Tom Lee’s BitMine faces about $7.3 billion in paper losses on its Ethereum treasury as Ether (ETH) traders weigh worsening sentiment, ETF outflows and a bearish chart setup pointing toward $1,600.
Key takeaways:
Bitmine keeps buying ETH even as its losses mount amid the 57% price drawdown from the August 2025 high.
ETH price technicals warn of a 25% drop, which would push Bitmine’s losses over $10 billion.
Bitmine’s ETH treasury dashboard. Source: DropStab.COM
Lee continues buying ETH despite mounting losses
Ether has fallen more than 57% from its October 2025 peak near $4,955 on Coinbase, with the sell-off also eroding Ethereum’s market share. ETH’s dominance (ETH.D) has dropped to about 10%, down from roughly 15% in August 2025.
ETH.D vs. ETH/USD daily performance chart. Source: TradingView
BitMine began building its Ethereum treasury in July 2025, days after closing a $250 million private placement to fund the strategy. By July 14, the company disclosed holdings of 163,142 ETH, worth about $500 million at the time.
As of last week, BitMine held 5.28 million ETH, or about 4.37% of Ethereum’s total supply, making it the world’s largest publicly traded Ether treasury company. That means Tom Lee’s firm kept accumulating ETH through the drawdown, even as its losses widened.
Lee has not treated the losses as a reason to retreat. In February, he argued that ETH’s steep drawdown may offer another buying opportunity, citing Ethereum’s history of V-shaped recoveries after 50%-plus declines.
Related: Ether pullback was ‘attractive opportunity’ for 71,672 ETH buy: Bitmine’s Lee
In May, BitMine said it would moderate the pace of its ETH purchases, but not abandon the strategy.
The company still expects to reach its goal of owning 5% of Ethereum’s total supply by December, signaling that Lee’s strategy remains focused on long-term accumulation despite widening paper losses.
Bitmine’s losses may swell to over $10 billion if ETH falls further
BitMine could see its Ethereum paper losses swell to over $10 billion if ETH’s prevailing bearish setup plays out as intended.
As of Sunday, ETH was hovering near the lower trend line of its prevailing rising wedge, a bearish reversal pattern that often signals fading buyer momentum.
ETH/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
A confirmed breakdown below that support could trigger a measured move toward the $1,600 area, down about 25% from current prices, by July or August. The target comes from subtracting the wedge’s maximum height from the breakdown point.
Conversely, a decisive rebound from the lower boundary may increase the odds of a 19%–20% rise toward $2,530, aligning with the wedge’s upper boundary and the 200-day exponential moving average (200-day EMA, blue line).
The breakdown scenario would raise BitMine’s unrealized losses to nearly $10.1 billion, based on its reported 5.28 million ETH holdings and average purchase price of $3,513.
Ethereum traders flip bearish
Ether’s bearish technical setup overlaps with several other headwinds, such as recent Ethereum Foundation departures, persistent ETH ETF outflows, and weakening social media sentiment.
ETH sentiment deteriorated sharply in May, with the bullish-to-bearish comment ratio falling from above 2:1 in late April to nearly 1:1, according to on-chain data platform Santiment.
Ethereum social media sentiment. Source: Santiment
“Historically, this kind of deterioration tends to happen when traders lose confidence in an asset’s short-term direction,” it said in a Friday report, adding:
“Crypto traders tend to become highly emotional during periods of underperformance, and ETH has increasingly become viewed as ‘dead money’ compared to assets that have shown much stronger momentum in 2026.”
Crypto lender Ledn says the consumer bitcoin-backed loan market could grow nearly 300-fold to as much as $1 trillion within the next decade, as demand for borrowing against digital assets far outpaces actual usage.
The forecast accompanied new research conducted by consumer insights firm Protocol Theory, which surveyed 1,244 cryptocurrency holders across the U.S. and Australia between February and March this year. The study found that while 88% of respondents said they would consider using a crypto-backed loan or credit product, only 14% currently do so, revealing what Ledn described as a “6-to-1 consideration-to-adoption gap.”
Ledn estimates the bitcoin-backed consumer lending market currently stands at roughly $3 billion. By comparison, Galaxy Research previously estimated the broader crypto lending market reached an all-time high of $73.6 billion in the third quarter of 2025.
The sector, however, still carries the scars of the 2022 crypto credit collapse, when major lenders including Celsius Network, Voyager Digital and BlockFi either filed for bankruptcy or were forced into restructuring after crypto prices plunged and liquidity evaporated. The failures wiped out billions of dollars in customer funds and severely damaged trust in centralized crypto lending models, prompting regulators globally to tighten scrutiny of the sector. Ledn’s report suggests rebuilding that trust remains the industry’s biggest challenge.
“The demand side of the equation is solved,” Ledn co-founder Mauricio Di Bartolomeo said in a statement. “What’s still catching up is the trust infrastructure that gives borrowers the confidence to act.”
The report argues that crypto-backed lending remains underdeveloped relative to the scale of digital asset ownership globally. The global cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at approximately $2.68 trillion as of May 2, according to data cited in the research.
The findings suggest the main obstacles preventing wider adoption are not lack of awareness or understanding, but confidence-related concerns. Among non-borrowers, the most commonly cited barriers were worries about managing crypto price volatility, liquidation risk and regulatory uncertainty surrounding crypto-backed loans.
Respondents also said platform reputation, transparency around loan terms, custody safeguards and risk management practices mattered more than rates or product features when selecting a lending provider.
The report frames crypto-backed borrowing as a digital asset equivalent of securities-backed lending or home equity borrowing in traditional finance: accessing liquidity without selling a long-term asset position.
Estimates of losses range from $2.8 million to $10 million.
StablR, a European stablecoin issuer backed by Tether, suffered an exploit on Saturday that drained funds from its minting contract and sent both its euro and dollar-pegged tokens sharply below their pegs.
Security firm Blockaid, which first flagged the attack on-chain, said roughly $2.8 million had been extracted. Marcin Kazmierczak, co-founder of RedStone Oracles, and on-chain monitoring account PharosWatch put the figure closer to $10 million. The disparity could not immediately be reconciled; the situation was still developing as of the time of writing. Both EURR, pegged to the euro, and USDR, pegged to the U.S. dollar, depegged by more than 20%, according to multiple observers.
StablR had positioned itself as a fully compliant, 100%-collateralized stablecoin issuer, one of a growing class of regulated euro stablecoin projects targeting European markets ahead of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework coming into full effect.
StablR confirmed the exploit in a post on X on Saturday, saying it had “identified an exploit” and was “actively working to contain it and minimize impact.” The company said it would share “verified details and next steps as soon as possible” but had not provided further on-chain specifics by the time of publication.
Key Compromised
Blockaid’s automated detection system identified the attack and issued an alert naming the two token contract addresses on Ethereum. On-chain analysts attributed the breach to a compromised key on StablR’s minting multisig, a security setup that required only one of three authorized signers to approve minting transactions. Kazmierczak described it as “another key compromise attack, this time a 1-of-3 minting multisig.”
PharosWatch noted that funds were withdrawn via CCTP — Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol — on Noble, a Cosmos-based chain, and said on-chain investigator ZachXBT had confirmed the attack.
Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, made a strategic investment in StablR in 2024.
The StablR exploit is the latest in a series of weekend security incidents that have hit crypto protocols. Kazmierczak said, “Seems like no weekend this year without a hack.”
Users holding EURR or USDR were advised to proceed with caution. StablR has yet to announce a recovery plan or provide an updated assessment of total losses.
The crypto industry has spent years debating whether quantum computing poses an existential threat to blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, researchers and builders believe artificial intelligence may be accelerating that timeline, and forcing a broader rethink of how digital security works altogether.
Leaders working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security described a rapidly changing landscape in which AI is simultaneously becoming a weapon for attackers, a defensive tool for developers, and an accelerator of quantum computing research.
“The security landscape of the future is going to be different,” said Alex Pruden, CEO of Project Eleven, a company focused on quantum-resistant infrastructure for crypto.
“Between quantum and AI, we’re going to go into a world where security, and this is more broadly than just crypto, you simply cannot count on the way you’ve always done things,” Pruden said.
The convergence of AI and quantum computing has become increasingly urgent following warnings from major technology firms and researchers that cryptographically relevant quantum computers may arrive sooner than previously expected. While experts remain divided on exactly when a quantum computer capable of breaking modern encryption will emerge, many believe AI could dramatically compress development timelines.
“AI is definitely being used to accelerate the development of quantum computing,” Pruden said. Researchers are already using machine learning systems to optimize quantum error correction, one of the field’s biggest engineering bottlenecks.
Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol and a former Google AI researcher, said AI has already been accelerating scientific discovery for years.
“AI is becoming more and more of an accelerator,” Polosukhin said. “The rate of research is going to accelerate from here, and we have already seen progress that people didn’t expect would come this early.”
Polosukhin pointed to his time at Google in 2016, when machine learning systems were already being used to discover new materials. “It might be that the next generation quantum computer will be built with AI and quantum computers of this generation,” he said. “It’s feeding into itself.”
For security researchers, the threat is no longer simply theoretical. The growing concern is that governments and sophisticated actors are already collecting encrypted internet traffic today with the expectation that future quantum computers will eventually be able to decrypt it, a strategy often referred to as “harvest now, decrypt later.” “If I know quantum computers are coming in a couple of years, I will start trying to capture all possible data that’s going around,” Polosukhin said.
“Everything we’re putting on the internet, if you’re identifiable as a person of interest, you can assume will be decrypted in two years,” he added. “It’s most likely happening already.”
The implications for crypto are especially severe because most blockchain networks rely on the same elliptic curve cryptography used across the broader internet. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically derive private keys from public keys, allowing attackers to compromise vulnerable wallets and systems.
But researchers increasingly argue the bigger story is not quantum alone, it is the combination of quantum computing and AI creating a permanent security arms race.
Artificial intelligence is already becoming increasingly effective at identifying software vulnerabilities and implementation flaws. “I would expect the advent of AI to accelerate… even more hacks,” Pruden said. “You have these AI models that are able to find either implementation bugs in the underlying cryptography or increasingly, I think, break the cryptography itself.”
At the same time, developers are deploying AI defensively for code auditing, testing and formal verification, mathematical techniques used to prove software behaves as intended. “AI can help with formal verification of post-quantum systems,” Pruden said. “That theoretically makes them more secure.”
The result, researchers say, is a future where security can no longer be treated as static infrastructure that gets upgraded once every decade. “Nothing is going to be as static as it’s been in the future,” Pruden said. “Either a quantum computer comes online to break some fundamental assumption, or AI gets smart enough to break that assumption too.”
That shift is already beginning to force blockchain networks to rethink how quickly they can evolve. Several ecosystems, including Ethereum, Zcash, Solana, Ripple and NEAR, are actively researching or implementing post-quantum migration strategies.
NEAR recently announced plans to integrate post-quantum cryptography directly into its account infrastructure, allowing users to rotate cryptographic schemes without migrating assets to entirely new wallets. “Back in 2018, when we were designing [NEAR], we were like: ‘Hey, quantum will come, we should have an easy way to do it,’” Polosukhin said.
Still, the transition remains technically difficult. Post-quantum cryptographic systems are often significantly larger and slower than current standards. “The cryptography that’s currently standardized for post-quantum is very big and slow,” Polosukhin said.
The broader implication, according to researchers, is that both AI and quantum computing are undermining a foundational assumption of the digital age: that encryption remains reliable for long periods.
Instead, security may increasingly become an adaptive, continuously evolving process, in which systems must constantly upgrade just to survive.
Read more: Here’s how bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks are preparing for the looming quantum threat
Senior officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission who raised concerns about prediction market companies were suspended, investigated and eventually pushed out of the agency.
According to a New York Times investigation published Sunday, the officials had flagged concerns about Polymarket, Crypto.com and a Gemini affiliate, each with alleged business ties to the Trump family. Career staff worried that Crypto.com was not treating small bettors fairly, that Polymarket lacked adequate fraud protections and that Gemini’s affiliate had not completed the required regulatory review to operate.
Despite those concerns, then-acting CFTC chair Caroline Pham and her senior counsel intervened to help the firms get what they wanted, sources told the NYT. By the end of 2025, two officials who had raised questions were placed on administrative leave and under internal investigation. Three others who had enforced crypto laws faced the same fate. None were told what they had done wrong.
“But current and former agency staffers said in interviews that the commission’s work force took away a clear message: Don’t cause trouble for those industries,” the report wrote.
Related: US Senate Banking Committee votes to advance CLARITY Act
CFTC pulls back on crypto enforcement
The report noted that the CFTC has significantly pulled back on crypto enforcement. The agency dropped at least five crypto investigations and went from filing more than 80 crypto enforcement actions under Biden to just two under Trump. Both of the recent cases targeted individual operators, not major firms.
Pham left the agency to join MoonPay, a crypto firm partnered with Polymarket. Her senior counsel, Brigitte Weyls, became general counsel at Gemini Titan, the same company whose application she helped approve, the NYT claimed. Current chair Michael Selig, the agency’s sole commissioner, previously represented crypto firms as a corporate lawyer.
Crypto.com is a business partner of Trump Media. Polymarket received investment from Donald Trump Jr-backed venture capital firm 1789 Capital. Gemini’s founders are financial backers of American Bitcoin Corp, a crypto firm co-founded by Eric Trump.
“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, told the outlet. “There are no conflicts of interest.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Polymarket, Crypto.com and Gemini for comment, but had not received a response by publication.
Relateed: CFTC no-action letter eases event contract reporting rules
CFTC sues states over prediction markets
As Cointelegraph reported, the CFTC has filed lawsuits against over their legal proceedings against prediction market platforms, launching action against regulators in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois.
Source: Fairplaygov
Last week, the House Agriculture Committee urged Trump to nominate four commissioners to the CFTC, warning the agency is ill-equipped to handle its growing responsibilities with only one member in place.
Magazine: Guide to the top and emerging global crypto hubs — Mid-2026
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents autonomously spending money online is still a tiny market, but some of the world’s largest tech, payments and crypto firms are already racing to build the infrastructure for it, Keyrock said in a new report.
The crypto trading and investment firm estimated that AI agents settled over $73 million across roughly 176 million transactions on blockchain rails between May 2025 and April 2026.
The volumes remain negligible compared to traditional finance (TradFi). Visa, for example, alone processes $14.5 trillion annually. But the significance lies less in the headline U.S. dollar value and more in how quickly the infrastructure stack is forming, the report argued. Global firms such as Coinbase (COIN), Stripe, Google (GOOG) and Visa (V) all rolled out competing systems for machine-to-machine payments.
The broader idea behind agentic payments is that software increasingly consumes digital services autonomously rather than through human-managed subscriptions and accounts. An AI trading agent, for example, could continuously purchase market data, cloud computing or AI-generated analysis in tiny increments throughout the day without a human authorizing each payment manually.
That potential is driving ambitious forecasts how big the agentic payment sector could grow. Gartner projects AI agents could intermediate $15 trillion in purchases by 2028, while McKinsey estimated retail agentic commerce could reach $3 trillion-$5 trillion by 2030, according to the Keyrock report.
Those projections imply growth rates even faster than stablecoins experienced during their breakout years, the report said, but said the pace of infrastructure deployment already signals the market is moving beyond its experimentation phase.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol has emerged as one of the leading crypto-native systems. The protocol allows AI agents to pay directly with USDC for services such as blockchain analytics or cloud infrastructure without creating accounts or subscriptions.
Stripe, with its Tempo blockchain, launched a competing framework called Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), while Google introduced AP2, a system focused on delegated spending authorization for AI agents. Visa has extended its card network with tokenized credentials designed for AI-driven commerce.
Crypto rails and stablecoins are emerging as the preferred settlement layer, and the economics help explain why.
Some 76% of agent transactions fall below the 30 cent fixed-fee floor common in card payments, according to the report. Most payments ranged between one and 10 cents, making traditional rails impractical for automated software agents buying data, AI inference or API access. Meanwhile, stablecoin settlement on some blockchains like Base and Tempo costs fractions of a cent.
Currently, 98.6% of machine payments settle in USDC, the stablecoin issued by Circle (CRCL). That solidifies Circle’s position in crypto payments, but also introduces risk of concentration, creating dependency on a single issuer.
Regulation could be a source of constraint for the growth. MiCA in Europe, the U.S. GENIUS Act and the EU AI Act are all expected to take effect around mid-2026, yet none of them directly address autonomous machine-to-machine transactions or questions around liability and agent identity, the report noted.
A blockchain researcher has pushed back against growing criticism of the Ethereum Foundation, arguing that the organization is doing “exactly” what it was designed to do, which the critics keep getting wrong.
In a post on X titled “Leave the Foundation Alone,” William Mougayar, a Toronto-based blockchain investor, researcher and best-selling author, argued that the EF is a protocol steward, not a marketing engine.
Mougayar said that ETH, Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation are three separate entities with three separate trajectories. “The asset is money. The infrastructure is shared compute. The Foundation is a non-profit that is steering the protocol toward irrelevance for its own founders,” he wrote, adding that confusing the three leads to bad predictions and misplaced anger.
Source: William Mougayar
The post comes as the foundation has faced a wave of criticism from the crypto community in recent months. ETH sales, unstaking moves and public silence have drawn repeated accusations that the organization is harming ETH’s price performance.
Related: Ethereum is still a good long-term buy, according data: Analyst
EF is hardening the protocol
Mougayar said the EF is on a “subtraction path,” working to become less central to Ethereum over time. “ It is hardening the protocol so the world does not need it so much. It is shipping upgrades. It is funding the research that nobody else funds,” he wrote.
He suggested that the criticism comes from people who want a king. He claimed that expecting the EF to market ETH or court institutions is “like expecting the IETF to run Super Bowl ads for TCP/IP.”
ETH is currently trading at $2,117.09, up by 4.67% over the past day. However, the token is down more than 57% compared to its all-time high of $4,953 recorded in August last year, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Related: Harvard dumps entire ETH position after just one quarter
EF sells, unstakes ETH
Earlier this month, the foundation completed its third OTC sale of ETH to BitMine Immersion Technologies, offloading 10,000 ETH at an average price of $2,292, worth roughly $22.9 million. Combined with two earlier transactions, 5,000 ETH in March and another 10,000 ETH the previous week, the Foundation has sold approximately $47 million worth of ETH to BitMine in recent weeks.
The sale also came shortly after the foundation unstaked 17,035 ETH worth around $40 million. The EF also unstaked another 21,270 Ether from Lido, worth nearly $50 million, earlier this month.
Market Moves: Why is Ethereum Foundation selling? BTC futures warning signs
Bitcoin (BTC) fell to $74,190 on Saturday, its lowest level in more than a month, despite pro-crypto Kevin Warsh being sworn in as Federal Reserve chairman a day earlier.
BTC/USD daily chart. Source: TradingView
Key takeaways:
Higher odds of a rate hike in 2026 are pressuring the Bitcoin market.
Bitcoin has historically struggled during years marked by Federal Reserve leadership changes.
Why is Bitcoin down despite a pro-crypto Fed chair?
Bitcoin’s sell-off came as the 2-year US Treasury yield climbed to 4.14%, its highest level since February 2025.
US 2-year bond yield daily chart. Source: TradingView
The 2-year yield is closely tied to where traders expect the federal funds rate to move in the near term. Its move above the Fed’s current 3.50%–3.75% target range suggests markets are no longer betting on quick easing under Warsh.
CME data shows traders now expect the Fed to keep rates unchanged for most of 2026, with futures pricing pointing to a possible 25 basis point hike in December.
Target rate probabilities for the December Fed meeting. Source: CME
Over the past three decades, the Fed has typically raised rates when the 2-year Treasury yield moved above the federal funds rate, as the gap suggested markets were pricing in tighter policy ahead, according to data provided by BCA Research.
US 2-year Treasury yield vs. US Fed fund target rate. Source: BCA Research
Conversely, when the 2-year yield fell below the Fed funds rate, it often signaled expectations for future rate cuts.
Related: Bitcoin ETFs snap 5-day inflow streak as BTC dips under $80K
Such a shift weakens the bullish case for BTC, which typically benefits from falling yields, lower real rates and easier liquidity conditions.
Warsh is “a known inflation hawk”
In the past, Warsh has spoken favorably about Bitcoin, criticized central bank digital currency, and backed a larger role for private-sector financial innovation. For crypto traders, that checks several bullish boxes.
But from a monetary-policy perspective, Warsh may still challenge the bullish Bitcoin narrative, according to analyst Crypto Patel.
In a Saturday post, Patel noted that Warsh is “a known inflation hawk,” not a dove, adding that a difficult macro backdrop, including Iran war-driven inflation risks and labor-market pressure, may keep him from slashing rates.
“Crypto-friendly on regulation is NOT the same as dovish on rates,” he said.
Bitcoin underperforms in years of Fed leadership changes
Another warning comes from Bitcoin’s historical reaction to Fed leadership changes.
In a Saturday post, analyst Lucky noted that BTC has struggled during previous chair transitions: it fell 84% after Janet Yellen took over in January 2014, 73% after Jerome Powell started in February 2018, and 60% after Powell began his second term in May 2022.
Source: X
Warsh’s takeover has so far coincided with a sharp BTC decline, suggesting traders may again be de-risking as they wait for policy clarity from the new Fed chief.
Bitcoin’s digital nature is the source of most of its advantages. Since it is programmable, it unlocks self-custody practices that can make theft and confiscation very difficult. Since it is digital, it can move at the speed of light, allowing movement of value and settlement across the globe in minutes.
Nevertheless, Bitcoin has at times been criticized for being hard to grasp, literally. Bitcoin, in its natural state, can not be touched, can not be physically held; it can only be imagined and understood. To many people, that’s a significant barrier and one that has inspired quite a few attempts to bring the coin into meat space, but it is not easy.
Entrepreneurs and artists alike, for well over a decade, have taken on the challenge of making Bitcoin physical in a way that retains its most valuable cash-like properties, and while nobody has entirely solved the problem, significant progress has been made, leaving a wonderful trail of artifacts along the way.
Casascius Coins
(Image by Stacks Bowers Galleries)
Minted as early as September 6th, 2011, at a bitcoin price of barely $8 dollars, Casascius coins are without a doubt the most iconic physical Bitcoin artifacts in history, with many copycats since. Named after Mike Caldwell’s Bitcointalk forum nym, which appears to be an idiom for “call a spade a spade”, the Casascius coins developed many of the practices that other attempts at physical Bitcoin would innovate on over the years.
One problem with making Bitcoin physical is the handling of private key material. Since Bitcoin is digitally native, it can only live in a cryptographic private-public key pair, a secret that is used to generate a public key, with Bitcoin-compatible cryptography. In the case of the Casascius coin, Caldwell generated the private keys in an airgapped machine and printed them, gluing them to the iconic precious metal coins and then presumably destroyed the copy that could have been kept on his computer. He described the security precautions taken on his website for potential buyers to review.
The printed private key was then covered by specialized tamper-proof stickers, which, if removed, leave an obvious mark in a “honeycomb pattern”. Buyers of the coins could thus tell if the private keys in a Casascius coin had been exposed before purchase from a third-party vendor.
This key management issue is the biggest hazard in the creation of physical bitcoin, and one which, in the case of Caldwell, was dealt with by trusting him not to cheat. He was also very transparent and careful by the standards of the time. To this day, his reputation is strong if not legendary, so that trust was well placed by buyers who profited greatly from the collector’s value of the items, which to this day mark a premium on top of the bitcoin and precious metal values of the piece.
Casascius coins were discontinued in November 2013 after the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a branch of the Treasury Department, informed developer Mike Caldwell that minting physical bitcoins qualified him as a money transmitter business with heavy compliance requirements. The trust involved in generating the private keys may have been a centralizing element that put a target on his back.
RavenBit Coins
A year after Casascius coins shut down, RavenBit launched, with an attempt at decentralizing the trusted minting problem of physical bitcoins. The RavenBit coins, very similar in form factor to Casascius, did not come with pre-generated keys; instead, they came with the tamper-proof sticker unpealed, such that the user could generate their own keypair, paste it to the coin and slap the tamper-proof sticker on top.
This, in a sense, decentralized the mint and, in theory, that is a breakthrough, but in practice, it just created a thousand trusted mints, without brands, without reputations, using office printers that probably had malware on them. If you got a RavenBit coin from someone, how could you know that the person who bought it and generated the private key in there didn’t keep a copy or take proper precautions?
To date, the RavenBit project has been abandoned, but it probably taught the industry an interesting lesson. To make Bitcoin physical, we need to go higher tech.
Opendimes
To route around the trusted mint problem — both at the center and at the edges – of physical bitcoins, Coinkite, the hardware wallet maker, designed the Opendime, a tiny computer purpose-built to be a Bitcoin bearer asset. Looking back on what motivated him, NVK, co-founder of CoinKite, told Bitcoin Magazine that, “Bitcoin is digital money. All we can do is an analog backup. Maybe someone cracks doing secp256k1 by hand in the future.” Meaning that currently, you always need some kind of computer to generate valid Bitcoin keys; that computer is the mint.
Opendimes were designed around this fundamental fact. They have a computer chip that can generate a private-public key pair and store the private key securely, behind a silicon tamper-proof mechanism.
Users have to feed it a file or some kind of input for entropy during setup, which the chip uses in part to generate the Bitcoin wallet, this grants further assurance that the random generation logic, which is open source, has an even better entropy input in the generation of those bitcoin keys.
The public key of the generated Opendime wallet can always be seen by connecting the device to a computer, as you would a normal USB stick; its balance is visible on a block explorer.
Users can then send bitcoin to the opendime, but if they want to withdraw BTC from it? They have to physically puncture the device, which unlocks a circuit to access the private key, but renders the device visibly unsealed.
Opendimes represent a major breakthrough in bearer asset technology and go for about $20 dollars each today, rising in price slightly with inflation from a low of about $13 each in 2016. As a result, they have also achieved iconic status, with artists embedding them in premium Bitcoin art and making them into Bitcoin meme culture.
While $13 to $20 dollars is very cheap for hardware wallets, and the trusted mint issue is effectively solved by letting users fill the device with their own coins, the price and form factor are still far away from cash. On a price basis alone, $20 dollars is a big ask. If Casascius charged about 20% markup for his coins, then Opendimes should hold at least $100 worth of Bitcoin inside to be worth the hardware, and for use as a currency, which prices out most every day purchases.
Finally, the badass cypherpunk USB stick form factor, while epic, does not visibly tell the user much about its contents, making each device effectively non-fungible with other Opendimes and thus not cash-like. A cheaper and probably more fungible alternative is needed.
The Satodime
Taking the Opendime concept to a more friendly form factor, the Belgian hardware wallet manufacturer Satochip created an open source credit card-like Bitcoin wallet, which has very similar qualities to the Opendime. It can generate Bitcoin private-public key pairs, and depending on the version, can even sign transactions. Users can interact with it via phone apps that talk to the card via NFC. Other form factors are available as well, like rings and coins that contain the same chip and capabilities.
The cost for Satochip hardware can be as low as 13 Euros, depending on the bulk purchases, which is cheaper than an Opendime, which gets us closer to everyday cash purchases, but not by that much. The Satochip cards are intended to be high-security hardware wallet devices anyway, not daily-use cash containers. And these powerful and small computer chips are not cheap, hence the price floor above $10 that seems so hard to break through, for now.
Too Expensive? The Fundamental Limits
So, how cheap does physical Bitcoin hardware need to be to make business sense, if it can make sense at all?
According to the Federal Reserve, it costs anywhere from 4.1 cents to 11.3 cents to produce U.S. dollars. The smaller the value, the more expensive it is, with $1 bills incurring a 4.1% loss in production costs.
That means that to justify a 20,000 Satoshis bill — roughly $16 dollars at today’s prices — the hardware needs to cost well under a dollar. Most computer chips powerful enough to do Bitcoin cryptography are above that price target, but there is one chip that demonstrates what is possible, the NXP’s NTAG X DNA chip.
Available in sticker antenna form factor, a couple of millimeters thin, this NXP chip can handle a variety of cryptographic primitives, such as ECDSA and ECC. It can create secrets, sign them and even encrypt a message. However, while powerful, it does not include the Bitcoin cryptography curve, secp256k1, which means it can’t do Bitcoin things natively.
Nevertheless, this 2025 generation NTAG can be purchased for roughly $3, if you can find any supply, demonstrating how low the price can go on a chip capable of performing cryptographic functions.
Sadly, the cash-like form factor most of the world is used to, with flexible bills that people can fold into their pocket, can be very damaging to computer chips, a fact that NVK says he learned from experience, as they experimented with Bitcoin bearer assets hardware.
The closest anyone may have come to the cash-like format is the OfflineCash company, with a beautiful, collection-worthy set of Bitcoin-denominated bills that have an NTAG-style NFC chip, which stores a user-generated key, while the company generates a second key on their servers, to create a 2 of 2 multisignature wallet. The Server key is on a time lock, degrading the multisig address to a 1 of 1 wallet, from which the user can eventually withdraw the bitcoin. This tries to get around the trusted mint issue, but ends up just replicating the many mints problem. Though their cash-like form factor is undeniably gorgeous.
The costs of producing a Bitcoin native NTAG can easily hit a few million dollars, and implementing Bitcoin’s cryptography in this way can be fraught with errors if manufacturers are not experts on the topic. It would also need to be fully open source to guarantee that there are no backdoors.
There’s one more fundamental problem with physical Bitcoin bearer assets. Even if you could get a cheap enough chip in a cash-like format, you would always need online access to verify its authenticity —that the cash is loaded with real bitcoin— since the asset is unavoidably digital. The problem could be solved by simply trusting an issuing mint of Bitcoin-denominated cash instruments, and believing in the face value of a redeemable bill, but that would miss the ideal of self-custodied, trusted cash. Though it probably would work in a friendly jurisdiction.
So, while it would be cool to have physical Bitcoin bills like those created by OfflineCash Company with a bearer asset secure chip and not trusted mint risk, we are still a ways away. And it might actually be overkill today, since no one would have bitcoin-denominated change anyway, so you’d end up getting fiat cash back, but maybe one day, post-hyperbitcoinization. NVK does believe there’s a superior solution to the cash format, at least for the foreseeable future, which is why Coinkite created the Tapsigner.
The Tapsigner
Built on the Coinkite Bitcoin NFC chip, a technology similar to the X DNA NTAG by NXP, though perhaps more powerful and thus more expensive, the Tapsigner comes in the familiar debit card form factor, with a secure element chip, NFC tap to pay and cool designs to choose from. Inside the chip, though, is a fully capable Bitcoin wallet, with scep256k1 cryptographic capabilities, letting it create Bitcoin keys, store the secret securely enough and sign transactions internally, to be broadcast by an accompanying phone, which serves as a critical visual aid for the user to verify transactions.
The Tapsigner can function as a bearer asset, but perhaps even better as a refillable hardware wallet that can spend specific amounts of bitcoin, like any credit card, resolving the issue of change, and enabling tap to pay to wallets that support the already popular feature.
With cards like the Tapsigner, which cost about $20 bucks, the problem of bitcoin-denominated payments returns to good old-fashioned retail adoption, and integration with major business accounting and payments software, which Cashapp and Square are blowing wide open.
After crumbling about 4% late Friday into early Saturday, bitcoin BTC$76,577.37 has more than retraced those losses in the past few minutes after President Trump announced a coming agreement with Iran and other Middle Eastern countries.
“An Agreement has been largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post.
“In addition to many other elements of the Agreement, the Strait of Hormuz will be opened,” the president continued.
The news sent bitcoin sharply higher to $76,700 after having fallen to nearly $74,000 earlier on Saturday.
