Early Riders | Open Range Weekly | 02.15.26
Bitcoin was down (1%) this week to a market capitalization of $1.38T.
Early Riders Media
This week's podcast addressed bitcoin's resilience following the decline to $60,000, emphasizing that fundamentals remain unchanged. The team discussed Tether's scaled-back fundraising plans and strategic investments across the digital asset ecosystem. Michael shared his weekend experiment building bitcoin and Lightning wallet integrations using Claude AI, demonstrating how frontier models can execute complex coding tasks.
You can find all our episodes on our podcast website as well as listen on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Industry & Institutional Updates
Standard Chartered partnered with B2C2 to provide institutional clients access to digital asset trading infrastructure.
Coinbase launched digital asset wallets built for AI agents, enabling autonomous systems to hold and transact digital assets.
Tether made a strategic investment into LayerZero Labs, creator of technology used for USDT cross-chain infrastructure.
BlackRock's IBIT achieved record trading volumes of more than $10 billion during bitcoin's price decline, demonstrating sustained institutional demand despite market volatility.
Goldman Sachs disclosed its $1.1 billion position in bitcoin, signaling growing conviction from the largest banks.
Binance bought $300 million in bitcoin for its SAFU reserve during the market dip, capitalizing on lower prices to strengthen its emergency fund.
Regulatory Updates
Vietnam announced that they will tax digital assets like stocks, treating digital asset gains as securities income for taxation purposes.
The CFTC clarified that stablecoins issued by national trust banks fall under its regulatory purview for derivatives oversight.
The UK picked HSBC as the platform provider for its digital bond pilot issuance, advancing blockchain integration in sovereign debt markets.
The EU Parliament backed the digital euro with alignment between Parliament and Council on online and offline-ready functionality.
The CFTC announced the newest group of Innovation Advisory Committee members including CEOs from Coinbase, Ripple, Uniswap, Kraken, and Anchorage Digital, to help modernize regulations.
Treasury Secretary Bessent stated that passage of the Clarity Act would provide "great comfort to the market", urging swift congressional action in favor of the bill.
What We're Watching
Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, the first wallet infrastructure purpose-built for autonomous AI agents to hold and manage crypto independently. The system enables AI agents to spend, earn, and trade digital assets without human approval at every financial decision, built on Coinbase's x402 protocol, which has processed over 50 million transactions to-date since launch.
Founded on Coinbase Developer Platform infrastructure, Agentic Wallets provide AI systems with programmable guardrails including spending limits, session caps, and transaction controls while keeping private keys isolated in secure environments. The wallets initially support EVM chains and Solana, with transactions available on Base Layer 2. As AI agents evolve from advisory roles to autonomous actors, Coinbase positions this infrastructure as foundational for the next phase of digital commerce, enabling agents to pay for compute, APIs, rebalance DeFi positions, and participate in creator economies autonomously.
Chart of the Week
Average output per labor hour reaches a decade-long high of nearly 1.8, which is the largest increase in output per labor hour since 2013.
AI adoption has already begun to impact average outputs per labor hour, which have rapidly risen since 2020, with the introduction of AI capabilities.
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