Podcast: The Everything Exchanges · A boring week that wasn't — Aug 16

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Whether you read every Daily this week, only a few, or none at all — here's the shape of the week, seen from a distance.

In this week's Digest:

🎧 Kaupr Weekly — The Everything Exchanges
💎 Bitcoin barely moved all week, and it stopped mattering
💎 Tether got its audit. Nobody got to read it.
💎 Three US agencies moved while Congress waited
💎 Computing power is about to have a market price
📅 Blockathon Stockholm, first pre-event, Thursday 20 August

— Morten

Kaupr Weekly is our short weekend audio commentary, hosted by Morten Myrstad, connecting the dots across a week of onchain finance rather than interviewing anyone about it.

In one week this summer, a platform built for crypto traded more in stocks, oil and silver than in crypto — $25 billion in seven days. In the same season the New York Stock Exchange said it is wiring its market engine to blockchain settlement. Eleven minutes on how many different players are now rebuilding the market around one shared venue, and on the weight behind it.

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Bitcoin has traded between $60,000 and $80,000 since February. This week it sat around $64,000 and did almost nothing at all.

That is normally the week you skip. This was not that week.

Average volume in bitcoin perpetual futures fell to its lowest since 2023. Seven-day volatility touched 0.6 percent on Sunday. Glassnode counts 45 price metrics that have sat in capitulation territory longer than at any stretch since the FTX collapse in late 2022, and the trading range has kept narrowing since June rather than widening.

K33 draws the distinction that matters: this does not look like the bear markets of 2014, 2018 or 2022. It looks like indifference rather than deterioration. Meanwhile US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $853 million in the week to 7 August, the strongest since April, with BlackRock's fund taking 81 cents of every dollar. Money arrived. The price did not respond.

The New York Stock Exchange confirmed it is still developing a venue for trading and settling tokenised securities, and took part in Wall Street's central clearing house tokenisation pilot in July. That clearing house launches its own service in October.

Bullish went further and did it. The exchange executed the first tokenised equity trades on a regulated digital asset venue, starting with its own shares — recorded at the share registry, giving holders the same legal standing as conventional shareholders rather than a synthetic wrapper, trading around the clock with near-instant settlement. Its chief executive ran the New York Stock Exchange before this.

The numbers underneath: the onchain market value of tokenised stocks has gone from $329 million a year ago to more than $2.6 billion. CoinShares and Token Terminal argue equities are now the fastest-growing tokenised category measured by holders — people who chose to own something, rather than capital an issuer parked to prove the product exists.

Two Nordic listed companies now have hedge fund veterans running their bitcoin. Peter Warren, 45 years in traditional markets, became chief investment officer at H100 Group with a mandate to trade options and other derivatives on its 3,506 bitcoin. Sweden's Hilbert Group did the same eighteen months earlier with Russell Thompson. Neither man was recruited in the usual way — in both cases the listed company bought his firm.

In Stockholm, Bitcoin Treasury Capital pays Europe's first dividend funded by a bitcoin holding on 19 August: one krona per preference share, a fixed 10 percent a year, on a debt-free balance sheet.

Elsewhere the same pressure produced different answers. Twenty One Capital's new chief executive told shareholders the company trades below the value of the bitcoin it holds and must become more than a treasury, naming five things it has to build. Strategy added $650 million to its dollar reserve and now explains each sale. MARA pledged 18,750 bitcoin to borrow $600 million rather than sell any of it. BitGo bought a SpaceX share live on its own earnings call, tokenised it, and borrowed against it without selling.

None of it was waiting for the price to move. That is the change.

KPMG US has issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International's 2025 financial statements — the most favourable conclusion an auditor can reach. Reserves exceeded liabilities by $6.814 billion at the end of the year, and the work covered transactions, ownership records and a physical inspection of the gold.

This follows years in which Tether promised a full audit and delivered quarterly attestations instead, a $18.5 million settlement with New York in 2021 and a $41 million fine from US derivatives regulators over claims that its stablecoin was fully backed.

Tether did not publish the statements. KPMG declined to comment beyond confirming the engagement.

The books are accurate. Whether anyone outside can check remains exactly where it was.

The Senate left for its August recess without voting on crypto market structure. A first procedural vote on the CLARITY Act is now set for 15 September, the day after members return — and that is a vote on whether to take the bill up, not on the bill itself. It needs 60 votes against a 53-seat majority.

What happened in the meantime is the story.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which grants national bank charters in the United States, said on Tuesday that firms in legally permissible activities including digital assets should have a path to becoming a national bank. It has taken 40 applications for new banks in 18 months, against fewer than four a year between 2011 and 2014. Thirteen digital asset applications are pending; one was refused in July.

The Securities and Exchange Commission called an open meeting for Friday with one item on the agenda: whether to propose Regulation Crypto, a tailored offering regime for certain crypto investment contracts. The notice arrived Monday night with four days' lead time, which is permitted only when the agency judges its business to be pressing. And the White House will host crypto executives next week.

Rules made by an agency can be unmade by the next one. That is precisely the difference legislation was meant to remove.

This one sits outside onchain finance, and it is worth knowing anyway.

CME Group and the index provider Silicon Data will list two futures contracts on 5 October tracking the hourly rental price of Nvidia's H100 and Blackwell B200 chips. Each contract represents a month's rent for a single chip. Two asset managers have already filed for exchange-traded funds tied to them.

It follows Nvidia's agreements with six of the largest US investment firms to build financing platforms for more than $500 billion of third-party capital, and Jensen Huang's argument that AI data centres qualify as investable infrastructure rather than a technology expense — one site serving many customers, on hardware that keeps improving through software.

Forbes put the counter-argument plainly: a label is not a loan document. Lenders care whether contracted revenue clears the debt before a newer chip generation lands. Amazon shortened the estimated useful life of some of its servers from six years to five in January 2025, citing the pace of development in artificial intelligence.

Two firms buying identical capacity have had no way to know which paid more. That changes in October.

The question is no longer what blockchain can do. It is what it should do. That is where Fati Hakim of FirstBlock opens the first of three virtual events Kaupr and FirstBlock are running ahead of FirstBlock-athon in Stockholm — a public conversation about the eight challenge categories, why these eight, and why now.

Free, live on Kaupr and YouTube. Moderated by Morten Myrstad and Zarina Björklund Rehn.

Kaupr Daily — Short, high-signal updates on markets, regulation, tokenization and stablecoins, every weekday.

Kaupr Digest — This: a weekly step back at the pattern behind the week's news.

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Thank you for reading our newsletters!

Wishing you a good Sunday. Daily subscribers, welcome back tomorrow morning — and everyone, welcome back for a new Kaupr Digest next weekend.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor