ChainFeeds on Aug. 1 published a new research briefing that pulled together market analysis, project history, company reviews, and product commentary across the crypto sector.
Glassnode says Bitcoin has entered a “waiting mode”
One of the featured pieces in the briefing was a Glassnode weekly report that described the market as being in a Risk Off phase.
According to the report, Bitcoin outperformed stock indexes last week. Oil price pressure left equities largely flat, yet Bitcoin still rose and finished ahead of both U.S. and European stocks. That relative strength has faded this week. Glassnode said Bitcoin kept falling while U.S. and European equities stayed broadly stable, with the turning point arriving on Monday. From then on, Bitcoin did not re-align with stock market performance. Oil gave back last week’s gains and became the weakest performer among the four asset groups tracked in the report.
Glassnode said one week of relative weakness does not by itself confirm a broader trend change. Still, it weakens one of the few positive signals seen during the June recovery phase, when Bitcoin had continued to attract buying interest even without a rise in equities.
From an on-chain cost basis perspective, Bitcoin is now trading in the densest region of the full cost basis distribution, around $62,000 to $68,000. That band marks the price range where a large amount of Bitcoin last changed hands. Glassnode said the holder mix there is roughly balanced: about half belongs to short-term holders who bought during this year’s decline, and about half belongs to long-term holders who have sat through a longer holding period.
Long-term holders are usually more patient and often form the base of market support. Short-term holders are more sensitive, and many are now underwater, which means they are more likely to become a source of supply into any rebound. The report identified $69,000, the short-term holder cost basis, as the key level overhead and an important trigger for whether the next leg higher can begin.
Glassnode also said two bear-market indicators point to the same conclusion: the current Bitcoin bear market remains relatively shallow. Measured against the 200-day moving average, no prior bear market kept price this close to trend for so long. Even the mildest bear phases in earlier cycles saw deeper deviations below the 200-day average than the current one. The same pattern appears in drawdown terms. Previous bear markets generally fell further from the cycle high, while this cycle has held at a comparatively elevated level.
Time matters as well. Glassnode said the period in which Bitcoin has traded below its 200-day moving average is only about three-quarters of the duration seen in a typical historical bear market, while most earlier bear phases lasted longer.
Eleven years after Ethereum genesis, the eight co-founders have gone in very different directions
ChainFeeds also highlighted a Protos article that revisited the Ethereum founding group. The piece noted that Ethereum’s genesis block was mined on July 30, 2015. Eleven years later, Ethereum has become one of the most important blockchains in crypto. Citing CoinGecko data, the article said its market capitalization is above $230 billion.
Among the eight official co-founders, Vitalik Buterin remains the figure most closely associated with Ethereum. He is still deeply involved in the network’s development and has long remained tied to work around the Ethereum Foundation. That visibility has also left him at the center of market criticism. The article said some traders believe the Ethereum Foundation has not done enough to push ecosystem growth or improve ETH price performance.
Joseph Lubin has continued building in crypto through ConsenSys, one of the ecosystem’s major infrastructure companies. Its products include the MetaMask wallet and Infura. The article added that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission previously sued ConsenSys over MetaMask-related business, but that case was later dropped during the second Trump administration.
Charles Hoskinson, after taking part in Ethereum’s early development, came to believe that a different blockchain was needed to address the problems he saw and went on to found Cardano. The article said his time in Ethereum was marked by conflict and ended with his departure. Citing Laura Shin’s The Cryptopians, it described serious internal disagreements. In market terms, the article said Cardano has lagged Ethereum so far. This year, Ethereum is down about 36%, while Cardano is down about 55%.
Gavin Wood had worked on Bitcoin development before joining Ethereum. He later founded Parity Technologies and launched the Polkadot network, which aims to connect different blockchains through the parachain model.
Anthony Di Iorio became one of the few co-founders who openly tried to step away from the crypto industry. The article said that in a 2021 interview with Bloomberg, he said he did not necessarily feel safe in crypto and viewed cryptocurrencies as only a small part of what the world needs. He later launched the Andiami project, which he described as “building tools to support a decentralized future.”
Mihai Alisie had founded Bitcoin Magazine, where Vitalik Buterin also once worked. Alisie later created AKASHA Project to explore decentralized social networking, though the foundation behind it shut down a few months ago.
Amir Chetrit had founded Colored Coins before joining Ethereum. The article said his period at Ethereum was also controversial, and he ultimately left with Hoskinson. Laura Shin referred to that episode as an early Ethereum “day of power struggles.” Since then, the article said, Chetrit has continued working in crypto while keeping a low public profile.
Jeffrey Wilcke, one of Ethereum’s early core developers, helped build the Geth client, or Go Ethereum. He later co-founded Grid Games with his brother, though public information on that project is limited.
The broader takeaway in the Protos piece was simple: the people who once shared the “World Computer” vision have split across very different paths. Some kept building inside Ethereum, some launched new chains, and some moved toward other technical fields.
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI infrastructure trade ran into a sharp reversal
Another article in the briefing, from TechFlow, traced the rise and strain of Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI infrastructure investment thesis.
The piece said Aschenbrenner was born in Germany to two physician parents, graduated from Columbia University at 19 with degrees in economics and mathematical statistics, and served as class valedictorian. After graduation, he joined OpenAI’s Superalignment Team, working with Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever on ways to make sure future superintelligent AI would not threaten humanity.
He later came to believe OpenAI had serious security issues and submitted a memo to the board warning about possible information security gaps, especially the risk of foreign industrial espionage. He was then fired by OpenAI, which said the reason was linked to information disclosure. Aschenbrenner denied that account.
After leaving the company, he published Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, a 165-page essay that had a wide impact across the AI industry. The paper argued that AGI could arrive around 2027 and might move toward superintelligence through recursive self-improvement between 2028 and 2030. It also said the main bottleneck for AI development would not be algorithms but real-world infrastructure: power, transformers, transmission lines, cooling systems, and data center space.
That view became the core of his investment framework. The article said he focused on companies with access to power, land, and data center capacity. Stripe founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross were among the investors who backed the idea, putting in about $225 million to help launch Situational Awareness LP. The article said Aschenbrenner also committed a large amount of his own capital.
From late 2025 through the first half of 2026, the fund expanded quickly. The article said it grew from about $225 million at launch to roughly $45 billion in assets under management at its peak in early July 2026, or about 200 times larger. The thesis was that AI’s next bottleneck would be infrastructure, so companies controlling power, land, and computing capacity would be re-rated by the market.
That logic led him to an area many traditional AI investors had overlooked: Bitcoin miners. After the 2024 Bitcoin halving, mining economics weakened, and a large number of mining firms began converting power resources, data centers, and land previously used for mining into hosting platforms for AI and high-performance computing. In Aschenbrenner’s view, those companies owned scarce assets needed in the AI era, but the market was still valuing them as conventional miners.
Then conditions changed sharply in July. The article said the fund came under pressure from both sides. On the long side, AI infrastructure names such as SK Hynix, Micron, and CoreWeave dropped hard from their highs. On the short side, software companies rebounded as expectations for AI applications improved. With losses mounting across both books and leverage in the structure, the drawdown accelerated.
Prime brokers then stepped in to help the fund meet margin requirements, but the expanding losses eventually forced the sale of its public equity portfolio. The article said the fund tried to ease liquidity pressure through additional capital and partial asset sales, but those efforts did not work. Millennium and Jane Street assessed the portfolio, and Citadel ultimately took on most of the public stock assets. The article added that the market generally views this kind of forced sale as unlikely to achieve ideal pricing.
Strategy’s first earnings report after the STRC dislocation put the focus on restoring par
An Odaily piece in the ChainFeeds roundup looked at Strategy’s financial results for the second quarter of 2026, released after the U.S. market close on July 31 Beijing time. The report was closely watched because it came after STRC, the company’s key financing instrument, fell well away from its $100 target par value.
Strategy posted $122 million in total revenue for the quarter, up 6.9% year over year. It also reported a net loss of $8.22 billion, driven by Bitcoin price volatility, including $8.32 billion in unrealized losses from changes in the fair value of digital assets. Judged only by conventional earnings metrics, the article said, the report looked poor. But for Strategy, the market is more focused on whether its Bitcoin treasury model can remain durable under stress.
At the end of the second quarter, Strategy held 843,775 BTC, up about 11% from the previous quarter. The article put the value of those reserves at about $55 billion, with an average carrying cost of roughly $75,000 per BTC. Despite the large paper loss caused by BTC price swings, the company has continued to treat Bitcoin as its core reserve asset.
Since May, STRC had gradually moved away from its $100 target par value and at one point fell as low as $74.57. After the earnings release, STRC was quoted at $89.5, still below the target range. Management said on the investor call that bringing STRC back toward par is now the company’s central task.
Founder Michael Saylor said the company will not issue new STRC at a discount before the instrument returns to its target price zone, in order to avoid harming existing investors. Addressing market speculation that a higher payout might attract fresh demand, Strategy CEO Phong Le said raising the STRC rate is not an effective way to restore the price to par and that the company plans to keep the annualized payout rate at 12%.
Rather than raise yield, Strategy wants to rebuild confidence through a larger cash position. As of July 26, the article said, the company’s U.S. dollar reserves had risen to $3.75 billion, enough to cover more than 2.1 years of preferred dividends and debt interest payments.
At the same time, Strategy has already activated a BTC monetization plan inside its digital credit capital framework. As of July 26, it had sold about $218.4 million worth of BTC under that program. The article treated that as a sign that Bitcoin is shifting inside Strategy’s balance sheet from a passive long-term reserve into an actively managed asset.
Where the old capital flywheel could be summarized as issuing equity or debt, buying Bitcoin, increasing assets, then raising more capital to buy more Bitcoin, the latest quarter suggests a move toward what the article called “two-way active capital management.”
On the investor call, Phong Le said Strategy is no longer only a Bitcoin buyer. Instead, it is managing four balance sheet elements together: BTC, U.S. dollar cash reserves, MSTR stock, and digital credit instruments including preferred shares such as STRC and convertible bonds. Bitcoin is no longer treated only as a long-duration holding. When needed, it can be monetized to replenish cash reserves, pay preferred dividends, and even support securities buybacks.
The company also plans to use repurchases to manage market dislocations. If STRC or MSTR trades at a discount, Strategy can use buybacks to increase per-share BTC exposure. If those securities trade at a premium, it can continue funding expansion through fresh issuance.
The article added that in the second quarter Strategy repurchased $1.5 billion of convertible debt at an 8% discount during a market pullback, cutting long-term debt from $8.2 billion to $6.7 billion. Net debt fell by about 18%.
The forward-looking pressure points in the article were twofold. In the short term, the question is whether STRC can return to its par-value trading zone, because that will shape confidence in the company’s digital credit structure. Over the longer term, the path of Bitcoin itself remains the key factor in whether Strategy’s capital model can expand again. The article said a renewed BTC upcycle would give that framework stronger support.
Four Pillars argues the endpoint for wallets is Open Money
The last featured item was a long English thread from Four Pillars that framed Open Money as a system that moves the center of money away from institutional accounts and into user wallets.
In that model, users connect to networks through wallets. The article stressed that a wallet is not only an app. It includes an on-chain account, a login method, signing authority, and the keys that move assets. If a banking app is a window into a bank ledger, then a wallet is closer to direct control over asset movement. Assets are not actually stored inside the wallet itself. They live at blockchain addresses, while the wallet manages the private keys and signing permissions that can move them. In the article’s phrasing, a wallet is not a box that stores money but a key that can move it.
Holding that key is self-custody. The piece said self-custody is not merely the act of “keeping assets yourself.” It means users stop placing funds into someone else’s institutional account and instead control assets directly through keys they hold. That shift in control is the core of Open Money.
Blockchains fit this structure because they turn money into a state on a public network instead of a record inside one company’s database. Anyone can interact through the same rules, the same address system, and the same protocols. Assets can move around the clock, smart contracts can add conditions and logic, and separate financial services can connect without permission. That is what makes money programmable and composable.
The article presented MetaMask as a clear example of how wallets have evolved from basic storage tools into Open Money platforms. At the beginning, MetaMask was a simple wallet. Before it arrived, users who wanted to interact with Ethereum had to run nodes from the command line, connect to RPC endpoints, manage private keys, and sign each transaction manually. For ordinary users, that was a high barrier. MetaMask lowered it with a browser extension that turned creating an Ethereum account, connecting to decentralized applications, and signing transactions into a set of click-based actions.
Over time, the role of the wallet expanded. It began as a place to hold tokens, then became the login layer for dApps, then added swaps, cross-chain functions, and multi-chain connectivity. Now stablecoins, payment cards, yield products, and derivatives are also entering the wallet environment. The article said the common thread is that financial functions are steadily moving into wallets on top of self-custody.
It contrasted that path with traditional fintech super apps. Those apps also provide transfers, investing, payments, loyalty points, and loans, but most still rely on platform accounts and partner financial institution ledgers. Users get convenience, yet funds remain in closed systems. MetaMask follows a different route: it makes the wallet the center of financial activity. Whether users are swapping assets, holding stablecoins, moving value across chains, or using payment services, the starting point is the user’s own wallet, not a platform account.
If Open Money is going to spread beyond crypto-native users, the article argued, it eventually has to work in real-world payments. A person may manage on-chain assets well, but if those assets cannot buy a cup of coffee nearby, the experience is still incomplete for a mass-market user. In practice, people care most about whether money can actually be used.
That is where MetaMask Card comes in. The article described it as a bridge between on-chain assets and real-world payments. Many existing crypto cards require users to deposit assets into an exchange or card provider account first. That may be convenient, but it returns the user to a custodial model. MetaMask Card is meant to keep assets in the user’s wallet until the moment payment happens. Users can link assets in their wallet to the existing card payment network, turning on-chain balances from numbers in an investment app into something that can be spent in day-to-day life.
That, the article said, is the most direct expression of Open Money: funds remain in the user’s wallet and are only used for a real-world transaction when needed. Storage, control, and spending converge in the same wallet.
The article also acknowledged current limits, including regional support, issuer arrangements, payment networks, regulation, and merchant acceptance. User experience is not uniform across markets. Even so, the direction it describes is clear. Wallets are moving beyond crypto asset storage and becoming a financial entry point that links on-chain assets with real-world payments.
