Apple Is About to Kill Sparrow Wallet on macOS

Craig Raw, the developer behind Sparrow Wallet, announced that Apple flagged his developer account for termination. Deadline: June 30. If they don't reverse it, every new Sparrow install on macOS fails and macOS development ends.

The backstory makes this worse. Since 2023, more than a dozen fake "Sparrow" apps have appeared on the App Store. Users have contacted Craig after losing their savings, in some cases their life savings, to these impersonators. Craig holds the registered US trademarks for the Sparrow name and logo. He has been publicly warning Apple about the scam apps since early 2024. They keep appearing.

Craig created a placeholder app, never published, to warn users that Sparrow is desktop-only and the App Store copycats aren't his. Apple called this "dishonest activity" and scheduled his account for termination. Read that again. The guy fighting scammers gets flagged. The scammers who stole life savings kept operating on Apple's platform.

This is a textbook example of why platform gatekeeping is a systemic risk for freedom tech.

I've used Sparrow for years. It is the best Bitcoin wallet available for desktop, full stop. Multisig, coin control, hardware wallet integration, Tor, UTXO management that most wallets don't even attempt. Free. Open source. And one automated decision by Apple could end it on macOS. This is why we build on open platforms. This is why self-custody matters. If your tools need a gatekeeper's blessing to exist, they aren't freedom tools. Download it now from sparrowwallet.com before the deadline. And if you have a few seconds, repost Craig's post to help get Apple's attention.

AI

Andrew Ng Says 100% of His Tasks Are Done by AI Agents

Why it matters: The capability gap that once made hiring necessary is closing fast.

Andrew Ng, the guy who founded Google Brain, said 100% of his daily tasks are now handled by AI agents, and that self-improving loops are next. "Give it 3-6 months and prompting is gone," he said. This lines up with new data from Stripe Economics showing that solo business formation is accelerating faster than employer businesses, and that solo operators are reaching meaningful income thresholds at higher rates. The Census Bureau had to raise its income assumptions because solo operators were generating revenue that previously required a team. AI is filling the capability gaps that once made hiring necessary. Pair this with bitcoin for payments and self-custody and you have the sovereign individual toolkit. No employer. No bank. No permission needed. We covered the AI agent revolution earlier this year, and the pace has only accelerated.

REGULATION

EU's MiCA Regulation Is Crushing Crypto. 75% of Firms Forced Out by July 1.

Why it matters: Europe just showed the world what "regulate, don't ban" actually looks like.

Pavol Lupták, a cryptoanarchist based in Paraguay, laid out the damage from the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. All European exchanges have delisted privacy coins like Monero and Zcash. USDT, the most widely used stablecoin in the world, has been pulled because Tether refused to comply. Every crypto ATM in the EU except Poland now requires full KYC. The compliance costs are so high that small services are shutting down entirely. Out of 3,000+ crypto firms operating in the EU as of 2024, only about 200 have secured a MiCA license. The rest are being forced out by July 1, 2026. Europe didn't ban crypto. They did something smarter and worse. They made it impossible for anyone except the largest, most surveillance-compliant firms to operate. The result is the same. We've been tracking this playbook for months. MiCA is the EU's version. Regulate until only the surveillance-friendly survive.

SEMICONDUCTORS

Nvidia's Next GPU Needs Four Dies Stitched Together. Packaging Is the New Bottleneck.

Why it matters: The cost of connecting chips is overtaking the cost of making them.

Nvidia's upcoming Rubin Ultra will reportedly require four reticle-sized compute dies stitched into a single package. The packaging technology needed to make that work, connecting multiple silicon dies so they behave like one chip, is now the dominant cost variable in AI hardware. TSMC's CoWoS and Intel's EMIB are the two leading approaches, and both are capacity-constrained. This matters for bitcoin miners directly. Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan, they all compete for the same packaging lines at TSMC and Samsung. When hyperscalers are willing to pay any price for packaging capacity, mining hardware gets pushed back in the queue. The bottleneck isn't transistors anymore. It's the glue holding them together. That's a structural constraint on hashrate growth that most people aren't paying attention to. When TSMC's Arizona fab hit yields surpassing Taiwan last year, it was a rare bright spot. The packaging capacity problem is why it matters even more now.

MACRO

Record 45% of Central Banks Plan to Increase Gold Reserves

Why it matters: The people who manage the world's reserve currencies are running to hard assets.

The World Gold Council's 2026 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey confirms what we've been saying for years: central banks are de-dollarizing. A record 45% of respondents expect to increase their own gold reserves over the next 12 months. Over the last four years, central banks have accumulated an average of 1,000 tons of gold annually, double the 500-ton average of the prior decade. 74% see US dollar holdings declining over the next five years. 84% believe gold will hold a higher share of total reserves five years from now. Central banks are also repatriating their gold, with 9% increasing domestic storage in the past year alone. Let that sink in. The people who run the monetary system are telling you, with their actions, that they don't trust it. They're choosing the hard asset. For nation-states, that's gold. For the rest of us who can't vault gold bars in the Bank of England, it's bitcoin. As Luke Gromen told us, the post-1971 dollar system is unwinding in real time. De-dollarization isn't a theory anymore. Central banks are voting with their vaults.

ELECTION INTEGRITY

Foreign-Born Judge Blocks Voter-Verification System Designed to Protect Election Integrity

Why it matters: If anyone, including non-citizens, can vote in American elections, elections have no integrity.

Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a Trinidad and Tobago native who became a U.S. citizen just seven years ago, struck down Trump's expanded SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) voter-verification system. The system was designed to cross-reference citizenship data with voter rolls to ensure only American citizens are voting in American elections. Sooknanan ruled that federal agencies lacked the statutory authority to overhaul SAVE for this purpose. A woman from Trinidad and Tobago who has been an American citizen for seven years is blocking the President's ability to verify that voters are actually citizens. You can't make this up. If verifying citizenship before voting is "unlawful," what is the point of citizenship? Elections only work if the people voting are the people who are supposed to be voting. Full stop. The ruling will almost certainly be appealed, but the damage to election integrity in the meantime is real. The broader pattern is unmistakable: the same institutions that want to expand the Patriot Act to digital assets are the ones blocking verification of who actually gets to vote.

Back Up Sparrow Wallet on macOS Before June 30

Your wallet still works after the deadline, but you won't be able to reinstall or get updates on macOS.

Don't wait until June 30 to figure this out. First, download the latest version from sparrowwallet.com and verify the GPG signature. Second, export your wallet backup file (File > Export Wallet > Sparrow) and store it somewhere safe. Third, consider running Sparrow on Linux as a long-term hedge against platform risk. Your seed phrase works on any platform. Apple can't revoke your private keys. If you're new to Sparrow, our comprehensive guide walks through everything from setup to advanced features.