Elizabeth Warren during the CLARITY Act markup: "While we're at war, Iran is openly gearing up to collect crypto fees from oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz."

Sen. Lummis: "The hardest piece of legislation I've ever worked on. We can return this industry to the United States because the majority of it has already left for overseas because this legislation wasn't ready until today."

Google search interest for "Bitcoin" just hit its lowest point in the last 12 months.

Sen. Tim Scott's opening statement kicking off the CLARITY Act markup: "For years, the digital frontier was trapped in a regulatory gray zone." "Developers, entrepreneurs, and investors were left with uncertainty. They faced confusion in enforcement actions when, instead, the government should have been crafting clear rules of the road." "Those hurdles drove innovation overseas, left Americans exposed, and made it harder for law enforcement to do their job." "Today, we change that. The bill we are marking up achieves three simple goals. Number one, protecting consumers. Keeping innovation here at home. And safeguarding U.S. national security. Those are not partisan goals. They are American priorities."

US interest expense on public debt just crossed $1.27 trillion over the last 12 months. It took 73 years to 109x that number from 1947 to 2019. It has more than doubled in the six years since. The 30-year treasury just cleared 5% for the first time since 2007. Japan's 20-year bond hit its highest yield since 1997. This isn't an isolated move. This is a global repricing of sovereign debt risk happening in real time. The doom loop is simple: higher rates mean higher interest expense, which means more borrowing, which means more supply, which pushes rates higher. At this pace, interest on the debt will surpass Social Security as the largest line item in the federal budget. The US government will spend more servicing past borrowing than on the retirement safety net for 70 million Americans. Global money supply just crossed $121.9 trillion, up $17.1 trillion in two years, growing at 7-8% annually. Central banks are trapped between inflation that won't die and debt loads that require low rates to service. Cut rates and you pour gasoline on the inflation fire. Hold or hike and the interest expense spiral accelerates. There is no clean exit. The inflation side is getting worse. Electricity prices up 50% in five years. PPI leading CPI higher. Data center construction at $50 billion annualized, up 437% since 2021, now exceeding office construction. The Informationist's CPI overlay tracks the 1970s pattern with a 0.93 correlation. April 2026 CPI sits at 3.78%, right at the inflection point where inflation re-accelerated before peaking near 14%. The Fed declared victory prematurely then, too. Meanwhile the S&P 500 just set a record for the most components hitting new 52-week lows on a day the index poked above its prior all-time closing high. The six-week rally is the biggest since QE1, concentrated in a handful of AI and infrastructure names. The index is a mask. Underneath it, the average company is deteriorating. Twenty-one million against all of it.

The Senate Banking Committee markup on the Clarity Act is Live:

Today's Bitcoin Brief: → US 30-year hits 5% for the first time since 2007 → Interest expense at $1.27T — took 73 years to 109x, 6 years to double → 1970s inflation overlay shows 0.93 correlation with today → Banking lobby wants to surveil your self-custody wallet → Claude recovered 5 BTC after 3.5 trillion failed passwords The sovereign debt trap is tightening. This is why Bitcoin exists. https://fountain.fm/episode/wialNi5cSjeuQq6bgNHA

Trump and Xi Jinping's first meeting of the Beijing summit has just concluded. Xi asked Trump whether the US and China can avoid the "Thucydides Trap," the historical pattern where a rising power and an established power end up at war. It has held true in 12 of 16 cases going back to ancient Greece. For a head of state to frame a summit around that question is a signal Beijing views the current trajectory as genuinely dangerous. Taiwan dominated. Xi called it "the most important issue in China-US relations" and warned that mishandling it could push the two nations into "collision or even conflict." Trump said he'd discuss US arms sales to Taiwan directly with Xi, breaking with decades of US policy that treated those sales as not open to negotiation with Beijing. Both sides are working to preserve the fragile tariff truce from last October. A 500-unit Boeing 737 Max order is expected, one of the largest in Boeing's history. New bilateral "Board of Trade" and "Board of Investment" bodies are being discussed. Iran looms over everything. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for over two months. The US wants China to pressure Tehran into reopening it. Analysts say Xi will be reluctant to cut support for Beijing's most important Middle East partner. Trump arrived with Musk, Jensen Huang, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, and executives from Goldman, Blackstone, Visa, Mastercard, and Boeing. State banquet tonight. More talks Friday.

O'Leary: "Would you prefer all of us stop while the Chinese accelerate theirs?" Tucker: "Do I want to become like China in order that we can 'beat China?' Not at all."

O'Leary: "By building a data center that trains AI, we create millions of jobs, high-paying jobs." Tucker: "What are those millions of jobs? We can go through the list of jobs they say it's going to eliminate."

President Trump arrives in Beijing and shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a formal welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People.

The Senate Banking Committee votes on the CLARITY Act tomorrow. The White House is targeting July 4 for final passage. The policy substance is largely settled. The stablecoin yield compromise is locked. The market structure framework is agreed upon. The bill passed its hardest technical negotiations. What could still derail it is the ethics provision. The current text contains none. Democrats say the bill will not move without conflict-of-interest rules for government officials involved in crypto. The White House says it will accept rules that apply equally across all of government but will reject anything targeting a specific officeholder. The bill needs 60 Senate votes to pass the full Senate, which requires bipartisan support. The committee can advance the bill tomorrow on party-line votes. But it still needs to merge with the Agriculture Committee's version, get ethics language both sides accept, and clear the 60-vote threshold. Whether that happens by July 4 or August or at all depends on whether the ethics fight gets resolved.

"I'm not too worried about any amendments tomorrow because the base text has gotten to a place with bipartisan collaboration that I think will carry the day." Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the CLARITY Act markup happening tomorrow.

Nakamoto reported a $238.8 million net loss in Q1, its first quarter as a Bitcoin operating company. $210 million of it is non-cash paper losses from Bitcoin dropping 22% during the quarter and a write-down on a pre-acquisition option. Nakamoto sold 284 BTC to fund operations. The company holds 5,000+ BTC and carries $210 million in debt via a Kraken loan collateralized by that Bitcoin. Its market cap is only $152 million, meaning the debt is larger than the equity. Total revenue was just $2.7 million. The operating businesses (Bitcoin Magazine, The Bitcoin Conference, UTXO Management) only contributed for about five weeks of the quarter and there were no major events. Q2 is the real test. The Bitcoin Conference revenue lands next quarter, and Bitcoin is up 16% from where it closed Q1.

Hill County, Texas, a rural county about 55 miles south of Fort Worth, just voted 3-2 to impose a one-year moratorium on new data center and energy storage construction. It is the first Texas county to successfully pass one. County commissioners said data center developers have found a "sweet spot" in rural Texas: limited regulations, limited enforcement, limited building codes, and no zoning requirements in unincorporated areas. At least eight projects are in the works for Hill County alone, and the county judge said he only knows about them because he hears through word of mouth when farmers sell their land. Developers are not required to disclose their plans. Residents raised concerns about noise pollution, water consumption, and electricity demand. Commissioners said projects are moving in faster than local officials can keep up. Data center developers called commissioners as late as 10 PM the night before the vote, pleading with them to reject the moratorium. The county attorney warned them they would likely be sued. They voted yes anyway. A state senator had already sent a letter to the Texas Attorney General claiming counties have no legal authority to impose moratoriums, asking him to investigate any county that passed one. A neighboring county, Hood County, backed down under that pressure. Hill County did not. The county judge said other county judges across Texas had been waiting for someone to go first. Hill County expects lawsuits from developers and possibly the state. This is the same tension playing out across the country as AI infrastructure scales up. The demand for compute is real. So are the concerns of people who live where it is being built.

Ryan Cohen isn't backing down after eBay called GameStop's $56 billion offer "neither credible nor attractive."

A former Humana doctor admitted her job was to deny patients care. She rejected a lifesaving operation. The patient died. She saved the company $500,000 and got promoted.

The US Senate has confirmed Kevin Warsh as the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve, replacing Jerome Powell. Warsh served as a Fed Governor from 2006 to 2011. He has called bitcoin "an important asset" and "a very good policeman for policy," arguing its price reflects confidence in the Fed's management of the dollar. He has also opposed aggressive CBDC expansion. A sharp departure from Powell's posture over the last eight years.

A Bitcoin holder (cprkrn) just used Claude to recover access to a wallet he'd been locked out of for over 11 years. He bought the bitcoin around 2014 when it was roughly $250 each. At some point he got stoned and changed his password, then could never get back in. He tried what he describes as "7 trillion passwords" over the years. Nothing worked. A few weeks ago he found an old mnemonic from before he changed the password. He thought he was still out of luck because the wallet file had been updated with the new password. As a last resort, he dumped his entire old college computer's files into Claude. Claude found an older version of the wallet file buried in the data. The original mnemonic successfully decrypted it. Claude identified a bug in how the wallet software concatenated the shared key and password, ran btcrecover with the correct algorithm, extracted the private keys, and converted them to WIF format. The address (14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6) received a total of 16.95 BTC over its lifetime. At today's prices, that is worth over $1.7 million. The wallet has since been emptied, meaning he likely moved the funds to a new wallet he controls. He paid around $250 per coin. He recovered them at over ~$80,000 per coin. An AI model did in one session what 11 years of manual attempts could not.

"A quarter of all iOS devices were vulnerable. You load a website and it breaks out of the browser, grabs your crypto keys off the secure enclave, pulls your photos. As models like Mythos become prevalent, we may see one of those every couple weeks." - Zach Herbert 🇺🇸