Indiana Gov. Mike Braun has signed legislation allowing bitcoin and cryptocurrency investments in the state’s public retirement and savings plans, opening the door for state employees to gain exposure to digital assets through self-directed accounts.

The measure, House Bill 1042, requires Indiana’s public retirement boards, deferred compensation committees, and annuity savings programs to offer self-directed brokerage accounts that include at least one cryptocurrency investment option by July 1, 2027. 

The accounts will allow participants to allocate a portion of their retirement savings to bitcoin, crypto assets, or crypto-linked exchange-traded funds, subject to…

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A Los Angeles County jury has found former Los Angeles Police Department officer Eric Halem guilty of kidnapping and bitcoin robbery in a 2024 home invasion that targeted a teenage cryptocurrency holder.

The verdict followed a two-week trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court, where prosecutors argued that Halem, 38, and three alleged accomplices posed as police officers to gain entry to a high-rise apartment in Koreatown. 

Once inside, they restrained a 17-year-old and his girlfriend and stole a hard drive containing private keys to roughly $350,000 in bitcoin.

The victim, who testified under his first name, Daniel, told jurors that the men threatened to kill him if he…

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Bitcoin is the largest pool of pristine collateral in the world.

It is scarce, globally settled, politically neutral, and cannot be diluted. Few assets combine monetary premium and liquidity at this scale. Yet borrowing against bitcoin remains expensive, fragmented, and short-term.

That mismatch is not primarily about volatility. It is about market structure. BTC-backed lending exists. But BTC-backed credit markets, in the mature sense, largely do not.

Loans Are Not Markets

If you post BTC as collateral and borrow dollars, the mechanics are simple.

Bitcoin is locked. Cash is advanced. If the loan deteriorates, the BTC is liquidated. That is origination.

In mature…

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Arthur Hayes, one of the most provocative and incisive minds in Bitcoin, has been officially confirmed as a speaker at Bitcoin 2026, returning to the world’s largest Bitcoin conference to deliver his signature blend of macroeconomic analysis, geopolitical insight, and unfiltered conviction on where the global financial system is headed — and why Bitcoin is the only rational response.

As the co-founder of BitMEX and the founder of Maelstrom, Hayes has built a reputation as one of the sharpest macro thinkers in the space, consistently ahead of the curve on the forces driving Bitcoin’s role in the broader monetary landscape. His widely-read essays have become essential reading…

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Segregated Witness (BIP by Pieter Wuile, Eric Lombrozo, and Johnson Lau) and Taproot (BIPs by Pieter Wuille, Jonas Nick, Tim Ruffing, and Anthony Towns) are the two largest changes ever made to the Bitcoin protocol. 

The former fundamentally changed the structure of Bitcoin transactions, and in the process Bitcoin blocks, to address inherent limitations of the previous transaction structure. The latter rearchitectured some aspects of Bitcoin’s scripting language, how complex scripts are structured and validated, and introduced a new scheme for creating cryptographic signatures. 

Those are both massive changes in comparison to say, adding a single opcode like…

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A new study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute shows that frontier AI models overwhelmingly prefer digitally-native monetary instruments, with Bitcoin emerging as the dominant choice. 

Researchers conducted 9,072 controlled experiments across 36 models from five leading providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek. 

The experiments tested AI agents’ preferences in scenarios involving transactions, store of value, unit of account, and settlement, offering a first-of-its-kind look at how AI approaches monetary decision-making when given full autonomy.

The study presented each model with monetary decisions without any prior context or suggestion toward a…

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