Hi! In today’s edition:
🟠 Bitcoin's most famous bull picked a side in the fight splitting the community.
🇫🇷 France decided prediction markets don't belong on its internet.
⚖️ FTX's latest payout crosses a key milestone.
Saylor Comes Out Swinging Against BIP-110
Michael Saylor has joined the chorus against BIP-110, the contested proposal to strip so-called spam data off the Bitcoin blockchain, calling it "a bad idea" in a 110-point essay posted Sunday.
"The proposed cure is more dangerous than the condition," the Strategy executive chairman, whose firm holds 843,775 BTC worth $54.31 billion, said.
BIP-110 would run a one-year soft fork capping arbitrary data and, controversially, lower the miner approval threshold from 95% to 55%. Saylor called that "too aggressive," warning it invites a chain split and chills developers.
Miner support for BIP-110 currently sits below 1%, yet the proposal hits a mandatory signaling window in early August. Saylor's stance lines up with Adam Back and other Bitcoiners already opposed.
France Pulls the Plug on Polymarket
France ordered its internet providers to block Polymarket on July 16, becoming one of the largest European markets to wall off the prediction platform. The gambling regulator, the ANJ, treats Polymarket as an illegal gambling site rather than a financial exchange.
A 2024 ban on French financial transactions had failed, since users simply switched on a VPN. Polymarket still drew 205,057 French visitors in June. The regulator also cited a rigged-looking weather bet: Météo-France flagged a tampered temperature sensor, and Paris prosecutors opened a cybercrime probe in May.
Advertising an unlicensed betting site can draw fines up to €100,000. France is among more than 30 jurisdictions restricting Polymarket, from Spain to Brazil, a widening crackdown as the company simultaneously pushes to expand in the United States.
FTX Creditors Cross the 100% Line
FTX will send roughly $900 million to creditors on July 31, its fifth payout since the exchange collapsed.
International "dotcom" customers and U.S. customers both reach 105% cumulative recovery, general unsecured and loan claims hit 103%, and the smallest "convenience" claims land at 120%. A separate $18 million goes to preferred equity holders.
Payouts are pegged to crypto prices at FTX's November 2022 bankruptcy, so creditors miss the run-up since. Funds flow through BitGo, Kraken, and Payoneer within days. The coming payout follows a $2.2 billion sum in March.
🚨 Monday Double-Header 🚨
Stripe bid $53 billion for PayPal and got rejected while Visa quietly opened stablecoin rails to 200 million merchants.
Cyclops founder Alex Wilson, who ran crypto at payments giant Shift4, joins Austin, Ram, and Chris to map who actually wins the payment rails. Plus: SpaceX trading below its IPO price, and whether the AI trade is finally cracking.
Today, 4:30pm ET.
Lyn Alden just announced Orange Juice, a permanent-capital firm that buys and permanently holds cash-flowing businesses and backs them with a bitcoin treasury, pitched as the anti-private-equity.
Laura gets all the details, plus discusses Strategy's record BTC sale, the Fed's "gradual print" era, and the spam fork tearing Bitcoin apart.
Streams Monday at 3:30pm ET.
🗳️ Uniswap is voting to activate v4 protocol fees across seven chains including Robinhood Chain, a move set to grow the UNI burn that hit a record 186,000 UNI in a single day last month. The onchain vote runs through July 26 and is passing so far with zero votes against.
🔮 Hyperliquid will open HIP-4 to permissionless deployment, letting anyone launch onchain prediction and outcome markets rather than only curated ones, with deployers required to stake HYPE as slashable collateral.
🔒 Allbridge paused Allbridge Core on Sunday after a flash loan attack that onchain analysts pegged at roughly $1.65 million, the cross-chain stablecoin bridge's second such exploit since 2023. The attacker used a $1.12 million Kamino flash loan to distort its Solana USDC/USDT pool, then bridged the funds to Ethereum.
₿ Bitcoin Japan tapped EVO Fund for a roughly $60 million raise, but earmarked only about $4 million for its first-ever bitcoin purchase despite adopting the name and a treasury strategy last year. The rest is headed to private equity, rare earth mining, and robotics.
⚖️ A UK gang was jailed for stealing more than £4 million ($5.4 million) in crypto by impersonating police officers and steering victims to fake police websites, the Met Police said. The three men, sentenced to terms of up to six years, funded a life of Rolexes and luxury holidays, though one had declared income of just £444 a year.
🏦 Bank of America named new leaders for crypto and AI, appointing Sonali Theisen to head its global digital assets platform spanning stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and custody, and Kevin Milsom to lead AI transformation across its global markets division.
🇯🇵 AZ-COM Maruwa will pay contractors in the yen-pegged stablecoin JPYC, routing payouts to around 2,300 Amazon Japan truckers and small delivery firms onchain, according to Nikkei, in what would be the country's first large-scale corporate use of the token. It is also weighing a 1 billion yen ($6.2 million) investment in issuer JPYC Inc.
🏟️ Galaxy Digital signed a 15-year deal to rename Texas Tech's football stadium Galaxy Stadium, tying the crypto and data center firm to a Big 12 program near its 1.6-gigawatt Helios AI campus in West Texas.
💰 SBI Holdings completed its takeover of Singapore crypto exchange Coinhako, acquiring a majority stake and consolidating it as a subsidiary as of July 16 after clearing approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
💸 Credible raised through a token sale on Solana-based launchpad MetaDAO, with the payments project drawing commitments well beyond its $4 million target.
Clifford Sosin: Maybe Intelligence Ain't All That
