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 week: ⚡ Why Strategy can't be forced to sell Bitcoin ⚡ Senate negotiators are racing to finalize the Clarity ⚡ Plus, inside the Saylor vs. Mallers “fight,” and what it's really about
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🎙 FEATURE INTERVIEW
🚨 Kraken's Chief Economist Debunks the Strategy-Forced-Seller Theory
Tomas Perfumo, chief economist at Kraken, tells Rizzo that everyone panicking over Strategy getting forced to sell Bitcoin missed the actual math. None of Strategy's debt is secured against Bitcoin, so there's no price level that triggers a liquidation, and the company has still bought over $13 billion in Bitcoin this year.
In the full conversation, Perfumo breaks down why Strategy's capital stack makes a forced sale mathematically impossible, why he's now calling for rate hikes instead of cuts by year's end, and lays out why BitMine's staking yield protects it from forced selling in a way Strategy's competitors aren't.
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⚡ THE SIGNAL
SENATE NEGOTIATORS ARE RACING TO FINALIZE THE CLARITY ACT THIS WEEK
The Clarity Act cleared its Senate Banking Committee markup last month on a bipartisan 15-9 vote, with two Democrats crossing the aisle to join all 13 Republicans.
Now, Senate Democrats want conflict-of-interest language restricting senior officials, namely President Trump and his family, from profiting off crypto business. Punchbowl reports that an emergency meeting this week is promising an end to that negotiation.
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SENATE BANKING CHAIR CONFIRMS CBDC BAN IS HAPPENING
House and Senate negotiators reached a bipartisan deal this week to fold a Federal Reserve CBDC ban into the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, with Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren leading the talks. The provision blocks the Fed from issuing a central bank digital currency through the end of 2030, and Scott told CNBC's Squawk Box this week that it will be law within weeks.
Senate procedural votes start now, with a House floor vote expected after June 23.
LIGHTSPARK LAUNCHED BITCOIN-POWERED PAYMENTS TO CHINA
Lightspark announced this week that customers on its existing Grid integration can now send payments directly to China, without a new partner or extra build required. As with the rest of Lightspark's network, the Bitcoin and Lightning settlement happens invisibly underneath, while senders and recipients just see dollars and yuan move.
Bitcoin just became the invisible rail connecting two of the world's largest trade economies. Probably nothing.
🔥 RIZZO’S WEEKLY TAKE:
I just watched Bitcoin Twitter spend a full week eating one of its own for asking a question, and I don't think most people even noticed what they were actually fighting about.
At BTC Prague, Jack Mallers asked Michael Saylor a question while he was on stage, and what followed turned into the most talked-about feud the space has had in months. Mallers, who runs XXI Capital, pushed Saylor on how Strategy calculates mNAV and whether selling equity below NAV to fund dividend obligations on products like STRC really counts as non-dilutive.
In a follow-up interview, Mallers admitted he still doesn't fully understand how the mechanics tie together, and that's exactly why XXI hasn't bought preferred stock or convertible debt. His company seeks to fund Bitcoin purchases from business profits, Strike's exchange revenue, and the mining operation, instead of issuing paper against future Bitcoin price appreciation.
One camp thinks Mallers was way over his skis for challenging Saylor. The other pointed out that Saylor invited the question himself.
To understand why this feels like a spiritual argument and not just a strategic one, you have to understand what Saylor is actually proposing. His vision now isn't simply that "companies should hold Bitcoin." It's arguably expanded, with the new idea that Bitcoin can be the reserve asset behind a new generation of dollar-like instruments, or what he is calling “digital money.”
Where Tether backs its stablecoin with T-bills, Saylor's architecture seeks to back “digital money” like APYX with MSTR equity and preferred instruments like STRC. The end user gets something that looks like a dollar. The backend is Bitcoin. The dollar, in this framing, never truly leaves the system — it just has a different engine.
To the Mallers camp, this is precisely the problem.
The Bitcoin OG critique isn't that Saylor is wrong about Bitcoin's value. It's that he's building a world where Bitcoin might win financially but lose culturally. In that world, the average person never holds a sat. They hold a wrapper. They interact with a product that happens to be backed by something that happens to be backed by Bitcoin.
The sovereignty, the self-custody, the peer-to-peer ethos — all of it gets abstracted away. You bought the milk. You never met the cow. For a Bitcoin culture obsessed with the idea society is collapsing from a lack of farm-to-table ethos, this matters.
And the fear runs deeper than aesthetics. If the dominant Bitcoin products of the next decade are institutional instruments — preferred equity, synthetic dollar wrappers, financialized treasury vehicles — then the people who actually accumulate Bitcoin are funds, corporations, and banks. Not individuals. The addressable market for self-custody wallets, Lightning payments, and peer-to-peer transactions shrinks. Bitcoin becomes the oil in the engine of a financial system that most people never see and never question. You got the benefits of oil without ever learning what a refinery does.
Some argue that's not the hyperbitcoinization they signed up for, but a hostile acquisition dressed up as adoption.
Saylor's counterargument, implicitly, is that this grief is naive. Technologies don't preserve their cultures at scale. The internet didn't. Radio didn't. Electricity didn't. The adoption of a technology by billions does not come with any ideology. If Bitcoin is going to compete against the dollar system — and Saylor clearly believes it will — then it needs instruments that can operate at the scale of the dollar system.
What makes this fight so combustible is that both sides want the same outcome — a world where Bitcoin defeats fiat. They just disagree on whether the revolution has to be felt to be real. The Mallers camp wants people to understand what they're holding. The Saylor camp doesn’t think they care, as long as Bitcoin is what's underneath.
Sure, a lot of this is also bear market theater. When the price is down, the community turns inward. Old grievances resurface. But strip away the noise and the argument is real, and it isn't going away.
The people who got into Bitcoin as peer-to-peer freedom money see that as giving away the thing they signed up for.
Both groups want Bitcoin to win. They just disagree on whether the people who end up with it need to know the core values. That’s an argument that’s unlikely to abate.
🔒 EVERY PART OF BITCOIN WAS DESIGNED ON PURPOSE. WAS YOUR STORAGE?
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🌎 Rizzo’s Upcoming Events
THE BITCOIN TREASURIES CONFERENCE | SEPTEMBER 2026
This conference is one you won’t want to miss. I’m working closely on assembling an epic lineup of the most impactful CEOs in the Bitcoin treasury movement (stay tuned for the formal announcement next week).
I’ve been saying it for months, the institutional arm of the Bitcoin movement is where all the action on mainstream adoption really is. This event will prove it. Get your tickets before prices increase.
🏦 First on Wall Street with Daily Dividends
Strive's SATA preferred stock has become the first listed security in US capital markets history to pay cash dividends every business day, starting June 16 at a 13% annualized rate, which works out to roughly a 13.88% effective yield with daily compounding.
Every move in the accumulation race is tracked in real time on BitcoinTreasuries.net — the only destination built to cover exactly how fast institutional adoption is moving.
→ Want to highlight your firm's public markets plans? Reach out to [email protected]
→ The BitcoinTreasuries.net Unconference returns to New York City this September. Full date announcement coming soon, reach out to [email protected] for early access.
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