Bitcoin’s Transformative Role As A Retirement Asset

According to the Bitcoin Reserve Monitor, 20 states have pending Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) legislation. As bullish as these efforts seem, they may be overshadowed by a sweeping federal framework pushed by Senator Cynthia Lummis, now the head of the Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets.

After 16 years of speculation, experimentation, block wars and debanking, it seems that Bitcoin is on the precipice of a major threshold. Bitcoin’s inflation rate is already lower than 1% and its 21 million BTC scarcity serves as a bulwark against inevitable currency erosion by the world’s central banks.

Perhaps most importantly, Bitcoin’s ledger can be easily verified by everyone,…

Read more on BitcoinMagazine

US stocks erase Monday losses after Bessent calls China trade situation ‘unsustainable’

This is a segment from the Forward Guidance newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

US equities are once again trading on a dream. 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite indexes hit intraday highs Tuesday after Bloomberg — citing unnamed sources — reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US/China trade war is unsustainable. While he expects de-escalation in the future, he said negotiations have not yet started. 

Bessent apparently made the comment at an investor event in Washington closed to the public and media. 

The Dow had gained more than 1,000 points midway through Tuesday’s session while the Nasdaq Composite rose as…

Read more on Blockworks

NEW: Bitcoin May Rise More as Amid Federal Reserve Risks, Says Standard Chartered

Bitcoin could continue its upward trend as fears grow over the independence of the Federal Reserve according to Geoffrey Kendrick head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered. He sees this as a government-related risk which boosts bitcoin’s appeal as a decentralized hedge.

Kendrick explained that threats to the Fed such as the possible replacement of Chairman Jerome Powell are pushing the US Treasury term premium to a 12-year high. Bitcoin has shown a strong historical connection to this premium and may soon catch up after recently lagging due to market focus on tech-related headlines.

Currently trading near $91200 bitcoin is up 4 percent in the last 24 hours. Kendrick maintains bold targets predicting bitcoin to hit $200000 by 2025 and $500000 by 2028. He also expects a massive rise in stablecoin supply to $2 trillion by 2028 driven by upcoming US regulations.

Embed Bitcoin Into Everything, Everywhere

Last week Breez Tech announced WebAssembly (WASM) support for their Nodeless Breez SDK. They had to rework a number of pieces of the SDK to make Bitcoin and Lightning work in the browser, implementing new ways to grab blockchain data, handle databases in memory, handle DNS resolution, interact with filesystems across different platforms, etc. 

Now a Lightning enabled wallet or application can run entirely in-browser. 

I’m sure plenty of you are immediately cringing and thinking about security concerns, and I would be the first to say that storing any material amount or significant percentage of your wealth in such a way is insane, but some portion of everyone’s stack needs to…

Read more on BitcoinMagazine

Immutable teases ‘multibillion dollar’ collab that could be its game with Ubisoft

This is a segment from The Drop newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson wrote on Tuesday morning: “Tomorrow we announce the outcome of a multibillion dollar partnership that’s been in the works for 2+ years.” 

While we didn’t hear anything from Immutable by publication time, it could be about their game with Ubisoft.

Immutable’s partnership with Ubisoft’s Strategic Innovation Lab was first announced in November 2023.

During an on-record interview at the Game Developers Conference in March, Immutable Chief Studio Officer Justin Hulog told Blockworks that he has been “working on co-developing a game with Ubisoft…

Read more on Blockworks

Yield Basis wants to be DeFi’s ‘Bitcoin black hole’

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

Michael Egorov is no stranger to token incentive mechanisms. As the founder of Curve, he pioneered vote-escrow (ve) tokenomics to juice the growth of the stablecoin AMM. But his new protocol, Yield Basis, is built for a different kind of user: “people who want to earn something on mostly Bitcoin,” as Egorov told Blockworks.

At its core, Yield Basis is an attempt to eliminate LP impermanent loss by leveraging liquidity. Egorov explains: “If you leverage liquidity by a factor of two and keep this leverage, then the pricing of liquidity which gives you impermanent loss actually…

Read more on Blockworks

A year after the Bitcoin halving, how much does 1 BTC cost to mine?

This is a segment from the Supply Shock newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

We all know halvings double the cost of production, a fact the media tends to dress up as an existential threat to Bitcoin every four years.

Miners seeking profit must also contend with fluctuating difficulty and energy costs. But if the price goes up, at least they’d get more money for every coin they mine.

At $88,500, bitcoin is ahead by 36% since the halving. More importantly, it’s up 130% on the average price during the last phase of the prior halving cycle (more than double!)

As it goes, high prices attract more miners, which have driven bitcoin’s total hash rate to all-time…

Read more on Blockworks