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BitMine Just Pulled a Saylor for Ethereum
Plus: 📉 Bitcoin's pre-Iran rally just got erased | 🚀 HYPE just flipped Solana on price | 🏛️ Bessent wants CLARITY passed this summer
Aakash Girimath
June 04, 2026
Hi! In today’s edition:
💼 The largest corporate Ethereum holder is borrowing a financing playbook that's worked for the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, and the underlying math is more interesting than it looks
📉 Bitcoin just gave up months of gains and erased the rally that started when the Iran conflict began, dragging billions in leveraged positions with it
🚀 A 19-month-old token briefly traded above an L1 that has anchored crypto for years, and the team behind the smaller one has fewer than a dozen employees
🏛️ The Treasury Secretary went in front of the Senate Wednesday with a specific ask and a phrase carefully chosen to manage expectations
BitMine Borrows Saylor's Playbook for ETH
BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), the largest corporate Ethereum treasury company, filed with the SEC on Wednesday to issue 3 million shares of Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock at a $100 stated value, targeting up to $300 million in gross proceeds. The preferred carries a 9.5% annual dividend paid weekly in cash, with shares to list on the NYSE under the ticker BMNP.
BitMine is led by Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee and holds 5.4 million ETH worth roughly $10 billion, or 4.5% of Ethereum's circulating supply. The company is sitting on an estimated $9.2 billion unrealized loss as ETH has fallen from around $5,000 in October to below $1,800. Proceeds will fund additional ETH purchases and validator infrastructure through BitMine's MAVAN platform.
The structure adapts Strategy's STRC model, which carries an 11.5% dividend and has raised about $10.5 billion since its July 2025 IPO. Moelis & Company and Cantor are joint lead bookrunners.
Bitcoin's Pre-Iran Rally Just Got Erased
Bitcoin tumbled below $62,000 on Thursday morning, sliding to its lowest level since before the U.S.-Iran conflict began and erasing months of gains, with cumulative crypto liquidations approaching $1.5 billion over the past 24 hours.
The slide extends a sharp correction that began last week, with the leading crypto sliding over 50% since its $126,000 ATH formed in October 2025. The 200-day moving average near $80,000 has acted as resistance four consecutive times. Spot Bitcoin ETFs marked their 11th consecutive day of net outflows on Wednesday, shedding $3.83 billion since May.
The macro overlay is what makes the slide structurally heavy. Oil prices have climbed on renewed Iran tensions, the dollar index has strengthened, and the S&P 500 keeps grinding to record highs on AI optimism while bitcoin diverges.
CryptoQuant analysts now flag the move as a genuine buyer drought hidden under record long-term holder supply.
HYPE Just Flipped Solana on Price
Hyperliquid's HYPE token briefly traded above Solana's SOL in dollar price on Wednesday, hitting an all-time high near $75.40 while SOL slipped to roughly $72 and its lowest level since late 2023.
The flip is symbolic, not structural. Solana still holds a market cap of approximately $42 billion versus Hyperliquid's roughly $16 billion. But HYPE has gained roughly 24% over the past month while SOL has dropped nearly 14% during the same period.
Hyperliquid's share of global perpetual futures volume reached a record 6.63% in May, while HIP-3 builder-deployed perpetuals generated more than $62 billion in monthly trading volume. Grayscale launched its HYPG staking ETF on Nasdaq on Wednesday, with Head of Research Zach Pandl calling Hyperliquid "the breakout success story of this cycle in crypto."
Bessent Wants CLARITY Passed This Summer
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday that the Treasury Department is moving forward with the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve at "deliberate speed" and urged senators to pass the CLARITY Act before the summer recess.
"It's very necessary to bring U.S. best practices onshore," Bessent said. "I look forward to the CLARITY Act being passed this summer."
The reserve, established by Trump's March 2025 executive order, holds approximately 207,000 BTC funded primarily through criminal and civil forfeitures. The CLARITY Act has stalled in the Senate over stablecoin yield provisions, developer protections, and conflict-of-interest concerns tied to President Trump's crypto ventures.
🔈BITS + BIPS INTERVIEW IS ON 🔊
The DOJ and CFTC's first-ever insider trading case against a public company employee — a Google engineer who made $1.2 million on Polymarket using nonpublic search ranking data — just put the whole industry on notice.
Sam Enzer, CahillNXT co-chair at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, joins Steven Ehrlich to explain how insider trading law now applies to prediction markets and what legal exposure traders actually face.
Livestreams Today, June 4 at 12pm ET
And don't go anywhere — Unchained continues right after with another live interview.
🎯 Polymarket's UMA upheld the "No" outcome on the $20M Strategy bitcoin sale market despite community backlash, ruling that the prior week's disclosure of Strategy's first BTC sale since 2022 did not satisfy the resolution criteria of the contract, which expired May 31. The dispute had become a flashpoint in the prediction market governance debate.
📋 Kraken parent Payward announced plans to offer tokenized IPO access to retail investors through its xStocks platform, joining Binance and Robinhood in the race to bridge tokenized public equities with crypto trading infrastructure ahead of SpaceX's expected June 11 listing.
🏛️ The House of Lords urged UK regulators to ease proposed stablecoin holding caps and other restrictions, arguing the current Bank of England framework could stifle market growth and undermine London's position as Europe's digital finance hub.
🔒 Trezor disclosed a hardware wallet vulnerability in its Safe 7 chip following research from Ledger Donjon, though the company said user funds remain safe and no exploit has been observed in the wild. The flaw affects the chip's secure element under specific physical attack scenarios.
🍰 Tether debuted a tokenized gold Visa card that pays out XAUT (tokenized gold) rewards on purchases, blending stablecoin payments infrastructure with commodity-backed token incentives in a consumer-facing product.
🇺🇸 The DOJ and CFTC opened a probe into George Santos over Kalshi trades tied to his State of the Union appearance, citing potential insider trading violations tied to nonpublic information about the speech and audience reaction.
⚙️ Solayer launched Margin Trade mainnet, a Solana-native onchain perpetual trading platform offering crypto, commodities, and equities via a single margin account. The launch targets Hyperliquid's perpetuals dominance from within the Solana ecosystem.
🔐 Zcash completed its NU8 network upgrade, described by the team as its most ambitious to date, after a four-hour block production stall during the transition. ZEC resumed its recent surge once consensus stabilized.
💱 Cardano slipped to a five-year low as founder Charles Hoskinson warned of a coming "wave of failures" across the crypto ecosystem in the broader downturn. TapTools, a major Cardano data provider, separately announced it is winding down operations.
💎 A 15-year-old physical bitcoin was redeemed for $1.78 million worth of BTC, marking one of the latest claims on the historic Casascius coin series first issued in 2011. The redemption highlights the long-tail of dormant supply that periodically enters circulation.
💳 Mastercard expanded stablecoin settlement to include Circle's USDC, Ripple's RLUSD, and PayPal's PYUSD, building out a multi-issuer stablecoin rail through its network for institutional settlement.
🌐 Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are reportedly among backers of a soon-to-debut stablecoin platform, signaling that the largest payment networks are coalescing around joint stablecoin infrastructure rather than competing fragmented standards.
🇬🇧 Revolut's US bank plans to offer stablecoin services alongside FDIC-insured products, per Reuters, marking another step in the convergence of regulated banking and stablecoin infrastructure at the consumer fintech level.
💼 Variant raised a $222 million fund targeting early-stage crypto and AI startups focused on expanding user "autonomy" through onchain agent infrastructure, decentralized identity, and self-custodial tools.
🇪🇺 Paypercut closed a €5 million seed round to build next-generation payments infrastructure for online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe, an underserved region in the stablecoin payments build-out.
🌊 Axis disclosed new strategic investors, including Steakhouse Financial and Serotonin, joining Galaxy, FalconX, and OKX Ventures. Axis is building cross-venue liquidity infrastructure for the tokenized economy, with Grove Finance and Basin (BlackRock, Securitize) providing the credit layer.
