The Daily: Strategy's bitcoin acquisition drought stretches on, and more

The following article is adapted from The Block’s newsletter, The Daily, which comes out on weekday afternoons.

Happy Monday! Bitcoin's implied volatility has dropped to its lowest level in nearly a year, reflecting changing derivatives market dynamics more than lower risk, according to Diana Pires, chief business officer at institutional crypto prime broker sFOX.

In today's newsletter, Strategy sells another 1,690 BTC, the Adam Back-backed H100 more than triples its bitcoin holdings, Robinhood launches crypto trading in the UK, and more.

Meanwhile, Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed to the Clarity Act, teeing up a Sept. 15 procedural vote in the Senate.

👀 P.S. Don't forget to check out today's reader poll on bitcoin vs. ether later in the newsletter.

⛰️ Reminder: We'll be on the ground at SALT's Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole Aug. 17-20, with exclusive interviews and coverage of the biggest stories shaping crypto and global finance.

Michael Saylor's Strategy sells another 1,690 BTC as USD reserve hits $4.65 billion

Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy sold another 1,690 BTC for about $108.6 million last week at an average of $64,262, trimming its holdings to 840,447 BTC, according to a Monday SEC filing.

• The firm also sold 6.6 million MSTR shares for $653.1 million, using the proceeds to buy back STRC preferred stock and top up its USD reserve by $650 million to $4.65 billion.
• Strategy's haul still accounts for around 4% of bitcoin's 21 million supply cap, but carries around $8.7 billion of paper losses at current prices against an average cost of $75,385 per bitcoin.
• Amid Strategy's continued bitcoin sales, co-founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor recently cleared the air on his personal stash, stating he had sold "not one satoshi."
• Under its new capital framework, Strategy has restricted its USD reserve to dividends and interest, authorized $1 billion buyback programs for common and preferred stocks, and expanded its bitcoin-monetization program to sell as much as $5 billion in BTC.
• The broader bitcoin-treasury cohort continues to struggle, with 196 public firms now holding BTC but their shares well off summer 2025 highs, while MSTR itself is still down about 78% from its peak.

Adam Back-backed H100 more than triples bitcoin holdings to 3,506 BTC in acquisition deal

One bitcoin treasury company that's still stacking is H100, the Adam Back-backed Swedish firm that more than tripled its holdings by acquiring Norwegian firms Moonshot and PDI.

• The company added 2,455.7 BTC through the deal, bringing its total holdings to over 3,506 BTC ($226.7 million), vaulting it from the 42nd- to the 26th-largest public corporate bitcoin holder, closing in on the Winklevoss-led Gemini treasury.
• H100 funded the acquisition with 790.5 million newly issued shares, about 70% dilution, though it said the deal left sats per basic share unchanged and increased sats per fully diluted share by around 5%.
• "This is the largest M&A transaction ever completed in the European Public Bitcoin Equity sector," H100 Executive Chairman Sander Andersen said.

Robinhood brings crypto trading to main UK app through Bitstamp

Robinhood began rolling out crypto trading to eligible UK customers, allowing them to buy and sell more than 50 assets in its main investing platform via Bitstamp, the exchange it bought for $200 million last year.

• Crypto now sits alongside stocks, ISAs, options, and futures in one app, launching with zero trading, account, and custody fees, though UK users face a 0.1% FX fee that rises to 0.3% on certain weekend conversions.
• Notably, external crypto transfers will not be available at launch, though the company expects to add more features to the UK app in the near future, a spokesperson told The Block.
• The launch also brings Robinhood's AI-powered Cortex feature that analyzes breaking news, market data, and technical indicators to explain what's driving price moves in assets like BTC, XRP, and SOL.

Standard Chartered sees LINK at $200 by 2030 as Chainlink underpins tokenized-asset boom

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 LINK price target by the end of 2030, a roughly 25-fold jump from about $8 today, casting the network as critical infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets.

• The bank sees onchain tokenized assets climbing to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, up from around $340 billion today, requiring the type of external data that Chainlink's oracles can provide.
• Analyst Geoff Kendrick expects Chainlink's fee generation to scale about 25 times by 2030 across its oracle and cross-chain lines, with its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) volume already up 353% year over year in Q2 to $4.9 billion.
• Nevertheless, Kendrick flagged three risks to the thesis: slower institutional tokenization, competition from specialist providers, and technical failures that could damage trust in the platform.

Bitcoin's BIP-110 supporters split onto minority chain as main network pulls ahead

A small group of Bitcoin nodes supporting the BIP-110 "anti-spam" proposal broke off onto a minority chain over the weekend at block 961,632.

• Just 2.5% of blocks signaled support for BIP-110 in the two weeks before it became compulsory, far short of the 55% needed without causing a chain split, and subsequently declining further.
• The forked chain quickly stalled after just two blocks, falling far behind the main network.
• It inherited Bitcoin's full mining difficulty but drew almost none of its hashpower, leaving it crawling along at a pace that could take years without a proof-of-work change.
• BIP-110 sought to restrict certain non-financial data like Ordinals inscriptions on Bitcoin for a year amid a broader debate over who decides how block space is used.

Reader poll

Which outperforms this week: bitcoin or ether?

BITCOIN

ETHER

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In the next 24 hours

• It's quiet on the economic calendar front.

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