SpaceX (SPCX) apparently moved bitcoin BTC$62,001.96 across its wallets early Wednesday for the first time in about six months in three transfers totaling less than $300 of its $1.16 billion holding that don’t signal any impending sales.
Data from Arkham Intelligence shows the largest transfer across addresses tagged as belonging to the company moved 0.00213 BTC, about $135, between two wallets. A second sent 0.00139 BTC, or about $89.
In the third, Coinbase Prime’s custody service topped up a SpaceX address with 0.000738 BTC, around $47, the kind of small amount an exchange sends to cover network fees before a larger transaction can go through.
SpaceX went public on June 12 in the largest IPO on record, and its filing put the company’s full bitcoin position on a public balance sheet for the first time. Small movements can draw attention after a share listing even though none of the coins reached an exchange deposit address and none left SpaceX’s control.
The company still holds 18,712 BTC. Transfers this size are usually routine maintenance: funding a wallet to pay fees, consolidating coins across addresses or testing a signing setup before moving a real balance.
Citadel abandoned its U.S. trade secrets lawsuit against crypto market maker Portofino Technologies, saying it no longer made financial sense to pursue another court victory while struggling to collect a nearly 6 million-pound ($8 million) judgment it already won.
In a filing made on Wednesday in the U.S., Miami-based Citadel jointly agreed with Portofino to dismiss the New York trade secrets case. Also on Wednesday, Citadel asked England’s High Court to declare Portofino founder Leonard Lancia bankrupt over the unpaid arbitration award. The moves underscore that the dispute has shifted from proving liability to collecting money.
Under the U.S. stipulation, each side will bear its own legal fees and costs, and Citadel also dismissed claims against unnamed Doe defendants.
Portofino Technologies is a Swiss crypto-native financial technology firm that provides institutional trading infrastructure for digital asset markets. Founded in 2021 by former Citadel Securities executives, the company specializes in market making, over-the-counter (OTC) trading and treasury management services for exchanges, token issuers, institutional investors and Web3 projects.
A spokesperson for Citadel Securities said “Mr. Lancia repeatedly lied to his colleagues at Citadel Securities and to Portofino’s investors, and we intend to enforce the UK court’s substantial judgment.”
Cantor Equity Partners I (Nasdaq: CEPO), a special purpose acquisition company backed by an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald, and BSTR Holdings said today that they will not complete their proposed bitcoin business combination on the terms set in their July 2025 agreement. The parties plan to negotiate a revised structure and amended terms that reflect market conditions.
The companies said the private placements tied to the original deal will not need to close. A shareholder meeting for CEPO, set for July 10, moved to a postponed date with no fixed timeline. Public shares submitted for redemption will return to holders, the note said.
The announcement marks a reversal for one of the largest bitcoin treasury deals to reach public markets. When the two firms unveiled the merger in July 2025, they framed a plan to take Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company, led by Blockstream co-founder and cryptographer Adam Back, public on Nasdaq under the ticker BSTR.
The combined entity would launch with 30,021 bitcoin, a stake worth more than $3 billion at the time, and rank among the largest public corporate bitcoin holders.
Adam Back took to X this morning to confirm: “From today’s filing, @bstrco and $CEPO have agreed to work together on and are currently discussing a potential revised structure and amended terms for their previously announced proposed business combination, intended to opportunistically better capitalize on market conditions.”
Merger targets 50,000-bitcoin treasury
The structure paired Back and Blockstream Capital, who agreed to contribute more than 30,000 bitcoin, with a private investment in public equity of about $1.5 billion. About 5,021 bitcoin came as in-kind contributions rather than cash.
Backers described the raise as the largest PIPE for a bitcoin treasury, and the company outlined a target of more than 50,000 bitcoin.
The deal drew attention for its ties to Cantor Fitzgerald. Brandon Lutnick, son of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, chairs the SPAC sponsor. The Securities and Exchange Commission declared the registration statement effective on June 5, 2026, and CEPO mailed its proxy to shareholders that day.
The path to a vote proved rough. CEPO pushed the shareholder meeting from June 26 to July 2, then to July 10, before the two sides paused the process. The delays tracked a broader slump in the bitcoin treasury model.
By late 2025, a rising share of treasury firms traded below the value of their bitcoin holdings, a condition analysts measure through mNAV, the ratio of a company’s market value to its crypto.
That gap matters for the treasury playbook. The model depends on a premium: when a stock trades above the worth of its bitcoin, the firm can issue shares to buy more. When the stock slips to a discount, fresh equity raises erode value for existing holders and the growth engine stalls.
Strategy, the pioneer of the approach, traded at a discount to its holdings, and smaller peers fell to steeper markdowns.
Neither firm detailed the shape of a revised deal. Any new terms would require fresh filings with the SEC to amend the registration statement and proxy. The parties said they expect to share more in due course.
BNB Chain has already lifted performance on BNB Smart Chain. During the first half of 2026, block times fell to 450 milliseconds from 750, while benchmark throughput rose to about 5,200 transactions per second from roughly 2,800.
David Z, BNB Chain’s chief technical officer, told CoinDesk the next phase focuses on execution rather than consensus.
“All smart contracts today need optimization directly at the execution layer,” he said. “The chains got fast at consensus and storage, but the execution engine itself still works like it’s translating sentence by sentence.”
The new network will use execution-layer techniques such as just-in-time compilation, which compiles code as it runs, and strength reduction, which swaps expensive calculations for simpler ones.
The roadmap also reserves blockspace for services such as oracles, liquidations and cross-chain bridges, alongside native privacy, account abstraction, gas sponsorship, transaction batching, scheduled execution and passkey signing.
BNB Chain is separately researching quantum-resistant security. The team said it aims to let users adopt quantum-safe protection without changing wallet addresses or disrupting existing applications, work that remains at the research stage.
Paradigm has raised $1.2 billion for a new venture fund focused on artificial intelligence and robotics, according to a blog post Wednesday.
The firm’s third venture fund reflects growing interest in AI and defense technology, though it does not signal an exit from digital assets.
“Crypto was the first frontier for us, and it continues to be a really exciting one, but there’s so much else happening right now that’s pretty hard to ignore,” managing partner Alana Palmedo told Bloomberg.
Paradigm has already deployed capital from the new fund into several companies, including autonomous drone delivery company Zipline International, which was valued at $7.6 billion in January, and space defense startup True Anomaly, which reached a $2.2 billion valuation in April.
Founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Paradigm built its reputation as one of crypto’s largest venture investors. The firm launched a $2.5 billion flagship crypto fund in November 2021, then the largest dedicated crypto fund, before raising an $850 million fund for early-stage blockchain startups in 2024.
Bitcoin traded near $62,000 today, surrendering part of a rebound that had carried it to $64,000 from last week’s bear-market low of $57,700. The pullback holds the price above the $60,000 level that CryptoQuant treats as support, though it trims a recovery of some 11% off the bottom.
The dip came as CryptoQuant’s Weekly Crypto Report, published today and shared with Bitcoin Magazine, argued the backdrop skews toward further gains. Head of Research Julio Moreno framed the bounce as a bear-market recovery rather than a trend reversal, with one central caution: the firm’s Bull Score Index, an aggregate of on-chain, market, and valuation conditions on a 0-to-100 scale, sits at 20, inside the bearish zone at or below 40 and short of the 60 reading tied to a sustainable bull market.
The report’s bullish case rests on seasonality. Across the past decade, July has ranked among Bitcoin’s stronger months, closing higher in most years shown.
The pattern held in the down-cycles of 2018 and 2022, when Bitcoin gained some 20% and 17% during the month as the broader trend stayed weak. Entering July 2026 off a bear-market low, the report said, that pattern skews near-term risk toward gains.
Bitcoin demand is turning
Demand has turned. The 30-day change in total demand — spot plus perpetual futures — collapsed to some -650,000 BTC in early June, the deepest negative reading since 2022, as Bitcoin fell toward $58,000.
It has since recovered toward neutral, with speculative futures demand crossing into positive territory and spot selling easing to its slowest pace since mid-May. A return to positive territory, the report said, would confirm a re-igniting demand engine.
U.S. buyers show signs of stabilizing. The Coinbase Premium Index, a proxy for U.S. spot demand, sank below zero in early June as Bitcoin bottomed near $57,000, one of its weakest readings of the year.
The premium remains under zero, though its path has tracked Bitcoin’s climb off the low and points to steadier institutional appetite.
Valuation added a floor. The on-chain trader unrealized profit/loss margin, for coins held one to three months, dropped below -24% in early June, under the -12% threshold the firm treats as undervalued. Readings at such extremes tend to mark local bottoms as short-term holders capitulate, the report said, and the margin has recovered as price bounced off $57,700.
Today’s slip to $62,000 underscores the report’s own hedge. CryptoQuant reads the market as off its lows, with improving internals but a bearish regime intact.
A durable rally, it concluded, would require the Bull Score Index to climb above 60. Until then, the firm treats the move as a recovery within a bear market, not a reversal — a framing this week’s give-back does little to challenge.
European Union officials are reportedly planning to revise the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework amid the implementation of a US law on stablecoins.
According to a Wednesday report from Euronews, EU officials planned to revisit proposed changes to MiCA to broaden the framework’s scope, specifically regarding non-EU companies issuing stablecoins.
The revised rules, which authorities will reportedly consider in 2027, were in response to the US government’s Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins, or GENIUS, Act, putting pressure on EU officials to clarify how US stablecoin issuers could be regulated in member states. Officials will also reportedly consider expanding MiCA to include rules on tokenized payments and deposits.
Under MiCA, crypto companies offering services to EU-based users across 27 member states must now be licensed as Crypto-Asset Service Providers (CASPs) by a regulator in one of the member states. Although the licensing requirement took effect on July 1, European Commission officials had already opened a comment period for potentially revising the framework, including provisions on decentralized finance (DeFi) and stablecoins.
Related: Stablecoin-settled TradFi perpetual trading tops $1.1T: Binance Research
The proposed framework, which some have dubbed “MiCA 2.0,” will remain open for comments until Aug. 31. However, Miroslav Durić, a senior associate at Taylor Wessing, told Cointelegraph in June that it was unlikely that “any concrete legislative proposals will be adopted before 2028.”
In addition to the GENIUS Act, US lawmakers are reportedly continuing discussions to advance their own version of market structure called the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act. The bill, advanced by two key committees in the previous 12 months, is expected to head to a vote in the Senate in July before the chamber breaks for month-long state work periods.
EU regulators reviewing crypto custody risks
The European Securities and Markets Authority, one of the regulators supporting the implementation of MiCA, announced on Wednesday that it planned to review the operational resilience of CASPs licensed under the recently enacted framework. From July through the first half of 2027, EU regulators will examine how crypto companies handle custody-related operational risks.
Magazine: Why stablecoins and SWIFT may have to coexist
Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.
In bitcoin BTC$62,129.74’s 4-year cycles, there has always been a distinct driver of selling pressure. In 2018, we saw the promise of crypto running ahead of its skis; the market drove up valuations of crypto projects far beyond their nascent stages of development that led to selling once participants understood the reality. In 2022, leveraged blow ups brought several forced sellers, such as Celsius and FTX, which pressured crypto prices. The most recent overhang on the market has been Strategy (MSTR), whose evolving capital structure drove concerns of potential BTC sales to meet dividend obligations. The good news is that MSTR took concrete steps to placate said concerns, shoring up its USD reserve and updating its capital allocation strategy, buying time for BTC to recover. The market can now look past this and evaluate BTC on its own merits.
The BTC story remains relevant as ever
BTC’s role as sound money resonates as the money supply continues to increase, surpassing $23 trillion for the first time in May. What’s notable is that the month-over-month jump was over 1% and the highest since 2021, a marked acceleration from prior months. Bitcoin remains a solution to rapid expansion of the money supply. While attention has drifted away from this to the Iran conflict and AI, BTC is poised to swing back to this dynamic.
Unlike its peer store of value asset, gold, BTC was designed to be easily divisible and portable. And its fixed supply of 21 million BTC still holds. There is value in this kind of neutral asset and allocators should continue to take note.
Polymarket, which began its return to the U.S. after a four-year ban with the acquisition of QCEX a year ago and the introduction of a mobile trading app in December, has started a campaign to persuade policymakers, regulators and potential users that it is trustworthy, Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
According to AP, Polymarket is working with social media influencers to produce viral marketing on TikTok and other platforms and has signed partnership agreements with major sports teams and Major League Baseball as well as news outlets including CNBC and CNN.
The steps Polymarket is taking in the U.S. will help legitimize it despite the issues it has faced in the past, Dan Lee, head of U.S. operations, said in an interview with AP on Wednesday.
“I think having the international business being the bulk of the volume, it often sort of masks the progress we are making here in the U.S. to broaden Polymarket’s acceptance,” Lee said.
The company’s X account now has 1.7 million followers and posts about current events several times a day. Rival platform Kalshi, which has been operating under the supervision of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) since 2020, has 431,400.
Bull Bitcoin exchange, recently licensed under MiCA, is challenging the European directive in French courts that sets up a mass surveillance database, putting millions of crypto users at risk.
Bull Bitcoin, the world’s oldest Bitcoin-only and non-custodial exchange, recently licensed under MiCA by France’s financial markets regulator AMF, has filed a legal challenge before the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme administrative court. The challenge seeks to annul Decree No. 2025-1276, the main measure transposing the European DAC8 directive into French law, on the grounds that it creates a massive surveillance grid and database that institutions can not secure from leaks and data hacks, ultimately putting civilians at risk of kidnapping and physical harm.
Alongside the legal action, the company is making dac8.com public: “a complete, fully sourced resource for citizens, journalists and policymakers,” according to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine.
In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in kidnappings and physical attacks on crypto users, most concentrated in Europe, with France being an epicenter. Organized crime seems to be exploiting poor data reporting laws of law-abiding crypto users who, by paying their taxes, expose their ownership of crypto assets. Given that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not reversible and can be transferred internationally with ease, criminals are hunting down crypto users. France has had the second most physical attacks on crypto users after the USA, which has a much larger population, according to Gart, a company dedicated to protecting users from this rising threat.
High-profile figures in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have been targeted in recent years, such as Binance France CEO David Prinçay and Ledger co-founder David Balland, who lost a finger during the incident, among many others. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, a high-security Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet company, has organized ‘wrench attack’ data for years in a database on GitHub showing an accelerating trend of attacks.
Bull Bitcoin argues in its legal challenge to the DAC8 that further consolidation and sharing of crypto user data will only perpetuate this trend of physical attacks. However, they also argue that these personal security risks created by the DAC8 are also working against the stated intentions of the regulations. They argue that users will simply find legal alternatives to centralized, regulated exchanges, opting to purchase the assets off the grid via peer-to-peer exchanges, home mining or offshore unregulated alternatives, making tax collection even more difficult.
User Data Honey Pots
DAC8 turns the natural incentive a company has to protect its users’ data into a valuable multinational database with many entry points, which cybersecurity experts have for a long time called a honey pot. Bull Bitcoin points out that regulated crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) under MiCA, DORA and the GDPR are supervised, sanctionable professionals with financial incentives to protect their customers. DAC8, in turn, does the opposite: it moves data into administrative reporting networks where access is broader, and accountability is harder for users to assess. The security of the whole — Bull Bitcoin concludes — is then only as strong as its weakest link.
The history of data security over the past decades shows that amassing user data and keeping it safe over time is very difficult. Just this year, the French National Agency for Secure Credentials (ANTS, also known as France Titres) suffered a major breach detected on April 15, 2026, exposing data from up to 11.7–19 million accounts. Compromised information included login IDs, full names, email addresses, dates of birth, account identifiers, and, in some cases, postal addresses, places of birth, and phone numbers.
Months earlier, the French National Bank account registry also suffered a major hack, exposing data tied to approximately 1.2 million accounts. The compromised information included IBANs, account holder names, addresses, and, in some cases, tax identification numbers, though officials stated the attacker could not view balances or conduct transactions.
In the United States, the situation is not much better. The Equifax Data Breach in 2017 affected 147 million Americans, and the National Public Data Breach of 2024 affected over 200 million Americans, leading to leaks of social security numbers among other critical information. And back in 2015, the Office of Personal Management of the U.S. government was also breached, compromising a large number of U.S. Government officials. The data stolen included everything from social security numbers to medical records.
The list of such breaches is long, and the only logical conclusion to draw from it is that the less user information that ends up in these honeypots, the better, as ultimately all of these hacks put civilians at risk either from physical attacks or from identity-theft related fraud.
Families On the Front Lines
Of the many issues identified by Bull Bitcoin and documented on the DAC8 website, the most alarming one might be how even individuals who have not purchased crypto might end up harmed by this concentration of data, just by familial association with a Bitcoiner or crypto user.
Citing data by Certik, Bull Bitcoin highlights that more than half of the violent incidents recorded in 2026 against crypto owners targeted a family member — spouse, child, elderly parent — as a direct victim or as a pressure lever over the key holder. On the topic, Bull Bitcoin assets that “DAC8 therefore exposes not only crypto-asset holders, but their entire close family circle: between 40 and 135 million Europeans fall into a physical-risk zone, without any of them ever having consented.”
Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin considers this overreach into the privacy of Euroeans to be potentially catastrophic for the prosperity of the continent, he minced no words in the press release saying that “DAC8 has transformed the concept of Know Your Customer into Kill Your Customer.” He added, “We cannot let the very foundations of civilization be shattered by this attack on privacy rights. We must draw a line in the sand and refuse to cede any more territory before we have nothing left. Someone must take a stand. It appears that no one else is willing and able to do so. Therefore, it falls to BULL to lead this fight.”
The DAC8.com is rich with facts, figures, official sources (EUR-Lex, OECD, Legifrance) and analysis, in French, English and other European languages for those interested in reviewing it and freely using it.
