Bitcoin clawed back above $61,000 after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said inflation risks have eased, giving the market its first real bounce of a brutal selloff. June nonfarm payrolls came in soft at just 57,000 jobs, cooling talk of a summer rate hike. Google Cloud dropped two new Gemini models, including a video generator priced at 10 cents per second of output. Meituan open-sourced a 1.6 trillion parameter coding model trained entirely on Chinese chips. And Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury finally got its shareholder vote on the Cantor SPAC merger today, after multiple delays.
Bitcoin is up about 4% on the day, trading above $61,000, and it's the first time in over a week we've seen a real bid. The trigger was Kevin Warsh, the new Fed Chair, saying inflation risks have come down. Then the jobs report landed at 57,000, well below expectations, which pretty much kills the case for a July rate hike.
But let's be honest about where we are. Bitcoin is down roughly 33% year to date and more than 50% off the October high above $126,000. June was the worst month on record for US spot Bitcoin ETFs, with about $4.5 billion in outflows. JPMorgan put out a note today calling out Strategy's bitcoin sales policy as adding two-way risk, arguing Saylor should issue equity to build cash instead of ever touching the stack.
Here's where it gets interesting. Glassnode data shows long-term holders have flipped back to net accumulation. More than 54% of Bitcoin supply is now held at a loss, which historically marks the transfer from weak hands to strong ones. Coinbase orderbooks are bid-heavy. Cantor Fitzgerald put out a note yesterday saying the bear market may be entering its final stretch.
The split is stark. Wall Street is selling through the ETFs. Old holders are quietly buying it back. A TD9 reversal signal just fired for the first time since July 2022, which was, of course, the last cycle bottom. That doesn't mean we won't see one more capitulation candle, and some analysts are still pointing at $52,000 as a possible target. But the setup is starting to look a lot more like accumulation than distribution.
The digital asset treasury company era is going through its first real stress test, and the results are ugly for the copycats.
Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury, or BSTR, had its shareholder vote today on merging with Cantor Equity Partners I. This is the deal that would put 30,021 BTC on the Nasdaq under a Bitcoin-only conservative yield strategy, basically Berkshire Hathaway for Bitcoin using covered calls and market making rather than DeFi degen plays. But the vote has been delayed twice already, most recently pushed from June 26 to July 2, and there's talk it may slip again to July 10 as they try to lock in up to $1.5 billion in PIPE financing.
Meanwhile in the UK, Satsuma Technology just had its shares suspended by the FCA because it couldn't publish annual accounts on time. Shareholders holding more than 20% want to force a return of capital, sell the Bitcoin, pay out cash, and delist. That vote is July 20.
And then there's the cautionary tale. A struggling Korean media company listed on Nasdaq had lined up $1 billion in financing to buy 10,000 Bitcoin. A recent filing confirms their BTC balance is now zero. They dumped everything, are pivoting to AI infrastructure, and are fighting to stay listed. The Trump family's American Bitcoin also sank 8.4% ahead of a reverse stock split just to keep its Nasdaq listing.
Contrast that with Metaplanet. The Japanese firm bought another 2,823 BTC in Q2, spending about $170 million, now holding 43,000 BTC and ranking as the third largest publicly traded holder. Their average cost is $106,500, so yes, they're underwater on recent buys. But they reported $10.9 million in revenue from their income generation strategy. That's the difference between an actual operating Bitcoin business and a leveraged bet dressed up as a treasury strategy.
The playbook only works if you can survive drawdowns. Everyone learned that this quarter.
Google Cloud pushed two new Gemini models today. Nano Banana 2 Lite is the fast, cheap image generation model, spitting out images in as little as 4 seconds with C2PA content credentials and SynthID watermarks baked in. The more interesting one is Gemini Omni Flash, now in public preview, priced at 10 cents per second of video output. It does conversational video editing, character and product swaps, style transfers, relighting scenes, and kinetic typography synced into the video, all driven by natural language. At 10 cents a second, that's $6 a minute for high-quality generated video that you can iteratively edit by just talking to it. The economics of video production are getting rewritten in real time.
On the coding side, Meituan open-sourced LongCat 2.0. This is a 1.6 trillion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1 million token context window, MIT licensed, trained entirely on more than 50,000 domestic Chinese ASICs. No Nvidia. It's scoring 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro, edging out GPT-5.5 at 58.6. It's been running stealth as Owl Alpha and topping the OpenRouter charts. API pricing is 75 cents per million tokens. That is aggressive.
Z.ai launched ZCode, a free agentic coding IDE built around GLM-5.2, with subscriptions starting at $16 a month, undercutting Cursor and Claude Code. And Google quietly shipped agents-cli, a lifecycle wrapper that gives Claude Code, Codex, and other assistants one-command access to Google's full agent development stack.
The pattern is clear. Coding agents are commoditizing fast. Chinese labs are shipping frontier-competitive open weights. And the Western moat is thinner than the valuations suggest. On top of that, OpenAI is reportedly in talks to give the US government a 5% equity stake, which is a fascinating way to trade regulatory scrutiny for permanent alignment with Washington.
The stablecoin fight just got a lot more interesting, and it's exposing some real fractures in the industry.
Jefferies put out a note today warning against buying the dip in Circle. The reason is Open USD, or OUSD, the new stablecoin backed by a consortium that includes Stripe and, oddly enough, Coinbase. Yes, the same Coinbase that helped build USDC and earns a huge chunk of the reserve yield through its Circle revenue-sharing deal. Coinbase is now backing the stablecoin trying to replace USDC.
Why? Because distribution wants more of the economics. Right now the issuer captures most of the yield on the underlying Treasuries. The 140 partners behind Open USD want a cut. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire's response was basically, good luck breaking USDC's network effect. That's probably right in the short term, but the pressure is real, especially with US regulation forcing stablecoin issuers to give up interest payments to holders.
At the same time, Standard Chartered and Circle just launched bank-led USDC minting and redemption for institutions, starting in DIFC Dubai. That's a big deal. It brings stablecoins directly onto traditional banking rails instead of routing through crypto-native exchanges. And Tradeweb settled its first real-time tokenized US Treasury transaction on the Canton Network, with Franklin Templeton on one side and Virtu Financial on the other, settled against a tokenized dollar.
On the regulatory side, MiCA is now up for review three years after becoming law in Europe, so-called MiCA 2.0. The UK published a payments blueprint calling for tokenization infrastructure. And Ondo Finance rolled out an SEC-aligned tokenized stock structure using Broadridge and Oasis Pro to keep tokenized securities inside existing US market rules.
The tokenization of traditional finance is happening, but the winners of the stablecoin layer underneath it are very much still to be decided.
One number to remember from today: 54%. That's the share of Bitcoin supply currently held at a loss. Every prior cycle, that ratio flipped from distribution to accumulation somewhere near the bottom. The ETF flows say one thing. The onchain data says another. Pick which signal you trust.