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Strive to merge with Semler Scientific to form “the fastest growing corporate Bitcoin holder”

Meanwhile, Metaplanet made its largest acquisition to date of 5,419 bitcoin.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive, which merged with Asset Entities earlier this month to launch a bitcoin treasury, announced it acquired Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal. Shares of Semler jumped on the announcement.

Tim Kotzman, founder of Bitcoin Treasuries Media, told Sherwood News that the merger ushers in the M&A era of bitcoin treasuries. 

“You can mine Bitcoin, buy it, or acquire it. I believe M&A will become the primary theme in the DAT [digital asset treasury] space and may become the prevailing activity, with bankruptcies taking a back seat due to the pristine nature of bitcoin as collateral,” he said. 

Maja Vujinovic, CEO of FG Nexus, echoed the sentiment, saying that she expects to see more of these mergers as public companies seek both liquidity and legitimacy in the digital asset space.

In the announcement, Strive said it acquired 5,816 bitcoin and noted that the combined company will own over 10,900 bitcoin, which is still not enough to rank in the top 10 of corporate bitcoin treasuries, so it has a lot of room to “become the fastest growing corporate Bitcoin holder.”

Speaking of, bitcoin treasury company Metaplanet has shot up to fifth place on the corporate bitcoin treasury leaderboard with its latest purchase. The Japanese company announced this morning that it acquired 5,419 bitcoin for $632.53 million, its largest acquisition to date.

And not to be forgotten, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, Strategy, announced it acquired 850 bitcoin for $99.7 million.

In other bitcoin treasury news:

  • Newly launched UK company B HODL started trading on the Aquis Stock Exchange on Monday after raising $20 million for its bitcoin treasury via the issuance of new shares. Major shareholders include Adam Back, inventor of Hashcash and cofounder of Blockstream, with a 25.3% share, according to the announcement.

  • French company Capital B acquired 551 bitcoin, bringing its total holdings to 2,800 bitcoin.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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