VirtuallBacon

Crypto trader and investor. I share my real portfolio, daily market updates, and live streams 3x a week on YouTube. My trading system and calls: @The_Coiners

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Tomorrow the Coinbase and Circle agreement over USDC enters its first three-year renewal term.

That contract sets how the two of them split the revenue USDC throws off, which in plain terms means who keeps the interest on the dollars backing it.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Every cycle I've sat through, the quiet stretch lasted longer than I thought I could stand.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Three crypto firms leaked customer data in one week, over 230,000 people. Every one of them through an outside vendor, not a direct hack. Your coins are fine, your phone number is not.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

austria just handed down its first published fine under MiCA, europe's big new crypto rulebook. 70,000 euros. the offence was filing a whitepaper late.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours:

🌍Market Overview:

🔸 The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to 298.7 million barrels, its first reading under 300 million since the early 1980s, and heads toward roughly 243 million once the 172-million-barrel Iran war release finishes.

🔸 China's July data missed on every line: retail sales grew 0.6% against 1.5% expected, industrial output rose 4.5% versus 4.8%, and fixed-asset investment contracted 6.7%, piling pressure on Beijing to widen stimulus.

🔸 Stripe finalized a deal to buy AI model-router OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, roughly five times the $1.3 billion valuation from a raise only months ago, a read on how strategic inference routing has become.

🔸 Japan's economy grew 1.1% annualized in the second quarter against 2% expected, with softer domestic demand offsetting strong exports in the first full quarter to carry the Iran war's energy shock.

🔸 HIVE jumped 9% in pre-market trading on a $350 million five-year GPU cloud deal that lifts contracted recurring revenue to about $180 million, another miner turning hash power into AI compute.

🔸 The Empire State factory index jumped to 20.6 from 15.6, its highest in more than four years, where forecasters looked for a drop. That cuts against the September Fed hold futures are pricing. #Markets

🪙Crypto Updates:

🔸 Solana's proposed SIMD-0553 fee overhaul would burn the resource fee rather than pay it to validators, lifting the daily SOL burn from around 648 toward 7,500 to 9,000. Still in its discussion phase. #Solana

🔸 50 million XRP worth $50.5 million left a Ripple-linked wallet for an address with no public identity on August 13, the same stretch in which weekly US spot XRP ETF inflows collapsed 93% to $1.01 million. #XRP

🔸 Hyperliquid put $141 million of its $169 million in second-quarter revenue into HYPE buybacks, which is roughly 83 cents of every dollar earned routed straight back into the token. #HYPE

🔸 Ethena is placing stablecoins into overcollateralized lending arrangements managed through prime broker FalconX, moving more of its reserve base into credit that earns rather than sitting idle.

🔸 Binance gave Russian investigators a customer's passport, address and phone number over transfers worth a little more than $700 to Ukrainian groups. That IT specialist has been jailed since September 2025.

🔸 Chainalysis is suing the US government over an ICE contract worth about $94.6 million that went to rival TRM Labs on a single bid, calling the sole-source award arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. #Crypto

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Only 27% of big US active funds beat their index fund over the year to June. Paying someone to pick stocks lost to doing nothing, three times out of four.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

$48 billion of borrowed bets on bitcoin, against only $25 billion of daily trading.

Not many buyers to catch it if that unwinds.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

NEAR had every ingredient for the 2024 and 2025 AI run and it still made a new low. I followed the project since 2023, through the whole pivot from layer 1 into AI, and that one fact keeps it off my buy list.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Cboe filed to list the first 3x bitcoin and ether ETFs in the US. The same sponsor already runs a 2x ether fund that lost 79.61% in the year to June 30.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Almost three quarters of last week's $18.6 billion into global stock funds went to Europe. The US got $2.6 billion. Odd for the biggest market in the world.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Galaxy has cut the odds of the US crypto market structure bill passing this year from 75% in May to 10%.

Executives meet the White House on Wednesday, but the Senate does not vote until September 15. The odds keep getting worse.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours:

🌍Market Overview:

🔸 Anthropic reported preliminary second-quarter revenue above $11.5 billion, up from $787 million a year earlier, and bankers are pricing a possible IPO off a projected $190 to $200 billion of 2028 revenue. #AI

🔸 Kalshi accused Nevada's gaming regulator of violating federal law after the state sought penalties of $120,000 a day. Investigators had placed nine trades on Kalshi's app in Nevada past a court-ordered deadline.

🔸 Nvidia is in talks to put as much as $3 billion into SoftBank's SB Energy, which is building OpenAI's Ohio campus. Days earlier it cut its guarantee on that project to under $120 billion from $250 billion.

🔸 SpaceX closed its acquisition of Cursor, the AI coding startup, which says it now gets access to the largest fleet of GPUs in the world. The April deal carried an option to buy Cursor for $60 billion.

🔸 Washington is preparing to tell the 35 signatories of its AI Opportunity Statement they will be shut out of the US-led AI coalition if they also sign up for Beijing's competing framework.

🔸 The AI selloff reached the top of the market-making chain. Jane Street lost roughly $15 billion in July, its first down month in about a decade, as the AI fund Situational Awareness sank. #Markets

🪙Crypto Updates:

🔸 Hyperliquid traders are marking Chinese robot maker Unitree near $38 billion on pre-IPO perpetuals, about four times the roughly $9 billion valuation of its Shanghai listing at 150.80 yuan a share.

🔸 Wrapped SOL went live on the XRP Ledger's native DEX through Axelar. XRPL Foundation director Hussein Zangana warned that Axelar currently remains the only legitimate wrapped SOL issuer.

🔸 Ethereum developers narrowed the scope of Hegotá, the 2027 upgrade. FOCIL is its only scheduled EIP so far, dozens of proposals remain under review, and client teams owe preference lists by September 10. #Ethereum

🔸 Russia runs 16.4% of Bitcoin's hashrate, an estimated 175 exahashes per second, and mining is barred in Moscow, the surrounding region and parts of Kursk, with restrictions set to run through Dec. 31, 2032. #Bitcoin

🔸 Lido switched on NEST, an automatic LDO buyback capped at $50K a day and $10M a year. It only spends half of daily staking revenue above $109K, and the protocol has been making around $75K.

🔸 Paul Tudor Jones's firm bought BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF again after a year of selling, lifting its IBIT holding by 109,446 shares, or 18.9%, from 579,083 at the end of March.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

BTC 63,008. Basically where it was yesterday, and the day before. A 200 dollar range over 24 hours. Boring is not the same thing as bearish.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Two Abu Dhabi funds hold $764 million of BlackRock's bitcoin ETF between them. Neither moved a single share last quarter. Not traders, just holders.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Chainlink is up about 14% this week while bitcoin is down 3%. Basically the only green thing on my screen.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

UBS went from call options on 80,000 shares of BlackRock's bitcoin ETF to 1.95 million in one quarter.

The filing does not say whether that is the bank's own bet or its clients'. Worth knowing before anyone calls it a signal.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the biggest in the world, just disclosed $81.9 million of BitMine stock. BitMine's whole business is holding Ethereum, 5.8 million coins of it.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

Reddit joins the S&P 500 before Tuesday's open. JPMorgan figures index funds have to buy 16.7 million shares, about three normal days of volume, whether they want the stock or not.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

World Liberty just got preliminary approval from the OCC to run its own national trust bank.

USD1 issuance, custody and the dollar reserves would all move in house, under OCC supervision instead of sitting with a third party.

[VirtualBacon @virtualbacon]

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours:

🌍Market Overview:

🔸 Nvidia's quarterly filing shows a SpaceX stake worth about $21 billion, 122.8 million Class A shares. That makes Elon Musk's rocket maker its second biggest holding, behind only Intel.

🔸 A federal trade court upheld Trump's removal of the $800 de minimis exemption, ruling he had that power under emergency economic powers. Amazon booked $600 million in tariff refunds last quarter. #Markets

🔸 Z​.ai released GLM-5.3, a 743-billion-parameter coder leading CyberGym at 84.5%, which flagged 2,436 vulnerabilities across 269 open-source projects. It still trails Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on coding. #AI

🔸 Applied Materials beat with adjusted EPS of $3.50 against $3.42 expected and sales up 25%, then fell nearly 6%. Guidance of $10.25 billion in revenue was not enough for the crowd.

🔸 The CFTC opened an internal review of mention markets, contracts on whether specific words get said, and Kalshi pulled its sports versions. The FT reported JPMorgan cut off Polymarket last October.

🔸 Databricks closed a $5 billion funding round at a $190 billion valuation to invest in enterprise AI. Its last $5 billion round, back in February, valued the company at $134 billion.

🪙Crypto Updates:

🔸 The OCC granted World Liberty Trust a conditional national bank charter, clearing it to issue USD1 to institutional clients nationwide. USD1 has passed $4 billion in circulation. #Crypto

🔸 Galaxy Research put the Coldcard exploit above 1,778 BTC, about $112 million, with a suspected fourth wave that would lift it to 2,417 BTC. No confirmed attacker activity since Aug. 6. #Bitcoin

🔸 BNB Chain set its Pasteur hard fork for 2:30 a.m. UTC on Aug. 25, after running on testnet since July 21. Three proposals tighten cross-chain checks, validator entries and old key rights.

🔸 SharpLink will stake $200 million of ETH through Lido, roughly 12% of its holdings, and hold the wstETH at Anchorage Digital.

🔸 StablecoinX disclosed a treasury of about 3 billion ENA, near 20% of Ethena's 15 billion supply, worth $218.4 million. One listed company now controls a fifth of the token.

🔸 Coinbase, Ripple, a16z, Chainlink, Paradigm and Kalshi are expected at an Aug. 19 White House crypto meeting, with a new CFTC advisory committee sitting the next day in Washington.