Incredible Bitcoin art by (X3N0533D). "The Timelocker"

"Energy is undervalued. Chip fabs may be undervalued. Whatever they thought the demand was going to be, it's going to be more." - Zack Shapiro on compute demand outpacing every projection. "If you extrapolate this out to the next model, there is a strong economic incentive to build the Dyson swarm."

The court has approved the pretrial schedule for Roman Storm's retrial. SDNY will retry the Tornado Cash co-founder this fall on two counts, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit sanctions evasion, after the jury deadlocked on both charges last August. Storm was convicted on one count of operating an unlicensed money transmission business, but that conviction is still being challenged. His post-trial Rule 29 motion argues the evidence and legal theories behind that conviction were invalid. If the court rules in his favor, it could vacate the conviction and complicate the government's path to retrial. This case remains one of the most important legal battles in open-source software. The question at the center of it has not changed. Can a developer be held criminally liable for writing code that other people use? Report via (theragetech).

Bitcoin settling local Kenyan M-Pesa payments through Ark VTXOs and a Lightning gateway, all from a phone at the airport in Nairobi.

Alabama is voting tonight in the most expensive crypto-funded congressional race of the 2026 cycle. Rep. Barry Moore, backed by Trump, is running against former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson for the open Senate seat. Three crypto PACs have flooded the race with outside money, all backing Moore. Fairshake has spent over $12 million through its affiliate Defend American Jobs. It is funded by Coinbase, Ripple, and Andreessen Horowitz, entered 2026 with $116 million on hand, and went 53 for 58 backing congressional candidates in 2024. Fellowship PAC launched with over $100 million in commitments. Cantor Fitzgerald put in $10 million. A senior Tether executive chairs the PAC. Some ad spending flows through a firm co-founded by Bo Hines, Trump's former crypto adviser who is now CEO of Tether US. The Blockchain Leadership Fund, backed by Chainlink Labs and Anchorage Digital, endorsed Moore as well. Moore voted for the GENIUS Act, the CLARITY Act, and the Financial Innovation and Technology Act. He personally holds Bitcoin. He is publicly anti-CBDC. The part worth paying attention to is how the money gets spent. Fairshake's Alabama ads highlight Trump's endorsement and attack Hudson on character issues. They almost never mention cryptocurrency. Voters seeing the ads likely have no idea they are funded by out-of-state crypto companies. Same playbook Fairshake ran across dozens of races in 2024. Hudson also rates "A" on Stand With Crypto and supports the same regulatory frameworks. But he has turned the spending itself into the issue, attacking the "California AI Crypto Tech Bros" trying to buy an Alabama Senate seat. The crypto industry learned in 2024 that it could shape Congress by spending big in low-turnout primaries where outside money goes further. Alabama is the next test of whether that playbook still works when the other side calls it out.

BlackRock files what appears to be the final amendment for its Bitcoin Premium Income ETF ($BITA) with a fee of 65 basis points. Eric Balchunas says it's lower than the two largest covered call ETFs (95bp and 99bp) and expects a launch soon. BlackRock is racing to beat Goldman to market, who is targeting around July 1.

Hillary Clinton calls Biden’s 2024 re-election bid a "terrible mistake" that hurt his legacy, the Democratic Party, and the country.

"Are you happy with the way the Clarity Act is turning out?" Jamie Dimon: "No. It allows them to effectively pay interest on deposits without the protection they should have. The banks will not accept it that way. The ABA, the small banks, the credit unions, not just the big guys." Then on Coinbase's Armstrong: "He's full of shit."

The UK Rape Gang Inquiry Report is out. Read it. All of it. What's documented in this report is absolutely sickening. 250,000+ estimated victims. 149 local authority districts. Nearly 40% of the country. The first recorded case goes back to 1955. The pattern was the same everywhere. Girls as young as 11 groomed with alcohol, drugs, gifts. Raped by organized networks. Passed between groups. Trafficked between cities. Filmed for blackmail. Threatened into silence. Every institution knew. Police treated children as willing participants. Social workers closed cases with clear evidence sitting in the file. NHS staff documented genital injuries, STIs, and pregnancies in children then sent them back into danger. Teachers watched older men collect girls from school gates and said nothing. Politicians knew too. They were briefed. They chose silence because they were more afraid of being called racist than they were of leaving children in the hands of rapists. That's not a political statement. That's what the report documents. This inquiry wasn't funded by the government. It was funded by 20,000 people who decided they'd had enough waiting. Led by survivors like Sammy Woodhouse, who was raped as a child in Rotherham and spent years fighting a system that blamed her for her own abuse. The Met has quietly opened a review of 9,000 child sexual exploitation cases. The National Crime Agency launched Operation Beaconport to reexamine thousands of dropped files. Evil exists. It operated in the open for decades because every institution that should have stopped it decided its own comfort mattered more than the children it was supposed to protect. The question is whether anyone with power will actually do something about it this time.

Europa is a new decentralized VPN marketplace built on Nostr and paid exclusively with Bitcoin. It launched this week from , the developer behind the Cashu ecash protocol. The concept is simple but the implications are significant. Instead of trusting a single VPN company with a global server fleet, one privacy policy, and one monthly subscription, Europa lets independent VPN operators list their servers on an open directory. Each operator runs their own infrastructure in their own jurisdiction, writes their own no-log policy, and sets their own price. Users browse the directory, pick an operator, and pay them directly over Lightning or Cashu ecash. The marketplace never touches the money and takes no cut. After payment, the operator delivers a standard WireGuard or OpenVPN config file. No proprietary app, no custom client. Users import it into the same open-source VPN software they would use anywhere else and connect. When the bundle runs out, the tunnel goes quiet. No auto-renewal, no card on file, no surprise charges. The reputation system runs on Nostr. Instead of editorial ratings or paid placements, recommendations and complaints come from people in your social graph. Sign in with a Nostr identity and the directory weights endorsements from accounts you already follow. If Nostr is not your thing, ignore the feature entirely and start with the smallest bundle from an unfamiliar operator to limit your risk. The entire protocol is built on public Nostr events. Operator listings, reputation data, and payment coordination all live on the Nostr network. The Europa website is just one viewer of that data, not the source. Other directories can exist. If Europa makes bad editorial choices, users can leave without losing access to the underlying marketplace. The protocol spec is CC0 (public domain) and the code is MIT licensed. What makes this meaningful is the architecture. Traditional VPN providers consolidate trust into one company in one jurisdiction. If that company gets acquired, served with a warrant, or breached, every customer is exposed at once. Europa distributes that trust across independent operators. Users can spread their traffic across multiple operators they actually chose rather than trusting a single brand to make every decision for them. Anyone with a server can become an operator. Anyone with a Lightning wallet can become a customer. No accounts required for either side.

Ross Ulbricht and wife Caroline announce they are expecting their first child.

Trump on growing fears of AI: "I'll tell you, AI has been amazing, because right now we have more jobs, more people working right now in the United States by far, than we ever had before."

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins lays out his "Make IPOs Great Again" agenda on CNBC Squawk Box.

The US-Iran deal includes immediate sanctions relief on Iranian oil sales upon signing, covering banking, transport, and insurance needed to move the crude. Further relief tied to Iran's compliance. Oil prices selling off on the news.

VanEck's Matthew Sigel published a framework for valuing Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI infrastructure. He argues that energized power is the only clean valuation lens right now. Disclosures vary wildly across the sector and cash flows barely exist, so contracted capacity is what the market is actually pricing. Companies with signed leases trade above 10x energized power. Those still selling a pipeline trade at 2-6x.