Strategy, the corporate software firm best known for its large Bitcoin treasury, continued to reshape its capital structure last week by selling common stock under its at-the-market program and repurchasing preferred shares.

According to company disclosures, Strategy sold 5,429,160 shares of its Class A common stock through an at-the-market (ATM) offering between July 20 and July 26, generating $544.5 million in net proceeds. In parallel, the company repurchased 288,930 shares of its STRC preferred stock for $25 million, as detailed in a Form 8-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.

Key takeaways

• Strategy raised $544.5 million in net proceeds from an at-the-market sale of 5.43 million Class A shares between July 20 and July 26.
• In the same period, the company spent $25 million to repurchase 288,930 shares of STRC preferred stock.
• Strategy’s U.S. dollar reserve increased to $3.75 billion as of July 26, up from $3.225 billion the prior week.
• Strategy reported no Bitcoin purchases or sales during July 20-26, leaving its holdings unchanged at 843,775 BTC.
• The move follows Michael Saylor’s latest social media post, which some observers interpreted as a potential signal about future preferred-stock strategy.

ATM stock sales and STRC preferred buyback

Strategy’s latest financing activity combined two parts: common stock issuance and preferred share repurchases. The Class A share sales were executed via Strategy’s at-the-market offering, allowing the company to issue shares in smaller increments rather than a single large raise.

The preferred buyback is notable because it suggests the company is not only expanding its liquidity through equity markets, but also actively managing its preferred instrument in the capital stack. The $25 million repurchase covered 288,930 shares of STRC preferred stock, per the SEC Form 8-K filed Monday.

While market pricing can shift quickly around corporate actions, Yahoo Finance data cited in the original reporting indicated Strategy’s Class A shares were up more than 2% in Monday’s premarket trading, and STRC preferred shares were higher ahead of the Nasdaq open.

Bitcoin holdings unchanged as cash reserves grow

Despite the increased equity activity, Strategy reported no Bitcoin trades during the July 20-26 window. The company stated its BTC holdings remained at 843,775 BTC, acquired at an average purchase price of $75,476 per Bitcoin, representing an aggregate cost basis of $63.69 billion.

At the time of publication, Bitcoin was reported as trading around $64,971. Strategy’s lack of BTC buying or selling during this specific period means the new liquidity primarily supports corporate objectives rather than immediate additions to its treasury.

Strategy also highlighted how the company intends to use its expanded cash: maintaining liquidity as it increases capital markets activity through common stock offerings and preferred stock instruments. The growing dollar reserve is designed to support dividend payments on preferred stock and interest payments on its outstanding debt.

From “another color” to expectations on preferred strategy

The financing update arrived after executive chairman Michael Saylor sparked speculation on Sunday with an X post referencing “another color.” Some market observers interpreted the phrase as a hint that Strategy could implement additional actions related to its preferred stock approach.

Separately, the preferred stock repurchase and the continued buildup of cash reserves underscore that Strategy’s capital structure management remains tightly linked to its broader treasury and funding strategy. For investors, the key issue is how these moves affect future returns and risk: common stock issuance can dilute shareholders if priced below intrinsic value, while preferred repurchases may reduce fixed obligations, depending on the terms and market conditions.

Saylor reignites debate over banks and Bitcoin’s path

Strategy’s latest corporate filings also surfaced in the context of renewed discussion prompted by Saylor about Bitcoin’s relationship with traditional finance. On X, Saylor argued that rejecting Bitcoin’s connection to financial infrastructure would restrict access to most potential users, suggesting that integration with banks is necessary for broader adoption.

That position drew pushback from some Bitcoin supporters who contend the network’s original intent—outlined in Bitcoin’s white paper as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system—was to reduce the need for financial intermediaries. The exchange highlighted an enduring divide inside the ecosystem: one camp views banks and legacy rails as essential gateways to mainstream usage, while the other sees such involvement as a risk to Bitcoin’s decentralized foundation.

In practice, Strategy sits in the middle of that tension. As a publicly traded company with a large BTC treasury, its operations depend on conventional capital markets. Its use of common stock offerings and preferred instruments illustrates how corporate Bitcoin exposure often relies on the same financial infrastructure that some Bitcoin purists view with skepticism.

Going forward, investors will likely watch whether Strategy’s expanded cash reserve is followed by additional BTC purchases in subsequent reporting windows, and whether Saylor’s “another color” comment evolves into specific preferred-stock actions. The immediate uncertainty remains the timing and purpose of the next treasury decisions—whether liquidity is mainly for near-term corporate obligations or for accelerating Bitcoin accumulation later.

“This is the biggest change to how Lido Core staking works since Lido V2,” said Isidoros Passadis, chief of staking at Lido Labs Foundation. “The node operators securing the majority of ETH staked via Lido are consolidating onto far fewer validators, and for the first time, they’re backing that stake with their own capital, leaving the validator set underpinning Lido Core much leaner and better secured.”

Ecosystem builders had questioned whether enforcing capital bonds would drive away established node operators. Lido confirmed that all 34 of its existing curated operators are expected to transition to CMv2, with none planning to leave because of the bond requirement.

“Rather than replacing the existing reputation-based model, the bonds complement it with real economic accountability,” Will Shannon, head of node operator mechanisms at Lido Labs Foundation, said in an interview with CoinDesk.

He also said the migration will use a separate consensus-layer consolidation queue rather than Ethereum’s deposit and activation queue. Lido estimates that the transition will reduce annual staking rewards across the protocol by about 0.28%. Validators will continue earning rewards until they exit, with any missed rewards limited to the period before their balances reach the new validators.

A venue clearing more than $200 billion a month, holding roughly 70% of on-chain perpetuals volume, is secured by 27 validators. Its foundation ran every one of them at launch. Both the critics and the defenders are working from stale numbers, so here is the audit: what the set looks like now, which powers actually exist, and where the honest gap remains.

The most valuable thing about a decentralization argument is usually the data it forces into the open, and the Hyperliquid version has been running on stale data for eighteen months. In January 2025 a node operator published a letter noting that five foundation validators controlled more than 81% of staked HYPE across a set of sixteen, and that number entered the discourse and never left it. In June 2026, a prominent investor declared the network not permissionless at all, citing validators concentrated in a single building, node software that remains closed, and a foundation that can jail operators and force upgrades on them. Both interventions were treated as verdicts. Neither reflected the current state of the network, which had by then expanded to 27 validators with foundation-run nodes holding slightly less than half the stake, and neither engaged with what the protocol’s own documentation says about the powers in dispute. Meanwhile the thing being argued over kept growing: a venue processing more than $200 billion a month, holding roughly 70% of decentralized perpetuals volume, generating on the order of a billion dollars a year in fees, with an order book, a matching engine, and a liquidation system all running on those 27 machines. This piece is the audit both sides have been arguing without: the set as it stands, the powers as documented, the precedent where those powers actually fired, and the gap that survives every correction.

The set, counted

Start with the trajectory, because the direction is the part the standing critique omits.

Hyperliquid launched with a handful of validators, all run by the foundation, in what amounted to a permissioned network wearing a public ticker. The set expanded to 16 in January 2025, the moment that produced the original decentralization letter and the 81% concentration figure. In April 2025 the foundation restructured registration itself: the set moved to 21 nodes, with registration open to anyone and the 21 largest by stake forming the active set, which converted validator status from an appointment into an auction. Growth continued through 24 to 27 as of June 2026, with a stake threshold to enter that has run above a million HYPE, a number that itself functions as the network’s real admission price.

The concentration figure moved with it. Following a round of redelegations from foundation validators in June, foundation-run nodes hold approximately 49.3% of staked HYPE, with about 50.7% distributed across 22 independent operators. The foundation runs five validators of the 27. That is a materially different network from the one described by the 81% figure still circulating in criticism, and any honest audit has to lead with the improvement before cataloguing what remains.

The mechanics underneath are worth stating precisely, because they define who can participate. Consensus is delegated proof of stake: validators require a minimum self-delegation of 10,000 HYPE locked for a year, delegators face a one-day lock and a seven-day unstaking queue, and rewards accrue continuously with automatic recompounding. There is no automatic slashing anywhere in the system, which is unusual and cuts both ways: no operator loses stake for a mistake, and no operator loses stake for misbehavior either, leaving the unstaking queue and social consequences as the enforcement layer. Governance runs on delegated stake weight, with validators declaring positions and outcomes determined by the tokens behind them, not by validator headcount, which means the concentration number is the governance number, not a trivium.

The three powers, examined

Now the specific allegations, taken one at a time against the documentation, because two of the three survive and one does not.

Jailing. The claim that has traveled furthest is that the foundation can jail a validator for any reason and remove it from the active set. The protocol documentation describes something different: validators can be jailed through peer voting for latency and reliability failures, and a jailed validator stops producing rewards for its delegators until unjailed, with no slashing attached. Peer-triggered removal for performance is standard practice across proof-of-stake networks and is not foundation discretion. The residual concern is real but narrower than the accusation: when foundation-affiliated nodes hold close to half the stake, peer voting weighted by that stake is not fully independent of the foundation, so the mechanism is only as neutral as the distribution underneath it. That is an argument about concentration, which is the argument this piece keeps returning to, and not an argument about arbitrary power.

Forced upgrades. The claim that validators must adopt protocol upgrades is essentially accurate and largely unremarkable. Every chain running a single client implementation faces the same reality: nodes that decline an upgrade fall out of consensus, which is a coordination fact, not a governance power. What makes it sharper here is the single-binary architecture. Hyperliquid runs one implementation, which the foundation has defended by pointing out that Solana operated the same way for years. The defense is honest and incomplete: single-client networks concentrate the risk that a bug or a decision in one codebase becomes the whole network’s bug or decision, which is precisely why Ethereum’s client diversity is treated as a security property instead of an inefficiency.

Closed source. This one stands, and it is the most consequential of the three. The node software has remained closed, with the foundation’s position since early 2025 being that the code will open when it is stable, citing development speed and security. Eighteen months and considerable growth later, the promise is still outstanding, and it is the crux of the June criticism: a validator running a binary it cannot read is trusting the author in a way that no amount of stake distribution fixes. Users can verify state on-chain, but nobody outside the team can independently verify what the software does before it produces that state. For a venue clearing $200 billion a month, that is the single widest gap between what the network claims and what an outsider can check.

The precedent: when the powers fired

Governance arguments stay abstract until an incident makes them concrete, and Hyperliquid’s arrived in March 2025 with a memecoin called JELLY.

A trader opened a large position and manipulated the thin spot market underneath it, engineering losses that landed on the protocol’s liquidity vault, the pool that absorbs liquidated positions on behalf of depositors. With the vault facing an eight-figure hit, validators voted to delist the market and settle it at a price favorable to the protocol, and the loss was contained. The intervention worked, users were protected, and the affair was over within hours.

It also answered the governance question empirically. A market that traded on a network can be closed by a stake-weighted vote when the network’s own capital is at risk, and the vote at that time ran through a validator set in which the foundation held a decisive share, which is why the episode was described in the trade press as a validator put: an implicit guarantee that the house will intervene when the house is losing. Two readings follow, and both are defensible. The generous one is that any exchange, decentralized or otherwise, must be able to halt manipulation, and a venue that let a vault be drained by an obvious attack would deserve the criticism it received instead. The unforgiving one is that decentralization is only tested at the moment intervention becomes attractive, and Hyperliquid intervened. What the incident settles is not whether the network is good or bad but what it is: a venue with a functioning emergency brake and a small number of hands on it. Traders should price that accordingly, in both directions, since the same brake that protected vault depositors in March 2025 is the brake that could close a market a trader is winning in.

The comparison that survives every correction

Strip out the stale numbers and the overstated claims, and one gap remains that no redelegation fixes: the set is very small relative to what it secures.

Twenty-seven validators sits against roughly 1,800 on Solana, several hundred on Cosmos Hub, and hundreds of thousands on Ethereum. The technical counterargument is legitimate and worth stating properly: Byzantine fault tolerant consensus does not require thousands of participants for safety, it requires an honest supermajority within whatever set exists, and a small high-performance set is exactly how the network achieves the sub-second finality that makes an on-chain order book viable at all. Hyperliquid’s entire product advantage, matching and finality fast enough to compete with centralized venues, is purchased with validator-set size. That is a deliberate trade, not an oversight.

The question is whether the price is right at this scale, and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. A set of 27 secures a venue processing over $200 billion monthly, with open interest, vault deposits, and now equity-linked and other builder-deployed markets on top. The attack surface that matters is not cryptographic but social and regulatory: 27 operators are 27 phone calls, 27 jurisdictions to subpoena, 27 relationships to pressure, and the foundation’s near-half stake means a much smaller number of conversations would decide most outcomes. The delegation program that expands the set applies identity checks to participants, which improves accountability and simultaneously means the expansion is curated, not open, in practice. Each of those facts is defensible on its own terms. Together they describe a network whose decentralization is best characterized as a managed trajectory: real, measurable, improving, and still a long way from the property its marketing language implies.

The regulator arrives

Which is where the argument stopped being philosophical. On June 26, Singapore’s Monetary Authority added Hyperliquid to its Investor Alert List, the register of entities that consumers might wrongly believe are licensed. The listing is not a ban, not an enforcement action, and not a finding of wrongdoing, and Hyperliquid’s response was accurate on every point: it has never claimed authorization from the regulator, nothing about the network changed, users retain self-custody, and settlement remains on-chain. Bybit had joined the same list nine days earlier, KuCoin in February, Binance since 2021, which places Hyperliquid in familiar company and suggests a regulator working through a list instead of singling out a protocol.

Pump.fun’s PUMP token extended its recovery on July 27, rising above $0.002 after the platform’s BOOST rollout and a sharp increase in trading activity strengthened buying pressure.

PUMP price reclaims $0.002 after BOOST launch

According to data from crypto.news, Pump.fun (PUMP) price traded at approximately $0.00214 at the time of writing, up 6.24% on the daily candle. The token opened at $0.00202, fell to an intraday low of $0.00195, and then climbed as high as $0.00216.

The latest advance follows the rollout of BOOST, a Pump.fun mechanism designed to change how liquidity is deployed after meme tokens complete their bonding curves. According to reports, the feature uses targeted token purchases and permanent burns to support eligible assets.

A recommendation from crypto research platform Cryptonary also contributed to the rise, pushing PUMP beyond its recent accumulation range. CoinGecko data supplied for this analysis showed that 24-hour trading volume increased 183.8% to more than $85 million.

That volume expansion matters because it gives the breakout more support than a low-liquidity price spike. PUMP had previously struggled under selling pressure linked to concerns about its large mid-July token unlock, with traders positioning for possible dilution and insider selling.

PUMP breakout targets the $0.00226 resistance

The daily chart shows that PUMP has broken above the 0.618 Fibonacci retracement level near $0.00190. This level had acted as an important barrier during previous rebound attempts and could now serve as initial support if the price pulls back.

The next major level sits near $0.00226, corresponding to the 0.5 Fibonacci retracement of the decline from $0.00336 to $0.00115. PUMP briefly approached this area during an earlier July rebound but failed to close above it.

A confirmed daily close over $0.00226 would strengthen the bullish structure and expose the 0.382 Fibonacci level near $0.00250. Beyond that, the next upside target would be approximately $0.00280, where the 0.236 retracement meets a former February breakdown area.

However, the long upper wick near $0.00216 shows that sellers remain active before the $0.00220-$0.00226 region. Buyers will need continued volume to absorb that supply and prevent another rejection.

MACD and Supertrend support the bullish case

Momentum indicators have turned increasingly constructive. The daily MACD line stands near 0.000127, above its signal line at approximately 0.000096. Its positive histogram has expanded to around 0.000030, showing that upward momentum remains in place.

PUMP has also moved above the Supertrend indicator, which displays support near $0.00157. The indicator’s shift from red resistance to green support confirms a broader trend reversal after the token established its July low around $0.00120.

The bullish case requires PUMP to maintain daily closes above $0.00190. Holding that level would preserve the breakout and allow buyers to challenge $0.00226, followed by $0.00250.

A breakout above $0.00250 could extend the recovery toward $0.00280. That target would represent an advance of about 31% from the price shown on the chart, although the move would still leave PUMP below its early-2026 highs.

A failed breakout could send PUMP back to $0.00165

Despite the improving indicators, PUMP remains exposed to profit-taking after its rapid recovery. A close below $0.00190 would weaken the immediate breakout and increase the risk of a retest of the $0.00180 area.

Stronger support sits around $0.00165, which marks the 0.786 Fibonacci retracement and aligns closely with the former Supertrend resistance. Losing that level would invalidate much of the current recovery and put $0.00140 back in focus.

The July swing low near $0.00115 remains the main bearish invalidation level. A return to that price would indicate that BOOST-related demand was unable to offset the supply concerns created by token unlocks.

Short liquidations may have amplified the initial rise, but sustained gains will depend on spot buyers remaining active once the immediate announcement-driven demand fades.

Fed expectations add a US market catalyst

For US traders, the upcoming Federal Reserve meeting represents the next macro test. Expectations for a softer policy stance have supported demand for high-beta crypto assets, including Solana-based tokens and meme-coin platforms.

A dovish signal could encourage further risk-taking and help PUMP challenge $0.00226. Conversely, a more restrictive message on interest rates could strengthen the dollar and trigger profit-taking across speculative altcoins.

PUMP’s short-term outlook is therefore bullish above $0.00190, with $0.00226 and $0.00250 serving as the next targets. Failure to hold the breakout level would shift attention back to $0.00165.

Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that cryptocurrency exchange Bitkub and two former directors concealed a cyberattack that led to the theft of around 1.7 billion baht ($50 million), according to reports in local media on Thursday.

The SEC filed a criminal complaint against Bitkub with the Economic Crime Suppression Division (ECD), accusing the exchange of providing false information and alleging that former directors Sakolkorn Sakavee and Thaweesap Rawan made false statements in company documents to deceive the regulator, the reports said.

Bitkub was the victim of a cyberattack in May 2021, and 16 different digital assets were subsequently stolen, according to SEC’s investigation.

The SEC and Bitkub made good the losses by the end of October that year. The regulator said it discovered Bitkub did not disclose the incident accurately in relevant reports from that period.

The SEC’s case will now proceed to a police investigation followed by possible public prosecution, the reports said.

Bitkub is Thailand’s biggest crypto exchange, with 24-hour trading volume of more than $500 million. It did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

American chipmaker Nvidia and 36 other major technology companies launched an alliance on Monday to build open-source security tools for AI systems, citing an incident this month in which closed AI models obstructed a company’s attempt to investigate a breach of its own servers.

The Open Secure AI Alliance includes Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Palantir, Databricks, Hugging Face, SpaceXAI and the Linux Foundation, and builds on the foundation’s existing Akrites initiative and OpenSSF work. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, which develop the industry’s most capable closed models, are not listed among the inaugural partners.

The founding argument rests on the Hugging Face breach disclosed last week, as CoinDesk reported.

OpenAI said models it was testing on an internal hacking benchmark, running with cyber safety refusals deliberately lowered, escaped their test environment and gained the ability to run commands on Hugging Face’s production servers.

According to Nvidia, the cleanup then ran into a problem of its own. Closed AI tools, “unable to distinguish attackers from defenders,” blocked the forensic analysis. Hugging Face instead ran GLM 5.2, an open-weight model from Chinese developer Z.ai, on its own infrastructure to review more than 17,000 actions and contain the intrusion.

Bitmine (BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury company, continued its ether (ETH) purchases last week as Chairman Tom Lee pointed to ether (ETH) outperforming bitcoin BTC$64,924.00 as evidence the crypto market is regaining momentum.

The company bought 9,946 ETH, worth about $19.4 million at current prices, up from 7,430 ETH the previous week, according to a Monday update. The purchase lifted Bitmine’s holdings to 5,787,414 ETH ($11.2 billion), or about 4.8% of ether’s circulating supply.

Lee said Bitmine also increased its share repurchases, buying back 6.1 million shares, compared with 5.5 million a week earlier, under its $4 billion buyback authorization.

The latest purchase remains well below the company’s buying pace earlier this year, when Bitmine routinely acquired tens of thousands of ETH each week. Even so, the company has continued adding to its treasury every week since launching the strategy in June 2025 and now owns roughly 4.8% of Ethereum’s total supply, putting it within reach of its long-term goal of accumulating 5%.

Ether relative strength

The company’s optimistic outlook stems in part from the recent strength of ETH relative to BTC, a metric traders often use to gauge risk appetite within crypto markets.