Join me today for Episode 1096 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
Website: https://www.oshigood.us/products
nostr Profile: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqswp94gnm4epqsgjkndl4lnd8krzdj5u4mzuppdtxksdymkty63g7gdurlfc
https://cointelegraph.com/news/cyber-criminals-steal-coinbase-customer-data-20-m-ransom
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/15/telegram-shuts-down-largest-illicit-online-marketplace-after-elliptics-insights
https://decrypt.co/320206/bitcoin-dips-on-weaker-than-expected-us-wholesale-prices
https://atlas21.com/ukraine-aims-create-strategic-bitcoin-reserve/
https://bitcoinnews.com/press-release/neutron-partners-with-cobo/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/arthur-hayes-btc-1m-by-2028-europe-get-money-out
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
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Topics for today:
- Coinbase Data Breach
- Telegram Black Market Shutdown
- Bitcoin Price Dip Because . . . Inflation
- Arthur Hayes: Get Your Money Out of Europe
Circle P:
Product: Artisan pecan butter, date bars and chocolatesWebsite: https://www.oshigood.us/products
nostr Profile: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqswp94gnm4epqsgjkndl4lnd8krzdj5u4mzuppdtxksdymkty63g7gdurlfc
Articles:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/14/jim-chanos-is-doing-an-aggressive-long-and-short-trade-involving-microstrategy-and-bitcoin.htmlhttps://cointelegraph.com/news/cyber-criminals-steal-coinbase-customer-data-20-m-ransom
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/15/telegram-shuts-down-largest-illicit-online-marketplace-after-elliptics-insights
https://decrypt.co/320206/bitcoin-dips-on-weaker-than-expected-us-wholesale-prices
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://atlas21.com/ukraine-aims-create-strategic-bitcoin-reserve/
https://bitcoinnews.com/press-release/neutron-partners-with-cobo/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/arthur-hayes-btc-1m-by-2028-europe-get-money-out
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
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Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
It is 09:14AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May 2025. That's a lot of fives because some kind of numerology going on there that I can't suss out. But this is episode ten ninety six of Bitcoin. And we've got a major, major investor who is doing a turnabout on micro strategy in favor of Bitcoin. We'll get into it. Coinbase is in the news after, well, their shitty security does what their shitty security always does. Telegram is also in the news as well as the PPI numbers came in. That's the, producer's price index. There was a surprise.
Yes. There was indeed a surprise. Fold has a new gift card kind of thing out. That just hit the news today, so we'll get into that as well as what's going on with Meta Planet. And, yes, we're going to stand with Ukraine, but not not in the way that that you might actually think. And then Neutron and Kobo, two names I have never heard of before, are doing something with Lightning Network in Asia. And then Arthur Hayes is gonna finish us out with a huge warning to Europe. It seems I'm not the only one that thinks that Europe is toast. And whenever I say that, for the European guys that listen to this, this is nothing against you guys as citizens.
Right? I don't y'all are lovely people. Most citizens of most actually, I'm gonna go ahead and say all citizens of all countries are just really good people, just the finest of people as as, I guess, orange men might say. It's the governments. This this is our issue, and it ain't exactly like the United States government is some kind of, you know, nun walking around in a habit, you know, you know, teaching kids English or anything like that. It's not just Europe. It's Canada. It's The United States. It's Brazil. It's everybody. But Arthur Hayes seems to be on track with what I have happened to think about the governments of Europe and what they're doing.
He is basically screaming get out, and we'll talk about it. But first, there's this character named Jim Chanos. And he is doing an aggressive long and a short trade involving both MicroStrategy and Bitcoin. This is out of CNBC. Jeff Cox is riding it. Investor Jim Chanos is simultaneously betting on Bitcoin and against MicroStrategy, which is now known as strategy. And I'm surprised that Jeff Cox did not get that one. But, hey, it is what it is. It's strategy, a company that is taking risky strategies on the cryptocurrency with a backing by enthusiastic retail investors.
I'm gonna pause here to say that over the last couple of days, I've mentioned that I'm seeing a shift in online I don't know what the fad of the day. You know, it was op return. Everybody was bitching and moaning and crying and sniping at each other. And now it's we're all gonna die because of Bitcoin treasury companies. This is part of that movement away from or or being scared of Bitcoin treasury companies. I think Jim Chanos is looking at the field, and he's noticing that there is negative sentiment going on in the chatter online, and that would be Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. God only knows what else. So he's looking at the same shit I'm looking at, and this is the way it seems that he's going to play it, quote, we are selling MicroStrategy stock and buying Bitcoin and basically buying something for a dollar and selling it for 2 and a half dollars. The former hedge fund magnate told CNBC's Scott Wapner from the sidelines of the SONE Investment Conference in New York. And it's probably pronounced sun, but I I don't know.
Strategy is considered a proxy for Bitcoin as the software and cloud company holds more than half of a million tokens. However, the company has used leverage to amass that Bitcoin stockpile and trades at a very large premium to said Bitcoin holdings, quote. If you look at where MicroStrategy is now, more ominously, some of its copycat companies that are now raising lots of money are doing is they are basically selling retail investors. This is a terrible sentence. Let's try this again. If you look at where strategy is now oh, god. This is just a this sentence is terrible.
I'm I'm having a real real difficulty here, guys. Let's try it for a third time. Third time's a charm always. If you look at where strategy and now more ominously, some of its copycat companies that are now raising lots of money are doing is they are basically selling retail investors the idea that we are going to buy Bitcoin in a corporate structure. Because of what strategy has done, you should value us at a similar premium, he said. Okay. I gotta pause here because that is the worst sentence I've ever heard. I I barely know what that means if I just go by the crappy grammar.
And I'm not usually a grammar Nazi, but it's not just that words are important, people. It's the way you put them in order that makes meaning. So it looks like what he's he's just I think what he's saying is that, look, man. MicroStrategy is buying a lot of Bitcoin. They're using leverage to do it. They have their their stock price is trading at a premium compared to the value of that which they are leveraged to buy, and that would be the Bitcoin. And therefore, we're selling MicroStrategy and buying Bitcoin. Let's just say it like that. However, Chanos labeled that thinking ridiculous.
We're doing exactly what MicroStrategy and cofounder and former CEO Michael Saylor are doing, he added. We are selling MicroStrategy stock and buying Bitcoin and basically buying something for a buck and selling it for 2 and a half bucks. MicroStrategy shares have soared more than 220% over the past year, while Bitcoin has gained nearly 70% during the same period. And president Donald Trump has been a vocal backer of crypto, which has risen sharply since he announced broad based tariffs in early April. Quote, this is a good barometer of not only just the arbitrage itself, but I think of retail speculation, Chanos said of his trade.
Chanos, if you're wondering, was founder of Kynikos Associates and now runs a family office while providing advice to institutional clients. Okay. So the good news is I've never heard of Jim Chanos before. The bad news is, he's big enough apparently in the space that he could cause some problems. And what problems would that be? He's playing with a real basket of fire here, and I think he's taking a massive risk. And I'm not saying that because he's selling MicroStrategy. I don't own any MicroStrategy stock. I don't own Misty. I don't own Strike. I don't own Strife.
I just want the Bitcoin. That that's all I want. Now on the surface, this sounds like it makes kind of a bit of sense. You do have strategy who has bought a lot of Bitcoin using a lot of debt instrumentation that they themselves have manufactured in order to get that. And because of the retail frenzy about Misty and strategy and strike and strife and all of the rest of the debt instrumentation that Michael Saylor has created, they are all piling in. And instead of buying Bitcoin, they're buying the actual MicroStrategy stock because they don't I don't know. They don't wanna hold Bitcoin. Actually, I think it's more that they it's not that they don't want to hold the Bitcoin.
It's that they're seeing the frenzy. They're seeing the fad. They're seeing the excesses of human nature in the wild and they are chasing after it like a cheetah does after game in the African savannah. Now that said, here's the problem with it, is that biker strategy or strategy has so intrinsically intertwined their company, the present and the future of that particular corporation is so tied to the performance of Bitcoin that if and I'm not saying that this will happen, I'm just saying that if there is enough sell off of MicroStrategy that Bitcoin itself will have the the people will have retail will have the perception that Bitcoin is losing its value, and they will sell the Bitcoin too. And that's why this dude is making a very dangerous trade for himself and forever for whomever he represents.
He said they said that he's, you know, heading up a family office. So I don't know who this family is, but this dude's making a dangerous trade. Because if he is able to physically affect in a good portion the amount that people perceive the stock price of strategy at at a lower price, that could have knock on effects on the price of Bitcoin simply because the perception of the tie between Bitcoin and MicroStrategy. Bitcoin, it should not matter. The problem is we're not dealing with Bitcoin. We're not dealing with MicroStrategy. We're dealing with human perception of a thing, and that's where shit gets dangerous.
So more power to them. And like I said, the thesis actually makes sense. They've got a lot of micro strategy stock, and they're selling it, and they're buying Bitcoin directly with it. Honestly, this is kind of what you should do. Is he taking into account the possible knock on effect of the fact that people are greedy, hairless apes that just fell out of trees somewhere around 250,000 to 2,500,000 years ago. I'm just I'm just saying. It's just we are not we're not the sharpest tools in the shed. Not anymore. Right? We're driven by fads. We're driven by social media. We're driven by mainstream media.
It's a problem. I hope he does okay. Now on to Coinbase who got hacked. Yes. They got hacked. It's a bad one too because Coinbase faces a $400,000,000 bill after insider phishing attack. Zolton Vardy writing this one for Cointelegraph. Coinbase, the world's third largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hit by a $20,000,000 extortion attempt after cybercriminals recruited overseas support agents to leak user data, the company said. Oh, man. They got to your insiders. According to a May 15 blog post, Coinbase said that a group of external actors bribed and coordinated with several customer support contractors to access internal systems and steal limited user account data. I call bullshit already. I'll bet it's extensive user account data. But, quote, these insiders abuse their access to customer support systems to steal the account data for a small subset of customers.
Again, I call bullshit. I'll bet it is a large amount of customers. Anyway, they added that there was no passwords, private keys, funds, or Coinbase Prime accounts being affected. Okay. We'll just give them that. Less than 1% of Coinbase's monthly transacting users data was affected by the attack. The companies just said that this is what they're saying. After stealing the data, the attackers attempted to extort $20,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, of course, Bitcoin. They sure as shit ain't gonna want Ethereum, from Coinbase in exchange for not disclosing the breach. Coinbase refused the demand.
Instead, the company offered a $20,000,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and the conviction of those responsible for this scheme. Scammers often masquerades as recognizable brands to inspire a false sense of trust in their victims. In 2024, Coinbase was the most impersonated cryptocurrency brand by scammers. Now Coinbase said that it will reimburse users who were tricked into sending cryptocurrency to phishing scammers with expected remediation and reimbursement expenses ranging anywhere from a hundred and 80 to $400,000,000. The crypto exchange disclosed the estimate in an eight k filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission today, May, noting the expenses relate to voluntary customer reimbursements and other remediation efforts.
The attackers have been approached or have been approaching the exchanges overseas customer support agents for a month, aiming to bribe them in exchange for customer information, said Coinbase cofounder and CEO Brian the Bald Armstrong. Following the attack, the exchange will strengthen its internal data management processes and relocate some of its customer support operations to avoid similar incidents. Social engineering schemes are a growing concern for Coinbase users. Blockchain security analyst, Zach XBT, estimated that users lost around $45,000,000 to phishing schemes in the week leading up to May.
The blockchain security analyst previously claimed that social engineering scams cost Coinbase users over $300,000,000 annually, CoinGraph CoinGraph CoinTelegraph reported May or February. Okay. So this is bad. Yeah. It it's bad. It's not the first time it's happened, and it certainly is not the last time that this has happened. So if you are a Coinbase customer and by the way, you shouldn't be. You should stay as far away from Coinbase as humanly possible for a whole raft of reasons, not just the fact that they have shitty security policies. Okay. And, also, if you are going to employ people for, like, slave labor wages overseas, this is what you should expect.
And this is exactly the attack vector that I would have used as well. I'm not gonna go after the American people. I'm gonna go after any of the contractors that are getting paid shit and offer them way more, which in my view for me is way less. I could be offering them a hundred times what they get paid by Brian Mulratt Armstrong to do some nefarious shit, and it's going to be cheap a f for me. But to them, their perception again, this is a human perception issue. Their perception of what I'm offering is a king's ransom considering what they're probably getting paid. This is one of the reasons why American companies hire people in third world countries to do shit.
I'm surprised more of this type of thing doesn't happen. So when they say that they're going to relocate some of their customer service people, the only way that they can do that is to take them or or or hire Americans in America, pay them the wages that Americans are going to expect, and then you have a shot of not having, like, a a can of worms so easily pried open. This is what happens when you pay people shit. And you pay people shit because, well, we've screwed up the money. It all boils down to broken money. All of these problems are solved with Bitcoin, except possibly dark markets.
Telegram, yeah, Telegram, has shut down the largest illicit online marketplace after Elliptics Insights. Jamie Crowley is writing this one for CoinDesk. Telegram has shut down the illicit marketplace, Hao Wang guarantee, formerly known as Huon guarantee, which has facilitated transactions totaling over $27,000,000,000 in stablecoins since 2021. That's that's a big number. Howang was shut down based on insights provided by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic on Tuesday. The closure took place amidst a crackdown on thousands of suspected Chinese crypto crime channels operating on Telegram following Elliptic's report into marketplace, Zenby Guaranty.
I don't know why all these people put guarantee in their name. It sounds like an insurance company, but whatever. Telegram has now shut down both Huon and Zenbi, which or is probably how it's pronounced, z or it's x I n b I, so I'm gonna say it's Zenbi, which processed in combination $35,000,000,000 of illicit transactions in stablecoin, Elliptic wrote in a web post on Wednesday. Quote, our analysis indicates that Huwound guarantee has facilitated transactions totaling more than 27,000,000,000 since 2021, making it the largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated.
Ever operated. And Genby was the second largest, having processed transactions worth 8,400,000,000.0 since 2022. For perspective, notable dark web marketplaces such as the Silk Road and AlphaBay process 216,000,000 and $639,000,000 respectively. So 27,000,000,000 versus Silk Road's two hundred and sixteen million and Alphabay's six hundred and thirty nine million dollars. You're talking about, like, orders of magnitude larger. Such marketplaces historically operated through anonymous browser, Tor, but have more recently shifted their operations to Telegram, the messaging app with over a billion users.
Huon and Xinbi are referred to as guarantee marketplaces. Ah, there we go. A term designated for platforms that do not sell goods and services themselves but provide a venue for merchants to sell to customers. That's a that's a large dark marketplace. $27,000,000,000. 30 5 billion dollars combined on just these two places. They've been operating on Telegram since 2021 and 2022. Surprising, honestly. Very surprising. Kinda makes you kinda makes you, you know, wish you had a a huddle bar from Oshi over there at oshigood.us. That's oshi good, o s h I g o o d dot u s. It's oshigood.us.
You go there and you buy your stuff with Bitcoin. He sells it all for Bitcoin. What does he got? Well, he's got banana chocolate chip hodl bars. He has mint cookie hodl bars. He has mint so what oh, is it wait. Yeah. So he's got those two. He's got something called Hodel rounds, which look very, very beautiful chocolate here. And then he's got this stuff called Hodel butter. Now he makes all this stuff himself. And what's a Hodel bar? Well, let me tell you what's in the, in the banana what was it? Banana chocolate chip huddle bar. You can get a four pack for 23,000 satoshis. That's 23,000 satoshis.
You get four of them. Be prepared for a long trek down the rabbit hole of hunger with a multi pack of sweet and savory. Having a backup bar handy when hunger rears its ugly head is better than finding an extra office chair to sell when it's time to buy the dip. Ingredients are dates, pecan butter, dark chocolate chips, banana powder, peanut flour, chocolate power powder, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sea salt. I got one of these things. They're heavy. These things are these things are heavy. These are the things that you want in your backpack when you're on a hike. The dates alone pack enough sugar and, like, if you actually look at the types of sugars that are in, like, dates and the rest of this stuff, these are this is, like, sort of come these are more complex sugars than normal. Right? It's not just, like, eating, like, sucrose or fructose or glucose.
Dates, especially, really, like, they just, like, a a nice little packet of energy. And, yeah, I mean, for all the people that are just carnivore only, I get it. I get it. But sometimes, dude, you want something tasty, you want something sweet, you want something that's going to fill you up and keep you marching down that path, and banana chocolate chip huddle bars are the way to do it. When you go to the cart, when you order your stuff, the first thing that you see in your cart is what you ordered, and the second thing is the promo code. Type in Bitcoin and. I'm not saying that you're gonna get any percentage off. This what we're doing here is we're letting Oshi know that you heard it here on the circle p. Right? The circle p is open for business. It's how I'm trying to kick start in my own way a small circular Bitcoin economy so that we can buy goods and services from each other with Bitcoin the way it was meant to be used.
That's why I do this. So when you type in Bitcoin and into the promo code section, no. You're not gonna get anything off. It's just gonna let Oshie know that you heard about it here at the Circle p on the Bitcoin and podcast. And that way, in a value for value way, he can determine for himself what was the sale worth for me. And then he will cut that to me in Satoshis because that's the way value for value advertising models should work. Now on to the rest of the news, we got decrypt and Vismaya v writing this one about the Bitcoin dip that we saw this morning.
Why? Well, we had weaker than expected United States wholesale prices, which probably means that Jerome Powell has yet more ammunition to defend his stance that he will not lower the fed fund rate, which means cheap money not gonna be available to get into risky assets, and that makes, well, that makes retail cry. Bitcoin slipped slightly on Thursday after a closely watched inflation gauge showed wholesale prices in The United States registered a drop in April. The producer price index for final demand fell point 5% in April, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Thursday, compared to economist expectations of a point 2% monthly rise.
The index rose 2.4% over the past twelve months, slightly cooler than expectations. Core producer price index, which excludes food, energy, and trade services, also edged down by point 1%. That's the first decline in that measure since April of twenty twenty. In response, Bitcoin fell 1.3% to a hundred and 2,655 after the report, pairing gains from earlier in the session as per CoinGecko data. And they talk about shitcoin number one, number two, and number three. And then they say PPI, which tracks what US suppliers charge retailers and distributors, is a leading gauge of wholesale inflation compiled by surveying over 100,000 product prices every month, and serves as an early signal for consumer side inflation trends.
The point 5% decline in April was driven entirely by services according to the report, which fell point 7%, the sharpest drop since the series began in 02/2009. Over two thirds of the decline came from shrinking margins in final demand trade services, particularly machinery and vehicle wholesaling, which plunged 6.1% according to the BLS. Quote, I don't view the PPI as a significant catalyst for Bitcoin in the current environment, especially given the market's muted response to the recent consumer price index data, which came out a couple of days ago. The analyst, Aurelie Barthiri, I guess is how you pronounce it. She's the principal or or he maybe. I don't know. He or she, whatever. Principal research analyst at Nansen.
The analyst noted that unless the PPI came in meaningfully above expectations, even a mild upside surprise, say 10 basis points, was unlikely to shift either Bitcoin's direction or the market's outlook on Fed rate cuts. There it is. Still, traders are watching for more than just the inflation figure. All eyes are now on Fed chair Jerome Powell's remarks scheduled later Thursday. That would be today, an event that many analysts say could overshadow the data. Oh my god. We're gonna all gonna die. Quote, if Jerome Powell signals no urgency to ease policy, saying something like we're not in a rush to cut, markets could still turn defensive, said Tracy Jin, chief operating officer of crypto exchange, Mexc.
That scenario is far from guaranteed. The Fed has held its benchmark rate at 2.25 to 4.5% for four straight meetings, resisting calls from Trump to begin easing policy ahead of the November election. Jin warned that a hawkish tone from Powell could trigger a brief shakeout, particularly in overheated altcoins and said Bitcoin might retest support zones near, of course, 97,000 or even slip as low as 93,000. Not long after the new data was released, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell reiterated that the Fed remains fully committed to the 2% inflation target today, but that it is weighing revised or revising its consensus statement in coming months. Oh, boy.
That'll be fun. He specifically mentioned that the Fed might adjust its language around shortfalls, forecasts, and uncertainty. Quote, as we have been reviewing assessments of the 2020 and of the policy discussions in recent years, a common observation is the need for clear communications as complex events unfold. A critical question is how to foster a broader understanding of the uncertainty that the economy generally faces in periods of larger, more frequent, or more disparate shocks, Jerome Powell said. Markets initially rallied earlier this week after The US and China agreed to roll back retaliatory tariffs for ninety days. CPI data on Tuesday also helped cool nerves with consumer prices rising just point 2% month over month and 2.3% annually, which was both in line with expectations.
Amid these developments, Jin noted, quote, the smarter strategy now is to wait for better long entry zones rather than chase strength into uncertainty. Wow. That's an interesting way to put it. Investors now await the May 30 release of the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, what's known as the PCE index, for further clarity on whether the central bank will stay patient or pivot. Ahead of the report drop, analyst at crypto payment provider b two b n Pay, whatever the hell that is, told Decrypt how Bitcoin had rallied significantly over the past two weeks without any meaningful correction and cautioned that a retracement, even if not immediate, could reach around 2% as investor caution picked up. Okay. So that's the end of the article.
Jerome Powell is not going to drop rates. Let me say it again. He is not going to drop rates. Why? Because this PPI that came out is telling Jerome that what he's doing is working. It's not that I agree or disagree with what Jerome Powell's doing. I'm trying to remain neutral. I'm telling you I'm trying to crawl into Jerome Powell's head and rummage around and open up little dusty boxes of keepsakes to figure out how this guy thinks, and I've been doing it for so long that I can tell you with beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is beyond my gut feeling.
Jerome Powell thinks that what he's doing is working, and the numbers are backing his play. So, therefore, he's got more than enough ammunition to stand up to what Trump wants and say, no. We're not doing shit. And he's not going to drop rates. What does that mean? I've said it before, but if you need to hear it again, it means that cheap money that you can borrow so that you can go into risky assets in the stock market or Bitcoin or whatever is not forthcoming. And because of that, people are gonna say, well, screw it. We'll sell and try to find sell out of whatever risky asset we got so that we can, I don't know, park our cash into something less risky because everybody knows that when we don't allow cheap money to flow, that risky assets or things that are quote, unquote risky assets lose value because people start pulling their value out of it because that's what they think everybody else is going to do, and it's like a round robin? It's like a a cycle into hell. Right? And everybody does the exact same thing. And we could see 97,000.
We could dip back below a hundred thousand dollars. We're we were struggling earlier today. What are we doing right now? Well, right now, we're at a hundred and $3,677, and we got to a low of, like, two and a half hours ago. We were at a hundred and $1,009.80. So we saw quite the dip over the last twelve hours. We'll have to wait and see what the hell happens. But this PPI, these numbers along with the consumer price index numbers on Tuesday, I said the same thing on Tuesday. He's got all and he being Jerome Powell, he has all the ammunition he needs to take aim at Trump and say, I'm not I'm not gonna you can do whatever you want. You can bitch and moan on on truth social all day long and twice on Sunday.
I'm not budging. There is no cheap money this time around. We'll have to wait until the next month CPI and PPI numbers come out or whenever they come out. And if if if we see problems then, maybe. But I'm I am not holding my breath for cheap money anytime soon. Let's run the number. CNBC futures and commodities, oil getting hit hard. The PPI in you know, the PPI just numbers just keep rolling. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.15% to $61.79 a barrel. Brittnorsea is down 2.1 to $64.71. Natural gas, down a half point to $3.47 per thousand. And gasoline, wow, down 1.66% to $2.13.
Gold and all of its shiny metal brethren are all up today. Gold is up 1.14% to $32.24 and 6 dimes. Silver is up point 7%. Platinum is up one and a third. Copper is up two thirds. Palladium is up one and three quarters. In agriculture, we got a mixed bag here, mostly in the green though. Biggest winner is chocolate. No. I lied. By more than doubling that, lumber is the biggest winner at 8% to the upside. And the biggest loser today is gonna be soybeans, 2.76% to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle is down one and a quarter point. Lean hogs are up 1.17%, and feeder cattle are down 1.47%.
Meanwhile, the Dow is up a third of a point to 42 to 50. S and P is up a third as is the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, S and P Mini is drifting sideways only moderately, slightly, kind of tiny in the red. We are at, however, a hundred and $3,780 per coin. That's a 2,060,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 32.1 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,864,941 and 1 half of. Average fees per block are low, 0.04 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are eight blocks carrying 8,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at 3 Satoshis per vbyte.
Low priority is gonna get you in also at 3 Satoshis per vbyte. Hash rate drifting sideways, 850.7 exahashes per second at this particular time. A reminder here to go to bitcoinandshow.com and sign up. Go to bitcoin and show bitcoinandshow.com. That's bitcoinandshow, it's all one word, .com. Trying to get this to be something. It'd be nice to get a couple of more people to, you know, register to the email. I'm not ever going to sell your email. I'm never going to give your email away. I'm not going to trade for goods and services with your email. It's mine. If you give it to me, I will keep it because it's mine.
Mine. Mine. Yeah. Just give me a hand with that website there. Just, sign up and I'd that's where I'm putting all of the shows. I'm thinking about putting out a news, you know, a newsletter, like a weekly recap of what happened during the week. We'll see how that goes. It's brand new. So, you know, get give me I'm not a good webmaster. So it's I'm getting better, but, yeah, it it's it's new, and I need some I need y'all's help with it. From Bitcoin Treasury Hysteria, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Psyduck with 1,021 sat says Axelrod.
Jason High with a thousand sat says, just wanted to say I love the show. Once I updated my once I update my website, I'd like to get info on joining the Circle p to advertise my tie dye shirts and oil paintings. Bring it on, brother. We will talk. Anonymous with a thousand says oh, no. That's the exact same one. Fountain I'm looking at fountain.fm and it's a little funk a little wonky sometimes. Psyduck, this time is a different one. Five hundred 90 nine sat says psyduck. Turkey with a hundred 500 sat says, nothing. Pies with $4.20 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with two thirty seven, not once, but twice says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use, introducing Bitcoin gift cards by Fold. Yes. Fold has introduced, as of today, a gift card that has actual Bitcoin on it. Let's find out if that's exactly true. Sometimes I've been fooled in the past, so let's let's read this announcement here. Buying and gifting Bitcoin is now as simple as buying any other gift card. Okay. Sounds good so far. You can now purchase and send digital Bitcoin gift cards powered by Fold. So not only can you easily gift Bitcoin, but someone brand new to Bitcoin can now have a starting balance of Bitcoin when you share Fold App with them. Keep reading and head to foldapp.com/ bitcoin gift cards to purchase a gift card. So how do they work?
Fold is partnering with a company named TOTUS, a leading gift card issuer for top consumer brands. This ensures a seamless buying experience and access to one of the widest retail distribution networks in the country. Once purchased, these Bitcoin gift cards can be redeemed into a fold Bitcoin balance. Gift cards are dollar denominated loaded with up to $500 worth of Bitcoin. The cash balance is held until redemption. The BTC amount purchased will be determined by the exchange rate at the time of redemption. What's the redemption period?
So if you buy and send a gift card to someone, they'll be taken through the process of creating a fold account, gaining access to their Bitcoin balance wallet, and exposed to all the other features for stacking sats. Once redeemed, those funds could be withdrawn to self custody or stay in their Bitcoin balance with Fold. This is the perfect onboarding experience. No altcoin distractions. A simple process requires no Bitcoin knowledge whatsoever. Peace of mind with a Bitcoin focused custodial solution and all the tools for continuing one's Bitcoin savings journey. Okay.
So it's it's it's not going to exist outside the fold ecosystem. That's fine. It's it's a like, to me, this is more of a promotion than any fourfold than anything else. It's like a way for, you know, I don't know, for me to be able to buy one of these things and I I I don't even know if I have to have a fold account to buy one. I do have a fold account, but I I don't know if I would need one to buy one of these. The issue is is that when you give it to somebody, the only redemption output of this is in Fold. So they're gonna have to sign up for Fold. It's actually kind of brilliant from a marketing standpoint, but it's not exactly my cup of tea. But, hey, at least with here here's the good news about this. Right? If if for whatever reason you hate fold, I actually I like fold. I have no problems with fold. I really don't. But if for whatever reason, you're just rolling your eyes about this because it's a marketing deal and it's like folding people into the Fold ecosystem. Hey. You see what I did there?
The fact that there is a a mechanism by which a gift card that holds an actual Bitcoin balance on it, and and that may not be true. We're not I mean, they're not really getting into the weeds of the mechanism. However, a Bitcoin denominated card is not not a terrible idea. It really is not a terrible idea. And again, kudos to the fact that this is a hell of a marketing plan to get people in to sign up for FOLD. Applause, brothers. Applause. That's all I can say. Let's get on to Japan. Get over to Asia. Get some sushi. Get some udon noodles because Japan's micro strategies, which is named Meta Planet, has posted a record quarter number.
Now they own over $700,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, but that's not the cool thing about that. It's their it's their quarterly numbers that's gonna be presented here that I'm interested in. So Meta Planet Incorporated, which is widely recognized as Japan's leading Bitcoin treasury company, you know, the BTC, god, has reported its strongest quarter to date for the first quarter of fiscal year twenty twenty five marked by record, a record operating profit and a significant expansion of its balance sheet. Revenue reached 877,000,000 yen, which is an 8% increase quarter over quarter.
That's pretty good, guys. While operating profit hit a record 593,000,000 yen, that's up 11 quarter over quarter. This marks the company's highest operating profit ever. Total assets surged to 55,000,000,000 yen. That's up 81%. And net assets soared to $50,400,000,000, which is a nine no. A 197% increase compared to the previous quarter. Despite a 7,400,000,000.0 yen valuation loss due to the lower Bitcoin price at the March, Meta Planet has rebounded strongly. As of May, the company holds 13,500,000,000.0 yen in unrealized gains.
Thanks to a recovery in Bitcoin's market value, the temporary dip impacted net income, which came in at 5,000,000,000 yen for the quarter, but core operations remain strong. The company's Bitcoin holdings have skyrocketed to 6,796 BTC, which is a 3.9% no. Percent. I'm sorry. A 3.9 x increase year to date. In 2025 alone, Meta Planet added over 5,000 BTC reinforcing its commitment to the Bitcoin treasury standard. Since adopting the strategy, the company has seen its BTC net asset value increase 103.1 x, not percent, x, and its market cap grow by 138.1 x.
Again, not percent, but x. 138.1 times. Damn. Quote, guided by the conviction, we pivoted in 2024 to become Japan's First dedicated Bitcoin treasury company, said Meta Planet's management in their quarter one twenty twenty five earnings presentation. In q one twenty twenty five, we launched and have already executed 87% of a two year, one hundred and sixteen billion yen moving strike warrant program, the largest and lowest cost equity financing of its kind ever placed in Japan, end quote. Meta Planet also reported a substantial rise in shareholders, growing from 10,854 shareholders in December of twenty twenty three to 63,654 by March of twenty twenty five. My god almighty. It's like a six x growth.
The growth trend saw major jumps throughout the year with 29,796 shareholders in June of twenty twenty four, '30 '7 '5 hundred and '30 '7 in September, '40 '1 thousand '5 hundred and '50 '3 in October, and 47,292 in December of twenty twenty four before surging to its current peak. Member of Meta Planet's board of director, Tyler Evans, posted on Twitter, congrats, Meta Planet. Simon Gurevich, Yashami Abe, and Dylan LeClaire on a record quarter. 3.9 x growth in BTC year to date is incredible. Quote, our results speak for themselves. We don't set targets to feel safe. We set them to exceed them quarter after quarter, said Meta Planet's management management.
The global feedback loop between capital markets and Bitcoin is just beginning. Meta Planet intends to be its premier conduit. So, yeah, holy shit. Remember that Meta Planet was essentially sort of like a failed hotel management company, Basically, a zombie. And they're like, well, what else that maybe let's do what Sailor's doing. Maybe maybe their chief investment officer or their chief financial officer was one of the people that took part of Michael Sailor's, you know, Bitcoin for chief investment officer's webinar, which he did, like, two and a half, three years ago. And a whole bunch of people attended, but we didn't really see anything drop out of it until the first quarter of this year is when it's real we just see nothing but acceleration.
Last quarter of last year, yeah, that one too. But it's really coming to the head in the first quarter of this year. Now we're in the second quarter and people are starting to have that, Like I said, it's no longer the opportune is gonna kill Bitcoin. It's the BTC, the Bitcoin Treasury companies are going to kill Bitcoin. Yet here we have Meta Planet that has completely turned their ass around. Now the next step for in for somebody like Meta Planet is to actually go back and say, what was our core business? Is there a way that we can get back into successfully managing hotel properties, which is what Meta Planet was doing, and they were not doing it well? Is there a way they can get back into that and do it well? Or do they pivot to something else? My my point here is is that one of the things that I myself am kinda sick about hearing is just zombie companies, and I'm I'm hate to say it, strategy was a zombie company.
Its stock price was just flat for debt for a couple of decades. I mean, it peaked around let's see. It had a massive peak to something like $420 adjusted or $390 adjusted for stock splits along the way in, like, '99, something like that, or 02/2001, right around the time that the .com bubble was inflating and then then it it died along with everything else in 02/2001 when that bubble burst. And then it stayed flat until the summer of, what was it, 2020 or 2021 or something like that when they started buying Bitcoin. They haven't really been doing anything. I mean, they have been servicing their customers. They've been, like, making some, you know, making some software for business analysis, but, yeah, whoop de doob.
And then they started getting into Bitcoin, and all of a sudden, they're back up to all time high stock prices. Well, that's all well and good, but there's no real product. They have talked about this artificial intelligence, business intelligence software that they've been working on. Until I see it, I I don't I don't actually view it as as a thing. Meta Planet is a fail you know, was a failing hotel property management company, so there's that. And then you've got shit like twenty one Capital coming up, which I can't tell what the hell it is they do. And and I like Jack Mallers. Don't get me wrong. And it sounds like I'm angry. I'm not. I'm just say I'm just trying to be pragmatic here and relatively neutral and say, what is it you actually do?
That's a fair question. There I'm not being unfair. I'm saying, what do you what do you produce? I mean, what do you make? Do you manufacture something? Do you create something? Do you ship something? Is it digital? Do you put it in a box and tape it and send it to my door? I mean, I don't know what half of these Bitcoin treasury companies do, which is one of the reasons why I think that Jim Chernobyl guy or what let's say what's his name? Chanos, not Chernobyl. Jim Chanos, the first story that we read today. I guarantee you that's probably his sentiment.
It's like, well, what is it that you actually make? What do you sell? Where where does where does your company's income come from? And it's not a bad idea for companies to to do what Michael Saylor said. You've got to stop treating your balance sheet as something that's neutral, something that is just you keeping a safe, something that you don't leverage, some something that you don't make work for you in a positive advantage sort of way. This is good advice. There is no reason not to enslave your money to go out and build more money. There's no reason not in fact, it's a bad idea to not do it.
But there's another part of the whole why do you have a company. You have to offer something. It can't just be about the balance sheet. There's there's a a gaping hole. There there's there's nothing to stand on. You've just got a balloon that's kind of tied to a string, and there's nothing between the ground and the bottom of the balloon. It's just this it's it's air. It's just open air. Without that grounding, and the grounding comes from a product or a service or several that you sell consistently year over year. That's what fills that gap between the balloon that is your treasury and the ground that is reality.
And without that, you have problems. And I think that's what Jim Chanos is picking up on. And he's saying, screw this. I'm getting the real thing. I'm buying Bitcoin. And I can't blame him for that either. Because, hell, even Ukraine wants to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Again, for those of you who think I'm rough on Ukraine, I'm not. It's not the people of Ukraine that I have a problem with. It's the government. It's corrupt. It's been that way for decades and decades and decades. The whole thing is a money laundering operation for The United States and the rest of the West. It is.
It always has been or at least since the era of Clinton. And Bush has used it. In fact, I'll bet I'll bet you that this you in fact, I think this Ukraine thing's been going on since Bush won, if not even Reagan. So it's not it's not a red versus blue thing. I'm saying that that we've used this poor country as a way to funnel all kinds of money in a way to launder that money and kick it back to the richest of the rich. And now we're using it as a proxy war against Russia. And who's caught in the middle but the people of Ukraine? So don't think that I'm going, yeah, I hate Ukraine.
I I think the people of Ukraine suck. That is not the truth. But their government? Dude, it ain't nothing but an extension of the western need to launder money, And that's why we see Ukraine with the problems that it has today. Maybe, just maybe, they can work themselves out of a hole and become an actual sovereign nation and tell both The United States and Russia and China to fuck straight off. And maybe they'll do it with Bitcoin because according to a report by encrypted, Ukraine is working on the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and the news was announced by Yaroslav Zelznick, vice chairman of the committee on fiscal tax and customs policy.
The draft law to establish the reserve is nearly complete according to the report, and could be submitted to parliament in the coming weeks. The goal is to grant the National Bank of Ukraine the legal authority to hold Bitcoin and treat it as a reserve asset. In recent years, Ukraine has shown openness toward digital assets, and the war with Russia has further highlighted their importance, with cryptocurrency donations helping the country raise millions of dollars in humanitarian and defense aid in 2022 and 2023. Now the Ukrainian government is planning a comprehensive set of reforms that would allow cryptocurrencies to gain a foothold within the country's regulatory framework.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation is leading this effort. The new law, excuse me, would categorize digital assets, establish rules for exchanges, and introduce clear tax guidelines. If approved, the measure could come into effect as soon as possible. Kirill Kominyakov, which is probably a butchering of the name, Binance's regional head for Central And Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa, stated that the exchange will support Ukraine in creating its Bitcoin reserve. So Binance to the rescue, and you know who's connected with Binance? Tether, USDT.
Are you telling you, man? This stablecoin shit is this is what bugs me. Is that what I what flashed in my head is that this Bitcoin reserve and Binance is gonna help is really just opening the door for Tether and USDT to come in so that we can flood Ukraine with United States debt. And if you don't know why I say that, then you haven't been listening to the show. That's okay. If that means you're new and I like new people, I'm not gonna get into it. I've I've talked about it several times, and we're we're kinda running late today, so I'm not gonna get into it. But that was my gut reaction when I read that first sentence.
Binance is gonna help Ukraine with its Bitcoin reserve. All I can see is Tether just like under a dark cloak waiting in the shadows to pop through the door when we open that song, bitch. But, anyway, while praising the initiative, Kirill added, this won't be a fast track process. According to Kamikov, establishing a national cryptocurrency reserve would require several large scale scale amendments to Ukrainian legislation, which will take time. He also noted that current legislation does not allow for the holding and management of digital assets within official reserves. And last month, Binance CEO Richard Tang told the Financial Times that the company is collaborating with multiple countries on establishing a Bitcoin reserve and crafting crypto legislations or regulations rather. Previously, Binance cofounder and former CEO, Shengpeng Zhao, had proposed that Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan develop sovereign Bitcoin strategies.
Ukraine is not alone in this initiative because other countries around the world have begun to consider Bitcoin as a strategic asset, and they list examples, and we don't need to go through them. Again, my gut feeling says that poor Ukraine is gonna be used again, except this time it's going to be unload an a nerve wracking amount of United States freshly minted debt in the form of USDT into Eastern Europe is gonna land right on the border of Russia. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. Tether is more than what it seems. I'm sure that the people that created tether at first had all the correct intentions.
It is now being turned into weaponry and highly effective weaponry, I might add, except it's fiscal in nature. It's financial in nature, and it can destabilize wherever it is we choose to unload United States freshly minted debt on because Tether is backed and going to be further backed by United States debt instrumentation. I'm just saying. Alright. So Neutron has partnered with Kobo to power all of Asia with the lightning network. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll I'll believe it when I see it. But for now, this is out of Bitcoinnews.com. Neutron, the leading lightning network infrastructure provider in Asia, is announcing a spanking brand new partnership with Kobo, a globally trusted digital asset custody platform.
And through the collaboration, Kobo will integrate Neutron's Lightning Network API, enabling real time cost effective Bitcoin transaction across all of its services. Neutron's mission is to make the Lightning Network the the financial backbone for modern Bitcoin use, bridging traditional finance with Bitcoin's borderless decentralized economy. And he says, quote, we're thrilled to partner with Kobo, a trusted leader in custodial services, to further accelerate Bitcoin infrastructure across Asia, said Albert Bu, CEO of Neutron. Quote, at Neutron, we are committed to providing enterprise business with easy and efficient integration into the Lightning Network, enabling next generation global real time settlement solutions solutions.
This partnership will not only drive innovation, but also empower businesses across Asia with fast, secure, and cost effective benefits of Bitcoin payments. You know what I love about this statement? Because that's a direct quote from the CEO of Neutron, Albert Bu. You know what I love about it? It's not suit speak. It actually is readable. It's legible. It doesn't it it says what they want to do. I I am good with this. This is this is the kind of corporate statement that I don't make fun of because I'm like, okay. You actually told me what you're gonna do. You didn't talk drone on about vision and mission statements and blah blah blah blah blah and, like, a whole bunch of ambiguous statements that could be taken one way or another depending on which way the fucking wind blows.
That's suit speak, and I can't stand it. At least this guy from Neutron, which I've never heard from before, has a cogent statement and a cogent cogent mission. Let's move on to the last story of the day. William Sueberg, Cointelegraph, Bitcoin to a million by 2028 as Arthur Hayes tells Europe to get your money out. I think Arthur sees what I'm seeing. Let's find out. Bitcoin will shoot to a million in just three years thanks to global macroeconomic economic shifts, Arthur Hayes forecast. Gotta pause. I'm not reading this to you so that you get all jitty about million dollar Bitcoin.
I don't try to do that. I'm more interested in his view on Europe, but I need to read the whole thing. It's the ethical thing to do. In his latest blog post released May, the former CEO of BitMex doubled down on his BTC price prediction. Bitcoin has two, count the one, two strong tailwinds that will help propel it to seven digits in a few years. For Hayes, shifting capital controls worldwide and United States treasury devaluation means that Bitcoin will become the go to safety net for investors everywhere. He summarized thusly, quote, foreign capital repatriation and the devaluation of the gargantuan stock of United States treasuries will be the two catalysts that will power Bitcoin to $1,000,000 sometime between now and 2028, end quote.
While the date may appear arbitrary and demand 900% price appreciation in Bitcoin, Hayes argued that the financial landscape could change in an instant depending on the next US governmental administration. Quote, I say 2028 because that is when the next US presidential election occurs and who knows what type of politician will win and what policies they will enact, end quote. While the presidency of Donald Trump has enacted various pro crypto policies, this could begin to reverse if a shift in government were to occur. In Europe, here we go. In Europe, meanwhile, an increasing desire to control and even suppress crypto used by the general population signals a growing divergence.
Quote, not even China has banned the private ownership of Bitcoin because it knows it's counterproductive as well as impossible, Hayes wrote. He continues, quote, for you Europoor peans, Euroeuropoor peans. He actually says that Europoor peans whose governments practice a less effective form of communism than China does, don't expect the European Central Bank to learn this lesson without trying. Therefore, get your money out now, end quote. As Cointelegraph reported, Hayes has not been shy about predicting both short term and longer term BTC price expansions in the year to come. In April, he foresaw the return, to a hundred thousand. And before that, joined those seeing the mid $70,000 zone as a likely local bottom.
Multi million dollar targets for the next decade include those of major financial players such as Fidelity Investments. And then they drone on about Michael Saylor who says my forecast for 2045 is 13,000,000 per coin. It's really about the the whole reason I brought this to you is the European thing. And his the he's he does is it is probably something we should capture here, the two tailwinds that he talks about. The the potential change of administer well, actually, there's going to be a change of administration in 2028 no matter what happens because Trump only has two terms. This is his second term.
So the only real possibilities here is that JD Vance becomes elected as the next president in 2028 or the Democrats seize control. And we don't know what Democrats will look like in 2028. They may be they may be very much different. You never know. It's possible. It's not like it hasn't happened before. And since there's such tumult in the Democratic party at this point, they could very much be different. They lost the twenty twenty four election because Kamala Harris failed and refused to embrace and acknowledge the Bitcoin core voter, which has become a political force. And we saw that in the election of Donald Trump.
They might very well say, we're not gonna do that shit again. And they may come in and actually not really be all hands on about throttling Bitcoin. You don't know. I don't know. We don't know. Right? So there's that. Then he talks about the second tailwind, and that's the well, what did how did he how did he term it? Let's see. Where was it? Hold on. This is ridiculous because I just saw it. Yeah. US Treasury devaluation. You're talking about a whole bunch of US treasuries that are held by people, a lot of people that aren't exactly really friendly to us right now. And it's not just the sale of the US treasuries.
I think he's actually hinting at more than that. I think he's talking about the creation of new treasuries, which are going to be bought by Tether. Because Tether, at this point, is the seventh largest buyer of US treasuries in the world. That's beyond most that's beyond Mexico and Canada combined. And the US treasury is a debt instrumentation. It's not printing money. It's printing debt. Whoever buys that debt basically monetizes that debt for us, and we get money for it. Right? That's sort of the way. I mean, that's probably should be a little bit more, you know, new not nuanced, a a little bit more, sophisticated, but that's essentially what's going on. We print debt. People buy it. We get money for we basic essentially, you know, printed that money, or printed that debt and got money for it. So we now have money for the debt that we printed, and it's other people's money unless nobody buys the treasury bills at the auction.
In which case, traditionally, the Federal Reserve of the United States prints money in US dollars to buy the debt instrumentation that was created by the US Treasury. That's the incestuous relationship that exists between US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve is private, and they get to print money. The United States Treasury Service or Treasury is not private. It is public, and yet they can print debt. See how this works? It is not exactly a good thing. But since the since the advent of Tether and stablecoins, you have USDT or the company rather, Tether, the company behind USDT as the seventh largest purchaser of debt.
This is what I'm talking about. They're they spin up coins essentially the more debt they buy from the United States Treasury, the more tether they print. So now we've got a a different public private instrumentation. Now the US Treasury can just print debt and they don't have to rely on the Federal Reserve as the buyer of last resort to print US dollars. Now they can just say, hey, we'll sell it to Tether and they'll print USDT and USDT is global. So anytime anybody trades their fiat currency for Tether see how this works? This is what I'm talking about with Ukraine.
I mean, Binance, where because Tether basically fell out of Binance. They were spun out of Binance. It was a it was a Binance deal way back in the day. Well, actually, it was Binance. No. It was Bitfinex is is what it was. But Binance, I think, is is going to help Tether come into Ukraine, and that's gonna put it on the backside of Eastern Europe. So now we've got we've got rails for Tether into Central America, North America, South America, Africa, Western Europe, and now we're gonna be on the very Eastern edge of Europe encroaching on Russia.
And Tether's heavily used in Southeast Asia. It's it's everywhere. And when they buy US debt and they print Tether, they're essentially exporting US debt around the world. And we and and America Americans in general don't use Tether that much, not in comparison to the rest of these countries. This is what I'm talking about. It's not gonna be a good deal. I mean, at least not for not for these countries. And and it could and it probably won't be for Americans either. But if we flood other markets with our debt first, do the math.
Anyway, that's that's all I got for you today. It is Thursday. We got one more day until Friday. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 09:14AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May 2025. That's a lot of fives because some kind of numerology going on there that I can't suss out. But this is episode ten ninety six of Bitcoin. And we've got a major, major investor who is doing a turnabout on micro strategy in favor of Bitcoin. We'll get into it. Coinbase is in the news after, well, their shitty security does what their shitty security always does. Telegram is also in the news as well as the PPI numbers came in. That's the, producer's price index. There was a surprise.
Yes. There was indeed a surprise. Fold has a new gift card kind of thing out. That just hit the news today, so we'll get into that as well as what's going on with Meta Planet. And, yes, we're going to stand with Ukraine, but not not in the way that that you might actually think. And then Neutron and Kobo, two names I have never heard of before, are doing something with Lightning Network in Asia. And then Arthur Hayes is gonna finish us out with a huge warning to Europe. It seems I'm not the only one that thinks that Europe is toast. And whenever I say that, for the European guys that listen to this, this is nothing against you guys as citizens.
Right? I don't y'all are lovely people. Most citizens of most actually, I'm gonna go ahead and say all citizens of all countries are just really good people, just the finest of people as as, I guess, orange men might say. It's the governments. This this is our issue, and it ain't exactly like the United States government is some kind of, you know, nun walking around in a habit, you know, you know, teaching kids English or anything like that. It's not just Europe. It's Canada. It's The United States. It's Brazil. It's everybody. But Arthur Hayes seems to be on track with what I have happened to think about the governments of Europe and what they're doing.
He is basically screaming get out, and we'll talk about it. But first, there's this character named Jim Chanos. And he is doing an aggressive long and a short trade involving both MicroStrategy and Bitcoin. This is out of CNBC. Jeff Cox is riding it. Investor Jim Chanos is simultaneously betting on Bitcoin and against MicroStrategy, which is now known as strategy. And I'm surprised that Jeff Cox did not get that one. But, hey, it is what it is. It's strategy, a company that is taking risky strategies on the cryptocurrency with a backing by enthusiastic retail investors.
I'm gonna pause here to say that over the last couple of days, I've mentioned that I'm seeing a shift in online I don't know what the fad of the day. You know, it was op return. Everybody was bitching and moaning and crying and sniping at each other. And now it's we're all gonna die because of Bitcoin treasury companies. This is part of that movement away from or or being scared of Bitcoin treasury companies. I think Jim Chanos is looking at the field, and he's noticing that there is negative sentiment going on in the chatter online, and that would be Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. God only knows what else. So he's looking at the same shit I'm looking at, and this is the way it seems that he's going to play it, quote, we are selling MicroStrategy stock and buying Bitcoin and basically buying something for a dollar and selling it for 2 and a half dollars. The former hedge fund magnate told CNBC's Scott Wapner from the sidelines of the SONE Investment Conference in New York. And it's probably pronounced sun, but I I don't know.
Strategy is considered a proxy for Bitcoin as the software and cloud company holds more than half of a million tokens. However, the company has used leverage to amass that Bitcoin stockpile and trades at a very large premium to said Bitcoin holdings, quote. If you look at where MicroStrategy is now, more ominously, some of its copycat companies that are now raising lots of money are doing is they are basically selling retail investors. This is a terrible sentence. Let's try this again. If you look at where strategy is now oh, god. This is just a this sentence is terrible.
I'm I'm having a real real difficulty here, guys. Let's try it for a third time. Third time's a charm always. If you look at where strategy and now more ominously, some of its copycat companies that are now raising lots of money are doing is they are basically selling retail investors the idea that we are going to buy Bitcoin in a corporate structure. Because of what strategy has done, you should value us at a similar premium, he said. Okay. I gotta pause here because that is the worst sentence I've ever heard. I I barely know what that means if I just go by the crappy grammar.
And I'm not usually a grammar Nazi, but it's not just that words are important, people. It's the way you put them in order that makes meaning. So it looks like what he's he's just I think what he's saying is that, look, man. MicroStrategy is buying a lot of Bitcoin. They're using leverage to do it. They have their their stock price is trading at a premium compared to the value of that which they are leveraged to buy, and that would be the Bitcoin. And therefore, we're selling MicroStrategy and buying Bitcoin. Let's just say it like that. However, Chanos labeled that thinking ridiculous.
We're doing exactly what MicroStrategy and cofounder and former CEO Michael Saylor are doing, he added. We are selling MicroStrategy stock and buying Bitcoin and basically buying something for a buck and selling it for 2 and a half bucks. MicroStrategy shares have soared more than 220% over the past year, while Bitcoin has gained nearly 70% during the same period. And president Donald Trump has been a vocal backer of crypto, which has risen sharply since he announced broad based tariffs in early April. Quote, this is a good barometer of not only just the arbitrage itself, but I think of retail speculation, Chanos said of his trade.
Chanos, if you're wondering, was founder of Kynikos Associates and now runs a family office while providing advice to institutional clients. Okay. So the good news is I've never heard of Jim Chanos before. The bad news is, he's big enough apparently in the space that he could cause some problems. And what problems would that be? He's playing with a real basket of fire here, and I think he's taking a massive risk. And I'm not saying that because he's selling MicroStrategy. I don't own any MicroStrategy stock. I don't own Misty. I don't own Strike. I don't own Strife.
I just want the Bitcoin. That that's all I want. Now on the surface, this sounds like it makes kind of a bit of sense. You do have strategy who has bought a lot of Bitcoin using a lot of debt instrumentation that they themselves have manufactured in order to get that. And because of the retail frenzy about Misty and strategy and strike and strife and all of the rest of the debt instrumentation that Michael Saylor has created, they are all piling in. And instead of buying Bitcoin, they're buying the actual MicroStrategy stock because they don't I don't know. They don't wanna hold Bitcoin. Actually, I think it's more that they it's not that they don't want to hold the Bitcoin.
It's that they're seeing the frenzy. They're seeing the fad. They're seeing the excesses of human nature in the wild and they are chasing after it like a cheetah does after game in the African savannah. Now that said, here's the problem with it, is that biker strategy or strategy has so intrinsically intertwined their company, the present and the future of that particular corporation is so tied to the performance of Bitcoin that if and I'm not saying that this will happen, I'm just saying that if there is enough sell off of MicroStrategy that Bitcoin itself will have the the people will have retail will have the perception that Bitcoin is losing its value, and they will sell the Bitcoin too. And that's why this dude is making a very dangerous trade for himself and forever for whomever he represents.
He said they said that he's, you know, heading up a family office. So I don't know who this family is, but this dude's making a dangerous trade. Because if he is able to physically affect in a good portion the amount that people perceive the stock price of strategy at at a lower price, that could have knock on effects on the price of Bitcoin simply because the perception of the tie between Bitcoin and MicroStrategy. Bitcoin, it should not matter. The problem is we're not dealing with Bitcoin. We're not dealing with MicroStrategy. We're dealing with human perception of a thing, and that's where shit gets dangerous.
So more power to them. And like I said, the thesis actually makes sense. They've got a lot of micro strategy stock, and they're selling it, and they're buying Bitcoin directly with it. Honestly, this is kind of what you should do. Is he taking into account the possible knock on effect of the fact that people are greedy, hairless apes that just fell out of trees somewhere around 250,000 to 2,500,000 years ago. I'm just I'm just saying. It's just we are not we're not the sharpest tools in the shed. Not anymore. Right? We're driven by fads. We're driven by social media. We're driven by mainstream media.
It's a problem. I hope he does okay. Now on to Coinbase who got hacked. Yes. They got hacked. It's a bad one too because Coinbase faces a $400,000,000 bill after insider phishing attack. Zolton Vardy writing this one for Cointelegraph. Coinbase, the world's third largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hit by a $20,000,000 extortion attempt after cybercriminals recruited overseas support agents to leak user data, the company said. Oh, man. They got to your insiders. According to a May 15 blog post, Coinbase said that a group of external actors bribed and coordinated with several customer support contractors to access internal systems and steal limited user account data. I call bullshit already. I'll bet it's extensive user account data. But, quote, these insiders abuse their access to customer support systems to steal the account data for a small subset of customers.
Again, I call bullshit. I'll bet it is a large amount of customers. Anyway, they added that there was no passwords, private keys, funds, or Coinbase Prime accounts being affected. Okay. We'll just give them that. Less than 1% of Coinbase's monthly transacting users data was affected by the attack. The companies just said that this is what they're saying. After stealing the data, the attackers attempted to extort $20,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, of course, Bitcoin. They sure as shit ain't gonna want Ethereum, from Coinbase in exchange for not disclosing the breach. Coinbase refused the demand.
Instead, the company offered a $20,000,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and the conviction of those responsible for this scheme. Scammers often masquerades as recognizable brands to inspire a false sense of trust in their victims. In 2024, Coinbase was the most impersonated cryptocurrency brand by scammers. Now Coinbase said that it will reimburse users who were tricked into sending cryptocurrency to phishing scammers with expected remediation and reimbursement expenses ranging anywhere from a hundred and 80 to $400,000,000. The crypto exchange disclosed the estimate in an eight k filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission today, May, noting the expenses relate to voluntary customer reimbursements and other remediation efforts.
The attackers have been approached or have been approaching the exchanges overseas customer support agents for a month, aiming to bribe them in exchange for customer information, said Coinbase cofounder and CEO Brian the Bald Armstrong. Following the attack, the exchange will strengthen its internal data management processes and relocate some of its customer support operations to avoid similar incidents. Social engineering schemes are a growing concern for Coinbase users. Blockchain security analyst, Zach XBT, estimated that users lost around $45,000,000 to phishing schemes in the week leading up to May.
The blockchain security analyst previously claimed that social engineering scams cost Coinbase users over $300,000,000 annually, CoinGraph CoinGraph CoinTelegraph reported May or February. Okay. So this is bad. Yeah. It it's bad. It's not the first time it's happened, and it certainly is not the last time that this has happened. So if you are a Coinbase customer and by the way, you shouldn't be. You should stay as far away from Coinbase as humanly possible for a whole raft of reasons, not just the fact that they have shitty security policies. Okay. And, also, if you are going to employ people for, like, slave labor wages overseas, this is what you should expect.
And this is exactly the attack vector that I would have used as well. I'm not gonna go after the American people. I'm gonna go after any of the contractors that are getting paid shit and offer them way more, which in my view for me is way less. I could be offering them a hundred times what they get paid by Brian Mulratt Armstrong to do some nefarious shit, and it's going to be cheap a f for me. But to them, their perception again, this is a human perception issue. Their perception of what I'm offering is a king's ransom considering what they're probably getting paid. This is one of the reasons why American companies hire people in third world countries to do shit.
I'm surprised more of this type of thing doesn't happen. So when they say that they're going to relocate some of their customer service people, the only way that they can do that is to take them or or or hire Americans in America, pay them the wages that Americans are going to expect, and then you have a shot of not having, like, a a can of worms so easily pried open. This is what happens when you pay people shit. And you pay people shit because, well, we've screwed up the money. It all boils down to broken money. All of these problems are solved with Bitcoin, except possibly dark markets.
Telegram, yeah, Telegram, has shut down the largest illicit online marketplace after Elliptics Insights. Jamie Crowley is writing this one for CoinDesk. Telegram has shut down the illicit marketplace, Hao Wang guarantee, formerly known as Huon guarantee, which has facilitated transactions totaling over $27,000,000,000 in stablecoins since 2021. That's that's a big number. Howang was shut down based on insights provided by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic on Tuesday. The closure took place amidst a crackdown on thousands of suspected Chinese crypto crime channels operating on Telegram following Elliptic's report into marketplace, Zenby Guaranty.
I don't know why all these people put guarantee in their name. It sounds like an insurance company, but whatever. Telegram has now shut down both Huon and Zenbi, which or is probably how it's pronounced, z or it's x I n b I, so I'm gonna say it's Zenbi, which processed in combination $35,000,000,000 of illicit transactions in stablecoin, Elliptic wrote in a web post on Wednesday. Quote, our analysis indicates that Huwound guarantee has facilitated transactions totaling more than 27,000,000,000 since 2021, making it the largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated.
Ever operated. And Genby was the second largest, having processed transactions worth 8,400,000,000.0 since 2022. For perspective, notable dark web marketplaces such as the Silk Road and AlphaBay process 216,000,000 and $639,000,000 respectively. So 27,000,000,000 versus Silk Road's two hundred and sixteen million and Alphabay's six hundred and thirty nine million dollars. You're talking about, like, orders of magnitude larger. Such marketplaces historically operated through anonymous browser, Tor, but have more recently shifted their operations to Telegram, the messaging app with over a billion users.
Huon and Xinbi are referred to as guarantee marketplaces. Ah, there we go. A term designated for platforms that do not sell goods and services themselves but provide a venue for merchants to sell to customers. That's a that's a large dark marketplace. $27,000,000,000. 30 5 billion dollars combined on just these two places. They've been operating on Telegram since 2021 and 2022. Surprising, honestly. Very surprising. Kinda makes you kinda makes you, you know, wish you had a a huddle bar from Oshi over there at oshigood.us. That's oshi good, o s h I g o o d dot u s. It's oshigood.us.
You go there and you buy your stuff with Bitcoin. He sells it all for Bitcoin. What does he got? Well, he's got banana chocolate chip hodl bars. He has mint cookie hodl bars. He has mint so what oh, is it wait. Yeah. So he's got those two. He's got something called Hodel rounds, which look very, very beautiful chocolate here. And then he's got this stuff called Hodel butter. Now he makes all this stuff himself. And what's a Hodel bar? Well, let me tell you what's in the, in the banana what was it? Banana chocolate chip huddle bar. You can get a four pack for 23,000 satoshis. That's 23,000 satoshis.
You get four of them. Be prepared for a long trek down the rabbit hole of hunger with a multi pack of sweet and savory. Having a backup bar handy when hunger rears its ugly head is better than finding an extra office chair to sell when it's time to buy the dip. Ingredients are dates, pecan butter, dark chocolate chips, banana powder, peanut flour, chocolate power powder, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sea salt. I got one of these things. They're heavy. These things are these things are heavy. These are the things that you want in your backpack when you're on a hike. The dates alone pack enough sugar and, like, if you actually look at the types of sugars that are in, like, dates and the rest of this stuff, these are this is, like, sort of come these are more complex sugars than normal. Right? It's not just, like, eating, like, sucrose or fructose or glucose.
Dates, especially, really, like, they just, like, a a nice little packet of energy. And, yeah, I mean, for all the people that are just carnivore only, I get it. I get it. But sometimes, dude, you want something tasty, you want something sweet, you want something that's going to fill you up and keep you marching down that path, and banana chocolate chip huddle bars are the way to do it. When you go to the cart, when you order your stuff, the first thing that you see in your cart is what you ordered, and the second thing is the promo code. Type in Bitcoin and. I'm not saying that you're gonna get any percentage off. This what we're doing here is we're letting Oshi know that you heard it here on the circle p. Right? The circle p is open for business. It's how I'm trying to kick start in my own way a small circular Bitcoin economy so that we can buy goods and services from each other with Bitcoin the way it was meant to be used.
That's why I do this. So when you type in Bitcoin and into the promo code section, no. You're not gonna get anything off. It's just gonna let Oshie know that you heard about it here at the Circle p on the Bitcoin and podcast. And that way, in a value for value way, he can determine for himself what was the sale worth for me. And then he will cut that to me in Satoshis because that's the way value for value advertising models should work. Now on to the rest of the news, we got decrypt and Vismaya v writing this one about the Bitcoin dip that we saw this morning.
Why? Well, we had weaker than expected United States wholesale prices, which probably means that Jerome Powell has yet more ammunition to defend his stance that he will not lower the fed fund rate, which means cheap money not gonna be available to get into risky assets, and that makes, well, that makes retail cry. Bitcoin slipped slightly on Thursday after a closely watched inflation gauge showed wholesale prices in The United States registered a drop in April. The producer price index for final demand fell point 5% in April, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Thursday, compared to economist expectations of a point 2% monthly rise.
The index rose 2.4% over the past twelve months, slightly cooler than expectations. Core producer price index, which excludes food, energy, and trade services, also edged down by point 1%. That's the first decline in that measure since April of twenty twenty. In response, Bitcoin fell 1.3% to a hundred and 2,655 after the report, pairing gains from earlier in the session as per CoinGecko data. And they talk about shitcoin number one, number two, and number three. And then they say PPI, which tracks what US suppliers charge retailers and distributors, is a leading gauge of wholesale inflation compiled by surveying over 100,000 product prices every month, and serves as an early signal for consumer side inflation trends.
The point 5% decline in April was driven entirely by services according to the report, which fell point 7%, the sharpest drop since the series began in 02/2009. Over two thirds of the decline came from shrinking margins in final demand trade services, particularly machinery and vehicle wholesaling, which plunged 6.1% according to the BLS. Quote, I don't view the PPI as a significant catalyst for Bitcoin in the current environment, especially given the market's muted response to the recent consumer price index data, which came out a couple of days ago. The analyst, Aurelie Barthiri, I guess is how you pronounce it. She's the principal or or he maybe. I don't know. He or she, whatever. Principal research analyst at Nansen.
The analyst noted that unless the PPI came in meaningfully above expectations, even a mild upside surprise, say 10 basis points, was unlikely to shift either Bitcoin's direction or the market's outlook on Fed rate cuts. There it is. Still, traders are watching for more than just the inflation figure. All eyes are now on Fed chair Jerome Powell's remarks scheduled later Thursday. That would be today, an event that many analysts say could overshadow the data. Oh my god. We're gonna all gonna die. Quote, if Jerome Powell signals no urgency to ease policy, saying something like we're not in a rush to cut, markets could still turn defensive, said Tracy Jin, chief operating officer of crypto exchange, Mexc.
That scenario is far from guaranteed. The Fed has held its benchmark rate at 2.25 to 4.5% for four straight meetings, resisting calls from Trump to begin easing policy ahead of the November election. Jin warned that a hawkish tone from Powell could trigger a brief shakeout, particularly in overheated altcoins and said Bitcoin might retest support zones near, of course, 97,000 or even slip as low as 93,000. Not long after the new data was released, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell reiterated that the Fed remains fully committed to the 2% inflation target today, but that it is weighing revised or revising its consensus statement in coming months. Oh, boy.
That'll be fun. He specifically mentioned that the Fed might adjust its language around shortfalls, forecasts, and uncertainty. Quote, as we have been reviewing assessments of the 2020 and of the policy discussions in recent years, a common observation is the need for clear communications as complex events unfold. A critical question is how to foster a broader understanding of the uncertainty that the economy generally faces in periods of larger, more frequent, or more disparate shocks, Jerome Powell said. Markets initially rallied earlier this week after The US and China agreed to roll back retaliatory tariffs for ninety days. CPI data on Tuesday also helped cool nerves with consumer prices rising just point 2% month over month and 2.3% annually, which was both in line with expectations.
Amid these developments, Jin noted, quote, the smarter strategy now is to wait for better long entry zones rather than chase strength into uncertainty. Wow. That's an interesting way to put it. Investors now await the May 30 release of the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, what's known as the PCE index, for further clarity on whether the central bank will stay patient or pivot. Ahead of the report drop, analyst at crypto payment provider b two b n Pay, whatever the hell that is, told Decrypt how Bitcoin had rallied significantly over the past two weeks without any meaningful correction and cautioned that a retracement, even if not immediate, could reach around 2% as investor caution picked up. Okay. So that's the end of the article.
Jerome Powell is not going to drop rates. Let me say it again. He is not going to drop rates. Why? Because this PPI that came out is telling Jerome that what he's doing is working. It's not that I agree or disagree with what Jerome Powell's doing. I'm trying to remain neutral. I'm telling you I'm trying to crawl into Jerome Powell's head and rummage around and open up little dusty boxes of keepsakes to figure out how this guy thinks, and I've been doing it for so long that I can tell you with beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is beyond my gut feeling.
Jerome Powell thinks that what he's doing is working, and the numbers are backing his play. So, therefore, he's got more than enough ammunition to stand up to what Trump wants and say, no. We're not doing shit. And he's not going to drop rates. What does that mean? I've said it before, but if you need to hear it again, it means that cheap money that you can borrow so that you can go into risky assets in the stock market or Bitcoin or whatever is not forthcoming. And because of that, people are gonna say, well, screw it. We'll sell and try to find sell out of whatever risky asset we got so that we can, I don't know, park our cash into something less risky because everybody knows that when we don't allow cheap money to flow, that risky assets or things that are quote, unquote risky assets lose value because people start pulling their value out of it because that's what they think everybody else is going to do, and it's like a round robin? It's like a a cycle into hell. Right? And everybody does the exact same thing. And we could see 97,000.
We could dip back below a hundred thousand dollars. We're we were struggling earlier today. What are we doing right now? Well, right now, we're at a hundred and $3,677, and we got to a low of, like, two and a half hours ago. We were at a hundred and $1,009.80. So we saw quite the dip over the last twelve hours. We'll have to wait and see what the hell happens. But this PPI, these numbers along with the consumer price index numbers on Tuesday, I said the same thing on Tuesday. He's got all and he being Jerome Powell, he has all the ammunition he needs to take aim at Trump and say, I'm not I'm not gonna you can do whatever you want. You can bitch and moan on on truth social all day long and twice on Sunday.
I'm not budging. There is no cheap money this time around. We'll have to wait until the next month CPI and PPI numbers come out or whenever they come out. And if if if we see problems then, maybe. But I'm I am not holding my breath for cheap money anytime soon. Let's run the number. CNBC futures and commodities, oil getting hit hard. The PPI in you know, the PPI just numbers just keep rolling. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.15% to $61.79 a barrel. Brittnorsea is down 2.1 to $64.71. Natural gas, down a half point to $3.47 per thousand. And gasoline, wow, down 1.66% to $2.13.
Gold and all of its shiny metal brethren are all up today. Gold is up 1.14% to $32.24 and 6 dimes. Silver is up point 7%. Platinum is up one and a third. Copper is up two thirds. Palladium is up one and three quarters. In agriculture, we got a mixed bag here, mostly in the green though. Biggest winner is chocolate. No. I lied. By more than doubling that, lumber is the biggest winner at 8% to the upside. And the biggest loser today is gonna be soybeans, 2.76% to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle is down one and a quarter point. Lean hogs are up 1.17%, and feeder cattle are down 1.47%.
Meanwhile, the Dow is up a third of a point to 42 to 50. S and P is up a third as is the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, S and P Mini is drifting sideways only moderately, slightly, kind of tiny in the red. We are at, however, a hundred and $3,780 per coin. That's a 2,060,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 32.1 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,864,941 and 1 half of. Average fees per block are low, 0.04 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are eight blocks carrying 8,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at 3 Satoshis per vbyte.
Low priority is gonna get you in also at 3 Satoshis per vbyte. Hash rate drifting sideways, 850.7 exahashes per second at this particular time. A reminder here to go to bitcoinandshow.com and sign up. Go to bitcoin and show bitcoinandshow.com. That's bitcoinandshow, it's all one word, .com. Trying to get this to be something. It'd be nice to get a couple of more people to, you know, register to the email. I'm not ever going to sell your email. I'm never going to give your email away. I'm not going to trade for goods and services with your email. It's mine. If you give it to me, I will keep it because it's mine.
Mine. Mine. Yeah. Just give me a hand with that website there. Just, sign up and I'd that's where I'm putting all of the shows. I'm thinking about putting out a news, you know, a newsletter, like a weekly recap of what happened during the week. We'll see how that goes. It's brand new. So, you know, get give me I'm not a good webmaster. So it's I'm getting better, but, yeah, it it's it's new, and I need some I need y'all's help with it. From Bitcoin Treasury Hysteria, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Psyduck with 1,021 sat says Axelrod.
Jason High with a thousand sat says, just wanted to say I love the show. Once I updated my once I update my website, I'd like to get info on joining the Circle p to advertise my tie dye shirts and oil paintings. Bring it on, brother. We will talk. Anonymous with a thousand says oh, no. That's the exact same one. Fountain I'm looking at fountain.fm and it's a little funk a little wonky sometimes. Psyduck, this time is a different one. Five hundred 90 nine sat says psyduck. Turkey with a hundred 500 sat says, nothing. Pies with $4.20 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. God's death with two thirty seven, not once, but twice says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use, introducing Bitcoin gift cards by Fold. Yes. Fold has introduced, as of today, a gift card that has actual Bitcoin on it. Let's find out if that's exactly true. Sometimes I've been fooled in the past, so let's let's read this announcement here. Buying and gifting Bitcoin is now as simple as buying any other gift card. Okay. Sounds good so far. You can now purchase and send digital Bitcoin gift cards powered by Fold. So not only can you easily gift Bitcoin, but someone brand new to Bitcoin can now have a starting balance of Bitcoin when you share Fold App with them. Keep reading and head to foldapp.com/ bitcoin gift cards to purchase a gift card. So how do they work?
Fold is partnering with a company named TOTUS, a leading gift card issuer for top consumer brands. This ensures a seamless buying experience and access to one of the widest retail distribution networks in the country. Once purchased, these Bitcoin gift cards can be redeemed into a fold Bitcoin balance. Gift cards are dollar denominated loaded with up to $500 worth of Bitcoin. The cash balance is held until redemption. The BTC amount purchased will be determined by the exchange rate at the time of redemption. What's the redemption period?
So if you buy and send a gift card to someone, they'll be taken through the process of creating a fold account, gaining access to their Bitcoin balance wallet, and exposed to all the other features for stacking sats. Once redeemed, those funds could be withdrawn to self custody or stay in their Bitcoin balance with Fold. This is the perfect onboarding experience. No altcoin distractions. A simple process requires no Bitcoin knowledge whatsoever. Peace of mind with a Bitcoin focused custodial solution and all the tools for continuing one's Bitcoin savings journey. Okay.
So it's it's it's not going to exist outside the fold ecosystem. That's fine. It's it's a like, to me, this is more of a promotion than any fourfold than anything else. It's like a way for, you know, I don't know, for me to be able to buy one of these things and I I I don't even know if I have to have a fold account to buy one. I do have a fold account, but I I don't know if I would need one to buy one of these. The issue is is that when you give it to somebody, the only redemption output of this is in Fold. So they're gonna have to sign up for Fold. It's actually kind of brilliant from a marketing standpoint, but it's not exactly my cup of tea. But, hey, at least with here here's the good news about this. Right? If if for whatever reason you hate fold, I actually I like fold. I have no problems with fold. I really don't. But if for whatever reason, you're just rolling your eyes about this because it's a marketing deal and it's like folding people into the Fold ecosystem. Hey. You see what I did there?
The fact that there is a a mechanism by which a gift card that holds an actual Bitcoin balance on it, and and that may not be true. We're not I mean, they're not really getting into the weeds of the mechanism. However, a Bitcoin denominated card is not not a terrible idea. It really is not a terrible idea. And again, kudos to the fact that this is a hell of a marketing plan to get people in to sign up for FOLD. Applause, brothers. Applause. That's all I can say. Let's get on to Japan. Get over to Asia. Get some sushi. Get some udon noodles because Japan's micro strategies, which is named Meta Planet, has posted a record quarter number.
Now they own over $700,000,000 worth of Bitcoin, but that's not the cool thing about that. It's their it's their quarterly numbers that's gonna be presented here that I'm interested in. So Meta Planet Incorporated, which is widely recognized as Japan's leading Bitcoin treasury company, you know, the BTC, god, has reported its strongest quarter to date for the first quarter of fiscal year twenty twenty five marked by record, a record operating profit and a significant expansion of its balance sheet. Revenue reached 877,000,000 yen, which is an 8% increase quarter over quarter.
That's pretty good, guys. While operating profit hit a record 593,000,000 yen, that's up 11 quarter over quarter. This marks the company's highest operating profit ever. Total assets surged to 55,000,000,000 yen. That's up 81%. And net assets soared to $50,400,000,000, which is a nine no. A 197% increase compared to the previous quarter. Despite a 7,400,000,000.0 yen valuation loss due to the lower Bitcoin price at the March, Meta Planet has rebounded strongly. As of May, the company holds 13,500,000,000.0 yen in unrealized gains.
Thanks to a recovery in Bitcoin's market value, the temporary dip impacted net income, which came in at 5,000,000,000 yen for the quarter, but core operations remain strong. The company's Bitcoin holdings have skyrocketed to 6,796 BTC, which is a 3.9% no. Percent. I'm sorry. A 3.9 x increase year to date. In 2025 alone, Meta Planet added over 5,000 BTC reinforcing its commitment to the Bitcoin treasury standard. Since adopting the strategy, the company has seen its BTC net asset value increase 103.1 x, not percent, x, and its market cap grow by 138.1 x.
Again, not percent, but x. 138.1 times. Damn. Quote, guided by the conviction, we pivoted in 2024 to become Japan's First dedicated Bitcoin treasury company, said Meta Planet's management in their quarter one twenty twenty five earnings presentation. In q one twenty twenty five, we launched and have already executed 87% of a two year, one hundred and sixteen billion yen moving strike warrant program, the largest and lowest cost equity financing of its kind ever placed in Japan, end quote. Meta Planet also reported a substantial rise in shareholders, growing from 10,854 shareholders in December of twenty twenty three to 63,654 by March of twenty twenty five. My god almighty. It's like a six x growth.
The growth trend saw major jumps throughout the year with 29,796 shareholders in June of twenty twenty four, '30 '7 '5 hundred and '30 '7 in September, '40 '1 thousand '5 hundred and '50 '3 in October, and 47,292 in December of twenty twenty four before surging to its current peak. Member of Meta Planet's board of director, Tyler Evans, posted on Twitter, congrats, Meta Planet. Simon Gurevich, Yashami Abe, and Dylan LeClaire on a record quarter. 3.9 x growth in BTC year to date is incredible. Quote, our results speak for themselves. We don't set targets to feel safe. We set them to exceed them quarter after quarter, said Meta Planet's management management.
The global feedback loop between capital markets and Bitcoin is just beginning. Meta Planet intends to be its premier conduit. So, yeah, holy shit. Remember that Meta Planet was essentially sort of like a failed hotel management company, Basically, a zombie. And they're like, well, what else that maybe let's do what Sailor's doing. Maybe maybe their chief investment officer or their chief financial officer was one of the people that took part of Michael Sailor's, you know, Bitcoin for chief investment officer's webinar, which he did, like, two and a half, three years ago. And a whole bunch of people attended, but we didn't really see anything drop out of it until the first quarter of this year is when it's real we just see nothing but acceleration.
Last quarter of last year, yeah, that one too. But it's really coming to the head in the first quarter of this year. Now we're in the second quarter and people are starting to have that, Like I said, it's no longer the opportune is gonna kill Bitcoin. It's the BTC, the Bitcoin Treasury companies are going to kill Bitcoin. Yet here we have Meta Planet that has completely turned their ass around. Now the next step for in for somebody like Meta Planet is to actually go back and say, what was our core business? Is there a way that we can get back into successfully managing hotel properties, which is what Meta Planet was doing, and they were not doing it well? Is there a way they can get back into that and do it well? Or do they pivot to something else? My my point here is is that one of the things that I myself am kinda sick about hearing is just zombie companies, and I'm I'm hate to say it, strategy was a zombie company.
Its stock price was just flat for debt for a couple of decades. I mean, it peaked around let's see. It had a massive peak to something like $420 adjusted or $390 adjusted for stock splits along the way in, like, '99, something like that, or 02/2001, right around the time that the .com bubble was inflating and then then it it died along with everything else in 02/2001 when that bubble burst. And then it stayed flat until the summer of, what was it, 2020 or 2021 or something like that when they started buying Bitcoin. They haven't really been doing anything. I mean, they have been servicing their customers. They've been, like, making some, you know, making some software for business analysis, but, yeah, whoop de doob.
And then they started getting into Bitcoin, and all of a sudden, they're back up to all time high stock prices. Well, that's all well and good, but there's no real product. They have talked about this artificial intelligence, business intelligence software that they've been working on. Until I see it, I I don't I don't actually view it as as a thing. Meta Planet is a fail you know, was a failing hotel property management company, so there's that. And then you've got shit like twenty one Capital coming up, which I can't tell what the hell it is they do. And and I like Jack Mallers. Don't get me wrong. And it sounds like I'm angry. I'm not. I'm just say I'm just trying to be pragmatic here and relatively neutral and say, what is it you actually do?
That's a fair question. There I'm not being unfair. I'm saying, what do you what do you produce? I mean, what do you make? Do you manufacture something? Do you create something? Do you ship something? Is it digital? Do you put it in a box and tape it and send it to my door? I mean, I don't know what half of these Bitcoin treasury companies do, which is one of the reasons why I think that Jim Chernobyl guy or what let's say what's his name? Chanos, not Chernobyl. Jim Chanos, the first story that we read today. I guarantee you that's probably his sentiment.
It's like, well, what is it that you actually make? What do you sell? Where where does where does your company's income come from? And it's not a bad idea for companies to to do what Michael Saylor said. You've got to stop treating your balance sheet as something that's neutral, something that is just you keeping a safe, something that you don't leverage, some something that you don't make work for you in a positive advantage sort of way. This is good advice. There is no reason not to enslave your money to go out and build more money. There's no reason not in fact, it's a bad idea to not do it.
But there's another part of the whole why do you have a company. You have to offer something. It can't just be about the balance sheet. There's there's a a gaping hole. There there's there's nothing to stand on. You've just got a balloon that's kind of tied to a string, and there's nothing between the ground and the bottom of the balloon. It's just this it's it's air. It's just open air. Without that grounding, and the grounding comes from a product or a service or several that you sell consistently year over year. That's what fills that gap between the balloon that is your treasury and the ground that is reality.
And without that, you have problems. And I think that's what Jim Chanos is picking up on. And he's saying, screw this. I'm getting the real thing. I'm buying Bitcoin. And I can't blame him for that either. Because, hell, even Ukraine wants to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Again, for those of you who think I'm rough on Ukraine, I'm not. It's not the people of Ukraine that I have a problem with. It's the government. It's corrupt. It's been that way for decades and decades and decades. The whole thing is a money laundering operation for The United States and the rest of the West. It is.
It always has been or at least since the era of Clinton. And Bush has used it. In fact, I'll bet I'll bet you that this you in fact, I think this Ukraine thing's been going on since Bush won, if not even Reagan. So it's not it's not a red versus blue thing. I'm saying that that we've used this poor country as a way to funnel all kinds of money in a way to launder that money and kick it back to the richest of the rich. And now we're using it as a proxy war against Russia. And who's caught in the middle but the people of Ukraine? So don't think that I'm going, yeah, I hate Ukraine.
I I think the people of Ukraine suck. That is not the truth. But their government? Dude, it ain't nothing but an extension of the western need to launder money, And that's why we see Ukraine with the problems that it has today. Maybe, just maybe, they can work themselves out of a hole and become an actual sovereign nation and tell both The United States and Russia and China to fuck straight off. And maybe they'll do it with Bitcoin because according to a report by encrypted, Ukraine is working on the creation of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and the news was announced by Yaroslav Zelznick, vice chairman of the committee on fiscal tax and customs policy.
The draft law to establish the reserve is nearly complete according to the report, and could be submitted to parliament in the coming weeks. The goal is to grant the National Bank of Ukraine the legal authority to hold Bitcoin and treat it as a reserve asset. In recent years, Ukraine has shown openness toward digital assets, and the war with Russia has further highlighted their importance, with cryptocurrency donations helping the country raise millions of dollars in humanitarian and defense aid in 2022 and 2023. Now the Ukrainian government is planning a comprehensive set of reforms that would allow cryptocurrencies to gain a foothold within the country's regulatory framework.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation is leading this effort. The new law, excuse me, would categorize digital assets, establish rules for exchanges, and introduce clear tax guidelines. If approved, the measure could come into effect as soon as possible. Kirill Kominyakov, which is probably a butchering of the name, Binance's regional head for Central And Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa, stated that the exchange will support Ukraine in creating its Bitcoin reserve. So Binance to the rescue, and you know who's connected with Binance? Tether, USDT.
Are you telling you, man? This stablecoin shit is this is what bugs me. Is that what I what flashed in my head is that this Bitcoin reserve and Binance is gonna help is really just opening the door for Tether and USDT to come in so that we can flood Ukraine with United States debt. And if you don't know why I say that, then you haven't been listening to the show. That's okay. If that means you're new and I like new people, I'm not gonna get into it. I've I've talked about it several times, and we're we're kinda running late today, so I'm not gonna get into it. But that was my gut reaction when I read that first sentence.
Binance is gonna help Ukraine with its Bitcoin reserve. All I can see is Tether just like under a dark cloak waiting in the shadows to pop through the door when we open that song, bitch. But, anyway, while praising the initiative, Kirill added, this won't be a fast track process. According to Kamikov, establishing a national cryptocurrency reserve would require several large scale scale amendments to Ukrainian legislation, which will take time. He also noted that current legislation does not allow for the holding and management of digital assets within official reserves. And last month, Binance CEO Richard Tang told the Financial Times that the company is collaborating with multiple countries on establishing a Bitcoin reserve and crafting crypto legislations or regulations rather. Previously, Binance cofounder and former CEO, Shengpeng Zhao, had proposed that Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan develop sovereign Bitcoin strategies.
Ukraine is not alone in this initiative because other countries around the world have begun to consider Bitcoin as a strategic asset, and they list examples, and we don't need to go through them. Again, my gut feeling says that poor Ukraine is gonna be used again, except this time it's going to be unload an a nerve wracking amount of United States freshly minted debt in the form of USDT into Eastern Europe is gonna land right on the border of Russia. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. Tether is more than what it seems. I'm sure that the people that created tether at first had all the correct intentions.
It is now being turned into weaponry and highly effective weaponry, I might add, except it's fiscal in nature. It's financial in nature, and it can destabilize wherever it is we choose to unload United States freshly minted debt on because Tether is backed and going to be further backed by United States debt instrumentation. I'm just saying. Alright. So Neutron has partnered with Kobo to power all of Asia with the lightning network. Yeah. Well, maybe I'll I'll believe it when I see it. But for now, this is out of Bitcoinnews.com. Neutron, the leading lightning network infrastructure provider in Asia, is announcing a spanking brand new partnership with Kobo, a globally trusted digital asset custody platform.
And through the collaboration, Kobo will integrate Neutron's Lightning Network API, enabling real time cost effective Bitcoin transaction across all of its services. Neutron's mission is to make the Lightning Network the the financial backbone for modern Bitcoin use, bridging traditional finance with Bitcoin's borderless decentralized economy. And he says, quote, we're thrilled to partner with Kobo, a trusted leader in custodial services, to further accelerate Bitcoin infrastructure across Asia, said Albert Bu, CEO of Neutron. Quote, at Neutron, we are committed to providing enterprise business with easy and efficient integration into the Lightning Network, enabling next generation global real time settlement solutions solutions.
This partnership will not only drive innovation, but also empower businesses across Asia with fast, secure, and cost effective benefits of Bitcoin payments. You know what I love about this statement? Because that's a direct quote from the CEO of Neutron, Albert Bu. You know what I love about it? It's not suit speak. It actually is readable. It's legible. It doesn't it it says what they want to do. I I am good with this. This is this is the kind of corporate statement that I don't make fun of because I'm like, okay. You actually told me what you're gonna do. You didn't talk drone on about vision and mission statements and blah blah blah blah blah and, like, a whole bunch of ambiguous statements that could be taken one way or another depending on which way the fucking wind blows.
That's suit speak, and I can't stand it. At least this guy from Neutron, which I've never heard from before, has a cogent statement and a cogent cogent mission. Let's move on to the last story of the day. William Sueberg, Cointelegraph, Bitcoin to a million by 2028 as Arthur Hayes tells Europe to get your money out. I think Arthur sees what I'm seeing. Let's find out. Bitcoin will shoot to a million in just three years thanks to global macroeconomic economic shifts, Arthur Hayes forecast. Gotta pause. I'm not reading this to you so that you get all jitty about million dollar Bitcoin.
I don't try to do that. I'm more interested in his view on Europe, but I need to read the whole thing. It's the ethical thing to do. In his latest blog post released May, the former CEO of BitMex doubled down on his BTC price prediction. Bitcoin has two, count the one, two strong tailwinds that will help propel it to seven digits in a few years. For Hayes, shifting capital controls worldwide and United States treasury devaluation means that Bitcoin will become the go to safety net for investors everywhere. He summarized thusly, quote, foreign capital repatriation and the devaluation of the gargantuan stock of United States treasuries will be the two catalysts that will power Bitcoin to $1,000,000 sometime between now and 2028, end quote.
While the date may appear arbitrary and demand 900% price appreciation in Bitcoin, Hayes argued that the financial landscape could change in an instant depending on the next US governmental administration. Quote, I say 2028 because that is when the next US presidential election occurs and who knows what type of politician will win and what policies they will enact, end quote. While the presidency of Donald Trump has enacted various pro crypto policies, this could begin to reverse if a shift in government were to occur. In Europe, here we go. In Europe, meanwhile, an increasing desire to control and even suppress crypto used by the general population signals a growing divergence.
Quote, not even China has banned the private ownership of Bitcoin because it knows it's counterproductive as well as impossible, Hayes wrote. He continues, quote, for you Europoor peans, Euroeuropoor peans. He actually says that Europoor peans whose governments practice a less effective form of communism than China does, don't expect the European Central Bank to learn this lesson without trying. Therefore, get your money out now, end quote. As Cointelegraph reported, Hayes has not been shy about predicting both short term and longer term BTC price expansions in the year to come. In April, he foresaw the return, to a hundred thousand. And before that, joined those seeing the mid $70,000 zone as a likely local bottom.
Multi million dollar targets for the next decade include those of major financial players such as Fidelity Investments. And then they drone on about Michael Saylor who says my forecast for 2045 is 13,000,000 per coin. It's really about the the whole reason I brought this to you is the European thing. And his the he's he does is it is probably something we should capture here, the two tailwinds that he talks about. The the potential change of administer well, actually, there's going to be a change of administration in 2028 no matter what happens because Trump only has two terms. This is his second term.
So the only real possibilities here is that JD Vance becomes elected as the next president in 2028 or the Democrats seize control. And we don't know what Democrats will look like in 2028. They may be they may be very much different. You never know. It's possible. It's not like it hasn't happened before. And since there's such tumult in the Democratic party at this point, they could very much be different. They lost the twenty twenty four election because Kamala Harris failed and refused to embrace and acknowledge the Bitcoin core voter, which has become a political force. And we saw that in the election of Donald Trump.
They might very well say, we're not gonna do that shit again. And they may come in and actually not really be all hands on about throttling Bitcoin. You don't know. I don't know. We don't know. Right? So there's that. Then he talks about the second tailwind, and that's the well, what did how did he how did he term it? Let's see. Where was it? Hold on. This is ridiculous because I just saw it. Yeah. US Treasury devaluation. You're talking about a whole bunch of US treasuries that are held by people, a lot of people that aren't exactly really friendly to us right now. And it's not just the sale of the US treasuries.
I think he's actually hinting at more than that. I think he's talking about the creation of new treasuries, which are going to be bought by Tether. Because Tether, at this point, is the seventh largest buyer of US treasuries in the world. That's beyond most that's beyond Mexico and Canada combined. And the US treasury is a debt instrumentation. It's not printing money. It's printing debt. Whoever buys that debt basically monetizes that debt for us, and we get money for it. Right? That's sort of the way. I mean, that's probably should be a little bit more, you know, new not nuanced, a a little bit more, sophisticated, but that's essentially what's going on. We print debt. People buy it. We get money for we basic essentially, you know, printed that money, or printed that debt and got money for it. So we now have money for the debt that we printed, and it's other people's money unless nobody buys the treasury bills at the auction.
In which case, traditionally, the Federal Reserve of the United States prints money in US dollars to buy the debt instrumentation that was created by the US Treasury. That's the incestuous relationship that exists between US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Federal Reserve is private, and they get to print money. The United States Treasury Service or Treasury is not private. It is public, and yet they can print debt. See how this works? It is not exactly a good thing. But since the since the advent of Tether and stablecoins, you have USDT or the company rather, Tether, the company behind USDT as the seventh largest purchaser of debt.
This is what I'm talking about. They're they spin up coins essentially the more debt they buy from the United States Treasury, the more tether they print. So now we've got a a different public private instrumentation. Now the US Treasury can just print debt and they don't have to rely on the Federal Reserve as the buyer of last resort to print US dollars. Now they can just say, hey, we'll sell it to Tether and they'll print USDT and USDT is global. So anytime anybody trades their fiat currency for Tether see how this works? This is what I'm talking about with Ukraine.
I mean, Binance, where because Tether basically fell out of Binance. They were spun out of Binance. It was a it was a Binance deal way back in the day. Well, actually, it was Binance. No. It was Bitfinex is is what it was. But Binance, I think, is is going to help Tether come into Ukraine, and that's gonna put it on the backside of Eastern Europe. So now we've got we've got rails for Tether into Central America, North America, South America, Africa, Western Europe, and now we're gonna be on the very Eastern edge of Europe encroaching on Russia.
And Tether's heavily used in Southeast Asia. It's it's everywhere. And when they buy US debt and they print Tether, they're essentially exporting US debt around the world. And we and and America Americans in general don't use Tether that much, not in comparison to the rest of these countries. This is what I'm talking about. It's not gonna be a good deal. I mean, at least not for not for these countries. And and it could and it probably won't be for Americans either. But if we flood other markets with our debt first, do the math.
Anyway, that's that's all I got for you today. It is Thursday. We got one more day until Friday. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I am your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
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