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. 

Mastercard announced its plans to expand its settlement capabilities to let issuers and acquirers settle some card transactions using regulated stablecoins. 

On Wednesday, Mastercard said the new capabilities will include intraday, weekend and holiday card settlement, supporting both fiat currencies and onchain settlement through regulated stablecoins. The company said the new options are designed to give its partners more flexibility in managing settlement liquidity and timing. 

The expansion shows stablecoins moving deeper into mainstream financial infrastructure as major payments networks test tokenized dollars for settlement. It follows Mastercard securing a New York BitLicense in May, allowing its US transaction services unit to conduct regulated digital asset business activity in the state. 

The stablecoin settlement option will support Circle’s USDC, Paxos-issued PYUSD, USDG and USDP, Ripple’s RLUSD and SoFi’s SoFiUSD. Mastercard said the stablecoins will be enabled across supported blockchain networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and XRPL.

ARQ, formerly known as DolarApp, CBW Bank, Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei are expected to be among the first to support stablecoin settlement optionality in the United States and Latin America, Mastercard said. 

The role stablecoins would play within Mastercard’s ecosystem. Source: Mastercard

Payment firms deepen stablecoin integrations

Mastercard’s settlement expansion with stablecoins follows a series of stablecoin-related moves from major payments and remittance companies. 

Visa said in April that its stablecoin settlement pilot reached a $7 billion annualized run rate, up 50% from the previous quarter, after adding five blockchains to bring its supported settlement networks to nine. The company said the expansion was aimed at giving issuers and acquirers more ways to settle with the network as stablecoins move into mainstream payment flows. 

The stablecoin market is currently valued at about $320 billion.

Related: Solana lands Mastercard, Western Union on new dev platform

The remittance sector has also dived deeper into stablecoins. On Tuesday, MoneyGram launched MGUSD, a USD stablecoin on Stellar, saying that the token would support treasury management settlement and currency trading in the United States, before a broader rollout worldwide.

In early May, Western Union has also launched its US dollar-denominated USDPT stablecoin on Solana, rolling out in the Philippines and Bolivia at launch, with plans to expand in 2026. 

Magazine: Korea’s first memecoin rug-pull case, China’s crypto rules review: Asia Express

After briefly falling below $66,000 on Wednesday, bitcoin BTC$66,784.43 is trading near the bottom of the Power Law corridor, a level that has historically come shortly before rebounds in the price of the largest cryptocurrency.

The model, popularized by physicist Giovanni Santostasi and refined by Porkopolis Economics, plots bitcoin’s price against time on a logarithmic scale and suggests that growth slows naturally as the network matures. It has tracked bitcoin’s price trajectory for more than a decade.

Unlike traditional cycle-based models that focus on the rate at which new bitcoin is created — it’s cut by 50% roughly every four years — the Power Law argues that bitcoin follows a long-term mathematical trend similar to patterns observed in nature, where growth decelerates over time.

According to checkonchain data, the Power Law Oscillator shows that when measured against the model, bitcoin has been more expensive than it is today for roughly 95.6% of its trading history.

Previous visits to these levels have coincided with periods of extreme market stress, including the March 2020 pandemic-driven selloff and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in November 2022. Both events pushed bitcoin toward the lower edge of the model before significant recoveries followed.

While the Power Law offers no guarantee the floor will hold again, long-term investors view the current reading as a sign that bitcoin is trading near one of its deepest historical discounts relative to trend.

Key Takeaways

• Shares of XOS skyrocketed more than 200% during after-hours trading on Tuesday, jumping from $2.23 to $7.16.
• The company unveiled its “Power Hub” product line — a containerized, megawatt-class energy storage solution that operates independently from traditional power grids.
• Delivered in standard shipping containers, the system can activate a location within days, eliminating the typical 3–7 year grid connection process.
• Power Hub configurations range from 1.2 MWh to 4 MWh capacity, leveraging a proven platform with 250+ MWh already operational across 1,400+ installations throughout North America.
• In the PJM market alone, grid connection bottlenecks drove capacity auction costs to $14.7 billion in 2025, a dramatic increase from $2.2 billion just two years earlier.

Xos Inc. (XOS) experienced a spectacular after-hours rally on Tuesday, with shares soaring over 200% from their $2.23 closing price to reach $7.16, following the company’s introduction of an innovative energy storage solution aimed at data centers and industrial facilities operating without grid connectivity.

Xos, Inc., XOS

This dramatic movement positioned XOS to begin trading at levels not seen in nearly two years, claiming the top spot among percentage gainers on Stocktwits heading into Wednesday’s early trading hours.

The driving force behind this surge was the after-market unveiling of the “Power Hub” product family — a factory-assembled, on-site energy storage platform engineered to supply megawatt-level electricity without depending on traditional grid infrastructure.

The offering includes three distinct capacity options, spanning 1.2 MWh through 4 MWh, and utilizes the same proven technology foundation that powers Xos’s current mobile electric vehicle charging solutions.

CEO Dakota Semler minced no words in describing the innovation: “This is not a battery. It is a deployable power plant.”

Semler emphasized that the system was developed to arrive via conventional trucking, operate without requiring microgrid control systems, and enhance both the cleanliness and efficiency of fuel-based power generation.

Multi-Billion Dollar Grid Bottleneck Crisis

The product’s market entry addresses an increasingly critical infrastructure challenge. Within the PJM region — among America’s most significant power markets — grid connection delays resulted in $14.7 billion in consumer costs during a single 2025 capacity auction. This represents a staggering jump from the $2.2 billion recorded two years prior.

Conventional grid connection timelines typically extend from three to seven years. Xos’s Power Hub, packaged in standard intermodal shipping containers, aims to reduce that timeframe to mere days.

The International Energy Agency forecasted in 2025 that worldwide data center power consumption would approximately double by 2030, propelled primarily by AI infrastructure. Within the United States, data centers have already contributed to half of all new electricity demand growth.

Proven Track Record Behind the Technology

According to Xos, the company has successfully deployed more than 250 MWh of energy storage capability throughout over 1,400 installations across North America using its current platform, providing the Power Hub with an established technological foundation.

Financial Snapshot

Notwithstanding the dramatic after-hours jump, the company maintains a modest market capitalization of just $27.03 million, positioning XOS firmly in small-cap territory.

The equity’s 52-week trading band extends from $1.60 to $5.60, and throughout the preceding 12 months, XOS had declined 29.21% before Tuesday’s explosive movement.

At the moment of the surge, shares were trading at approximately 16% of the annual range — substantially nearer to the yearly floor than the ceiling.

The stock’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) registered 63.24 prior to the announcement, with Benzinga’s technical analysis suggesting short and intermediate-term bullish momentum combined with long-term consolidation patterns.

The premarket momentum extended into Wednesday’s opening session, with XOS climbing nearly 244% at the time of publication.

Global payment networks Stripe, Visa and Mastercard are close to introducing a new stablecoin platform, according to three people familiar with the plans.

U.S.-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) is also looking into the possibility of participating in the stablecoin platform, one of the people said.

Coinbase, Stripe and Visa declined to comment. Mastercard had not responded to requests for comment by publication time.

Stablecoins, one of the busiest areas of crypto, have become a focal point for the large card networks and payments players. The total stablecoin market cap is about $325 billion, according to CoinGecko data. The market is dominated by Tether’s USDT, at $115 billion.

Stripe acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge in late 2024 for $1.1 billion. Mastercard, which acquired stablecoin firm BVNK earlier this year, said this week it plans to expand always-on stablecoin settlement.

In April, Visa announced it was expanding a stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains, adding Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo to existing support for Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar.

Late last year, Coinbase announced a white-label stablecoin service, as well as the Coinbase Business service for stablecoin payments.

Since August 2023, Coinbase and Circle Internet (CRCL), issuer of the second largest stablecoin, have had a revenue-sharing agreement, which comes up for renewal in August this year. The token, USDC, has a market cap of $76 billion.

Under the deal Coinbase keeps 100% of the interest income generated from USDC held on the exchange, while splitting revenue 50/50 for USDC circulating across all off-platform and decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems.

Quick Overview

• Palo Alto Networks delivered Q3 adjusted earnings of $0.85 per share, surpassing Wall Street’s forecast of $0.80.
• Total revenue reached $3 billion, marking a 31% year-over-year increase and exceeding projections of $2.94 billion.
• Backlog expanded 36% to reach $18.4 billion, outpacing analyst predictions.
• PANW shares surged more than 10% after hours before retreating as market participants recognized acquisition contributions to growth.
• Multiple Wall Street firms increased their price targets, including Evercore ISI to $375 and Stifel to $330.

Palo Alto Networks (PANW) unveiled its fiscal 2026 third-quarter performance on Tuesday, exceeding expectations across all key financial indicators.

Adjusted profit per share registered at $0.85, outperforming analyst projections of $0.80 and improving from $0.80 during the corresponding period last year. Total sales hit $3 billion, surpassing the anticipated $2.94 billion.

Shares initially spiked over 10% during after-hours trading Tuesday evening. However, by Wednesday’s premarket session, most gains had evaporated, with the stock declining approximately 4.8%. Recent trading placed shares around $297.18, hovering just beneath the 52-week peak of $302.95.

Palo Alto Networks, Inc., PANW

Total sales advanced 31% compared to the prior year. When excluding acquisitions, organic revenue expansion came in at 14%.

The company’s order backlog climbed 36% to $18.4 billion, also exceeding analyst consensus forecasts. Next-Generation Security annual recurring revenue expanded 60% on a year-over-year basis.

Chief Executive Nikesh Arora attributed the strong performance to “an acceleration in organic bookings momentum, the sustained tailwinds from our platformization strategy, and surging cybersecurity needs as AI transitions from experimental stages to enterprise-wide production.”

M&A Activity Fuels Expansion

The difference between total and organic growth numbers highlights the impact of multiple acquisitions being integrated simultaneously. The most significant transaction involved identity security company CyberArk, which Palo Alto purchased through a combination of cash and stock that finalized in February, valuing CyberArk at approximately $25 billion.

Product sales climbed 31%, powered by firewall orders, XSIAM solutions, artificial intelligence offerings, and SASE products, alongside contributions from both CyberArk and Chronosphere acquisitions.

Executives increased fiscal 2026 fourth-quarter guidance beyond the magnitude of the quarterly beat. Management indicated that both organic and acquisition-related expectations for Q4 rose above the beat amount, although specific organic versus inorganic breakdowns were not disclosed.

Wall Street Upgrades Price Forecasts

Several brokerage firms elevated their price objectives after reviewing the quarterly results.

Evercore ISI boosted its target to $375 from $320. Cantor Fitzgerald increased its objective to $340 from $285. Wells Fargo adjusted upward to $325 from $285, while Citizens lifted its target to $320 from $250 alongside a Market Outperform rating. Stifel raised its price target to $330 from $275 while maintaining a Buy recommendation, highlighting robust execution across both organic initiatives and acquisition-driven expansion.

The CyberArk transaction incorporates identity security capabilities into Palo Alto’s comprehensive platform. AI agents — applications leveraging AI models to execute sophisticated tasks — need access to confidential information and external communications, establishing new vulnerability points. Identity management is viewed as a critical defensive mechanism.

Okta, a rival in the identity security space, witnessed its stock surge 30% following its earnings release last week as investors reacted positively to agent-identity software opportunities. CyberArk unveiled comparable software in late 2024, which is now being integrated into Palo Alto’s expanded ecosystem.