Hi! In today’s edition:
📈 Crypto's market cap briefly brushed $3 trillion on a SpaceX-driven short squeeze, but analysts say the rally still lacks broad conviction as flows stay weak
🏦 BlackRock's yield-paying iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA) went live on Nasdaq, trading some Bitcoin upside for a mid-to-high-teens yield
🪙 Coinbase entered the tokenized stock race with 1:1-backed onchain shares that pay dividends, part of a sweeping "everything exchange" push
⟠ Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade, its biggest since the Merge, entered the final development stage with devnet testing underway
Crypto Brushed $3 Trillion, but Conviction Is Missing
Crypto's total market value briefly brushed $3 trillion this week, but the rally rested on a short squeeze rather than fresh conviction.
The trigger came from outside crypto. After SpaceX went public and soared, traders piled into bearish bets on its blockchain-based perpetual futures, then got squeezed as the stock kept climbing. SpaceX's implied valuation on these venues briefly topped $3 trillion, with about $5 billion of the perps trading in 24 hours across Hyperliquid and Binance.
Crypto itself stayed cautious with Bitcoin hovering near $66,000, barely moving despite the US-Iran deal and the market-cap milestone. Derivatives data showed open interest and basis ticked up, but funding rates and implied volatility stayed near multiyear lows, showing high concentrated leverage with no apparent demand.
However, according to experts, the worst of the selling is done, as the real bid has not returned.
BlackRock's Yield-Paying Bitcoin ETF Goes Live
BlackRock launched its iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF on Tuesday, a product that trades away some of Bitcoin's upside in exchange for double-digit income.
Trading on Nasdaq under the ticker BITA, the fund splits its holdings between Bitcoin and BlackRock's spot IBIT ETF, then sells call options on up to 35% of the portfolio each month to generate cash payouts. Head of digital assets Robert Mitchnick described it as roughly "70% upside retention in IBIT and a mid-to-high-teens yield" under current conditions.
BlackRock is pitching the product to advisors, insurers, and pension funds who have stayed away from Bitcoin partly because it pays no yield. The launch follows the firm's January filing and beats Goldman Sachs, which filed a similar income product in April, to market.
Coinbase Pushes Into Tokenized Stocks and Much More
Coinbase unveiled a sweeping expansion Tuesday aimed at becoming an "everything exchange," led by tokenized US stocks that it says offer real ownership.
The exchange said its tokenized stocks will be backed one-for-one by underlying US equities, letting users own, trade, hold, and redeem shares onchain while automatically receiving dividends. CEO Brian Armstrong drew a sharp line against rivals: "Other current solutions are some form of derivative or IOU, not real ownership." The tokens debut first in eligible jurisdictions outside the US.
The tokenized stocks were one piece of a much broader "System Update." Coinbase also introduced options on stocks and crypto, stock and ETF trading, pre-IPO and thematic perpetual futures, expanded prediction markets, an SEC-registered AI advisor tool, and consumer products including a USDC-backed credit card.
Ethereum's Biggest Upgrade Since the Merge Nears
Ethereum's next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, has entered its final development stage, developers said, in what they call the network's most ambitious change since the 2022 Merge.
Developer teams are now running "devnets," early testing environments, containing the full slate of planned changes before the code moves to public testnets. "This is the last phase before we work on hardening and then shipping the testnets," said Ethereum Foundation core developer Parithosh Jayanthi. No firm activation date is set, but the upgrade is expected in the second half of the year.
Glamsterdam's headline features include enshrined proposer-builder separation, which moves block-building onchain to curb MEV manipulation, and block-level access lists to speed execution. It also brings sweeping gas repricings that would make computation cheaper and state more expensive.
📈 Tokenized Stocks, Regulated Perps, and the Fine Print 📜
First up at 2pm ET: Zach Pandl, Head of Research at Grayscale Investments, joins Steven Ehrlich on Bits + Bips: The Interview for a conversation you don't want to miss.
At 3pm ET: Kalshi's regulated perpetual futures just cleared $5.5B in two weeks — the opening proof-of-concept for whether a CFTC-approved venue can pull volume from offshore giants.
John Wang, Head of Crypto at Kalshi, joins Laura Shin to explain what regulated perps are, why the futures-vs-swaps classification fight matters, and where Kalshi goes from here.
Then at 4pm ET: Coinbase announced 1:1 backed tokenized US stocks — launching outside the US only — and the big question is: what legal rights do you actually have as an onchain stockholder?
Kain Warwick, Luca Netz, and Taylor Monahan break that down alongside the Anthropic model ban and Strategy's latest $100M bitcoin buy.
Catch all streams today starting at 2pm ET.
However you consume Bits + Bips, we've got you covered — and you'll want to be locked in because the show has recently migrated to its own feed.
🎧 Audio person? → Apple Podcasts or Spotify 📺 Visual learner? → YouTube 🐦 Live-poster? → X or LinkedIn 🌐 Web reader? → Unchained
🇪🇺 Binance faces uncertainty over its EU licensing and may have to halt services for clients in the bloc next month, according to a Reuters report of a Greek rejection. Binance said its European regulatory application is fully compliant and disputed the characterization.
🏦 State Street launched a money market fund for stablecoin issuers, a GENIUS Act-compliant vehicle to manage the reserves backing digital dollars. It joins BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Fidelity competing for a reserve-management market that could reach trillions by 2030.
⚖️ SEC Chair Paul Atkins defended CFTC leadership amid questions over whether the derivatives agency can oversee fast-growing prediction markets. Atkins called Chairman Michael Selig "capable," even as the CFTC, with roughly 550 staff to the SEC's 4,000-plus, pushes to assert jurisdiction over sports-betting markets.
💼 Robinhood cut 10% of its workforce, with CEO Vlad Tenev framing the layoffs as a move to flatten the org and raise "talent density." The company expects about $28 million in restructuring charges and said its business "has never been stronger."
🏛️ A bipartisan group of senators urged the Treasury not to cut states out of the GENIUS Act stablecoin oversight process. The letter pushes back on a reading of the law that would centralize authority federally, arguing states should keep their supervisory role.
🇮🇳 India's Enforcement Directorate filed charges against eight defendants over an alleged $20 million Coinbase spoofing scam. The agency said Chirag Tomar, already sentenced to 60 months in the US, and associates ran spoofed Coinbase sites to harvest credentials, and it has provisionally attached about $6.8 million in assets.
📉 Pump.fun activity has cratered 80% over three months, dragging down Solana network fees as traders rotate toward perps. The launchpad's revenue has fallen to about $800,000 a day from $4.8 million six months ago, and Solana's daily fees have dropped to roughly 5,300 SOL from 33,000 SOL in January.
🇯🇵 The Bank of Japan raised interest rates to a 31-year high, but analysts expect no meaningful disruption to crypto markets. Bitcoin actually rose after the decision, suggesting the hike was already priced in.
🇳🇬 The IMF warned that Nigeria's stablecoin adoption is testing the limits of its monetary and regulatory frameworks. The fund said the risks grow more pronounced as adoption scales, urging stronger oversight.
🇫🇷 French Bitcoin treasury firm Capital B is developing an STRC-style credit instrument for the European market, board director Alexandre Laizet told The Block at BTC Prague. The bitcoin-backed product would target double-digit yields with single-digit volatility, drawing on the firm's 3,139 BTC.
🤖 Decentralized-AI tokens Venice's VVV and Morpheus's MOR jumped after the US ordered Anthropic to cut foreign access to its two most advanced models, prompting Anthropic to disable them while it contests the order. The rallies ran on a censorship-resistance narrative rather than capability, MOR's 21% move came on under $300,000 of volume, and both projects' open-source models test as less capable than the Anthropic systems pulled.
🔗 Squid integrated Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin for cross-chain swaps across the XRP Ledger, Ethereum, and Layer 2s. The integration lets RLUSD move across chains more easily, expanding the stablecoin's reach as Ripple pushes adoption.
🥊 Trump-backed World Liberty Financial is nearing OCC trust charter approval, which would give the Trump-family-linked crypto firm a federal banking footprint. The move would deepen WLF's reach into regulated finance and intensify the conflict-of-interest questions already surrounding it.
🤝 Y Combinator launched Locus Founder, an AI agent that builds and runs an internet business from a text message and settles payments in USDC. The agent earns, holds, and spends through a non-custodial wallet with built-in spending controls and human oversight.
🌍 Ripple invested in Flutterwave and is pushing RLUSD and XRP Ledger adoption across Africa, tapping the continent's largest payments processor. The deal valued Flutterwave at about $3.2 billion and gives Ripple a major distribution channel for cross-border payments.
🏗️ Inveniam agreed to acquire MANTRA, combining MANTRA's tokenized-asset infrastructure with Inveniam's AI-ready private-market data. Inveniam had invested $20 million in MANTRA last year before moving to buy it outright.
Oak Research: Would Crypto Be Better Off Without LayerZero?
Ponyo: Are HIP-3 Newcomers Cooked?
