereum ETF from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20. 

The company’s fund sponsor, Yorkville America, filed for withdrawal, citing a decision not to pursue the public offering “at this time.” 

ETF analysts noted that the decision appeared driven less by regulatory headwinds and more by competition from established players like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley, which now dominate what has become a $57 billion Bitcoin ETF market.

The Bitcoin strategy has coincided with a dramatic deterioration in Trump Media’s financials. In its first-quarter 2026 earnings report, the company posted a net loss of $405.9 million on just $871,200 in revenue — a staggering widening from a $31.7 million loss during the same period a year earlier. The bulk of those losses, approximately $368.7 million, stemmed from non-cash unrealized losses on digital assets and equity securities.

DJT shares have fallen roughly 60% over the past 12 months and were trading around $7.95 to $8.15 on Thursday and Friday. 

The company, which was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, has struggled to build meaningful advertising revenue even as it has aggressively bet on crypto as a core pillar of its financial strategy.

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U.S. Lawmaker Unveils Bill to Codify Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Draws Bipartisan Support 

Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, introduced legislation Thursday to permanently establish a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, unveiling the American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA) — a bill designed to codify President Donald Trump’s March 2025 executive order and give the reserve a durable legal foundation in statute.

The measure, which has garnered bipartisan support and more than a dozen co-sponsors in Congress, would task the Treasury Department with overseeing the reserve while creating a separate digital asset stockpile for federally held cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin. Begich drew a direct comparison between bitcoin and gold, arguing the market has already determined both assets as the dominant stores of value in their respective classes.

“When you look at gold, it is the dominant precious metal reserve,” Begich told Fox Business. “When you look at bitcoin, it represents about 60% of all market cap for the entire crypto space. So the market has decided, in the case of gold and in the case of bitcoin, that this will be the predominant store of value within that asset class.”

ARMA builds on the earlier BITCOIN Act, which Begich originally introduced in March 2025 alongside Sen. Cynthia Lummis. The updated legislation would authorize the Treasury to acquire up to 200,000 BTC per year for five years — targeting a total of 1 million bitcoin, or roughly 5% of global supply — with all holdings locked for a minimum of 20 years. 

The U.S. government currently holds an estimated 328,372 BTC accumulated through law enforcement seizures, including proceeds from the Silk Road takedown and the 2022 Bitfinex hack recovery.

The U.S. bitcoin handling needs to change

Co-sponsor Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., underscored the urgency of giving that existing stockpile a strategic home. “The United States government already holds billions in seized bitcoin with no coherent strategy for managing it, and that needs to change,” Harrigan said.

The bill’s introduction comes amid a broader wave of crypto-friendly legislative momentum in Washington. The Senate Banking Committee passed the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act in a 15-9 bipartisan vote on May 13, advancing a sweeping regulatory framework for the crypto industry to the full Senate floor. 

Two Democrats — Senators Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — crossed the aisle to support the measure. Sen. Lummis signaled the bill could reach a Senate floor vote by mid-June, though she cautioned that timeline may be optimistic.

The legislative push also arrives as the Treasury Department intensifies pressure on crypto-linked illicit finance. 

Under Operation Economic Fury, the U.S. seized nearly $500 million in Iranian cryptocurrency assets as of late April, reinforcing calls for a comprehensive government strategy to manage seized digital assets. 

The White House has separately signaled a formal announcement on the operational status of the strategic bitcoin reserve is imminent, with a senior administration official saying a key legal hurdle has been cleared.

This post U.S. Lawmaker Unveils Bill to Codify Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Draws Bipartisan Support  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Unchained and Bitcoin Park Hit the Road For Bitcoin Pizza Day With “The New Rules of Bitcoin”

AUSTIN, Texas – May 20th, 2026 – In celebration of Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22, Unchained, a Bitcoin financial services company founded in 2016 by Joe Kelly and Dhruv Bansal, and Bitcoin Park are hosting special screenings of “The New Rules of Bitcoin,” a short film produced in partnership with The Atlantic’s brand studio Atlantic Re:Think, in ten major US cities. The film highlights three core ideas: Bitcoin is not what you think, Bitcoin is long term thinking, and Bitcoin is true ownership. These ideas lay the groundwork for Bitcoin’s distinction from other cryptocurrencies, with its unique blend of long-term wealth preservation and direct, collaborative custody.

On May 22, 2010, a programmer paid 10,000 bitcoin for two large pizzas to be delivered to his home in the first documented real-world bitcoin transaction. An amount worth around $760 million today, highlighting Bitcoin’s incredible rise to become a mainstream global asset. 

Screenings will run this week in Fort Worth, Kansas City on Friday 5/22, 7 PM, at Buffalo State Pizza Company, Chicago, Washington D.C., Portland, Nashville, Austin, Tampa Bay, and Lexington, Kentucky on Friday, 5/22, 6pm at Goodfellas Pizza. Through The New Rules of Bitcoin Roadshow, Unchained and Bitcoin Park are equipping local meetups with a free screening kit, a discussion primer, and pizza sponsorship for the first 100 meetups— bringing Bitcoin’s story to communities face-to-face, just like on the original Pizza Day. 

“Bitcoin Pizza Day is a reminder that adoption happens peer-to-peer,” said Jonathan Sexton, the Chief Commercial Officer at Unchained. “Every new bitcoiner was, at some point, brought in by another bitcoiner. We made this film with The Atlantic to give the community a tool to share Bitcoin with a new audience, and to help people who are still unsure about bitcoin to give it another look. And the roadshow is the platform to help bring about the next wave of adopters.”

“Since 2022, we’ve experienced in-person meetups work to bring new people into the bitcoin ecosystem, meetup after meetup,” said Rod Roudi, co-founder of Bitcoin Park. “Bitcoin education is at the core of most meetups and this time, supported by a really cool new film. Grassroots, word of mouth is how Bitcoin spread in the first place, and it’s how it will continue to spread.”

This Pizza Day, Unchained is waiving the first trading fee on all new retirement accounts created before June 1st that move from any crypto competitor. To learn more, book a consultation with one of Unchained’s U.S.-based bitcoin experts here. 

About Unchained

Unchained is a Bitcoin financial services company founded in 2016 by Joe Kelly and Dhruv Bansal and headquartered in Austin, Texas. The company built its services around collaborative custody, a multisignature structure in which clients hold their own keys while Unchained provides the financial infrastructure around them. Since its first bitcoin-backed loan in 2017, Unchained has originated more than $1 billion in loans, secured more than 100,000 BTC on its platform, and reported zero capital losses.

The company offers vaults, IRAs, a trading desk, commercial loans, inheritance planning, and its Signature advisory service for individuals and businesses. Its Bitcoin IRA is the only retirement account in the market that gives clients direct key control. In 2025, Unchained received a Wyoming trust charter through its subsidiary Gannett Trust, expanding its fiduciary and wealth advisory capabilities.

Unchained’s open-source wallet Caravan remains available to the public as a standalone tool, independent of any commercial relationship with the company. To learn more, visit unchained.com. 

About Bitcoin Park

Bitcoin Park is a community-supported campus founded in 2022 with locations in Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas. Its mission is to support and accelerate the grassroots freedom tech movement by creating a home for mission-obsessed Bitcoiners, builders, and freedom fighters to work, learn, collaborate, and build.

Programming runs on three rails of freedom tech — AI, energy, and bitcoin — across meetups, workshops, and summits spanning custody & treasury, energy & mining, grassroots adoption, healthcare, payments, policy, and more.

AI Freedom Lab anchors the AI rail — Bitcoin Park’s initiative advancing sovereign, collaborative, and decentralized infrastructure so anyone can build on their own terms.

The capstone is Imagine IF, a summit of summits, held in Nashville the first week of October each year — a call to action for dreamers, builders, and believers to shape the world we want to live in, where AI, energy and converge in service of human flourishing and creative optimism. Each “Imagine IF…” talk plants a seed for what’s possible when bold imagination meets human action. To learn more, visit imagineifnashville.com 

Media Contact 

Melrose PR | [email protected]

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored press release. Readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence before acting on any information presented in this article.

This post Unchained and Bitcoin Park Hit the Road For Bitcoin Pizza Day With “The New Rules of Bitcoin” first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Bitcoin Magazine.

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VerifiedX Brings Native Bitcoin Redemption and FROST Privacy to Base DeFi with Fireblocks Integration

The VerifiedX foundation has announced the launch of vBTC.b on Base with support for Fireblocks, aimed at bringing Bitcoin’s digital gold qualities and world-class brand recognition to Defi and the Institutional self-custody markets.  

According to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, VerifiedX is the first “Non-Synthetic Bitcoin Asset” with built-in native bitcoin redemption, compatible with Base, Coinbase’s increasingly popular EVM blockchain and Defi platform. “vBTC is now live as a canonical asset on Base under the ticker vBTC.b and is officially listed inside the Fireblocks platform with self-custody enabled.”

While the integration with Base makes vBTC available to the public. The integration with Fireblocks unlocks institutional interest, as Fireblocks is a leading institutional digital asset custodian and a powerful brand in the Western market. 

According to DefiLlama, the Defi market today holds over 80 billion in value. While Bitcoin remains the king of the crypto markets, its representation in Defi remains small; only 5 billion worth of value is held in Bitcoin across the broader crypto-defi ecosystem, while Ethereum holds over 43 billion of the same. 

VerifiedX believes there is strong demand for Bitcoin inside Defi, with institutions increasingly interested in self-custody solutions that can satisfy their needs for regulatory compliance as well as privacy from onchain analysis and front running. VerifiedX has been designed around these expectations, while innovating beyond traditional bridges, synthetic bitcoin wrappers and trusted federations. 

Their novel approach leverages a large open network of FROST multiparty computation (MCP) nodes that arguably set a new standard for cross-chain technologies. The VerifiedX tech stack has received “an institutional full-stack audit via Halborn.”

Bitcoiners can expect enhanced integration with Defi rails from vBTC, with new utility such as “programmable settlement, collateralized borrowing, yield strategies, and AI-agent commerce” among other potential features, while leveraging a far more decentralized and self-custody oriented cross-chain technology than has been available to date. The VerifiedX chain also has zero-knowledge proof technology built in natively, providing a privacy benefit to its users as they move BTC in and out of the system, shielding them from onchain analytics. 

FROST Multi-Party Computation and Self-Custody 

The VerifiedX network leverages breakthroughs in cryptography built around Bitcoin’s taproot upgrade. Each VerifiedX validator runs a FROST multi-party computation (MCP) server, a sophisticated and scalable form of Shamir secret sharing developed independently of VerifiedX. 

FROST, which stands for “Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures,” unlocks a technology similar to multi-signature addresses in Bitcoin, but without leaving an obvious onchain footprint. FROST-generated addresses are cryptographically indistinguishable from other taproot addresses, providing significant privacy benefits. 

But the real value of FROST is its threshold signature technology, which allows party members to easily add and remove key shares (shards) to the group (as long as a majority agrees), without having to do on-chain transactions. Keeping the related computation off-chain allows a lot more parties to participate in the security scheme than previously possible, while keeping costs low and leaving no on-chain footprint on Bitcoin. When more than the threshold of shards are used in this MCP process, a valid Bitcoin transaction can be assembled. 

New members can join the public VerifiedX network as validators at any time, though they must jump through a few hoops. Users would need to sign a variety of transactions on the VerifiedX blockchain and need to hold 5000 VFX, the native asset of this blockchain. Once the right onchain transactions are signed, the network welcomes the new validator and their corresponding shard, growing the number of parties needed to pass the threshold. The result is a dynamic and large multi-signature bitcoin wallet that avoids corporate federated whitelists or small high-trust custodians. If members remove their 5000 VFX from the address, their node is removed from the active validators, and the FROST scheme adjusts accordingly. 

It’s important to note that while it is a breakthrough in decentralization, this public network scheme does not pass the technical definition of on-chain self-custody, since it does not give Bitcoin holders unilateral withdrawal rights to the underlying Bitcoin. If, for some catastrophic reason, the whole VerifiedX public FROST pool went offline, holders of vBTC would be unable to redeem their bitcoin. However, the scheme is arguably far more decentralized than current alternatives, often relying on simple single-digit multisignature addresses, synthetic bitcoin tokens backed by altcoins or trusted federations. In the current bootstrap phase, there are over 100 active validators, and the number can technically go up well over an order of magnitude.

The VerifiedX tech does, however, open the door for a self-custodied path from Bitcoin to Defi. According to Jay Pollak — Head of Strategy and Business Development at the VerifiedX Foundation — the VerifiedX protocol can allow users to set up their own “self-sovereign smart contracts” with shards and the corresponding smart contract that mints 1:1 collateralized vBTC 100% under their control, though this specific capability will be announced in more detail and made easier in upcoming updates. Such a ‘self-sovereign smart contract’ setup would arguably pass the self-custody standard, unlocking a direct path from onchain Bitcoin to the Defi ecosystem under the same vBTC ticker. 

The VFX Governance Token

VFX, the governance token of the VerifiedX blockchain, is a critical security component of the whole equation, especially for the public FROST pool. Some kind of cost needs to be imposed on new validators to prevent a swarm of fake accounts from overwhelming the network. To that end, the current implementation of the protocol demands 5000 VFX coins to be held by validators. However, according to Pollak, this number is very likely to go down soon.

The value of VFX has seen a sharp rise since January 2025, though Pollak points out that Bitmart is the only exchange that lists it, and better price discovery will come as it enters bigger markets and more liquidity is made available. He was adamant that VFX is a governance token and has no interest in competing with Bitcoin in any way. Today, VFX trades at about $69, making the cost of being a validator quite high, though Pollak also said the amount of VFX required was very likely to change to a much lower amount soon, making the self-sovereign smart contract self-custody path far more accessible. 

200 million units of VFX were minted in 2023 during the founding of the protocol, with 67.5 million going to the VerifiedX foundation and the rest being mined for active participation and in the test network. Today, the foundation holds about 32.3 million VFX coins. According to Pollak, the current lifetime supply of VFX is approximately 169.9 million, with the remaining 30 million effectively burned in the early days for security reasons. The circulating supply is much smaller, he added, as the testnet era mints are constrained and can only move small amounts at a time, “subject to an on-chain unlocking schedule, limiting sales to no more than the burn rate per block.” 

Bitcoin Magazine has a financial relationship with The VerifiedX Foundation. This article was not commissioned or reviewed by The VerifiedX Foundation and reflects the independent judgment of the author.

This post VerifiedX Brings Native Bitcoin Redemption and FROST Privacy to Base DeFi with Fireblocks Integration first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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Btrust Appoints New Board of Directors to Steer Next Phase of Bitcoin Development

Btrust, the non-profit organization dedicated to decentralizing Bitcoin open-source development, has announced the appointment of a new Board of Directors, marking the completion of a landmark governance transition and the launch of the organization’s next strategic chapter.

Following a global, open call and a rigorous, multi-stage selection process, Janet Maingi, Bruno Garcia, and Laurence Aderemi have assumed full governance responsibilities, the organization told Bitcoin Magazine.

The selection was guided by Btrust’s Genesis Principles, which prioritize transparency, fairness, and mission alignment — values that have anchored the organization since its founding.

The transition fulfills the original mandate set in 2021, when Btrust was established with a 500 BTC endowment from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and rapper Jay-Z — a donation valued at approximately $24.5 million at the time of announcement. The gift was intended to fund Bitcoin development across Africa and India, with Dorsey and Jay-Z deliberately stepping back from governance to allow an independent board full decision-making authority.

The inaugural board — composed of Obi Nwosu, Ojoma Ochai, Carla Kirk-Cohen, and Abubakar Nur Khalil — was tasked with building the organization’s operational and financial foundation before enabling a structured handover to a successor board. 

Btrust’s long-term mission of bitcoin development

Over a multi-week transition period that concluded April 30, 2026, the incoming and outgoing boards collaborated closely to ensure continuity across governance, financial oversight, and operations. The handover included budget reviews, documentation consolidation, and the initiation of an independent audit designed to reinforce accountability.

“Today marks an important milestone for Btrust,” said CEO Abubakar Nur Khalil, who was formally named to the top executive role in late 2025 after serving in an interim capacity. “We are confident the new board will strengthen our impact and safeguard our long-term mission.”

The new board brings deep and complementary expertise spanning Bitcoin infrastructure, energy systems, and open-source software development. Their appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the organization, which has steadily expanded its footprint across the Global South. 

In 2023, Btrust acquired Qala, a Bitcoin and Lightning Network developer training firm, rebranding it as the Btrust Builders Programme to accelerate the pipeline of open-source contributors from Africa. More recently, Btrust has signaled expansion into Latin America as part of its broader global strategy.

With the governance transition now complete, Btrust moves forward with renewed institutional clarity. The organization’s core mission — ensuring the Bitcoin ecosystem remains open, inclusive, and resilient by diversifying who builds it — remains unchanged. The new board is expected to guide grantmaking strategy, strengthen oversight of the Builders Programme, and deepen Btrust’s presence in underrepresented developer communities worldwide.

This post Btrust Appoints New Board of Directors to Steer Next Phase of Bitcoin Development first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin-Backed Loans Could Hit $1 Trillion, Ledn Says — But Most Crypto Holders Still Haven’t Borrowed

A new report from Bitcoin lending platform Ledn is putting a big number on a market that barely exists yet: $1 trillion. The company released research showing that the consumer Bitcoin-backed loan market — currently worth around $3 billion — could grow 300 times larger within the next decade. 

To put that in context, Galaxy Research pegged the entire crypto lending market, across every type of platform and product, at a $73.6 billion all-time high in Q3 2025. Ledn is betting the consumer Bitcoin slice alone will dwarf that figure.

The research was conducted by Protocol Theory, a consumer insights firm, and surveyed 1,244 cryptocurrency holders across the United States and Australia in February 2026. The headline finding: 88% of crypto holders said they would consider borrowing against their digital assets, but only 14% currently do. 

That leaves a 74-percentage-point gap between people who are open to the idea and people who have actually done it. So what’s stopping them?

The top barriers were not about understanding the product. Non-borrowers pointed to three confidence-related concerns: worries about crypto price swings, the risk of getting liquidated if prices fall, and uncertainty about regulation. When asked what they look for in a lending platform, respondents ranked risk management practices, platform reputation, and clear terms ahead of interest rates or features. Trust, in other words, is the product.

“The demand side of the equation is solved,” said Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn. “What’s still catching up is the trust infrastructure that gives borrowers the confidence to act.”

Ledn’s $200 million bitcoin-collateralized bond rated by S&P

That infrastructure is starting to take shape. In February 2026, Ledn closed what it calls the first-ever investment-grade Bitcoin-collateralized asset-backed security — a $200 million bond deal with its senior tranche rated BBB- by S&P Global. 

Galaxy Research described it as crypto credit moving “away from a niche product toward broader institutional acceptance.” Since issuance, those bonds have traded roughly 5% tighter on interest, a signal that institutional buyers are pricing the underlying credit well.

Among the 14% who already borrow against their crypto, the behavior mirrors how wealthy people use mortgages or securities-backed loans — accessing cash without selling a long-term asset. The research found 72% of crypto holders agree that Bitcoin-backed loans give them a way to access funds without selling their holdings.

Regional differences emerged too. Australian respondents were more likely than Americans to borrow as part of a financial plan and to shop around between lenders, reflecting a more fragmented market in Australia where no single platform has locked up the category.

Ledn’s co-founders first made the $1 trillion forecast publicly at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas in April. The company has serviced more than $10 billion in loans since launching in 2018 and operates in more than 100 countries.

This post Bitcoin-Backed Loans Could Hit $1 Trillion, Ledn Says — But Most Crypto Holders Still Haven’t Borrowed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Standard Chartered to Absorb Zodia Custody’s Core Business in Digital Asset Consolidation

Standard Chartered announced Monday that its non-binding offer to acquire Zodia Custody — the digital asset custodian it co-founded in 2020 through its innovation arm SC Ventures — has been accepted by Zodia’s shareholders and noteholders.

The deal, subject to regulatory approvals, will fold Zodia’s regulated custody operations into Standard Chartered’s existing Financing and Securities Services business. The transaction is less a traditional acquisition than a strategic reorganization: a parent bank reclaiming the client-facing business it incubated at arm’s length, now that the market has matured enough to justify direct ownership.

Zodia was established alongside Northern Trust in late 2020, when regulatory uncertainty and reputational risk made it sensible for Standard Chartered to experiment with crypto custody through a separate entity. Over time, the custodian attracted minority investors including SBI Holdings, National Australia Bank, and Emirates NBD, building out operations across seven offices in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The structure served its purpose — but it also created duplication. 

Standard Chartered consolidates custody, spins infrastructure

Standard Chartered had developed its own digital asset custody capabilities within its Corporate and Investment Bank, running two custody offerings that served overlapping institutional clients.

The acquisition resolves that redundancy. By merging Zodia’s custody book into its Financing and Securities Services division, Standard Chartered gains a consolidated client base, eliminates operational overlap, and positions itself as one of the few global banks with a fully integrated, regulated crypto custody offering. 

Peers have moved in the same direction: BNY Mellon launched its Digital Asset Custody platform in 2022, and Morgan Stanley applied for a national trust bank charter in early 2026 to bring crypto custody inside a regulated banking framework.

What survives of Zodia is perhaps the more consequential piece of this transaction. The company’s institutional infrastructure platform — the technology that allows other financial institutions to build and operate digital asset services — will be separated into a new entity called Zodia Solutions, sitting under SC Ventures. 

Julian Sawyer, Zodia’s current CEO, will lead the new business. Zodia Solutions will operate as a bank-grade infrastructure provider, essentially becoming a SaaS platform for institutions that want to enter digital assets without building the underlying plumbing themselves. Standard Chartered will be a client, as will other banks. Existing minority investors remain in discussions about future stakes in the new entity.

The split reflects a real tension in the market. Institutional clients increasingly want custody held within a regulated bank, not a fintech-adjacent subsidiary. But those same institutions also need specialist technology infrastructure to power their own digital asset offerings — and that infrastructure is more valuable as a shared service than locked inside one bank’s balance sheet.

The digital asset custody market currently exceeds $1 trillion in assets under custody and is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2035, growing at a compound annual rate of roughly 24%. Standard Chartered is positioning itself to compete for both the direct custody mandates and the infrastructure contracts that will define that expansion — a two-track strategy that this transaction makes explicit for the first time.

Completion remains subject to regulatory sign-off, with no disruption expected for existing Zodia custody clients in the interim.

This post Standard Chartered to Absorb Zodia Custody’s Core Business in Digital Asset Consolidation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Open Heads to Iconic Glen Abbey Golf Club for June 8, 2026 Event

The Bitcoin Open, a combined golf and poker tournament organized by Bitcoin Sports Network and Satstreet, is scheduled for June 8, 2026, at Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario. The event will take place at the club during its 50th anniversary year.

Glen Abbey Golf Club, designed by Jack Nicklaus and opened in 1976, is one of Canada’s most recognized golf venues. It has hosted the Canadian Open multiple times and is known for its championship-level layout and history in professional golf. The course is located approximately 30 minutes west of Toronto and serves as a public golf facility with a significant legacy in Canadian sports.

The Bitcoin Open consists of a scramble-format golf tournament on the main championship course during the day, followed by a Texas Hold’em poker tournament in the evening. The golf portion uses a team scramble format, typically with groups of four players. The field size is limited, with organizers noting strong demand and a reduced number of remaining team spots as of mid-May 2026.

Prizes for the event include two separate hole-in-one awards, each consisting of one Bitcoin. Additional golf prizes cover the longest drive and closest to the pin. Golf winners will also receive tickets to the 2027 Bitcoin Golf Championship, scheduled to take place in Nashville, Tennessee, ahead of the 2027 Bitcoin Conference. The winner of the poker tournament receives $5,000 CAD in stablecoins.

A list of hole sponsors for the event has been announced. These include APX Lending, Tetra Digital Group, The Canadian Bitcoin Conference, Satstreet, True North Airways, Ledn, Gator Mining Inc., Wealthsimple, CAD DIGITAL, PRIVATEDEBT Partners, McCarthy Tetrault, and Samara Asset Group.

Bitcoin Sports Network operates as an organizer of Bitcoin-themed sports and lifestyle events, including golf tournaments held in conjunction with major Bitcoin conferences. Satstreet, a Canadian Bitcoin-focused company, is co-hosting the event and serving as one of the hole sponsors. The two organizations are collaborating on this Canadian edition of The Bitcoin Open.

The event is open to participants from the Bitcoin community, including builders, investors, and others active in the industry. Registration is handled through the official event website, with tickets covering both the golf and poker components. The schedule includes on-course activities, meals, and networking periods at the venue.

This marks the first time The Bitcoin Open is held at Glen Abbey. Previous Bitcoin Sports Network golf events have taken place in locations such as Las Vegas, often timed near larger Bitcoin conferences. The Canadian event is positioned as a standalone gathering in the Toronto area.

Glen Abbey’s 50th anniversary provides additional context for the timing. Since its opening, the club has been a central part of Canadian golf, training professionals and hosting amateur and professional competitions.

This post Bitcoin Open Heads to Iconic Glen Abbey Golf Club for June 8, 2026 Event first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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