Early Riders | Open Range Weekly | 07.13.26
Bitcoin gained ~1% this week to a market capitalization of $1.26T.
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On this week's Final Settlement, the team broke down Trump's billion-dollar digital asset windfall, the Open USD consortium's shot at reshaping stablecoin economics, and record Bitcoin ETF outflows.
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 $216 million, its largest disposal ever, to cover preferred dividend payments.
Alfa-Bank announced plans for Bitcoin trading, custody, and a digital depository once Russian regulation takes effect.
Crusoe entered talks to raise $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, nearly triple its last mark.
Empery Digital sold nearly half its Bitcoin holdings for $87 million, redirecting capital toward an AI data center stake.
EDX Markets closed a $76 million Series C led by SBI Holdings to expand institutional trading and clearing infrastructure.
Strike debuted Bitcoin-backed loans with no margin calls, built on a $2.1 billion credit facility with Tether.
Vanguard posted its first-ever Head of Digital Assets role, a thaw after years of dismissing the asset class.
Radar Chat launched an encrypted messaging app with self-custodial Lightning payments, making sending Bitcoin as easy as texting.
BitGo introduced quantum-risk management tools for institutional Bitcoin wallets, including exposure scoring and address remediation.
Tether invested $20 million in Brazil's Mercado Bitcoin to expand payments, tokenization, and lending across Latin America.
Paradigm raised a $1.2 billion fourth fund spanning digital assets, AI, robotics, and frontier technology.
Circle secured final OCC approval for a national trust bank, bringing USDC reserves under direct federal supervision.
Sony received conditional OCC approval for Connectia Trust, a national trust bank focused on a dollar-backed stablecoin.
eToro unveiled an AI overhaul, including its Tori agent that can execute trades through WhatsApp and Telegram.
Kraken won a $22 million arbitration award against former auditor Mazars over its abandoned 2022 audit.
AscendEX ceased operations amid a liquidity crunch, warning users they may not recover their full balances.
TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic worth roughly $19 billion at its 401 MW Kentucky campus.
Regulatory & Sovereign Updates
New Hampshire's Executive Council rejected a $100 million Bitcoin-backed municipal bond, which would have been the world's first.
The Reserve Bank of India backed a digital asset policy leaning toward prohibition, as tax officials flagged untraceable offshore trading.
Swift started its blockchain ledger with 17 global banks, enabling 24/7 tokenized payments to compete with stablecoins.
What We're Watching: Polymarket Plugs Into Bitcoin's Payment Layer
Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market, just launched instant Bitcoin deposits over the Lightning Network, powered by Spark, the bitcoin Layer 2 from the Lightspark team. Sats now move from any Lightning wallet to a live position in under a second, at near-zero fees, versus the 10 to 60 minutes the old on-chain route took. Deposits stay self-custodial until a trade is placed.
Prediction markets are in a full institutional breakout: combined monthly volume across Polymarket and Kalshi hit $44.8 billion in June, up roughly 75% from May, ICE committed up to $2 billion to Polymarket, and one bank forecast puts annual volume at $1 trillion by 2030. Polymarket is the largest consumer app yet to route money over bitcoin rails.
Spark is a statechain Layer 2 that moves ownership of on-chain coins by rotating keys between the user and a set of independent operators, with a pre-signed exit back to the base layer at all times. Every mainstream app that accepts sats makes bitcoin the funding asset. A Lightning deposit hands over no card number and no bank login, allowing the payment itself to become the credential.
Chart of the Week
Roughly 400 million people worldwide have some Bitcoin exposure, yet only 13% can explain how it works, and just 57 million addresses hold any at all. The number of non-zero addresses has climbed straight through every drawdown, including this one, while only 0.2% of the addressable wealthy market holds a meaningful position.
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