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White House’s long-awaited digital assets report fails to boost bitcoin’s price

Six months after President Trump’s executive order established a working group to create a regulatory framework for crypto, the White House finally released its 166-page report on digital assets this afternoon. Despite its length, it gave very few details on the bitcoin strategic reserve, an issue most insiders are focused on.

The report also failed to boost bitcoin’s price or the overall crypto space. All assets were largely down following its release. 

The report did clarify that there will be two entities: a bitcoin reserve and a  “digital assets” stockpile, but fell short of mentioning which assets would be included in the latter.  The US government holds 198,000 bitcoin, according to Arkham Intel.

The report did answer some questions, such as which entity would take custody of the assets:

“The Reserve and the Stockpile will be administered by Treasury, which will establish an office to administer and maintain control of the associated custodial accounts.”

It explained that both entities will be funded by forfeited digital assets, yet also noted that these need to “satisfy statutory objectives,” which “will continue to be used for those objectives, including to compensate identifiable and verifiable victims of crimes, to support law enforcement operations, to be equitably shared with state and local law enforcement partners, and to fulfill other statutory forfeiture program requirements.”

Finally, the report says that bitcoin in the reserve “will generally not be sold” and that “Treasury and Commerce will develop strategies that could be used to acquire additional bitcoin,” but did not explain which “budget-neutral” tactics this would entail.

Alexander Blume, CEO of Two Prime, told Sherwood News that today’s report largely reiterated existing initiatives, adding that some seem disappointed about a lack of information about a bitcoin strategic reserve.

“I think the report reaffirms the administration’s prioritization of the industry and provides incremental clarity on how the branches of government can best proceed to constructive rulemaking,” he said. “This is not an earth-shattering report, but more of a standard, dull policy document. It’s the slow grind of government bureaucracy, not the bleeding edge of crypto tech.”

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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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