Bitcoin was down (7.2%) this week to a market capitalization of $1.45T

Industry & Institutional Updates

FalconX filed a confidential S-1 draft with the SEC for a year-end IPO, hiring Cantor as advisor; the institutional prime brokerage has processed over $2 trillion in volume and owns 21Shares.
Banca Sella became the first Italian bank licensed under MiCA for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency custody, with a full service offering planned before year-end.
Mastercard secured a New York BitLicense from the NYDFS to handle stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and on-chain settlement, following its $1.8 billion acquisition of BVNK in March.
Coinbase won CFTC approval to connect US clients to global crypto perpetuals and options as foreign futures, the first such designation for a regulated US crypto exchange.
Cash App completed a phased USDC rollout to approximately 60 million users, while simultaneously showcasing Bitcoin Lightning payments at Square merchant POS terminals.
Kraken launched Bitcoin Vault, a non-custodial Bitcoin yield product offering 2.5% APY deployed across Aave and Morpho, drawing $30 million in its first 10 hours.
Trump Media transferred $205 million in Bitcoin to Crypto.com as unrealized losses on its holdings reached $455 million, against a Q1 net loss of $406 million on just $871,000 in revenue.
Coinkitelaunched the Coldcard MK5, the first hardware wallet release since 2022, featuring a larger Gorilla Glass screen, improved NFC, and faster navigation.
Strategy completed a $1.5 billion convertible note repurchase at an 8% discount, reducing its debt load from $8.2 billion to $6.7 billion and achieving 13.3% BTC yield year-to-date.
Coinbase and Standard Chartered partnered to add AUD, SGD, CAD, and CHF fiat rails through Coinbase Prime, expanding global fiat access for institutional clients across Asia-Pacific and Europe.
Visa invested in Replit and integrated its Intelligent Commerce suite into the platform, embedding agentic payment infrastructure directly into AI-generated application workflows.
SoFi launched SoFiUSD, the first stablecoin issued by a US national bank, available on Ethereum and Solana with 1:1 USD redemption for its 15 million members.
Paxos received SEC registration for its Securities Settlement Company as a clearing agency, the first blockchain-native firm to achieve full SEC clearing registration after seven years of development.
Tether partnered with the National Bank of Georgia to launch an official Georgian Lari stablecoin on a public blockchain, the first sovereign stablecoin in the Caucasus region.
Tether's USAT grew 540% in April to 140 million tokens, backed by cash and Treasury-collateralized reverse repos, though the supply remains far smaller than Circle's $76 billion USDC.

Regulatory & Sovereign Updates

Texas Comptroller Hancock named a five-member Strategic Bitcoin Reserve advisory committee and opened proposals for firms to custody the state's Bitcoin, with members including CleanSpark CFO Gary Vecchiarelli and SMU law professor Carla Reyes.
The U.S. Treasury seized nearly $1 billion in Iranian crypto under "Operation Economic Fury," including $344 million in USDT frozen by Tether from IRGC-linked Tron wallets, with Secretary Bessent saying the U.S. "outright grabbed the wallets."
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon vowed to fight the Clarity Act and called Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong "full of sh*t," signaling coordinated bank opposition to digital asset market structure legislation.
The UK sanctioned Justin Sun's HTX exchange under its Russia sanctions regime, the first time a crypto exchange has been designated under the UK's Russia financial restrictions.
Hong Kong's SFC finalized its cryptocurrency regulatory framework for advisory and asset management services, describing it as the final component of a comprehensive digital asset regulatory structure.

What We're Watching: Block Adds Stablecoin Support

Block is finishing its phased rollout of USDC stablecoin payments to approximately 60 million Cash App users this week, while simultaneously showcasing Bitcoin Lightning payments at the Square merchant point-of-sale in Las Vegas.

Bitcoin Is Money, Not Just an Asset to Hoard

Cash App treats Bitcoin as spendable money in production today: peer-to-peer transfers over any Cashtag, Lightning send and receive, Bitcoin Boost rewards on every Cash App Card swipe, and Bitkey for self-custody with NFC tap-to-pay. Square enables merchants to accept Bitcoin over Lightning directly through existing hardware. This is the original whitepaper thesis, peer-to-peer electronic cash, shipping at scale in 2026. Bitcoin competes in both the money market and the store-of-value market simultaneously, which together represent a multi-trillion-dollar addressable base that no other digital asset can credibly target.

Stablecoins Ship Alongside Because the Market Wants Dollars

Plenty of users get paid in dollars, priced in dollars, and owe rent and taxes in dollars. USDC and similar instruments put those dollars onto open, programmable rails without changing the user's unit of account. That is a legitimate, durable preference, particularly in the US, and a complete product accommodates it. The product question Block answered is "how do we let users transact in either and on the rails of their choice?"

Three Structural Reasons the Two Are Complementary, Not Adversarial

First, Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It does not close for bank holidays. Stablecoins are functionally the only counterparty that can match that settlement window. Deep, global Bitcoin markets require a tokenized dollar on the other side, which is why stablecoin float and Bitcoin liquidity have grown together rather than at each other's expense.

Second, stablecoins do meaningful user-education work. For most new users globally, particularly outside the US, the first contact with a public blockchain is a dollar-denominated stablecoin, not Bitcoin. The dollar is the familiar object; self-custody and on-chain settlement are not. The stablecoin on-ramp lowers the activation energy that eventually delivers a meaningful share of those users to Bitcoin.

Third, issuer behavior reveals the convergence. Tether systematically allocates 15% of its quarterly profits to Bitcoin purchases. The largest stablecoin business in the world is, structurally, one of the largest programmatic Bitcoin accumulators. The stablecoin rails are quietly funding the Bitcoin balance sheet.

What Dorsey's Quote Actually Means

Asked about the rollout, Jack Dorsey said, "I don't like that we're going to support stablecoins but our customers want to use them." Jack understands that a complete consumer fintech in 2026 needs to be: spendable Bitcoin for users on a Bitcoin standard, programmable dollars for users on a dollar standard, and the on-ramps, custody and merchant tooling that work for either currency.

The Allocator Takeaway

The asset-class question (does Bitcoin earn a place in a long-duration portfolio?) is separate from the rails question (which rails will money increasingly live on?). The infrastructure question, who owns the custody, compliance, settlement and merchant plumbing that supports both Bitcoin and tokenized dollars, is where most of the durable enterprise value will accrue long-term.

Chart of the Week

Central banks bought more gold in 2024 than at any point since 1950, reversing a 50-year trend defined by systematic reserve liquidations after Nixon ended dollar-gold convertibility in 1971. The UK sold 395 tonnes in the late 1990s. Switzerland sold 1,300. For three decades, official gold holdings fell. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 appears to have permanently reset that calculus. Central banks are now accumulating at record pace, and they are not accumulating dollars.

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Early Riders | Open Range Weekly | 06.01.26