"Foreign adversaries, Marxists, national security hawks, effective altruists, and frontier labs angling for regulatory capture. All rowing in the same direction on restricting AI. I don't even think they're working together." - Conner Brown

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the Clarity Act is ready for a full Senate floor vote, calling it a bipartisan breakthrough that would establish the first comprehensive federal framework for digital assets.

"Napoleon would go back to the tent after the most intense fighting in history and dictate a letter about building a bridge in rural France. That is what these agents allow us to do. Multiply human agency." - Conner Brown

Chinese AI models now outpace U.S. ones in token usage on OpenRouter, per Bloomberg. Weekly global share shows China's models topping American peers for the first time in 2026, driven by growing adoption of cost-effective options.

"Bitcoin is probably the most liquidity sensitive asset on the planet. Liquidity is losing momentum." Michael Howell on why Bitcoin and gold are already signaling the cycle has turned.

"I don't believe there's a four-year cycle in Bitcoin. I think there's a 5 to 6 year liquidity cycle." Michael Howell says the cycle is driven by average global debt maturity, not halvings.

"We were the first to put all the pieces together. The Party for Socialism and Liberation are functioning as important organizers in a lot of these debates." Conner Brown on tracing foreign-linked dark money behind anti-data center activism across America.

Coinbase settled its FOIA lawsuit against the SEC. The SEC will pay $150,000 and overhaul its record-retention policies. The SEC's own inspector general found that close to a year of former Chair Gary Gensler's text messages were wiped after the agency reset his phone before making a backup. The destroyed window covered the FTX collapse and the agency's peak enforcement campaign against crypto exchanges. 38% of the recovered texts touched agency business. The irony is hard to miss. Under Gensler, the SEC levied more than $1 billion in fines on financial firms for losing employee messages.

.@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.