Good morning. Here's what's moving. The SEC and CFTC just signed an agreement to end duplicative enforcement actions against crypto companies, a genuinely meaningful shift in how Washington regulates digital assets. Bitcoin ETFs pulled in another two hundred fifty-one million dollars yesterday, extending March inflows past one and a half billion. Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, now holds over seven hundred thirty-eight thousand Bitcoin after adding more than sixty-six thousand coins this year alone. Blockstream deployed the first post-quantum signature transactions live on the Liquid sidechain. And Cerebras, the AI chipmaker most people still haven't heard of, just got namedropped by Oracle alongside Nvidia and AMD. Let's get into it.
The AI chip landscape is shifting fast, and this week gave us several signals worth paying attention to. First, Oracle's earnings call. CEO Larry Ellison mentioned Cerebras alongside Nvidia and AMD as a key provider of AI hardware in Oracle's infrastructure. That's a big deal for a company that until recently got eighty-seven percent of its revenue from a single Middle Eastern client. Cerebras has now secured a one-point-one billion dollar funding round at an eight-point-one billion valuation, plus a ten billion dollar commitment from OpenAI. Landing Oracle diversifies their customer base significantly and positions them as a credible third option in the GPU wars.
Meanwhile, Meta is going full speed on custom silicon. They're planning to ship four new generations of their MTIA inference chips in just two years, cutting the typical development cycle from eighteen months down to six. Their strategy is inference-first, meaning they're optimizing for the workloads that actually cost the most at scale: running models in production, not training them. This is Meta essentially saying they don't want to be dependent on Nvidia for their core AI infrastructure.
And Nvidia itself isn't sitting still. They announced a partnership with Thinking Machines Lab to deploy at least one gigawatt of next-generation Vera Rubin AI systems, with a focus on India as an AI research hub. Nvidia also invested directly in the company. But here's the tension: despite record quarterly sales of sixty-eight billion dollars and a two hundred fifty billion annual run rate, Nvidia's stock has been punished. Investors seem to be pricing in the possibility that the AI hardware boom might be peaking, or at least that Nvidia's dominance won't be quite as unchallenged going forward.
The broader picture is clear. The AI compute market is fragmenting. Nvidia still leads, but Cerebras, Meta's custom chips, and AMD are all carving out real positions. For anyone tracking where the trillions in AI infrastructure spending actually land, this diversification matters.
Let's talk about some genuinely important Bitcoin infrastructure developments that don't get enough attention.
Blockstream just deployed the first live post-quantum signature transactions on the Liquid sidechain. Using their smart contract language Simplicity, they implemented a verifier based on the SHRINCS scheme, which lets Liquid users opt in to quantum-resistant transaction protection without changing the network's consensus rules. Now, to be clear, this isn't full quantum resistance. The blocksigning mechanism and the Bitcoin peg still use classical cryptography. But it's a real, functioning proof of concept running on a live network. That matters. Most post-quantum crypto talk is theoretical. This is actual code processing actual transactions.
Then there's Utexo, which raised seven and a half million dollars in a seed round led by Tether, with Franklin Templeton and Maven11 also participating. Utexo's goal is to enable native USDT settlements directly on Bitcoin using Lightning and RGB protocols. They're building a unified API that abstracts away the complexity of these underlying technologies so payment operators and wallets can facilitate instant, private USDT transfers on Bitcoin's network. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has been vocal about Bitcoin being the ultimate global settlement layer, and this investment backs that vision with real capital. If Utexo delivers, it meaningfully strengthens Bitcoin's position as infrastructure for dollar-denominated payments, not just a store of value.
The Bitcoin Optech newsletter also highlighted V-PACK, a new standard for stateless verification of virtual transaction outputs across different Ark implementations. This enables independent auditing, which is particularly useful for hardware wallets interacting with Ark. There's also a draft BIP to expand the nonce space in block headers from sixteen to twenty-four bits, which would improve mining efficiency and simplify ASIC design.
All of these developments share a common thread. The Bitcoin ecosystem is quietly building serious infrastructure: quantum resistance, stablecoin settlement, second-layer scaling. None of it is flashy. All of it is consequential.
Now to regulatory news that could reshape how crypto companies operate in the United States.
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and the CFTC announced a new memorandum of understanding to end duplicative enforcement actions. This means the two agencies will hold joint meetings on product applications, coordinate rule interpretations, share enforcement decisions, and even conduct combined examinations of regulated firms. For years, the crypto industry has been whipsawed between the SEC claiming tokens are securities and the CFTC treating them as commodities, sometimes with both agencies going after the same company for the same activity. That era appears to be ending.
This is not just symbolic. Joint product application reviews mean that when a company wants to launch a new crypto product, they won't get contradictory guidance from two different regulators. Combined enforcement decisions mean we shouldn't see the SEC and CFTC filing parallel cases against the same entity. For founders and compliance teams, this is a real reduction in regulatory risk.
Meanwhile, the Tornado Cash saga continues. Federal prosecutors are pushing to retry developer Roman Storm on money laundering and sanctions violation charges after the first trial ended with a deadlocked jury. This comes in the same week that the Treasury Department told Congress that lawful users of digital assets may legitimately use mixers to protect personal wealth and business payments. The contradiction is stark. Washington is simultaneously acknowledging that privacy tools have legitimate uses while trying to imprison someone for building one.
On the Binance front, the DOJ is reportedly probing whether the exchange facilitated sanctions evasion for Iranian networks, even after Binance's four-point-three billion dollar settlement in 2023. Binance has responded by suing the Wall Street Journal over its reporting. And Binance.US separately appointed a compliance veteran as its new CEO, signaling it's preparing for a more heavily regulated environment.
One more notable development: Wells Fargo filed a trademark for WFUSD, covering crypto trading, payments, staking software, and blockchain-based financial services. This follows JPMorgan's similar trademark filing that preceded its tokenized deposits on Base. The big banks are clearly positioning for a tokenized future, even if they're doing it quietly.
Bitcoin is hovering just under seventy thousand dollars, and the market is in what analysts are calling its most psychologically challenging phase.
The price has been repeatedly rejected at seventy-two thousand. Only fifty-seven percent of Bitcoin supply is currently in profit, a level historically associated with the early stages of bear markets. The Fear and Greed Index is in extreme fear territory. And yet, institutional money keeps flowing in.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs have now recorded one and a half billion dollars in net inflows for March alone, completely reversing a five-week outflow streak. BlackRock's IBIT fund is doing the heavy lifting, accounting for roughly half of the weekly inflows. On March tenth alone, ETFs saw two hundred fifty-seven million in net inflows, bouncing back from a brief withdrawal the day before. This pattern of consistent institutional buying despite weak on-chain metrics and bearish sentiment is creating an interesting divergence.
Strategy continues to be the most aggressive corporate buyer. They've added over sixty-six thousand Bitcoin in sixty-eight days this year, bringing their total to seven hundred thirty-eight thousand coins. Their STRC preferred stock is now generating enough daily volume to imply buying power of about nineteen hundred Bitcoin per day, more than four times the daily mining output. Strive, another Bitcoin treasury company, just allocated fifty million from its own treasury into Strategy's STRC, creating this recursive loop of Bitcoin-linked corporate investment.
The macro backdrop is mixed. February CPI came in exactly at forecasts, which markets took as neutral. Bitcoin bounced above seventy thousand as oil prices dropped on cooling Iran tensions and a reported four hundred million barrel strategic release. But next week brings rate decisions from seven major central banks, and with war-driven oil spikes still a risk, inflation expectations remain elevated. No one is pricing in rate cuts for March or April.
Bitwise's CIO Matt Hougan made an interesting argument this week. He said Bitcoin doesn't need to capture fifty percent of gold's market to reach a million dollars per coin. It just needs about seventeen percent of the total store of value market over the next decade. Whether you find that plausible depends on your timeframe and your conviction. But the institutional plumbing to get there is being built right now, one ETF inflow at a time.
Here's the thing to sit with. The two biggest stories right now, the AI chip race and Bitcoin institutional adoption, share something in common. In both cases, the infrastructure is being built faster than the market is pricing it in. Meta is shipping custom chips every six months. Blockstream is testing post-quantum signatures on a live network. BlackRock is pulling in hundreds of millions a day through Bitcoin ETFs. The headlines focus on price and volatility. The signal is in the plumbing. Pay attention to what's being built, not just what's being traded.