Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Nears $112K — Strategy Still Accumulating Despite S&P 500 Snub

Michael Saylor’s Strategy continues its aggressive Bitcoin accumulation strategy, announcing the purchase of 1,955 BTC for $217.4 million at an average Bitcoin price of $111,196 per coin. The latest acquisition brings the company’s total Bitcoin holdings to 638,460 BTC, maintaining its position as the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin globally.

The move comes as Bitcoin Price holds steady between $110,500 and $112,200 and follows Strategy’s exclusion from the S&P 500 in favour of Robinhood (HOOD). Despite that and shareholder criticism, Executive Chairman Michael Saylor is pressing ahead with the firm’s Bitcoin-only treasury strategy.

The firm’s average purchase price now stands at $73,880 per Bitcoin, representing a significant paper profit on its holdings given current market prices.

The company’s aggressive accumulation comes amid a broader trend of corporate Bitcoin adoption, with over 200 public companies now holding Bitcoin in their treasuries. Recent entrants include American Bitcoin, which debuted on the Nasdaq last week, and Metaplanet, which increased its holdings to 20,136 BTC through a $15.2 million purchase.

BREAKING: STRATEGY BUYS ANOTHER 1,955 #BITCOIN FOR $217 MILLION pic.twitter.com/SFZqhYnbXW

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) September 8, 2025

Strategy has faced shareholder scrutiny after revising its modified Net Asset Value (mNAV) policy. The firm had pledged not to issue shares if its mNAV dropped below 2.5X, but the updated guidance could now open the door to greater dilution.

The surge in Bitcoin treasury companies has become a defining trend of 2025, with collective corporate holdings now exceeding 1 million BTC, or roughly 5% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply.

We’re witnessing an unprecedented shift in corporate treasury management. Companies are increasingly viewing Bitcoin as a strategic asset class, leading to a competitive race for accumulation among public companies.

Strategy’s latest purchase was funded through its ongoing at-the-market (ATM) equity offering program, which has proven successful in raising capital for Bitcoin acquisitions. The company’s total investment now represents nearly 3% of Bitcoin’s total supply, making it a significant force in the market.

Despite recent market volatility and shareholder concerns, Strategy’s commitment to its Bitcoin strategy appears unwavering. The company has consistently accumulated Bitcoin through various market conditions, maintaining its position as the leading corporate proponent of Bitcoin adoption.

As corporate Bitcoin adoption continues to accelerate, Strategy’s pioneering approach has established a template for other companies looking to diversify their treasury holdings. With its latest purchase, Strategy reinforces its position at the forefront of this growing movement, despite recent challenges and market fluctuations.

This post Bitcoin Price Nears $112K — Strategy Still Accumulating Despite S&P 500 Snub first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Vivek Sen.

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The Avant-Garde and Bitcoin: Decentralized Money Didn’t Come From Nowhere

Bitcoin is a financial tool born of code and cryptography. But seen in a wider frame, it belongs to a cultural lineage more than a century old. Since the 1910s, avant-garde movements have probed questions that later became central to Bitcoin: Who decides value? Can rules replace rulers? How do systems record time, distribute trust or resist authority? Far from appearing out of nowhere in 2009, Bitcoin crystallized ideas that had long circulated in artistic experiments.

You don’t need to like art — or on-chain art — to follow this argument. This article is not a case for “Bitcoin art” but for understanding Bitcoin’s conceptual prehistory. If you are a Bitcoin maximalist, read what follows as the backstory of your protocol’s worldview, not an art-world detour. And if you are an on-chain maximalist, remember that maximalism of any kind denies reality: The logic of Bitcoin was not born on-chain.

Artists tend to surface and stress-test ideas before society at large absorbs them. What they explore in canvases, instructions, networks or number systems often migrates years later into economics, engineering and politics. The point of this article is not to conflate art with Bitcoin, but to show that Bitcoin is the cultural consequence of ideas rehearsed for over a century — ideas about decentralization, protocol, time and value that were already in the air long before they were established in code.

Avant-Garde Futurism: Speed, Systems and the Machine Aesthetic

If the early 20th century’s avant-garde had a launchpad, it was Italian Futurism. Announced in 1909 on the front page of Le Figaro by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement exalted “the beauty of speed,” the dynamism of the industrial city and the power of engines, aircraft and modern weapons. It called for the destruction of museums and libraries in favor of an aesthetic reboot — art in step with the machine age.

Futurist painters like Giacomo Balla and sculptors like Umberto Boccioni sought new visual strategies to capture motion: blurred outlines, repeated forms and “lines of force” that rendered figures as vectors in a dynamic system. Boccioni’s iconic “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913) depicts a striding figure whose body is broken into aerodynamic planes — more like a fluid diagram than anatomy. In sound, Luigi Russolo’s “Intonarumori” (noise intoners) brought the clang of factories and the churn of engines into orchestral performance, turning music into a mechanical event.

Futurism’s legacy is complicated — Marinetti’s later alliance with Italian fascism casts a shadow — but the movement planted seeds of a mindset crucial to later art and to Bitcoin alike: art as the design of systems, not just objects. The Futurists embraced rhythm, repetition, serial processes and the deliberate use of technology as a driver. In effect, they imagined culture running on protocols — machines with outputs defined by rules and cycles.

The Futurists embraced the rhythm of machines, the pulse of the assembly line, the precision of the stopwatch. Bitcoin transposes that rhythm into economics: Value emerges not from decree but from a timed, rule-governed process distributed across the network. Futurism never imagined digital money, yet it prepared the ground by making repetition and system-thinking feel natural. 

Dada: Anti-Art as an Attack on Systems

Amid the chaos of World War I, another avant-garde arose in Zurich, New York and Berlin: Dadaism (circa 1916-1920s). Futurism threw itself at the promises of modernity; Dada, in contrast, set out to smash them. Dada artists rebelled against the rationality that had led to war; they created “anti-art” — absurdist performances, nonsense poems, collages of trash — to shock and upend bourgeois sensibilities. In doing so, they directly attacked the authority of art institutions and the concept of inherent value in art.

The familiar example is Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), but an equally revealing case is his Monte Carlo Bonds (1924): printed bearer “securities” issued in a planned edition of thirty, each priced at 500 francs and designed to raise capital for a roulette “system” Duchamp claimed to have perfected. The bonds looked and read like legitimate financial instruments — complete with detachable dividend coupons, corporate statutes on the verso and Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp with shaving-foam “horns” inside a roulette wheel — but were staged as artworks. The company’s chair was Duchamp’s female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy; the administrator, Duchamp himself. Buyers were, in theory, investors; in practice, they treated the sheets as art objects, leaving every coupon uncut. The piece collapses two regimes of value — finance and art — and exposes the same underlying mechanism: value is not intrinsic, it is a social contract sustained by trust, scarcity and rules. Duchamp even paid a token interest once before abandoning the gambling scheme, an elegant reminder that the belief structure around the object quickly outstripped any cash flow it could ever yield.

Dada’s irreverent destruction of logic and value systems sowed seeds that later artistic (and even financial) revolutionaries would harvest. Later, Cypherpunks and Bitcoiners would challenge the fairness of the financial order; the Dadaists had already mocked the so-called rationality of polite society. They revealed that what people accept as valuable — whether a work of art, a bond certificate or fiat currency — might just be a shared fiction propped up by authority. In Dada, we see the prototype of Bitcoin’s ethos of challenging institutional authority: If Duchamp showed a urinal or a satirical bond could be “art” through collective agreement, Bitcoin showed that a piece of code can be “money” through collective agreement.

Notably, Dada was also inherently international and decentralized. Its artists (Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hannah Höch, etc.) were dispersed across Europe and the U.S., yet connected via manifestos, magazines and mail. This early 20th-century art network operated outside state or museum control — effectively a proto peer-to-peer network of creative exchange. In the way Dadaists mailed ideas and manifestos to each other across borders, we can glimpse the later ideal of a decentralized, censorship-resistant communication system.

ZERO: Building with Rules

By the late 1950s, Europe’s postwar avant-garde was looking for a clean slate. In Düsseldorf, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene founded ZERO (1957), soon joined by Günther Uecker. “Zero” for them wasn’t nihilism; It was a reset, a way to sweep aside the subjectivity of earlier modernism and construct art from scratch, using only light, rhythm and repetition.

ZERO’s works were precise and repeatable: Piene’s “Lichtballette” used mechanical projectors to choreograph moving patterns of light; Mack constructed mirrored reliefs and spinning discs to create optical vibration; Uecker covered surfaces with dense fields of nails, turning hammering into a serial procedure. The art was in the process — the timed flicker, the rhythmic rotation, the grid of repeated forms.

Equally important, ZERO was never a closed group but an international network, linking to parallel movements in the Netherlands (Nul), France (GRAV) and Italy (Azimut). Exhibitions and collaborations spanned multiple countries, operating more like a decentralized platform than a single “school.”

For Bitcoin’s lineage, ZERO offers two resonant ideas. First, the reset: Starting from “zero” to construct a system by explicit rules recalls the symbolic reboot of Bitcoin’s Genesis Block. Second, the focus on time, repetition and seriality anticipates a culture attuned to protocols — systems where outputs arrive at fixed intervals and cumulative sequences matter. 

Network Art: From Mail to Fluxus to the Net

While ZERO was exploring rules and serial processes, other artists of the 1960s turned toward communication itself as a medium. Their works made art into a distributed process, shared across people and places, outside the control of galleries or states.

One form was Mail Art, pioneered by Ray Johnson in the early 1960s. Small drawings, collages and notes circulated through the postal system, creating an “Eternal Network” of participants. Anyone could join; the post became a decentralized gallery where no curator decided who belonged. In Eastern Europe and Latin America, Mail Art even slipped under censorship, showing how a simple network could resist centralized control.

In parallel, Fluxus, led by George Maciunas and a loose international circle, declared that anyone can make art. Their performances, event scores and “fluxkits” were cheap, reproducible and often humorous — designed to evade traditional collecting and institutional ownership. Fluxus was art as open source action: participatory, irreverent and spread through informal networks of friends and collaborators.

By the 1990s, these impulses migrated online with Net Art. Early internet artists used chatrooms, email and websites as venues for collaborative works that were interactive, ephemeral and uncollectable in the traditional sense. Net Art made the network itself the artwork.

Mail Art, Fluxus and later Net Art all treated the network itself as a stage. Letters, performances, websites — each bypassed the gatekeepers of museums and markets, proving that exchange could be free, horizontal and self-sustaining. Bitcoin builds on that same intuition: validated by the network, not an institution. 

Conceptual Art and Algorithmic Thinking: From Ideas to Code

By the late 1960s, avant-garde art took a radical turn: The object itself was no longer essential. In conceptual art, what mattered was the idea or instruction. Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967 that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” His “Wall Drawings” consisted of sets of directions — lines, arcs, grids — executed by others. The authorship resided in the rule, not in the handcrafted product. The point was profound: Art could function like a protocol, a system anyone could run.

Almost at the same moment, artists began to make that principle literal. Algorithmic art translated imagined rules into actual computer code. Vera Molnár, for example, programmed early plotters in the 1960s to produce abstract line drawings. These works were generated rather than drawn; their originality lay in the algorithm itself. She described her method as a machine imaginaire, where systematic variation could produce surprising forms.

Seen together, these two practices created a cultural shift. Conceptual art established the logic that the work is the instruction rather than the object, while algorithmic art showed how that logic could be executed in code — precise, repeatable, and indifferent to the hand of the maker. Bitcoin fuses both. It is at once a conceptual protocol — rules inscribed in advance, like a score — and a piece of running code executed by miners and nodes, who perform the role of LeWitt’s assistants or Molnár’s machines: They don’t invent, they follow instructions. This lineage prepared audiences to see systems and protocols themselves as creative and valuable forces. Without it, the idea that an immaterial construct like Bitcoin — a set of rules enforced by code — could carry real value would have been harder to imagine.

Avant-Garde Time: On Kawara and Hanne Darboven

If conceptual and algorithmic artists turned rules into art, others in the same era turned to time itself as their system. Few bodies of work make the analogy to blockchain more striking than those of On Kawara and Hanne Darboven.

Beginning in 1966, On Kawara painted dates — plain white text on monochrome canvases — in his ongoing “Today Series.” Each painting had to be completed on the date it depicted; if not, it was destroyed. Often it was stored with a local newspaper, a kind of analog timestamp. Alongside this, Kawara logged every person he met (“I Met”), every route he took (“I Went”), the times he rose each morning (“I Got Up” postcards) and telegrams that declared simply: I am still alive. What emerged was a strict, cumulative chronology of existence: day after day, block after block, a sequence of proofs that life had occurred.

Hanne Darboven, working in Germany, went even further. From the late 1960s she devised numerical systems that translated calendar dates into endless handwritten sequences of sums, columns and grids. Her installations stretch across entire walls — hundreds of sheets filled with notations representing days, months, decades. Darboven turned the passing of time into a literal record of numbers, an unbroken chronology with no story beyond the sequence itself.

Seen together, Kawara and Darboven reveal how time, repetition and documentation can become both material and meaning. Their work anticipates exactly what Bitcoin later encodes. Each block on the chain functions like a Kawara date painting: a timestamp that proves the system is still alive. The sequence of blocks resembles Darboven’s endless grids, discrete units of time lined up to form an immutable chronology. And in both cases, meaning arises not from any single entry but from the accumulation of the whole chain. What Kawara and Darboven made visible is that even the simplest act of marking time can take on depth when repeated and preserved.

Systems and Power: Institutional Critique and Currency Hacks

While some artists turned inward to rules and time, others in the late 1960s and ’70s turned outward to expose the hidden systems of power — financial, political, institutional. Their work shows most clearly how art anticipated Bitcoin’s impulse to bypass authority.

In New York, Hans Haacke set out to reveal how money and power shape culture. For his 1971 project “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System” he used public records, maps and photographs to document the slum properties of a major real estate network in the city. The work was scheduled for a solo show at the Guggenheim, but six weeks before opening, the museum canceled the exhibition and dismissed the curator. No direct link between the landlords and the museum was ever established, but the cancellation itself made Haacke’s point: Institutions are never neutral and attempts at transparency can be too uncomfortable to display.

In Brazil, under dictatorship, Cildo Meireles developed a quieter but equally radical tactic. His “Insertions into Ideological Circuits” (1970) placed dissenting messages into everyday exchange systems. On Coca-Cola bottles, he silk-screened political slogans that only appeared once refilled; the bottles then reentered circulation. In his “Banknote Project,” he stamped questions like “Who killed Herzog?” (after a murdered journalist) onto currency, then spent the notes back into the economy. The system — Coca-Cola’s distribution, the state’s money supply — became the medium for critique. Meireles demonstrated that even a currency could be hacked into a carrier of counter-authority.

For Bitcoin, the resonance is unmistakable. Meireles’s stamped banknotes foreshadow the idea of embedding messages in a financial system itself — Satoshi Nakamoto’s Genesis Block inscription (“Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”) is a direct continuation of that gesture. Both artists understood that systems are never neutral: They embody ideology. By inserting new content or exposing hidden structures, they revealed how authority could be challenged not with slogans alone but by repurposing the system against itself.

Bitcoin pushes that artistic lesson to its limit. Haacke revealed hidden structures and Meireles hacked messages into the circuits of money, Bitcoin doesn’t just comment on the system, but builds a new one. It inherits Haacke’s demand for transparency by making every transaction publicly visible on the blockchain and it carries forward Meireles’s spirit of subversion by creating a parallel currency outside the reach of state control. What had once been artistic interventions now scales into a global protocol. It’s not a metaphor about money, but a functioning redesign of how money itself can work.

Bitcoin as the Cultural Consequence

Looked at together, these movements tell a story that runs straighter than it first appears. Futurism celebrated the rhythm of machines; Dada stripped away institutional authority and showed how value depends on agreement; ZERO started again from light, rules and repetition; Mail Art, Fluxus and Net Art turned networks into the work itself; conceptual and algorithmic artists shifted attention from objects to protocols and code; On Kawara and Hanne Darboven treated time as something to be marked and accumulated, day by day; and Haacke and Meireles showed how power systems could be exposed or quietly hacked from within.

Each of these experiments rehearsed ideas that Bitcoin later fixed in its code: decentralization, rules over rulers, value as consensus, transparency as a form of truth, time as structure and the use of systems themselves as instruments of critique. None of this arrived out of thin air in 2009. For decades, artists had been testing the same ground — whether in paintings, instructions, mail networks, grids of numbers or altered banknotes — long before those intuitions were written into code. 

None of this replaces Bitcoin’s technical invention. Proof-of-work remains the foundation that makes the system unforgeable, but it does not explain why people choose to protect and transact with it. This is why it misses the mark to see Bitcoin only as a financial tool or to dismiss its cultural dimension as a side story. Bitcoin is also a cultural artifact, shaped by a long history of challenges to authority and experiments with rules and systems. You don’t need to like art to see that. What Bitcoin embodies is not an isolated breakthrough but the continuation of ideas rehearsed for more than a century. Recognizing that history does not weaken Bitcoin’s invention; it roots it in a broader cultural lineage. Bitcoin is not an accident of code but the latest chapter in a century-long attempt to imagine systems beyond authority, to bind time into structure and to prove that value is ultimately what we choose to share and defend.

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

This post The Avant-Garde and Bitcoin: Decentralized Money Didn’t Come From Nowhere first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Steven Reiss.

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Sora Ventures Launches Asia’s First Bitcoin Treasury Fund, Plans to Buy $1 Billion in BTC Within 6 Months

Today, Sora Ventures announced the launch of Asia’s first Bitcoin treasury fund, unveiled during Taipei Blockchain Week. The fund, backed by a $200 million commitment from partners and investors across the region, aims to purchase $1 billion worth of Bitcoin within the next six months, according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine.

This new fund follows the individual Bitcoin treasury firms that have emerged across Asia in recent years — including Japan’s Metaplanet (TYO:3350), Hong Kong’s Moon Inc. (HKG:1723), Thailand’s DV8 (SET:DV8), and South Korea’s BitPlanet (KOSDAQ:049470). While those companies hold bitcoin directly on their own balance sheets, the Sora Ventures treasury fund will act as a central pool of institutional capital designed to both support these existing firms and fuel the creation of similar treasuries globally.

By doubling down on Asia’s early Bitcoin treasury pioneers while expanding outward, the fund aims to create synergies between regional and international treasuries, strengthening Bitcoin’s role as a reserve asset across markets. Led by Sora Ventures’ management team, the initiative will also bring in new institutional partners to broaden resources and expand the network of Bitcoin treasury companies operating in Asia.

Luke Liu, Partner at Sora Ventures, emphasized the uniqueness of the initiative, stating, “This is the first time that Asia has seen a commitment of this magnitude toward building a network of Bitcoin treasury firms, with capital commitment towards Asia’s first $1 billion treasury fund.”

Historically, the largest Bitcoin treasury funds and corporate adoption have been concentrated in the U.S. market. Now, Asia is positioning itself as a serious contender for institutional Bitcoin investment. Jason Fang, founder and Managing Partner at Sora Ventures, highlighted the shift: “Asia has been one of the most important markets for the development of blockchain technology and Bitcoin. We have seen a rise in interest from institutions investing in Bitcoin treasuries in the U.S. and EU, while in Asia efforts have been relatively fragmented. This is the first time in history that institutional money has come together, from local to regional, and now to a global stage.”

In 2024, Sora Ventures invested in Metaplanet, Japan’s first Bitcoin treasury, supporting its allocation of ¥1 billion (approximately $6.56 million) to bitcoin. In 2025, the firm acquired Moon Inc. in Hong Kong, DV8 in Thailand, and partnered in acquiring BitPlanet in South Korea — each deal designed to replicate and scale Bitcoin-first treasury models across Asia.

With Asia’s institutional landscape now aligning around Bitcoin adoption, the new $1 billion fund represents a significant step toward mainstream recognition of Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset in global markets.

This post Sora Ventures Launches Asia’s First Bitcoin Treasury Fund, Plans to Buy $1 Billion in BTC Within 6 Months first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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An Excerpt From Bitcoin Circular Economies: The Impact

It is difficult to quantify the multiple dimensions in which the community has been affected since the project began, just as it is also difficult to anticipate the various ways in which Bitcoin is changing the lives of its users around the world. However, there is one thing that Mike particularly points out: “It’s interesting to highlight how Bitcoin changed the time preference, specifically of young people in El Zonte.”

Time preference is the subjective value by which an individual discounts the value of the future. It is always preferable to have something in the present than to have to wait for something to come, since any future promise has a lower probability of occurring. One of the adverse effects of the paper money printed by governments, with no limit on its issuance, is that it generates great uncertainty due to the permanent increases in prices. This tends to increase people’s time preference, since it makes more sense to consume in the present than to save for the future, where that money may be worth much less. On the contrary, Bitcoin, being a scarce asset, which tends to appreciate over time by cyclically cutting its issuance until the maximum limit of 21 million, is proving to reduce the time preference. As it appreciates over time, small savings in the present can generate significant future benefits, thus increasing the propensity to save and plan for the future. This simple fact has profound implications at a social level, because it reflects in greater investment in education, deeper human relationships or greater care for the environment. “I see young people thinking about their future for the first time. This was not something we planned; it happened by surprise. We started to see them save. Kids who had never had more than five dollars in their lives now have a couple hundred dollars in Bitcoin, which they saved to make a repair to their parents’ house or buy a new cell phone. We started seeing this virtuous circle of people taking good decisions, saving for the first time, and making the future a real possibility,” Mike calmly explains , as someone who knows that important processes take time to mature.

Mabel also witnessed this change firsthand. “I grew up here, in El Zonte, I have never had access to banks in El Salvador like almost most of us who live here. “I have no credit cards or bank accounts. Before Bitcoin, cash was our only form of payment. It was very difficult to be able to save because you always find an excuse to spend cash. Today that has changed, and, thanks to Bitcoin, I am more conscious of saving for the future.”

“Meanwhile, Brayan argues that there is one variable missing from the equation of opportunities that we are trying to reconstruct: unemployment.  “If you don’t know any better, you may have the wrong dreams. Bitcoin didn’t just change me, its positive impact can be seen throughout the community.” The desire to emigrate was something deeply rooted in the Salvadoran society. Others, sadly, wanted to become gang members and criminals. “That’s why the Bitcoin Beach employment support program was so important. There were many cases of people who, due to the lack of opportunities, were involved in illegal activities and now, thanks to Bitcoin, all of them decided to get their lives back on track. Today they have families and honourable jobs thanks to this first opportunity they received with Bitcoin and the community work of our team”. Along the same lines, Mike highlights that having a scarce currency, which appreciates over time, helped the young people to get back to having incentives and investing in their future and training. “They began to value education again as an opportunity for personal development. For the first time, we see many young people thinking about going to high school and then the possibility of going to college. But most importantly, they now want to invest more in their community. They stopped seeing El Zonte simply as the place with no opportunities from which to go to the United States. We are witnessing how, for the first time, they began to see their land as a place where they really want to build a future for themselves and their families.”

Living in exile is like chronic pain, it appears and disappears, but the suffering is always there. Returning becomes a possibility when major changes happen in the place of origin, especially in the circumstances that initially drove people to leave. “Of course, initially this happened within a small group,” Mike continues. “But then, when people from abroad started coming to El Zonte wanting to be part of what was happening here, it increased the sense of local pride and made people value it as a special place.” Today, very few people want to emigrate to the United “States. The whole community began to think about how to build a life in El Zonte. “That strengthened our kinship, it created a community safety net at the local level. When you think about the long term, the human and community bonds become fundamental,” Mike points out, resting his hand on his heart.

Bitcoin adoption generated multiple impacts on Bitcoin Beach. Some of them are intangible, but particularly mobilizing, such as the sense of belonging. “The connection, the hope of being part of something bigger. For the first time we were no longer an isolated city in a poor Latin American country, we were connected to a global, vibrant, innovative and revolutionary community. Before that, the general feeling was that opportunities were only for the rich, for North Americans or Europeans. Salvadorans didn’t have opportunities.” As the people of El Zonte began to participate in this global monetary system, they realized that all those opportunities were open to them as well. “Now they can work remotely, and they can become programmers, without having to leave their families and communities in El Salvador to participate in the global economy. That created a lot of pride and purpose, particularly in the young people,” Mike emphasizes.

The daily life at Hope House is vibrant and Jorge’s interview is interrupted by René, one of the young people involved in the activities of the center. It was the perfect opportunity for him to share in his own words what Hope House means to him: “It is a unique place that is dedicated to supporting children to develop as better people. We support each other to build a life together in the community.”

Learning the story of Hope House and Bitcoin Beach is so inspiring and exciting, that this social project has made the Bitcoin Circular Economy concept viral, encouraging other entrepreneurs to replicate this model of human development in other parts of the world. Passionate people, dedicated to helping others and bringing hope and opportunities to their communities. Leading by example, the founders of Bitcoin Beach never stopped dreaming. Unarguably, Bitcoin and its technology gave rise to economic and social development in El Zonte. However, they never imagined what impact would unroll to the rest of the country. Without trying to, with humility and low profile, they became key players in the transformation of El Salvador into a thriving and innovative country.

Discover more in Bitcoin Circular Economies
This excerpt is just the beginning. Dive deeper into how Bitcoin is transforming communities worldwide in Bitcoin Circular Economies. The e-book is available now, and the paperback is open for pre-order for only $21 for a limited time.

 Order your copy here

This post An Excerpt From Bitcoin Circular Economies: The Impact first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Gabriel Kurman.

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Pierre Rochard to Headline Bitcoin for Financial Services Summit in Denver

The Bitcoin for Financial Services Summit, set for October 16–18, 2025, at The Space in Denver’s RiNo district, will see financial professionals convene to explore Bitcoin’s integration into mainstream finance. With a capped attendance of 150, the event targets accountants, wealth advisors, attorneys, insurance agents, asset managers, and fintech leaders seeking practical strategies for Bitcoin adoption.

Headlined by Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Bond Company, and Andrew Hohns, CEO of Newmarket Capital, the summit will deliver actionable insights over three days. Sessions will cover Bitcoin acquisition for families and businesses, financial services, custody solutions, cost basis tracking, tax reporting, corporate treasury management, inheritance planning, and Bitcoin-backed lending.

The event kicks off with a classic golf tournament on October 16 at 10:00 AM MST, fostering peer-to-peer networking. Formal sessions begin October 17 at 10:00 AM, following a breakfast mixer at 8:00 AM, and conclude on October 18 at 4:00 PM. Attendees will also enjoy sponsor showcases, live product launches, and an evening bourbon tasting to build partnerships.

Held at The Space (3700 N Franklin St.), the venue is accessible via train from Denver International Airport, with hotels, restaurants, and bars within walking distance. General admission is $285, with a golf-inclusive package at $440. Registration, open at denver.space, includes all sessions, meals, and an after-party.

The summit’s objectives are clear: equip professionals with Bitcoin knowledge, spark partnerships, and connect attendees with referral partners and products. Sessions will address real-world applications, from estate planning to insurance coverage, while live product announcements offer a first look at emerging financial tools. Organizers are applying for CPE and CE credits, with details forthcoming in September.

With Bitcoin gaining traction in financial services, the event aims to bridge traditional finance and cryptocurrency. Professionals can reserve spots now to join industry pioneers in shaping Bitcoin-powered finance.

This post Pierre Rochard to Headline Bitcoin for Financial Services Summit in Denver first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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U.S. Bank Resumes Bitcoin Custody Services for Institutional Investors, Adding Support for Bitcoin ETFs

U.S. Bank announced today that it has officially resumed its cryptocurrency custody services for institutional investment managers, reopening a program first introduced in 2021. The service, which is being relaunched as an early access program for Global Fund Services clients, is designed to provide secure safekeeping solutions for bitcoin, with NYDIG serving as the sub-custodian.

The decision comes after years of regulatory uncertainty, with U.S. Bank citing a clearer framework for digital assets as a key factor in relaunching the program. In addition to providing custody for bitcoin directly, the bank has expanded its offering to include custody services for bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Stephen Philipson, vice chair of U.S. Bank Wealth, Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking, highlighted the bank’s pioneering role in digital finance. “We’re proud that we were one of the first banks to offer cryptocurrency custody for fund and institutional custody clients back in 2021, and we’re excited to resume the service this year. Following greater regulatory clarity, we’ve expanded our offering to include bitcoin ETFs, which allows us to provide full-service solutions for managers seeking custody and administration services.”

NYDIG, a vertically integrated bitcoin financial services and power infrastructure firm, will act as the primary bitcoin sub-custodian for the program. Tejas Shah, CEO of NYDIG, said the partnership underscores the convergence of traditional finance with the digital asset economy. “NYDIG is honored to partner with U.S. Bank as its primary provider for bitcoin custody services. Together, we can bridge the gap between traditional finance and the modern economy by facilitating access for Global Fund Services clients to bitcoin as sound money, delivered with the safety and security expected by regulated financial institutions.”

The relaunch reflects U.S. Bank’s ongoing strategy to expand its digital capabilities for institutional clients. Dominic Venturo, senior executive vice president and chief digital officer, said the initiative positions the bank at the forefront of innovation. “U.S. Bank has been at the forefront of exploring how digital assets can serve our clients. Further expanding our capabilities unlocks new opportunities to deliver innovative solutions to those we serve. U.S. Bank will continue to drive progress and shape the future of what matters for our clients in digital finance.”

U.S. Bank Wealth, Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking currently manages more than $11.7 trillion in assets under custody and administration as of June 30, 2025. The bank’s services span fund custody, ETF and alternative investment administration, asset management, corporate trust, and wealth management solutions.

Headquartered in Minneapolis, U.S. Bancorp is the parent company of U.S. Bank, with approximately 70,000 employees and $686 billion in assets. Recognized for digital innovation and client service, U.S. Bank has also earned recognition as one of the 2025 World’s Most Ethical Companies and one of Fortune’s most admired superregional banks.

This post U.S. Bank Resumes Bitcoin Custody Services for Institutional Investors, Adding Support for Bitcoin ETFs first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Price Surges Above $111,000 As Strategy Buys $449 Million Worth Of BTC

Strategy has acquired an additional 4,048 Bitcoin worth approximately $449.3 million at an average Bitcoin price of $110,981 per BTC, according to a Form 8-K filed with the SEC on September 2, 2025. The company’s total Bitcoin holdings now stand at 636,505 BTC, purchased at an aggregate price of $46.95 billion.

The latest purchase was funded through multiple at-the-market (ATM) offering programs, including proceeds from the company’s STRF, STRK, STRD, and MSTR ATMs. During the period from August 26 to September 1, Strategy raised $471.8 million through these offerings, demonstrating continued investor appetite for Bitcoin-linked securities.

The company’s aggressive Bitcoin acquisition strategy comes amid a broader trend of corporate treasury adoption. Many major companies have announced significant Bitcoin purchases in the past month alone, including Ming Shing Group’s deal to acquire $483 million of Bitcoin and KindlyMD buying $679 million worth of Bitcoin.

Strategy’s financial innovation has created new Bitcoin-linked instruments attractive to institutional investors. The company currently maintains several ATM programs, including a $2.1 billion STRF ATM offering 10.00% Series A Perpetual Strife Preferred Stock, a $4.2 billion STRC ATM offering Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, a $21 billion STRK ATM offering 8.00% Series A Perpetual Strike Preferred Stock, a $4.2 billion STRD ATM offering 10.00% Series A Perpetual Stride Preferred Stock, and a $21 billion MSTR ATM offering Class A common stock.

Each successful placement underscores the appetite for bitcoin-tied fixed income and cements the company’s reputation as a credible issuer experimenting at the intersection of Bitcoin and traditional markets.

The company recently updated its guidance to allow tactical equity issuance even when its premium to Bitcoin net asset value falls below the previous 2.5x threshold. This change provides Strategy with greater flexibility to continue its Bitcoin accumulation strategy during market weakness.

Strategy may soon face another milestone with potential inclusion in the S&P 500 index. If admitted, the stock could see billions in passive inflows and would join Coinbase and Block in embedding Bitcoin exposure directly into mainstream equity portfolios.

The company maintains a public dashboard on its website providing real-time updates on its Bitcoin holdings, market prices of outstanding securities, and other key performance indicators.

As more corporations adopt Bitcoin treasury strategies, Strategy’s approach serves as a template for striking a balance between aggressive accumulation and innovative financing structures. The trend shows no signs of slowing, with analysts expecting additional corporate Bitcoin announcements in the coming months.

Trading at $111,000, Bitcoin price has maintained stability despite significant corporate buying pressure, suggesting substantial underlying market depth and growing institutional acceptance of the asset class.

This post Bitcoin Price Surges Above $111,000 As Strategy Buys $449 Million Worth Of BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Vivek Sen.

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Metaplanet’s President Lays out Plan to Acquire 210,000 Bitcoin by 2027 at Shareholder Meeting

On September 1, 2025, Metaplanet hosted an EGM in the heart of Tokyo.

At the event, Metaplanet’s president, Simon Gerovich, highlighted the successes the company has had in its 16 months operating as a bitcoin treasury company and laid out the company’s plan for acquiring 210,000 bitcoin — 1% of the total supply — by 2027.

This vision includes issuing two versions of a new financial product — Metaplanet Prefs, perpetual preferred stock offerings that resemble the type that Strategy rolled out in March 2025 — in efforts to acquire said bitcoin.

Metaplanet’s Milestones

Gerovich commenced the meeting by explaining how Metaplanet pivoted from operating as a struggling hotel company to a bitcoin treasury company in early 2024.

Since then, he pointed out, Metaplanet has acquired approximately 0.1% of the total supply of bitcoin, far surpassing its initial goal of acquiring 10,000 bitcoin.

During the event, Gerovich also announced that Metaplanet had increased its holdings to 20,000 bitcoin, giving it the sixth largest bitcoin balance sheet in the world.

*Metaplanet Acquires Additional 1,009 $BTC, Total Holdings Reach 20,000 BTC* pic.twitter.com/kwvUkQaFth

— Metaplanet Inc. (@Metaplanet_JP) September 1, 2025

He added that his goal is for Metaplanet to have the second largest bitcoin balance, second only to Strategy. And he compared Metaplanet’s percentage of bitcoin per share over the past year to Strategy’s, noting that it’s increased its percentage to 2,274% as compared to Strategy’s 86%.

Gerovich also pointed out that Metaplanet stock trades over 100 hours per week via exchanges and brokerages worldwide, helping to make the success of Metaplanet not just a Japanese story, but a global one.

“Wherever you are in the world, Metaplanet is within reach,” Gerovich told the event’s 3,000+ attendees.

Metaplanet Prefs

“Traditionally, preferred equity has been in a quiet corner of finance, but, backed by bitcoin, it’s something entirely new,” said Gerovich.

He explained how the preferred equity Metaplanet plans to offer will not only become a major fundraising mechanism to acquire more bitcoin, much like it has for Strategy, but that it will also establish a bitcoin-backed yield curve — one with the potential to produce greater returns than those from fixed income products in Japan.

What is more, Gerovich highlighted the fact that Metaplanet is in a unique situation to create such a product in that it can borrow at extremely low rates, as Japan currently has the lowest interest rates of all G7 countries.

“Low rates in Japan are our hidden superpower,” he said.

He also shared that traditional fixed income markets are “under strain” and that investors are “searching for alternatives.”

This, according to Gerovich, is an opportunity to become the largest issuer of bitcoin-backed fixed income in Asia. He believes that the types of preferred equity Metaplanet plans to offer will serve as an enticing alternative to traditional fixed income products.

Metaplanet plans to offer two classes of preferred equity.

Class A will be designed to be a “safer and steadier” financial product that offers a yield, much like traditional fixed income products. The product will yield 5%. Class B will be riskier but will also come with the option to be converted into Metaplanet’s common stock.

These new financial products will offer Metaplanet four distinct advantages, stated Gerovich.

Four Advantages of Metaplanet’s Perpetual Equity Products

1. Diversification of financing: Thus far, Metaplanet’s only fundraising mechanism has been issuing shares of its common stock. Prefs will offer the company a new way to raise money.
2. Permanence: Issuing perpetual debt instruments with a promise of a 5% return rate enables Metaplanet to obtain financing without the constant burden of refinancing risk.
3. Low cost of financing: As mentioned, interest rates in Japan are the lowest amongst all G7 countries, enabling Metaplanet to raise money at a cheaper rate that most of its bitcoin treasury company peers.
4. Ability to cap preferred share issuance: Metaplanet will cap its preferred share issuance at 25% of its bitcoin NAV. Doing this would help to keep Metaplanet afloat in the event of even a 75% drop in the price of bitcoin.

After discussing these four advantages, Gerovich summarized his presentation with a revised mission statement for Metaplanet: Pioneer a new theory of credit in Japan; [issue] instruments built upon over-collateralized, absolutely scarce digital capital.

Resounding Approval 

After laying out the plan for Metaplanet Prefs, Gerovich asked the attendees if they’d approve of the company’s seeking to amend the articles of incorporation.

He was met with a resounding round of applause.

And the members of the audience weren’t the only ones excited about Gerovich’s vision and his proven ability to execute on it.

Eric Trump, who serves as a strategic board advisor to Metaplanet and who partook in a fireside chat with Gerovich during the afternoon’s programming, spoke highly of Gerovich.

“Simon is one of the most honest people I’ve ever met in my entire life,” said Trump. “You have a great leader in Simon and a wonderful product in Bitcoin, and I think that’s a winning combination.

Nakamoto CEO David Bailey, who invested in Metaplanet soon after it implemented its bitcoin treasury strategy, also praised Gerovich and the Metaplanet team, noting that investors across Japan are being forced to take notice of the company.

“Metaplanet has become too big to ignore,” said Bailey.

Bailey went on to say that he looks forward to the day that Gerovich is invited to meet with the prime minister of Japan as well as the emperor of the country thanks to the work Gerovich has done in making Metaplanet a “systemically important institution for Japan.”

Disclosure: Nakamoto is in partnership with Bitcoin Magazine’s parent company BTC Inc to build the first global network of Bitcoin treasury companies, where BTC Inc provides certain marketing services to Nakamoto. More information on this can be found here.

This post Metaplanet’s President Lays out Plan to Acquire 210,000 Bitcoin by 2027 at Shareholder Meeting first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

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Google’s Android Lockdown: Are You Really in Control of Your Phone?

Android, Google’s mobile operating system, announced on August 25 that it will be requiring all app developers to verify their identity with the organization before their apps can run on “certified android devices.”

While this might sound like a common sense policy by Google, this new standard is not just going to be applied to apps downloaded from Google Play store, but all apps, even those “side loaded” — installed directly into devices by side-stepping the Google Play store. Apps of the sort can be found online in Github repositories or on project websites and installed on Android devices directly by downloading the installation files (known as APKs). 

What this means is that, if there is an application that Google does not like, be it because it does not conform to its policies, politics or economic incentives, they can simply keep you from running that application on your own device. They are locking down Android devices from running applications not with their purview. The ask? All developers, whether submitting their apps through the Play store or not, need to give their personal information to Google. 

The decision begs the question, if you can not run whatever app you want on your device without the permission of Google, then is it really your device? How would you respond if Windows decided you could only install programs from the Microsoft app store?

The move has of course made news in tech and cyber security media and caused quite a stir as it has profound consequences for the free and open web. For years, Android has been touted as an open source operating system, and through this strategy has gained massive distribution throughout the world with users in developing countries where Apple’s “walled garden” model and luxury devices are not affordable.

This new policy will tighten up controls over applications and its developers, and threatens the freedom to run whatever software you like on your own device in a very subversive and legalistic way. Because of Google’s influence over the Android variety of phones, the consequences of this policy are likely to be felt by the majority of users and devices, throughout the world.

Android justifies the policy change with concerns about the cyber security of their users. Malicious apps side-loaded into devices have led to “over 50 times more malware” Android claims in their announcement blog. As a measure of “accountability,” and with the council of various governments throughout the world, Android has decided to take a “balanced approach,” and the language couldn’t be more Orwellian. 

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” – Benjamin Franklin

Put in simpler terms, Google is looking to collect the personal information of software developers, centralizing it in its data centers alongside that of all of its users, in order to “protect” users from hackers that Google can’t seem to stop today in the first place.

After all, if Google and Android could actually keep personal user data secure in the first place, this would not be a problem, right?

Google’s solution to user data leaks is to collect more user data, ironically enough, in this case the data of developers who use the Android platform. A remarkable leap of logic, lazy and fundamentally decadent, a sign that they’ve lost their edge and arguably truly forgotten their now scrubbed “don’t be evil” motto.

Information Wants To Be Free

The reality is that Google finds itself trapped by a dilemma set up by the nature of information and the digital age, to quote the 90’s cypherpunk Steward Brand, “information almost wants to be free”.

Every hop that personal data, like your name, face, home address or social security number, makes throughout the internet is an opportunity for it to get copied and leaked. As your information moves from your phone, to a server in your city to another server in a google datacenter, every hop increases the likelihood that your data gets hacked and ends up on the dark web for sale. A thorny problem when user data is the primary business model of a giant like Google who processes it and sells it to advertisers who  in turn create targeted ads. 

We can measure the veracity of Brand’s information principle by looking at two fascinating statistics, which not too many people seem to talk about oddly enough. The first is the absurd amount of data hacks that have taken place in the last 20 years. For example, the Equifax Data Breach in 2017, affected 147 million Americans, and the National Public Data Breach of 2024 affected over 200 million Americans leading to leaked data including social security numbers which likely ended up for sale in the dark web.

While legendary hacks like that of the Office of Personal Management of the U.S. government, compromised a large amount of the U.S. Government officials at the time, including everything from social security numbers to medical records.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that a majority of Americans have had their data hacked and leaked already, and there’s no easy way to reverse that. How does one change their face, medical history or social security number after all?

The second statistic, which no one seems to connect to the first, is the rise of identity theft and fraud in the United States. Did you know that in 2012, 24 billion dollars’ worth of identity theft were reported? Twice as much as all other forms of theft combined that same year. Business Insider reported at the time from Bureau of Justice statistics that “identity theft cost Americans $24.7 billion in 2012, losses for household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft totaled just $14 billion.” Eight years later that number doubled, costing Americans $56 billion in losses in 2020. Both of these trends continue to grow to this day. It may indeed already be too late for the old identity system which we still rely so heavily on. 

Generative AI adds fuel to the fire, in some cases trained in leaked user data with examples of image models able to create high quality images of humans holding fake IDs. As AI continues to improve, it is increasingly capable of fooling humans into thinking they are talking to another human as well, rather than a robot, creating new attack vectors for identity fraud and theft.

Nevertheless, Google insists that if we just collect a bit more personal user data, maybe then the problem will just go away. Convenient for a corporation whose main business model is the collection and sale of such data. Has any other corporation done more damage to civilian privacy than Google btw? Facebook I suppose. 

In Cryptography We Trust

Now to be fair to the 2000’s Web2 tech giants the problem of secure identity in the digital age is not easy to solve. The legal structures of our societies around identity were created long before the internet emerged and moved all that data to the cloud. The only real solution to this problem now is actually cryptography, and its application to the trust that humans build in their relationships in the real world, over time.

The 90s cypherpunks understood this, which is why they invented two important technologies, PGP and webs of trust. 

PGP

PGP invented in 1991 by Phill Zimmerman, pioneered the use of asymmetric cryptography to solve this fundamental problem of protecting user data privacy while also enabling secure user authentication, identification and secure communication.

How? It’s simple actually, by using cryptography in a similar way as Bitcoin does today to secure over a trillion dollars of value. You have a secure ‘password’ and keep it as secret as possible, you don’t share it with anybody, and your apps use it carefully to unlock services but the password never leaves your phone. We can do this, it works, there’s even custom made hardware to lock down precisely this kind of information. The person or company you want to connect with also creates a secure ‘password’, and with that password we each generate a public address or digital pseudonymous ID. 

The company encrypts a message with their password and your public address and sends you a message. Well thanks to the magic of cryptography, you can decrypt that message with your password and the company’s public address. That is all we need to secure the web. These public IDs do not have to reveal any information about you and you could have one for every brand or identity you have online. 

Webs Of Trust

But there is also the question of reputation, how do you know that the company you are trying to connect with is who they claim to be? In cyber security this is called a man in the middle attack, where a malicious third party impersonates who you actually wish to connect to. 

The way cypherpunks solved this problem in the 90s was by developing the concept of webs of trust, through real world ceremonies called ‘signing parties’.

When we meet in person, we decide that we trust each other or affirm that we already know and trust each other enough to co-sign each other’s public IDs. We give each other a cryptographic vote of confidence — so to speak –  weighed by our brand or publicly known nym. This is similar to giving a follow to someone on a public forum like X.com, It is the PGP equivalent to saying ‘I’ve met Bob, I recognize XYZ as his public ID, and I vouch that he is real’.

While this sounds tedious, antiquated and like it would never scale to the whole world, technology has advanced a great deal since the 90’s, in fact this fundamental logic is how the internet is sort of secured today.

Remember that green lock that used to be displayed on every website? That was a PGP-like cryptographic handshake between your computer and the website you were visiting, signed off by some ‘certificate authority’ or third party out on the internet. Those certificate authorities became centralized custodians of public trust and like many other institutions today probably need to be decentralized.

The same logic can be applied to the verification and authentication of APKs, by scaling up webs of trust. In fact in the open source world, software hashed into a unique ID derived from the data of the software, and that hash is signed by developer PGP keys to this day. The software hashes, PGP public IDs and signatures are all published alongside software for people to review and verify. 

However if you don’t know whether the PGP public ID is authentic, then the signature is not useful, since it could have been created by an impersonator online. So as users we need a link that authenticates that public ID as belonging to the real world developer of the app.

The good news is that this problem can probably be solved without having to create a global surveillance state giving all our data to the Googles of the world. 

For example, if I wanted to download an app from a developer in eastern europe, I likely won’t know him or be able to verify this public ID, but perhaps I know someone that vouched for someone that knows this developer. While I may be three or four hops away from this person, the likelihood that they are real suddenly goes up a lot. Faking three or four hops of connection in a web of trust is very expensive for mercenary hackers looking to score a quick win. 

Unfortunately, these technologies have not been adopted widely, beyond the high tech paranoid world,  nor gotten as much funding as the data mining business model of most of the web. 

MODERN SOLUTIONS

Some modern software projects recognize this logic and are working to solve the problems at hand, making it easy for users to leverage and scale cryptographic webs of trust. Zapstore.dev for example is building an alternative app store secured by cryptographic webs of trust using Bitcoin compatible cryptography, the project is funded by OpenSats, a non profit that funds open source Bitcoin related software development.

Graphene, an Android operating system fork that’s become popular among cyber security enthusiasts, has also implemented an alternative app store that addresses many of these issues without having to DOX app developers, and serves as a high security operating system, looking to solve many of the privacy and security issues in Android today.

Far fetched as it may seem, cryptographic authentication of communication channels and digital identities is the only thing that can protect us from personal data hacks. Entropy and the security created from randomness via cryptography is the only thing AI can not fake. That same cryptography can help us authenticate ourselves in the digital age without having to share our personal data with every intermediary out there, if we use it right.

Whether this new policy by Android is sustained, or whether enough public outcry can stop it and better solutions do get popularized and adopted remains to be seen, but the truth of the matter is clear. There is a better way forward, we just have to see it and choose it.

This post Google’s Android Lockdown: Are You Really in Control of Your Phone? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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Eric Trump Said The Bitcoin Price Is Definitely Going To $1 Million At Bitcoin Asia

Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and son of U.S. President Donald Trump, made bold predictions about bitcoin’s future price trajectory during his appearance at the Bitcoin Asia conference in Hong Kong on Friday, telling attendees that the Bitcoin price will “definitely” reach $1 million.

“There’s no question bitcoin hits $1 million,” Eric Trump declared during a panel discussion with David Bailey, citing surging institutional demand and its limited supply as key drivers for the astronomical price target. The Bitcoin price currently trades around $110,000, having risen 18% this year, but still remains well below Trump’s ambitious forecast.

Eric Trump’s appearance at the two-day Hong Kong event, which attracted more than 20,000 attendees—triple last year’s numbers—highlighted the growing global influence of the Bitcoin industry and the Trump family’s deepening involvement in it.

JUST IN: Eric Trump says, “There is no question #Bitcoin hits a million dollars.”

“Everyone is buying Bitcoin” pic.twitter.com/PEzRZK8Zgk

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 29, 2025

During his talk, Trump also praised China’s role in the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem, calling the nation a leading force in Bitcoin and crypto despite Beijing’s ban on crypto trading since 2021.

The comments come as the Trump family has significantly expanded its Bitcoin and crypto ventures over the past year. Eric Trump and his brother Donald Trump Jr. co-founded American Bitcoin, a mining operation that is approximately 20% owned by the Trump brothers and the remainder by Hut 8. The company recently raised $220 million and is planning a September Nasdaq debut through its merger with Gryphon.

Eric Trump emphasised the dramatic shift in U.S. crypto policy under his father’s administration, claiming more progress has been made on Bitcoin and crypto in the seven months since President Trump’s return to office than in the previous decade. “We went from 0 to 100 instantaneously,” he said, describing America as “winning the digital revolution” thanks to strong political backing and institutional support from Wall Street firms, sovereign wealth funds, and retirement accounts.

Trump also highlighted his involvement with Japanese Bitcoin treasury company Metaplanet, where he serves on the board of advisors. He praised the company’s president and CEO, Simon Gerovich, during his panel discussion, reflecting the growing international network of Bitcoin-focused enterprises.

Eric Trump’s bullish Bitcoin price prediction reflects growing institutional confidence in its long-term prospects, and the Bitcoin Asia conference underscored Hong Kong’s rising role in the global Bitcoin landscape.

This post Eric Trump Said The Bitcoin Price Is Definitely Going To $1 Million At Bitcoin Asia first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Vivek Sen.

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Nunchuck Wallet Brings Programmable Bitcoin To Everyone With Miniscript Support

Today Nunchuck Wallet releases support for fully generalized Miniscript use, bringing a degree of flexibility and control to their users not seen before. 

For those unfamiliar with Miniscript, it is a policy language invented by Core developer and former Maintainer Pieter Wuille to make the creation of customized Bitcoin scripts easier and safer. Miniscript takes the most commonly used pieces of Bitcoin script, i.e. signature locks, timelocks, hashlocks, etc. and creates a “higher level” programming language for users to create custom scripts. 

This higher level language is designed to be safely analyzable and composable, meaning that once users create a customized script they can be sure that it will behave exactly how they expect it to. 

Nuchuck provides two basic templates users can use, simply needing to fill in the keys they wish to use in the wallet. One is a decaying multisig, where after a timelock expires less keys are required to spend in order to ensure that key loss does not result in losing funds. The other is an expanding multisig, where over time other keys can sign for a transaction beyond the core key set. I.e. initially a 2-of-2 is required, but after a timelock a third key can sign instead. 

In addition to these basic templates, more advanced users can import any custom Miniscript template they have created themselves.

Miniscript templates can be applied to both Native Segwit wallets as well as Taproot wallets. 

Out of the gate, the following hardware wallets will support Native Segwit Miniscript: Coldcard, Tapsigner, Blockstream Jade, and Ledger. 

The following will support Taproot Miniscript: Coldcard and Ledger. 

MuSig2 use with Miniscript will be limited to software only keys for the time being. 

Nunchuck’s end-to-end encrypted communication function has full support for Miniscript templates, allowing collaboration between users in constructing and using template based wallets. 

In addition, Nunchuck has compiled a 101 Technical Guide for users who wish to make use of Miniscript in their wallets. For those more inclined to dive into the nuts and bolts themselves, here is also a website put together by Pieter Wuille with a breakdown of Miniscript itself and some basic tools. 

This post Nunchuck Wallet Brings Programmable Bitcoin To Everyone With Miniscript Support first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

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Bitcoin and Crypto Advocates Warn Congress: Protect Developers or Lose Industry Support

The DeFi Education Fund has penned a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee with support from over 110 crypto builders, investors and advocates urging Congress to “provide robust, nationwide protections for software developers and noncustodial service providers in market structure legislation.”

The letter, which has been signed by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, the Blockchain Association and the Digital Chamber to name a few of the signatories, states that crypto market structure legislation must protect developers if the broader industry is to support it.

“Without such protections, we cannot support a market structure bill,” reads the letter.

The letter draws a line between the regulatory framework that exists for the “traditional, intermediated financial world” and the world of open-source development, which requires protections for developers so as to not force them into “unworkable regulatory categories.”

If the United States is to fulfill President Trump’s vision of becoming the “crypto capital of the world,” states the letter, it must continue to welcome cutting-edge software development in the digital space as it has since the earliest days of the internet.

According to the letter, the total share of open source developers based in the United States dropped from 25% in 2021 to 18% in 2025, which is attributed to a “lack of regulatory clarity for software development.”

The letter expresses gratitude for both the House and the Senate having included language from both the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA) and the Keep Your Coins Act that protects developers of noncustodial crypto software in their respective drafts of the CLARITY Act.

It stressed that it’s imperative that these protections be kept in the bill and that “these protections must make explicit that no individual or entity is subject to regulation solely for engaging in activities that are core to creating, developing, publishing, and maintaining blockchain networks, nor for enabling users to access such networks via software interfaces while maintaining custody of their own funds.”

Finally, the letter points out that protecting software developers is a bipartisan issue, highlighting the fact that a bipartisan supermajority of 294 members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the CLARITY Act, and urges the Senate to improve upon developer protections in its draft of the bill.

This post Bitcoin and Crypto Advocates Warn Congress: Protect Developers or Lose Industry Support first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

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Block Inc. Launches Proto Rig: Modular Bitcoin Miner Challenging Bitmain’s Dominance

Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc. recently announced the Proto Rig, a modular reinvention of Bitcoin mining hardware not seen since Bitmain’s launch of the S1 ASIC rig in 2013, over 12 years ago. The announcement was made from the facilities of Core Scientific with whom Block has partnered to design, test and develop the Proto line of mining hardware. Dorsey personally attended the event, among a who’s who of the Bitcoin mining industry. 

Spotted: The boss @jack getting a closer look at Proto Rig. pic.twitter.com/196Sk9KOzn

— Proto (@protomining) August 14, 2025

The Proto Rig has the potential to disrupt and challenge Bitmain’s effective monopoly over mining hardware manufacturing, with approximately over 80% of the market, a position it has enjoyed for most of Bitcoin’s history. But the main innovation does not come from more powerful or energy-efficient chips — not yet anyway — rather from making everything else around the chip drastically better, designed to lower repair frequency and maintenance costs. Its modular design supports seamless upgrades and part replacements that can be swapped in seconds. 

In an interview with The Mining Pod, Perry Hothi, blockchain solutions architect at Block, focused on the mining division since 2022 said the device was more than just competitive with the Bitmain line of mining rigs; “When people hear competitive, they automatically think efficient, right? I always say it’s profitable… If it’s not running, efficiency doesn’t matter.” It changes the focus of the conversation in mining from the specs of ASIC chips toward the amateur design of mining rigs as a whole, which have not yet caught up with best practices developed by the data center industry in its many decades of experience. “When you look at the data center world, they’ve been doing it for 10 times as long [as Bitcoin miners]. There’s a lot of innovations they made that work for us,” Hothi said, implying the Proto Rig was designed to learn from the scaled-up data center industry. 

Erik Cativo, a Bitcoin product developer and HRF grantee echoed this sentiment on X saying the “Proto Rig looks clean. Reminds me of beautifully designed Swedish telecom hardware.”

Proto Rig looks clean. Reminds me of beautifully designed Swedish telecom hardware. pic.twitter.com/4F3fLSPw6Q

— Erik (@uxerik_) August 14, 2025

In the interview, Hothi also discussed the vision and complexities of manufacturing the Proto Rig in the United States, expressing the benefits of manufacturing pieces at home, which can improve reliability of supply chains and is also now strongly incentivized by President Trump’s new tariff regime. On the topic Hothi said, “there are certain components that can be built faster in China and brought over, others are better built in America now… Like there’s a not too distant future where every component in [the Proto Rig] will be built right here [in the United States].” He added that today, “the [ASIC] chips are going to be in Taiwan, but even those eventually, we’re looking to make those here.”

Regarding the ASIC chip of the Proto Rig, Max Guise Product & ASIC Lead at Proto told Bitcoin Magazine “Our system is vertically integrated end-to-end, including our own chip. At a system level, we can offer different configurations that bring different efficiency depending on the mining operator needs, and our configurations go as low as 14.1 joules per hash efficiency rating.” keeping details about the chip close to the chest and emphasizing the Proto Rig’s customizability and modularity. 

Modularity

In order to provide more reliable hashrate to miners, the Proto Rig is designed in modular pieces starting with the chassis, which measures 39cm by 29cm by 50cm and can host nine boards’ worth of chips, six fans and three modular power units. The Proto Rig can be liquid cooled as well, while the modular fans suggest the hardware is meant to be modded or extended to serve different use cases and approaches, perhaps enterprise miners or the booming home mining industry. The Proto Rig is highly customizable allowing miners to choose exactly how many chips to run, while also having clear hardware and software error signals in case a fan breaks or a power supply is overheating. 

The Proto Rig manages to squeeze the equivalent of three mining units in the space of two traditional models while being competitive to top-of-the-line industrial miners like the Bitmain Antminer S21 XP or the MicroBT Whatsminer M66S, both running on about 14 joules per terahash. Yet the Proto Rig delivers up to 810 TH per unit in the same space as the competitors, taking into account the real estate costs of industrial mining, which for years have filled out warehouses of units side by side. 

14.1 J/TH !! https://t.co/bZtUkwAkEj

— jack (@jack) August 14, 2025

The Proto Right might not just be built for the big miners. There were multiple hints in the event and following commentary that suggest home miners will get some love as well from the Proto hardware team. Jack Dorsey himself tweeted out “A commitment to ALL the players in the mining industry, not just the big guys.” He retweeted a bitcoiner who attended the event and shared his excitement with some photographs. 

The mysterious tweet has not been followed up with any details but there are rumours that there might be a Bitaxe-style collaboration with Proto which would look to serve the home mining market. 

When asked about home mining Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine “Proto is designing products for mining operators of all sizes. Our first product, Rig, is a 12 kilowatt system, which is a higher power requirement than most home miners can handle, so it is best suited for operators who have more infrastructure involved in their operations. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of future products that could be more retail-friendly, but right now it’s not our focus.”

StratumV2 On By Default: Huge For Miner Decentralization

Brian Stegall, head of design at Proto, announced at the launch event that the “Proto Rigs will support Stratum V2 out of the box,” adding that, “It’s a more efficient protocol that offers native hashrate auditing, which helps detect and reduce issues like miner misconfiguration, unwanted divergence and other fleet-wide issues.” 

Stratumv2 is a mining pool update to the popular Stratum V1 protocol which dominates adoption among miners, in part because it was one of the first software tools developed to pull hashrate from miners throughout the world, allowing them to act as one miner and share rewards. The old protocol, while well understood by miners has a serious downside, it centralizes the construction of blocks to the mining pool operator, an issue that was recently revealed to be worse than expected, as most mining pools appear to be copying block templates produced by Antpool. The risk threatens a deep layer of the Bitcoin network, potentially exposing transactions to censorship, if this trend is not reversed. 

StratumV2 was designed to put block template production in the hands of hashrate providers, pushing the process to the edges and thus increasing the diversity of blocks and transactions included, ultimately safeguarding Bitcoin’s censorship-resistance properties. 

But mining pools have been slow to adopt the protocol, likely because of the software development lift. With the Proto Rig building it into the software stack of the machine, we should expect a much higher rate of adoption as the Block’s mining rigs get rolled out into production. This is a development that the greater Bitcoin community has been working toward for many years. 

Open Sourcing The Software

Going beyond just reinventing mining hardware, Proto has also announced the open source release of its mining management software, Fleet.

Brian Stegall broke the news by sharing their experience researching the state of software in the Bitcoin mining industry as, “We chatted with a ton of different people in varying sizes of operations, and we listened to all the complaints… We broke that down into three areas… One, that there’s too many tools. Two, making it simple is important. And automation and AI is the third one.”

Fleet consolidates a patchwork of tools used by miners to boot and track their machines as well as identify hardware or software failures. Laughing in playful disbelief Stegall said that “We went to a lot of facilities and there’s a lot of places where they’ll scan the network with BTC.com tools, still. Yeah. Right. And then will flip it into a spreadsheet and upload it.” As an example of how badly a modern software suite is needed, he described some arcane process of big mining.

Stegall also made the case that having a better-designed and robust software tool to manage the hardware would help train employees more effectively and let them focus on more important issues rather than struggle with bad user interfaces.

On the topic of security Stegall said that the “Proto Fleet comes out of the box with secure boot technology to guarantee that the firmware you’re running comes from Proto. This is an extra measure that prevents supply chain attacks, malware attacks, and theft of Bitcoin rewards.” He added that, “It will also allow you to disable secure boot technology easily if you want to do something of your own.”

Finally, the topic of AI was teased out as a modern approach to user experience, though the hints made were somewhat vague: “We wanted to make clean and clear dashboards… If fan3 is broken, we tell you fan3 is broken… We’re providing robust repair guides right in proto-fleet… We want to introduce a modern AI-powered interface… Automated alerts so that you don’t even have to ask the chat interface.”

While details on the depth of AI integration into Fleet are still scarce, what Stegall shared does reveal a vision of high-tech modern software helping increase the efficiency of Bitcoin miners as a whole. 

The software is expected to be open sourced in the near future, though no software has been released to the public yet. 

Pricing and Delivery

Overall, while we have learned much about Block and Proto’s plans to serve and upgrade the Bitcoin mining industry, no details have been shared about the price of the Proto Rigs, on the topic Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine that “We want to hear from everyone interested in Proto Rig. There are many ways to configure the rig, and pricing and configuration options are handled directly by our Sales team.”

The rigs are starting to hit the market, apparently not just to Core Scientific who has a close partnership with Proto, Max Guise told Bitcoin Magazine that the “Proto Rigs are shipping to customers now. As far as availability, we recommend customers to check with our Sales team on exact availability depending on configuration and volume”.

All and all, the Proto Rig reveal left a strong impression in the mining industry and greater Bitcoin community: It demonstrated a mastery in industrial design and showed off what top Western talent can bring to a hardware industry that for most of Bitcoin’s history has been dominated by the East. 

This post Block Inc. Launches Proto Rig: Modular Bitcoin Miner Challenging Bitmain’s Dominance first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine – Read More

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Drops Again — And Nope, It’s Still Not Because of the Fed

..aaaand, we’re back at it again — a misbehaving bitcoin price. Sunday evening bitcoin flash-crash dipped a red candle the size of Jupiter; and more eerily, it kept dropping down on Monday morning, touching below $111,000.

Now, around here in the land of bitcoin price therapy, we say that nobody knows why prices move. But sometimes, we do… though not as well as we would like. Today, I discuss two things: the last 24 hours’ worth of shenanigans and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s remarks late last week. 

An Unruly Bitcoin Price

Late Sunday (European time) was pretty disgusting:

It’s hard to say “nobody knows” when a chart looks like that; somebody knows what happened to plunge the bitcoin price some 3,000 in a matter of minutes. If it’s not a specific macro event, like last week, the only thing eating through order books like this are a) massive orders, and — what amounts to the same thing — b) mass liquidations. 

Yesterday, there was some indication of both: 

Quien de ustedes fue? pic.twitter.com/lizlwaDFPD

— Nico ₿丰 (@bourbonni) August 24, 2025

or…

This entity liquidated their entire 24k balance, sending all of it to Hyperunite. They transferred 12k just today and are still actively selling, which is likely contributing to the ongoing price drop. https://t.co/HYPBiGzjRf pic.twitter.com/crML9AqvvV

— Sani | TimechainIndex.com (@SaniExp) August 24, 2025

This is an underdeveloped market, and it’s ridiculous how small we are and how illiquid the bitcoin market is: still able to get wacked around by individual market actors. (As always in Bitcoinland, there is some schmuck willing to turn a verifiably bad thing into a good thing.) 

The 2.5% instant drop in bitcoin price last night might be a one-off due to a whale selling or some liquidations, but the gradual, diagonally down movement during the night and Monday morning (bitcoin price crashing below $111,000) is much more worrying. Ignore the big, noisy whale… wth is happening? Why are we slowly dying when we should be winning, son!

All the macro arrows of the world are pointing in the right direction: Why is the bitcoin price trading down, in this range, when any sane assessment puts it double or triple from here…? (And no, we didn’t drop below $111,000 as or because or in relation whatsoever to Metaplanet announcing buys).

Price does whatever it wants; shitcos do whatever they please.

Bitcoin price therapy definitely needed: Bitcoin price just does whatever it wants, with no regard for sanity or rational assessment. Not a care in the world for the most bullish of bullish circumstances. Maximum pain, I’ve heard it said. Not even Saylor’s million-dollar-cost averaging made much of a dent:

Strategy has acquired 3,081 BTC for ~$356.9 million at ~$115,829 per bitcoin and has achieved BTC Yield of 25.4% YTD 2025. As of 8/24/2025, we hodl 632,457 $BTC acquired for ~$46.50 billion at ~$73,527 per bitcoin. $MSTR $STRC $STRK $STRF $STRD https://t.co/KCrM0ffClo

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 25, 2025

One of these magic tea leaves reading techniques (128-day moving average), tells us our Bitcoin Magazine Pro team today, is at $108,500… so we’ll probably go there. Saylor et al have already sold their kidneys and chairs, so I wonder what’s left.

More interesting/terrifying is that it keeps falling afterwards, hitting new lows. Our most scoop-like explanation is that all of these shitcos — of which Mr. Bailey, the owner of BTC Inc, runs one, having recently incinerated some $41 million — gobbling up all these coins during the spring couldn’t hold on to them and are now burping them back out again; some, in liquidation-infested red candles, and others in slow, grindy, time-weighted price.

A certain Cypherpunk OG seems aware of the structure:

have they not heard of TWAPs? do they not like money? such clumsy market activity. normally people with that kind of money would be smarter.

— Adam Back (@adam3us) August 25, 2025

Bitcoin Price and Powell’s Bowel

Sometimes we actually (sort of) do know what happened in markets — like last week, Aug 22, at 10 am Eastern: Released on Fed website was the statement/upgrade to Fed’s monetary policy framework. It was widely interpreted as future easing of monetary policy in the cards. How do we know this? Because every (hard) asset jump on the minute, and the dollar index fell:

• 9:59:49…bitcoin price = $112,393, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro’s chart.
• 10:00:49, one minute later, it’s 113459… 
• a few minutes after that, we hit 115,000, bitcoin price rising 2.3% on the news.

This is the kind of shit that moves markets, and the instant, large moves make us pretty confident that THIS is the cause.

(for reference: 9.59, DXY = 98.7; two minutes later, 98.15; another minute, 97.8. That’s 1%, in a blink… That’s a big move for the DXY!)

Now we’ve located the source — Powell’s speech and/or the release of the statement. Which bit of his statement is what shocked markets so?

What happens on releases like this — or inflation numbers or unemployment by BLS — is that simple trading algorithms scrape the websites for instant updates and make a split-second assessment, often with second-order trading effects following. The move itself often get reversed ten, twenty, thirty minutes later when human and intelligent assessment have gotten involved. It was all a nothingburger, after all. That wasn’t the case this time, as the bitcoin price traded high over the weekend (until someone ruined the fun on Sunday…).

Powell’s statements last week revealed that

• inflation is a little elevated, but under control and coming down
• GDP growth had slowed markedly
• unemployment was steady and balanced (but “a curious kind of balance” where both supply and demand fall together) → risks altogether up.
• …and they’ll scrap this entire mistaken idea of average inflation target (over some time period nobody ever specified). 

“In the near term, risks to inflation are tilted to the upside, and risks to employment to the downside — a challenging situation” 

Yet Powell concluded that those risks “may warrant adjusting our policy stance.”

Powell confirms the Fed is abandoning its 2% average inflation target. pic.twitter.com/7J2W3cNyHL

— TFTC (@TFTC21) August 22, 2025

In the minutes and hours after the speech and the release of the statement, bitcoin price peaked at $117,000, before falling back to $116,000; that’s market participants dissecting and assessing, organically, what this new state means.

Here’s where my “Nobody knows why” take still holds: Nobody knows which part of Powell’s statement mattered, since new information is always mixing and merging with the expectation market participants had going in — and we can only rarely tell what those were. What we’re doing when we’re playing these catch-up, ad hoc, after-the-case explanations is playing post-rationalization games. Not that impressive. 

Altogether pathetic. We need Bitcoiners rich and flourishing, not impoverished and distraught.

Bitcoin price therapy out. See you all in Hong Kong for Bitcoin Asia.

This post Bitcoin Price Drops Again — And Nope, It’s Still Not Because of the Fed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine – Read More

Bitcoin Magazine

Freedom of Mind and Freedom of Money: Inside Costa Rica’s Growing Bitcoin Circular Economy

The embryo of each Bitcoin Circular Economy is unique.

The purposes of Bitcoin Circular Economies are diverse and, as they grow, the projects develop their own identity: education, P2P, payments, wallets etc. The quests of their protagonists often shape the origin of each, with characteristics and needs that define them. The founders, who decide to pursue this social, technological and economic adventure, define the spirit of the project. The Bitcoin Jungle project was born in the heart of the Costa Rican jungle, where a vibrant community of expatriates and digital nomads from all over the world is trying to develop a more conscious way of living in harmony with nature.

Two men lit the spark that gave birth to Bitcoin Jungle. Over time, others joined the fire, but two were the energies that aligned to start this project. One a developer and serial entrepreneur; the other a journalist, retired teacher and democracy activist. 

Both shared two deeply rooted beliefs in their hearts. First, Costa Rica is the best place in the world to live. Second, Bitcoin is an enlightening technology that can lead humanity to a more peaceful and evolved lifestyle.

Richard Scotford lived in Hong Kong for more than 20 years. He worked as a teacher and freelance reporter for various media outlets, always as a political analyst. Richard witnessed firsthand the peaceful protests that began there in 2014 with the “Umbrella Movement,” which later became a symbol of resistance. Without mincing words, Richard supported Hong Kong’s democratic struggle against the Chinese Communist Party, which imposed an election system where the people could only choose among candidates selected by the party. Through his articles, Richard became part of Hong Kong’s political scene, and when his friends and colleagues began to be imprisoned, he decided it was time to take a new direction in life.

At the time, Richard knew nothing about Bitcoin and admits that he crossed off the list of all the mistakes that cryptocurrency users usually make before coming into Bitcoin.

“We were scammed, we lost money until mid-2018 when we started to understand the differences between Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies.”

The realization about Bitcoin and the profound impact it could have on the world came at a very special time in the lives of Richard and his wife. 

“We were in the middle-class trap, where we had everything we needed. All we could do was have more or better stuff. A better car, a fancier boat, a bigger house or join a better club. I call it a trap because there was nothing extra to own. It was clear that our happiness was not going to change by having more or better things. We wanted to do something radically different and that’s how we ended up in Costa Rica.”

At first, the couple explored the diverse climates and landscapes of the country. They found many similarities with the jungles of Hong Kong, enjoyed the volcanic beaches of the Pacific Ocean as well as those of the Caribbean. It was not easy to impress the new visitors, who knew the Asian beaches by heart. It wasn’t until Christmas 2019 when Richard would find a new meaning to his purpose in Costa Rica.

“We participated in an ayahuasca ceremony in the jungle. Suddenly, three different ideas connected in my mind. On the one hand, I felt a call to dive deep into jungle medicine, which is central to Costa Rican culture. On the other hand, all the ideas I had about Bitcoin connected. At the time, I was precisely falling down the rabbit hole, studying and learning as much as possible.”

“It all connected with conversations about the best way to school our daughter.”

“It all came together: I was a teacher in Hong Kong, so naturally it came up for me to get involved with a local elementary school. Then the idea of building our own secondary school in 2020 would come up.”

Before long, the dream of opening his own school came to life. “I told my wife: ‘We are going to create the first school in Costa Rica that accepts bitcoin. And we’re going to teach their kids and our kids about Bitcoin.’ The only thing I could think of was to send out a tweet to the Bitcoin community that said, ‘We are a school in Costa Rica, we want to accept Bitcoin. How can we do it?’”

Many people responded to Richard’s request for help, including Nicholas Burtey, co-founder of Galoy and the Bitcoin Beach wallet, currently called Blink. Nicholas suggested that the best way to start accepting small payments was through a Bitcoin Lightning wallet and offered to help. He encouraged them to create a fork of their own wallet, based on the open source repository of the Bitcoin Beach wallet.

That was the first moment Richard realized he wasn’t alone. “That’s where things started to take shape. We wanted to develop our own wallet to simplify payments at school, and at the same time also facilitate Bitcoin adoption in Uvita, the town we chose to live in. The problem was that we didn’t have the technical skills needed to fork the Galoy repository and build it.”

The universe manages to cross the paths of people who need each other. Just when Richard was stymied by his lack of technical skills to launch a local version of the wallet tailored to Uvita’s needs, he met Lee Salminen, a software engineer and serial entrepreneur from Boulder, Colorado. Lee is a cheerful, positive person who sees opportunity in every challenge. The combination of his technical skills, his passion for Bitcoin and his purpose in life made him the perfect candidate to start a Bitcoin Circular Economy. Richard and Lee fit together like pieces of a puzzle.”

“Lee is another core founder of Bitcoin Jungle. He was able to bring the project to life. He copied Galoy’s wallet over a weekend, without any support. Even the guys at Galoy couldn’t believe we had done it so fast,” Richard recalls.

“Bitcoin is a tool to change the world, to raise the awareness of humanity.”

Just at that time, the first edition of the Adopting Bitcoin conference was taking place in El Salvador. Richard traveled to the neighboring country, while Lee stayed in Costa Rica working on the wallet. “Going on that trip to El Salvador was eye-opening. No one knew who I was. Just a simple English guy walking down the halls, trying to make friends, saying, ‘Hi, we want to do something like Bitcoin Beach in Costa Rica — can you help us?’”

The Sats Were Already in This Circular Economy

Seen from the outside, Bitcoin Jungle’s approach seemed impossible. Copying the source code of a wallet over a weekend, without technical support from the original developers, was a huge challenge. Then launching an adoption campaign without a significant amount of sats to donate and start the process. 

However, Richard knew that a Bitcoin Circular Economy in Costa Rica had potential for one simple reason. “The sats were already there! I knew Costa Rica was different. There were a lot of people around me who owned bitcoin. It was full of expats. All we needed was to create the payment rails to get them moving. The money was already here, we just needed places to spend it.” Richard doesn’t beat around the bush and gets straight to the point because he feels he has a message to share:

“You have to know your community. Understand and provide the services they need. It’s important to learn from other circular economies, but many times the keys to success are in the differences.”

When Richard returned from El Salvador, Lee already had his wallet working. The excitement within the volcanoes of the Costa Rican jungle was beginning to stir the first tremors.

The Circular Economy Plan: Start Small

From the beginning, the founders of Bitcoin Jungle decided to keep the efforts concentrated in a relatively small area called The Golden Triangle, demarcated by the towns of Dominical, Uvita and Tinamaste. Instead of spreading the efforts throughout the country, they decided to focus on this particular region, characterized by spiritual seekers, surfers and people with a deep connection to nature. 

“Although Bitcoin Jungle is spilling all over Costa Rica, in the beginning we had no plans to go out massively and try to adopt the whole country. It has always been about keeping it small, local, within our personal connections. The area between Dominical, Uvita and Tinamaste has a lot of healers, natural medicine practitioners and alternative people. It has this unique energy that is hard to explain, but easy to feel. It is a very large area, full of foreigners, who receive income from their countries and need to spend it in Costa Rica.”

Govinda wears yoga attire and whispers in a calm voice, which conveys the vibe of much of this community of foreigners who chose Costa Rica as their new home. Govinda is another key member of Bitcoin Jungle: He runs the holistic center Awake, a sustainable hotel with activities related to yoga and meditation.

Awake is also the place where many Bitcoin meetings are held, as well as training sessions on the Bitcoin Jungle wallet. This center is also the location where the Nostrica conference was held in 2023. This unique community has adopted Bitcoin as another tool to seek the elevation of human consciousness and harmony with nature. In pursuit of contributing to this balance, gaining trust within the community was key to integrating this innovative technology into their daily lives.

“It was key to the success of the project to have founders like Lee and Richard,” Govinda explains. “When the project started, there were several cryptocurrency scams going around and they were able to explain in Spanish to the store owners the differences with Bitcoin, as well as the technical aspects of the wallet in very simple terms. They were key to developing confidence in the project and the team of people behind it.”

Being scarce, digital and transparent, bitcoin begins to demonstrate its advantages, solving problems for multiple types of people. It is worth looking at the profile of the main users of Bitcoin Jungle. They face a different problem than the exiled families in El Salvador who send remittances back home.

It is true that both projects coincide in the way they defined their target influence area, seeking to concentrate the amount of Bitcoin payments per store, nurture their user experience and economic revenues, with the aim of maintaining a stable relationship between the number of visitors and the length of the store network. However, the Golden Triangle population had something in common that other Bitcoin Circular Economies did not. As Richard likes to say, 

“Most of the people in the Bitcoin Jungle community have already done the work.”

He refers to the fact that many of the people in Uvita and Dominical already understood how to hold virtual currencies and many even used bitcoin as a store of value. The team just needed to give them a direct payment system to ignite the virtuous circular cycle. Instead of paying with high-fee credit cards and constantly needing to transfer money into the country from abroad, users could simply load their Bitcoin Lightning wallet and buy whatever they needed.

“Our main goal was pretty simple, we were focused on reducing the friction of using bitcoin for people visiting and living in Costa Rica,” Richard expounds the conclusion he came to some time after processing the purpose that had distilled his spiritual journey. All that remained was to design an adoption strategy and encourage Bitcoiner tourism.

Bitcoin Circular Economies are New Social Contracts

Costa Rica is known worldwide for its paradisiacal beaches, misty jungles, exotic animals, volcanoes and surfing. It tends to be a very attractive spot for tourism in the Central American corridor. Add its political stability, its high security standards, its motto “Pura vida” (pure life), as a declaration of respect for nature and the abolition of its army. The result not only caught the attention of tourism within the ecosystem, but also of the community of digital nomads, who began to take it as one of their permanent residencies.

The community continues to expand, with a growing percentage of visitors and families who decide to settle. Most are foreigners from the United States, Canada and Europe, some seeking to escape excessive surveillance and increasing government oppression.

“Many came here looking for a new social contract, one that works for everyone and is not imposed from a top-down approach,” Govinda stresses before pausing, taking a breath, and clarifying the unwritten but community-adopted manifesto. “We believe in freedom, peace and prosperity, which are values that are deeply aligned with Bitcoin. We don’t want to be told what to do. This is why I have high hopes for the rapid growth of the Bitcoin Jungle community.”

However, the first years of these projects, which grow into a Bitcoin Circular Economy, are not easy. Founders often delimit the boundaries. There are multiple ways to get involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem and, given the characteristics of the Costa Rican community, different models were discussed in the early days. Having a large community of tech-savvy expats, with bitcoin available to spend, represents either a temptation or an opportunity — depending on your point of view — to develop a profitable business.

One of the early contributors to the project was interested in pursuing this line, while the other founders wanted to build a nonprofit community endeavor. “There was an interesting situation at the beginning, because one of the early founders tried to turn it into a commercial project and make money from it. All the other founding members were more interested in it remaining a community-driven thing. This led to a very healthy split around 2021 and what is now known globally as Bitcoin Jungle is the nonprofit project that we decided to continue,” Govinda clarifies, inviting reflection with raised eyebrows.

There are multiple Bitcoin businesses around the world that follow conscious efforts of social responsibility. However, there is a reason why Bitcoin Circular Economies are deeply rooted as nonprofit community projects. Govinda converses while touching the air with his hands. The more he shares his thoughts, the closer he comes to the image of a shaman who can observe the inner self of people who cross his path.

“People can sense it. The energy is completely different if there is someone behind it who wants to make profit or if it comes from a sincere and genuine interest in the good of people and humanity. These subtle energies create projects with a very different spirit. We were not doing this for the money.” 

Govinda speaks confidently of ideals. When the goal is to prove that a new social contract is possible, the words do not waver. “We believe in Bitcoin and we believe in Costa Rica. We want it to be a union between technology and nature to raise the level of consciousness. We are ready to dedicate some of our time and energy to make this happen as a gift to our community and the world.”

“Bitcoin aims to change power dynamics of money, to break free from abusive forces that enslave us, and to reclaim our sovereignty to choose freely.”

Nostr in the Bitcoin Jungle

Bitcoin Jungle was able to build its own identity. Another unique feature of this Bitcoin Circular Economy is its link with Nostr, the open source communications protocol that’s ideal for developing decentralized social networks. These platforms can easily integrate with the Bitcoin Lightning Network and implement micro-donations, called “zaps,” for content creators.

Given its unrestricted access design and resistance to censorship, Nostr is ideal for promoting freedom of expression in the face of social control and government censorship. Jack Dorsey, the original founder of Twitter, has been living in Costa Rica for a long time and has been closely following and supporting the growth of Bitcoin Jungle. He is one of the big promoters of Nostr, has funded several projects in the ecosystem and was instrumental in creating the first international conference on this technology.

“Jack was one of the first people to follow our Twitter account, but we had no personal contact. One day, he tweeted that a Nostr conference should be organized in Costa Rica and that he was willing to fund it if the community organized it.”

Pride covers Richard’s face as he describes the backstage of Nostrica, the event they organized together. After all, Richard had experienced first-hand the social control during his years in Hong Kong. “We all loved the idea because decentralized social networks are very much needed today. So we reached out to him and offered our entire infrastructure and business ecosystem to simplify payments for attendees.” The combination of the world’s first Nostr conference with the possibility of powering the Bitcoin Jungle circular economy seemed like a perfect match. Jack Dorsey gave the green light.

The Nostr protocol has multiple philosophical similarities with Bitcoin and, consequently, there is significant overlap between their communities. Govinda, as expected, holds space for individual freedoms alongside its inner peace. “This new communications protocol has the potential to enable social networking with complete freedom of expression — we could build a decentralized Twitter or Facebook! We can talk and share ideas or images without surveillance. It’s cryptographic and decentralized, like Bitcoin.”

Since its creation by anonymous user @fiatjaf in 2020, the Nostr protocol has seen a rapid increase in usage driven primarily by the Bitcoin community. The team insisted to Jack that the event be held in Uvita to leverage and stimulate the Bitcoin circular economy. As it happened, the Nostrica conference was a success. With over 50 speakers and 300 participants, it significantly increased international awareness of Bitcoin Jungle. 

“It really put us on the map as a destination for many Bitcoiners,” Richard recalls. “We already had one of the best user experiences for spending sats and enjoying Bitcoin, but many of them still hadn’t heard of us before the event.” The circular economy that Nostr has its strongest relationship with today is Bitcoin Jungle, and that has had many good consequences. Not only did it increase the endogenous tourism of the ecosystem, the unexpected success of the conference also generated the first economic gain for Bitcoin Jungle.

“Up until this event, everything has been self-funded. The devices we deliver to the stores, the cost to support the users, the training, the node on which the wallet runs, and so on. We don’t charge anyone, not on transactions within the node, everything is completely free,” Richard humbly shares. 

“Going forward, we plan to continue doing festivals every year to further advance our community mission, so everyone is invited to the Freedom Festival in February 2025!”

The Spiritual Connection: Why Bitcoin and Costa Rica Were Made For Each Other

Costa Rica is a very special place. Many people who dream of making a positive contribution to the world, for some reason, are attracted to this country. The connection between these international spiritual seekers and Costa Rica has created a unique community in the world, combining innovation, yoga, nature, ayahuasca and technology. 

In retrospect, it is understandable why this environment became fertile ground for the birth for perhaps the most important Bitcoin Circular Economy in the world. This transcendental aspect is present in the minds and hearts of those who make Bitcoin Jungle. Richard, who used to be a reporter clinging to the truth and transparency of democracy, continues to go through a personal transformation, though without losing his essence. “I would say my main goal is the spiritual elevation of consciousness about Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a fundamental part of this new world we are trying to build, that’s why we created Bitcoin Jungle. It’s our contribution to a more conscious and free future for humanity.” 

Those who are deeply connected to Gaia tend to perceive the cyclical nature of all processes in our universe. Human evolution has also been shown to follow recurring patterns. Many Bitcoiners have been pointing out for over a decade that we may be on the verge of a major paradigm shift. This sense of hope is palpable throughout the Bitcoin Jungle community. There is a deep shared belief there that after the inevitable collapse of fiat currencies under the weight of their own debt, there will be a new beginning. 

“There is a large community of international seekers here. They believe in freedom, peace and prosperity. Values that are deeply aligned with Bitcoin’s culture. They understand how money printing and inflation create poverty and inequality. They understand how traditional institutions and governments extract value from working people. All of us believe in the sovereignty of individuals and the power of decentralized communities. This is why Bitcoin and Costa Rica are made for each other.”

Govinda no longer sounds like a shaman; he now speaks like the leader of a movement. He probably has a little bit of each. Either way, both he and Richard are very clear in their motivations. “We’re not just doing this because we love Bitcoin. We’re doing this because we want to change the world. But to do that, it’s important that we also change inwardly. It’s a fusion between our spiritual quest, a new philosophy of life and a technology that facilitates it. There is no way we can sustainably raise human consciousness unless we liberate the way we store and transfer value between us,” Richard concludes.

When people cannot control the soundness and ownership of their money, their vital energy can be abused and manipulated. This also applies to sovereign countries when they see their foreign currency reserves being diluted by the issuers of those fiat currencies. With Bitcoin, individuals and nation-states become truly sovereign entities, with the ability to protect their wealth from potential confiscation.

“Bitcoin protects your energy in a way that no one can mess with,” Govinda enthuses. “Before Bitcoin, we were truly free only in our souls. We have energy sovereignty as spiritual beings, but on a physical level we were completely controlled by the elites, their politicians and their armies. Now Bitcoin has extended our freedom to the physical world — that changes everything! It also enables sovereignty, celebration of life and healing on a global scale.”

“Bitcoin is the liberation of humanity from ancestral abuse.”

A Circular Economy Network

In the case of Bitcoin Jungle, as in all other Bitcoin Circular Economies, their first contact at the beginning of the project was with the friends of Bitcoin Beach. In addition to that first inspiring trip to El Salvador and the opportunity to use their wallet code, both teams have a permanent communication channel to collaborate and share ideas. On the educational side, Bitcoin Jungle has also received support from My First Bitcoin.

“We have a very good relationship with Mike and the Bitcoin Beach team. We are also very grateful to Napoleon from My First Bitcoin,” Richard punctuates his mental list of collaborations. “I myself dictate his materials to the kids here at school. Whenever we meet at any conference we try to organize a dinner between the circular economies. Thankfully, that table is getting bigger and bigger every time. Bitcoin is very powerful.” 

The Bitcoin Circular Economies play a unique role in the ecosystem because they demonstrate on a small scale how global Bitcoin adoption can benefit people and communities with different needs. 

“I’m a big fan of the Bitcoin Ekasi team,” Richard sums up, in a demonstration of the strength that traces the invisible thread. “How a poor village in South Africa has been able to create a Bitcoin Circular Economy that is becoming known around the world.” Richard even dreams of the day when we have conferences totally dedicated to studying these early adopter case studies. “I would love to see a conference totally dedicated to Bitcoin Circular Economies. With projects from all over the world coming together to share their experiences, their stories and their lessons learned.”

What role will a Bitcoin Circular Economy play in the future? Will these early communities be the birth of a new way of organizing society? Will we see an exponential growth of pari passu BCEs with the mass adoption of Bitcoin? If today’s overcrowded cities continue their decline along with fiat governments drowning in debt, is it possible that a decentralized way of living could offer a better quality of life, greater community livelihood and deeper connection with nature? For years, the Bitcoin community has predicted the emergence of luxurious Bitcoin citadels in the future. Can a Bitcoin Circular Economy be a more heterogeneous and inclusive alternative to those citadels? 

“To me, a circular economy is the lifeblood of Bitcoin, even if many bitcoiners haven’t yet realized it. Bitcoin strongholds will be elitist places, designed from the top down and only for a lucky few. The great thing about a Bitcoin circular economy is that we have not been designed out of luxury,” Richard expounds. “We have simply emerged from social, not-for-profit efforts, with the goal of improving the lives of everyone in our communities.”

Gabriel Kurman is a blockchain entrepreneur with more than a decade of corporate finance experience. A co-founder of several projects such as Rootstock, La Bitcoineta and Blockchain4Humanity, he dedicates his life to Bitcoin innovation and education. His first book, Bitcoin Circular Economies, is out this month by Bitcoin Magazine Books.

Bitcoin Jungle can be found on IG, or via www.bitcoinjungle.app and the festival website. Donations are welcome via: www.bitcoinjungle.app/donate

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

Discover more in Bitcoin Circular Economies

This excerpt is just the beginning. Dive deeper into how Bitcoin is transforming communities worldwide in Bitcoin Circular Economies. The e-book is available now, and the paperback is open for pre-order for only $21 for a limited time.

Order your copy here

This post Freedom of Mind and Freedom of Money: Inside Costa Rica’s Growing Bitcoin Circular Economy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Gabriel Kurman.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Jerome Powell Blinks at Jackson Hole: Bitcoin Price Rips Higher as Fed Signals Dovish Shift

Bitcoin surged 5% (about $5,000) following Jerome Powell’s remarks at the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium, igniting fresh momentum in a bull market that has been quietly grinding higher since early 2024.

For much of this cycle, bitcoin’s rise has come against a headwind of monetary tightening. The story of this bull run began when BlackRock filed its spot Bitcoin ETF application in June 2023, which marked the institutional green light for Bitcoin adoption. Since then, despite persistent inflation concerns, rate hikes and constant talk of “higher for longer,” Bitcoin has continued to march higher, shaking off the macro drag.

Today could mark a turning point. Powell’s speech hinted at what markets have been waiting for: the Fed preparing to pivot. After nearly two years of restrictive policy aimed at cooling inflation, the Fed Chair acknowledged that conditions have shifted. Inflation has cooled from its peak, economic growth is slowing, and the burden of tighter monetary policy is showing cracks in the system (see recent employment numbers). 

For the first time in this cycle, Powell’s tone suggested the Fed is ready to ease its grip.

The market reaction was immediate. Bitcoin ripped higher (~$117,000 as of this writing), as traders recognized what this means: the “monetary headwinds” narrative could be giving way to the tailwinds of easier liquidity. Risk assets thrive when central banks blink, and bitcoin, the hardest money in existence, tends to be the fastest horse when the Fed caves to its own new reality.

This is more than just a short-term rally. It could be the inflection point that turns a steady, resilient bull market into a raging one. The Fed’s posture has been the one remaining damper on bitcoin’s upside. If Powell and the FOMC are now signaling a shift toward accommodation, bitcoin stands to benefit disproportionately.

We’re still early. This bull market was born in the shadow of BlackRock’s ETF filing, and it has matured through relentless skepticism and macro drag. Now, with dovish policy winds starting to blow, the path forward could resemble prior parabolic phases of Bitcoin cycles.

The message from Jackson Hole is clear: The Fed is relenting. Bitcoin is already responding. And if history is any guide, the real fireworks may just be getting started.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Jerome Powell Blinks at Jackson Hole: Bitcoin Price Rips Higher as Fed Signals Dovish Shift first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Brandon Green.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Assistant Attorney General Galeotti’s Talk on Crypto Devs Changes Very Little

Today, Acting Assistant Attorney General (AAAG) of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice (DoJ) Matthew Galeotti gave a talk at an event hosted by the American Innovation Project in which he harped on the point that the DoJ will no longer prosecute open-source crypto developers who have no intent to commit a crime.

Official Remarks from the Department of Justice at AIP Summit https://t.co/j4FHHnfH7Z

— American Innovation Project (@AIPLeads) August 21, 2025

AAAG Galeotti began his talk by telling the audience that Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Todd Blanche had asked Galeotti to speak to the audience about the DoJ’s focus on “even-handed enforcement of the law” in the digital asset space.

In AAAG Galeotti’s talk, he referenced a memo DAG Blanche issued in April, in which DAG Blanche stated that the DoJ would end its regulation by enforcement approach, popularized by the Biden administration, as it pertains to the crypto industry and crypto developers.

AAAG Galeotti reiterated and reinforced some of the points from the Blanche memo, producing a number of quotable moments in the process.

Here are some of the high notes he hit:

“The Department will not use federal criminal statutes to fashion a new regulatory regime over the digital asset industry. The department will not use indictments as a lawmaking tool. The Department cannot leave innovators guessing as to what could lead to criminal prosecution.”

“Our view is that merely writing code without ill intent is not a crime. Innovating new ways for the economy to store and transmit value and create wealth without ill intent is not a crime.”

“Generally, developers of neutral tools, with no criminal intent, should not be held responsible for someone else’s misuse of those tools. If a third-party’s misuse violates criminal law, that third-party should be prosecuted — not the well-intentioned developer.”

Prominent voices from the crypto industry posted some of these promising quotes on X:

1/ For too long, crypto and open source developers in the US have been living under a cloud of doubt. That uncertainty ends today, with an emphatic statement from the DOJ that *shipping code is not a crime.*

— Katie Biber (@katiebiber) August 21, 2025

While other prominent figures from the industry voiced their skepticism, highlighting some of the quotes from AAAG Galeotti’s speech that left cause for concern:

Assistant Attorney General Galeotti gave an encouraging but incomplete speech at the AIP summit today. The highlight is a commitment to respect FinCEN guidance on non-custodial software development going forward. That’s good to hear. But Coin Center has some questions.

He said,…

— Peter Van Valkenburgh (@valkenburgh) August 21, 2025

Having listened to the talk myself, I’d love to say I came away from it feeling optimistic, or even cautiously optimistic. (Maybe I feel a little bit of the latter.)

Mostly, though, I feel a healthy skepticism, most comparable to Van Valkenburgh’s, as it seems that AAAG Galeotti left the door open to further prosecutorial overreach by the DoJ.

Put another way, I believe the likes of the Samourai developers and Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash, would still be prosecuted in the wake of this oration, especially judging by some of the concerning comments AAAG Galeotti made in the latter half of it.

These comments included the following (non-italicized portions of quotes are included for context):

“If a developer merely contributes code to an open-source project without the specific intent to assist criminal conduct, aid or abet a particular crime, or join a criminal conspiracy, he or she is not criminally liable.”

“As the DAG memo makes clear, the Justice Department will not charge regulatory violations in cases involving digital assets, like unlicensed money transmitting under 1960(b)(1)(A) or (B), in the absence of evidence that a defendant knew of the specific legal requirements and willfully violated them. [However] we may under certain circumstances bring cases under 1960(b)(1)(C), which prohibits the transmission of funds that the defendant knows are derived from a criminal defense or are intended to be used to support unlawful activity.”

“Where the evidence shows that software is truly decentralized and solely automates peer-to-peer transactions, and where a third party does not have custody and control over user assets, new 1960(b)(1)(C) charges against a third party will not be approved. Though, if criminal intent is present, other charges may be appropriate — all of the subject’s conduct and the services they provide end-to-end will be considered.”

Having covered both the Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash cases, I saw a lot of the “evidence” used to illustrate criminal intent for the developers in both cases.

Much of it was rhetoric related to the developers reacting to bad actors using the software they’d created in illicit activities, including instances in which they were seemingly trolling.

The most egregious instance of this being when the Samourai developers invited Russian oligarchs to use their service to evade sanctions:

Welcome new Russian oligarch Samourai Wallet users https://t.co/WBhB6J89SR

— Samourai Wallet (@SamouraiWallet) June 30, 2022

Now, if I’m speaking plainly, one of the major lessons that crypto developers should have learned from the Samourai and Tornado Cash cases is don’t even joke about bad actors using your service.

With that said, it’s not illegal to joke about it, and in the case of Roman Storm, he made efforts to stop bad actors from using Tornado Cash, including implementing a Chainalysis oracle on the front end of Tornado Cash.

But I’m getting slightly off track here…

The point I’m trying to make is that AAAG Galeotti’s comments about criminal intent can be interpreted broadly, and, because of this, they eclipse many of the more positive points he made about the DoJ not aiming to prosecute crypto developers.

And so I agree with Van Valkenburgh in that we must continue to press Congress for safe harbor via the language in the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act (BRCA), some of the language from which has been included in the recent draft of the CLARITY Act, and fight key battles in court.

The DOJ has yet to offer binding legal analysis, we will continue to press Congress for an authoritative safe harbor (BRCA) & support litigation. Grateful Michael Lewellen has pursued his case to obtain binding precedent; hope a judge rules publishing software is not a crime.

— Peter Van Valkenburgh (@valkenburgh) August 21, 2025

Because, even in the wake of this seemingly positive talk from AAAG Galeotti, developers are still at risk.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Curb Your Enthusiasm: Assistant Attorney General Galeotti’s Talk on Crypto Devs Changes Very Little first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Circular Economies and a Bridge Between Las Vegas and Peru

I never expected a jetlagged morning in Las Vegas would change my life, let alone spark hope on the other side of the world. But that’s what happened when I — a consultant, ex-Deloitte, and fundraiser with nine years of experience in the nonprofit sector — landed at the Bitcoin Conference Las Vegas looking for something bigger than “business as usual.” Fundraising had started to feel like… well, just fundraising for the sake of fundraising.

What surprised me most, though, was how quickly I found myself swept up by the conference energy. On my very first day, I ended up volunteering with the Open Source Hub. There, I was able not only to help build bridges between innovative projects but also to connect more deeply with teams like Primal and see how Nostr opens doors for Latin American circular economies.

On Day Two, while most people were still asleep, I showed up early, determined to pick out a Bitcoin present for my nieces. Among the buzzing Bitcoin bazaar stands, I found a booth with beautiful children’s books and merch, and as luck would have it, found myself chatting with Fernando Motolese — the founder of Bitcoinze. Right place, right time! He ordered 200 Portuguese-language kids’ books, and as two Lusophones got talking, he told me bluntly:

“If you want to see Bitcoin change lives, you need to talk to Valentin Popescu from MOTIV PERÚ.”

Years earlier, I lived in Peru, working for an NGO alongside Inca communities, where I’d find myself having guinea pig for breakfast and alpaca for dinner. No WiFi, no bathrooms, only latrines. The idea of saving money was so foreign, we didn’t even have a local word for it. 

That’s the harsh reality: In so much of Latin America, the concept of saving doesn’t even exist, let alone the tools to do it. For many, life is simply about surviving today — not building for tomorrow. When I met Valentin, everything clicked: this person wasn’t just talking about Bitcoin as tech or investment. He was making Bitcoin a tool for hope, for learning, for self-sufficiency… for actual change.

Picture this: Deep in Peru’s Sacred Valley, along Amazonian rivers, entire communities are leapfrogging the financial system that forgot them. At Motiv Perú centers, kids and entrepreneurs get paid in sats for learning, for teaching, for building stuff. You earn, you save, you spend — all with bitcoin. No fragile cash, no corrupt intermediaries. Like all circular economies, they’re growing from the bottom up.

Here’s the kicker: Because of Motiv Perú, these communities and circular economies aren’t just surviving — they’re dreaming. They’re seeing a future where they can work, own and save. Bitcoin is also accepted for everything: bread, haircuts, even trips to Machu Picchu.

Motiv Perú is driving a revolution in community empowerment throughout Peru by leveraging Bitcoin as a catalyst for growth and inclusion. The organization was born from a $5,000 bitcoin donation during the COVID pandemic and is sustained by ongoing bitcoin contributions, ensuring its mission remains community-driven and decentralized. Through hands-on financial education and the nurturing of bitcoin circular economies, Motiv Perú gives some of the country’s most marginalized populations practical access to digital finance. By making Bitcoin a tool for earning, saving and transacting, Motiv Perú equips community members with real opportunities for self-sufficiency and sustainable progress.

The organization’s story began with the Life Saving Steps project, delivering shoes to children in Peru’s remote Andean region — an act funded through bitcoin donations that addressed basic needs and built trust. This foundation paved the way for projects like “Surf for All,” which combines sports and digital literacy for children with special needs, and ongoing nutrition programs that support child health. Today, every Motiv Perú initiative — from its origins to its innovative programs — demonstrates how grassroots action, coupled with Bitcoin adoption and donor support, can spark lasting transformation for those traditionally excluded from opportunity.

BITCOIN EDUCACTION
Welcome to the Kids Sport Program!
A space where children learn, play, and grow through sports.
With dedicated coaches and activities designed to strengthen body, mind, and values.

At MOTIV PERU we believe every child deserves the chance to train like a… pic.twitter.com/fOeVrycjUD

— MOTIV Perú (@MotivPeru) August 16, 2025

That conversation with Valentin changed everything: I went on to become an ambassador, and now I’m working on “Bitcoin Cup,” a top surf competition and a vibrant celebration of Bitcoin adoption and the circular economies powering Huanchaco, Peru:

Stay tuned, because this is just chapter one. The real story isn’t only written in conference halls — it’s unfolding in places forgotten by the banks, but now remembered by Bitcoin.

When a woman learns, a whole community flourishes
From Pisac, in the heart of the Sacred Valley – Cusco, we share with you an entrepreneurship workshop full of energy, ideas and dreams.

Thanks to donations in Bitcoin sats, these adult women and mothers are accessing… pic.twitter.com/QlAlr7UXWc

— MOTIV Perú (@MotivPeru) May 2, 2025

This post Bitcoin Circular Economies and a Bridge Between Las Vegas and Peru first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Pachamada.

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Bitcoin Magazine

9 Ways Bitcoin Treasury Companies Can Differentiate in a Crowded Market

The Era of Easy Differentiation Is Over

There was a time when holding Bitcoin was enough. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) proved it in 2020—simply moving idle cash into Bitcoin electrified markets, drove premiums above NAV, and rewrote corporate playbooks. But five years later, the battlefield has changed.

Dozens of public companies across Japan, France, the U.S., the U.K., Sweden, Canada, and Brazil now run Bitcoin treasury strategies. ETFs have captured billions in flows. El Salvador holds it as sovereign reserve. In this environment, “we own Bitcoin” is no longer a differentiator.

If a company cannot compete on size, speed, or scale, it must assemble alternative sources of firepower to win over shareholders and maintain its mNAV premium. Without it, momentum stalls, media cycles fade, and mNAV grinds down toward 1—or below.

1) Lean into jurisdictional leverage

Why it matters. Jurisdiction sets the cost of capital, the shape of your investor base, and the menu of corporate instruments you can legally deploy. It is a design variable, not a constraint.

What it unlocks. In Japan, ultra-low rates and NISA eligibility made zero-coupon, premium-redeemable debt and retail inflows a rational path. In France, PEA-PME turns qualified equities into long-horizon, tax-advantaged vehicles, ideal for controlled floats and large ATMs. In the U.S., fair-value accounting and deep markets enable layered stacks across convertibles, secured bonds, preferreds, and ATMs. Elsewhere (U.K., Sweden, Canada, Brazil), wrappers and local capital habits create distinct demand curves that equities can tap even when local ETF options are limited or structurally different.

Operator’s takeaway. Your jurisdiction should amplify your intended shareholder mix (retail wrappers vs. institutions), your funding cadence (episodic raises vs. rolling ATMs), and your narrative (innovation vs. stability). Treat geography as a capital tool.

2) Seasoned leadership and the rise of the Head of Bitcoin Strategy

Why this role works. Markets do not just underwrite balance sheets; they underwrite operators and storytellers. A Head of Bitcoin Strategy concentrates credibility, turns complex treasury moves into plain-English updates, and acts as a public interface to the Bitcoin community. Done well, it blends execution oversight, digital IR, and content amplification into one compounding asset.

• Visibility: Maintains a daily/weekly public presence across X, podcasts, and industry events, giving investors a consistent, authentic voice.
• Digital IR: Publishes treasury updates, KPI explainers (mNAV, BTC per share, BTC Yield, VPBS), and rationale for capital actions—shrinking the information asymmetry that otherwise drags mNAV toward 1.
• Community fluency: “Talk the talk, walk the walk.” They earn trust by engaging directly with Bitcoin-native concerns (custody, key management, valuation nuances, regulatory noise) instead of outsourcing messaging.
• Deal surface: Their presence draws inbound capital partners, analysts, and potential co-issuance allies you wouldn’t otherwise meet.

Which companies are leaning in?

• Strive hired Jeff Walton as VP of Bitcoin Strategy.
• Méliuz named Mason Foard Director of Bitcoin Strategy.
• H100 Group brought on Brian Brookshire as Head of Bitcoin Strategy.
• The Smarter Web Company added Jesse Myers as Head of Bitcoin Strategy.
• Semler Scientific added Joe Burnett as Director of Bitcoin Strategy and added Natalie Brunell to the board.

Operator’s takeaway. A seasoned Bitcoiner in a visible, accountable role is leverage for your IR strategy. It reduces mispricing risk, speeds consensus with investors, and turns every operational step into earned media.

3) Distinct capital-market advantages

Why it matters. “How you fund” is as important as “what you hold.” Instruments are not interchangeable; each taps a different pool and tells a different story.

• Convertibles minimize cash interest and defer dilution, appealing to hedge funds that model optionality.
• Preferreds open the door to fixed-income allocators who cannot buy Bitcoin directly but can underwrite yield with collateralized upside.
• ATMs convert ambient market interest into rolling issuance that doesn’t shock the float, supporting consistent purchase cadence.
• Jurisdiction-native bonds (e.g., zero-coupon yen redeemables) align with local rate regimes and retail appetites.

Execution nuance. Mechanically, your stack should: (a) diversify counterparty types, (b) sequence issuances to keep purchase cadence alive, and (c) present a clean, repeatable narrative: “Here’s how capital becomes Bitcoin per share without reckless dilution.”

Operator’s takeaway. Treat the capital stack like a product line. It should scale, segment, and sell—again and again.

4) Access to deep capital pools

What “deep” actually means. Deep pools are not just “big markets.” They are pre-committed or quickly addressable channels that allow you to raise, deploy, signal, and repeat without stalling. That loop is the flywheel: issuance → Bitcoin purchase → KPI improvement → coverage → larger issuance → repeat.

Why it’s essential. Without depth, you burn through one raise, make one splashy purchase, and then disappear for quarters. Coverage dies, skeptics set the narrative, and mNAV compresses. With depth, you keep the drumbeat: recurring buys that keep you in the news cycle, maintain attention from incremental buyers, and compound trust.

How leaders operationalize depth.

• Shelf readiness and pre-cleared docs that let you issue on a 48–72h window.
• Multiple channels (convertibles, prefs, ATMs, jurisdiction-specific debt) so a single market hiccup doesn’t halt you.
• Market-maker alignment to tighten spreads and maintain tradability through issuance waves.
• Investor rosters segmented by instrument, coupon/yield tolerance, and cycle behavior.

Operator’s takeaway. Depth is a system you build in advance. If you can’t raise quickly and predictably, you can’t stack predictably—and you won’t hold your premium.

5) Fiduciary discipline in execution

Discipline is visible. Boards and investors can tell when a team runs a real playbook. Discipline shows up as speed, sequencing, and risk controls—not slogans.

What disciplined operators do.

• Time the windows. They issue into strength (better terms) and buy into weakness (better BTC per dollar).
• Pre-authorize. Shelves, legal, auditor sign-offs, and risk gates are ready before the market turns.
• Protect dry powder. They budget a cadence of recurring buys, not an undisciplined sprint that leaves them silent for months.
• Own the aftermath. Every issuance and purchase is followed by crisp disclosure, KPI updates, and explicit links from action → outcome.

Operator’s takeaway. The market rewards professionalism under time pressure. Discipline lowers cost of capital, earns trust, and sustains your ability to repeat the cycle.

6) Cash-flow positive businesses

Why profits matter. External capital is accelerant; operating cash flow is oxygen. A business that funds part of its Bitcoin accumulation from profits builds an organic stacking engine that does not depend on market mood.

Mechanics that work.

• Programmatic allocation. Commit a clearly sized, recurring slice of operating cash (e.g., % of gross profit or FCF) to monthly BTC purchases.
• Resilience in drawdowns. Profit-funded buys maintain cadence when issuance windows narrow, stabilizing BTC Yield and VPBS.
• Credibility with conservative investors. Profit allocation demonstrates alignment between the operating model and the balance-sheet strategy; you are not just diluting to accumulate—you’re earning to accumulate.

Operator’s takeaway. Treat profits as a perpetual reserve-replacement plan. You’re not just raising to grow reserves; you’re running a business that mints reserves.

7) Transparency & investor relations

Premiums are a function of information symmetry. Markets punish opacity with parity pricing. They reward clarity with durable premiums.

What exemplary IR looks like.

• Cadenced reporting of treasury activity (dates, BTC amounts, average purchase price, updated cost basis).
• KPI transparency: mNAV, BTC per share (diluted and basic), BTC Yield (periodic and YTD), VPBS.
• Plain-English rationales linking each issuance and purchase to strategy: why this instrument, why now, how it serves Bitcoin per share over time.
• Accessible leadership via earnings calls, AMAs, and third-party interviews—especially from the Head of Bitcoin Strategy.

Operator’s takeaway. Treat IR as your company’s valuation infrastructure. The faster and clearer you collapse uncertainty, the longer you can defend a premium.

8) Visibility and trust

Attention is an input, not an outcome. Capital markets are social systems; what investors see and hear shapes what they can underwrite.

How leaders manufacture visibility.

• Network effects. Credible membership signals (e.g., Bitcoin For Corporations) and third-party validators (auditors, analysts) reduce perceived risk.
• Content and cadence. Consistent, executive-level commentary across owned and earned channels keeps you present between raises and purchases.
• Community proximity. Your Head of Bitcoin Strategy should live where the conversation happens—on X, on stage, on long-form video—turning every treasury action into a story investors can repeat.

Operator’s takeaway. Visibility without substance is hype; substance without visibility is underpriced. You need both to keep incremental buyers coming in at a premium.

9) Uplisting and multi-ticker access

The reach advantage. Uplisting and cross-listing expand your addressable investor base, improve liquidity, and tighten spreads—each a contributor to sustained premiums.

What to optimize.

• Pathing. Move from growth/venture venues to senior markets as quickly as governance, filings, and audit readiness allow. Add U.S. OTC or ADRs to open the world’s largest retail and institutional channels.
• Market maker alignment. Ensure continuous two-sided markets through issuance cycles; don’t let liquidity disappear the week you need it.
• Coverage and comparables. Senior listings invite analyst coverage and index inclusion pathways, anchoring valuation to higher-quality comps.

Operator’s takeaway. Uplisting multiplies pools of capital you can tap on demand, which multiplies your ability to keep buying, which multiplies trust.

Consequence of weak firepower—and what strong firepower earns you

If you don’t build firepower, the market will price you at parity. One raise, one purchase, one press cycle—and then silence. Coverage fades. Spread widens. Incremental buyers wait for lower. mNAV converges to 1. At that point, your equity competes poorly against spot exposure: no yield, no narrative, no reason to choose you.

But if you do build it, you gain compounding advantages:

• Lower cost of capital from repeat issuances to known buyers who trust your cadence.
• Stickier shareholder base because reporting and access reduce uncertainty.
• Higher BTC per share because capital is converted with discipline and profits backfill the stack.
• Defensible premium because investors can model the next raise, the next buy, and the next disclosure with confidence.

The difference between weak and strong firepower is not ideology—it’s operating tempo and capital design. This is a balance-sheet business. Treat it that way.

Where Bitcoin For Corporations fits

Bitcoin For Corporations exists to help leadership teams not just hold Bitcoin—but build the firepower to sustain premiums, secure capital depth, and earn long-term investor trust.

BFC delivers this through four pillars:

• Marketing & Exposure: Strategic visibility to position every raise, purchase, and corporate move as part of a larger narrative.
• Research & Intelligence: Actionable insights, benchmarks, and frameworks to guide treasury execution with precision.
• Networking: Direct access to corporate peers, capital providers, and thought leaders shaping the market.
• Deal Flow: A pipeline of investor access and partnership opportunities to strengthen long-term capital strategy.

Together, these give treasury leaders the positioning, insight, and connectivity to move early and move well.

Disclaimer: This content was written on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations. This article is intended solely for informational purposes and should not be interpreted as an invitation or solicitation to acquire, purchase or subscribe for securities.

This post 9 Ways Bitcoin Treasury Companies Can Differentiate in a Crowded Market first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

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Who Rugged Rogoff?

Kenneth Rogoff spoke, and the Bitcoin hornet’s nest awoke. 

When the celebrated Harvard economist and former chief economist at the IMF yesterday publicly confessed that he was wrong on Bitcoin, he didn’t do so gracefully; instead, he doubled down. You see, it wasn’t that his prediction in 2018 of Bitcoin’s imminent doom and the bitcoin price to quickly collapse was wrong; it was

1. Trump crypto regulation was beneficial instead of the needed crackdown
2. Bitcoin was embraced and (shockingly) used by criminals, and
3. Trump “brazenly hold hundreds of millions … of dollars in cryptocurrencies seemingly without consequence.”

I mean, talk about willful ignorance. Scooby-Doo called and wants his villains back (“I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”). There’s no other value to this thing, no other censorship-resistance use case, no savings-outside-the-shady-banks option, no instant global payments over Lightning?

Even in that 2018 CNBC interview, Rogoff said regulation of the sector would lead to lower prices, not a catalyst for higher ones, as he now pretends. This smells like a salty rationalization, not a serious analysis. 

Slay Your Heroes, Always

Rogoff’s excellent book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, and especially the freely available data behind the research for dozens of countries over hundreds of years, was a godsend during my university years. I learned so much from him. 

When I finally met Rogoff in 2018 or so, it was a total “kill your idols” moment. He had just released his unfathomably stupid book The Curse of Cash — about how we should ban cash because criminals… and cash also makes monetary policy transmission worse and negative interest rates more difficult to impose. I was trying to explain to him the virtue of competitive note issuance and monetary freedom. To my shock, he was sputtering nonsense about free banking and falsities about U.S. banking history, let alone the past monetary arrangements of Canada, Scotland, or Sweden, of which he knew nothing.

The moment really stuck with me. I was young and not yet that disillusioned with elite knowledge and the much-revered academic establishment. But I was speechless that a famous Harvard professor didn’t know better… what, the skills and cognitive faculties and hard work that got you here have now been completely eroded? 

It was around this time that I started saying,

The most important thing I learned at Oxford was that you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.

It was a wake-up call of astronaut-meme proportion: I was in the big leagues, the hallowed halls of wisdom, interacting with the big names, talking to the smartest and most celebrated of economists and economic historians in my field… and it turned out they were unread in all the things that matter. I remember a night in Oxford when I had to explain to a well-respected historian how loans in one bank end up as deposits in another, thus multiplying the (broad) money supply. Textbook stuff.

Elite university profs can be stupid…? Yeah, totally. 

Bitcoin derangement syndrome, BDS, is a big, bad monster that’s taken many bright minds away from us, well before their time. Many fiat elites became too enamored by their own egos, too stuck in the status quo that, by the way, has benefited them enormously. They often become blind to the errors of their past opinions. 

The correct intellectual approach when reality behaves differently from what you expected is to reassess your model. Maybe you got something wrong?

The reasonable reaction to the bitcoin price doing 13x (+1,220%) in the seven years since you loudly proclaimed its imminent death is to change your mind. (For reference: U.S. official CPI: +29%; U.S. median earnings: +38%; S&P500: +146%.)

Maybe I missed something, you ought to ask yourself. Maybe there’s something here that I couldn’t see. Maybe, just maybe, there’s true value in this worthless, speculative, technobabbling disaster?

I have lost almost all of my respect for legacy academics; we definitely need new institutions of (higher) education. Bitcoin is for anyone, but not everyone, and people get bitcoin at the price they deserve.

For all I care, Rogoff can join the likes of Elizabeth Warren at the back of the line.

This post Who Rugged Rogoff? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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Bitcoin Privacy: The Effects Of Surveillance On Society

This is the first in a 10-episode video series focusing on Bitcoin privacy, filmed at bitcoin++ Privacy Edition in Riga and elsewhere. Each episode will touch on some aspect of Bitcoin privacy, tools to use Bitcoin privately or surveillance techniques.

Privacy is heads, censorship resistance is tails. They’re two sides of the same coin. 

Everything people do together is inherently interactive. When those interactions cannot be conducted privately, when they become common public knowledge, the participants can be subjected to external pressure. They can be shunned, shamed, jailed or penalized in many other ways. 

Without privacy, you have no censorship resistance. Without privacy, most people will censor themselves. 

In this first episode, I sit down with Yuval Kogman from Spiral to discuss privacy in the modern digital era. Bitcoin is a digital money, and like everything else in our lives that has been digitized by computing technology and the internet, it leaves bread crumbs everywhere by its nature. 

These bread crumb trails, in combination with the computing technology that created them in the first place, has radically changed the environment in which people interact with each other, particularly where some form of power asymmetry exists (i.e., the governing vs. the governed). 

Those with the capability to pick up and analyze those breadcrumbs can apply technology to exert disproportionate control over other people. 

Click the image below to watch the talk: 

This post Bitcoin Privacy: The Effects Of Surveillance On Society first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

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Bitcoin Tipping Is Now Live on X, Powered by BitBit and Spark

LOS ANGELES (CA), 8/18/2025 – BitBit, the self-custodial social wallet that lets users instantly send and receive bitcoin directly in their browser, today announced the launch of its X (formerly Twitter) integration, enabling users worldwide to exchange bitcoin tips on the platform seamlessly. The payments will be associated with X usernames, allowing anyone to receive them, even without a wallet.

The integration leverages Spark — the fastest, cheapest, most UX-friendly way to build financial apps and launch assets on Bitcoin. Spark is built by Lightspark, providing open, always-on payments solutions for the internet powered by bitcoin, the only open, neutral network for moving value. Lightspark powers integrations with partners such as Coinbase, NuBank, Bitso, and many more to enable payments on Bitcoin. 

“At Lightspark, we’re working tirelessly to ensure the future of money looks like the open Internet,” said David Marcus, Lightspark’s co-founder and CEO. “Spark is built on Bitcoin because it’s the only open, neutral network for moving value. By choosing Spark, the BitBit wallet builds on this openness and proves Bitcoin’s potential to empower creators and the global X community.”

While tips have been available on X since 2021, this is the first self-custodial tipping solution available to the public. By leveraging Spark, the fastest, cheapest and most UX-friendly way to build financial apps and launch assets on Bitcoin, the solution eliminates the technical friction and complexity associated with scaling solutions like the Lightning Network, providing users with a seamless and intuitive wallet experience. Tip receivers will have 21 days to create a wallet to receive the money; otherwise, a refund transaction will automatically be sent back to the sender.

“It’s very important to meet people where they are rather than assume they will learn how to use new technologies,” said Felipe Servin, Founder and CEO of BitBit. “With over 500 million people already using X and most of the Bitcoin-focused conversations happening there, this is the ideal place to integrate Bitcoin payments for the general public.”

The extension is now live for all Chrome-compatible browsers, with mobile support and stablecoin integrations coming very soon. Install it here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fngpibmhccdaokelgaccddiehlggihlo

About Spark

Spark is the fastest, cheapest, most UX-friendly way to build financial apps and launch assets on Bitcoin. We’re building the Bitcoin internet. Follow on X @spark

About BitBit

BitBit is a self-custodial social Bitcoin wallet that lets users send and receive Bitcoin and stablecoins right directly in their browser. Powered by Spark, a next-gen Bitcoin Layer 2, BitBit integrates directly with X usernames for frictionless tipping, payments, and community engagement, all without sacrificing privacy or control of funds. To learn more about BitBit, visit bitbit.bot

Press Contact

[email protected]

This post Bitcoin Tipping Is Now Live on X, Powered by BitBit and Spark first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Spark.

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How to Think About Bitcoin Treasury Companies: A Bitcoiner’s Dilemma in the Age of Rampant Speculation

Strategy, Michael Saylor and MSTR have taken over Wall Street. To many people’s chagrin, the suitcoiners and corporates are here: Bitcoin held by corporations in the form of bitcoin treasury companies is hypnotic to look at. It has captured more or less everyone’s mind — mine, included.

It’s the latest fad on the world’s capital markets, celebrated by a narrow sway of financially savvy Bitcoiners and insiders, yet hated by tradfi people who can’t for the love of humanity understand why anybody, let alone a company, would want bitcoin at all. Every odd Bitcoin podcaster has joined one or more bitcoin treasury companies as investors or advisors… or, to put their role more bluntly: as glorified marketers posing as retail-delivery systems.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent hundreds of hours investigating bitcoin treasury companies. I’ve read reports and explainers, bull-ish puff pieces and in-the-weeds descriptions. I’ve thought deeply about the financial-market logic behind them. I’ve edited excellent articles pushing the rationale for treasury companies, and overseen equally superb arguments against them. 

In some small ways, I’ve even fallen prey to them; I’m not as aggressively opposed to them as I gave voice to in the June 2025 article (“Are Bitcoin Treasury Companies Ponzi Schemes?”) that was, incidentally, shoved before Michael Saylor on Fox Business last week. 

Beautiful, @FoxBusiness @saylor @Strategy pic.twitter.com/GnhLt6gWF2

— Joakim Book (@joakimbook) August 4, 2025

Here’s what I’ve learned from all of this. 

What’s a Sane, Normal, Regular Bitcoiner To Do? 

The easiest way to go about bitcoin treasuries and financialized bitcoin is to simply ignore everything. Before Enlightenment: chop wood, hodl self-custody bitcoin; after Enlightenment: chop wood, hodl self-custody bitcoin. Only time will tell if these financial vehicles, loaded with corporate-wrapped bitcoin and soft-spoken CEOs, will succeed or spectacularly blow up. 

But in topics of money and finance (and economics more broadly), there is usually no nice, neutral choice, no non-action; my money and savings must go somewhere, my attention and labor be focused on something. New bitcoin treasury companies are launched weekly; aggressive fund raises or purchases are announced daily. Being in this space, having an opinion becomes inevitable; having a good, well-informed one seems almost a moral imperative.  

Having spent years diving into the weeds of monetary economics, financial history and now the wild financial frontier of Bitcoin, the intellectual path to tread here is quite narrow. One side promises a fast-track to the hyperbitcoinized future we all envision, with corporate charters merely amplifying my sats on the way; the other, a cesspool of financial engineering and a hive of speculative mania quickly lining up Bitcoiners to have their fiat contributions repurposed as bitcoin yield. 

$MSTR trades at a premium to Bitcoin NAV due to Credit Amplification, an Options Advantage, Passive Flows, and superior Institutional Access that equity and credit instruments provide compared to commodities. pic.twitter.com/AYQlytS4ID

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 13, 2025

Why Would a Bitcoiner Get Involved with These Companies?

One reason is leverage. As a typical millennial, I don’t have a house and thus no easy access to cheap debt (basically the only reason to own a home). 

I can collateralize my coins via e.g., Firefish (at 6-9% APR), or draw on my credit cards (11% and 19%, respectively). Those terms aren’t great; they come with a hefty price tag, a pretty small capital pool and they’re not cheap. Even if bitcoin CAGRs at 30-60%, that’s over longer time periods — not monthly or annually, which is the cadence at which I have to service these types of debt. 

In contrast, Strategy and MARA issue convertible debt at 0%. Those liabilities come due in a half-dozen years, and they’re in the nine-figure range. Said Pierre Rochard in debating Jim Chanos last month: 

“The ability to access the terms that Saylor has… is not accessible to individuals holding Bitcoin in cold storage.”  

For most Bitcoiners, getting in on this action is proving too juicy to resist… even if you need to fork over control and ownership, and additionally pay a hefty premium over their current bitcoin stash for the privilege of owning some of these shares.  

As a leverage mechanism, Saylor’s turn into preferred shares seems much more expensive — paying 8-10% interest is approaching my own borrowing abilities — but they’re way safer. 

The prefs safeguard the company itself, since they remove the risk of margin calls or debt-fuelled bankruptcy concerns, and give the company unprecedented flexibility. Preferred shares provide a release valve, since Strategy can opt not to pay the dividends for e.g., STRD; doing the same for STRF “only” costs them a 1% penalty going forward. In a pinch, and without much implication for the company itself, Strategy can even withhold payment for the others (at the risk of zeroing out the bondholder bagholder, and making plenty of people plenty angry).

$MSTR is basically unbreakable.

As long as BTC grows faster than the preferred yield (>10%), Strategy can keep stacking and issuing more preferreds.

If BTC hits 30% ARR like Saylor predicts, $MSTR will become one of the biggest companies in the world.

If BTC slows to 15%…

— BTCoptioneer (@BTCoptioneer) August 6, 2025

Here’s the paradox: While this is financial leverage for Strategy, which gets more and more of other people’s money to plunge into bitcoin and top up their stash, it isn’t leverage for (new) shareholders of MSTR. 

To invoke Jim Chanos’ answer to Rochard in that debate: the point of leverage is to have more than $1 of exposure. If I buy MSTR at mNAV 1.5, and Strategy itself has a leverage ratio of about 20%, I’m not levering up! (1/1.5 x 1.2 = 0.8). Thus, for every $1 I plunge into MSTR, I’m getting about 80 cents of bitcoin exposure. And the corporation, of which that share is a portion, still needs to pay about what I pay my financiers for the pleasure of using someone else’s money.

The calculations for most of the other treasury companies get even worse, mostly because of their excessive mNAV. You are the yield that the bitcoin treasury companies are chasing. When we invest in these companies, we play fiat games. And we play them directly in proportion to how expensive the mNAV is. I’ve asked many times: 

“How can a bitcoin, wrapped in a corporate charter, suddenly be worth double, triple, or ten times the most liquid, observable and obviously indisputable price on the planet?” 

Indeed, 

“What extreme value-added transformation does our orange coin undergo the moment you take it under your financially leveraged wings and promise to issue debt, preferred stock, and equity against it — in “waves of credit bubbles,” we hear the ghost of Satoshi faintly whisper.“

Strategy’s great discovery — which everyone is now head-over-heels copying — is that wrapping a bitcoin in a corporate shell, smashing some leverage on top of it, and selling it on Wall Street somehow makes that same bitcoin worth multiples of its actual market price. 

Much of the conversation ends there, with tradfi journalists busy dismissing this as a fad or a bubble; per the efficient market hypothesis, or just common sense, nothing should trade above the price of the only thing it holds. 

Not enough. Let’s tally some quite sound reasons for why corporate stocks doing nothing but acquiring bitcoin ought to be worth more than the bitcoin they hold: 

1. Storage. Self custody is easier than you think, but plenty of people still shy away from it (see: ETFs). An additional weird reason is the high-profile wrench-attacks on Bitcoiners across the world; it’d be reasonable to pay some sort of premium for letting someone else store your coins. Can’t wrench-attack my MSTR shares. Saylor seems to know what he’s doing (though custodying with Coinbase has raised some eyebrows), so let’s “store” our bitcoin with his company. 10%. 
2. Futures. Future bitcoin is worth more than present bitcoin. At any given time, there are unannounced treasury company purchases accruing to shareholders but that aren’t yet public information. Whenever you purchase shares you’re only aware of the deals or acquisitions not yet made public… but we all know, and can predict, that shares should trade a little higher than they currently do: You’re always trading shares on present information, knowing full well that there are things behind the scenes resulting in more. That’s presumably worthy of some premium, so: 5% for e.g., Strategy; plenty more for the small and aggressive ones.
3. Regulatory arbitrage. Look, says the bulls, there is all this money out there, desperate to buy bitcoin but just aren’t allowed to. I don’t quite believe that: Not that many people or institutions are keen on orange, and even if they were, whatever premium we wish to attach to this taxation-mandate-401(k)–regulatory hurdle, it’ll decay with time and adoption. The same financial incentives and laws of gravity that justify bitcoin treasury companies working at all also work to undermine the very regulatory obstacles that give them value in the first place. 20%.
   (For some, such as Metaplanet in Japan, where bitcoin investors face excessive capital gains taxes, that arbitrage premium is worth more than that.) 
4. Catch-all. I’m probably missing some additional reason — some of these companies have residual, real-world businesses too — for why a bag of bitcoin ought to be worth more than the bitcoin inside the bag… so let’s just add another 20% here. 

Sum: 10+5+20+20 is 55… and conveniently about where MSTR traded when I first handwaved together these premium justifications. At a bitcoin price of $122,500, the 628,791 BTC on Strategy’s balance sheet is worth about $77 billion, but the market capitalization of the firm is $110 billion (~45% premium). 

$MSTR trades at a premium to Bitcoin NAV due to Credit Amplification, an Options Advantage, Passive Flows, and superior Institutional Access that equity and credit instruments provide compared to commodities. pic.twitter.com/AYQlytS4ID

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 13, 2025

Strategy is a Bank: The Economic Vision

Not the kind that takes (bitcoin) deposits and issues (bitcoin) mortgages, but another, more deeply economic kind.

You can think of banking as one of society’s risk-sharing mechanism. Society advances loans to some risky ventures, and capital markets — of which the banking system is one part — distribute the levels of risk stemming from them. (A financial “Who Gets What and Why,” basically.)

A bank, economically speaking, is an institution that takes on that risk having some non-public information about the entities involved; it distributes a small, guaranteed return to the lender, while it, itself, gains from any successful venture — though not by as much as the equity owner themselves. If the bank does this successfully, i.e., it on average picks successful ventures and earns more in interest on credit-worthy loans than it pays on interest to depositors, it makes profits for itself.

This is what Strategy is doing, using the undiscovered zone between the bitcoin world and the fiat world. 

Tradfi institutions, pension funds or retirees are the bank-financing component of the structure. They “deposit” money in Strategy, with returns and terms determined by the specific tranche they choose (STRK, STRD, STRF, STRC, or residual claimant in common stock, MSTR).

The bank invests these funds in assets: Strategy sits in the middle, guaranteeing the payouts to these economic entities by predicting that the assets will pay off more than the stated interest on the “bank deposits.” Rather than a bank lending on mortgages and credit cards and to small businesses, Strategy’s “lending” side consists of a single client: the world’s best-performing asset. What Strategy is doing is making the (very sensible) gamble that bitcoin will increase in dollar terms faster than the 8-10% it has to pay tradfi fiat institutions for the privilege of using their money. 

Any middle-schooler with a calculator can figure out that infinite riches await if you’re borrowing at 10% per year to hold an asset that appreciates by 40% a year. 

Naturally, bitcoin doesn’t do nice, comfy, 40%-a-year. If that were the case, per Michael Saylor’s own words, Warren Buffett would have snatched up aaaaall the bitcoinz long ago: 

“If bitcoin was not volatile, people with more money than you, more power than you, would outbid you for the bitcoin; you couldn’t have it… At the point that it becomes completely predictable, Warren Buffet will say ‘oh yeah; we get it; we just bought all the bitcoin’… and your opportunity is gone.”

All that Strategy need to ensure is that the financing won’t bankrupt it; that the issuance is well under its control and discretion; that dividend payments are conservatively enough compared to the net capital it holds (i.e., bitcoin); and, most importantly, that the liabilities aren’t callable such that they’d force the company company to sell bitcoin at inopportune moments.

Basically, Saylor created a vehicle exceedingly suited to make his way through extreme downturns. Even 80% falls in bitcoin — the worst of its kind, and it’s certainly questionable whether those will ever happen again, given the size and public availability of the asset — won’t stifle the company. The key to a successful Ponzi is that the money must keep rolling in. More precisely, Strategy is conservatively Ponzi-like in its financing (unlike classic — fraudulent — Ponzis schemes, Saylor isn’t running a fraud; the optics just overlap, and nobody is defrauded… unwillingly, anyway). 

What neither tradfi journalists nor treasury company-skeptic Bitcoiners have formulated well is how exactly these schemes fall apart. For “Economic Forces,” economist Josh Hendrickson outlines precisely the relevant stumbling blocks: “If markets are segmented and there is an expectation that the price will continue to experience rapid appreciation, this makes the present discounted value of a future liquidation could exceed the current liquidation value. If the stock is selling at its current liquidation value, it is underpriced.” And:

“what MicroStrategy has done is turn itself into a bitcoin bank by issuing dollar-denominated liabilities and purchasing bitcoin. The company is explicitly engaged in financial engineering to exploit regulatory arbitrage.”

Strategy’s model, but more so the other copy-cats given their respective jurisdictional moats, can thus break if:

1. Investors are wrong about the future trajectory of bitcoin 
2. Whatever mandates, tax rules and legal obstacles that currently prevent investors from buying bitcoin directly loosen up

The flywheel effect, so imaginatively dubbed by the Twitteratis of the Bitcoin world, is the ability to exploit regulatory arbitrage, which, in turn, “is contingent upon investors maintaining this expectation that bitcoin is going to be worth considerably more in the future,” in Hendrickson’s very academic, economistic words. 

Shareholders and buyers of the preferreds won’t be happy in the event of nonpayment of the dividend. Shareholders of MSTR itself will be unhappy if they’re diluted merely to satisfy bondholders (or worse, and Ponzi-like) pay the interest to preferreds. But so what? It doesn’t break Strategy.

What will break the model is the disappearance of these tradfi-to-bitcoin obstacles. It’s the regulatory hurdles that propelled so many of these companies forward; turned them to financial bridges between the new world and the old; made them vacuum up unproductive, low-yielding capital from all over the world and suck it into bitcoin.  

If fund managers or treasury departments or family offices routinely stack bitcoin instead of various Strategy products (or securities of Strategy copy-cats, as the case may be in different parts of the world), the primary reason for bitcoin treasury companies go away. 

The existence of bitcoin treasury companies, in short, hinges on the inertia of the present system. It depends, crucially, on family funds and pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and traditional investors not doing the hard work of figuring out actual bitcoin exposure (plus some safe, conservative leverage). If they don’t do that, and instead prefer to overpay 50% for the privilege, then… yes, the bitcoin treasury companies’ business models are forever sustainable. 

What Else Can Go Wrong?

There’s a custodian risk for Strategy, certainly, with its coins with various custodians, and in solutions that are purposefully kept pretty opaque. What happens to Strategy’s business if e.g., Coinbase goes bankrupt? Or worse, new political winds bring in confiscation and/or aggressive taxation metrics?

Fair enough, these are tail risks but risks nonetheless. 

And — it’s almost trivial to point this out — if Bitcoin somehow fails, obviously Strategy fails with it. If bitcoin stays a $118,000 stablecoin forever, most of Strategy’s opportunistic use of plentiful financial capital becomes almost moot, and it’ll trade like the pot of bitcoin most journalists and many analysts think it is, its extraordiary growth (mostly) evaporated. 

And I think that’s what trips up so many journalists and analysts when looking at this treasury company phenomenon: If you can’t see how or why bitcoin would ever have value or use, let alone a place in the future of money and finance, then obviously a corporation devoted to acquiring as much bitcoina as it can makes no sense at all.

If you do see a use and future for bitcoin, its price ever-growing against an ever-declining fiat, a corporate vehicle dedicated to acquiring more by wielding capital markets money flows becomes a whole other proposition. 

The Hedge and The FOMO: What If I’m Wrong?

Intellectual humility forces us to realize that maybe, just maybe, we got something wrong. 

Diamond hands are continually forged… and mine remain pretty weak. It usually really troubles me when the bitcoin price drops precipitously. (It’s the sudden extreme of it, I believe, that’s a big deal… and I find it hard to account for it even in hindsight). I act recklessly, lash out — and not infrequently YOLO into lows with rent money or other pools of spare cash that really shouldn’t go into bitcoin. 

In bull markets, that kind of behavior usually works to my benefit… but one day it won’t. Morgen Rochard, on one of these endless appearances on the Bitcoin podcast circuit, hammered home this point. (I sometimes say that Morgen has, paradoxically, convinced me to hold less bitcoin than I do… sleep calmly at night, be stoic in the face of price moves, etc, etc.) 

The more I learn about Strategy, the more I’m warming up to its many specially catered products. It makes some semblance of sense for me to own e.g., STRC for short-term cash and STRK for muted bitcoin exposure with cash flow. STRK, financially speaking, is like holding bitcoin twice financially removed; short-term movements in short-term price would be much less extreme and it would pay me a bit of additional fiat side income.

Given that my net worth and professional engagements are mostly tied to bitcoin and correlated to bitcoin price, having slightly less of my net worth in this one-stop-shop area makes sense.

Why Not Just Hold Cash in a High-Yield Savings Account?

Good question. Two reasons: they don’t yield very much… checks notes… 4.05% on my “high-yield” dollar account. Saylor’s equivalent product, STRC, targets a rate hundreds of basis points above that; and STRK, which in the medium term approximates bitcoin itself, discounted or amplified by changes in MSTR’s mNAV (since at MSTR = $1,000, ten STRK converts), currently yields over 7%. Second, knowing myself, I’m pretty sure I’ll just plunge cash balances held in a fiat bank account into bitcoin at the first sign of a significant price dump; holding STRC or STRK in a brokerage account would at least raise the barriers to that sort of imprudent behavior. 

You only really need to own two assets now.

Bitcoin and $STRC.

Financial planning got a whole lot easier.

— James Van Straten (@btcjvs) August 9, 2025

Hedges… Hedges Everywhere

Since I’m already structurally short fiat — per the original Speculative Attack, I hold debt and bitcoin, so I’m leveraged long — it makes sense to… deep breath… diversify, just a little bit! 

I already routinely max out the pension contribution that my jurisdiction local mafia already forces me to pay into. The funds inside that permissioned wrapper invest broadly in stocks and bonds (roughly 75:25 proportion); compared to any sort of bitcoin comparison, these of course perform awfully, but in case I’m somehow — for some unimaginable reason — wrong about this whole money-printing, central banking-end-of-an-era thing, at least I won’t starve in old age: 

I think of that contribution as

1) tax minimisation (I hate the gov profoundly, suffer enormous displeasure at every cent forked over)
2) A form of hedge in case I’m big-time wrong on this orange revolution (my work, employment,and net worth is already heavily dominated by BTC)

— Joakim Book (@joakimbook) June 28, 2025

Second, contributing to it comes with massive tax perks: Maxing out the contribution gives me some 1.5x the money right off the bat. While those additional funds will be outgrown by bitcoin’s routine ~40% CAGR in less than two years, they also come with tax-free mortgage perks; should I want to get myself a house real-world shitcoin someday, I can use this pot of money for the occasion. 

The bitcoin-opportunity cost is real, and over time quite debilitating, but this isn’t a matter of conviction. Real-world practicalities rule: It makes a world of difference for how you live your life if hyperbitcoinization happens in a week or in a hundred years. 

What has any of this got to do with bitcoin treasury companies?!

Plenty: because the hedging mentality of “what if I’m wrong about this” prevails here as well.

For all the fluff and fancy verbiage, all the new metrics and futuristic moon dreams, I still can’t get past why a bitcoin when wrapped in a corporate charter should be worth more than a bitcoin. Yes, yes, net-present-value of future growth, yield, capital arbitrage, speculative attack, and bet on hyperbitcoinized banking but… really?!

OK, so what if I’m wrong? Plenty of people I trust in the Bitcoin space vouch for these things — more by the minute, it feels like — and there is some logic to them. Cheap leverage, speculative attack, tapping into (read: tricking) fiat pools of money to flow into bitcoin. 

…so I FOMO’d into two treasury companies recently: Two Strategy products (MSTR and STRK) and the Swedish small newcomer H100.

It’s Nice to Have Stocks Again…

A decade or more ago, I used to hold plenty of stocks — large, well-diversified portfolios, meticulously tracked. For years now, and for obvious reasons, I haven’t held any. 

I decided on Strategy’s stuff because they are the least financially insane in this space; the second one because I had easy access via my old-time Nordic bank accounts — and I wasn’t going to bother with finding a convenient brokerage, sign papers and transfer funds, in order to maybe play with a few hundred bucks of bitcoin treasury funds. There’s enough ridiculous paperwork in the world. 

On the off chance that these things amount to anything, Strategy will be there, running the show: MSTR is “amplified bitcoin,” as their marketing says. Since most of my savings are orange-clad and my professional life is deep orange, once more, that sort of diversification makes sense. (Plus, the mNAV for MSTR is quickly approaching one… 1.42 as I’m writing this.) 

With Emil Sandstedt’s words ring in my ears — I understand that I am the BTC yield they’re after — but at 25%-ish BTC yield and 20% (safe) leverage via the prefs and convertibles, I’ll be back at even exposure about this time next year: My ~150 dollars’ worth of MSTR shares currently provide about 120 dollars’ worth of bitcoin exposure; I’m happy to throw in the extra $30 bucks for the financial empire Mr. Saylor is erecting (and the potential growth in bitcoin-per-share).  

Second, H100. The mNAV here was also pretty acceptable for a small, nimbly, fast-moving and uniquely jurisdictionally dominant player — at 2.73, ugh — but its low days-to-cover rate makes me feel that I won’t get too shafted. 

My first realization after buying some: I’d forgotten how much fun it is!

Suddenly, I’m tracking several different asset prices instead of just one. Suddenly, I’m financially in cahoots with real companies doing real things (…ish, anyway), rather than just the most portable, global and easily accessible money there ever was. Psychologically, I felt part of something — vested in the venture, the speculative attack and bitcoin yield-curve construction project that is treasury companies. How exciting!

Second realization: Bitcoin has messed with clarified the meaning of ownership. 

None of these instruments are mine; they’re wrapped in layers of permissioned custody. I can sell them at the press of a button (from nine to five, Mondays through Fridays…), but I only ever see any of that value if
a) the brokerage cooperates
b) the bank that receives the payout cooperates, and
c) the government doesn’t block the transactions. 

It is one step worse than what Knut Svanholm elegantly remarks on in Bitcoin: The Inverse of Clown World:

“A bank is akin to a 2-of-3 multi-sig wallet where you, the bank, and the government hold one key each. In other words, money in the bank is not really yours. Nor is it really money at all.”

…Or Not So Nice to Have Stonks

I quickly got myself a few reminders of the intransparent, altogether ridiculous and bureaucratic nightmare stock “ownership” is. After I had transferred funds to the brokerage last month, found STRK and pressed “buy,” I received an error message: “This security is not available to you.” 

Turns out I wasn’t eligible to own American securities through that brokerage. 

Tradfi assets are so intransparent and so darn permissioned. And the reminders of this obsolete value-technology kept coming. Obviously, it took a day or two for that “investment” to go -11%, reminding me that I still know nothing about fair valuation or timing the market. (Then again, bitcoin puked off 5% from its then 2-week 118,000 stablecoin pattern, so the opportunity cost was somewhat muted.)

It got worse when trudging through the lower-level sludge of bitcoin treasury companies: the two Swedish penny stocks that have made noise (H100, and K33; I had to buy something with the money intended for STRK) instantly fell 10% and 20% respectively — basically from the moment I touched them. Some experiment. 

To paraphrase an old Wall Street adage, an idiot and his sats are soon separated… and the present idiot doesn’t even have any new, shiny things to show for it because — newsflash! — stocks are custodial and immaterial! They reside in a brokerage firm’s database, and by extension, a company ledger somewhere. They’re not physical… and they’re not even really mine! I can’t spend them, move them, back them up or recover them to a different wallet. They’re stuck where they are, dead stock in Adam Smith’s famous phrasing regarding money.  

Instead, I set aside some other fiat funds in my regular banking app and impulse-bought MARA (MSTR is available there, but no other Strategy instruments); while MARA is issuing stocks and convertible debt to stack sats like yet another treasury company, at least it’s an underlying operating business (mining) — and their mNAV is around 1, so I don’t pay a premium for their financial-market, cost-of-capital arbitrage-ish play.  

How, Just HOW, will Bitcoin Treasury Companies Fail?

“There’s a real possibility we have, like, a dot-com style boom-and-bust cycle in this public equity world.”
Danny Knowles, May 28, “What Bitcoin Did”

Strategy is bulletproof. 

As Lyn Alden’s question in the Strategy Q2 earnings call illustrated, even in an 80% bitcoin drawdown, Strategy will be fine. The company was in a much worse position during the 2022 bear market when its bitcoin was directly tied to margin loans and collateral for bank debt. That’s not the case in 2025 when preferreds run the show. 

Looking past the occasional tradfi analyst or journalist obsession with mNAV, or why a company should be valued above the bitcoin it holds, and the pearl-clutching, inside and outside Bitcoin over using debt for acquiring more bitcoin, Strategy is unbelievably conservatively financed. The company holds bitcoin worth some $77 billion; the convertible debt amounts to about $5 billion ($8 billion, really, but some of them are deep in the money and trade as equity, not debt, at this point). There’s a little over $6 billion of preferred stock outstanding across STRK, STRD, STRF and STRC. (That makes the company about 15% levered, meaning bitcoin would have to drop by over 85% for the company to have any sort of solvency problems.)

Another avenue for problems is if tradfi money market capital dries up. Strategy’s ability to overperform bitcoin by generating increasing bitcoin per share depends on some combination of lower/safer cost of capital (or better terms on its debt) or tapping the above-1 mNAV (instantly accretive since it lets Saylor buy bitcoin at discount). In the absence of that — say, nobody buys the treasury company issuances, and financial capital flows somewhere else; money printing stops; interest rates on (safer?) government securities shoot up, etc — I don’t see how Strategy’s mNAV doesn’t just collapse back down to 1. 

Lastly, there’s a custodian risk for Strategy specifically. Being the biggest player around, with some 3% of the total supply, honey-pot risks abound. (This probably won’t be an issue for the smaller ones, distributed across very different jurisdictions.) Strategy keeps its gigantic pile of coins with Coinbase custody — in solutions that are purposefully kept pretty opaque. 

What happens to Strategy’s business if Coinbase goes bankrupt? Or worse, new political winds bring in confiscation and/or aggressive taxation metrics? These are good questions, but very out-there tail risks nonetheless. Do we really have to worry that much about them?

Whether bitcoin treasury companies are here to bring bitcoin to the center of global capital markets, or whether this all ends in disaster, we have yet to see. 

Closing Thoughts: Sell-Out? Ponzi Got to Your Head?

Have I intellectually sold out? Am I a corporate slave? Has David Bailey’s musings — and the fact that Nakamoto, loosely affiliated with Bitcoin Magazine via shared ownership and marketing services — rubbed off on me, now that NAKA is merging with KindlyMD and can unleash its flywheel/“Ponzi” scheming in full?

First, it would be a deep betrayal of journalistic integrity and — tells me our in-house legal counsel — illegal to use a media platform to pump securities owned by its owner. (Though in the age of Trump, who can tell?). But I certainly wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t seriously investigating the pros and cons of these entities mushrooming up everywhere. 

Second, and as an illustration of my very low conviction in all of this: I hold about as much in treasury company stocks as I do in custodial Lightning wallets for zapping and convenience spending — ergo, not much. 

Third, for full transparency (again, on advice of counsel), here’s the experience detailed to date (note: calculated at prices before Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments yesterday shoved all these prices downward): 

A few things stand out. 

1. Choose your bitcoin treasury companies carefully: H100 and Sander Andersen seem pretty dedicated to the stacking effort, and the company keeps moving up the bitcoin treasuries list. For now, financial markets reward such companies for their efforts. In contrast, the K33 team moves much slower, and their share price experience since their first bitcoin launch months ago has been classic, short-term pump before gradually declining back to where the stock started. MARA and Strategy are hovering around where they have been for months. 
2. My amazing ~5% excess return over bitcoin is too meagre to bother with — and one-off lucky. Over longer time periods, this might change… but honestly, just don’t bother.
3. I will probably get tired of this latest fiat financial engineering fad soon enough. It’s only so much fun to hold permissioned, brokerage-limited, old school assets. 

Come hell or high water, celebration or disaster, glory or tears… it seems much easier to just keep chopping wood and stacking sats into cold storage than to bother with any of these bitcoin securities. 

Treasury fever is running high on Wall Street and among hyped-up Bitcoiners. Maybe the financialization of bitcoin is upon us… but honestly, I think I’ll mostly just sit this one out. 

—

BM Big Reads are weekly, in-depth articles on some current topic relevant to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. If you have a submission you think fits the model, feel free to reach out at editor[at]bitcoinmagazine.com.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc, BTC Media, Bitcoin Magazine or its staff. The article is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal or professional advice. No material non-public information was used in writing this article. Opinions, and financial actions taken as a consequence of those opinions, are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect BTC Inc, BTC Media, or Bitcoin Magazine. 

Nakamoto has a marketing partnership with Bitcoin Magazine’s parent company BTC Inc to help build the first global network of Bitcoin treasury companies, where BTC Inc provides certain marketing services to Nakamoto. More information on this can be found here.

This post How to Think About Bitcoin Treasury Companies: A Bitcoiner’s Dilemma in the Age of Rampant Speculation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Joakim Book.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Online Privacy Is Under Threat in the UK and US. Policy Expert Freddie New Advises How To Protect Yourself

Due to certain laws and court rulings, it’s becoming more and more difficult to preserve one’s privacy when communicating and transacting online, but there are steps we can take to maintain our privacy, as per what Bitcoin policy advocate Freddie New shared in my recent interview with him.

Before getting to those steps, though, please allow me to offer some background on how online privacy has been negatively impacted in both the UK and US as of late.

July 25 marked the first day of enforcement for the UK’s Online Safety Act, which requires that UK internet users input identifying information before browsing certain websites in efforts to protect children from accessing harmful or age-inappropriate content.

In the US, the founders of Samourai Wallet, a Bitcoin mixing service, recently pled guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, while a co-founder of Tornado Cash, an Ethereum mixer, was found guilty of the same charge.

Like I said, things have been “pretty shit” (to borrow a phrase from my friends across the pond) for online privacy lately.

But Freddie New says that this isn’t time to despair; instead, he argues, it’s time to take very concrete actions that can help us to maintain our anonymity to a better degree while using the internet.

Ways to Increase Online Privacy

• Use a VPN: VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) allow you to browse the internet from a remote server, masking your IP address and anonymizing your identity in the process. Popular VPNs include Mullvad VPN, Obscura VPN, and Proton VPN. “Downloads of the Proton VPN soared by 1,800% on the day that the [Online Safety] Act became law,” explained New.
• Use a fully-encrypted email service: Email services such as Proton Mail, Mailfence, and Hushmail, encrypt the emails you send so that only you and the recipient of the email you send can read what’s inside. “Thinking about using Proton Mail instead of Gmail,” New suggested in the interview.
• Set up a Nostr key pair: New recommended setting up Nostr key pair (it’s easier than it sounds) via Nostr clients like Primal and Iris, as you don’t have to input any identifying information to get started using Nostr via these clients, which serve as social media platforms and help connect you to the world’s biggest bitcoin circular economy.
• Learn how progressive web apps (PWA) work: A PWA is an app that you can access through a web browser as opposed to through Apple’s App store or the Google Play store. (Think signing into X via a web browser versus using the iPhone app.) New explained that using apps like this helps users to circumvent the “gate kept worlds of the Google Play store or the App Store,” worlds that typically require more identifying information to enter.
• Learn how to use APKs: An APK, or an Android Package Kit, is a file you can use to download an app to your Android device without going through the Google Play store. “Just this weekend, I downloaded the APK for Bitchat,” said New in the interview of the new app that enables you to communicate via your phone more privately.
• Get a bitcoin hardware wallet: Hardware wallets allow users to transact more privately then custodial apps like Relai or CashApp do. “Considering getting a Trezor or COLDCARD,” advised new.

By following the above advice, you can greatly improve your online privacy.

And if it feels overwhelming to do all of the above, start by taking just one or two actions and creating incrementally better privacy for yourself.

As New said in the interview, “No one in the digital age is ever going to have perfect privacy, but you can be slightly better than the next person — improving your privacy even slightly is better than not taking the step at all.”

This post Online Privacy Is Under Threat in the UK and US. Policy Expert Freddie New Advises How To Protect Yourself first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Frank Corva.

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Bitcoin Magazine

KindlyMD & Nakamoto Officially Merge, Plans to Buy One Million BTC

KindlyMD, Inc. (NASDAQ: NAKA) and Bitcoin-native holding company Nakamoto Holdings Inc. have officially completed their long-anticipated merger, forming a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury vehicle with ambitions to acquire one million BTC. The combined entity will operate under the KindlyMD name, trading on the Nasdaq Capital Market, while Nakamoto will function as a wholly owned subsidiary overseeing the Bitcoin financial services division.

BREAKING: David Bailey’s Nakamoto officially completes merger and can now buy over $740 MILLION #Bitcoin

Bullish! pic.twitter.com/PKOP2PamZB

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 14, 2025

“Our vision is for the world’s capital markets to operate on a Bitcoin standard. Today’s merger represents the beginning of that journey for our company,” said David Bailey, CEO of the combined company. “Since I started my journey in Bitcoin 13 years ago, I’ve always believed Bitcoin would become the most valuable asset in human history, held by every person, company, and government. The securitization of Bitcoin has shown us how institutions will adopt it. We intend to drive that forward.”

Tim Pickett, former KindlyMD CEO and now Chief Medical Officer, added: “We are thrilled to officially close our merger with Nakamoto. We’ve built KindlyMD on operational and innovative excellence, and we are now extending that same principle to our capital strategy. Bitcoin gives us the ability to preserve value with the same integrity we apply to delivering care.”

The transaction generated approximately $540 million in gross proceeds through a private placement in public equity (PIPE) financing, which will be used primarily for Bitcoin purchases. A $200 million convertible note offering is expected to close tomorrow.

Bailey will lead as CEO and Chairman of the Board, with a strengthened leadership team including Amanda Fabiano as COO, Tyler Evans as CIO, and Andrew Creighton as CCO. Newly appointed independent directors include Charles Blackburn, Perianne Boring, Eric Weiss, Greg Xethalis, and Mark Yusko, alongside Pickett.

The merged company’s mission is clear: build a premier, institutional-grade Bitcoin treasury vehicle to drive corporate and government adoption of the asset. By leveraging advanced corporate finance strategies, Nakamoto aims to simplify Bitcoin integration into global capital markets and position itself as a leader in public market Bitcoin treasury management.

Bailey reinforced his commitment on X, stating: “Honored to officially join KindlyMD as CEO and Chairman. Thank you for coming on this journey with me — together we will rebuild the world on the bitcoin standard. One Nakamoto = One million Bitcoin.”

Disclosure: Nakamoto is in partnership with Bitcoin Magazine’s parent company BTC Inc to build the first global network of Bitcoin treasury companies, where BTC Inc provides certain marketing services to Nakamoto. More information on this can be found here. 

This post KindlyMD & Nakamoto Officially Merge, Plans to Buy One Million BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Breaks $123,000, Bullish Momentum Targets $125,000

Bitcoin’s price climbed above $123,000 today, according to data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro, putting it just shy of breaking its current all-time high of $123,180 set on July 14, 2025. The move comes amid surging institutional interest, record corporate holdings, and growing national-level profits from BTC adoption.

JUST IN: $123,000 Bitcoin pic.twitter.com/jKYgPK0wIS

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 13, 2025

Coinciding with Bitcoin’s rise in price, today marked a major milestone for Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-heavy firm, Strategy, whose BTC holdings closed at an all-time high valuation of $77.2 billion. Saylor announced on X that this represents a jump of $35.4 billion from the firm’s previous peak of $41.8 billion in 2024. Strategy’s aggressive accumulation strategy has made it one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world and a key driver in market sentiment.

Today, Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings closed at an all-time high of $77.2 billion. pic.twitter.com/NgssOoIFKy

— Michael Saylor (@saylor) August 13, 2025

Meanwhile, El Salvador’s Bitcoin gamble continues to pay off. President Nayib Bukele revealed on X that the nation now sits on an unrealized profit of $468,307,816 from its BTC holdings. After investing $300,548,375 into Bitcoin, the country’s total BTC stash is now valued at $768,856,191. The nation’s Bitcoin Office celebrated the milestone, declaring: “El Salvador’s bitcoin bet is paying off BIG TIME! Our holdings just soared past $770M USD!”

pic.twitter.com/RwGDNx8oOt

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) August 13, 2025

Institutional investment products are also seeing surging activity. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded massive trading volumes today, led by BlackRock’s IBIT, which alone traded over $3.7 billion. Fidelity’s FBTC followed as the second-most traded, logging $530 million in volume—substantial, but still well below IBIT’s dominance.

Today’s trading volumes $IBIT w/ $3.7 Billion pic.twitter.com/94pP2g12Rz

— HODL15Capital (@HODL15Capital) August 13, 2025

Some market watchers say the rally could take a brief pause before its next leg higher. “There will be more Bitcoin ATHs but I think we will see a pullback because alts are running too hot now,” said Samson Mow, CEO of Bitcoin technology company Jan3. “Once the altcoin mania passes, Bitcoin will take off. This is just how it’s always been.”

With Bitcoin just a fraction away from setting a fresh record and both institutional and sovereign adoption accelerating, market participants are watching closely for a breakout to the next milestone of $125,000. Whether it happens in hours or days, momentum appears firmly in Bitcoin’s favor—fueled by whale buying, corporate treasuries, and geopolitical endorsements.

This post Bitcoin Price Breaks $123,000, Bullish Momentum Targets $125,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Surges Near All-Time High, BTC Poised to Break $123,000

Bitcoin surged above $122,000 today, leaving it only about 1% away from setting a new all-time high, according to data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro. The current record of $123,180, set on July 14, 2025, could be broken at any moment given bitcoin’s trademark volatility. With institutional adoption continuing to rise and demand for BTC accelerating, a new record may arrive sooner rather than later.

#Bitcoin is just 1% away from setting a new ATH pic.twitter.com/tjefL2v4nL

— Bitcoin Magazine Pro (@BitcoinMagPro) August 13, 2025

Adding to this momentum, whale accumulation has hit unprecedented levels. As of yesterday, the number of addresses holding over 100 BTC reached a new all-time high of 18,996, surpassing the previous peak of 18,544 from February 26, 2017. Bitcoin Magazine Pro’s chart shows a steady increase in these large holdings, driven in part by corporate treasuries aggressively adding BTC to their balance sheets. Michael Saylor’s firm Strategy has more than doubled its Bitcoin holdings since Donald Trump’s election victory, boosting its total treasury by 60%. This buying spree comes amid a friendlier regulatory climate under the Trump administration, which has rolled back certain Biden-era enforcement actions and introduced pro-crypto policies.

Macroeconomic conditions are also adding fuel to the bullish fire. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said interest rates are “too constrictive” and should likely be 150-175 basis points lower. Speaking on Bloomberg Surveillance, he stated, “I think we could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis-point rate cut in September… we should probably be 150, 175 basis points lower.”

President Trump took it a step further today, calling for the Federal Reserve to cut rates by 3 or 4 points, which would bring them to around 1%. “I believe we should be three or four points lower. So that’s over a trillion dollars we pay — every year — in interest. And it’s truly just a paper calculation. You sign a document and you save almost a trillion dollars… But despite that, we’re powering through it and have the greatest economy we’ve ever had,” said Trump.

JUST IN: President Trump said the Fed should lower interests rates by 3 or 4 points to 1% pic.twitter.com/Njen6ipI2w

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 13, 2025

Meanwhile, Cathie Wood, CEO of ARK Invest, reaffirmed her ultra-bullish, long-term outlook. Speaking to CoinDesk, she said, “I think that we can safely say that our bull case is well over a million, well over a million dollars in five years,” citing Bitcoin’s role as the “gateway into digital assets for institutions” and a “substitute for gold as a store of value.”

With institutional inflows, whale accumulation, and potential monetary easing converging, bitcoin could be on the verge of a historic breakout to new all-time highs.

This post Bitcoin Price Surges Near All-Time High, BTC Poised to Break $123,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Nears $123K as Whale Addresses Hit All-Time High

Bitcoin is holding strong at around $120,000, sitting less than 3% below its all-time high of $123,180, as whales continue to accumulate large amounts of BTC. According to fresh data from Bitcoin Magazine Pro, the number of addresses holding over 100 BTC has reached a new all-time high of 18,996.

The chart provided by Bitcoin Magazine Pro shows the number of unique addresses holding at least 100 BTC steadily increasing, now surpassing its previous peak of 18,544 made back on February 26, 2017. The data “can be used alongside the other Address Balance charts to understand whether adoption is increasing or decreasing generally for Bitcoin over time, and also whether usage is increasing or decreasing among specific cohorts,” Bitcoin Magazine Pro notes.

JUST IN: The number of addresses holding more than 100 #Bitcoin has hit a NEW ALL TIME HIGH pic.twitter.com/LKkxTZMq6y

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 12, 2025

This surge in large holdings is being driven in part by corporate treasuries aggressively adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets. Michael Saylor’s firm Strategy has more than doubled its Bitcoin holdings since Donald Trump’s election win, boosting its total treasury by 60%. This accumulation coincides with a regulatory shift under the Trump administration, which has rolled back certain Biden-era enforcement actions and introduced pro-crypto policies, encouraging more institutional adoption.

As a result, over 160 public companies now hold Bitcoin as a primary reserve asset—up from just 43 in 2023. Notable players include David Bailey’s Nakamoto, which is poised to purchase over $760 million worth of BTC once its merger with KindlyMD is complete. And Jack Maller’s Twenty One Capital, which already owns 43,514 BTC, making it the third-largest corporate holder in the world.

Nakamoto will be buying the top forever.

— David Bailey $1.0mm/btc is the floor (@DavidFBailey) August 11, 2025

A Bitcoin address is a string of 26–35 characters, functioning like a public key that allows users to send and receive BTC. Wallets can hold multiple addresses, and there is no theoretical limit to the amount of Bitcoin a single address can hold. While addresses with small holdings (e.g., 0.1 BTC) are also increasing, the spike in addresses with over 100 BTC highlights growing concentration among high-value holders.

With only 21 million BTC to ever exist—and about 19 million already mined, of which an estimated 3 million are lost—the race to secure large Bitcoin holdings is intensifying. If current trends continue, Bitcoin could surpass its all-time high in the coming days as institutional buying pressure remains relentless.

Disclosure: Nakamoto is in partnership with Bitcoin Magazine’s parent company BTC Inc to build the first global network of Bitcoin treasury companies, where BTC Inc provides certain marketing services to Nakamoto. More information on this can be found here.

This post Bitcoin Nears $123K as Whale Addresses Hit All-Time High first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Stays Above $118,000 As Metaplanet, Smarter Web Company Buys Additional Bitcoin

Bitcoin price maintained its position above $118,000 as two major corporations, Metaplanet and Smarter Web Company, announced significant additions to their Bitcoin treasury holdings, highlighting the growing trend of institutional Bitcoin adoption.

Metaplanet, now the sixth-largest corporate Bitcoin holder, acquired 518 BTC at an average price of $118,519 per coin, representing a total investment of approximately $61.4 million. The Tokyo-based investment company’s latest purchase brings its total holdings to 18,113 BTC, with an average purchase price of $101,911 per Bitcoin.

The company’s Bitcoin-related metrics show impressive growth, with its BTC Yield – a key performance indicator measuring Bitcoin holdings relative to fully diluted shares outstanding – reaching 26.5% in the current quarter. This follows remarkable yields of 41.7% in Q3 2024, 309.8% in Q4 2024, 95.6% in Q1 2025, and 129.4% in Q2 2025.

JUST IN: Metaplanet bought another 518 #Bitcoin for ¥9.08 billion. pic.twitter.com/WT0FFhFmhi

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) August 12, 2025

Simultaneously, Smarter Web Company announced it has bought 295 BTC for $35.2 million at an average of $119,412. The company’s move represents a growing trend among publicly traded firms seeking exposure to the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

The announcements come amid an unprecedented surge in corporate Bitcoin treasury adoption, with the number of public companies holding Bitcoin increasing to over 200 in last few months. This rapid expansion demonstrates the growing acceptance of Bitcoin as a treasury asset among institutional investors.

Metaplanet’s systematic approach to Bitcoin acquisition has been particularly noteworthy. Since July 2024, the company has steadily increased its holdings from under 200 BTC to its current position of 18,113 BTC, executing many separate purchases. The company funds its Bitcoin purchases through various capital market activities, including stock acquisition rights and bond issuances. Recent transactions include multiple exercises of the 20th Series of Stock Acquisition Rights, with tranches ranging from 1.3 million to 9 million shares between July and August 2025.

The increasing number of companies adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets reflects a maturing market. We’re seeing innovative financing structures and sophisticated treasury management strategies being deployed specifically for Bitcoin acquisition.

The trend of corporate Bitcoin adoption shows no signs of slowing, with new companies announcing Bitcoin treasury positions almost daily. This surge in institutional interest has helped maintain Bitcoin’s price stability above $118,000, despite broader market volatility.

As more corporations embrace Bitcoin as a treasury asset, the market continues to evolve with new financial instruments and investment vehicles designed specifically for institutional Bitcoin exposure. This growing institutional adoption may signal a new phase in Bitcoin’s journey from a speculative asset to a mainstream treasury holding.

This post Bitcoin Price Stays Above $118,000 As Metaplanet, Smarter Web Company Buys Additional Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Vivek Sen.

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Bitcoin Magazine

How Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc Is Reinventing Finance With Bitcoin

Block, Inc., founded by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Twitter, is a financial technology company with a deepening full-stack connection to the Bitcoin industry through its subsidiaries. Its companies span payments apps and merchant tooling with Bitcoin integration, the development of bitcoin mining hardware, open source software development, a decentralized finance protocol for peer-to-peer markets and even a self-custody hardware wallet. 

Formerly called Square and founded in 2009, the company started integrating Bitcoin into its technology offering as early as 2014 via Cash App — its most famous subsidiary — allowing merchants to accept bitcoin payments through the app. In 2021, Square Inc officially rebranded to Block Inc, doubling down on its commitment to Bitcoin and affirming its vision of the future as one where the Bitcoin Blockchain would play a pivotal role. Square became a subsidiary of Block Inc and now deals primarily with payment terminal technology. Today, Block has 8,584 BTC on its balance sheet valued at almost 1 billion dollars, with an average purchase price of 30,405 dollars per bitcoin. 

Of Block’s subsidiaries and investments, most have explicit connections to Bitcoin or blockchain systems such as Cash App, Bitkey, Proto, Spiral and Tidal. All of them are advancing Bitcoin adoption at various levels of the industry and have growing influence and gratitude from the Bitcoin community. Jack Dorsey has been a leading donor to various Bitcoin nonprofits and community efforts, including OpenSats, which funds open source Bitcoin development and through which a great deal of Nostr — a Bitcoin-native social network protocol — has been bootstrapped.

In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Miles Suter, product lead at Block, shared insights into the company’s vision for the future and Bitcoin’s ideal role in it. He said that, “We think Bitcoin achieves its ultimate destiny when it’s being used as everyday money. Just like Satoshi intended. I think that Bitcoin as a global financial infrastructure that everyone can access lets companies like Block operate in a much more global manner. And I think that payments are essential to maintaining the core properties that make Bitcoin unique and ultimately will make it win in the long run.”

Below you’ll find short overviews of some of Block’s Bitcoin-related companies, particularly those serving retail, with exclusive quotes from Suter on how they serve critical roles in the path to hyperbitcoinization. 

Square

Launched in 2009, Square is a point-of-sale (POS) system enabling merchants to accept card payments and manage operations like inventory, payroll and business loans. Serving four million sellers and processing $241 billion annually as of 2024, Square announced that it began rolling out Bitcoin payments for merchants at the Bitcoin Vegas conference in 2025, allowing them to accept bitcoin seamlessly via its POS hardware.

The move marks a major milestone in Bitcoin’s integration with retail payment systems, establishing a missing pillar up until now in the business toolkit needed to really use bitcoin as a medium of exchange. “On the Square side, we have over 4 million merchants in the U.S. with a full suite of point-of-sale, inventory, taxes, reporting, like the best in the business in terms of traditional payments processing. This initiative goes beyond just Bitcoin payments,” said Suter.

With the full-stack accounting integration of Bitcoin, merchants who wanted to accept the digital currency but could not because of a lack of tooling now have the door wide open. But the vision is greater than that. “And we’re going to be offering a full-stack Bitcoin banking suite specifically designed for small businesses,” Suter added, leaning into the growing trend of bitcoin treasury companies and strategies that is dominating Bitcoin news today.

Companies will soon have all the tools to accept bitcoin payments and put them directly into their company treasury rather than instantly sell bitcoin for dollars. If they need liquidity, they are already able to put that bitcoin as collateral and get dollar-denominated loans straight to their bank account via companies like Unchained — though, without a doubt, Block is also moving in that direction for their clients. Suter added that “one thing I love about this full-stack Bitcoin banking suite is that we’re democratizing access to Bitcoin treasury tools that were previously only available to large corporations. I believe that holding Bitcoin on your balance sheet shouldn’t just be a Wall Street luxury.”

Cash App

Cash App, perhaps the most renowned brand within the Block portfolio, completes the retail payments side of the hyperbitcoinization engine Block is building. Introduced in 2013, Cash App is a consumer-focused digital wallet with a reported 57 million active users in 2024, offering person-to-person payments, debit cards, stocks and Bitcoin trading, and tax filing. Cash App reported $10 billion in bitcoin-sourced revenue in 2024, making up 62% the total, by charging ~2% per trade.

Cash App might also be the first mainstream payments app to integrate Lightning, Bitcoin’s payments network. It is at the cutting edge of the industry, producing the highest publicly disclosed, bitcoin-denominated revenue but operating the Lightning Network at 9.7% return. This is not some weird crypto magic yield, and can only be achieved by making sure bitcoin payments are incredibly efficient and reliable. Suter noted that “to me, it’s proof that Bitcoin is already a functioning payment network, not digital gold. It’s more than that. And I don’t want to get too into the weeds here, but I can confidently say that we have the most talented set of Lightning engineers in the world working on these problems.”

Exalted about the success of Cash App’s Bitcoin integration, Suter added that “we’re super excited about Lightning’s role in making Bitcoin everyday money because that’s really, from a Block Inc. perspective, we believe that’s essential for Bitcoin’s future, Satoshi’s original vision, peer-to-peer electronic cash.”

Consumers cannot just easily buy and send bitcoin via Cash App, but also automate purchases, an investment strategy known as DCA or dollar cost averaging, which has been mathematically demonstrated to be one of the best investment strategies there are in bitcoin. 

The combination of Cash App and Square unlocks what tech people call a “fly wheel,” a term used to describe self-reinforcing loops of consumer and business behavior that can drive a business to new heights and which is usually not possible if a building block in that business logic is missing. Perhaps with these two major integrations, the vision of Bitcoin payments dreamt about by early adopters for over a decade, which have not really worked very well up until now, can finally become a reality. 

Bitkey

Anchored in the fundamental value proposition of Bitcoin — censorship resistance through individual liberty and self custody — Block has launched a new hardware wallet product called Bitkey. The device is designed specifically for Bitcoin security, using a popular technology called multisignature, which decentralize the passwords — private keys— needed to move the bitcoin to three different devices: the Bitkey hardware, a key stored for recovery in Block’s servers and a third key encrypted with the user’s credentials and stored on the user’s chosen Google drive account.

The Bitkey, launched globally in 2024, makes various design choices that depart from the way other hardware wallets in the industry function — the most primary and controversial difference being that it never shows private key material to the user. Unlike every other hardware wallet and most self-custody Bitcoin and crypto apps, Bitkey hides key material almost entirely from the user, instead giving them various well-designed tools to secure, recover and inherit their bitcoin securely to their loved ones. Suter noted that “we built Bitkey to expand who can safely self-custody. We — Bitcoiners — joke that you should onboard your grandma to self-custody, but I hear countless stories of that being true and people reaching out because the onboarding was so seamless.”

The device looks and feels like alien technology, every unit with a unique mixed stone pattern, and that lights up to the touch, like it is alive. It is a profound rethinking of self custody, born of a deep critique of the user experience of the traditional Bitcoin seed backup approach. While the design has been in the market for barely a year and no public data on sales numbers has been released, it will be interesting to see if they can break new ground into hardware wallet adoption — a metric historically poor for an industry so culturally defined by self custody. 

This post How Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc Is Reinventing Finance With Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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