TLDR

• Peter Schiff warned that Bitcoin could fall below $20,000 if it breaks the $50,000 level.
• He said excessive complacency suggests the market is not near a bottom.
• Schiff argued that a sharp drop could push long-term holders to exit positions.
• Strategy sold 32 BTC to fund preferred dividends while holding over 843,000 BTC.
• CryptoQuant reported that monthly Bitcoin demand has contracted by 232,000 BTC.

Bitcoin traded near $67,000 after a 4% daily drop and a 16% monthly decline. Peter Schiff warned that a break below $50,000 could trigger a slide under $20,000. He argued that complacency, not volatility, threatens market stability.

Bitcoin Price Outlook Faces $20K Breakdown Risk

Schiff posted on X that investor sentiment shows excessive calm despite recent losses. He wrote, “There’s way too much complacency in Bitcoin for the market to be anywhere near a bottom.” He added that once Bitcoin breaks $50K, it should fall quickly below $20K. He said that such a move would pressure long-term holders to exit positions. He claimed many investors would “finally throw in the towel” after a sharp breakdown.

Earlier, Schiff questioned whether a Bitcoin crash would drag broader risk assets lower. He suggested that either outcome could redirect capital toward “value and safety.” For years, he has supported gold as a hedge during market stress. He repeated that stance while discussing current price conditions.

Schiff also targeted Strategy’s STRC preferred stock during his commentary. STRC traded below $96, pushing its yield near 12% at the time. He argued that doubts about dividend payments could drive the price lower. He described a potential need to raise the coupon as a “death spiral.”

Strategy recently sold 32 BTC for $2.5 million to fund preferred dividends. The company still holds over 843,000 BTC on its balance sheet. Schiff suggested that the preferred structure remains fragile despite the large holdings.

Market Reaction Splits as Analysts Cite Demand Contraction

Crypto commentator Alex Marzell dismissed Schiff’s outlook on social media. He said that a move to $20K would only test his available cash. Meanwhile, Bitget CEO Gracey Chen said she plans to buy nearly $50,000. She stated that global money printing could support commodities, including Bitcoin and gold.

Chen also flagged short-term risks affecting the Bitcoin price. She cited CPI pressure, potential rate hikes, and selling by large holders. She mentioned possible sales from Strategy and Mt. Gox creditors. She also said heavy AI-related IPOs could drain market liquidity.

CryptoQuant research head Julio Moreno reported contracting Bitcoin demand. He said monthly demand has fallen by 232,000 BTC. He stated that weakening demand, not macro factors, drives the correction.

Bitfinex published a report describing a “slow bleed” phase. The report linked price weakness to distribution and fading conviction. Moreno’s assessment aligned with that view on demand contraction.

Federal investigators have opened a probe into former U.S. Representative George Santos after suspicious prediction market trades allegedly generated tens of thousands of dollars around President Donald Trump’s February State of the Union address.

NPR reported that the Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are investigating Santos after prediction market platform Kalshi detected unusual trading activity linked to a contract on whether he would attend the speech. According to NPR, Kalshi froze Santos’ account and referred the matter to regulators after reviewing the trades.

Based on NPR’s reporting, Santos allegedly wagered that he would not attend the event despite posting a video on X indicating that he planned to be present in the gallery. As President Trump delivered his address, Santos posted from an airport, after which the market’s odds on his attendance dropped sharply, NPR said.

People familiar with the matter told NPR that Kalshi has sought to interview Santos as part of its internal investigation. The report added that Santos has not participated in those interview requests. 

When contacted by the outlet, Santos responded, “Well, that’s news to me.”

Kalshi’s enforcement efforts face new test

Coming months after Kalshi disciplined political candidates for trading on their own races, the Santos case places renewed attention on how prediction markets police participants who may possess direct knowledge of an event’s outcome.

Back in April, Kalshi suspended three federal candidates after an internal review found they had placed bets on their own election contests. Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said at the time that candidates capable of influencing market outcomes violated exchange rules regardless of the size of their trades.

Those earlier cases resulted in exchange penalties but did not lead to referrals to the DOJ or the CFTC. NPR’s reporting suggests the Santos matter followed a different path, with Kalshi freezing the account and escalating the issue to regulators.

Kalshi has recently expanded measures intended to prevent market abuse. The company said it introduced screening tools designed to stop users from trading on events in which they are directly involved.

Prediction markets draw growing insider trading scrutiny

Attention from regulators has increased as several high-profile cases have raised questions about the use of nonpublic information in event-based contracts.

In April, federal prosecutors charged a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier with making roughly $409,881 from Polymarket bets tied to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Authorities alleged the trader possessed advance knowledge connected to the operation.

More recently, the DOJ and the CFTC charged Google software engineer Michele Spagnuolo with insider trading tied to prediction markets. Prosecutors alleged that Spagnuolo used confidential Google search ranking data to place $2.7 million in bets on Polymarket, generating approximately $1.2 million in profit before the information became public.

CFTC Enforcement Director David Miller said in May that insider trading laws apply to prediction markets and rejected arguments that event contracts exist outside existing market abuse rules.

Congress has also stepped up oversight. In May, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer launched an inquiry into insider trading safeguards at Kalshi and Polymarket, seeking information about monitoring systems and enforcement practices.

As scrutiny has intensified, both Kalshi and Polymarket have introduced additional compliance measures. 

Kalshi has focused on identifying participants with direct involvement in market events, while Polymarket has revised its rules, expanded surveillance programs, and hired blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis to support investigations into insider trading and market manipulation.

Zcash Foundation released Zebra 4.5.3 and Zebra 5.0.0 after engineers found and fixed a critical soundness bug in the Orchard Action circuit.

The foundation said Zebra 4.5.3 activated an emergency soft fork at mainnet block height 3,363,426. The release temporarily rejected transactions and blocks containing Orchard actions while engineers prepared a corrected circuit.

The soft fork went live at about 02:00 UTC on June 2 after an earlier coordination attempt faced patch deployment issues. The foundation said private coordination with miners and exchanges started on May 31 to reduce the chance of exploitation before public disclosure.

NU6.2 restores shielded transactions

Zebra 5.0.0 activated the NU6.2 hard fork at mainnet block height 3,364,600. The upgrade re-enabled Orchard actions with a corrected circuit and routed Orchard proofs to a new per-circuit verifying key. The release also marked the second security-driven protocol upgrade in Zcash history since 2016.

A hard fork was needed because a zero-knowledge proof circuit fix requires a new pinned verifying key. 

“We strongly urge all node operators to upgrade to Zebra 5.0.0 as soon as possible,” Zcash Foundation said.

No known exploit found

The bug was discovered on May 29 by independent security researcher Taylor Hornby during a protocol audit for Shielded Labs. ZODL engineers Daira-Emma Hopwood, Kris Nuttycombe and Jack Grigg confirmed the issue within hours and began work on a fix.

The foundation said the flaw could have allowed invalid state changes inside Orchard and possible double spending within that pool. It also said Zcash’s turnstile mechanism protected total ZEC supply, and “There is no evidence of unauthorized value creation.” The affected code included older halo2_gadgets, orchard and zcash_primitives releases, plus zcashd versions 5.0.0 through 6.12.3.

Why Orchard remains important

Orchard is Zcash’s newest shielded pool and a core part of its privacy system. It launched with NU5 in 2022 and uses Halo 2, which removed the need for a trusted setup. That design made Orchard a key part of Zcash’s current privacy roadmap.

Related market coverage has recently focused on rising Zcash shielded use. A recent report said about 30% of ZEC supply had moved into shielded pools, with Orchard holding 4.2 million ZEC and most of the recent growth.

The foundation said user privacy was not harmed during the incident. Sapling and transparent transactions also continued operating normally while Orchard actions remained paused.

Node operators now face the main task of upgrading to Zebra 5.0.0, rather than relying on older releases. Operators that stayed on an incorrect fork after NU6.2 may need to resync from scratch or restore from a backup made before activation.

Key Highlights

• GameStop stock jumped approximately 9–12% following announcement of historic Q1 net income, 14% revenue increase, and $2B buyback authorization
• Marvell Technology climbed more than 16%, continuing Tuesday’s remarkable 33% gain after Nvidia’s Jensen Huang hinted at potential $1 trillion market cap
• Intel stock advanced 6% as company executives highlighted robust data center CPU orders and rapidly scaling 18A chip manufacturing
• GitLab declined 6% following workforce reduction announcement impacting 14% of employees and withdrawal from 22 markets
• S&P 500 futures edged lower amid Middle East missile activity that reignited geopolitical worries and elevated crude prices

GameStop delivered what many consider its most impressive quarterly performance in years, reporting record-breaking Q1 financial results. The retailer achieved 14% revenue expansion, surpassed analyst projections for earnings per share, and maintained a formidable balance sheet with $9.7 billion in cash and equivalent holdings.

GameStop Corp., GME

Management announced authorization for a substantial $2 billion stock repurchase initiative extending through July 2029. Pre-market and early session trading witnessed share prices rising between 9% and 12%.

Chairman Ryan Cohen continues capturing market attention through his aggressive pursuit of eBay via a proposed $56 billion acquisition. While eBay’s leadership has turned down the approach, Cohen has signaled readiness for a proxy battle and outlined plans to leverage GameStop’s physical store network to enhance eBay’s e-commerce platform.

Marvell’s AI Momentum Continues Building

Marvell Technology maintained its extraordinary market surge, tacking on another 16% Wednesday after Tuesday’s spectacular 33% leap. The momentum traces back to remarks from Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, who floated the possibility of Marvell becoming the next technology company achieving a $1 trillion valuation.

Market enthusiasm has focused heavily on Marvell’s Teralynx T100 networking processor, engineered specifically for AI-focused data center deployments. Industry observers view the company as a critical provider of AI infrastructure components, particularly customized semiconductor offerings.

Intel similarly posted gains of approximately 6% after CFO David Zinsner highlighted exceptional demand patterns for data center processors. He characterized the company’s 18A chip as experiencing the fastest production ramp-up the company has witnessed in no less than five years, projecting that CPU demand could accelerate dramatically as artificial intelligence workloads proliferate.

Zinsner referenced transformation initiatives spearheaded by CEO Lip-Bu Tan, which include condensing management hierarchy from 12 levels to 6 and trimming total headcount beneath 80,000 personnel.

GitLab and Palo Alto Experience Declines

GitLab shares retreated approximately 6% following disclosure of a corporate reorganization eliminating roughly 14% of its employee base globally. The software development platform additionally announced plans to cease operations in 22 nations, contracting its international footprint by approximately 37%.

GitLab projects pre-tax restructuring expenses between $30 million and $35 million, with the majority concentrated in the second fiscal quarter of 2027.

Palo Alto Networks declined roughly 4% despite delivering impressive quarterly results. The cybersecurity leader exceeded expectations with adjusted earnings of $0.85 per share and posted revenue reaching $3 billion, representing 31% year-over-year growth.

Next-Generation Security Annual Recurring Revenue surged 60% to $8.1 billion. The selloff occurred even as management elevated full-year projections across all major financial categories.

Broader equity markets faced modest headwinds. S&P 500 futures retreated 0.08% as fresh missile attacks in the Middle East heightened anxieties about a faltering U.S.-Iran diplomatic agreement, driving crude oil quotations upward.

Bitcoin registered marginal gains, changing hands around $67,250. Gold futures slipped 0.65%, while the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 4.483%.

Bitcoin (BTC) overnight fell all the way back to $65,300, but has since bounced back to the $67,000 area shortly before the open of U.S. stocks.

A check of the charts shows this is the third time bitcoin has dropped to the mid-$60,000 range since its panicky February 6 bottom.

The previous two “re-tests” of that February 6 bottom — February 24 and March 29 — worked out for the bulls, with prices quickly recovering back above $70,000 and eventually to $83,000 by mid-May.

What happens on this third occasion remains to be seen.

U.S. stock index futures are little changed after another round of record highs on Tuesday. The price of oil and bond yields are both modestly higher.

It has been more than a year since President Trump signed the executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve on March 6, 2025, and the project is finally moving from rhetoric toward machinery. 

A White House report in July 2025 laid out the policy blueprint. In May 2026, Patrick Witt of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets called the latest progress a “breakthrough” and signaled concrete announcements were close. Two competing bills now sit in Congress: Senator Cynthia Lummis’s BITCOIN Act, which would have the Treasury begin actual purchases as soon as Q4 2026, and Representative Nick Begich’s rebranded American Reserve Modernization Act, which quietly dropped the headline one-million-Bitcoin purchase target and added a 20-year lockup instead. 

As the one-year mark of the blueprint approaches this July, the question is no longer whether the U.S. has a Bitcoin reserve. It already does, on paper. The question is whether July brings the thing that would make it real: a legal path to actually buy Bitcoin. This piece lays out what exists now, what is expected, and why the gap between the two is the whole story.

What already exists

The first thing to get straight is that the United States already has a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. It has had one since March 2025. What it does not have is a reserve that does what the headlines implied.

The March 6, 2025 executive order created two things: a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, capitalized with Bitcoin the government already owned through criminal and civil asset forfeiture, and a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile for the non-Bitcoin crypto the Treasury had seized. The order made one commitment crystal clear. The Bitcoin in the reserve “shall not be sold and shall be maintained as reserve assets.” That is a directive to hold, full stop.

What the order did not do was authorize the government to buy any Bitcoin with public money. It instructed the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries to develop “budget-neutral” strategies for acquiring more, meaning any purchases would have to be funded without costing taxpayers a cent, through forfeiture proceeds or penalties rather than appropriated dollars. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed in August 2025 that the U.S. “won’t be buying” additional Bitcoin in the near term. So the reserve, as it actually exists, is a rebranding of coins the government already held, with a promise not to sell them.

That is why critics were unimpressed at the launch. Charles Edwards of Capriole Investments called the reserve “a pig in lipstick,” arguing it just renamed existing holdings without any plan for fresh purchases. The “digital Fort Knox” rhetoric from White House crypto figures collided with the operational reality: Fort Knox holds gold the government actively acquired, while the SBR holds Bitcoin the government happened to seize from criminals. The gap between those two things is exactly what the upcoming work is supposed to close.

What the July 2025 blueprint actually said

The blueprint people are now waiting to see built on came out on July 30, 2025, when the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released its report after a 180-day review.

The working group, with Treasury Secretary Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and SEC Chair Paul Atkins as key members, produced what Atkins described as a blueprint to make America “the crypto capital of the world.” On the reserve specifically, the report confirmed the hold-don’t-sell policy and the budget-neutral acquisition framework. It also went broader, recommending that the SEC and CFTC use their existing authorities to enable crypto trading at the federal level and that agencies relaunch efforts on bank crypto custody, stablecoin reserves, and tokenization.

The report also surfaced an uncomfortable detail that complicates the entire reserve concept. While the government officially owns forfeited assets, seized assets are often earmarked to compensate victims of the hacks and scams they came from, or to flow into the general Treasury, rather than being available to lock away in a permanent reserve. In other words, a chunk of the Bitcoin people assume sits in the reserve may be legally spoken for. That accounting problem is part of why Witt said the priority was to “get our own house in order” before disclosing the size of the government’s holdings.

So the July 2025 blueprint set the policy direction clearly. What it could not do, because an executive order and a working-group report cannot do it, is create the legal authority to hold Bitcoin permanently and buy more. That requires Congress.

The two bills that would make it real

This is where the live action is, and where July matters. Two pieces of legislation would convert the reserve from a holding directive into a genuine accumulation program, and they take very different approaches.

The BITCOIN Act, championed in the Senate by Cynthia Lummis, is the maximalist version. It is the bill that originally carried the headline target of the U.S. acquiring one million Bitcoin over time. If it passes, analysts estimate the Treasury could begin its first official Bitcoin purchase as soon as Q4 2026, which would make the United States the first sovereign nation to actively accumulate Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset rather than simply holding what it seized. Lummis has been the most aggressive congressional voice for treating Bitcoin like a true strategic reserve on par with gold.

The American Reserve Modernization Act, or ARMA, is the House version, introduced by Nick Begich of Alaska with Democrat Jared Golden of Maine as co-lead. The rename from Begich’s earlier version was a deliberate move to broaden bipartisan appeal, and the substance shifted too. ARMA quietly dropped the one-million-Bitcoin purchase target that anchored the BITCOIN Act. In its place it added a hard 20-year lockup, requiring all Bitcoin deposited into the reserve to sit untouched for at least two decades, barring the government from “selling, swapping, auctioning, encumbering, or otherwise disposing of” it for any reason.

The UK’s financial watchdog has warned Premier League Football clubs that they could be exposed to potential money laundering violations if they continue to partner with unauthorised crypto firms.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) today warned all UK football clubs, while noting that it was mainly writing to clubs in the country’s top division signing sponsorship deals with unregistered financial firms.

It claimed, “These unauthorised firms may be breaching UK financial services laws by providing financial services in the UK without authorisation. Fans using these firms risk losing all their money.”

Among the clubs engaged in sponsorships with unauthorised crypto firms are Manchester City, which is partnered with Socios, OKX, and Axi.

Chelsea, meanwhile, is partnered with crypto exchange BingX while Newcastle United is partnered with VT Markets, a crypto firm currently on the FCA’s warning list.