Bitcoin gained 3% this week to a market capitalization of $1.24T.
Early Riders Media
On this week's Final Settlement, the team dissected Strategy's five-point plan to defend Stretch and its new Bitcoin monetization program, Washington's tightening grip on frontier AI releases, and the tokenization wave pulling Franklin Templeton and BlackRock deeper into digital assets.
You can find all our episodes on our podcast website as well as listen on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Industry & Institutional Updates
Strategy sold 3,588 bitcoin for $216m to fund its dividends. The company did not sell or repurchase any of its common or preferred equities, despite its openness to doing so.
Coinbase, Visa, and BlackRock backed Open USD, a new shared stablecoin from 140-plus firms, sending Circle shares down 16%.
Goldman Lampe Private Bank acquired $137 million in Bitcoin, timing the purchase to the market drawdown.
Metaplanet added 2,823 bitcoin to become the third largest corporate bitcoin treasury.
Binance halted services for EU customers after withdrawing its MiCA license application, planning to reapply through France.
BitGo cut nearly 15% of its workforce amid the weak stock price since going public.
BNY expanded its Circle relationship, making USDC the first stablecoin on its Digital Asset Custody platform.
FalconX secured a MiCA license from Malta two days before the EU transition deadline.
Binance faced a £150 million London High Court claim from 1,700 UK customers over unauthorized derivatives sales.
BitMEX announced the resignation of its CEO and CFO as the exchange continues seeking a buyer.
BlackRock integrated Ethena's USDe into its $20 trillion Aladdin platform, with BUIDL backing Ethena's white-label stablecoins.
Framework Ventures raised $400 million for its fourth fund, expanding beyond digital assets into AI, robotics, and energy.
Securitize debuted on the NYSE via a $400 million SPAC merger valuing the tokenization firm at $1.25 billion.
SBI Mining Pool to shut down after five years of activity, and representing 2% of global hash rate.
Breez added a Send USDT/USDC feature to its SDK that lets any app send dollars directly from a user's bitcoin balance to recipients on 30+ networks like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron.
Regulatory & Sovereign Updates
President Trump’s 2025 financial disclosures included more than $580m in gains from digital asset activities. The President held over $50m in bitcoin in cold storage.
The UK's FCA published landmark digital asset rules, setting capital and stress-testing requirements ahead of an October 2027 authorization regime.
The EU's MiCA transition period ended, leaving only licensed providers able to operate across the European Economic Area.
What We're Watching: Cloudflare Just Changed the Internet
Cloudflare just changed the internet's monetization path from advertising to pay per request.
This week it announced the Monetization Gateway, an engine that lets any site behind Cloudflare charge for what it serves: a web page, a dataset, an API, or an MCP tool call. The site owner writes a rule and sets a price. An agent that wants the resource pays for it at the edge, and the metering and settlement move off your origin.
For example, a client asks for a resource, and the server answers with 402 Payment Required, a status code that has sat unused in the HTTP spec for three decades, along with the price, the accepted asset, and where to pay. The client pays, retries with proof, and the resource comes back. No checkout page, API key, or account with the seller is needed, because the payment serves as the login credentials.
Why now?
Agents are becoming the primary users of the web, and they do not behave like people. They do not watch ads or hold monthly subscriptions. They read a page once and move on. According to Cloudflare: AI crawlers already request content up to 100 to 10,000 times for every visitor they send back. Usage-based pricing for everything an agent consumes, priced by the request, the token, or the outcome, will become the new norm.
At launch we expect this to settle with stablecoins. Dollars on-chain are what the people behind agents already understand, and they clear it in under a second, and for a fraction of a cent. Every stablecoin is a claim on a dollar held by a company inside a jurisdiction. As this traffic scales, the needs increase for a neutral, global base that no single issuer can freeze or debase, and that is the role that Bitcoin is best positioned to fill.
Chart of the Week
US spot Bitcoin ETFs gave back 71,800 BTC in June, the largest monthly redemption since the products launched in January 2024, with the trailing 30-day net flow bottoming at a record 80,340 coins. The selling was concentrated in BlackRock's IBIT, which returned 56,500 BTC, nearly four times Fidelity and Grayscale combined. On the other end of the table, Morgan Stanley's MSBT and Grayscale's Mini Trust kept buying through the worst month on record.
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