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Hey all,
I’m Rizzo, the Bitcoin Historian. For more than a decade, I’ve been documenting Bitcoin’s evolution — the people, ideas, companies, and moments that shaped it.
I spend every day tracking what’s shaping Bitcoin.
This newsletter connects the dots. Each edition highlights the stories, signals, and historical context you need to understand what’s happening in Bitcoin right now. And where it may be headed next.
This week: Morgan Stanley launches the first bank-branded Bitcoin ETF and buys 444 BTC on day one, Iran settles oil in Bitcoin on-chain, and a builder at the frontier of AI admits he had to use Coinbase's chain to make it work. Everything below is what you need to know — and what most people missed.
🎙 FEATURE INTERVIEW
🤖 Is Bitcoin Ready for AI?
David Seroy has done something most people talking about AI and Bitcoin haven't: he actually built a working demo. As Head of Ecosystem at Alpen Labs, Seroy coded an agent that borrows against Bitcoin, routes through DeFi, and sends a payment with no human input required. Then he admitted he had to use Coinbase's Base chain to do it, because Bitcoin's programmability gap is real.
This week, Seroy joined Rizzo to break down why AI agents need Bitcoin for the same reason humans do. But Seroy isn’t convinced AI will add billions to Bitcoin’s market cap – at least yet. Listen for David’s view on what Bitcoin must do right now to compete.
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⚡ THE SIGNAL
$10 TRILLION MORGAN STANLEY'S BITCOIN ETF BOUGHT 444 BTC ON DAY ONE
Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF (ticker: MSBT) launched this week as the first spot Bitcoin ETF ever issued directly under a major U.S. bank's name. Every ETF that came before it — BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, VanEck — was built by an asset manager. Morgan Stanley did it under its own roof, with its own 16,000 advisors ready to sell it.
On day one, the fund bought 444 BTC. That's not a soft launch. By most measures it ranks among the most successful ETF debuts on record, which says a lot about how much pent-up demand was sitting behind the bank's client base.
Other banks will follow. The only question is how fast.
IRAN IS NOW EARNING BITCOIN FROM OIL PAYMENTS
Reports emerged this week that Iran could soon be earning as much as 10,000 BTC per month through oil tanker payments — roughly $2 million per ship, ten ships per day, settled in Bitcoin. That was the projection. Chainalysis made it harder to dismiss.
The blockchain analytics firm confirmed Iran's military is already moving hundreds of millions annually using Bitcoin and crypto, with more than $100 million in oil trade visible on-chain. A sanctioned nation-state is settling oil revenue in Bitcoin in plain sight.
For years the argument was that Bitcoin couldn't function as a serious settlement layer. That argument is getting harder to make.
ADAM BACK JUST DESTROYED THE QUANTUM FUD ON LIVE TV
Google published a paper suggesting quantum computing poses a risk to cryptographic systems, including Bitcoin. It made headlines. It also put cypherpunk legend and Blockstream CEO Adam Back in front of a live Bloomberg camera.
Back's verdict: today's quantum computers are extremely basic, and Bitcoin has roughly a decade to prepare. That's not a dismissal; Bitcoin developers take long-term protocol risk seriously. But it's a long way from the "Bitcoin has failed" narrative the paper generated.
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🔥 RIZZO’S WEEKLY TAKE:
In 2015, bringing up Bitcoin at a financial industry conference was a bad idea. You'd get looks. It was socially awkward, like you'd said something everyone agreed to pretend they hadn't heard. How things have changed.
The two camps at the time had already settled into their positions. The Bitcoin side believed it would replace every financial institution on earth. The bank side responded with "blockchain, not Bitcoin" — the idea that they'd take the useful parts, discard the decentralized mining, and subsume the whole thing into existing infrastructure.
Both were wrong. Neither knew it yet.
Schwab just told 46 million clients how much Bitcoin to own. Before getting into the numbers, it's worth asking why this is happening now, because the timing isn't random. Every Bitcoin bull market up to this point had a retail story. In 2013, it was payments. In 2017, it was app tokens. In 2020, it was a grassroots uprising, people demanding harder money from the bottom up.
Each cycle had its version of how Bitcoin reaches a billion users through consumer adoption. Then 2024 came, and that narrative basically disappeared. Meme coins filled the retail attention vacuum and the industry quietly stopped expecting a consumer breakthrough. Institutional adoption isn't just Wall Street coming around. It reflects something the industry doesn't say out loud much — a declining confidence that retail gets Bitcoin where it needs to go.
That context reframes what Schwab actually published. The percentages matter less than the direction. Fidelity says 3%. UBS says 4%. BlackRock says 1 to 2%. Schwab says up to 8%. None of those numbers come from conviction. They come from institutions trying to find a defensible position before their competitors do.
Wall Street wants BTC to be digital gold, a finite non-correlated asset that sits quietly in a portfolio and doesn't cause compliance problems. That's a fine thing for Bitcoin to be. It's just not the whole thing.
I had an early Circle account and a Blockchain wallet. It was just numbers on a screen inside a password-protected web account. I didn't really hold anything. It wasn't until I wrote down 24 words, reconstructed a wallet from scratch, and actually moved Bitcoin peer-to-peer without anyone in the middle that I understood what made it different from every other asset I'd ever touched. That's the thing Schwab's research won't tell its clients. Until you do that, it's very easy to look at Bitcoin and conclude it isn't substantially different from anything else in your portfolio.
That's a false conclusion, but it's a natural one when your only exposure is a line item on a quarterly statement. Price exposure is one part of Bitcoin. It doesn't point to the actual potential — an asset that can move globally in milliseconds, peer-to-peer, without an intermediary. The more you're divorced from that, the harder it is to see what Bitcoin actually is.
🏦 THE TREASURY RACE DOESN'T STOP
The global race among corporations inspired by Michael Saylor is getting interesting, and no one is covering it better than Bitcoin Treasuries.
The big news this week – its research team is projecting Strategy will pass BlackRock next week in total Bitcoin holdings. That means a new king on top of the publication’s famous leaderboard, but it also signals something deeper.
While ETFs are passively allocating, a new class of companies is adding to BTC demand with conviction. The haters say it’s a fad. This event shows the opportunity is real, and it proves treasury companies like Strategy can achieve BTC growth at a level that even the largest financial institutions can’t.
Every move in the corporate accumulation race is tracked in real-time on BitcoinTreasuries.net, the only destination built to cover exactly how fast institutional Bitcoin accumulation is moving.
→ Want to highlight your firm’s public markets plans? Reach out to [email protected].
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