The Bitcoin treasury company space is becoming more divided between firms with actual financial strategies and those leaning more on promotion, according to one industry executive.

“I think a lot of them don’t have the right capital structure, right. They don’t have the ability to actually deploy Bitcoin,” Sean Bill — co-founder of Bitcoin treasury company BSTR, alongside Adam Back  — said during an interview with Cointelegraph published to YouTube on Tuesday.

“They’re really planning on having Bitcoin do all the talking for them,” Bill said. “I do think that you have a lot of carnival barkers in this space,” Bill said.

Sean Bill spoke to Cointelegraph at BitcoinVegas. Source: Cointelegraph

Bill said that works well to an extent if a company has “cheap and easy access to leverage in the marketplace.” If not, companies must engage in other activities to add value beyond just holding Bitcoin, Bill explained. “Otherwise, investors will go to an ETF, you know, and just use a simple product like that, Bill said.

Bitcoin treasury companies have been one of the most talked-about narratives of the cycle, but questions have lingered over whether the sector is forming a bubble. While corporate Bitcoin treasuries have helped drive demand, they also introduce systemic risks. In a June 3, 2025, note to investors, Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered Bank, said that a sharp price drop could trigger significant liquidations, while regulatory and market maturation may erode the premium for Bitcoin proxy stocks.

Related: Bitcoin plums new six-week lows as analyst eyes BTC price dip ‘end’ at $72K

There are 198 public companies collectively holding around 1.25 million Bitcoin, according to BitcoinTreasuries data. Michael Saylor’s Strategy is the largest public corporate holder, with a treasury of 843,738 Bitcoin.

On Wednesday, Cointelegraph reported that Bitcoin treasury company Nakamoto (NAKA) stock is down by about 67% year-to-date (YTD) and by more than 99% since its May 2025 peak of about $34 per share, reaching a low of about $0.16 per share in April before the reverse stock split on Friday.

Nasdaq warned the company in December that its shares would be delisted after trading below $1 for at least 30 consecutive days, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.

Magazine: HYPE chases $100 target, ETH could dump below $1800: Market Moves

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju warns the Bitcoin bear market could extend into early 2027, based on on-chain PnL data.

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju posted on X this week warning that Bitcoin’s current downturn mirrors the extended bear cycles of 2014, 2018, and 2022, and may not resolve until early 2027.

“Once profit-taking cascades, Bitcoin investors’ PnL typically falls for about 18 months,” Ju wrote. “Since the trend change started in October 2025, the bear market could last until early 2027. The trend only changes when unrealized profits rise and realized profits fall. We’re not there yet.”

What the PnL Index shows

Ju’s analysis is grounded in CryptoQuant’s PnL Index Signal, a 365-day moving average that tracks investor profitability cycles. The indicator peaked in late 2025 in a pattern closely matching the tops recorded before the prolonged bear phases of 2014, 2018, and 2022. Each of those periods saw steep sustained declines once the signal rolled over from its peak.

Bitcoin was trading near $73,000 at the time of the post, down roughly 30% from its 2025 highs, amid rising macroeconomic pressure from elevated US Treasury yields and broader risk-off sentiment across markets. As crypto.news reported, bearish social commentary on Bitcoin hit its highest level in 2026 earlier in April as spot demand weakened.

The reversal signal Ju describes requires a specific combination that has not yet materialised: unrealized profit margins must begin rising while realised profits fall simultaneously, indicating that selling pressure is exhausting itself and buyers are regaining control. Until that pattern appears, Ju views the bear case as intact.

Not all analysts share the extended timeline. VanEck CEO Jan van Eck told CNBC earlier this year that Bitcoin may be forming a cycle bottom, pointing to options market stabilisation and slowing long-term holder selling as early constructive signs. Coinbase noted in its April 2026 monthly report that price support may emerge between May and June, potentially setting up a stronger third quarter.

How Bitcoin recovers from this level

For a sustained recovery, Ju flagged two critical demand drivers: renewed inflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs and increased activity from over-the-counter institutional desks, both of which have slowed in recent months. ETF flows have remained positive but at a normalised pace relative to the surge seen in early 2025.

On-chain data from CryptoQuant shows that capital inflows into Bitcoin continue to rise, but market capitalisation has not responded proportionally. That divergence, where money enters the market but prices stagnate or decline, is the defining signature of a bear market in Ju’s framework.

Bitcoin’s current price is consolidating near the $73,000 level, with CoinGlass identifying $74,200 and $74,500 as key resistance zones where large sell orders are clustered. The Clarity Act’s potential passage remains one of the most cited institutional catalysts that analysts believe could shift sentiment, though Ju’s PnL model operates independently of policy timelines.

The United States has seized roughly $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday, adding that some of the wallet owners may not yet know the funds are gone.

“I believe that we have seized about a billion dollars of their crypto,” Bessent said while speaking at the Reagan National Economic Forum. “Just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now and not have realized that their wallet had been grabbed,” he added.

Bessent said the seizures are part of the US financial pressure campaign against Iran, known as Operation Economic Fury. Launched in March 2025, the operation has targeted Iranian assets across multiple fronts, seizing cryptocurrency, freezing bank accounts and working with European allies to confiscate properties.

Scott Bessent at the Reagan National Economic Forum. Source: YouTube

“I think between five and a half to six weeks of an incredibly successful military campaign and Operation Economic Fury, where we have really cut them off. They are at the end of their Tether now financially,” he said.

Related: Crypto markets shed $80B after fresh US strikes on Iran

Iran’s financial state is dire

The Treasury secretary said the regime had been siphoning $400 to $500 million a month and dividing the proceeds among roughly 80 leaders before the US intervened. He said inflation in Iran has likely surpassed 200%, food vouchers are being distributed, the internet has been shut down and 40 to 50% of Iranian troops are not getting paid.

Bessent also addressed ongoing negotiations with Iran, noting the complexity of dealing with a fractured leadership structure following US and Israeli strikes on senior regime figures.

The newly disclosed $1 billion figure is roughly double the $500 million in Iranian cryptocurrency assets the Treasury Department announced it had seized in late April, and much higher than the $344 million in seized crypto assets disclosed earlier in the month.

Related: Bitcoin bounces as Trump prepares to announce ‘negotiated’ Iran deal

Iran eyes Bitcoin-powered insurance scheme for Hormuz

As Cointelegraph reported, Iran is weighing a plan to monetize control of the Strait of Hormuz through a Bitcoin-based insurance model. A state document cited by Fars News Agency, an outlet closely affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, outlined a platform called “Hormuz Safe,” which would sell digital marine insurance paid in Bitcoin and settled on the blockchain, potentially generating over $10 billion in revenue for the country.

In early April, a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union said certain ships would be able to pass through the strait provided that they pay a tariff of $1 per barrel of oil in Bitcoin.

Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs — Mid-2026

Binance named Genius Terminal its 65th HODLer Airdrop, giving 10 million GENIUS tokens to qualifying BNB holders.

Binance announced Genius Terminal as the 65th project on its HODLer Airdrop program, continuing its pattern of rewarding loyal BNB holders with tokens from projects ahead of their exchange listing.

The snapshot window for eligibility ran from May 11 to May 13, 2026. Only BNB subscribed to Binance’s Simple Earn or On-Chain Yields products during that three-day period qualifies, with allocations distributed proportionally based on each user’s BNB balance. Rewards were sent to eligible users’ Spot Accounts within five hours of the announcement.

Payouts.com co-founders say the future of agent payments combines stablecoin rails with programmable control layers built for enterprise trust.

Payouts.com co-founders Leor Ceder and Barak Hirchson say the next wave of AI agent commerce runs on stablecoin rails, and on the programmable control layer built on top of them. In their view, wallets are a necessary foundation, but the durable enterprise value sits in what governs them.

The position adds a critical dimension to the wallet-led narrative dominating agent payments today. Juniper Research forecasts cross-border B2B stablecoin payments will hit $5 trillion by 2035, up from $13.4 billion in 2026, with B2B taking 85% of total stablecoin transaction value.

Where stablecoins win and where smart rail selection matters

Hirchson, Payouts.com’s chief solutions officer, said rail selection is decided by the recipient: country, payment method, urgency, amount, and cost all factor in. Stablecoins win cleanly in two scenarios.

The first is cross-border versus SWIFT, where wire fees and FX spreads can eat 4 to 5% of a transaction. The second is machine-to-API micropayments, where the x402 standard already routes pay-per-call API invoices in stablecoin. Crypto.news reported that AI agents have settled $73 million across 176 million transactions on crypto rails, with USDC handling 98.6%.

“PIX clears in under ten seconds in Brazil for free, UPI handles hundreds of millions of transactions a day in India at near-zero cost,” Hirchson said. “The agents that scale are the ones that can pick the right rail per transaction, not the ones locked into a single rail based on what their limited wallet supports.”

The five non-negotiable agent controls

Hirchson laid out five controls he said are non-negotiable before companies let agents transact autonomously: scoped credentials, hard spend caps enforced at the protocol level, cryptographically signed mandates, idempotency at the payment layer, and a fail-closed posture.

“This is what programmable spending actually means. You define the envelope once, the infrastructure enforces it forever, and the agent operates freely inside it,” he said. “Is the industry building these fast enough? Not uniformly.”

Some wallets shipped recently include hard caps and signed mandates, he said. Others ship with an API key and a balance, which he called the worst-case configuration for a compromised key.

What the agent payment stack looks like by 2027

Ceder said the interesting question by May 2027 will not be which stablecoin wins. It will be programmability: how granularly enterprises can define what an agent is allowed to do, how reliably that policy is enforced, and how cleanly compliance can be proven after the fact.

“The wallet wars happening right now will look the way the browser wars look in retrospect: necessary, formative, and not where the durable value got captured,” Ceder said. The compliance layer must be built into the infrastructure rather than the agent, with every payment passing a cascade of principal, account and jurisdiction checks before any money moves.

Coinbase and Cloudflare have built the x402 protocol into a fast-growing settlement rail for agents, with the standard recently joining the Linux Foundation. AWS embedded x402 into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments earlier this month, while Solana and Google launched Pay.sh as a parallel route.

For Payouts.com, the bet is that the control layer above those rails is where enterprise spend will land. The agent stays autonomous. The envelope around it does not move.

Senator Cynthia Lummis says the Clarity Act must pass this Congress or the next legislative window opens in 2030.

Senator Cynthia Lummis issued a stark warning on May 29, telling lawmakers the current Congress represents the final realistic window to pass comprehensive digital asset legislation before a four-year freeze sets in.

In a post on X, the Wyoming senator wrote: “The next window for digital asset legislation after this Congress is likely 2030. Until then, developers remain exposed with no legal protections, and law enforcement remains without the tools to hold bad actors accountable. The Clarity Act solves both.”

Why Lummis says 2030 is the fallback

The Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act with a 15 to 9 bipartisan vote on May 14, marking real progress after months of stalls over stablecoin yield disputes. A full Senate floor vote is a different calculation, with November 2026 midterm elections compressing the available calendar to weeks.

Lummis has argued the current moment is defined by a political alignment that rarely holds in Washington: the House passed the Clarity Act 294 to 134, the Senate Agriculture Committee has cleared its version, and the White House under Trump has publicly backed it as a national priority. A House flip after midterms, or a shift in Senate committee composition, could disassemble that alignment entirely and force the industry to start over under a new Congress with different priorities.

Political forecasts add weight to that concern. Several analysts expect Republicans to lose seats in November, which would push digital asset regulation down the Democratic agenda. Polymarket currently prices Clarity Act passage in 2026 at roughly 58%, a figure that reflects both the bill’s progress and the obstacles ahead.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins offered a counterpoint, telling Fox Business he has confidence Congress will pass the bill and that President Trump will sign it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also pressed for urgency, warning that regulatory ambiguity has already driven crypto development toward Abu Dhabi and Singapore.

What a delay actually costs

The Clarity Act would establish formal definitions for digital assets and divide oversight between the SEC and CFTC based on each asset’s classification. Without it, the SEC continues applying the Howey test case by case, with no binding rules or procedural protections for the sector.

As crypto.news reported, stablecoin yield provisions remain one of the most contested flashpoints, alongside ethics language barring government officials from personally benefiting from crypto holdings. Both issues must clear before the bill reaches Trump’s desk.

Lummis, who announced she will not seek a second Senate term, has framed the stakes in direct terms. Without the Clarity Act, she says American developers remain targets for prosecution simply for publishing code. The Senate Banking Committee’s approval was a milestone, but the floor vote, reconciliation with the House version, and the presidential signature all remain ahead. Lummis’s warning is that the calendar for all three is narrowing fast.