Bitcoin has underperformed compared to other “risk-on” assets this year — and if history’s anything to go by, its price could dip as low as $38,000 by October. 

That’s according to a new report by NYDIG, which reveals that the asset’s current slump is down to supply mechanics rather than risk sentiment. 

Bitcoin’s price has in the past moved with tech stocks but 2026 has been different: AI-related equities have soared while crypto markets have slumped. Bitcoin was recently priced at $64,809, down nearly 30% year-to-date and close to 50% less than its October all-time high of $126,080. 

“Bitcoin’s 2025–2026 drawdown is bringing the 4-year cycle narrative…

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President Donald Trump plans to meet with a group of senators at the White House on Thursday afternoon to address the last major obstacle to the crypto market structure bill, according to people familiar with the plans that spoke to Politico and lawmakers involved in the talks.

The sticking point is the ethics section of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would restrict senior government officials from holding personal business interests in the crypto sector. Democrats have made such limits a condition of their support, in large part to address Trump’s own ties to the industry. 

Negotiators have not reached a compromise, and the Senate calendar leaves a narrow…

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A new study argued that Polymarket’s five-minute Bitcoin contract became a machine for wealth transfer. It moved money from retail bettors to a small band of manipulators, and it made Bitcoin’s spot price worse in the process.

The paper, “Settlement Manipulation in Prediction Markets” by David Dai, Ruizhe Jia, and Shihao Yu of Stanford and Singapore Management University, studied a product that did not exist before February 12, 2026. 

On that date Polymarket launched a binary contract that paid $1 if Bitcoin closed a five-minute window above where it opened, and $0 otherwise. A fresh contract opened every five minutes around the clock. 

Within months, Polymarket’s…

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The Bitcoin price jumped over $65,500 on Wednesday after US inflation data showed that producer prices fell in June. 

Data from the Labor Department showed that the Producer Price Index posted its biggest decline in 14 months. The PPI, excluding food and energy, fell 0.3% in June, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. 

Bitcoin’s price was recently trading at $64,943, a 2% 24-hour jump. 

The Bitcoin price has typically surged when signs inflation is cooling emerge as investors then expect a bigger chance of lower interest rates. Crypto, stocks and other “risk-on” assets have in the past done well in a low-interest rate environment. 

Still, the cooling…

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VerifiedX today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with BitGo to provide qualified custody support for vBTC, with immediate support for vBTC.b, the non-synthetic canonical Bitcoin asset issued through the VerifiedX Network and deployed on Base. The partnership represents a significant milestone in bringing institutional-grade custody, compliance, and security standards to programmable Bitcoin while preserving direct redemption to native Bitcoin.

Under the agreement, institutions, asset managers, family offices, corporations, and professional allocators will be able to custody vBTC upon final integration and can now immediately custody vBTC.b through…

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Japan’s parliament passed an amendment on Wednesday that reclassifies cryptocurrency as a “financial asset,” a shift that pulls bitcoin and other digital assets out of the country’s payments regime and into the framework that governs stocks, bonds, and investment trusts, according to a report from public broadcaster NHK.

The change strips crypto of its prior status under the Payment Services Act, where regulators treated it as a means of settlement, and folds it into the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA), the same statute that oversees traditional securities. 

The amendment moves bitcoin and other crypto under a single investor-protection standard. NHK…

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Keel Infrastructure Corp. has secured a set of approvals that push its data center project in Sherbrooke, Québec, toward construction. 

The City of Sherbrooke cleared the North American digital infrastructure and energy company to enter into an agreement with Hydro-Sherbrooke for the transfer and operation of 96 megawatts of existing capacity, along with a purchase agreement for the land where the campus will rise.

The power agreement lets Keel consolidate three of its current Bitcoin mining sites in the province into a single 96 MW campus. The company did not request additional power, a choice that preserves the use of current electrical infrastructure and keeps the project…

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China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate has published a set of recommendations that would reshape how the country investigates and prosecutes cryptocurrency-related money laundering, including a proposal to treat the use of mixers and privacy coins as evidence of criminal intent.

The article, released in the official Procuratorial Daily, was written by two prosecutors from Hunan Province’s Yuhu District and an associate law professor at Xiangtan University. 

The authors argue that the decentralized, pseudonymous, and cross-border design of virtual currencies has outpaced China’s legal framework and created a three-part problem: defining the offense, gathering evidence,…

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This is a guest post by Brandon Black. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Within the tiny internet bubble of Bitcoin X (formerly Bitcoin Twitter or Crypto Twitter), there has been a lot of noise in the past year about @dathon_ohm’s proposal for a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, otherwise known as BIP110. Underlying this proposal is the idea that certain Bitcoin transactions have been violating the principles of the network by including in their locking or unlocking scripts data that can be interpreted in one or more additional ways besides their plain Bitcoin script interpretation. According to…

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