Morgan Stanley is bringing $9 trillion to the bitcoin ETF race and undercut the whole complex at 14 basis points. Fannie Mae just blessed bitcoin as mortgage collateral. And the DATs are unraveling. New episode of Final Settlement is live.

buying bitcoin in 2012 is basically the same as winning the lotto sounds great until you realize most lotto winners go broke. and thats exactly what happened. most people who got in early either sold it, lost it, traded it for something stupid, or went completely sideways psychologically because they didnt understand what they were holding most people who got in early dont have most of it anymore. thats just the reality the real opportunity isnt just buying bitcoin and sitting on it. its building the businesses and infrastructure that serve the next billion people who will interact with it custody. financial services. AI-native payment rails. stablecoin infrastructure. lending. treasury management. tools for advisors and institutions the entrepreneurs who build these things will create enterprise value and generational wealth that far exceeds anything they would have made just holding bitcoin early. because theyre building for the adoption curve thats actually coming. not the one thats already passed @Michael Tanguma on The Last Trade

The obituaries are out. The manipulation allegations are loud. And your onchain data, identity, and home address are probably already compromised. New episode of The Last Trade, out now 👇

AI hyperscalers competing for foundry capacity could squeeze out bitcoin ASIC manufacturers. But as @MartyBent describes, the solution to high prices is high prices. The same demand forcing chip supply chains to scale will benefit bitcoin mining long-term.

@MartyBent RETURNS to THE ₿ROADCAST with @Bram & @Michael Tanguma Seven figure BTC was never going to arrive quietly. Geopolitics unraveling. The nature of work changing. A global search for real money. That world is here...and accelerating. ⚡️EP. 24 link below⚡

50% of bitcoin supply is underwater. Long-term holders aren't selling. The latest obituaries are out. @npub1qh5s...eh9r is back to break down what the on-chain data actually says. New episode of The Last Trade, out now.

~ A Warranted Alarm Bell ~ Markets are noisy by design. Price action in any single asset over any short window tells you very little. But when two assets that have historically moved together begin moving in opposite directions, the divergence becomes the data. Bitcoin and the Nasdaq have done exactly this. Since bitcoin posted its all-time high in late 2025, equity markets have held relatively steady while bitcoin has pulled back meaningfully. Casual observers have called it a crypto-specific correction. Macro-aware investors are looking harder. Bitcoin is the most liquid, globally accessible, freely traded asset in the world with no issuer, no earnings guidance, and no central bank managing its price. It responds, with remarkable sensitivity, to the global supply of fiat credit. When fiat credit expands, risk appetite rises and bitcoin tends to rise with it, often faster than everything else. When the market begins anticipating a contraction, bitcoin reflects that stress early. The current divergence from the Nasdaq is the alarm going off. ~ What the Alarm Is Pricing ~ The stress the market appears to be discounting runs deeper than the familiar variety. A rate cycle gone too far, a commodity shock, a geopolitical disruption; those are legible risks with well-worn playbooks. What is gaining traction is more structural: AI-driven productivity improvements, genuinely transformative over the long run, may displace a significant share of white-collar employment faster than the labor market or the credit system can absorb. The transmission mechanism is worth tracing carefully. Knowledge workers account for a disproportionate share of consumer credit and mortgage debt relative to their share of the workforce. A meaningful reduction in that cohort's ability to service debt lands on bank balance sheets as credit losses, concentrated among regional and mid-market lenders whose books are far less diversified than the systemically important institutions. Markets identify these vulnerabilities early, price the weakest credits aggressively, and trigger the depositor behavior that turns solvency concerns into liquidity crises. That sequence, credit stress to institutional distress to Fed response, is exactly what long-horizon bitcoin holders are watching for. In 2020, the Fed's emergency balance sheet expansion took bitcoin from ~$3,800 to ~$60,000 in fourteen months. This is no longer purely theoretical. This morning, Blue Owl Capital, the $295 billion alternative asset manager whose stock trades on the NYSE, permanently halted redemptions at OBDC II, its retail-focused private credit fund, reversing a promise made just weeks ago to resume normal quarterly withdrawals. To raise liquidity, Blue Owl sold $1.4 billion in credit assets, including 30% of OBDC II's total portfolio. Redemption pressure had been building for months. The fund's co-CEO said publicly on February 5th that he saw no red flags in the loan book. The fund's largest single industry exposure is internet software and services, exactly the segment of the credit market most directly in the path of AI-driven disruption. Credit stress rarely announces itself cleanly. It shows up first in redemption queues and rushed asset sales, in the gap between what managers say publicly and what they do two weeks later. Bitcoin has been pricing this dynamic for months. Blue Owl is the first concrete confirmation that the alarm was warranted. ~ Sovereign Capital Stacking ~ The 13F filings released this week deserve more than a passing glance. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company increased its position in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF by 46% in Q4 2025, bringing its holding to 12.7 million shares as of December 31. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council, an independently-run Mubadala unit, added to its position as well, reaching 8.2 million shares. Their combined stake exceeded one billion dollars at period end. The timing and the framing tell the real story. These purchases were made into bitcoin price weakness. A spokesperson for ADIC described bitcoin as "a store of value similar to gold" and framed the allocation as part of a long-term diversification strategy. That language reflects the output of a multi-year asset allocation review, structural conviction, and the kind of patience that sovereign mandates uniquely allow. Sovereign wealth funds do not chase performance. They underwrite scenarios over decade-long horizons and size positions to match conviction. Mubadala meaningfully increasing a bitcoin position during a drawdown reflects an analytical conclusion about where bitcoin fits in a world of expanding fiat supply and eroding reserve currency credibility, and they are putting capital behind it while retail investors are heading for the exits. ~ Patience Is the Position ~ The environment taking shape is the one long-term bitcoin holders have been preparing for. Fiat credit systems under stress, a Fed with limited options, and a banking system that historically gets one response when things get bad enough. Blue Owl locking retail investors out of a private credit fund this morning, while sovereigns quietly build bitcoin allocations which they describe in the same language as gold, captures the broader picture. The credit cracks are visible. The sequence that follows is familiar. And the most patient capital in the world is accumulating through the volatility rather than running from it. Long-term holders who have done the same work and reached the same conclusions have no reason to behave differently. The thesis has not changed. The evidence behind it keeps compounding.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! According to the Bitcoin is Dead tracker on bitcoindeaths.com, Bitcoin has been declared “dead” 467 times since 2010. Well played gents 🤌 @Bitcoin Policy Institute @PUBKEY @npub1xy6e...hgpl

running models locally = running your own node normies want chatgpt the same way they wanted coinbase. easy, custodial, someone else’s rules. meanwhile the freaks are pulling quantized 70B models through ollama, running open-webui on refurbed dell workstations with a single 4060 Ti, wiring up MCP servers so their local models can use real tools, and building RAG pipelines over their own documents. same energy as compiling bitcoind on a thinkpad in 2012. open source models are eating closed source the same way bitcoin ate every altcoin that tried to compete on “features.” llama, deepseek, qwen: permissionless, forkable, nobody’s product. running inference on your own hardware is “not your keys not your coins” for AI. your prompts, your weights, your machine. no logs. no content policy. no ToS update at 2am that lobotomizes your model because some compliance team got nervous. the hosted API providers are the exchanges. convenient until they’re not. rate limited, censored, deprecated on a thursday with zero warning. you don’t verify, you trust. this past week, both Coinbase and Lightning Labs shipped agent payment tooling built on HTTP 402, the internet’s forgotten “payment required” status code. the approaches tell you everything. Coinbase’s x402 routes agent payments through USDC on Base. Stripe integrated it the same day. requires a facilitator service, stablecoin custody, onchain settlement through their infrastructure. it’s the banking stack rebuilt for machines. Lightning Labs dropped L402: fully open source, no facilitator, no identity, no signup. an agent hits a paywall, lnget pays a lightning invoice, gets a macaroon as cryptographic proof, and moves on. agent-to-agent commerce on bitcoin rails with scoped permissions and remote key isolation. lnget works like wget except it pays invoices. unix philosophy meets sound money. one side is recreating visa for bots. the other is extending the protocol. same fork in the road we’ve been watching for over a decade. local AI setups today look like running bitcoin core in 2012. ugly, half broken, mass tinkering required. the people doing it anyway will be unreasonably far ahead of everyone else within a few years. normies will get their sanitized corporate AI the same way they got their bitcoin ETFs. late, watered down, and fully captured. the builders are in the terminal.

OpenAI acqui-hires OpenClaw. Coinbase & Stripe building payment rails for AI agents. Schwab, Fidelity & Wells Fargo race to build stablecoins. Ray Dalio says the world order is officially broken. New episode of Final Settlement is live 👇

Bitcoin is down ~45% from ATHs. So why does sentiment feel even worse? Because some people are down ~95%. Retail skipped bitcoin & chased leveraged proxies loaded with unnecessary risk. All that buy pressure never touched the real asset. @ODELL on The Last Trade

Fiat debasement is no longer fringe. It’s fully in the zeitgeist. Gold made that clear in 2025. But bitcoin's tailwinds are compounding: liquidity backdrop improving, banks stepping in, ETF rails expanding, and allocator education spreading. @npub1qh5s...eh9r on The Last Trade

The mechanics of a speculative currency attack, clearly articulated by @Pierre Rochard 👇 1) Borrow weak currency (fiat) 2) Accumulate strong currency (bitcoin) 3) Let bitcoin appreciate 4) Repay fiat denominated debts

The global monetary order is shifting. From sovereign LBOs to rapid currency debasement in Iran & Venezuela, the demand for a neutral, distributed reserve asset is no longer theoretical. We are in the early stages of a profound capital rotation. @MartyBent on The Last Trade

Quantum risk warrants rigor, not haste. As @ODELL articulates on The Last Trade, novel cryptography is validated over time, not under panic. And proposals to “freeze” coins undermine bitcoin’s core attribute: neutral, rules-based property rights.

Running nostr