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Bitcoin Brief

Wednesday, June 25, 2026

Sup, freaks.

The crypto industry's most important bill is now facing opposition from the Catholic Church, four major law enforcement associations, Wall Street, and Native American tribes. The CLARITY Act's BRCA provision is the one that would have kept Samourai Wallet's developers out of prison. Without it, writing non-custodial software equals money transmission under federal law. The bill needs to pass by next month or it's dead for the year. Today we look at the strange coalition that formed against it, what it means for open-source development, and whether Congress can thread this needle before the midterms swallow everything.

Lead Story

Catholic Leaders and Law Enforcement Unite Against the Crypto Industry's Most Important Bill

Why it matters: The BRCA provision is what separates"writing code" from"money transmission." Lose it, and the Samourai prosecution becomes the template for every future open-source Bitcoin developer.

The CLARITY Act was supposed to be a bipartisan win for crypto. It passed the Senate Banking Committee in May and had enough momentum to be the first serious digital asset framework signed into law. Now it is fighting for its life against an improbable coalition, and the clock is running.

The friction point is Section 604, also known as the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act. It would shield non-custodial software developers from being classified as money transmitters under federal law. The crypto industry calls it a"red line." Remove it, and they walk. But now 82 Catholic leaders, organized through the Alliance to End Human Trafficking (founded by US Catholic Sisters), sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Thune and Minority Leader Schumer warning the provision could"make it more difficult to responsibly monitor illicit financial activity tied to trafficking, organized crime, child exploitation, sanctions evasion."

The same week, four of the country's most powerful law enforcement organizations sent their own letter to Acting AG Todd Blanche and White House digital assets adviser Patrick Witt. The National District Attorneys Association, National Association of Assistant US Attorneys, International Association of Chiefs of Police, and National Sheriffs' Association argued the provision could"create oversight gaps, hinder illicit-activity probes and weaken KYC/AML requirements." This was first reported by Punchbowl News.

What gets missed in coverage of this is what the BRCA actually does. It does not shield criminal conduct. It prevents non-custodial software developers, people who write code but never hold or control anyone's funds, from being swept up under money transmission laws designed for banks and wire services. Senator Lummis has argued the bill"closes the gaps bad actors exploit." Supporters say the BRCA is surgical: if you hold keys, you are a money transmitter. If you write software that lets others hold their own keys, you are not. The critics are conflating tool makers with the criminals who might misuse the tools.

The stakes are not hypothetical. As we covered in our deep dive on the Samourai Wallet prosecution, the DOJ sent two developers to prison for building privacy software they never controlled. Their crime was writing code. The BRCA would have prevented that prosecution. Without it, that precedent stands, and every open-source Bitcoin developer is now a potential money transmitter.

The bill faces a House hearing on July 17. Industry leaders say if it cannot pass before August recess, midterm politics will kill it for the year. The opposition is growing: Wall Street is fighting the stablecoin yield provisions, Native American tribes are opposing the prediction market sports wagering language, and some Democrats are citing the Trump family's crypto ventures as a reason to slow-walk the whole thing. The CLARITY Act is not dead. But it has never looked more precarious. I've been watching this race against the calendar for months, and right now the clock is winning.

No bill is better than a bad bill, but the BRCA should simply be cut and dry: if you are a software developer building free, open source software tools, you should not be held liable for what end users do with your software. Very cut and dry. Very straightforward. It is a shame that the Catholic organizations and police departments think otherwise. It is inherently evil.

The analogy writes itself: we do not charge car manufacturers when someone uses their car as a weapon during a terrorist attack. We do not charge gun manufacturers in this way. Software developers should be treated no differently. The tool is not the crime. The person who commits the crime is liable for their actions, not the person who created a bitcoin wallet that they used.

As I discussed with Kyle Olney on a recent episode, the loophole in the BRCA as currently written is exactly what the opposition is exploiting. The critics are not wrong that language matters. But the solution is to fix the language, not to gut the provision entirely. Get the bill right. Get it passed. The alternative is a legal framework where writing privacy software is a federal crime.

Signal

On-Chain

Checkmate:"We Are at the Pointy End of the Bear Market"

Why it matters: Historically, this is where the last remaining believers capitulate and the patient accumulate.

James Check (Checkmatey) published a measured but striking piece this week. The Bitcoin market is, in his words,"dead quiet." Cyclically low trade volumes, sentiment in the absolute gutter, and on-chain data consistent with conditions historically seen at the pointy end of a bear cycle, where hopelessness peaks and the maximum number of people start to truly believe the asset is never coming back. He is not calling a bottom. He is describing the conditions that have, in prior cycles, preceded recoveries. The data snapshot below is consistent with his read: SOPR below 1, short-term holders deeply underwater, and NUPL still in the"Hope/Fear" band. Worth reading his full analysis in his newsletter, Checkmate On-Chain.

Macro

Gold Crashes Below $4,000 as Hawkish Warsh Signals Price Stability Priority

Why it matters: The debasement trade was the thesis. A hawkish Fed and a stronger dollar are the counter-thesis.

Gold is below $4,000 for the first time since November 2025, down roughly 30% from its January highs near $5,600. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's first meeting sent a clear hawkish signal: price stability is the priority, and a stronger dollar may be welcome. Goldman Sachs cut its year-end gold forecast by $500 to $4,900. Deutsche Bank trimmed its Q4 estimate by 17%. Michael Howell at Capital Wars noted"Chair Warsh May Welcome A Stronger US Dollar." The one pillar holding gold up: central bank buying continues. But the debasement narrative that drove gold and bitcoin together from 2023 to early 2026 is under real pressure. How the two assets decouple, or fail to, from here is the story to watch.

AI / Chips

OpenAI and Broadcom Unveil"Jalapeno," a Custom AI Inference Chip Built in 9 Months

Why it matters: The fastest ASIC development cycle for high-performance semis on record, and OpenAI plans gigawatt-scale deployment by late 2026.

Announced today: OpenAI's first"Intelligence Processor," a custom accelerator designed from scratch for LLM inference, went from design to tape-out in 9 months. That is faster than anything comparable in the high-performance semiconductor space. Broadcom handled networking, Celestica handled system integration. OpenAI says performance per watt is"substantially better" than current state-of-the-art (self-reported, unverified). The chip is already running GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark in the lab. Deployment at gigawatt scale with Microsoft and partners is targeted for late 2026. AI was also used to accelerate parts of the chip design process itself. The vertical integration story for AI compute is moving faster than most expected.

AI

Cursor Trains a 1.5 Trillion Parameter Frontier Model. The API Reseller Model Is Dead.

Why it matters: The first app-layer company building frontier-scale compute is a structural shift, not a product announcement.

Anysphere's Cursor is training a 1.5 trillion parameter model on 100,000+ Nvidia GPUs inside xAI's Colossus cluster, making it the first application-layer software company to build a frontier-scale model from scratch. For comparison, Claude Opus and GPT-5.x have both been confirmed below 2 trillion parameters. The SpaceX $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere is expected to close in Q3. Cursor also announced"Origin," an agent-first Git hosting platform intended to replace GitHub. Moving from API reseller to proprietary inference is a fundamentally different cost structure and competitive position. The compute war is not just a hyperscaler story anymore.

Infrastructure

Cerebras at Post-IPO Lows as US Data Center Shortage Reality Check Sets In

Why it matters: $800 billion in 2026 hyperscaler capex meets a reality where half the planned capacity doesn't exist yet.

Cerebras stock hit a post-IPO low after a disappointing revenue forecast, but the real signal is in the admission buried in the coverage: roughly half of the 16 GW of US data center capacity planned for 2026 is facing cancellation or delay. Only 5 GW is currently under construction. The result is"mountains of expensive compute hardware currently operating as high-tech paperweights." The gap between announced AI infrastructure ambitions and energized, working facilities is enormous, and the market is starting to price it in.

AI / Open Source

Unsloth AI Quantizes a 754B Frontier Model Down to 217 GB. It Runs on a Mac Studio.

Why it matters: If compression at this scale holds up and generalizes, it throws a serious wrench in the narrative that frontier AI requires centralized gigawatt data centers to run.

Unsloth AI released GGUF quantizations of GLM-5.2, a 754-billion-parameter Chinese frontier model from Zhipu AI. They compressed the original 1.51 TB BF16 model down to 217 GB at 1-bit quantization. The 1-bit version runs locally on a Mac Studio at roughly 21 tokens per second, with no internet connection required. The model scores 99.2 on AIME 2026 and 91.2 on GPQA-Diamond, which puts it in frontier territory. The whole thing is MIT-licensed and compatible with llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio, and vLLM. It is yet to be determined whether this is going to be replicable and scalable for all frontier models. But if something like this catches on, it definitely throws a wrench in the infrastructure buildout and the idea that we need all this energy and data center infrastructure to run these models. I would say you probably still need a good amount of infrastructure to train the models, at least.

Bitcoin Dev

Bark Goes Live on Bitcoin Mainnet. Ark Wallets Are Here.

Why it matters: Ark has been in development for years. A public mainnet server changes the"in theory" to"try it now."

Per Optech #410, Second's Bark implementation of the Ark protocol is now live on Bitcoin mainnet, with a public Ark server, the Bark SDK, and barkd daemon for developers. Three consumer wallets are ready from day one: Arke, Noah, and Alby Hub with an Ark backend. Also from Optech this week: Sparrow Wallet 2.5.0 ships silent payments receiving support, building on the send capability from version 2.3.0. And JoinMarket NG 0.32.0 has been released. A productive week for the Bitcoin developer ecosystem.

Policy

Congress Passes 4-Year Fed CBDC Ban, Digital Asset Clarity Act Clears Committee

Why it matters: A federal CBDC prohibition is now on its way to becoming law. A digital dollar just got harder to build.

The Senate passed a four-year ban on a Federal Reserve CBDC, tucked into a housing bill. The House is expected to pass it quickly. Separately, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9. Two pieces of legislation moving in parallel: one that blocks the government's ability to build programmable surveillance money, and one that attempts to define what private digital money is allowed to be. The CBDC ban is the easier win. The CLARITY Act is the harder one with more enemies. Both matter.

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See you tomorrow,
Marty

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