The National Fraternal Order of Police became the latest organization to throw its support behind the long-awaited Clarity Act.
In a statement Friday, specifically addressed to Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Timothy Eugene Scott, the fraternal organization wrote that it approved of the latest bill. The FOP works to improve the working conditions of law enforcement officers.
The newest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto, something opposition lawmakers previously had issue with. On Wednesday, Senator Warren, a long-time crypto critic, said that the latest bill would allow President Donald Trump to make money from crypto, as well as benefit criminals.
JUST IN: The world's largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers now officially endorses the passage of the Clarity Act: pic.twitter.com/N10g5jIZ0M
“The latest version of the ‘Clarity Act’ includes several provisions that improve the ability of State and local law enforcement to protect consumers, investigate financial crimes, and coordinate with their Federal partners,” the letter read.
“The revised bill establishes safeguards aimed at addressing fraud and victimization involving digital asset kiosks and related activity while also providing for anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance obligations across the digital asset ecosystem.”
U.S. lawmakers are currently mulling over the latest draft of the Clarity Act — a crypto market structure bill aims to set in stone digital asset regulation.
More support for the bill
Top crypto advocacy groups the Crypto Council for Innovation, Blockchain Association, and the Digital Chamber also threw their support behind the latest draft of the Clarity Act on Friday.
The trade associations said that passing the bill is necessary to establish the “first comprehensive federal consumer protection framework for digital asset markets” as more Americans begin to use and invest in crypto.
The Clarity Act, which Republicans passed last year, has been in a deadlock mainly because banking chiefs raised concerns over stablecoins and the yield they would potentially pay customers.
America’s biggest crypto exchange, Coinbase, pulled support for the bill in January after clashing with banking chiefs who said that earning yield on stablecoins should be banned.
U.S. banks have said they could lose customers if crypto exchanges offer more attractive products for their deposit base.
A new bill has been circulating this week and it is expected it will head to floor vote.
The latest draft bans officials and their families from issuing or promoting crypto — a sore point for Democratic politicians who have argued that President Donald Trump’s family has unfairly benefited from crypto ventures.
President Trump campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space but his digital asset ventures have raised eyebrows among Washington lawmakers who think the Trump family has unfairly profited from crypto businesses.
For three sessions crypto looked through the war; oil topping $100 sent the bill, BTC lost the $65,000 floor, and gold — the one asset that had been pricing the war — got sold too.
Generated using Nano Banana 2
The Verdict
BTC — Short-term (3–5 months): BTC at $64,775 (−1.98%) did the one thing yesterday’s edition said would mark the breakout a failure: it closed back below $65,000. For two sessions that level was the floor settled ETF money defended without a headline. Today the headline that broke it came from the oil pit, not the crypto tape — Brent topped $100 a barrel for the first time since May#1 and risk assets finally stopped looking through the war. The map inverts from yesterday: $65K is now the ceiling the move has to reclaim, $62K is the line that confirms a lower low, and a bounce that fails at $65K tells you the break is real. This is not a crash — under 2% down — but it is the failed break the levels were built to catch.
BTC — Long-term (1–3 years): The multi-year case is unmoved by a risk-off session driven by a shipping lane. Supply is fixed at twenty-one million coins, issuance halves on schedule, and the tradable float keeps shrinking as long-term holders sit still. You are accumulating a verifiable, tightening supply from a market whose sentiment gauge still reads Fear — the accumulation half of the cycle, not the distribution half. A war premium that pushes price down is the kind of discount this horizon is supposed to buy, not flinch at.
ETH — Short-term: ETH at $1,885.29 (−3.02%) gave back the $1,900 line it had defended all week and now sits with only the $1,800 weekly-close shelf beneath it. That shelf was always the real test; this session made it the only test. Hold $1,800 into the weekly close and the death-cross repair survives a genuine risk-off; lose it and the repair was a summer-liquidity mirage. ETH leading on green days and trailing on red ones is normal beta — the tell will be whether the $1,800 bid shows up.
ETH — Long-term: Ethereum remains the settlement layer regulated finance reaches for when it puts assets on-chain — stablecoin float, tokenized funds, staking collateral. Franklin Templeton this week called agentic AI paying for things autonomously crypto’s “killer use case”#2, and those rails settle where the plumbing already is. That demand compounds on usage, not price, and keeps accruing whether ETH trades at $1,885 or $4,000. At current levels you are buying the settlement layer in the lower third of its multi-year range.
ADA — Short-term: ADA at $0.1697 (−4.40%) was the worst of the majors and finally round-tripped the Van Rossem fork gain that had impressively held past 48 hours. The lesson is the one Cardano keeps teaching: upgrade rallies fade when the broader tape turns, because the buyers were positioning, not using. The fork did not fail — the risk-off did what risk-off does to the highest-beta name in the room. Watch transaction counts and fee revenue, not the candle, for whether anything structural changed.
ADA — Long-term: Over a multi-year horizon ADA remains a wager on the gap between what the network processes and what its roughly $6.3 billion market cap implies. Pull the on-chain numbers yourself — daily transactions, fee revenue, stablecoin float, active addresses — and set them against the cap. A −4.4% day on a war headline tells you nothing about that gap; only the usage data does. Decide whether the market is pricing execution risk or simply not watching, and size accordingly.
SOL / BNB / XRP: The tail woke up on the wrong side. SOL at $75.98 (−3.18%), XRP at $1.11 (−3.66%) and BNB at $566.18 (−1.07%) all fell, with BNB the relative haven. Yesterday’s sleepy, non-rotating tape resolved downward together — which is what correlation looks like when a macro shock hits and everything trades as one risk asset again. No rotation, just a uniform step lower.
Why The Market Is Here
The war the market ignored for three sessions finally sent the bill. Yesterday’s edition flagged the exact fault line: “if the barrel keeps climbing, the equity short squeeze and the oil price stop being reconcilable.” They stopped. The Houthis claimed strikes on two Saudi Arabian tankers in the Red Sea as the US launched more Iran strikes#3, Brent jumped +6.54% to $100.22 #1, and this time equities and crypto broke with it instead of past it — the Nasdaq fell −2.78% and the S&P 500 −1.36%. The reconciliation the digest has been waiting three days for arrived in a single session.
Two chokepoints, not one, are now effectively closed. The reason this oil move is different: it is not a premium, it is a physical supply constriction. Insurance rates through the Strait of Hormuz have hit four times their five-year average as both Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb shut down#4. With oil at $100 for the first time since May#5 and peace talks collapsed#6, the barrel is no longer trading a headline risk — it is trading the fact that ships cannot get through. That feeds straight into inflation math, and into a Fed that markets keep insisting is leaning hawkish, a reading that still sits awkwardly against a cut-leaning Warsh. Higher oil does not force a hawkish Fed; it forces a Fed that has to explain why it is still cutting into a supply shock.
The strangest tell: gold got sold too. Gold fell −2.33% to $4,050 — the same asset that spent all week as the lone holdout pricing the war. Oil spikes, equities fall, and gold drops? That is not a peace signal. It is a liquidity scramble: when the dollar bids hard in a genuine risk-off — DXY +0.34% to 101.48 — traders sell what they can, including winners, to raise cash and meet margin. Gold falling alongside stocks is the fingerprint of forced deleveraging, not a change in the war story. Watch whether it is a one-day scramble or the start of something breaking.
Crypto had its own structural jolt. Independent of the macro, a piece of the old market died: BitMEX announced it will shut down on September 23, and its BMEX token crashed roughly 90%#7. The exchange Arthur Hayes co-founded pioneered Bitcoin perpetual futures; its exit removes a leverage venue and closes a twelve-year chapter. It did not move the majors, but it is a reminder that the derivatives plumbing under this market is consolidating, not expanding.
Fear ticked down, not off a cliff. The Fear & Greed Index slipped from 33 to 31 — still Fear, not Extreme Fear#8. A two-point drop on a −2% BTC day and a −2.78% Nasdaq day is a measured reaction, not a panic. The crowd that spent the week making peace with the breakout did not stampede when it broke — which is either resilience or complacency, and the next two sessions will say which.
Institutional Pulse
The flow story that held the floor yesterday is now the flow story that couldn’t. A sixth-day ETF bid and a record Binance outflow defended $65K on Wednesday; on Thursday a macro shock overwhelmed it. That does not mean the settled money left — it means a $100 oil print is a bigger force than a billion-dollar inflow week, and both can be true. The question for the next session is whether ETF flows keep coming through the break, which is what real accumulation looks like, or whether they pause and let the tape find a lower level first.
The treasury complex, by contrast, is still the side that breaks under pressure. Smarter Web sold 178 bitcoin at $65,762 to repay an $11.7 million convertible early#12, the latest coin-holding vehicle forced to sell into the market rather than through it. As ever, the size that moves a level like $65K rarely prints on the exchange tape you watch — blocks route through OTC desks and settle late. The verifiable signal remains the ETF number; watch whether it stays green through the break.
Calendar Watch
The driver this session was unscheduled — a tanker attack, not a data release — and that is the point worth diarizing. With no ceasefire framework and no scheduled off-ramp for the war, the market’s next catalyst is as likely to be a headline at 3 a.m. as a print at 8:30. The one calendar item that now matters more than it did a week ago is the oil feed-through into the next inflation reading: a sustained Brent hold above $100 turns up in CPI with a lag, and that is the number that will force the Fed to reconcile a cut-leaning stance with a supply shock. Position for headline risk, not calendar risk.
Signals Worth Watching
$65K broke; $62K is the line now. The two-day floor is a ceiling until reclaimed. A bounce that fails at $65K confirms the failed break; a daily close below $62K confirms a lower low and opens the next leg down. Reclaiming $65K on a close is the only thing that repairs the breakout — until then, the burden of proof flipped to the bulls.
ETH’s $1,800 shelf is the whole test. With $1,900 gone, the weekly-close $1,800 shelf is the last line holding the death-cross repair together. Close the week above it and ETH survived a real risk-off intact; lose it and the repair was liquidity, not demand.
Oil above $100 is the macro input everything else keys off. If both chokepoints stay shut and Brent holds triple digits #4, it is a persistent inflation input and a persistent drag on risk. But the same setup cuts both ways: a ceasefire or a reopened lane could reverse the oil spike as violently as it arrived, and crypto would bounce with it. This is the one variable that can flip the whole thesis in a single headline.
Gold’s drop is the deleveraging tell. If gold keeps falling alongside equities, that is forced selling, not a war de-escalation — and forced selling in one asset tends to find others. Watch whether the dollar bid #8 keeps everything correlated to the downside.
ADA is back to the data-gap watch. The fork gain is gone; the network is again just a number waiting on usage data to justify or condemn its cap. Nothing this session was about Cardano specifically.
If I Had $100 This Month
The setup is a breakout that failed on a macro shock it never priced, dropping BTC under $65K, ETH toward its last shelf, and the whole board a step lower on $100 oil — while the long-term institutional build kept going as if none of it happened. A war-driven dip is exactly the kind of discount steady accumulation is built to buy, not chase and not fear.
$60 → BTC. Buying a tightening supply below $65K, on a dip driven by a shipping lane rather than anything broken in the asset, is accumulation into weakness you can source.
$25 → ETH. Near its $1,800 repair shelf, paying for the settlement layer in the lower third of its range while the rails keep getting built.
$15 → ADA. The fork trade round-tripped; buy the network for the throughput data to come, not for a chart that just gave back a week.
Hold actual coins. Not ETF shares, not equity proxies.
This is how I’d think about it. Make your own call.
Sources
#1 — Global oil prices top $100 after Houthis claim strikes on Saudi Arabian tankers — MarketWatch
#2 — Franklin Templeton Says Agentic AI Is Crypto’s ‘Killer Use Case’ — Decrypt
#3 — Yemen’s Houthis attack Saudi tanker as US launches more Iran strikes — BBC World
#4 — How shipping insurance rates are rising, as Hormuz, Bab al-Mandeb shut down — Al Jazeera
#5 — Oil prices hit $100 for the first time since May — BBC World
#6 — Why are UK fuel prices rising again? — BBC Business
Chain of Thought is a daily crypto and macro market digest. Not financial advice.
The Barrel Finally Collected was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Coinbase Institutional and Glassnode have maintained a neutral Q3 2026 crypto outlook as a 12% quarterly market contraction clashes with early signs of Bitcoin accumulation. Coinbase Institutional Research and Glassnode based the outlook on more than 25 charts covering onchain…
Somewhere right now, on a livestream, someone is tearing open a foil package while hundreds of people watch. Trading cards have become a spectator sport. The card market is at all-time highs, cardboard repriced by the hour, rare cards selling for eight figures, and a general sense of frenzy. But watch enough of it and something strange becomes clear. Nobody is looking at the cards. The audience isn’t consuming images, it’s consuming anticipation.
The card boom has also surfaced hard questions, and the hardest ones surround grading. The past year saw the hobby’s dominant grading house facing scrutiny over grades that shifted after cards moved through its own buyback program, and collectors began asking, who grades the grader. When a single subjective number separates a card from ten times its value, and the arbiter of that number also holds a position in the asset, the hobby has a verification problem. These are, in the language of bitcoiners, trusted-third-party problems.
The two worlds keep arriving at the same three questions: what’s real, what’s rare, and what holds value. A graded slab and a confirmed transaction on the timechain are answers to the same anxiety. Collectors demanding transparent grading and provenance that can’t be quietly revised are asking for verification over trust, whether they use those words or not. In that sense, card collectors and bitcoiners already share the same ideals.
This is why BMAG (Bitcoin Museum and Art Gallery) is making trading cards a serious part of its program. Seven years as the cultural wing of the Bitcoin Conference, more than 130 BTC ($8+ million) in art and collectibles sales, the first Magic: The Gathering tournament at a Bitcoin Conference, staged in Las Vegas with Kraken and on-site TAG grading, and the conviction that cards are asking the same questions bitcoin already answered.
The fullest expression of that focus arrives this August. At Bitcoin Asia 2026, August 27-28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, BMAG will debut a full Trading Card Expo on the conference floor. The Expo is anchored by a marketplace of established vendors from across Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, alongside live activations, grading and authentication, card auctions, and a curated gallery presentation surrounding it all. Cards and collectibles will be available for purchase, and attendees are encouraged to bring their own cards for grading or resale to the 40+ card vendors. Hong Kong is one of the most active card markets in the world and a Bitcoin conference is the natural room for it.
But a marketplace alone isn’t the point. The trading card has an art pedigree longer than most people realize. Jefferson Burdick, the father of American card collecting, spent his final years transferring thousands of cards into albums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where his collection remains today. Art Spiegelman worked at Topps inventing series like Garbage Pail Kids before his mainstream graphic novel successes. And the critic Brian Droitcour recently put his finger on why the format matters right now: a Magic card is an image that does something, rarity and function entwined, while NFTs inherited that logic and captured only the rarity. Droitcour argues that NFTs dissolved the old hierarchy between the artwork and the collectible, and that the most interesting artists working today make objects that are both at once.
A generation of artists has taken that invitation literally. Over the past few years, a loose scene of mostly pseudonymous artists, formed across crypto subcultures, Twitter timelines, and private group chats, has been quietly staging one of the more genuine artistic rebellions of the decade. Where the establishment crypto-art world courted galleries with polished generative work, these artists went the other direction, making images dense with meme references, anime, veiled art history, and internet debris, layered so deep that critics had to invent new words for them. They call the style schizocollage. In Spike Art Magazine, Dean Kissick placed the work in the lineage of deliberately “bad painting,” a tradition Marcia Tucker gave institutional credentials when she inaugurated the New Museum with an exhibition of that name in 1978. And increasingly, the scene’s work has been heading not toward the gallery wall but toward cardboard: the pack, the pull, the sleeve, and the slab treated not as merchandising afterthoughts but as the medium itself.
BMAG has spent years working in a room the traditional art world ignored, the art gallery inside a Bitcoin conference. When the painter Nardo showed at Bitcoin MENA in 2024, our conversation kept circling memes as units of cultural transmission and the internet’s layered debris as legitimate subject matter for painting. A year later his Citadel, a seven-foot oil painting built from a 4chan meme, debuted at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas: a monument raised to an internet shitpost. The card movement runs on the same current at a different scale, small enough to fit in a penny sleeve. It’s a conversation we’ve continued in these pages all year, with founders like Alladan Flinn of Based Trading Cards, who describes cards as physical timestamps of the Bitcoin movement. We’ll have much more to say about the artists of this scene, and what they’re bringing to Hong Kong, in the weeks ahead.
The Card Expo debuts at Bitcoin Asia 2026, August 27-28 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Vendors of cards, collectibles, and related goods can apply for a table here. Tables are limited.
Follow BMAG on X at @BMAG_HQ for new partnership announcements, auctions, and first looks at the artists coming to Hong Kong.
What Happens If the Next Crypto Transfer Cannot Wait Until Monday?
For companies holding meaningful crypto balances, this could become a practical infrastructure problem. Risk teams may be able to decide instantly, but finance still needs clean EUR settlement, predictable limits, and clear documentation. The process also cannot become fully manual every time the market moves fast.
So I started evaluating on/off-ramp platforms from a simple angle: which ones could potentially shrink the gap between a crypto decision and fiat execution?
Before the Next Market Move
For companies holding meaningful crypto balances, this is a practical infrastructure problem. Risk teams can decide instantly, but finance still needs clean EUR settlement, predictable limits, and clear documentation. The process also cannot turn manual every time the market moves fast.
So I started evaluating on/off-ramp platforms from a simple angle: which ones actually shrink the gap between a crypto decision and fiat execution?
On/Off-Ramps That Could Fit This Use Case
Kraken could be one of the first platforms many teams check. It has a strong reputation among experienced crypto users and may be relevant for companies that need exchange liquidity and crypto-to-fiat conversion. For businesses, the key points to check would be supported regions, business account setup, withdrawal limits, EUR rails, and whether the process could fit treasury or supplier-payment needs.
Another option to review could be WhiteBIT On/Off-Ramp, especially for crypto-to-EUR conversion through SEPA. For a business earning in $ETH, $BTC, or $USDT and paying European suppliers in euros, it may make settlement more predictable for finance teams. The key details to check are 90+ EUR pairs, deposits and withdrawals, a fixed €5 fee, and custom limits based on KYB level.
Coinbase can also fit, especially for companies already in its ecosystem or wanting a familiar fiat-to-crypto environment. Its strengths are brand recognition and compliance reputation. Questions to check: business account eligibility, supported jurisdictions, withdrawal rails, and fitness for repeated EUR settlement rather than occasional transfers.
The Main Lesson
The Friday problem is easy to understand. A company can decide to cut exposure at 4 p.m., but the actual risk stays open until the fiat rail can move.
For businesses holding crypto, limits, KYC, documentation, settlement windows, and fees should be checked before urgency hits. If your company earns, holds, or converts crypto into EUR, the real question is simple: what happens if the next transfer cannot wait until Monday?
Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. Do your own research before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.
Bitcoin price has slipped back toward $65,000 after spot ETF outflows, a major options expiry and rising oil prices stopped its rebound from extending beyond $66,800. According to data from crypto.news, Bitcoin (BTC) price traded near $65,050 on July 24,…
Poolin has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States as it moves to sell its Texas bitcoin mining assets under a court-supervised process while carrying about $173 million in prepetition obligations. According to filings in the U.S.…
Bitcoin has fallen below $65,000 after the Trump administration announced tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on imports from 60 trading partners covering more than 99% of U.S. trade. CNBC reported that the duties will take effect at 12:01 a.m. ET…
RAS AL KHAIMAH, UAE, July 23, 2026: BFM Company Limited today introduced Bitcoinist.App, a non-custodial Bitcoin mining app and Learn-to-Mine platform released exclusively for iOS. Available from the Apple App Store, Bitcoinist.App gives people a simple way to learn how Bitcoin mining works, access real hashpower, create private Bitcoin mining pools, and receive payouts directly to a wallet they control. Onboarding uses Sign in with Apple, and users can begin from an iPhone without buying mining hardware or entering payment information.
Most people will never run a miner at home. In some regions, particularly parts of the developing world, high room temperatures can cause mining equipment to overheat, while the electricity needed to run air conditioning around the clock can make home mining prohibitively expensive. Noise and the miner’s own continuous power draw add to the barrier. In many parts of the world, people access the internet primarily through mobile data on a phone, without a practical wired connection for dedicated mining equipment. A physical miner also needs a stable network connection. Bitcoinist.App lowers those barriers with a simple iOS interface for learning about Bitcoin and directing real, remotely hosted hashpower through three modes:
Learn and unlock. The built-in Bitcoin Academy offers a 31-lesson video curriculum that explains Bitcoin and mining in practical terms. Educational videos and optional rewarded ads can unlock free mining rental time, so users can start mining from day one without a purchase.
Rent or connect. Paid access is offered through an in-app subscription. Users can access hashpower in 1 TH/s increments from miners hosted in UAE data centers and third-party facilities, or from capacity supplied through third-party hashpower marketplaces. Mining does not run on the iPhone. The app is a simple control layer for real hashpower, and pricing is published in the app. Support for connecting user-owned hardware, including home miners like the Bitaxe, is planned.
Route and pool. Users can create a private mining pool, invite friends and family to combine hashpower, and compete with the global hashrate. They can also mine solo or route miners to the Ocean pool for steadier payouts.
Bitcoinist.App is strictly non-custodial. There is no internal wallet or platform balance. Users choose an external self-custody wallet for payouts; mined bitcoin is sent to that address rather than held inside the app. Bitcoinist.App does not hold user private keys or mined funds.
Bitcoinist.App provides mining infrastructure and education, not a yield product, investment scheme, or custodial wallet. An in-app subscription or ad-supported access provides mining time, not bitcoin and not a promised return. Mining outcomes depend on network difficulty, pool performance, transaction fees, and deployed hashpower. Some hosting and hashpower capacity comes from third parties, so availability and performance can vary by provider. Nothing in this release guarantees any amount of mined bitcoin.
“We designed Bitcoinist.App to orange pill the masses through mining and education,” said Fouad Jamil, Founder and CEO of Bitcoinist.App. “People can begin with a phone, learn what Bitcoin mining actually does, direct real hashpower, and receive every sat in a wallet they control. We are not mining for users and we never custody their bitcoin. We provide the infrastructure and tools; users decide where their hashpower goes.”
Bitcoinist.App is operated by BFM Company Limited, registered in RAK DAO, Ras Al Khaimah, UAE (Bitcoin Mining license No. 07010714), with mining infrastructure in UAE data centers and third-party mining facilities around the world. Additional capacity may be supplied through third-party hashpower marketplaces. Availability is subject to regional eligibility.
Bitcoinist.App is a Bitcoin-only, non-custodial mining app and education platform available exclusively on iOS. Designed for ease of use, it lets people learn about Bitcoin, unlock free mining rental time through educational videos and optional rewarded ads, or choose an in-app subscription for ongoing access to real hashpower. Users can create private mining pools with friends and family, compete with the global Bitcoin hashrate, or route miners to Ocean, while payouts go directly to self-custody. Mining does not run on the iPhone. Bitcoinist.App is operated by BFM Company Limited (RAK DAO, Ras Al Khaimah, UAE). The official website is bitcoinist.app. Follow Bitcoinist.App on X, Telegram, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored press release. Readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence before acting on any information presented in this article.
Bitcoin has fallen below $65,000 after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened a “massive attack” on Iran, with the cryptocurrency losing about 1.5% on Thursday. According to data from crypto.news, Bitcoin (BTC) was trading at $64,885 on July 23, extending its…
Bitcoin may be slumping — along with the Nasdaq in general — but one technology investment seems to be doing well: publicly-traded mining companies.
Top U.S. Bitcoin mining companies — Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA — all experienced gains between 3-7% on Thursday, despite a sell-off across other assets.
The Bitcoin price was down about 2% Thursday, trading for $64,760. Major stock indices also took a hit — including the tech heavy Nasdaq — but a handful of miners continued to rally on new deals related to high-powered computing and artificial intelligence.
Hut 8 announced Monday that it had signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas — doubling the site’s tenant to 704 MW of contracted capacity and fully commercializing the campus against its 1,000 MW of utility capacity.
And on Tuesday, IREN Limited signed $2.8 billion in new AI cloud contracts. Formerly a Bitcoin miner, IREN is now transitioning to mostly providing high-powered computing to power AI demand.
Both experienced price jumps Thursday morning in New York, with Hut 8 sustaining its rally.
AI deals
A number of Bitcoin miners are focusing on the industry as minting the biggest cryptocurrency 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.
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. However, running AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.
BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has chimed in on the crypto-quantum debate — and is surprisingly optimistic.
The firm, which manages over $15 trillion in assets, said in its new report, Quantum Computing and Blockchains, that upgrading existing cryptography to quantum-resistant standards is a far easier task than actually building a functional quantum computer capable of breaking that cryptography.
“In our view, PQ migration for cryptocurrencies is eminently addressable from a technical
standpoint, and the key challenge is one of timely coordination and implementation,” the report read.
The crypto community has sounded the alarm about hypothetical advancements in quantum computers that could in the future be able to break Bitcoin’s cryptography. Some in the space — including Bitcoin developers — have started preparing for a post-quantum future by testing quantum-resistant signatures on live sidechains.
Quantum computers do exist but make mistakes and a machine that can break Bitcoin’s cryptography currently does not exist. Bitcoin currently is the biggest computer network in existence.
BlackRock has skin in the game after having debuted in 2024 spot Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded funds. BlackRock’s Bitcoin fund had the most successful launch in the history of the ETF industry.
BlackRock boss Larry Fink has also talked of Bitcoin being “digital gold” and an “international asset” and has spoken about how crypto networks can help tokenize everything.
JUST IN: Michael Saylor announces Strategy, BlackRock, Fidelity and Coinbase are pledging $15 million to support open source Bitcoin development "for the decades ahead." pic.twitter.com/W5q60ph9n3
The report said that while solutions exist for protecting Bitcoin against quantum computers — it is technically simple to upgrade — coordination is hard given the cryptocurrency’s decentralized, consensus-driven development.
BlackRock noted that about 35% of circulating Bitcoin’s supply is potentially vulnerable to certain attack types due to exposed public keys, and 11-19% may be permanently lost regardless of migration.
Along with crypto bigwigs like Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Block, BlackRock on Thursday announced a new Bitcoin Security Consortium aimed at donating funds to engineers to help their open-source work supporting proposals like BIP-360.
The asset manager added in the report that while BIP-360 is a credible, well-designed piece of a larger puzzle, it stopped short of calling it the solution. Still, it added that Bitcoin and other crypto networks had the advantage.
“That said, it is a much less daunting task to upgrade current cryptographic systems (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others) to a quantum-secure standard than it is to build a CRQC from where quantum computing progress stands today,” the report noted.
“Thus, advantage remains decidedly with the defense, at the current juncture.”
When confidence disappears, even the biggest crypto platforms can unravel faster than most people expect.
One of the biggest lessons from the past few years in crypto is that an exchange doesn’t always fail because it has run out of money. Sometimes, it fails because everyone believes it will.
Imagine waking up to news that your preferred platform may be facing financial difficulties. Within minutes, social media is flooded with rumours. Thousands of users begin withdrawing their funds. Others follow – not because they know the platform is insolvent, but because they fear being the last person left if it is.
This chain reaction is known as a depositor run, or more commonly, a crypto bank run.
We’ve seen it happen with platforms like Celsius, Voyager Digital, and most famously, FTX. These events demonstrated that confidence is one of the most valuable – and fragile – assets in the entire cryptocurrency industry.
So why do depositor runs happen, and why are crypto platforms particularly vulnerable?
What Is a Depositor Run?
A depositor run occurs when a large number of customers attempt to withdraw their funds from a financial institution at the same time because they fear their assets may no longer be safe.
Traditional banks have faced depositor runs throughout history. Cryptocurrency platforms face the same challenge, but the risks are often amplified.
Unlike most banks, centralized crypto exchanges generally do not benefit from government-backed deposit insurance. Once confidence begins to erode, customers can often withdraw their assets instantly, placing enormous pressure on the platform’s available liquidity.
The painful irony is that a platform that might have survived under normal conditions can become insolvent simply because too many people tried to leave at once.
Why Crypto Platforms Are Especially Vulnerable?
Most centralized cryptocurrency exchanges and lending platforms act as custodians, holding digital assets on behalf of millions of users.
While customers often assume their assets remain untouched, some platforms use part of those deposits to support lending, provide liquidity, or facilitate leveraged trading.
This can improve capital efficiency, but it also means that not every deposited asset is immediately available for withdrawal at the same time. The model resembles fractional reserve banking, where institutions do not hold every customer’s deposit in liquid form.
As long as withdrawals happen gradually, the system generally functions smoothly. Problems arise however when everyone wants their money back at once.
What Triggers a Crypto Depositor Run?
Several factors can quickly undermine confidence in a cryptocurrency platform.
Lack of Transparency
Trust depends heavily on transparency. If users cannot verify whether an exchange actually holds sufficient reserves, rumours can spread rapidly.
The collapse of FTX in 2022 illustrated this risk dramatically. What initially appeared to be a liquidity problem ultimately exposed an estimated US$8 billion shortfall in customer assets, triggering one of the largest withdrawal waves in crypto history.
Market Volatility
Sharp declines in cryptocurrency prices can reduce the value of assets held by exchanges and lending platforms. During the 2022 crypto market downturn, platforms like Celsius Network and Voyager Digital faced intense withdrawal pressure as falling prices weakened their financial positions and eroded user confidence.
Leverage and Counterparty Risk
Many crypto businesses are deeply interconnected. When one major firm experiences financial distress, the effects tend to spread.
The collapse of Three Arrows Capital exposed this vulnerability. Several lenders and exchanges with significant exposure to the hedge fund suffered substantial losses, forcing some to suspend withdrawals and intensifying fears across the broader market.
Operational Failures
Confidence can disappear overnight if users believe a platform is no longer secure. Exchange hacks, smart contract vulnerabilities, cybersecurity breaches, or governance failures can all trigger sudden withdrawal requests – even when customer assets have not actually been compromised.
Regulatory Uncertainty
Legal uncertainty can also fuel panic. Where regulations are weak or customer protections are unclear, users often have little assurance about what happens if an exchange becomes insolvent. Without clear rules governing custody, reserve management, or asset segregation, rumours can quickly become self-fulfilling.
What Has Changed Since the 2022 Crypto Crisis?
The failures of several major platforms forced the industry to rethink transparency.
One notable development is the introduction of Proof of Reserves – a system that allows exchanges to demonstrate they hold certain customer assets on-chain. Many platforms now use cryptographic techniques such as Merkle Trees to improve reserve verification.
However, Proof of Reserves has limitations. Showing assets alone does not reveal a platform’s liabilities. An exchange may demonstrate substantial reserves while still owing customers more than it actually holds. For this reason, many experts argue that Proof of Reserves should be complemented by independent audits, clear financial disclosures, and stronger governance.
Regulators have also begun introducing more comprehensive rules covering customer asset segregation, custody standards, reserve management, and capital requirements to reduce the likelihood of future depositor runs.
Can Depositor Runs Be Prevented?
No financial system can eliminate the risk entirely but several measures can significantly reduce the likelihood and severity of a depositor run: maintaining adequate liquid reserves, publishing transparent reserve and liability disclosures, segregating customer assets from company funds, strengthening corporate governance and risk management, and complying with prudential and regulatory standards.
For users, many in the crypto community embrace the principle: not your keys, not your coins.
This reflects the idea that assets held in a personal wallet remain under the user’s direct control rather than depending on a centralized custodian. That said, self-custody comes with its own responsibilities – including securely managing private keys and protecting against theft or accidental loss.
Why Depositor Runs Matter Beyond a Single Exchange
A depositor run affects far more than the platform at its centre.
When one major exchange suspends withdrawals or collapses, fear often spreads across the wider market. Investors rush to exit other platforms, stablecoins come under pressure, lending slows, and prices can decline sharply.
This contagion effect reveals how deeply interconnected the cryptocurrency ecosystem has become.
As the industry matures, maintaining trust is no longer simply a matter of technology. It increasingly depends on sound governance, effective risk management, and transparent operations.
Bottom Line
Cryptocurrency was created to reduce reliance on traditional financial intermediaries. Yet as centralized exchanges became the primary gateway to digital assets, they also reintroduced one of finance’s oldest risks: the loss of confidence.
The collapses of Celsius, Voyager, and FTX showed that even in a blockchain-based financial system, trust remains indispensable.
Today, the focus is now on whether crypto platforms can build and maintain the trust needed to endure uncertain times, rather than just attracting users.
Depositor runs are not just about liquidity. They are about trust. And in both traditional finance and digital finance alike, confidence remains the foundation on which every financial system is built.
If you enjoy analytical commentary on digital asset regulation, crypto markets, and emerging financial technologies, consider subscribing to my newsletter where I share additional research, commentary, and industry insights.
Also, if your company, startup, or publication needs clear, well-researched content on blockchain, digital assets, fintech, or emerging technology law, my inbox is always open.
Login
The world's largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers now officially endorses the passage of the Clarity Act: pic.twitter.com/N10g5jIZ0M
