Crypto
Bitcoin ice carving
Bitcoin ice carving (Kirsty O’Connor/Getty Images)

Nakamoto buys $679 million in bitcoin in its first purchase as a public company

Bitcoin’s price meanwhile seems frozen, but one solo miner is on fire.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Bitcoin is struggling to regain momentum, and has been stuck in the $114,500 to $116,500 range over the past 24 hours. Nonetheless, VanEck analysts said that despite this pullback, they are sticking with their $180,000 bitcoin price target by year-end.

That hasn’t slowed Nakamoto, fresh off the completion of its merger with Nakamoto last week, from making its first bitcoin purchase as a public company.

The bitcoin-native venture, helmed by Trump crypto adviser David Bailey, acquired 5,744 bitcoin at an average price of $118,204 per bitcoin for $679,000,000.

“The purchase was made using PIPE proceeds, reflecting the company’s commitment to executing a disciplined bitcoin treasury strategy and long-term mission to acquire one million bitcoin under the Nakamoto Bitcoin Treasury,” the company said this morning.

In other bitcoin news:

  • Bitdeer released its second-quarter earnings, reporting bitcoin mining revenue of $59.3 million, up from $41.6 million in Q2 2024, and the company’s bitcoin holdings jumped to 1,502. It also reported revenue of $155.6 million, up 56.8% year over year, but had higher operating costs and reported a net loss of $147.7 million, much higher than the $17.7 million a year prior. Benchmark analysts reiterated their “buy rating, but the stock is down more than 7% as of 11:00 a.m. ET.

  • A rare win came for a solo bitcoin miner who solved block 910,440, earning a reward of 3.137 bitcoin. “Mining difficulty is now near all-time highs at 129 trillion, making consistent solo wins even less likely,” according to Bitbo.

  • Japanese public company Lib Work announced it plans to buy $3.3 million worth of bitcoin.

  • A second coffee chain may be entering the bitcoin treasury game. Following Spanish coffee chain Vanadi Coffee, now California-based Reborn Coffee has announced it’s initiated a strategic review to assess the potential use of crypto, including bitcoin and ethereum, as part of its “treasury management framework.”

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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.

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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.

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