Crypto World
Its partners just built a replacement
On June 30, more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, Google, and Circle’s most important ally, Coinbase, unveiled a stablecoin designed to give away the exact revenue stream Circle lives on. CRCL cratered 17% in a day and is down nearly 40% on the month. This is the story of how a moat made of partnerships gets drained by the partners.
Summary
- More than 140 major firms backed Open USD, a shared-economics stablecoin that directly challenges Circle’s reserve-yield business model.
- Circle’s stock plunged after the launch, as investors priced in the risk of partners capturing stablecoin reserve income themselves.
- Circle still has defenses in regulation, liquidity, and trust, but OUSD could pressure its margins and partner leverage.
The most dangerous sentence in Circle’s business model was always hiding in plain sight, in its own filings: nearly all of the company’s revenue comes from interest earned on the reserves backing USDC. Not fees. Not technology. Interest. Circle holds tens of billions of dollars of customer money, parks it in United States Treasuries, and keeps the yield, a business so profitable and so simple that the only real question was how long the companies generating that float would let someone else collect it.
On June 30, the answer arrived. A consortium of more than 140 companies announced Open USD, a dollar stablecoin with free minting and redemption, shared governance, and, most importantly, reserve income distributed back to the participants instead of retained by an issuer. The backer list reads like the org chart of global payments: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and Stripe from the card and processing world; BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, BBVA, Mizuho, U.S. Bank, and DBS from asset management and banking; Google, Samsung, IBM, and Shopify from technology; and Coinbase, Ripple, OKX, Bybit, Gemini, Fireblocks, Anchorage Digital, MetaMask, Aave, Solana Labs, and Polygon from crypto.
The market read the announcement correctly and instantly. Circle’s stock fell as much as 18% intraday and closed down 17.55% at $62.63, its worst day since March, extending the monthly drawdown to 39%. The launch was the top trending story in crypto by nightfall, and the one-line verdicts wrote themselves: Circle’s closest partners had gathered in a room and designed its replacement.
The stock’s full 2026 chart shows a company the market keeps re-underwriting shock by shock. The March 20% plunge came on a draft proposal threatening the yield model from the regulatory side; June’s came from the commercial side; between them, the shares have swung on every headline touching reserve economics, because a business this concentrated converts every threat to one revenue line into a threat to the whole valuation. Wall Street’s consensus target near $120, roughly 91% above the post-crash price, is less a disagreement about the facts than about the timeline: the analysts are pricing the years OUSD needs to actually ship and scale, while the tape prices the strategic position, which changed in an afternoon.
The reality is more layered than the verdict, and more interesting. Here is how the stablecoin business actually works, why the consortium model attacks it at the load-bearing wall, and what Circle can still do about it.
A beautiful business with one assumption
Circle’s economics are worth spelling out, because they explain both the 91% analyst upside targets before the announcement and the 17% single-day repricing after it.
USDC circulates around $73 billion. Circle invests the reserves behind those tokens in short-term Treasuries and cash equivalents, and at prevailing rates that float generates several billion dollars a year, roughly 96% of company revenue. The model has effectively no credit risk, no inventory, and no marginal cost per dollar of growth. What it has instead is a single giant assumption: that the businesses and users who hold USDC will keep letting Circle pocket the yield on their money.
Defending that assumption is expensive, and the expense is the tell. Circle paid Coinbase $908 million in a single recent year as a distribution fee for carrying USDC, a payment that is best understood as yield-sharing under a different name, negotiated bilaterally with the one partner large enough to demand it. Every other participant in the USDC economy, the fintechs settling on it, the exchanges quoting it, the merchants accepting it, generated float for Circle and received nothing. The consortium’s founding insight is simply that the Coinbase deal should be everyone’s deal, structurally, by default.
The history rhymes hard enough to sting. USDC itself began life inside a consortium, the Centre venture that Circle and Coinbase governed jointly until 2023, when the structure dissolved, Circle bought out its partner, and shared governance gave way to a single issuer with a paid distributor. Our explainer on consortium stablecoins covers that arc in full, and the short version is uncomfortable for the incumbent: the industry tried single-issuer economics, watched the issuer keep the money, and has now come back for the original model with 70 times as many partners.
What Open USD actually is
Strip the launch-day theater and the product has 5 defining features.
It is issued by an independent operator, Open Standard, led by Zach Abrams, whose stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge was acquired by Stripe in 2024, which makes the venture a Stripe alumni project with the parent’s full weight behind it. Stripe has already committed to making OUSD the base stablecoin across its commerce ecosystem.
It is free at the point of use. Businesses mint and redeem with no fees and no volume limits, removing the toll booths that large-scale users complain about with incumbent issuers.
It shares the money. Reserve income flows back to participating partners after a management fee, governed by a board drawn from the membership. This is the feature that hit Circle’s stock, because it converts every consortium member from a customer of stablecoin issuers into a shareholder of one.
It launches natively on Solana later this year, with the distribution map already sketched by the membership: MetaMask at the wallet layer, Aave in lending, Fireblocks and Anchorage in custody, Shopify and Mercado Pago at the merchant edge, and the card networks wherever they decide interoperability suits them.
And it is aimed at enterprise treasury and merchant payments first, the exact segments where stablecoins have been compounding fastest and where Ripple’s decision to join the consortium made strategic sense for RLUSD, since a shared standard grows the settlement pie that every issuer’s adjacent businesses feed on.
The consortium is not even alone in its category. The Paxos-led Global Dollar Network has run the shared-economics playbook with Robinhood, Kraken, and Galaxy since 2024, and European banks are building the euro-denominated Qivalis venture on the same logic. The GENIUS Act‘s 2025 passage is the common enabler: once federal law defined what a compliant dollar stablecoin is, the risk of issuing one collapsed, and the strategic question flipped from whether regulated institutions should touch stablecoins to why they would hand the float to a third party.
The spectator with the biggest stake
Any Circle analysis that stops at OUSD misses the largest player in the market, who spent June 30 doing what it always does: nothing visible, profitably.
Tether’s USDT circulates at more than double USDC’s size, and its dominance rests on a base the consortium barely touches: offshore exchange liquidity, emerging-market dollar demand, and the informal settlement flows where compliance surface area is a cost, not a feature. The consortium’s enterprise-treasury-and-merchant thesis attacks Circle’s home market precisely because that is the market where its members live, which leaves the incumbent conveniently out of the crossfire.
Post-GENIUS market share data already showed the shape of the fight: Tether’s share drifted from 62% to 59% since the act passed while Circle’s climbed from 19% to about 24%, meaning the regulated segment was growing at the offshore leader’s relative expense. OUSD’s arrival splits the regulated segment’s future growth without touching the offshore base at all.
The regulatory chessboard adds pieces weekly. Banks outside the consortium responded to the launch by asking regulators for tighter oversight of the entire category, a move that reads as incumbents calling the referee on other incumbents. Europe’s MiCA regime, having just shown its teeth on exchange licensing, applies its own e-money rules to stablecoins and has already reshaped which tokens can circulate in the bloc, with Tether conceding ground there while Circle’s EU authorization became a genuine asset. And the same United States framework that made OUSD possible constrains it: the GENIUS Act’s prohibition on paying yield directly to retail holders is why the consortium’s revenue sharing flows to member businesses instead of end users, a design detail that keeps the product enterprise-shaped and leaves the consumer yield question, the truly disruptive one, for another regulatory fight on another day.
The DeFi layer chooses quietly
One constituency will vote on this war earlier than the treasurers and the regulators: decentralized finance, where the default settlement asset is chosen by liquidity gravity, integration inertia, and a handful of protocol governance decisions.
USDC’s position in DeFi took years to compound. It is the reserve asset of major lending markets, half of the deepest trading pairs on every serious venue, and the collateral standard that risk frameworks were written around. That inertia is real protection: migrating a lending market’s base asset is a governance fight, an oracle change, and a liquidity bootstrap all at once, and protocols do not undertake it for a marginally better logo. But the consortium roster shows the attack vector, because Aave, MetaMask, Solana Labs, and Polygon are members. The protocols and platforms that decide DeFi defaults are, in several key cases, now economically aligned with the challenger, and OUSD launching natively on Solana drops it into the ecosystem where new-asset liquidity bootstraps fastest.
The adjacent battleground is machine payments, the fastest-growing new demand source for dollars on-chain. USDC is currently the default settlement asset of the x402 agentic payments stack, an incumbency worth compounding volumes as autonomous agent commerce scales. But the consortium overlaps suspiciously well with that stack’s infrastructure: Stripe co-authored the machine payments standards, Google and the card networks sit in both stories, and a consortium coin with zero mint and redeem friction is engineered for exactly the high-frequency, low-margin flows agents generate. If the agent economy’s plumbing quietly swaps its default dollar, Circle loses the growth segment before the incumbency ever shows up in a market share chart.
The bear case for Circle, steelmanned
The market’s 17% answer contains a specific chain of logic, and it is worth walking honestly.
The consortium members control distribution, and distribution is the whole game in a commodity product. A dollar token is a dollar token; what differs is where it is accepted, quoted, and defaulted. Stripe alone processed $1.9 trillion in payments last year. Shopify fronts millions of merchants. Coinbase decides what tens of millions of retail users see first. When the companies that own those surfaces share in OUSD’s economics, every integration decision tilts one way, not through conspiracy but through arithmetic.
The Coinbase position is the sharpest edge. Circle’s largest distribution partner, the recipient of that $908 million annual payment, is a founding member of the rival. Coinbase’s implicit calculation, that a governance seat and revenue share in a coin running through its own ecosystem beats collecting fees as Circle’s middleman, is exactly the calculation every other large USDC holder will now run. Even if Coinbase never demotes USDC, the negotiating leverage in every future renewal just changed hands.
And the margin math bites even in the scenarios where Circle keeps its users. If OUSD’s default yield-sharing forces Circle to extend Coinbase-style economics across its partner base to defend circulation, revenue compresses without a single dollar of USDC leaving. A company with 96% of revenue from one stream does not need to lose the stream to be repriced. It only needs to lose pricing power over it, and June 30 was the day pricing power visibly moved to the other side of the table.
The precedent from adjacent markets is not comforting either. Interchange, card processing, and index funds all followed the same arc: a profitable intermediary, a coalition of its largest customers, and a shared-ownership alternative that turned margin into member rebates. Payments infrastructure trends toward mutualization once the customers are big enough to build their own, and 140 of them just did.
The bull case the selloff ignored
The counterarguments are real, which is why the stock clawed back part of the loss by Thursday and why Clear Street and KeyBanc both called the plunge overdone.
Start with the oldest lesson in consortium history, the one sitting in Circle’s own past: shared governance is easy to announce and brutal to operate. Centre could not align two partners; Open Standard proposes to align 140, including direct competitors, across banking, cards, tech, and crypto, with a product that has not launched, on a timeline of later this year. Visa and Mastercard sitting on the same board as Aave and Solana Labs is a press release until the first hard decision about chain support, freeze policies, or fee changes, and the graveyard of bank consortia is full of ventures that died at exactly that meeting.
Circle’s actual moat may also be misidentified. USDC’s advantage was never that partners lacked alternatives; it was regulatory surface area. Circle holds licenses and registrations across the United States and Europe, survived a decade of scrutiny, kept its peg through the 2023 banking crisis, and is the counterparty compliance departments have already approved. Europe’s MiCA enforcement just showed what that is worth, locking the world’s largest exchange out of an entire continent for compliance history, and a not-yet-launched consortium coin starts that decade-long accumulation from 0. Enterprise treasurers do not move to a token because its governance is philosophically nicer. They move when it is approved, liquid, and boring, and USDC currently owns boring.
The market-size argument does the rest of the bullish work. Stablecoins circulate above $300 billion today, with Citi projecting $4 trillion by 2030 and BNY sketching $1.5 trillion as a conservative case. In a market growing that fast, USDC’s share, which climbed from 19% to around 24% since the GENIUS Act while Tether’s slipped from 62% to 59%, can shrink relatively while growing absolutely, which is precisely how Jeremy Allaire framed his response. Competition validating the category is a real phenomenon; ask any index fund pioneer how terminal the arrival of rivals proved.
There is also a stickiness argument hiding in the float itself. Stablecoin balances are not portfolio allocations that rebalance on a committee vote; they are working capital embedded in exchange accounts, smart contracts, payment flows, and treasury operations, each with its own migration cost. USDC’s $73 billion is distributed across millions of holders and thousands of integrations, and history says such bases erode slowly even under direct assault: Tether has survived a decade of existential headlines with its dominance dented, not broken, because the marginal holder’s laziness is the strongest force in payments. OUSD must not merely exist and pay better; it must be worth the operational work of switching, integration by integration, and the burden of proof sits with the challenger for years.
And Tether looms over the whole fight as the unbothered variable. OUSD’s enterprise-and-merchant focus attacks Circle’s home turf, not the offshore, trading, and emerging-market flows where the market leader, at more than double USDC’s circulation, actually lives. It is entirely possible the consortium’s main casualty is the number-two coin’s growth rate while number one watches from a distance.
Circle’s option tree
The defense does not have to be passive, and Circle’s realistic moves sort into 4 branches, each with a cost.
Match the economics. Extending Coinbase-grade revenue sharing across the partner base is the direct counter, and the most expensive: it concedes the model, compresses the margin that justifies the stock’s multiple, and converts Circle from toll collector to utility overnight. The consolation is that a utility with USDC’s regulatory footprint and liquidity is still a formidable business, just a differently valued one. The market spent June 30 pricing exactly this branch.
Sell what the consortium cannot ship. Circle’s decade of licenses, audits, banking relationships, and crisis-tested redemption infrastructure is not replicable by press release, and the company’s cleanest play is to weaponize the gap: court the treasurers, banks, and regulated funds for whom counterparty diligence is the product, while OUSD spends its first years earning the approvals USDC already holds. Every quarter the consortium’s launch slips, this branch compounds.
Climb the stack. Circle’s own network buildout, including the Arc chain project, follows the same logic driving every player in the infrastructure race: if issuance economics commoditize, own the settlement layer where the volume clears and charge there instead. It is the identical conclusion Stripe, Coinbase, and Robinhood reached about their own businesses, and it puts Circle in the corporate chain land grab as a competitor instead of a casualty.
Become the acquirer or the acquired. A $60-something CRCL with the category’s best regulatory position is simultaneously a consolidation vehicle and a target, and the same banks lobbying against the consortium have balance sheets that could decide the question. Stranger outcomes have printed in payments; the interchange wars ended with the networks owning pieces of their disruptors.
None of the branches is comfortable, and the honest read is that Circle’s management now has to pick among them under a deadline the consortium set. That is what June 30 actually changed: not the revenue, which is intact, but the initiative, which is gone.
What to watch as the war starts
The battle turns operational from here, and the checkpoints are concrete. Watch whether OUSD ships this year at all, because consortium timelines slip as a rule. Watch the first anchor migrations, especially anything Stripe or Shopify announces about defaults, since defaults move float in ways press releases do not. Watch Circle’s counter-moves: expanded revenue-sharing, new distribution deals, and progress on its own network ambitions, including the infrastructure race where Stripe’s Tempo chain already showed how seriously the payments giants take owning the rails. Watch the banks outside the consortium, who greeted the launch by asking regulators for tighter oversight, a reminder that the incumbents have moves of their own. And watch the Coinbase relationship above all, because the day that renewal changes is the day the thesis resolves.
The challenger has its own proof burden, and it is heavier than launch-day coverage implied. OUSD must clear the same licensing gauntlet in every jurisdiction where its members want to use it, keep a peg through its first crisis, build redemption infrastructure that works at institutional scale on the worst day of the year, and do all of it while a 140-member board negotiates every consequential decision. Circle has already paid those tuition bills; the consortium’s members have only agreed to split the check. Markets price announcements instantly and operations slowly, which is exactly why the definitive verdict on June 30 will not arrive until OUSD survives something.
The deepest reading of June 30 is not that Circle dies. It is that the era of the stablecoin issuer as a standalone toll collector just ended, on a Tuesday, by consensus of everyone who pays the tolls. Circle built the proof that a regulated digital dollar could work at scale, and the reward for proving it is 140 companies deciding the model is too good to leave to one company. Being replaced by your own success story is a very specific kind of defeat, and it is also, sometimes, survivable. Circle has 4 to 6 months before its replacement takes its first breath. What it does with them decides whether June 30 was the day the moat drained, or just the day everyone finally saw how much water was in it.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset markets are volatile, and you can lose your entire investment. Always do your own research. Information current as of July 4, 2026.
SpaceX earnings land Tuesday, August 4, marking the first since the company went public. The June listing already paid Morgan Stanley bankers about $100 million in fees.
That fee was the small part. IPOs led by SpaceX sent more than $74 billion to the bank’s wealth arm. Now SpaceX has to show the numbers behind it.
How the SpaceX IPO Built Morgan Stanley’s $10 Trillion Quarter
SpaceX sold 555,555,555 shares at $135 each on June 11. That raised $75 billion. It is the biggest IPO ever, more than double the $29.4 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019.
Ten banks ran the deal. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan led them. They all shared the fee pool.
Only one of those banks also ran SpaceX employee stock plans. That is what set Morgan Stanley apart.
Here is why it matters. When staff get rich on IPO day, the money lands wherever their stock plan already lives.
Morgan Stanley’s wealth arm took in $148.1 billion of new client money last quarter. A year ago the figure was $59.2 billion.
Just over half came from IPOs of stock plan clients, its earnings release shows. That is more than $74 billion in three months. Bloomberg reported a large share came from SpaceX.
The bank calls this unit Workplace. It bought Solium Capital in 2019 and E*Trade in 2020 to build it. Both deals pushed the firm deeper into steady fee income after the 2008 crisis.
Workplace now serves over half the S&P 500. It also covers about 70% of the 100 biggest private companies worth more than $1 billion. Total client assets passed $10 trillion.
Jed Finn runs Morgan Stanley’s wealth business. He sees the IPO as a start, not a payday.
“It would be a mistake to think about the IPO as a one-off event for asset capture. These are opportunities with multiple phases, with shares that get unlocked and new shares issued.”
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Here is the catch. Most of that money is not earning fees yet.
Morgan Stanley charges a fee once clients move cash into managed accounts. Only 26% of the new money went that way last quarter. A year earlier it was 72%.
Bloomberg puts the yearly revenue from SpaceX-linked money above $100 million. Getting it depends on shares that are still locked.
What SpaceX Earnings Have to Prove on August 4
Results come after the close on Tuesday. Analysts expect a loss of 26 cents a share. Nine of them filed forecasts, per Zacks.
This is the first real look inside the business. Investors want launch numbers, Starlink revenue, and the split between government and commercial work.
The stock has not waited. SPCX closed at $108.37 on July 31. That is 20% below the $135 offer price and 33% below its $161 first-day close. It hit a record low last week.
Contracts have not helped either. Shares still fell after SpaceX won $1.6 billion in Space Force launch work through 2027.
Then comes August 6. About 911.5 million locked shares become free to sell, two trading days after earnings.
At Friday’s price that is close to $99 billion of stock. It is more than the IPO itself raised. Meta’s 2012 unlock is the closest thing to a warning here.
Morgan Stanley has already been paid. It raised its dividend 15 cents to $1.15 and approved $20 billion in share buybacks. SpaceX investors are still waiting.
The post SpaceX IPO Paid Wall Street $100 Million: Will It’s First Earnings Repay Investors? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez is no longer employed by the federal government after being placed on unpaid leave over allegations that he used insider knowledge to bet on President Donald Trump’s speeches, according to another official.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said that Perez had left his government job but did not say whether he resigned or was fired.
Inside the Allegations
The White House had suspended Perez earlier this month following an ABC News report that alleged he made more than $100,000 through bets on the online prediction market Kalshi. The report said the wagers were based on advance knowledge of what Trump would say during major speeches, including the State of the Union address earlier this year.
The allegations drew a sharp response from the White House. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the reported insider trading as “deeply unfortunate and, frankly, a disgrace.” Kalshi also responded after the report was published.
Robert Denault, the company’s lawyer and head of enforcement, said in a post on X that its surveillance team detected the trades, investigated them, and referred the matter to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Denault’s statement did not identify Perez by name.
Legal Battles
Kalshi has faced legal hurdles this year in Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, and Washington. At the same time, it has also tightened its own rules. In April, the prediction market suspended three political candidates for betting on elections they were contesting after determining that the trades amounted to political insider trading under its CFTC-approved rules.
An insider trading case on Polymarket also surfaced that same month. Federal prosecutors charged US soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke with allegedly betting on whether former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power. Authorities said Van Dyke, who worked on the operation targeting Maduro, made about $400,000 from the trades.
The legal battle over prediction markets has also taken a new turn. This week, a federal judge temporarily blocked Minnesota from enforcing a new law that would have banned prediction markets in the state. The ruling gave a temporary win to Kalshi, Polymarket, and the CFTC as the case moves forward.
Judge Katherine Menendez said the law is likely preempted by the federal Commodity Exchange Act because many event contracts may qualify as federally regulated swaps. The law, signed by Governor Tim Walz in May, was set to take effect on Saturday. The judge said the injunction could later be narrowed if needed.
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President Donald Trump reshared a White House post on Sunday about restarting California’s Sable Pipeline. The same day, OPEC+ agreed to pump more oil from September.
Both moves add oil to the market. Neither has helped drivers yet. Californians paid $5.49 a gallon in late July, the highest price in the country.
Why Trump Revived a March Order Now
Gas is expensive, and Trump knows it.
US drivers paid about $4.10 a gallon in the week to July 27, federal data shows. That is 97 cents more than a year ago.
In June, Trump told fuel retailers to cut prices to $2.50. They have not.
California hurts most at $5.49 a gallon. That is roughly $1.39 above the national average, which makes the state an obvious target.
On March 13, Trump signed an order giving Energy Secretary Chris Wright emergency powers. The law behind it, the Defense Production Act, lets Washington direct private companies during a crisis.
Wright told Sable Offshore Corp. to reopen the Santa Ynez Pipeline. It had sat unused since a 2015 oil spill.
Oil flowed the next day. Sable aimed to sell about 50,000 barrels daily from April 1, a company filing shows. The line can carry 200,000.
Courts keep pushing back. On June 17, a California appeals court blocked Sable’s coastal work, backing state regulators in a published opinion.
OPEC+ Supply Hike Opens One Tap, Not All
Seven countries agreed to pump 188,000 more barrels a day from September. Saudi Arabia and Russia account for most of that, at about 62,000 barrels each.
The move finishes one round of cuts. The group had held back 1.65 million barrels a day since April 2023. That batch is now fully back.
A second cut from November 2023 stays in place. So the taps are not fully open.
OPEC says it can still speed up, pause, or reverse, according to its July statement.
Harder talks come in 2027, when the group sets new limits for each member. Iraq already wants a bigger share.
What This Means for Crypto
More oil has not made oil cheaper.
Brent crude sat near $87 on July 20. US crude was close to $84. Those are the latest daily figures from the Energy Information Administration.
Wars in Iran and Ukraine explain the gap. They block exports, so the extra barrels stay stuck on paper.
That matters for Bitcoin. Costlier fuel pushes inflation higher, and energy costs pressure Bitcoin by making rate cuts less likely.
Cheaper fuel does the opposite. It gives the Federal Reserve room to cut, which has lifted risk assets before, such as after the Fed held rates steady.
The question now is simple. Will September’s barrels reach buyers, or stay stuck?
The post Trump’s Oil Order Meets OPEC+ Supply Hike: Why California Gas Costs $5.49 appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Data shared by Lookonchain earlier today suggests that Trump Media, the entity behind the Truth Social media platform, majority-owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, has sold over $165 million worth of bitcoin.
This was the second substantial sale made by the entity in recent months after it had splashed over $1 billion at prices near the top last year to accumulate 11,542 units.
The on-chain analytics company noted that the latest offload was for 2,628 BTC after it had transferred the stash to crypto.com. This continued a streak that began earlier this year.
Previously, the entity had spent $1.37 billion to acquire 11,542 BTC at an average price of $118,522. Since its entry level was very close to bitcoin’s very top marked just under a year ago, this automatically means that its sales have been completed at prices well below that.
CryptoPotato reported the previous BTC disposal in May, when wallets linked to Trump Media sold another substantial batch of 2,650 BTC for $205 million.
Lookonchain’s data concurs that the entity has sold a total of 7,281 BTC since it began disposing of its assets, at an average price of under $75,000. This means that its total losses have grown to $555 million.
It looks like Trump Media sold another 2,628 $BTC($165.07M).
Trump Media bought 11,542 $BTC($1.37B) at an average price of $118,522, then started selling 7 months ago, selling a total of 7,281 $BTC ($545M) at an average price of $74,855.
Trump Media is now down a total of $555M… pic.twitter.com/9xx0MTbweg
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) August 2, 2026
Aside from the continuous controversial decisions toward the crypto industry from the POTUS-linked companies, this move builds on a recent worrisome trend about BTC treasury firms deciding to sell during times of distress.
As we reported last week, several public companies have shifted their strategies, with some selling BTC holdings while others have paused buying the asset indefinitely.
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After two consecutive painful months in which they lost billions of dollars, the spot Bitcoin ETFs finally turned the page in July, but inflows were still modest.
Meanwhile, the exchange-traded funds tracking the performance of the largest altcoin enjoyed the month more, attracting over 2x more fresh capital.
Bitcoin ETFs in July
March and April were quite bullish for the spot BTC ETFs as the financial vehicles attracted well over $3 billion. However, the trend changed violently in May when they lost $2.43 billion. June became the worst month on record, as investors pulled out just over $4.5 billion. In total, the net outflows for May and June stood at nearly $7 billion, and the cumulative total flows dropped from over $58 billion to $51 billion.
July started more positively, with almost $200 million in net inflows during the first full week. Another $76 million followed during the second, and a more modest $34 million in the third. The trend was obvious as the initial high numbers gradually declined, aligning with the underlying asset’s controversial and sporadic price performance and ultimately leading to a very modest increase throughout the month.
The last week in July was once again in the red, with investors pulling $61.53 million out of the funds. Friday was the most painful day, as the total net outflows stood at over $265 million. As such, the month ended with $172.42 million. On one hand, green finally overcame the red wave, but on the other, the number was nowhere near enough to offset some of the recent losses.
ETH ETFs Do Better
The Ethereum ETFs entered July after a similarly painful two-month streak, in which they lost $541 million in May and another $529 million in June. However, investors were more persistent, and the actual net inflows for July were at a more respectable $365.17 million, thus outpacing the BTC ETF flows by over 2x.
Moreover, the ETH ETFs closed all four full weeks of July in the green, including the last one, which saw only one day in the red. Perhaps this investor behavior is among the reasons behind the underlying asset’s major resurgence in July. As reported earlier, ETH ended the month with a substantial 20% increase, making it the best in precisely a year.
All eyes are now on August, which hasn’t been ETH’s most favorable month historically, but there are some major double-digit exceptions.
The post Bitcoin vs. Ethereum ETF Battle: Who Won July? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
The developers pushing Bitcoin’s BIP-110 rule change have called off its launch. They blamed the industry response to a Coldcard wallet flaw that left user funds easier to steal.
Udi Wertheimer announced the delay, urging anyone running BIP-110 software to switch back to a normal Bitcoin (BTC) node. He gave no new date.
Why BIP-110 Activation Was Paused
BIP-110 is a temporary rule change, known as a soft fork. It would limit how much data people can pack into Bitcoin transactions.
Supporters say that data crowds out ordinary payments. Critics say Bitcoin should not police what users store.
The limits would last one year. Developer Dathon Ohm wrote the rules, and Bitcoin Knots software ships them.
Miners started voting on December 1, 2025. The Bitcoin blockspace spam debate had already split the community.
Then a separate problem landed.
Coinkite disclosed the bug on July 30. Its COLDCARD wallets built seed phrases, the master key behind a wallet, using far less randomness than promised. Roughly 72 bits instead of 128.
That gap makes a seed vastly easier to guess. Wallets running firmware released since March 2021 were hit hardest.
Updating the device does not fix a seed it already made. Coinkite is telling owners to move their money.
Thieves had already drained wallets tied to the flaw. The company has not said how much was lost.
Wertheimer called the delay a matter of timing, not doubt.
“…due to the coldcard incident, BIP-110 community leaders have decided to DELAY ACTIVATION. a new activation date will be announced at a later time,” he wrote.
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The Math Was Already Settled
Miners back a rule change by flagging their blocks. BIP-110 needed 55% of blocks in a two-week stretch. That means 1,109 blocks. The live monitor counted 30.
That is 2.63% of 1,068 blocks mined this period. It is the best BIP-110 has ever managed. It is still more than 20 times short.
Every earlier two-week stretch since December finished below 1.3%. Only 948 blocks are left. Even if every one voted yes, the total would reach about 48%. It could not pass this round.
That was already true days before anyone announced a delay.
Michael Saylor has warned about Bitcoin neutrality for weeks. He says almost every yes vote comes from one mining pool. Blockstream chief executive Adam Back has flagged chain split risk, calling the 55% bar too low to be safe.
A second phase was due at block 961,632, about six days away. It would reject any block that did not vote yes.
Nodes still running BIP-110 would enforce that on their own. That is why the warning to switch back matters.
No one owns Bitcoin’s rules. Nobody can flip a switch to start or stop a soft fork. This was a request, not a command.
Whether operators listen will say more about BIP-110’s support than any vote counter has.
The post BIP-110 Activation Frozen After Coldcard Exploit: Is the Soft Fork Dead? appeared first on BeInCrypto.
Senators Ruben Gallego and Thom Tillis sent a proposed revised ethics provision to the White House on Thursday, after drafting the compromise the day before, an industry source familiar with the talks told CoinDesk. As of midafternoon on Friday, the White House had not officially responded to the proposal.
Ethics remains the biggest outstanding issue to be resolved before the Clarity Act can advance. There are ongoing negotiations around other issues, including stablecoin reserves and yield, law enforcement authorities and some of the Agriculture Committee provisions addressing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s total remit, but these are relatively uncomplicated compared to ethics, two industry sources said. One added that they expected those other issues to be resolved relatively quickly should negotiators come to a deal on ethics.
If the White House signs off on the counter-proposal from Tillis and Gallego, that could speed the way to at least the first part of the cloture process, the other source told CoinDesk. The Senate would still need to follow the cloture process laid out in last week’s edition of this newsletter, but the timelines involved mean that it would be difficult to get the bill all the way through by the end of the week. Still, getting through that first procedural vote would be a visible win for the crypto industry, should it happen.
Strategy Inc. kept the annual dividend rate on its STRC preferred stock at 12% for August 2026, even though the Nasdaq-listed security ended July more than 10% below its $100 stated amount.
Summary
- 12% annualized dividend remains unchanged for August despite STRC closing July at $89.46 per share.
- $3.75 billion reserve covers roughly 2.1 years of preferred dividends and debt interest payments currently.
- Strategy repurchased 288,930 STRC shares below par while retaining $975 million in remaining authorization capacity.
The company’s official STRC information page confirms that the variable annualized rate for record dates beginning in August remains 12%. Executive Chairman Michael Saylor promoted the product on Aug. 1 as a way to “stretch your income,” emphasizing its twice-monthly payment schedule.
STRC closed at $89.46 on July 31, down $0.25 during the session. At that price, the $12 annualized payout based on the security’s $100 stated amount produces an effective yield of about 13.41%. Because Saylor announced the unchanged rate during the weekend, no post-announcement market reaction will be available until Nasdaq trading resumes.
Strategy’s STRC dividend no longer rises automatically
Strategy raised STRC’s annual dividend from 11.5% to 12% for record dates beginning in July. The increase followed a sharp June decline that took the shares as low as $71.25 and moved them far below the $100 level the company wants to maintain.
However, the company changed its rate-setting policy on June 29. Under the revised framework, management considers STRC’s market price, credit spreads, competing yields, Bitcoin volatility, cash-reserve coverage and the wider capital structure. The filing specifically states that Strategy will not necessarily raise the dividend solely because STRC trades below its stated amount.
That policy explains why July’s discount did not produce another 50-basis-point increase. Strategy instead said during its second-quarter results that it would maintain the 12% rate until STRC shows “sustained, healthy trading” near $100. The language describes management’s objective and does not guarantee that the shares will return to par.
The decision also prevents Strategy’s cash obligations from rising further while the company attempts to repair demand through other measures. Every additional 50 basis points would increase the annual cash cost across more than $10.46 billion in outstanding STRC stated value.
Buybacks now carry more of the price-support burden
Strategy has shifted part of its response from dividend increases to preferred-share repurchases. Between July 20 and July 26, the company bought back 288,930 STRC shares for approximately $25 million, paying an average of $86.53 per share. The purchase represented a 13.47% discount to the shares’ stated amount.
About $975 million remains under Strategy’s $1 billion preferred-securities repurchase authorization. Management said it intends to purchase more STRC at deeper discounts and reduce its activity as the security approaches $100. The authorization does not require Strategy to spend the remaining amount and has no fixed expiry date.
Repurchasing shares below par reduces the number of preferred shares requiring future cash distributions. It also lets Strategy retire $100 of stated value for less than $100. However, buybacks use capital that could otherwise remain available for dividends, debt interest or Bitcoin purchases.
As previously reported, Strategy funded its first $25 million STRC repurchase while increasing its U.S. dollar reserve and keeping Bitcoin purchases paused. The company raised much of that liquidity through sales of MSTR common stock rather than new STRC issuance.
The $3.75 billion reserve supports the 12% payout
Strategy reported a $3.75 billion U.S. dollar reserve as of July 26. The company said that amount covers approximately 2.1 years of expected preferred-stock dividends and interest on outstanding debt. The reserve can only be used for those obligations unless the board approves another purpose.
The cash cushion has become more important because Strategy’s preferred-stock commitments have expanded. The company recorded $400.7 million in preferred dividends during the second quarter, compared with $49.1 million one year earlier. It has paid or declared more than $1 billion in cumulative preferred distributions.
Strategy also reported an $8.22 billion second-quarter net loss, driven mainly by an $8.32 billion unrealized loss on its Bitcoin holdings. The accounting loss did not represent an equivalent cash outflow, but the preferred dividends must be paid in U.S. dollars.
The company has therefore authorized Bitcoin sales to refill the reserve, cover dividends and interest, or finance approved security repurchases. Strategy had sold approximately $218.4 million of Bitcoin during 2026 through July 26 to fund part of its preferred obligations.
As crypto.news reported, Strategy held 843,775 BTC at an average acquisition cost of about $75,476 as of July 26. The company valued that position at $54.77 billion using Bitcoin’s July 27 market price, compared with its $63.69 billion original cost.
STRC holders receive two payments each month
STRC moved from monthly to semi-monthly distributions after shareholders approved the change in June. Record dates now fall on the 15th and final day of each month, with payments generally following around 15 days later.
Strategy has already declared a payment of $0.50 per share for Aug. 15 to investors recorded as shareholders on July 31. The company’s website lists the 12% rate for August record dates, but future cash distributions still require board or committee approval and are not guaranteed.
For U.S. federal tax purposes, Strategy expects the current payments to be treated as returns of capital to the extent of an investor’s tax basis. That is the company’s expectation rather than a guarantee of each shareholder’s treatment, and Strategy advises investors to seek tax guidance based on their own circumstances.
STRC is also unsecured. Strategy states that its preferred securities are not collateralized by its Bitcoin holdings and only hold a preferred claim on the company’s residual assets. The company further warns that STRC is not a bank deposit, is not FDIC-insured and does not carry the same protections as Treasury securities or money-market funds.
What happens next for STRC and Strategy
Chief Executive Phong Le said management’s objective is for STRC to trade between $99 and $100 “over time.” Strategy has not provided a deadline for reaching that range, and the shares’ $89.46 closing price shows that the market continues to demand a yield above the stated 12% rate.
The next confirmed event is the Aug. 15 distribution. Investors will then watch Strategy’s next monthly rate decision, further STRC repurchases and weekly SEC disclosures covering common-stock sales, Bitcoin transactions and changes to the dollar reserve.
Saylor separately posted “Bitcoin Drive engaged” on Aug. 2 alongside the company’s treasury chart. The message may fuel expectations of a new purchase disclosure, but the post does not confirm that Strategy bought Bitcoin or reversed its recent pause. An SEC filing or company announcement would be needed to verify any transaction.
As of then, Strategy is relying on its existing 12% rate, twice-monthly payments, cash reserves and discounted repurchases rather than offering STRC investors another dividend increase.
The spot exchange-traded funds tracking Ripple’s cross-border token continue with their impressive performance in times of market uncertainty, and saw only one day of no reportable action in the past week, unlike the previous ones.
July also ended in the green for the funds, meaning that only one out of the nine months they have been active was in the red.
The Good Weekly and Monthly
Data from SoSoValue shows that Monday and Wednesday were quite modest in terms of net inflows. On both days, the ETFs attracted just under $600,000. However, the green streak continued and accelerated at the end of the business week, with $6 million in net inflows on Thursday and another $7.7 million on Friday.
Thus, the week ended with $14.86 million in the green, making it the best since the one that ended on July 2, when the funds attracted $17.19 million. On a monthly scale, investors poured in $27.29 million into the spot XRP ETFs.
What’s even better is that the funds have reached another all-time high in terms of cumulative total net inflows, at over $1.5 billion as of Friday’s close. Bitwise’s XRP has extended its lead over Canary Capital’s XRPC, with $511 million in net inflows compared to $467 million for the latter.
The Bad
Although July indeed ended in the green, the actual net inflows were not all that impressive. The $27.29 million places July as just the second-worst month, beating only January when investors inserted $15.59 million into the funds.
In contrast, June was a lot more positive, with the net inflows standing close to $60 million. May was even better, with almost $132 million. The all-time high from November at $666.61 million remains untouchable.
The Ugly
Although this improved at the end of the month, July saw the most days with no reportable action in terms of net flows. Precisely half of the trading days (11 out of the 22) saw no flows, according to SoSoValue, which, aligned with the more modest $27.29 million in net inflows, suggests dwindling interest in the funds.
Separately, the underlying asset’s price performance continues to disappoint despite the numerous positive developments in the broader Ripple ecosystem. Although it managed to defend the $1.05 support during the weekend, XRP is still below $1.10, and it’s down by more than 3% on a monthly scale. What’s even more worrisome is the fact that August has been a particularly painful month for the asset historically.
The post Ripple (XRP) ETF Monthly Recap: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly appeared first on CryptoPotato.
Strategy’s preferred stock tracker, STRC, ended July trading well below its $100 par value, but management signaled that the company’s next preferred dividend rate will not rise. Executive chairman Michael Saylor said the August dividend will remain at 12%, continuing a payout level that was set after a June performance dip.
In a Saturday post on X, Saylor confirmed the dividend will hold at 12% for August. He also noted the company will keep its semi-monthly payment cadence for the second straight month after shareholders approved that change in June, following the earlier decision to increase the dividend by 50 basis points to 12%.
Key takeaways
- Strategy’s executive chairman said the August STRC dividend will remain at a 12% rate, not increase.
- STRC has continued to trade below its $100 par value throughout July, despite a monthly price rebound that began after the June dividend hike.
- Management reiterated a longer-term objective for STRC to trade near $99–$100, without specifying a timeline.
- Strategy reported building a large cash reserve—cited as $3.75 billion—to support preferred stock payouts and related obligations.
Dividend holds at 12% as preferred shares stay below par
Although STRC shares did not reach par in July, the stock did gain momentum over the month. The shares closed at $89.46 on Friday, up 5.42% for the month that started with the dividend adjustment.
Earlier, management had lifted the dividend rate in response to weak performance in June—raising it by 50 basis points to 12%. After that change, Strategy’s preferred payout strategy moved toward semi-monthly distributions, a structure that takes effect for the second month in August after the June shareholder vote.
Trading activity on Friday was also notably lighter than typical: volume was about two-thirds of the Nasdaq-listed shares’ daily average, according to the figures referenced in the report. That detail matters because it suggests the month’s rebound did not coincide with a surge in participation, even as investors processed the dividend update.
Management’s $99–$100 target meets a lower-than-par reality
Even as the next dividend stays flat, Strategy’s leadership continues to frame STRC around a valuation target. On Friday, CEO Phong Le reiterated that management’s “corporate objective” is for STRC to trade at $99–$100 over time, without adding specifics on when that goal might be reached.
That position is important to read in context: shareholders were told the dividend rate would not increase in August, even after the company adjusted payouts earlier in the quarter. Investors looking for signals that STRC might close the gap toward par have therefore had to balance two competing inputs—management’s longer-term pricing objective and the near-term decision to keep the dividend at the same level.
Cash reserve and buybacks aimed at supporting payouts
While the dividend rate message was unchanged, Saylor’s social-media activity pointed to continued capital management efforts tied to Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury strategy. On Sunday, he posted “Bitcoin Drive engaged,” accompanied by a familiar chart of Strategy’s BTC buying activity as tracked by Saylortracker.com.
The emphasis on liquidity and coverage aligns with what Strategy disclosed in its latest reporting. The company recently reported an $8.22 billion second-quarter net loss, driven primarily by an $8.32 billion unrealized loss on its Bitcoin holdings as the cryptocurrency’s price declined during the quarter.
Against that backdrop, Strategy said it has built a $3.75 billion cash reserve intended to support preferred stock payouts following the launch of its BTC monetization program. In the same vein, the company described a $3.75 billion U.S. dollar reserve sufficient to cover more than two years of preferred dividend payments and related interest obligations.
Strategy also disclosed that it repurchased $25 million of its STRC preferred shares at a discount to par and said it intends to keep buying the securities while they trade below $100. For investors, the practical takeaway is straightforward: management is pairing a coverage plan with an active buyback strategy, presumably to reduce pressure on valuation while the preferred shares trade under par.
However, the gap between par value and the prevailing market price remains the key issue. Management’s stated intent to buy more when the shares trade below $100 suggests the company believes the market offers an entry point—but without a near-term dividend increase, investors will likely focus on whether buybacks and reserve policy can translate into sustained movement toward the $99–$100 trading range.
What to watch next for STRC holders
With the August dividend rate confirmed at 12% and STRC still trading below $100 par, the next signal for holders will likely come from any further updates on Strategy’s Bitcoin treasury actions and whether cash-reserve coverage and buybacks continue at a pace that supports improving market pricing. Investors should also watch whether management provides clearer timing around its $99–$100 objective, since it currently remains framed as a long-term goal rather than a defined schedule.
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