Crypto World
Whales bought $16.7B of Bitcoin as ETFs bled a record $4B
June delivered the worst month in the history of United States spot Bitcoin ETFs, with more than $4 billion pulled and 2026 flows turning negative for the first time. Over the same 2 weeks, the largest wallets on the network absorbed 270,000 BTC. One of these cohorts is going to be wrong, and the last 3 cycles say which one it usually is.
Summary
- U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw record June outflows, with more than $4 billion leaving as institutional risk appetite weakened.
- Whale wallets accumulated about 270,000 BTC worth $16.7 billion during the same period, signaling strong on-chain buying.
- The split suggests Bitcoin’s next move depends on whether ETF flows recover or macro pressure forces another leg lower.
Two things happened in the Bitcoin market in the second half of June, and they cannot both be right.
The first happened in brokerage accounts. United States spot Bitcoin ETFs bled $4.06 billion in June, the worst calendar month since the products launched in January 2024, surpassing the previous record of $3.56 billion set in February 2025.
Depending on where the cutoff lands, some counts put the figure closer to $4.5 billion. The bleeding was not a single bad week: it followed a record 13-day outflow streak from mid-May that had already drained $4.37 billion, and by month-end the funds were net negative for 2026 as a whole, the first time cumulative yearly flows have gone red since the ETFs existed. The largest fund did most of the draining, shedding roughly $3.55 billion on its own.
The second happened on-chain. Over the final 2 weeks of that same stretch, wallets classified as whales accumulated more than 270,000 BTC, roughly $16.7 billion at prevailing prices, according to Bitfinex analysts. The buying happened while the spot premium, a gauge of how aggressively United States buyers are bidding, stayed negative, meaning the demand was not coming from American spot desks. Glassnode’s cohort data confirmed the shift from a second angle: long-term holders flipped back to net accumulation across wallet sizes at the start of July, even as the ETF prints stayed red.
$4 billion walked out one door while $16 billion walked in another. That is not noise. That is the two most-watched capital cohorts in this market taking opposite sides of the same trade at the same prices, and the resolution of that disagreement is the Bitcoin story for the rest of the year.
The month that broke the ETF narrative
The scale of June’s institutional retreat deserves its own accounting, because the spot ETFs were supposed to be the structural bid that made this cycle different.
The pitch, repeated across 2 years of allocator decks, was that regulated wrappers would convert Bitcoin from a sentiment asset into an allocation, with sticky advisory money arriving in measured percentages and staying through drawdowns the way it stays in equity funds.
For most of 2024 and 2025, the pitch held: inflows compounded, the products swallowed multiples of new mined supply, and every dip met a wrapper-shaped bid. June was the first month that tested the sticky part of the story at scale, and the answer was unambiguous. Faced with a real macro shock, the allocation behaved exactly like every other risk allocation in the book, which is to say it left, on schedule, through the most liquid exit, without ceremony.
Price told the top-line story: Bitcoin fell from around $74,000 to near $58,000 across the month, touched 21-month lows, and closed a week below its 200-week moving average for the first time since 2023, a line that has historically marked deep cycle lows and long accumulation zones. Sentiment followed price into the basement, with the Fear and Greed Index pinned between 11 and 15, deep in extreme fear, through the back half of the month. Retail’s search behavior matched the mood: queries for Bitcoin going to 0 hit record highs earlier this year, and broader crypto search interest has only recently begun recovering from 1-year lows.
The flow mechanics beneath the price were the real damage. As crypto.news reported when the record was confirmed, the Coinbase Premium stayed negative through June, apparent demand stayed deeply negative, and ETF redemptions became the dominant driver of daily price action, averaging out to roughly $180 million to $200 million in net selling per trading day. When the products finally printed a green day on July 2, a $221 million inflow that ended a 10-day losing streak, the breadth told its own story: One fund took in $166 million while the largest fund was still bleeding $40 million on the day flows supposedly turned.
Three forces stacked up to produce the exodus. Macro did the heavy lifting: May inflation printed a hot 4.2%, the Federal Reserve spent June sounding restrictive, and institutional risk mandates de-allocate mechanically when real-rate expectations rise, without any view on Bitcoin specifically. Regulatory whiplash added a second layer, with the market structure fight in the Senate stalling and starting through the month, leaving custody and licensing frameworks unresolved for exactly the institutions the ETFs serve. And a third force was more mundane: competition for risk capital.
The SpaceX listing raised $75 billion in the middle of the drawdown, the largest liquidity event in market history, and some of the money that would otherwise have sat in crypto risk simply had somewhere more exciting to be, a dynamic that carried straight into the tokenized trading frenzy around the stock.
Whatever the weights on those three, the conclusion the flows describe is uniform: the marginal institutional holder of wrapped Bitcoin spent June getting out.
Inside the machine that sold
The phrase ETF outflows compresses a mechanical process worth uncompressing, because the mechanics explain why the selling was so relentless and why it can reverse just as mechanically.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs do not hold sentiment; they hold coins against shares. When holders sell more shares than buyers absorb, authorized participants redeem the excess, the fund sheds Bitcoin, and the coins hit the market as programmatic supply. Through June, that redemption machine ran nearly every session, and the composition mattered as much as the total.
The largest fund was the epicenter, accounting for roughly $3.55 billion of the month’s bleed on its own, which reads less as 1,000 small investors leaving and more as a handful of very large allocators de-risking through the deepest door available. Smaller funds bled proportionally less, and when the streak finally broke on July 2, the breadth stayed poor: the $221 million net inflow decomposed into one rival fund absorbing $166 million while the flagship still lost $40 million.
A genuine flow regime change looks like several consecutive green days across the complex, led by the largest fund; one day of one fund catching a falling knife does not qualify, and desks that trade these flows professionally treat anything less than 3-5 confirming sessions as noise.
The forced-seller identity question has a partial answer in the parallel stress that ran through the corporate treasury complex during the same weeks. Strategy’s preferred shares sold off hard enough that Bitwise published a note framing the episode as a late-cycle leverage unwind, with over-extended structures deleveraging while institutions positioned to replace them as the marginal buyer. Miners added their own supply, with MARA’s reported $1.5 billion Bitcoin sale putting the biggest corporate mining treasury on the sell side just as ETF redemptions peaked.
Add the SpaceX raise vacuuming $75 billion of risk appetite out of the same investor base, and June’s selling resolves into something more specific than fear: a synchronized deleveraging across every wrapped, leveraged, and mandated form of Bitcoin exposure at once, while the unwrapped form of the asset quietly changed hands underneath.
That specificity matters for what comes next. Deleveraging events are finite by construction: forced sellers run out of the thing they are forced to sell.
Sentiment-driven bear markets can grind for years, but a leverage unwind ends when the leverage is gone, and several of June’s selling engines, the redemption streak, the preferred-share stress, the miner treasury sales, have visibly decelerated into July.
The buyers who showed up anyway
Now the other side of the ledger, because it is bigger.
The 270,000 BTC that whale wallets absorbed in 2 weeks is not a normal accumulation print. It is more than the entire ETF complex sold in the month, absorbed in half the time, at prices between roughly $58,000 and $62,000. The negative spot premium during the buying window is the detail that locates the buyers: this demand was not United States spot desks and not the ETF creation mechanism. It was large holders, a category that spans exchanges, custodians, early-cycle capital, and entities that never touch a regulated wrapper, taking delivery while the wrapper crowd distributed.
Glassnode’s supply data adds the pain context that makes the accumulation more notable, not less. At the start of July, roughly 10.8 million BTC sat at an unrealized loss against 9.2 million in profit, a ratio that historically appears near capitulation zones, not near tops. Long-term holders turning to net accumulation into that kind of tape is the specific pattern that marked the depths of 2022 and the pre-ETF trough of 2023: the coins move from stressed hands to patient ones before any recovery shows up in price, and the transfer is only visible in hindsight to anyone watching price alone.
The whale cohort’s composition is admittedly opaque, and honest analysis says so. Wallets above 1,000 BTC are a crude proxy that includes exchange consolidation, custodial reshuffling, and over-the-counter settlement alongside genuine conviction buying. But the 2-week scale, the direction, and the corroboration from long-term holder metrics make the benign explanations hard to stretch across the whole print. Someone with size decided that sub-$60,000 Bitcoin was a purchase, at the exact moment the most regulated distribution channel in the asset’s history was running in reverse.
There is also a rotation story inside the accumulation. The buying coincided with capital moving toward on-chain yield and infrastructure rather than away from crypto entirely: tokenized real-world assets crossed $20 billion in on-chain value, and Solana, the strongest major through the drawdown, rose about 15% since early June with tokenized asset transfers on the network up 120% to $8.53 billion, extending the performance gap that has defined the L1 race all year. The pattern suggests large investors were not abandoning the asset class. They were leaving the most liquid, most scrutinized wrapper and taking positions closer to the metal.
That rotation reframes what the ETF outflows even measure. The funds were sold to the world as the institutionalization of Bitcoin, and their flows became the market’s favorite proxy for smart money. June exposed the proxy’s limits: the wrapper tracks one specific investor type, the benchmark-constrained allocator, whose behavior is the most macro-sensitive and least conviction-driven in the entire holder base.
The actual institutional spectrum now runs from those allocators through corporate treasuries, miners, sovereign-adjacent funds, and on-chain natives, and in June those groups pointed in three different directions at once. Reading Bitcoin through ETF flows alone in this market is like reading equities through one mutual fund complex: informative, loud, and structurally incomplete.
What the divergence has meant before
Splits between institutional flows and on-chain accumulation are rare enough to have a track record, and the track record leans one way.
The clearest precedent predates the ETFs: through late 2022 and 2023, while the Grayscale trust traded at a discount that made institutional sentiment look terminal, and every regulated access story was going backward, large wallets accumulated through the low $20,000s and teens. The buyers who tracked institutional sentiment missed the bottom; the ones who tracked coins on the move caught it.
February 2025 offered a smaller rehearsal of the current setup, with the then-record $3.56 billion ETF outflow month arriving alongside stubborn on-chain absorption, followed by recovery once the macro trigger faded. Bitfinex analysts framed June’s version explicitly in those terms: simultaneous institutional selling and whale accumulation is the pattern that has appeared near past cycle lows, where long-term holders take supply off sellers before the recovery reaches price.
The pattern’s logic is structural, not mystical. ETF flows are downstream of mandates, benchmarks, and quarterly reviews, which makes them systematically late in both directions: the wrapper crowd bought the top of the euphoria and is now selling the bottom of the fear, because that is what risk-managed allocation does. On-chain whales answer to no committee. When the two disagree, the disagreement itself is the signal, because it marks the moment coins transfer from mandate-driven hands to conviction-driven ones.
Retail sentiment data rounds out the historical picture from the contrarian side. Record-high searches for Bitcoin going to 0, extreme-fear readings pinned for weeks, and supply majority-underwater have each individually marked accumulation zones in prior cycles; their simultaneous appearance alongside documented whale absorption is the full bingo card. The caveat that keeps the pattern honest is that sentiment extremes date bottoms only in retrospect, and the same indicators flashed for months through late 2022 while price kept sliding. Fear confirms opportunity for buyers with time horizons measured in years. It punishes everyone else.
None of that makes the signal infallible, and the bear case deserves its full weight. A divergence is not a timing tool: whales were also early in 2022, absorbing supply months before the actual low, and anyone who leveraged the accumulation thesis got carried out before being proven right.
The macro trigger has not disarmed, either. The next inflation print is the live variable, and a hot number would reload the exact mechanism that drained $4 billion in June, since nothing about whale accumulation prevents mandate-driven funds from selling more. Bitwise’s read of the parallel stress in Strategy’s preferred shares, that the market is working through a late-cycle leverage unwind, cuts both ways: unwinds end at bottoms, but they end violently, and the last leg is usually the worst one.
Reading the whale cohort honestly
The 1,000 BTC threshold that defines a whale wallet captures several very different animals, and the interpretation of the accumulation depends on which ones did the buying.
The most bullish reading assigns the coins to conviction capital: family offices, early holders reloading, sovereign-adjacent vehicles, and the class of buyer that accumulates through over-the-counter desks precisely to avoid moving the price. The negative spot premium through the buying window supports this reading, since it rules out the visible United States bid, and OTC accumulation into weakness is the classic signature of patient size.
The most boring reading assigns some of the movement to plumbing: exchanges consolidating cold storage, custodians migrating wallets, and settlement flows that inflate cohort statistics without expressing any view. The truth is a blend, and serious on-chain analysts hold the number loosely for exactly that reason.
Two cross-checks tilt the blend toward conviction. The first is the long-term holder metric, which is behavior-based instead of size-based: coins that have not moved in months turning into net accumulation is hard to generate with custodial reshuffling, and Glassnode flagged that shift across cohorts at the start of July. The second is the duration of the pattern. Wallet consolidation is lumpy and episodic; the June accumulation ran daily, through a 2-week window, against a falling price, which is the shape of a program, not a migration. Whoever was executing wanted more Bitcoin every day the price stayed under $62,000, and got it.
It is also worth noting who the whales are buying from, because supply has a face too. The ETF redemptions put a regulated, auditable seller on the tape every session. Miners under margin pressure added inventory. Short-term holders who bought the $70,000s capitulated at 21-month lows, the behavior that pushed over half the supply underwater. The full picture is a wealth transfer with unusually clean bookkeeping: from leveraged, mandated, and exhausted hands into large, unhurried ones, at prices the buyers evidently considered a discount.
The scenario map from $62,000
Divergences resolve, and this one has three plausible endings with watchable triggers.
The repair scenario is the historical base case. Macro softens, the July inflation print cooperates, ETF flows string together green sessions with breadth, and the price reclaims the 200-week average, converting June into another entry in the ledger of cycle lows that on-chain accumulation called early. The whales’ entry zone between $58,000 and $62,000 becomes the level the market defends, because the buyers who own it have shown they defend it. Confirmation looks like the flagship fund flipping to inflows and $62,500 breaking on volume.
The chop scenario is the underpriced one. Inflation stays sticky without spiking, the Fed stays parked, and the market grinds sideways for a quarter while ETF flows oscillate around 0. Whale accumulation in this world is early rather than wrong, the 2022 pattern, where large wallets absorbed supply for months before price agreed with them. The tell is time: patient capital does not mind, leveraged capital dies, and funding rates across the perpetuals complex show which cohort is being tested week by week.
The break scenario is the one the bears own. A hot CPI reloads the redemption machine, the 200-week average rejects the recovery, and $58,000 fails, opening the trapdoor toward the low $50,000s that technicians have flagged since the June breakdown. Even then, the divergence data offers the bears only half a victory: it would mean the whales were early again, not that the transfer did not happen, and every prior cycle says the coins that moved in June do not come back out at these levels regardless of what the next quarter’s candles look like.
There is one more asymmetry the bulls gloss over: the two cohorts do not experience being wrong the same way. If the whales are early, they wait, unleveraged and unbothered, the way they waited through 2022. If the ETF sellers are wrong, they will buy back in at higher prices, book the round trip as risk management, and their investors will barely notice. The divergence is a strong signal about where coins are going and a weak one about when price follows, and conflating those two claims is how retail traders turn a sound accumulation thesis into a liquidation.
The tape since the split
The first days of July have started scoring the disagreement, gently, in the whales’ favor. Fed chair Kevin Warsh acknowledged at the Sintra forum that inflation expectations had come down, and Bitcoin jumped more than 4% through $61,000 on the repricing of rate-hike risk. Two days later, a soft jobs report, 57,000 payrolls against expectations near 100,000 with 74,000 in downward revisions, extended the move, and Bitcoin printed $62,310 on Friday, its strongest level in 10 days, while equities set records and the ETF complex managed its first inflow in 2 weeks.
The checkpoints from here are unusually clean. Flows first: One $221 million day against a month of $4 billion proves nothing, and systematic desks want several consecutive green sessions with breadth across funds, including the largest one, before treating the reversal as a regime change rather than a bounce. Price second: $62,500 is the resistance the whole market is watching, and the 200-week average overhead is the structural line that separates a reclaimed cycle from a broken one. Macro third: the next CPI print either confirms Warsh’s softening or reloads the outflow machine.
And underneath all three sits the quieter metric that started this story: whether the coins keep moving to hands that do not sell on committee schedules. The divergence will close one way or the other, because it always does. Either the ETF sellers return as buyers at higher prices, which is how every prior version of this split resolved, or the whales have mistimed a macro regime that mandate money saw first, which would be a first. $16 billion in 2 weeks says the largest holders in the market have already placed their answer. The exit Wall Street used in June is still open. It is just worth noticing who was standing on the other side of it, catching everything that came through.
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.
Crypto’s most prominent former regulator wants the industry to stop treating the CLARITY Act as make-or-break. Chris Giancarlo, who chaired the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2017 to 2019, says the technology gets built either way.
Giancarlo still wants the bill passed. However, he argues the industry has staked its public message on legislation that has sat idle in the Senate for 80 days.
The CLARITY Act Is Not a Precondition
Speaking in a recent interview, Giancarlo said the sector has overcommitted to one piece of legislation.
“Now, what I’d say to the industry is perhaps it’s time to stop making such a big deal out of CLARITY,” he said.
The timeline explains the anxiety. The House passed H.R. 3633 on July 17, 2025, by 294 votes to 134. The Senate Banking Committee advanced it 15-9 on May 14, 2026.
No floor vote has followed. The Senate calendar sends the chamber home from August 10 until September 11, leaving roughly one week of floor time.
Giancarlo pointed to an older technology as precedent.
“The industry is running around saying we need clarity, we need clarity. Yeah, we do. But the internet is still happening and there’s never been an authorizing statute 30 years later. If we don’t get clarity, innovation goes on.”
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That cuts against the message from the bill’s loudest backers, including MicroStrategy and its lead Senate author, Cynthia Lummis.
Why Giancarlo Still Wants the Bill
His position is not opposition, and part of it is personal. Section 503 codifies LabCFTC, the fintech office he created in May 2017 as acting chairman.
He wants every financial regulator in Washington to run something similar.
“I’d like to see clarity pass, but I think we need to brace ourselves that it might not and the world is going to go on.”
The Precedent That Worries Him
Giancarlo also warns that legislation drags surveillance along with it. Public Law 119-27, the GENIUS Act, subjects permitted stablecoin issuers to the Bank Secrecy Act.
CLARITY applies the same standard to digital asset transactions. Giancarlo argues that approach violates Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
What Happens If CLARITY Fails
The CFTC is running on one Senate-confirmed official. Michael Selig, sworn in as the 16th chairman in December 2025, occupies the only filled seat of five.
Giancarlo expects the agency to keep moving with or without a statute.
“This is a change that is going to happen whether the clarity bill passes or not… Clarity will bring order to how that change happens. But it’s not going to stop that change.”
Failure would separate builders from spectators, he argued.
“If clarity doesn’t pass, the… premium for courage is going to go up.”
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The post Stop Acting Like the CLARITY Act Is Everything, Former Regulator Says appeared first on BeInCrypto.
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.
The post Trump Media Sells Another $165M in Bitcoin, Booking a Fresh Loss appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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.
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