.@jack mallers' letter to Strike investors after stepping down from Twenty One. "The moment you blame someone else for your outcome, you hand them the power to define it." "Strike isn't for sale. Its mission isn't for sale. The only thing that changes for Strike investors is that Strike now gets all of me."

Sen. Cynthia Lummis praises President Trump for voluntarily agreeing to a strict ethics ban preventing all federal officials, including the President, from issuing or sponsoring digital assets for profit. "Let's get the Clarity Act passed NOW."

"This was the first time I walked into a briefing. They had read our report cover to cover." Conner Brown on briefing Taiwan's central bank after BPI's Bitcoin reserve paper went viral in their legislature.

Senate Republicans just released an updated Clarity Act. An ethics package negotiated between the White House and Senators Lummis and Moreno bans covered officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets for compensation while in office. They must sell their crypto holdings, place them in a blind trust, or both. Democrats say they haven't seen the text and oppose putting DOJ solely in charge of enforcement. The Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act is unchanged. Non-custodial developers and infrastructure providers won't be treated as money transmitters. Self-custody protections remain intact. The "knowingly" amendment preserving criminal liability for facilitating illicit transactions is the piece to watch. How broadly prosecutors interpret that word will determine whether this section actually protects developers or gives law enforcement a backdoor to go after them anyway. Stablecoin yield rules are unchanged. No interest on idle balances, but activity-based rewards are allowed. New law enforcement provisions fund state and local crypto investigations, create a cyber center targeting nation-state actors, and require stablecoin issuers to comply with orders to freeze, seize, burn, and reissue tokens.

CNBC on CLARITY Act progress: “There was a reported agreement yesterday between Republicans and The White House on ethics..as far as I've heard Democrats were not privy to this..they still have concerns..these next few weeks are critical.”

NVIDIA's new Vera Rubin NVL72 just benchmarked at 10x more tokens per megawatt than Blackwell on DeepSeek-R1 inference. Sounds like AI will need less power. It won't. NVIDIA says agentic AI applications consume up to 15x more tokens than conventional AI. A 10x efficiency gain disappears inside a workload that generates 15x more tokens. Bitcoin miners already ran this experiment. ASICs went from 100 J/TH to 12 J/TH. An 8x efficiency gain. Network hashrate didn't flatten. It went vertical. More efficient hardware lowered break-even costs, attracted more capital, and intensified the search for cheap energy. Jevons paradox isn't a theory anymore. It's an observable pattern across every form of computation. Better steam engines didn't end coal demand. Cheaper bandwidth didn't reduce internet traffic. More efficient mining rigs didn't cap hashrate. AI is next. Every megawatt of secured generation, transmission, and cooling just became more valuable, not less.

More than 20,000 bitcoiners, builders, miners, investors and operators read the Bitcoin Brief. Every weekday we cover bitcoin, macro, energy, AI, markets, geopolitics, policy, privacy, mining and freedom tech. The point is not to dump more news into your inbox. It is to connect stories that look unrelated until the consequences become obvious. Free. Sign up here:

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TFTC 773 w/ Conner Brown: "The first time I walked into a central bank briefing, they had read our Bitcoin report cover to cover and taken extensive notes." We discuss: ⚡ Taiwan's central bank ⚡ The silicon shield ⚡ Open source vs China

Real yields on the 10-year U.S. Treasury just hit 2.35%. That's the highest since October 2008.

"Large language models have to seek truth otherwise you'll lose trust in them." Mark Cuban says LLMs might be the thing that counteracts social media's polarization problem.

"CEOs have no clue what is going on. None whatsoever." Mark Cuban on why enterprise AI is way harder than anyone expected. "By definition you should just be able to ask AI to do what you need. Yet Microsoft is hiring 6,000 people."

"There's going to be a lot of data centers that are going to be turned into pickleball courts." Mark Cuban on the AI bubble and why tech breakthroughs will do to data centers what fiber optics did to bandwidth.

Someone built a BIP-110 compliant encoding scheme that stuffs arbitrary data into contiguous bytes using tapscript opcodes. Peter Todd: "THE BYTES ARE TOUCHING!!!"

Joe Kent on Israeli intelligence being candid in private. "Candidly, if it was one-on-one, their intelligence guys with our intelligence guys, they would say 'now is the time for us to take down the regime.'"

Joe Kent reveals he proposed removing US air defense systems from Israel to prevent the 12-day war. "We remove some of the air defense features that we give the Israelis... if you attack, we're not going to defend you." Nobody wanted to touch it.

Axon wants to turn 60 million US streetlights into AI-powered surveillance cameras. "Now streetlights can do more than light the street, they can protect it." They call it Lightpost. Plugs into the existing socket. License plate readers, live streaming video, edge processing.

America broke from the Henry Adams Curve and chose scarcity. Today’s Bitcoin Brief also covers XXI dropping Strike, BIP-110’s Lightning risk, and status-driven fertility. Read by bitcoiners, builders, miners, investors and operators. Join them:

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OpenAI's own AI models broke out of a sandboxed testing environment, found a zero-day vulnerability, gained internet access, and then hacked into Hugging Face's production servers to cheat on a benchmark test. This wasn't a human attacker. It was GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased model running a cyber capabilities evaluation. The models chained together stolen credentials, privilege escalation, lateral movement, and zero-day exploits across multiple systems to get the answers they wanted. Hugging Face's security team detected and contained the breach. OpenAI says this is "unprecedented" and is sharing findings so defenders can understand what AI models are now capable of. Advanced AI models can now independently discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world production systems without source code access. This wasn't theoretical. It happened.

Shareholders of Mark Moss-backed Bitcoin treasury company Satsuma Technology have voted to sell all 668 BTC, return capital, and shut down the company. Satsuma is a small company listed in London. The holdings are tiny in the grand scheme of things, but the story fits a broader pattern. The wave of hastily formed Bitcoin treasury companies in 2025 was widely seen as a topping signal. Now in 2026, a growing number of those same companies are abandoning the strategy altogether. Satsuma joins Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury, whose SPAC merger with Cantor stalled and had to be renegotiated, and Empery Digital, which sold half its BTC stack to pivot into AI data centers. The Bitcoin treasury model works when there's a clear plan to create value on top of the BTC on the balance sheet. When companies are simply holding Bitcoin with no operational thesis, shareholders eventually ask why they're paying management fees for something they could do themselves with an ETF. The companies that survive this cycle will be the ones actually building credit instruments, structured products, and real businesses around their Bitcoin holdings. The rest will get voted out of existence.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the Clarity Act is at the "1-yard line."