Bitcoin Magazine

Democrats Push Back on GOP Ethics Text as Thune Doubts a Pre-Recess Clarity Vote

Senate Democrats have rejected the ethics provision in the latest Clarity Act draft in blunt terms, and Majority Leader John Thune cast doubt on Thursday that the crypto market-structure bill can pass before the August recess.

“Whatever piece of s–t they sent back to us, that was not a serious effort,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona told Politico, faulting Republicans for turning months of talks into language he called far from a deal. Gallego said he is at work on a counteroffer with Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina “and other Republicans that are not being named right now.” “We are still in this fight,” he said. “We are going to send back language.”

The dispute centers on enforcement. Democrats say they will not accept an ethics provision with the Department of Justice as its sole enforcer, a stance rooted in distrust of the Trump Justice Department to police the president. 

Earlier talks broke down over the role state attorneys general would play in enforcing the rules.

The GOP language came from an agreement between the White House and Republican Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno. Lummis defended it, and said in a statement that “President Trump is supporting the most robust ethics rules ever imposed on the office of the presidency.” 

The new draft would bar federal officials from issuing digital assets and would sunset in 2029, and the White House has pressed Democrats to accept it. Tillis called the White House-approved language “good,” yet allowed that “the baseline… falls short of what some of the Democrats want,” and said one more talk with the White House lies ahead.

The ethics fight traces to President Trump’s crypto ventures, which a July disclosure tied to more than $1 billion in income over the past year. A group of seven Democrats led by Angela Alsobrooks said this week the text “falls short” on consumer protection, illicit finance, and conflicts of interest.

The Clarity Act has 14 days before the August deadline

Thune tempered expectations on the calendar. Industry and congressional negotiators had marked August 7 as the date the bill needed to clear the Senate for a real shot at passage this year. 

“I don’t think we’ll be able to get them done,” Thune told reporters, in reference to Clarity and a separate college-sports bill. “I would like to at least get Clarity started. We’ll see where the votes are.”

A start before the recess would leave the bill for a narrow window in September, with midterm campaigning and other priorities set to crowd the floor. Thune’s staff pointed to a Russia sanctions bill that the late Senator Lindsey Graham championed as the next item for floor time. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt pushed back on Thune’s read, and told CoinDesk he was “perplexed” and “slightly more optimistic,” with the first week of August still open.

The bill has moved through months of bipartisan talks, and the House passed its version in July 2025. Beyond ethics, some Republicans have flagged the treatment of stablecoin yield, and Goldman Sachs, one of the bill’s backers, sits opposite JPMorgan in a Wall Street split over the measure. Galaxy Research has cut its passage odds to 50-50.

This post Democrats Push Back on GOP Ethics Text as Thune Doubts a Pre-Recess Clarity Vote first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Smarter Web Company Sells Bitcoin to Clear $11.7 Million Debt Facility

The Smarter Web Company has sold a portion of its Bitcoin treasury to repay an $11.7 million convertible debt facility held by TOBAM, a move the company frames as a choice for balance-sheet flexibility over equity dilution.

The company sold 177.8909127 BTC at an average price of $65,762 to retire the instrument, known as the “Smarter Convert,” ahead of schedule. The transaction totaled $11,698,540 and was settled roughly two weeks early. After the sale, Smarter Web still holds 2,700 BTC in treasury.

Smarter Web’s financing decisions 

On its face, a Bitcoin treasury company selling part of its holdings can read as a signal of weakening conviction. But the transaction is a debt-management decision.

Smarter Web was not exiting its Bitcoin position. It used BTC to extinguish a debt obligation and avoid issuing 7,718,551 ordinary shares, an outcome that would have diluted existing shareholders had the convertible converted into equity instead.

Bitcoin treasury companies typically generate headlines in one direction: a purchase, a rise in total holdings, a deeper commitment to Bitcoin as a balance-sheet asset. Investors respond according to their view of corporate crypto exposure, but the pattern is usually additive.

Smarter Web sold Bitcoin to settle a specific financing instrument, the company said. That is different from a sale driven by lost confidence in the asset, and different again from a forced sale tied to a liquidity shortfall.

The company faced a capital-structure choice. It could leave the convertible in place and risk dilution from a future conversion into shares, or it could draw down part of its Bitcoin position to repay the debt directly. Management chose the second path, prioritizing a cleaner balance sheet over preserving the full Bitcoin position.

For shareholders, the logic may be more legible than the alternative. A new issuance of millions of ordinary shares carries a direct and immediate dilutive effect on per-share value. 

A reduction in Bitcoin holdings, by contrast, leaves the company’s per-share equity structure untouched while removing a fixed liability from the balance sheet.

Smarter Web’s remaining 2,700 BTC treasury indicates the company has not abandoned its Bitcoin strategy. The sale addressed one financing obligation, not the broader thesis behind the holdings.

This post Smarter Web Company Sells Bitcoin to Clear $11.7 Million Debt Facility first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Goldman Sachs Backs the Clarity Act, Splitting Wall Street Over Crypto Rules

Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon has thrown his support behind the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill moving through the Senate, a stance that sets one of Wall Street’s largest banks apart from rivals lining up against it.

“I’m very supportive of moving the Clarity Act forward, so we can get some market structure in place and start to move the innovation process along,” Solomon said in an interview with Politico. He called the bill imperfect, and said its value lies in creating “a level playing field to enhance market stability and allow these markets to develop appropriately.”

Solomon spoke after Senate Republicans began circulating new text of the bill this week, ahead of a possible floor vote. His endorsement lands against a wave of opposition from other bankers, chief among them JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, who declared war on the bill and, in May, upbraided Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong over the industry’s lobbying.

Banks split over stablecoin yield

The split runs along business lines. The fight centers on a provision that governs stablecoin yield, the rewards crypto platforms can pay users who hold dollar-pegged tokens. Commercial and community banks warn the language would pull deposits out of insured accounts and cut into local lending.

Six of the largest banking trade groups, including the American Bankers Association, published a statement Wednesday that called the Clarity Act and its provisions a risk to “the local lending that drives economic activity in the U.S.” The ABA has pushed to strip the yield language, and labor unions have joined the opposition.

Investment banks like Goldman, less reliant on consumer deposits, have trained their focus on other parts of the bill. 

Solomon pointed to language that would let “regulated institutions that have been on the sidelines participate more actively,” a green light for old-guard firms to use digital assets and blockchain rails. “Goldman Sachs’s position is that we believe strongly that we need one system where everybody can participate,” he said, and declined to weigh in on other bankers’ views.

The stance fits Goldman’s own turn toward the asset. The bank has disclosed a $1.1 billion position in a spot bitcoin ETF, called the funds an “astonishing success,” and Solomon has revealed a small personal bitcoin holding.

The bill’s stablecoin section holds the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise, which bars passive yield on idle balances while it permits narrow activity-based rewards, a line the banking lobby says leaves too much room.

The measure has moved through bipartisan talks for months. The House passed its version in July 2025, and the Senate Banking Committee advanced its text in a 15-9 vote in May. 

The Clarity Act still faces an uphill battle

The path to the floor for the Clarity Act stays murky. Republican senators John Curtis of Utah and John Cornyn of Texas told Punchbowl News they share the banks’ worry over deposit flight. “Crypto is not going to be loaning any money for small businesses,” Cornyn said. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana hinted at concerns of his own.

The sharpest problem is ethics. The new Clarity Act draft would bar federal officials from issuing digital assets, language negotiated between Senators Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Moreno, and the White House. Democrats call it too weak, in part because they distrust the Trump Justice Department to enforce limits on the president. 

President Trump and his family made more than $1 billion from crypto ventures over the past year, a windfall that has fueled Democratic demands for reform. A group of seven Democrats led by Angela Alsobrooks said Wednesday the text “falls short” on consumer protection, illicit finance, and conflicts of interest.

Lummis framed the Clarity Act standoff without illusion. “There’s not going to be a provision that makes opponents of the president happy that also makes the president happy,” she said to Punchbowl. Majority Leader John Thune aims for a vote in the coming week, a window that lawmakers say may decide whether the bill lives or dies before the August recess.

This post Goldman Sachs Backs the Clarity Act, Splitting Wall Street Over Crypto Rules first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Kazakhstan Moves to Build a National Crypto Reserve Funded by Bitcoin Miners

Kazakhstan has laid out a plan to build a national strategic crypto reserve fed by its bitcoin miners, part of a two-step push by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev to pull the country’s large mining industry into a regulated, state-supervised system.

A presidential decree signed July 7 sets the frame, and a government resolution approved July 18 supplies the mechanism. The government cleared the rules for strategic digital mining under Government Resolution No. 638, published in the PRG.kz legal database.

Together the two measures aim to route mining output and crypto trading through Kazakh infrastructure, with the state taking a share of mined coins for a sovereign reserve.

The reserve sits at the center. Under the July 18 resolution, the Kazakhstan government created a program of “strategic digital mining,” in which miners receive electricity quotas at capped tariffs on 10-year contracts from listed power producers. In exchange, they must hand over part of what they mine, according to local reporting.  

A formula sets the transfer at 10% of mined digital assets after the cost of electricity and grid services, paid each month to the state-linked Astana Hub fund, which passes the coins to the National Investment Corporation of the National Bank for management inside a “national strategic crypto reserve.”

The first approved power source is the Ekibastuz GRES-1 coal plant, with a 300-megawatt quota. To qualify, a miner must run a data center of at least 150 megawatts, with rigs that each clear 150 terahashes per second, among other conditions.

The resolution defines its reserve as a vehicle to invest in digital assets, in derivatives tied to those assets, and in the shares of companies that build or invest in crypto. 

Rather than hold coins alone, the structure gives the state a spread of exposure to the sector it now seeks to grow, with the National Bank’s investment arm at the controls.

The design turns Kazakhstan’s cheap power and mining base into a channel for state accumulation, an approach that echoes the reserve strategies spreading among governments. Kazakhstan had floated a $1 billion crypto reserve built in part on seized assets and state-mined coins, and its central bank moved to invest up to $350 million in crypto-linked funds. 

The United States established a strategic bitcoin reserve from forfeited coins last year, a model other states have weighed.

NEW: Kazakhstan approves "the implementation of strategic digital [asset] mining" and a national reserve pic.twitter.com/go0HT2Nhl6

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 23, 2026

Kazakhstan as a bitcoin mining hub

Kazakhstan ranks among the world’s largest bitcoin mining hubs, fifth by mining activity in the Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report from April 2025, a status built on cheap coal power that drew miners after China’s 2021 ban, though the country moved to tighten its mining rules over grid strain. 

The new program reads as an attempt to harness that base rather than curb it, and the decree directs the Kazakhstan government to tap associated petroleum gas, natural gas, and renewable output for mining.

Other crypto tasked 

The July 7 decree reaches past mining. It sets up a Committee on Digital Assets and Payment Systems under the National Bank, and orders work on tokenization platforms, exchange and custody services, and crypto-fiat channels tied to the financial system.

It calls for stablecoins to settle cross-border trade for export and import, tokenized government securities by the end of 2026, and rules that isolate customer assets from a bankrupt provider’s estate.

To pull activity onshore, the decree offers a plan to exempt individuals from personal income tax on crypto gains earned through Kazakh providers from the start of 2026 through the end of 2028, plus a window for holders to disclose coins acquired or mined in the past if they move them into regulated infrastructure. 

The government also plans a National Cryptocurrency Analysis Center by mid-2027 to track transactions and flag illicit schemes, along with a review of DeFi platforms.

This post Kazakhstan Moves to Build a National Crypto Reserve Funded by Bitcoin Miners first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development

Nine of the largest names in institutional Bitcoin launched the Bitcoin Security Consortium on Thursday, a group backed by $15 million in member pledges over three years to fund work on the network’s long-term security, including preparation for a future era of quantum computing.

Founding members are Anchorage Digital, ARK Invest, BlackRock, Block, Blockstream, Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, Galaxy, and Strategy, a lineup that spans holders, custodians, exchanges, infrastructure and payments providers, and asset managers. 

The consortium’s day-to-day work falls to Mike Schmidt, executive director of the developer non-profit Brink, who serves in a volunteer role.

Schmidt tweeted about the role, saying, “I said yes because supporting Bitcoin’s developers and helping people understand their work are the two things I’ve spent my time in Bitcoin on, through Brink and Optech. This group wants to do both: fund the people already securing Bitcoin, and bring accurate information about that work to audiences it doesn’t currently reach.”

Each member directs its own funding to the developers, researchers, and organizations it chooses; the $15 million figure is an aggregate of independent pledges rather than a pooled fund. The group also plans to serve as a reference point on Bitcoin’s security for investors, the public, and the media, and to publish material it will update as the field develops.

Funding advocates

The consortium drew clear limits around its role. It says it does not develop or direct Bitcoin’s protocol, takes no position on specific protocol changes, and does not speak for Bitcoin or its developers.

It casts itself on the model of industry groups that fund the open-source software they rely on without controlling the work. 

“Bitcoin’s development is, and will remain, the work of a global, decentralized community of contributors,” the group said.

“As long-term holders, we have every incentive to see Bitcoin remain secure for generations,” said Phong Le, Chief Executive Officer of Strategy. “Funding the people who do this work, and helping inform the conversation around it, is a natural way for us to contribute.” 

Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s Global Head of Digital Assets, said Bitcoin Core developers “do incredibly important work,” and that the members would make “significant additional funding available to support Bitcoin’s long-term security needs.”

Brink, the non-profit coordinating the effort, has funded open-source Bitcoin work since 2020, including more than $1 million to developers in a single year and the first third-party security audit of Bitcoin Core. Schmidt co-founded the group with developer John Newbery.

Bitcoin and quantum 

Much of the consortium’s stated focus lands on the quantum question. Large-scale quantum computers able to break BTC’s cryptography do not exist today, and credible estimates place such capability years out. 

The group frames post-quantum protection as a long-term priority the technical community already works on, and positions itself as a grounded source as that work moves.

That framing matches a wider institutional turn toward the issue. Coinbase has formed a quantum computing advisory board, Galaxy launched its own quantum readiness initiative with developer grants days before, and BlackRock has listed quantum computing as a risk in its spot BTC ETF filings. 

Developers, for their part, have proposed migration plans built on schemes such as BIP-360 that would move coins to quantum-resistant addresses, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute has warned the timeline is compressing.

Views on urgency diverge, a split the consortium’s members embody. Adam Back, founder of member firm Blockstream, has called the quantum threat decades away, while other voices place a capable machine within the next several years. 

The stakes are large either way, since Coinbase research has estimated that between 20% and 50% of BTC’s supply, much of it in older wallet formats, could face exposure to a long-range quantum attack. 

The consortium sidesteps the timeline debate and stakes its role on funding and information rather than a forecast. Its own summary holds that the risk is real, yet the network is preparing.

This post BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy Among Nine Firms Launching the Bitcoin Security Consortium, Pledging $15 Million To BTC Security Development first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Swiss Bank BancaStato Launches Bitcoin Trading Through Sygnum and Avaloq

BancaStato, the cantonal bank of Ticino in southern Switzerland, has launched regulated crypto trading, a service that lets clients buy, hold, and sell bitcoin from the bank’s existing web and mobile apps, the digital asset bank Sygnum said on Thursday.

The bank connected Sygnum’s application programming interface to its Avaloq core banking system and digital channels, a setup that places bitcoin trading inside the same apps clients use for traditional accounts. 

At launch, clients can trade bitcoin (BTC) and other crypto with market orders placed by quantity or U.S. dollar value.

Bitcoin sits at the center of the offering, a pattern across the wave of European banks that have added crypto services. BancaStato clients gain exposure to the asset through a regulated channel rather than a standalone exchange, and their holdings rest in Sygnum’s custody rather than on the bank’s own balance sheet.

Sygnum said client assets are held in an institutional-grade, multi-layer custody solution built on hardware and software controls, governance processes, and independent external audits. The firm said all client assets are held off-balance sheet in regulatory and legal compliance, a structure meant to shield holdings if the bank enters bankruptcy. 

The point matters for bitcoin holders, since a bearer asset kept off the balance sheet stays separate from the claims of a failed institution’s creditors.

The integration runs on Sygnum’s B2B API without a separate order management system, an approach the firms said cuts cost and complexity. “BancaStato, becoming the first bank on Avaloq’s SaaS environment to enable clients to buy, hold and sell crypto via API with Sygnum directly from within its e-banking platforms, marks a significant step in the maturity and scalability of regulated digital asset infrastructure,” said Fritz Jost, Sygnum’s chief B2B officer.

Founded in 1915, BancaStato runs its core banking and digital channels on the Avaloq platform in a software-as-a-service model. Curzio De Gottardi, the bank’s head of products and services and vice-chairman of its executive board, cast the launch as an extension of the bank’s existing lineup. “Our seamless integration of traditional assets, investment solutions — and now digital assets — further enhances our group’s future-ready offering,” he said.

BancaStato joins Zuger Kantonalbank and more than 25 other banks and financial institutions on Sygnum’s B2B platform. Sygnum said its partner banks give more than a third of the Swiss population a route to own digital assets.

Bitcoin in swiss banks

The launch adds to a run of Swiss institutions bringing BTC to their clients. Zürcher Kantonalbank, the country’s fourth-largest bank, rolled out bitcoin trading and custody; St. Galler Kantonalbank opened bitcoin buying and custody to retail clients; and UBS has weighed bitcoin trading for select wealth clients. Sygnum itself has built out bitcoin-linked lending, from a partnership with Relai on BTC-backed loans to a $50 million bitcoin-backed syndicated loan for Ledn.

Sygnum holds a Swiss banking license and, since June 30, 2026, a Crypto-Asset Service Provider license under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, granted by Liechtenstein’s Financial Market Authority. 

That license lets EU banks tap Sygnum’s infrastructure to launch digital asset services, a path other providers such as Bitcoin Suisse have taken from the same jurisdiction.

This post Swiss Bank BancaStato Launches Bitcoin Trading Through Sygnum and Avaloq first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Nasdaq-listed Zhibao Technology to Take 3,500 Bitcoin in Proposed PIPE Financing

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. 

It is the kind of reinvention that has swept public markets over two years, as firms remake themselves around a bitcoin treasury and corporate holdings climb to records. Zhibao’s stock jumped near 24% on the news.

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. 

This post Nasdaq-listed Zhibao Technology to Take 3,500 Bitcoin in Proposed PIPE Financing first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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New Clarity Act Draft Would Bar Trump and Officials From Issuing Crypto, With a 2029 Sunset

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

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 22, 2026

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. 

Democrats on the Banking Committee had pressed for enforceable conflict-of-interest rules, and an amendment to bar officials from crypto ties failed during the May markup of the Clarity Act.

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. 

The Senate Banking Committee advanced its text in a 15-9 vote in May. Coinbase and other firms have pushed for passage before the August recess, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put the effort at the “1-yard line,” and Trump has pressed the chamber to act.

This post New Clarity Act Draft Would Bar Trump and Officials From Issuing Crypto, With a 2029 Sunset first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Coinbase Settles FOIA Fight With the SEC Over Gensler’s Vanished Texts

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. 

Chief legal officer Paul Grewal disclosed the deal in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.

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.

This post Coinbase Settles FOIA Fight With the SEC Over Gensler’s Vanished Texts first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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VanEck: Bitcoin’s Summer Lull Masks a Tightening Supply Base

Bitcoin spent the past month in a holding pattern around $63,700, and VanEck’s latest Bitcoin ChainCheck reads the setup as a cautious pause rather than a bottom, with derivatives flashing fear, miner economics near multi-year lows, and long-term holders tightening their grip.

The mid-July report frames the moment as consolidation, not recovery. Bitcoin closed July 12 at $63,742, flat against a month earlier yet 33% off its six-month high and 14% below its 200-day moving average near a bitcoin price of $74,000. 

The pause caps two monthly declines, a 3.6% dip in May and a 20.5% drop in June. 

Trading thinned into the summer. Spot volume averaged about $5.1 billion a day over the 30-day window, down near 29% from the post-2019 norm, a softness the firm notes has marked June through August in each of the past six years. 

Realized volatility fell to 30.4% on an annualized basis, under the trailing-year 43% level and well beneath the long-run average near 81%.

Derivatives flash fear, not panic

VanEck reads the derivatives complex as defensive. The one-month put/call implied volatility skew widened to +11.4 percentage points, an 83rd-percentile mark since 2021, and traders appear content to fund put purchases with the sale of calls. 

The firm reads that as fear rather than capitulation. Total options premium eased 23% to $613.6 million, and the put/call premium ratio climbed to 1.49, against an average near 0.71.

Perpetual-futures funding tells a similar story. The rate sits near +4.5% on a 30-day average, about half the long-run +8.4%, a sign that positioning stays far from bullish after a spring stretch in which traders were paid to hold shorts. 

VanEck maps both signals to below-average forward returns across the 30-to-180-day window. It flags two markers of a true bottom that have not arrived: a skew past +15 points, or funding that flips negative. Until one appears, the firm sees near-term downside pressure over a quick rebound. 

VanEck has pointed to negative funding as a bullish tell in past notes.

Bitcoin ETP outflows and shaken treasury confidence

Demand ran negative on the month, a drop the report ties to exchange-traded product outflows. U.S. spot ETPs shed 40,010 BTC, worth about $2.40 billion, while corporate treasuries added 2,343 BTC and miners kept 1,204 BTC. Exchange balances rose to fill the gap. 

The report also charts shaken confidence among digital asset treasuries after Strategy used $1.38 billion to retire convertible notes, a move that left the company with a $900 million reserve and pushed it to its first bitcoin sales since 2022. Those sales, VanEck writes, fed the negative flows across the treasury cohort.

The on-chain picture cuts the other way. The share of bitcoin held longer than a year reached 60.8% of supply, a figure that has climbed through the price drop from 59.1% six months earlier. Another 17.7% of supply sits in the six-to-twelve-month band, coins that graduate into the long-term bucket if they stay put. 

VanEck projects the long-term share reaches about 62% in three months and nears 63% in six. Regimes with a long-term share above 60% and rising have lined up with above-average returns across horizons in the firm’s tests, an echo of its prior finding that whales kept holding through the selloff. 

Selling, the report finds, concentrates in the middle of the age curve, while the youngest and oldest coins stay still. Profitability metrics run cold, with net unrealized profit at the 17th percentile and 53% of supply in profit against a four-year average of 76%.

Miner economics near multi-year lows

Miner economics form the report’s grimmest section. Network hash rate held near record highs around 930 EH/s as price fell, a mix that pushed implied hashprice to about $30.6 per petahash per second per day, near multi-year lows. 

Daily miner revenue averaged $28.5 million, down 39.5% year over year, a level that puts lower-efficiency rigs at or below breakeven. Miner-held bitcoin stayed near 1.785 million, a sign of steady sales of new coins over capitulation.

The pivot to artificial-intelligence hosting runs through the section. VanEck highlights TeraWulf’s 20-year, $19 billion lease with Anthropic and CleanSpark’s $6.6 billion deal as top unlevered yields, part of a build-out the firm has tied to a $50 billion near-term funding gap. 

Miner equities have dropped about 42% from 52-week highs on higher rates, a New York pause on data-center construction, and doubt over AI returns. 

The firm keeps its conviction, and points to richer contract terms, new AI deals, and hyperscaler spending as reasons the de-rating overstates the risk. 

It also notes bitcoin correlation across the group has stepped down, a sign the market prices the names on their own merits. That optimism is not universal across the market; some analysts have argued an AI pivot alone will not rescue struggling miners.

VanEck sees a market that leans toward soft returns over the near term, held back by cautious derivatives and weak miner cash flow, yet supported by a supply base that keeps tightening. For patient holders, the firm writes, the structural picture stays constructive.

This post VanEck: Bitcoin’s Summer Lull Masks a Tightening Supply Base first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Satsuma Shareholders Approve Bitcoin Liquidation, London Delisting

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.

This post Satsuma Shareholders Approve Bitcoin Liquidation, London Delisting first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

White House Presses Senate Democrats To Accept Trump Ethics Deal On Clarity Act

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, told CoinDesk 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.

The Clarity Act’s text cleared the Senate Banking Committee in a 15-9 vote, with Gallego and Alsobrooks joining Republicans to advance it. 

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. 

Galaxy Research puts the odds of passage at 50-50.

This post White House Presses Senate Democrats To Accept Trump Ethics Deal On Clarity Act first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Senator: Clarity Act is ‘Almost There,’ Treasury Secretary Puts It at the ‘1-Yard Line’

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 Senate Banking Committee advanced its version of the Clarity Act in a 15-9 vote this spring, with two Democrats crossing over.

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. 

The CFTC chair called the bill “so close”, while Galaxy Research cut its passage odds to 50-50 as the clock ran down. 

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.

This post U.S. Senator: Clarity Act is ‘Almost There,’ Treasury Secretary Puts It at the ‘1-Yard Line’ first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Treasury Freezes $130 Million Iran-Linked IRGC Crypto Wallet, Tracks Ayatollah’s Assets

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. 

Tehran, for its part, reportedly moved to accept bitcoin from tankers seeking passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a $1-per-barrel toll that turns its grip on the chokepoint into settlement revenue. The strait carries a fifth of the world’s oil.

The war has repriced bitcoin as well. 

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.

This post U.S. Treasury Freezes $130 Million Iran-Linked IRGC Crypto Wallet, Tracks Ayatollah’s Assets first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Russia Passes Landmark Crypto Law, Setting State-Run Rails for Sanctioned Trade

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

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 21, 2026

A channel for sanctioned trade

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. 

Russia’s crypto pivot

Moscow has pitched crypto trade as a route around sanctions for years; the new law builds it into formal infrastructure.

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.

The passage marks another step in a run of Russian crypto moves, from a bid to make digital assets part of “everyday finance” to a crackdown on unregistered mining that carries the threat of forced labor. 

This post Russia Passes Landmark Crypto Law, Setting State-Run Rails for Sanctioned Trade first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat

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.

This post Galaxy (GLXY) Commits $5 Million to Prepare Bitcoin for the Quantum Threat first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Jack Mallers Steps Down as CEO of Bitcoin Treasury Twenty One Capital 

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.

This post Jack Mallers Steps Down as CEO of Bitcoin Treasury Twenty One Capital  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo and Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin-Treasury Capital B Plans 10-for-1 Reverse Stock Split for September

Capital B, the Paris-listed bitcoin treasury company once known as The Blockchain Group, will combine every 10 existing shares into one new share beginning September 8, according to a regulatory filing the company published Monday.

The consolidation reduces the number of outstanding shares from 300,650,632 to 30,065,063. Each new share will carry a par value of €0.80, up from €0.08 for the existing stock. The company framed the transaction as a “purely technical exchange” that leaves the aggregate value of each shareholder’s holdings unchanged, save for the treatment of fractional entitlements.

Capital B said the move aims to “support the company’s institutional development and to open the company’s shares to a broader universe of investors.” 

Many institutional funds operate under internal rules that bar them from holding stocks below a set price, and some exchanges impose minimum-price thresholds for continued listing. A higher quoted price per share removes one barrier to that participation.

Capital B shares trade near €0.48 on Euronext Growth Paris and have declined about 40% since the start of the year, per Google Finance data. Should the company’s market value hold, each consolidated share would open near €4.80.

Key dates for Capital B shareholders

The reverse split period runs from August 6 through September 7. Shareholders who hold a number of shares divisible by 10 will see their positions converted with no action required. 

Those holding leftover shares can buy or sell stock before the deadline to reach a round multiple of 10. For investors who do not, financial intermediaries will sell the shares tied to fractional entitlements and distribute the cash proceeds, with payments set to begin September 14.

September 7 marks the final trading day for the existing shares. The consolidated shares start trading the following day under a new ISIN, the code exchanges use to identify a security. The company has set September 9 as the record date and September 10 for settlement and delivery.

Capital B will also pause conversions of certain convertible bonds and exercises of share warrants from August 17 through September 10. After the split, the company will adjust conversion prices and warrant ratios to reflect the reduced share count, multiplying bond conversion prices by 10 while dividing warrant ratios and unvested free shares by 10.

Treasury strategy stays central

The share restructuring does not add bitcoin to the balance sheet or raise new capital on its own. It changes the number and nominal value of shares through a technical consolidation, a step the company tied to its goal of reaching a wider investor base.

Capital B’s bitcoin holdings

Capital B holds 3,139 BTC, a figure that ranks it as the second-largest listed corporate bitcoin holder in Europe, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net. Germany’s Bitcoin Group SE sits ahead of it with 3,605 BTC, the data shows. Capital B, which describes itself as Europe’s first bitcoin treasury company, built much of that position through fundraising rounds during the first half of 2026. 

In May, it acquired 192 BTC for €13 million after completing three capital raises.

The company has moved to widen its access to capital. In June, shareholders approved authority for as much as €5 billion in capital increases and €100 billion in credit instruments, resolutions that drew more than 95% support from votes cast. Those approvals give the board financing capacity for future purchases.

Capital B measures progress through bitcoin held per fully diluted share rather than total reserves alone, a framework common among bitcoin treasury companies. The firm has also said it is developing a bitcoin-backed credit product for the European market, though it has not set a launch date.

This post Bitcoin-Treasury Capital B Plans 10-for-1 Reverse Stock Split for September first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Coinbase Executive Says Clarity Act Has ‘Tremendous Momentum’ in the Senate

Coinbase Vice Chair Ryan VanGrack said the Clarity Act has gained “tremendous momentum” in the Senate, in a CNBC “Squawk Box” appearance that made the case for a federal crypto framework and touched on bitcoin, blockchain, and the industry’s uneasy truce with Wall Street.

VanGrack, a former SEC official, framed the Clarity Act as an overdue set of rules rather than a giveaway. “It’s not about no regulation,” he said. “This is about imposing regulation on the industry for the first time.” He described a “win-win-win” for American investors, innovators, and standards should the measure pass, and said a bipartisan group of senators has kept up work “even in the last few weeks and days.”

Clarity Act updates

The House passed its version of the Clarity Act last year, and attention has shifted to the Senate, where the path to 60 votes remains the central hurdle. 

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill in a 15-9 vote this spring, with two Democrats crossing over, and House members have urged the Senate to act before the August recess. The measure sits in a narrow window as negotiators work out remaining terms.

President Trump added his voice last week, posting on Truth Social in support of Senator Lindsey Graham and calling on the Senate to pass the bill. Trump framed the stakes in terms of competition with China, a message he has repeated as he presses the chamber to move.

VanGrack said Democrats have won concessions that strengthen the bill’s consumer protections. 

JUST IN: Coinbase Vice Chair talks CLARITY ACT on CNBC

"The Democrats have obtained meaningful concessions to make what was already a strong consumer protection bill, THAT much stronger" pic.twitter.com/y3n04dKdRi

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 20, 2026

He pointed to an illicit-finance framework, an “FTX loophole” that the text would close, insider-trading safeguards, and added disclosures. 

“Across the board, the Democrats have obtained meaningful concessions to make what was already a strong consumer protection bill that much stronger,” he said. 

He said the bill would not change how crypto is classified as a commodity or a security in a fundamental sense, and would preserve the registration, examination, and surveillance structure from the House version.

Asked how the industry reconciles with skeptics like JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, VanGrack pointed to a wave of bank and institutional deals. 

“Not a week goes by,” he said, where a firm fails to announce a new crypto project or investment. He predicted an “inevitable convergence,” a point at which the market stops separating traditional finance from crypto and treats each as a modern financial institution.

That convergence has played out in public, and in conflict. JPMorgan and Coinbase announced a partnership to widen crypto access, and the bank has moved to accept bitcoin as loan collateral and to let clients trade it. 

Dimon, for his part, has declared war on the Clarity Act and aimed a crude insult at Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, a reminder that the détente carries friction.

Is bitcoin real? 

The interview turned to a sharper question from CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin: whether blockchain is real but bitcoin is not. VanGrack called it “a fair question” and said the technology’s benefits stand on their own — faster settlement, more transparency, and round-the-clock transactions. 

He argued that no one building a financial system today would recreate the infrastructure of the past century. He cited Citadel Securities, which he said made another large investment in the crypto economy last week, as a sign that major institutions are trending the same course.

Sorkin pressed the harder edge of the design: the technology aims to remove the counterparty a customer might call when something goes wrong. VanGrack conceded the point as fair, then countered with the costs of the current system — days to reconcile trades and the counterparty risk that delay creates. 

“I’m not here to tell you it’s the wrong technology,” he said. He acknowledged open questions, including whether crypto accounts should carry interest or loyalty rewards, a debate that bankers have raised and that the law will settle as “a blunt instrument.”

He closed on the case for Clarity Act passage. “In the absence of clarity, you do not have a federal oversight and framework,” he said. “So whether you love crypto or hate crypto, you should want” the Clarity Act.

This post Coinbase Executive Says Clarity Act Has ‘Tremendous Momentum’ in the Senate first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

New Onramp Report Makes the Case for Spot Bitcoin Over Paper Claims as Price Sits at Half Its Peak

A new research report from bitcoin custody firm Onramp argues that the recent market slump is a reason to buy, and that owners should hold the asset itself rather than a paper claim on its price.

The report, titled “Back to Basics” and published in July 2026, opens on a market puzzle: bitcoin trades at about half its late-2025 high, while equities and gold sit at or near records of their own. For a different asset, the report says, that divergence would read as a warning. For a fixed-supply asset with adoption at an early stage, it reads as an opening.

Onramp splits its case into three parts — the fundamentals of bitcoin, the gap between owning the asset and owning a wrapper, and the data behind its claim that the moment favors accumulation.

Bitcoin’s fixed supply

The first section runs through ten ideas. Money, the firm writes, is a technology for storing value across time, a test that cash fails over long horizons. 

Fiat currencies lose purchasing power by design, since a money supply built to expand hands the first use of new units to governments and the institutions nearest them, while it charges holders of existing balances through a weaker currency. 

Against that backdrop, the report frames scarcity as the source of monetary integrity, and it casts bitcoin’s 21 million cap as a limit that any participant can verify rather than one that rests on trust.

Other points cover bitcoin’s fixed issuance schedule, the halving, and the role of decentralization in making the rules credible. Authority rests with users who run full nodes, the report says, not with miners or firms, a structure that has held through past attempts to change the protocol’s core rules. 

It defends proof of work as a productive use of energy, with a nod to miners that consume flared gas and surplus renewable output, and it presents bitcoin as gold’s successor — scarce and durable, yet able to move across the world in minutes and to be audited by any holder.

On volatility, Onramp treats sharp drawdowns as a feature of an asset in the middle of monetization. Declines of fifty percent or more have occurred several times, the report notes, and each prior drop gave way to a recovery beyond the former peak. 

The firm favors a mechanical approach over market timing, a nod to dollar cost averaging that some view as a growing strategy and one that analysts have urged during recent dips.

‘Paper Bitcoin’

The report’s sharpest argument sits in its second part, on “paper bitcoin.” A large share of what changes hands under bitcoin’s name, Onramp writes, is not bitcoin but a claim on it — a fund share, an exchange balance, or a structured product that stands as the obligation of a counterparty.

Such wrappers can track the price, the firm allows, and many run as described under capable managers. The trouble is structural: each layer adds a custodian, an administrator, or a counterparty that the asset itself does not carry, and any of them can fail for reasons apart from bitcoin. The report ties the point to strain among bitcoin-linked credit products.

Direct ownership, by contrast, preserves what the firm calls bitcoin’s bearer quality — control of the keys as ownership in full, with no account to approve and no party able to freeze or reclaim the holding. 

That framing echoes the case that bitcoin removes counterparty risk from a balance sheet. From there, Onramp makes its commercial pitch. Owners can pursue self-custody, the firm writes, or turn to multi-institution custody, a model that splits keys across independent institutions so that no single party can move the coins and no single failure can lose them. 

Onramp has raised $12.5 million to scale that platform and has folded cash, bitcoin, and gold into one account.

Market timing

The third part turns to timing. Onramp lists four observations: a drawdown that is shallow by bitcoin’s own history, a pattern of recoveries after comparable declines, the record of steady accumulation against other assets, and the odd sight of bitcoin at a discount while most markets sit at highs. 

The present cycle stands about seven months past its peak and near half below it, the report says, an earlier and shallower stage than equivalent points in past cycles.

The conclusion returns to the title. Onramp says it is getting back to the basics this summer, and it frames the message without a forecast: buy on a schedule while prices are low, and hold what you accumulate in custody you control, spread across independent institutions.

The fundamentals, the firm writes, are unaffected by the fall in price. A lower price on an asset of fixed supply and expanding adoption, it argues, is the thesis working in the buyer’s favor.

This post New Onramp Report Makes the Case for Spot Bitcoin Over Paper Claims as Price Sits at Half Its Peak first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.