Crypto
Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas
Orange inflatable dog at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference (Tayfun Coskun/Getty Images)

Bitcoin 2025 Conference: Bitcoin buys and other showy bitcoin announcements galore

“Orange is the new gold.”

The Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas wrapped up last night, with crypto bigwigs like Jack Mallers and Strategy cofounder Michael Saylor, as well as brothers from the Winklevii to the Trumps, taking the stage. Vice President JD Vance also made an appearance, as did recently pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of Silk Road, who received a standing ovation.  

“Orange is the new gold” was the slogan, and the color was everywhere as the wilder side of crypto conferences was back on display. The Gemini booth displayed orange Cybertrucks that can mine bitcoin, while conference sponsor Steak ’n Shake went with dancing cows. Steak ’n Shake COO Dan Edwards said at the conference that using bitcoin instead of credit cards saved the company 50% of its processing fees since all its US stores began accepting bitcoin as of May 16.

In terms of announcements, some of the major ones from companies included:

  •  GameStop announced its much-anticipated first bitcoin purchase of 4,710 bitcoin. (The stock has taken a hit since.)

  • Healthcare company KindlyMD, which announced a merger with bitcoin investment company Nakamoto Holdings, also acquired its first symbolic 21 bitcoin.

  • Cantor announced its bitcoin financing business had executed its first transactions with FalconX and Maple. The business “expects to make available up to $2 billion of financing in its initial phase,” the press release said.

  • In addition, Cantor Fitzgerald Asset Management announced it plans to launch the Cantor Fitzgerald Gold Protected Bitcoin Fund, which will “will combine direct Bitcoin exposure with downside protection based on the price of gold.”

  • Strive Asset Management, the company cofounded by Vivek Ramaswamy (which “isn’t a typical Bitcoin treasury company”), announced a $750 million PIPE deal signing. Proceeds are “expected to support the company’s first wave of Bitcoin acquisitions,” according to a press release.

  • Jack Dorsey’s Block announced the launch of bitcoin payments on Square. The new feature was available during the conference, and attendees were able to experience it “firsthand at the BTC Inc. merchandise store.” The feature will roll out “in the second half of 2025 and is expected to reach all eligible Square sellers in 2026.”

  • Soccer club Paris Saint-Germain, one of the largest in the world, announced it had established a bitcoin reserve. “We put bitcoin in our books. We took our fiat reserves and we actually allocated bitcoin; we still have it in our books. We’re the largest player in the sports ecosystem to kind of that,” club executive and PSG Labs head Pär Helgosson said.

At the national level, Bilal Bin Saqib, CEO of the government-backed advisory body Pakistan Crypto Council, announced that the country would establish a strategic bitcoin reserve.

Finally, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, slated for a “special announcement,” said the city will be the first one in the world to issue a bitcoin bond.

More Crypto

See all Crypto
crypto

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

crypto

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC and Chartr Limited produce fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and are fully owned subsidiaries of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, Robinhood Money, LLC, Robinhood U.K. Ltd, Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, Robinhood Gold, LLC, Robinhood Asset Management, LLC, Robinhood Credit, Inc., Robinhood Ventures DE, LLC and, where applicable, its managed investment vehicles.