Saylor, Strive and Bitmine all buy · Polymarket $21bn — Tue 1 Sep

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August ended up 24.95%, bitcoin's first green August in five years. The companies that spent the summer selling spent the last week of it buying.

💎 Strategy, Strive and Bitmine all bought in the same week
💎 Hilbert Group counts the cost of becoming something other than an asset manager 💎 A new Danish fund is built to earn whether crypto rises or falls
💎 Polymarket raises at $21 billion, a billion behind Kalshi
💎 Schnabel says the ECB has to put reserves on the chain itself

— Morten

🎧 Did you catch — Kaupr Weekly Episode 9: Life After the Premium — The Bitcoin Treasury Companies a Year On?

Close to fifteen Nordic companies announced a bitcoin treasury strategy last year. A year on, most have left quietly, and the four still standing have each attached something else to the balance sheet.

Episode also available on Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Bitcoin's first green August since 2021

Bitcoin closed August up 24.95%, its strongest month of 2026 and the third-best August on record behind 2017 and 2013. The move ran from the low $60,000s to above $81,000 before settling near $78,000, driven by Treasury buyback plans, renewed ETF demand and short liquidations rather than a single headline. Bitcoin remains well below its October 2025 record near $126,080.

Why it matters: September has usually been where strong Augusts get given back, though the last three Septembers finished positive — history offers a caution here, not a forecast.

Source: Bitcoin's first positive August since 2021 comes with a familiar September test — The Crypto Times

Strategy buys again after two months out

Strategy bought 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million in the week to 30 August, its first purchase since June, at an average of $80,318. It funded the buy by selling MSTR shares for $602.8 million and also repurchased $151.8 million of STRC preferred stock. The company sold bitcoin at around $62,250 a coin over the summer and has now bought back roughly 29% higher.

Why it matters: Buying back above the selling price is what the summer's funding squeeze ended up costing, and it returns the largest corporate holder to the bid.

Source: Strategy buys $370M of bitcoin in first purchase since June — Decrypt

Strive adds 1,800 BTC

Strive bought another 1,800 BTC for roughly $143 million at an average of $79,431, lifting its holding to 23,156 BTC worth about $1.76 billion. The Nasdaq-listed asset manager, which trades as ASST after merging with Asset Entities, added $81 million of bitcoin alongside a share sale earlier in the month. The latest tranche sits close to break-even at current prices.

Why it matters: Strive kept buying through the summer while others stopped, so its cadence says less about the rally than Strategy's return does.

Source: Strive adds $143 million in bitcoin as treasury firms pile back in — Decrypt

Bitmine makes its largest ether purchase since June

Bitmine bought 53,501 ETH for about $131 million, its biggest weekly purchase since June, lifting holdings to 5.9 million ETH — 4.9% of supply and 98% of the way to its stated 5% target. The company has bought every week since launching the strategy in June 2025 and stakes about 86% of its ether through its MAVAN platform, for projected annual revenue near $335 million.

Why it matters: Staking gives an ether treasury a revenue line a bitcoin treasury does not have, which changes what the balance sheet has to earn on its own.

Source: Tom Lee's Bitmine buys $131M of ETH in largest ethereum purchase since June — Decrypt

Hilbert Group's rebuild cost SEK 87.6 million

Sweden's Hilbert Group closed the half year with a loss of SEK 87.6 million, of which SEK 50.4 million carries no cash effect — share-based programmes, amortisation on acquisitions and a remeasurement of the Nordark price. The group has consolidated the trading business Enigma, bought Nordark, launched the Hilbert Finance division for institutional crypto lending, and applied to Malta's regulator for both a MiCA and a payment institution authorisation. Assets under management stood at USD 119.5 million at the end of June, alongside 4,679 bitcoin in a fund.

Why it matters: The market-neutral strategies returned positively while bitcoin fell about 26% over the same period, which is the case the rebuild is meant to scale.

Source: Hilbert Group lost 88 million as Hilbert 2.0 took shape — Kaupr

A Danish fund built to earn in both directions

Azpire Capital in Aarhus launches its first fund today, registered with Finanstilsynet and restricted to professional investors. The model ranks major crypto assets over a 24-hour horizon and takes both long and short positions, aiming to earn on the gap between the market's winners and losers rather than on direction. Over the first 14 months of testing the strategy returned 25% while bitcoin fell 30%.

Why it matters: Most crypto funds on offer today follow the market up and down, so one that does not gives Danish institutions a different reason to allocate.

Source: New Danish fund bets on crypto falling as well as rising — Kaupr

Coinbase puts perpetual futures in the Base App

Coinbase launched perpetual futures inside its Base App on 19 August, offering eligible users up to 50x leverage across crypto and tokenised equity markets, with Hyperliquid running the backend. The feature is unavailable in the US, UK and Canada, though US users on Coinbase's main platform already have leverage capped at 10x. Coinbase says perpetuals now account for 75% of overall crypto trading volume.

Why it matters: At 50x, positions liquidate on moves a spot holder would simply sit through, so the same flows arrive with more force.

Source: Coinbase is adding perpetual futures to its Base app — The Motley Fool

Polymarket raises at $21 billion

1789 Capital is leading a $1 billion round valuing Polymarket at $21 billion post-money, up from $15 billion in April when D.E. Shaw and G Squared came in as new investors. Kalshi raised at $22 billion in May, and Donald Trump Jr., a partner at 1789, advises both platforms. Polymarket has lagged Kalshi this year on operational and legal issues.

Why it matters: Two prediction-market platforms now carry valuations within a billion dollars of each other, on a regulatory question neither has settled.

Source: Polymarket funding round led by 1789 values firm at $21 billion — Bloomberg

How far perpetuals can stretch

Perpetual futures let traders hold leveraged exposure to a price indefinitely without owning the asset, and centralised crypto exchanges processed $85.3 trillion of them in 2025. Coinbase International launched pre-IPO perpetuals starting with SpaceX, and Kalshi has filed with the CFTC for perpetuals tied to a US stock index. Market makers quoted in the piece put the binding constraint not on demand but on the reference price, which has to keep updating as the contract trades.

Why it matters: The assets that rarely trade — private companies, property, art — are precisely the ones without a continuously observable price, so the model reaches furthest where it is hardest to anchor.

Source: How perpetual futures could make more assets tradable — Forbes

Schnabel wants the ECB to issue reserves onchain

Isabel Schnabel of the ECB's Executive Board argued at Jackson Hole that central banks must issue tokenised reserves directly rather than through bridges or private intermediaries, since only that produces reserves that actually sit in the ledger. Stablecoins can be made safe but cannot expand supply when demand for liquidity rises, she said, which makes them complements to central bank money rather than substitutes. Project Pontes, which connects TARGET Services to market DLT platforms and gives the Eurosystem its own platform, launches next month.

Why it matters: In the omnibus model the tokens are a claim on the intermediary rather than on the central bank, and every ledger wanting its own version splits settlement into parallel private claims.

Source: ECB board member want

📅 Kaupr Event — Blockathon Stockholm: Pre-event 3 | Thursday 3 September, 11:00–12:30 CET

The first two sessions were about why. This one is also about what: the challenges teams will work on, what the days in Stockholm actually look like, and what it takes to arrive ready. Moderated by Melissa Persson and Morten Myrstad, with speakers announced shortly. Free and live on Kaupr.io and YouTube — registering gets you the reminder and the recording afterwards.

👉 Register here

Thank you for reading Kaupr Today. If you find this briefing useful, please share it with a colleague or friend who should be following Nordic and European digital-finance news more closely.

Kaupr Today now has its own home — read, listen, watch and explore at today.kaupr.io.

Wishing you a great Tuesday — and welcome back tomorrow morning for the next edition of Kaupr Today.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor