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: a Bitcoin OG who bought at $1 goes public with $750M, Satoshi's coins become a political flashpoint, and the corporate accumulation race closes Q1 with two moves worth remembering. Everything below is what you need to know — and what most people missed.

Insider Reveals Corporations Are Secretly Buying Bitcoin

Bill Barhydt has been in this longer than most. He worked on SSL deployment at Netscape in the nineties, helped build the first credit card payment gateways, and found Bitcoin when it was still measured in fractions of a dollar.

Abra, the company he's been building since 2014, has held Bitcoin on its balance sheet almost from the start.

This week, Barrett joined Rizzo to talk through Abra's $750 million go-public announcement via New York Providence Acquisition Corp., why private companies are holding Bitcoin by the thousands, and his macro thesis — fourth turning, late-stage debt cycle, and why scarce assets will soon have their moment.

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JACK DORSEY JUST TURNED ON BITCOIN FOR 4 MILLION BUSINESSES

Read the Hard News. Share the Hype.

Jack Dorsey's payments company went deep into Bitcoin lore this week – reviving Gavin Andresen’s famous Bitcoin faucet from 2010. This time around, the public payments giant is giving away $1 million in free BTC to customers who complete bounties.

The nostalgic push was part of a broader campaign by the company to boost merchant acceptance of BTC, following lightning payments going live overnight at 4 million merchants last week.

$10 TRILLION MORGAN STANLEY IS BUILDING ITS OWN BITCOIN ETF

Read the Hard News. Share the Hype.

Every spot Bitcoin ETF trading in America today was built by an asset manager. BlackRock, Fidelity, Invesco, VanEck. Morgan Stanley is doing something none of them did — issuing one directly under the bank's own name.

NYSE approved the listing this week. The ticker is MSBT. The fee is 14 basis points, lowest in the market. And Morgan Stanley has 16,000 financial advisors who can put it in front of clients the moment it launches — clients who've been waiting for Bitcoin exposure from a name they already have a relationship with.

A quick word from our sponsor Trezor. You don’t have to hold your BTC with Wall Street. I've been in the room for most every major moment in Bitcoin history. The lesson I keep seeing repeated: self-custody isn't optional, it's survival.

Trezor makes it simple, secure, and Bitcoin-only. If you haven't moved your Bitcoin off an exchange yet, this is your reminder. bit.ly/rizzo-trezor

I came away from that conversation more unsettled than I expected, and it wasn't because of quantum computing.

Three factions have formed around this debate. Traders who've convinced themselves that Satoshi's coins staying put is part of their investment thesis. L2 builders waiting for permission or a paycheck before engaging seriously. And the core developers actually doing the work, inside the slow, deliberately frustrating governance process that has kept Bitcoin from becoming every other cryptocurrency.

The first group is the one that’s most worthy of skepticism. Strip away the technical framing, and the argument is downright sinister: they want social consensus to override the property rights of other users because it suits their valuation model. Your default assumption about Bitcoin should be that all 21 million coins are spendable. The moment that changes, the moment a majority can decide which coins are safe and which need to be quarantined, you don't have harder money. You have the current monetary system with a different group of people making the calls.

Every freeze proposal runs into the same wall. To protect coins, you have to prove who owns them. To prove ownership, you have to trust whatever process adjudicates that. That answer is always politics, and politics in Bitcoin has a bad track record.

The block size wars are the cautionary tale. Both sides were urgent, both were certain, and nine years later, both camps appear even more wrong about the timeline they were fighting over (and the solutions they wanted to see enacted).

The worst outcome here isn't quantum, it's an emergency response rushed through governance that solves the technical problem while breaking the foundation of the very thing it was supposed to protect.

Rizzo's perspective on the quantum debate landed in Fortune this week. The piece, by Finance and Crypto Editor Jeff John Roberts, covers the calls to freeze Satoshi's wallets ahead of a potential quantum threat — and quotes Rizzo directly on why a compulsory upgrade would be anathema to Bitcoin's core values.

The global race among corporations inspired by Michael Saylor is getting interesting, and no one is covering it better than Bitcoin Treasuries.

The corporate Bitcoin race ended Q1 with two moves worth remembering.

Strategy closed the quarter having bought 88,000 Bitcoin in 90 days — putting Michael Saylor on pace to hold 1,000,000 BTC by December. The war chest to keep buying: $42 billion raised.

MetaPlanet, meanwhile, dropped $338 million on 5,075 Bitcoin on April 2nd, vaulting the Japanese firm into the 3rd largest Bitcoin treasury company in the world.

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.

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