Zhibao Technology, a Shanghai-based insurance-technology firm listed on the Nasdaq, said Wednesday it has signed a non-binding term sheet for a stock sale that would be paid for in bitcoin — some 3,500 coins, worth near $220 million at current prices.
The deal, a private investment in public equity known as a PIPE, would have a buyer named Joyertech and Information OPC subscribe for Zhibao shares with consideration the company expects to include about 3,500 BTC.
The figure remains subject to final valuation, custody arrangements, an audit, regulatory review, and definitive agreements. Zhibao stressed that the term sheet binds no one, and that the transaction may change or fall through.
The structure hints at a familiar move. Zhibao (NASDAQ: ZBAO), which pioneered a “2B2C” embedded-insurance model in China and launched the country’s first digital insurance brokerage platform in 2020, would keep running its existing business at first.
Yet the buyer would name a majority of the board at closing, a control transition that would hand the newcomers the steering wheel while the current team minds the legacy operation until a later “separation, disposition, or other restructuring.”
$220 million in bitcoin has a new owner
In plain terms, a modest insurance-tech company would become a home for a large pile of bitcoin, with new owners in charge. Rather than raise cash and buy coins on the market, Zhibao would take the bitcoin itself as payment, a swap that seats a treasury on its balance sheet from day one.
Behind ZBAO are employees, insurance clients, and a founding team that built something new in a crowded market, and the term sheet would fold that story into a treasury vehicle shaped by people who may value the shell as much as the business.
For the current staff, the promise is continuity “until the separation” — words that carry their own uncertainty.
The wager holds warning signs. Analysts have called the treasury boom a bubble, and some treasury firms have started selling their coins under market pressure this year.
The crypto industry may be relatively small in terms of employers — but the economic contribution is big.
That’s according to a new report published by the National Cryptocurrency Association and the Pragmatic Policy Group, which reveals that while only 34,000 people are employed by crypto companies, the industry will contribute $55 billion in 2026 to the U.S. economy.
The report, “Crypto at Work”, which claims to be the first to comprehensively analyze the crypto industry’s footprint in the U.S. labor market, said that jobs in the space also average $133,000 a year — more than double the $64,000 national median wage, and ahead of average pay in tech of and manufacturing.
“Crypto creates many jobs outside the tech industry and directly supports more jobs than key manufacturing industries,” the report said.
Using a standard input-output economic model, PPG calculated that every direct crypto job supports roughly six additional jobs elsewhere in the economy — at suppliers, and at businesses where crypto workers spend their paychecks.
Stacking those indirect and induced jobs on top of the direct total produces a figure of 232,000 jobs in total that the industry supports.
By raw headcount, though, crypto remains a small employer. The report itself benchmarks its 34,000 direct jobs against coffee and tea manufacturing (28,400 jobs) and tobacco manufacturing (10,600 jobs) — hardly the scale of a major American industry.
The industry’s footprint is also geographically lopsided: California, New York, and Texas account for 60% of all crypto jobs, with 57,600, 53,800, and 26,500 respectively.
Heartland states—Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas among them — together support just over 17,000 jobs. The report singles out Colorado and North Dakota as rising hubs, pointing to Colorado’s crypto-friendly tax policy and firms like Riot Platforms and Crusoe Energy, and North Dakota’s flare-gas mining operations and a pilot stablecoin from the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
PPG describes the study as the first comprehensive, economy-wide look at crypto’s labor market impact, built on 2024 Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The firm also flagged a limitation in its own approach: because “a dedicated crypto workforce profile does not yet exist,” it modeled crypto’s financial activities using the occupational mix of broader technology industries rather than traditional finance.
NCA, which funded the research, said it hopes the findings give policymakers “an evidence-based understanding of the sector’s economic contribution.” The nonprofit launched in 2025 to promote what it describes as safe, informed cryptocurrency adoption in the U.S.
In a July 21, 2026 blog post, Lightning Labs described Wavelength as “Bitcoin on Easy Mode for Agents and Humans.” The company stated that the Lightning Network already delivers instant, global, low-fee payments under user control, but previously required infrastructure most builders preferred not to operate. Wavelength closes that gap by turning the hard parts of Bitcoin and Lightning integration into a handful of API calls.
High-Level Overview
Wavelength embeds a self-custodial wallet that runs inside web or mobile apps (via WebAssembly or compiled binaries) or as a standalone client. Users control their own keys on-device. The system supports on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning payments via atomic swaps, and an Ark-like settlement layer for fast, low-cost off-chain transfers that can settle in batches to the blockchain. Every off-chain payment uses a standard BOLT 11 invoice, so the wallet interoperates with the existing Lightning Network from the first integration.
Lightning payments route through Loop for deep, reliable liquidity. A coordination service settles transfers between users but never takes unilateral control of funds. According to the announcement, users can always perform a unilateral exit to on-chain Bitcoin at any time via an explicit exit command, without needing cooperation, the Wavelength SDK is open source.
The same Wavelength API is exposed to AI agents as typed tool calls through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Agents can hold balances and pay for API calls, data feeds, or other agent services in fractions of a cent. Wallet creation and unlocking designed to remain outside the agent channel so seeds and passwords are not exposed to the model. This pairs with L402, Lightning Labs’ protocol for machine-native authentication and per-request Lightning payments.
Core commands cover the full lifecycle: create/unlock, balance, recv (for addresses or invoices), send, activity, and exit. Integration options include the embedded SDK, a gRPC/REST API, browser WASM package, and an MCP server. Documentation is structured for both human developers and agents, including llms.txt indexes and agent onboarding guidance.
Availability and Roadmap
Wavelength is available immediately on Signet and testnet. Mainnet access is invitation-only; interested parties can request it after installing the toolkit. Bitcoin is supported at launch. Stablecoin support is planned via Taproot Assets so the same API surface can handle both. Future work includes deeper mobile embedding and optional direct Lightning channel support using Lnd.
Lightning Labs noted in its announcement that during the closed alpha, Lightning transactions carry a minimal 1 basis point service fee (plus standard network routing fees), with ordinary Bitcoin network fees applying for on-chain activity. Pricing may evolve.
On X, Lightning Labs summarized the release: “Announcing Wavelength, the easiest way to integrate bitcoin for agents and humans. With a simple non-custodial API, anyone can integrate Lightning into their app and get instant, high volume, low fee transactions. Machines can pay machines. Humans can pay humans. Anywhere.” A follow-up post directed builders to a form for early mainnet access.
The release positions Wavelength as infrastructure that lowers the barrier for application developers, “vibe coders,” and autonomous agents to offer self-custodial Bitcoin payments by default rather than as a specialist feature. Full documentation, quickstarts, and the open-source repository are available at wavelength.lightning.engineering and the linked GitHub project.
Senate Republicans released an updated version of the Clarity Act on Wednesday, a draft that for the first time carries a crypto ethics agreement barring the president, vice president, members of Congress, federal judges, and other covered officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets.
The new Clarity Act text, posted after morning briefing calls with stakeholders, adds a section titled “Ban on certain digital asset transactions.” It states that a covered individual “shall not, in exchange for consideration,” issue or sponsor a digital asset, a prohibition that reaches public officials and employees during their service, and their spouses.
A companion clause bars the listing of any digital asset found to be issued or sponsored by a covered individual in violation of the ban.
The bill offers a safe harbor. A covered individual would avoid violation by placing a direct interest in a digital asset in a qualified blind trust, divesting it, or both, along procedures that track the ethics-agreement rules under section 208 of title 18.
A separate carve-out protects continued use of a covered individual’s name, image, or likeness when an issuer or intermediary used it before the person entered covered status.
JUST IN: Senate Republicans release updated Clarity Act text that bans the President and covered officials from issuing digital assets and requires them to sell their crypto holdings or put them in a blind trust. pic.twitter.com/v7UDXGI45B
The ethics package carries an expiration date. Under the draft, the provisions have no force after noon on January 20, 2029, and no person faces penalty after that sunset for conduct on or before it. The timing lines up with the end of the current presidential term.
Clarity Act dispute over President Trump’s crypto efforts
The ethics language answers a months-long Clarity Act dispute over President Trump’s crypto ventures, which a July financial disclosure tied to about $1.4 billion in 2025 income through the $TRUMP token and World Liberty Financial.
Eleanor Terrett reported the package was negotiated between the White House and Republican Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno, and that it does not carry Democratic sign-off.
Beyond ethics, industry sources say the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act stays intact from the committee version. The BRCA holds that non-custodial developers and infrastructure providers are not money transmitters for building or maintaining decentralized networks, a protection the industry has pushed to preserve.
Further amendment details
The Lummis-Grassley amendment keeps criminal liability for anyone who “knowingly” facilitates illicit transactions, and the Keep Your Coins Act preserves the right to self-custody.
The stablecoin-yield section holds the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise: a ban on interest paid on idle payment-stablecoin balances, with room for rewards tied to activity such as transactions or staking, as long as those rewards do not function as interest on a bank deposit.
A new section of the Clarity Act builds out law enforcement tools. It raises funding for state and local crypto investigations and blockchain analytics, sets up training for police and prosecutors, creates a “cyber center” against nation-state actors such as North Korea and Iran, and forms a public-private task force on fraud.
It also requires stablecoin issuers to comply with lawful orders to freeze, seize, burn, and reissue tokens.
The text carries bankruptcy protections that treat customer digital assets as property of the customer rather than part of a failed company’s estate, a rule meant to head off another FTX-style loss.
The 616-page draft came from Republicans, and it lacks Democratic support for the moment.
Senator Lummis thanked her “Democratic colleagues for their important contributions” and voiced a commitment to “reaching a deal in the coming days that will allow this legislation to become law.” Majority Leader John Thune plans a floor vote in the coming weeks.
The release caps a stretch of pressure to move the Clarity Act. The House passed its version in July 2025 on a 294-134 vote, and the measure has waited in the Senate since.
Crypto entrepreneurs Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss donated over $10 million after liquidating Bitcoin to American super PAC MAGA Inc., which supports President Donald Trump.
A Tuesday filing shows each twin — the founders of the public crypto exchange, Gemini — donated over $5 million each.
The donation comes about one month after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission asked a judge to vacate the agency’s $5 million penalty against Gemini.
The twins back in 2024 announced that they had donated 30.94 Bitcoin, valued at over $2 million at the time, to President Trump’s campaign, claiming it would “put an end to the Biden Administration’s war on crypto.”
During the Biden Administration, regulators cracked down hard on crypto exchanges — including Gemini — but since President Trump took office, a number of lawsuits have been scrapped.
MAGA Inc. has raised over $400 million in fresh cash ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The Winklevoss twins are Bitcoin OGs
The Winklevoss Twins — who claimed they played a part in the creation of Facebook — founded crypto exchange Gemini in 2014 after being early Bitcoin backers.
Crypto industry observers have long speculated that the twins are two of the biggest Bitcoin holders in the space.
The twins have long praised President Trump’s pro-Bitcoin and pro-business stance, claiming it’s crucial for the future of the crypto industry in the country.
Tyler in particular emphasized the need for a political shift to prevent further harm to the industry and to restore an environment conducive to innovation and economic growth.
“President Donald J. Trump is the pro-Bitcoin, pro-crypto, and pro-business choice,” he said back in 2024. “This is not even remotely open for debate. Anyone who tells you otherwise is severely misinformed, delusional, or not telling the truth.”
Back in May, Gemini shares jumped over 20% in after-hours trading after the Winklevoss twins announced a $100 million Bitcoin-funded investment in the company alongside Q1 earnings showing 42% year-over-year revenue growth.
The quarter’s results included a narrowed net loss of $109 million and a sharp rise in services and credit card revenue, though trading volumes had fallen from a year earlier following Bitcoin’s crash from its October peak.
The rally followed months of turmoil for Gemini, including layoffs, executive departures, shareholder lawsuits, and a stock price that had dropped more than 89% from its IPO high, partly offset by a CFTC derivatives license granted in April.
American investors have thrown fresh cash at Bitcoin exchange-traded funds over the past six days, helping the price of the top cryptocurrency to rise again.
Data from Farside Investors shows that close to $1 billion has been pumped into the funds since Tuesday last week.
The price of Bitcoin was recently trading at nearly $65,860, down slightly over the past 24 hours but up 1% over a seven-day period. The leading cryptocurrency touched a weekly high yesterday of $66,891.
Funds managed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Grayscale have taken in over $930 million in the six-day streak after weeks of lacklustre flows and sloppy price action.
Bitcoin is currently nearly 50% below its October record of $126,080 after a massive liquidation event, war in the Middle Eastern and inflation all weighed the cryptocurrency down.
Bitcoin upside potential?
Analysts remain wary of digital assets’ future price path as markets reckon with a re-escalation of the Trump administration’s war with Iran and inflation.
European asset management firm CoinShares last week said that while investors are back at putting fresh cash in Bitcoin via the exchange-traded products, other factors may hold digital asset markets from going higher.
“We have said for some time that Bitcoin has probably reached, or is close to, its floor,” James Butterfill, head of research at CoinShares, wrote. “But we see no significant upside potential from here.”
Current macroeconomic headwinds, such as the US bombing Iran and rising oil prices, could see inflation go up again. The price of Bitcoin has typically done well on news that inflation is coming down because investors expect interest rates to come down.
And another report by NYDIG last week claimed that the asset’s current slump is down to supply mechanics rather than risk sentiment.
The report revealed that Bitcoin’s year-to-date performance makes it the worst-performing asset — losing out against US treasuries, silver, and currencies like the Swiss Franc.
It added that if Bitcoin’s price action were to match other drawdowns — like the bear market of 2022 — a “potential cycle low near $38k-$39k” was possible.
Coinbase has settled its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission, closing a years-long fight that came to rest on a batch of text messages the agency admits it destroyed.
Under the terms, Grewal wrote, the SEC will pay $150,000 and repair its record-retention policies.
The story behind the settlement is what gives it weight. Coinbase filed FOIA requests in 2023 for records that might show how the SEC decided to treat crypto as securities, the same question at the center of the enforcement suit the agency brought against the company that June.
Rather than hand over the files, the SEC denied the requests, and the case dragged into court.
The SEC’s own inspector general found that close to a year of former Chair Gary Gensler’s text messages, from October 2022 to September 2023, had been wiped after the agency reset his phone before a backup was made.
That window covered the collapse of FTX and the agency’s hardest push against crypto exchanges. The watchdog found that 38% of the recovered texts touched agency business, including a May 2023 exchange on the timing of enforcement against trading platforms.
SEC should play by the same rules: Coinbase
Grewal built his case on a point that needs no legal training to feel. Under Gensler, the SEC had levied more than $1 billion in fines on financial firms for losing employee messages, and had said “everybody should play by the same rules.”
Yet it lost its own chair’s texts during the most consequential stretch in crypto’s short history. “The Gensler SEC destroyed documents they were required to preserve and produce,” Grewal wrote when the report landed. “We now have proof from the SEC’s own Inspector General.”
For Coinbase, the value was never the documents alone. The company had cast its transparency suits, including a challenge to the SEC and FDIC over pressure on crypto’s banking access, as proof that regulators leaned on the industry without clear rules. The SEC’s own case against Coinbase fell away in early 2025 under a new administration and a new chair.
The settlement doubles as a personal coda. Grewal, the lawyer who steered Coinbase through years of combat with the SEC, plans to leave the company at the end of July.
He closes this chapter with a small check, a promise of better filing habits, and a story the industry will carry for a long time: that the recordkeeping enforcer could not keep its own records.
Satsuma shareholders have voted to unwind the company’s bitcoin treasury and pull its shares off the London Stock Exchange.
At a general meeting on July 20, holders passed two special resolutions: one to return substantially all of Satsuma’s capital to shareholders, the other to cancel the company’s listing on the FCA’s Official List.
The capital return resolution carried 90.63% support, with 7,869,182,042 votes in favor against 813,703,719 opposed. The delisting resolution passed with near-identical margins, 90.59% in favor.
The board will now close out Satsuma’s trading operations and sell the company’s remaining bitcoin, roughly 668 BTC.
The stock had traded as Satsuma Technology PLC (LSE: SATS), one of the UK’s bitcoin treasury vehicles, second in size only to The Smarter Web Company.
A timetable set out in the June 24 shareholder circular governs the wind-down. The record time for entitlement to B Shares falls at 6 p.m. on August 3, the deadline for warrant holders to exercise their warrants if they want the resulting ordinary shares included in the capital return.
Once the total number of qualifying shares is fixed, Satsuma will petition the UK High Court to confirm the return of capital. A directions hearing is set for August 13, with a confirmation hearing to follow on September 8.
Under that schedule, the listing cancellation lands on September 14, and payments and CREST transfers go out by September 28.
Satsuma’s bitcoin struggles
The vote caps a run of trouble for a company that built its identity around holding bitcoin on a public balance sheet. Satsuma bought most of its coins at an average price above $113,000.
With bitcoin trading below $68,000 in July, the treasury sat on steep unrealized losses, and Satsuma’s shares fell more than 99% from their June 2025 peak near £14 to around 21 pence, a valuation below the worth of its own bitcoin holdings.
The company had already begun trimming its position under liquidity pressure. In December 2025, the company sold 579 of its 1,199 bitcoin for roughly £40 million, proceeds it used to retire £78 million in convertible loan notes that matured on December 31. That sale left the company with 620 BTC and about £90 million in cash.
By April, Pantera Capital, which held a 6% to 7% stake, was publicly pushing Satsuma’s board to sell its remaining bitcoin and hand the cash back to shareholders rather than persist as a listed treasury company.
That pressure, combined with a shareholder requisition from holders representing more than 20% of Satsuma’s issued capital, forced Wednesday’s vote.
The board itself split on the outcome. Four of six directors recommended shareholders reject the wind-down, arguing it would dismantle a listed bitcoin vehicle and close off the company’s existing strategy. Two directors backed the proposal, citing shareholder demand and the execution risk of continuing as a going concern.
Satsuma’s exit adds to a wave of distress among smaller bitcoin treasury companies as coin prices sit well below the levels at which many of them accumulated their holdings, leaving boards to choose between raising fresh capital or returning what remains to shareholders.
Tech entrepreneur Jack Dorsey has announced a new group chat platform aimed at reducing teams’ reliance on platforms like Slack, in the Bitcoin maxi’s latest push for decentralization.
The Block co-founder wrote Tuesday on X that the new app, named Buzz, was “for teams of people and agents of all sizes” and “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.”
Described as “A new native workspace for human and agent teams” on its website, Buzz users can “chat with teammates and specialized agents in one shared space, then move straight into planning, project management, coding, and PRs.”
A statement from parent company Block said that the new app was built on decentralized social networking Nostr protocol.
“The interface will feel familiar to anyone who’s used a modern team communication tool,” Block added.
“Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, said.
“The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”
Decentralize everything
Dorsey, whose firm Block owns companies Square and Cash App, has long been pushing for decentralized solutions: primarily with Bitcoin.
The billionaire founder of Twitter left the social media company to focus his efforts on payments and Bitcoin adoption in 2021, saying he wants the cryptocurrency to be the global currency and “everyday money.”
He has also described Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper as “poetry.”
Cash App allows users to send and receive and buy and sell Bitcoin and point-of-sale terminals Square accept the orange coin via the Lightning Network.
Block also last year debuted a Bitcoin mining rig with swappable parts, with the idea that miners could cut costs on repairing and replacing the devices.
Crypto giant Coinbase is making its “everything exchange” push in Canada.
Eric Richmond, country director and CEO of Coinbase Canada, told BNN Bloomberg in a Tuesday interview that the move would allow Canadians to not only buy crypto but also trade tokenized stocks and put money on prediction markets.
“Coinbase believes we have a new technology here that can really help with that, and that’s blockchain and the technology that underpins crypto today,” Richmond said in the interview. “How do we create that one place for Canadians to have their entire financial experience in one app that’s underpinned by this technology that makes things frictionless, seamless, and 24/7?”
He added: “I think people are starting to realize the fact that banks close at 4 p.m., or the markets close at 4 p.m., or that wires can take days to settle, or that access for high-net-worth individuals to certain products are gated for just those high-net-worth individuals.”
Coinbase in the U.S. allows Americans to place bets and trade stocks. The company started as a place allowing people to buy and sell Bitcoin but has since offered hundreds of digital coins.
Richmond added that the company was working with Canadian regulators to make the launch.
Tokenized stocks are versions of equities that trade on the technology underpinning Bitcoin: the blockchain. Proponents like Coinbase argue that by tokenizing everything, traders will be able to make transactions around the clock, 24-7.
A number of crypto exchanges are also making the push to branch out from crypto: Kraken, for example, has also started allowing users to trade stocks and has announced plans for a prediction market platform.
Coinbase’s big moves
Coinbase has made some bigger moves in recent years, other than just working as a crypto exchange.
America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, last year signed a deal with the company to allow customers to directly link their bank accounts to the platform.
Coinbase also provides custody services — including to Wall Street giants like BlackRock — and has a contract with the US government to hold onto seized crypto.
The company also in April received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. for a national trust banking charter, essentially paving the way for it to serve as a crypto custodian on a federal basis, managing assets for larger entities.
The company has clashed with banking executives recently over stablecoin rewards: the exchange wants its yield-bearing stablecoin products to continue, which in turn could prove to be a bigger boon in the long-run for the business.
The White House is pushing Senate Democrats to accept a conflict-of-interest agreement that President Donald Trump worked out with Republicans, a move that negotiators hope will settle the last major dispute in the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.
A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, toldCoinDesk that Trump “has agreed to the most comprehensive and wide-ranging ethics provision in history.”
No details have emerged on what crypto restrictions Trump has consented to, and Democrats have been kept out of the loop on the provision.
The ethics section would restrict senior government officials from personal business ties to the crypto industry, including Trump, whose family holdings have generated more than $2 billion in new wealth since he returned to office, according to Reuters. Release of the final draft has stalled for several days as negotiators work through the language.
Democratic lawmakers have not received a briefing on the concession, though Republicans and the crypto industry have begun a sales campaign that casts Democrats as the obstacle.
“If Senate Democrats block this historic legislation after the administration has bent over backward to accommodate their concerns, stakeholders should make no mistake: It is the Democrats who are blocking this legislation because they were never serious about a legislative outcome,” the White House official said.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has added his voice to the push, saying that lawmakers stood at the “1-yard line” on the Clarity Act and urging Congress to pass the bill before the recess.
Clarity Act updates coming out of the White House
Democratic negotiators such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks have not seen details of the agreement with Trump, who met with Republican senators at the White House last week.
Many of the Democrats have drawn a line that the ethics provision needs to be strong. Trump has pressed the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, and his disclosure that he made more than $1 billion from crypto in 2025 has given critics fresh ammunition.
Both said in May they would not back the final passage without an ethics provision. During the committee markup, an amendment from Senator Chris Van Hollen to bar the president, vice president and members of Congress from crypto business ties failed 11-13.
The industry expects full circulation of the legislative text this week, according to CoinDesk.
The Senate has fewer than three weeks to finish the bill and clear a floor vote before Majority Leader John Thune’s August 7 deadline, when lawmakers break for their reelection campaigns and enter a narrow stretch to finish the bill.
Hyperscale Data, Inc. has announced that it’s upped its Bitcoin holdings to over 1,000 digital coins.
The New York Stock Exchange-listed company said Tuesday that it had over 1,087.4527 BTC as of Sunday — or $72.4 million based on today’s prices.
The holdings are split across the company’s wholly owned subsidiaries, Sentinum, Inc. and Ault Capital Group, Inc. (ACG). During the week ended July 19, ACG added roughly 51.5 bitcoin through open-market purchases.
The latest disclosure marks a significant acceleration in Hyperscale Data’s accumulation strategy. The AI data center company held just 627.9 BTC in late March 2026 — meaning it has nearly doubled its position, adding about 460 BTC in under four months.
The buildout is part of the company’s goal of establishing a $100 million digital asset treasury and reaching full parity between its Bitcoin holdings and market capitalization. With a market cap of roughly $63 million, that threshold has now been crossed — the company’s bitcoin alone is worth more than the company itself, before counting cash or its operating businesses.
Executive Chairman Milton “Todd” Ault III leaned into that disconnect, stating, “We now hold more than $70 million in Bitcoin.” He argued the market is assigning zero value to the company’s cash, its Michigan data center, and its portfolio of operating businesses, and said Hyperscale will keep executing while highlighting the widening gap between its market capitalization and underlying value.
At the time of writing, GPUS is trading near $0.13 a share.
Hyperscale is following the Bitcoin treasury strategy playbook
Strategy Inc. (MSTR) has become the flagship case study in the evolution of Bitcoin treasury strategies in the corporate world.
Under the leadership of Michael Saylor, Strategy shifted from a traditional software business to buying Bitcoin and allowing investors to get exposure to the asset via its shares which trade on the Nasdaq.
This model has inspired other corporations like Hyperscale Data to add the leading cryptocurrency to their treasuries — though Hyperscale’s case is unusual in that its holdings now exceed its entire market cap, a situation more commonly seen in deeply discounted treasury plays.
Senator Kevin Cramer said the Senate has moved close to a deal on the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill, with a fresh set of amendments on ethics and enforcement before Democrats for review.
The North Dakota Republican, a member of the Senate Banking Committee, told Fox Business on Tuesday that the bill grows “clearer” as “each issue gets dealt with,” and that “we’re almost there.” He said the largest holdup is Democrats reading the new amendments, “some of them relevant to the ethics piece.”
The central compromise Cramer described concerns who enforces the law. He said there appears to be “some agreement that the Department of Justice would be the prevailing enforcer,” a structure he backed as the source of uniform rules. Democrats, he said, had preferred a role for state attorneys general, an approach he argued would create “too disparate a situation” for the clarity the industry seeks.
Ethics fight over President Trump
That enforcement question sits at the heart of a months-long ethics fight over President Trump’s crypto ventures.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, who chairs the Banking Committee’s digital assets subcommittee, had floated language that would let state attorneys general sue exchanges that list tokens issued by public officials, a provision aimed at holdings tied to the president and his family.
Democrats on the committee have pressed for enforceable conflict-of-interest rules, and an amendment to bar the president, vice president, and members of Congress from crypto business ties failed on a party-line vote during the committee markup.
Trump has met with senators over the ethics dispute as the White House and negotiators work toward terms. The shift Cramer outlined would route that enforcement to federal prosecutors rather than to fifty separate state offices, a change that narrows the paths available to challenge a listed token but centralizes the decision to act in the Justice Department.
Cramer said the Senate has “a couple more weeks” before the August recess, and echoed Lummis in the push for passage before the break.
“We have to get this done,” he said about the Clarity Act.
Lummis, in an interview last week, said the bill was “ready” and that it was “very important” to move it across the finish line before the recess, so that markets could see “the stability that will be provided to them if they remain on shore in the United States.”
Cramer flagged one more sticking point beyond enforcement: the definition of securities intermediaries. “The industry doesn’t like that,” he said, and noted a preference for a definition built around decentralization. He cast the remaining gaps as matters of “small details.”
Lots of clarity about the Clarity Act
The Clarity Act would split oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, set disclosure rules for certain tokens, and extend anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules to crypto exchanges. The House passed its version a year ago, and the measure has waited in the Senate since.
The timeline is tight. Majority Leader John Thune has aimed to bring the bill to the floor before the work period ends in early August, and House members have urged the Senate to act within the window.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen: Clarity Act on ‘1-yard line’
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added his voice to the push, telling Bloomberg that lawmakers stood at the “1-yard line” on the Clarity Act and urging Congress to pass the bill before the recess.
The bill competes for floor time with a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown at the end of September and a reconciliation package, priorities Cramer ranked ahead of other items in the same interview. President Trump has pressed the chamber to pass the crypto measure, a message he has paired with warnings about competition from China.
For all the optimism, Cramer stopped short of a firm date. “I don’t know that we get to it this week,” he said, a caveat that leaves the bill’s fate to the narrow stretch of Senate days before lawmakers leave Washington.
Bitcoin’s price jumped Tuesday to its highest in over one month, bringing crypto stocks like Bitcoin treasury’s Strategy with it.
The Bitcoin price was recently priced at $66,886, up nearly 3% in 24 hours. Over the past seven days, the leading cryptocurrency has risen by close to 6%.
Its rise comes as stocks also trade higher — despite tensions in the Middle East flaring up again.
Nasdaq-listed Strategy (MSTR), formerly MicroStrategy, also jumped above $100 per share on Tuesday.
The price jump comes even as the Bitcoin juggernaut on Monday revealed it did not make its usual crypto buy, instead reporting the sale of a $225 million in MSTR shares, which it used for its dollar reserve.
Strategy stock plunged with the price of Bitcoin last year, and is currently well below its November 2024 peak of $473.83.
The software company, which started buying Bitcoin in 2020 as an inflation hedge, holds at 843,775 BTC, a position worth around $56.2 billion at current prices.
Other Nasdaq-listed crypto stocks, including America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase (COIN) and Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA), also surged on Tuesday. COIN at the time of writing was up 11% and MARA was trading over 6% higher.
Middle East flare up
Bitcoin’s price has taken a hit so far in 2026, and is currently down nearly 24% year-to-date. Since the leading crypto notched a new record of $126,080 in October, it has shed close to 50% of its value.
The asset first got hit hard in October when the biggest crash in the history of the industry liquidated more than $19 billion in crypto bets.
Then, crypto markets got hit harder after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February, driving oil prices higher and deepening uncertainty around global inflation.
Investors are now not expecting the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates anytime soon. More inflation comes less chance of interest rate cuts, which restricts the liquidity that Bitcoin needs to surge.
Iran and the U.S. continue to fight, ending a truce, but Bitcoin seems immune to the latest flare up.
As of July 20–21, the U.S. carried out its 10th straight night of strikes on Iranian military targets, with Trump vowing retaliation for three American service members killed and the Pentagon reporting nearly 100 U.S. troops injured over two weeks.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News on Tuesday that the United States froze a crypto wallet linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worth $130 million, part of a campaign to track the assets of Iran’s supreme leader around the world.
“We are tracking these accounts all over the world,” Bessent said, in remarks that framed the Treasury work as one prong of an “economic fury” push against Tehran alongside a blockade. “We froze a crypto wallet linked to the IRGC the other day.”
He said investigators had “found the money man for the Ayatollah” and were tracing the holdings of Ali Khamenei, including properties he valued at more than $100 million. Bessent said the Treasury hopes to publish the addresses of those properties. He cast the seizures as a transfer of value to the American people and a squeeze on the regime.
Iran’s economy in ‘freefall’
Bessent also described a collapse in Iran’s economy. He said the rial sits at an all-time low against the dollar and called it in “freefall,” with an inflation rate he put “upwards of 180%.” His account tracks the rial slide that has pushed some Iranians toward bitcoin.
The comments extend a Treasury campaign that has run through the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States. The department has sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange and said the U.S. has seized $1 billion of Iran’s crypto. Blockchain analysts have tied billions in on-chain flows to IRGC-linked wallets, with such wallets receiving more than $3 billion in 2025, a rise from over $2 billion the year before.
In a separate move, the stablecoin issuer Tether froze $344 million in USDT across two blockchain addresses tied to the IRGC, one of the largest single actions in the sequence.
Bitcoin’s design draws both sides of the fight. It settles without a correspondent bank or a reserve-currency issuer, a trait that lets Iran monetize oil access outside the dollar system and lets Treasury trace and freeze value on a public ledger.
The conflict has reshaped how crypto figures into the region. Since U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began, bitcoin use inside the country has surged as residents moved value out of the banking system.
Treasury has not published documentation of the $130 million wallet freeze or the property addresses Bessent referenced. The inflation and currency figures came from his remarks rather than from Iranian data.
Russia’s State Duma passed a law on Tuesday that regulates the circulation of crypto and digital rights for the first time, a framework that sets rules for crypto exchanges, digital depositories, and investors while it opens a state-supervised channel for cross-border trade.
Lawmakers cleared bill No. 1194918-8, “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” in its second and third readings, the final stage in the chamber, according to semi-official Russian news agency Tass.
The measure heads to the Federation Council and to President Vladimir Putin for a signature, a process expected to take two more weeks before the law takes effect. It caps a sweeping regulatory push that has moved through parliament across the year.
Legalization or taxation?
The law does not turn bitcoin into money a Russian can spend at the store. The ruble stays the sole lawful currency for goods and services inside Russia, the ban on crypto payments holds, and a bar on advertising that promotes such use holds with it.
What the law does is grant crypto a legal identity and a set of gates. It recognizes digital assets as property, licenses the firms that handle them, lets investors buy within set limits, and clears crypto for use in foreign trade.
In plain terms, Russia is not freeing crypto for daily life; it is bringing crypto inside the state’s fence, where the government can watch it, tax it, and steer it toward the uses it wants.
Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the Duma Committee on Financial Markets, said the bill was “aimed at creating legal conditions for the functioning of cryptocurrencies in our country,” and that lawmakers had “maximally” weighed industry feedback.
From September 1, 2026, the Bank of Russia will license five categories of participant — exchanges, brokers, management companies, depositories, and exchangers — the spine of the new market.
Firms in a special registry may run exchange activity, with a grace period to July 1, 2027, before that requirement takes hold. Such firms must carry minimum capital of 15 million rubles, some $190,000, and must join a self-regulatory body.
The law defines exchange activity as the systematic purchase and sale of cryptocurrency for one’s own account outside organized trading, with “systematic” set at two or more deals in a month above 3.5 million rubles.
JUST IN: Russia passes law that "regulates the circulation of digital currencies and digital rights in Russia for the first time," TASS reports pic.twitter.com/nmTsKUeOTA
The commercial heart of the law sits in the cross-border carve-out. The framework legalizes what gray-market networks did in the shadows: settlement of foreign trade in crypto, outside the dollar-and-euro banking system that Western sanctions target. It hands the practice the Bank of Russia’s stamp.
The same function ran through venues such as Garantex, which U.S. law enforcement shut down in March 2025, and through the ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin, a token that has moved tens of billions in sanctions-linked flows and that the U.K. has named in a sanctions round.
The turn is a sharp one. In January 2022, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, the Bank of Russia proposed an outright ban on crypto transactions and mining, and cast digital assets as a threat to financial stability.
That stance held for as long as it took Western governments to cut Russian banks from SWIFT, a move that made trade in dollars and euros a harder task. Four years of infighting followed between a finance ministry that wanted crypto legal and a central bank that wanted it banned.
Putin signed an experimental law in August 2024 that permitted mining and international crypto payments; Tuesday’s bill is the permanent frame that replaces the trial.
The law’s rules for investors and coins
For investors, the law splits the market in two. Non-qualified retail buyers may purchase up to 300,000 rubles of cryptocurrency, near $3,800, through a single licensed intermediary each year, and may send up to 100,000 rubles abroad.
Qualified investors face higher ceilings — up to 3 million rubles for purchases and 1 million rubles for foreign transfers. Both groups must pass a risk-awareness test, and qualified status can rest in part on prior crypto experience. Tax treatment is set to track the rules for securities, with rates to firm up as implementing regulations arrive. The tiered design follows earlier steps that opened bitcoin access to retail buyers.
The law leans on monitoring rather than disclosure of every wallet. Drafters dropped an earlier plan to require holders to reveal individual wallet addresses; reporting will center on transaction volumes and account balances.
Large transfers to foreign or third-party accounts face a 48-hour hold, a window for authorities to review funds before they clear.
Assets that clear strict thresholds may trade on organized venues — an average market cap above 5 trillion rubles over two years and average daily volume above 1 trillion rubles — limits expected to confine early trading to bitcoin and ether, with solana a possible third. Privacy coins that hide transaction data stay barred.
The main provisions take effect on September 1, 2026, with a transition period for existing operators that runs to March 1, 2027.
Galaxy Digital launched a Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative today, a program that commits up to $5 million in developer grants, a research effort, and a new advisory council to harden the network against the arrival of powerful quantum computers.
The Nasdaq-listed firm framed the multi-pillar effort as an attempt to close a gap between two worlds moving at different speeds.
“There’s a gap between the quantum computing world, which is moving fast, and the Bitcoin development world, which is just beginning to engage with post-quantum cryptography in earnest,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy, whose team has tracked the threat for Wall Street and cast it as a long-term engineering problem rather than a crisis.
Bitcoin’s security rests on elliptic curve cryptography, a scheme that a machine running Shor’s algorithm could break by deriving a private key from an exposed public key.
An attacker with such a tool could forge a signature and drain a wallet, with nothing on-chain to flag the theft. No such computer exists today, yet the estimated timeline for one keeps compressing, a trend the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned narrows the window for the network to upgrade.
Galaxy’s multi-pillar effort to prepare for quantum
The grant program forms the first pillar. Galaxy said it would fund work on quantum-resistant transaction proposals, the integration of post-quantum signature schemes, tooling for wallet and custodian migration, and formal security audits of proposed code.
Grants will be judged one at a time and paid on a milestone basis, and the firm expects to open applications without delay through the address quantum@galaxy.com.
A research and publishing arm forms the second pillar, with Galaxy Research set to publish analysis of the threat and the developer response for investors, policymakers, and the technical community.
The third pillar is a Quantum Advisory Council that will guide the research and weigh grant proposals. Its first members are Barry Sanders, professor and scientific director of Quantum City at the University of Calgary; Damien Bérubé, an MIT Sea Grant Knauss Fellow; and Eran Tromer, a professor of computer science at Boston University.
“As leaders in the digital assets space, we believe it’s important that we help be part of the solution to any potential threat quantum computing poses to Bitcoin,” said Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy, a figure known for bold price calls on bitcoin. Sanders said quantum timelines “continue to compress” and that bitcoin should be no exception to the preparation underway across governments and industries.
Old and reused addresses face the sharpest risk, since their public keys sit exposed on the ledger. An estimated 1.7 million BTC rest in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses, a stash with keys on permanent display.
Defenses under review center on migration to quantum-resistant address types and new signature schemes, an approach embodied in BIP-360, a proposal from developer Hunter Beast that removes public-key exposure from standard transactions.
That proposal merged into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository this year, and BTQ Technologies deployed a working implementation on a quantum testnet.
Bitcoin’s decentralized governance turns such changes into a slow process of design, review, testing, and deployment that can span years. Some observers cast that structure as the true obstacle, a governance challenge as much as a cryptographic one, and the pool of developers on the problem stays small next to its scale.
Quantum tech is surging
The launch lands in an active warning cycle. Galaxy Research has held that the risk is real yet the countermeasures are advancing, and President Trump signed executive orders that advance U.S. quantum work and set a 2031 federal deadline for post-quantum defense. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024.
Galaxy said it welcomes co-funders and other stakeholders, and acknowledged that peers may pledge their own funds toward the same goal. The firm cast that prospect as a benefit rather than a rivalry, with an open invitation to institutions and developers who want to join.
Bitcoin treasury Twenty One Capital has named Raphael Zagury as its chief executive officer, a leadership change that arrives seven months after the firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Zagury succeeds founder Jack Mallers, who is stepping down to focus on his Bitcoin payments company, Strike.
Speaking on the transition, Mallers said, “I’m grateful to everyone at XXI and everyone who believed in what we built,” said Jack Mallers. “Serving Bitcoiners has always been the mission, and that doesn’t change. Strike is where I carry it forward.”
Austin, Texas-based Twenty One, which trades under the ticker “XXI” on the NYSE, said it would focus on becoming an institutional-grade operating company that’s judged on cash flow generation and capital allocation discipline, not just its Bitcoin holdings.
It added that it would build and acquire high-quality operating businesses that “leverage Twenty One’s balance sheet while maintaining disciplined capital allocation at the parent company and create a long-term ownership model inspired by Berkshire Hathaway.”
“My job is to build the operating company around [Twenty One], with the discipline, governance, and executional rigor of an institution,” Zagury said in a statement. “I believe our business will perform best when we also focus on the cash flow we generate and the rigor with which we allocate capital, not only by the Bitcoin we hold.”
Mallers leaves XXI
The firm, the product of a joint effort by Tether, Bitfinex, Cantor Fitzgerald, and SoftBank, is the second biggest public Bitcoin treasury, according to Bitcointreasuries.net, with a total of 43,514 coins — or $2.8 billion in Bitcoin at today’s prices.
It debuted last year through a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners, a blank check company affiliated with financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
“XXI was built by Bitcoiners, for Bitcoiners. During my role as CEO, we defined a vision for a Bitcoin-native financial enterprise. As I focus my efforts fully at Strike, I look forward to watching the next phase of growth at XXI,” Mallers said.
The companies behind it are a mix of traditional finance giants and crypto companies: Tether is the biggest issuer of stablecoins and Bitfinex is a crypto exchange. SoftBank is a Japanese multinational investment holding company and Cantor Fitzgerald is a Wall Street firm previously headed up by U.S. President Donald Trump ally and Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick.
Zagury founded and leads the team behind Elektron Energy, a large-scale Bitcoin mining and infrastructure business.
Before that, he held roles as a managing director at Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch, and as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. He also co-founded OpenCo, at one point among Brazil’s largest fintech lenders.
The change at the top comes with a shift in deal strategy. In April, Twenty One had floated a plan to consolidate the firm, Strike, and Elektron Energy into a single Bitcoin-native platform spanning financial services, mining infrastructure, capital markets, and treasury. According to Bloomberg reporting, that deal has been scrapped. Twenty One confirmed that Strike will now remain a standalone business and is out of the running for a merger.
Bitcoin miner Hut 8’s shares rose Monday after the Toronto Stock Exchange- and Nasdaq-listed firm said it had signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion for its AI data center.
Hut 8 shares peaked as high as $106 a pop before dropping to around $101. They closed Monday up over 10%.
The deal will see the Toronto-based firm’s Beacon Point campus in Texas data center cover 352 megawatts of IT capacity. The tenant using the data center’s will have its capacity doubled to 704 MW.
Hut 8 added that the campus has a base-term contract value of $19.6 billion over 15 years, rising to as much as $50.2 billion if renewal options are exercised.
Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, said: “The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it. Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double its footprint at the site, the strongest validation an asset can receive.”
Hut 8 last year signed a deal with American Data Centers Inc., a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., to contribute its Bitcoin mining equipment and help debut their American Bitcoin mining firm.
AI pivot
Hut 8 is one of a number of top publicly listed miners that have started directing resources to providing the infrastructure for high-powered computing.
The company in December secured a Google-backed partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build up to 2.3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in the U.S.
JUST IN: #Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 just announced it partnered with Google for financial backing on a 15-year lease.
A number of Bitcoin miners have already gone all-in on the industry as minting the biggest digital coin by market cap becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges.
As the price Bitcoin has dipped, it has become harder for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet.
Nasdaq-listed Bitfarms last year announced that it would wind down mining operations to focus on high-performance computing.
Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.
Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.
Both the crypto mining and HPC industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers — but the move isn’t always easy: AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin Japan, a subsidiary of Asia’s answer to Strategy, Metaplanet, has announced it entered into a financing agreement to start buying the leading cryptocurrency for its treasury.
The Tokyo-based, publicly-listed company said Thursday that it had approved a convertible bond deal with EVO Fund to raise 9.66 billion yen ($59.5 million). The deal will see the company spend over 662 million yen — or over $4 million — on its first Bitcoin transaction.
Bitcoin Japan works on Bitcoin-related media, data platforms and events to promote the understanding of the leading cryptocurrency in Japan and “contribute to the development of its ecosystem globally,” according to its website.
Its parent company, Metaplanet, is a publicly-traded company following in the footsteps of Nasdaq-listed Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — by buying and holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet. It first started buying the asset in 2024.
Metaplanet is one of the biggest Bitcoin treasuries in the world, with 43,000 digital coins worth over $2.8 billion in its coffers. Its stock is currently down over 50% year-to-date.
JUST IN: Japan Public company Bitcoin Japan Corporation has raised $60 million through convertible bonds, allocating $4.08 million to make its first buy for their BTC treasury
Bitcoin Japan’s announcement comes as treasury companies see their stock slide. Last year, the business model of buying and holding Bitcoin and other digital assets with spare cash suffered with a plunge in crypto prices.
Strategy, the biggest and oldest Bitcoin treasury, has seen its Nasdaq-listed stock nosedive by nearly 80% over the past year.
Little known publicly traded companies in 2025 rushed to announce they were buying digital assets in a hope to boost their stock prices. The strategy worked but since the market downturn, a number of firms in the space have had to sell a portion of their holdings as the price of Bitcoin has slumped.
But companies are still accumulating during the downturn — and firms like Bitcoin Japan are seeing the current market price of the leading asset as an opportunity to start a crypto treasury.
Regulatory push
While Japan has long been a hub for crypto enthusiasts — former major Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was based in Tokyo before a 2014 hack and its subsequent closure — lawmakers are now working on regulating the asset class.
Japan’s parliament last week passed a law amendment to designate cryptocurrency assets as “financial assets,” making the assets subject to stricter regulations, eventually paving the way for products like Bitcoin exchange-traded funds to debut in the Asian nation.
The regulation is likely to come into effect within a year, Reuters reported, citing NHK news.
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