The buyers came back · Four SEC rules in five days · New podcast — Sun 6 Sep

Bitcoin closed August up 25%, then spent the week being repriced twice by two different Fed officials. Underneath the noise, the structure of the market changed more than the price did.

💎 Strategy, Strive and Bitmine all bought again — without the premium
💎 The Fed went from hike to hold in five days, and nothing underneath it moved
💎 The SEC rewrote four rules in a single week
💎 NYSE's owner, 21 banks and the ECB are all building the same layer
💎 Perpetuals went from offshore product to regulatory filing

New Kaupr Weekly out today on what prediction markets are becoming. And Blockathon Stockholm starts tomorrow morning, with all three pre-events now up to watch in full.

— Morten

Three million people opened an account with Kalshi over five weeks this summer, and by the end of the World Cup prediction markets accounted for more than a quarter of all legal sports betting in the United States — up from nine percent in January. The same summer, traders on Polymarket priced SpaceX's first day before the stock exchange had a price at all. Football and a space company: nine minutes on what these markets are becoming, and whether it is just gambling and insider trading.

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Last week's episode asked what was left of the bitcoin treasury companies a year after the wave. By Monday the story had a new chapter.

Michael Saylor posted a chart of Strategy's holdings with a two-word message — "We're back" — and the following morning the company disclosed its first bitcoin purchase since June: 4,603 BTC for $370 million. Strive added 1,800 BTC for $143 million. Tom Lee's Bitmine bought $131 million of ether, its largest weekly purchase since June. Three treasury companies in a single week, after a summer in which the sector lost around $80 billion in market value and several members sold.

Not sentiment. Strategy's cash finally matched its convertible debt, leaving net leverage near zero after a summer when traders had priced in forced selling. Its STRC preferred share, built to trade at $100, closed near par after bottoming in the seventies. Every dollar spent defending STRC below par had been a dollar not spent on bitcoin.

Strategy's mNAV — its market value against the bitcoin it holds — stands at 1.06, down from 3.89 in late 2024. The company sold bitcoin around $62,250 a coin over the summer and bought back at $80,318, roughly 29% higher.

Issuing shares well above net asset value was the entire model. At 1.06 there is almost nothing left to issue against, which means this week's purchases were funded by an ordinary share sale rather than by the premium — and that is a different business.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh told Jackson Hole that 54% of the PCE basket had risen faster than 3% over the past year. By Wednesday the market put the odds of a September rate hike at 66%, bitcoin had slipped below $77,000, and Wall Street had closed lower three sessions running.

Governor Christopher Waller said he could support holding rates steady if inflation keeps easing. Hike odds fell to 42%. Crypto's total market value returned to $2.73 trillion, Coinbase, Circle, Strategy and Robinhood all gained double digits, and the dollar touched its lowest level since May.

Nothing about the economy changed in between. Two officials said different things about the same data.

Glassnode noted that trading activity stayed subdued against previous bull runs even as ETF money arrived, and that the Coinbase premium — which compares US prices with international ones — has been negative for more than four months. IG's Tony Sycamore put much of the August rally down to short covering. Bitcoin's correlation with gold hit 91% during Thursday's move, well above its correlation with the S&P 500.

A rally that tracks gold rather than anything happening inside crypto is a rally borrowed from the macro, and it can be recalled on the same terms it was lent.

The regulator moved on four fronts in five days.

It set a public roundtable for 17 September on round-the-clock equity trading, with NYSE, Nasdaq, DTCC, BlackRock, Schwab, Citadel Securities, Jane Street and Robinhood on the panels. It proposed modernising the rules for transfer agents — the firms that record who owns a security, under a framework untouched for decades — explicitly to let blockchains serve as official records. Commissioner Hester Peirce asked whether the rule should still require a physical address, or whether a wallet address would do.

Examiners are now asking firms running special purpose vehicles to document that the vehicles actually hold the private-company shares they sell exposure to, after complaints and heavy marketing ahead of the SpaceX and Anthropic listings. And a separate proposal sitting with the White House would let retail investors into private markets through registered funds, and widen who can be charged performance fees.

Two of the four open access and two restrict it, and all four turn on the same question: who is allowed to own what, and how the ownership is proved. That question is exactly what a tokenised market has to answer before it can exist.

Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, picked tZERO to build the transfer-agent and broker-dealer systems its planned tokenised-securities platform will need. ICE is investing in the company and licensing its 103 blockchain patents, and the two will look at accepting tokenised assets as collateral at ICE's clearing houses.

Twenty-one banks including Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and UBS are planning a dollar stablecoin for the first half of 2027, timed to the GENIUS Act taking effect that January. JPMorgan is not among them, continuing instead with its own Kinexys and JPM Coin systems.

Isabel Schnabel of the ECB's Executive Board argued that central banks have to issue tokenised reserves directly rather than through bridges or private intermediaries. Stablecoins can be made safe, she said, but cannot expand supply when demand for liquidity rises — which makes them complements to central bank money rather than substitutes. Project Pontes launches next month.

The exchange, the banks and the central bank are each building the piece of settlement they control, and none of them has settled where the pieces meet. Putting a stock on a chain is the easy part.

Perpetual futures let a trader hold leveraged exposure to a price indefinitely without owning the asset. Centralised crypto exchanges processed $85.3 trillion of them in 2025. Until recently, almost none of that was available to US investors.

Coinbase put perpetuals with up to 50x leverage inside its Base App, running on Hyperliquid, unavailable in the US — then filed with the SEC this week for permission to list equity perpetuals onshore, with CFTC sign-off to follow. Polymarket launched perpetuals across crypto, stocks, gold, silver and two oil benchmarks; Kalshi had filed for its own oil perpetual the day before. Polymarket raised at a $21 billion valuation, a billion behind Kalshi's May round.

The constraint is not demand. A perpetual needs a reference price that keeps updating as the contract trades, which is straightforward for oil and equities and much harder for a private company, a building or a painting.

The structure reaches furthest into exactly the assets it can anchor least well. That is the limit, and it arrives well before the regulation does.

This week's episode goes into both halves of it — what prediction markets and perpetuals actually are, and the fight over who gets to regulate them. Listen.

Teams start work Monday morning at Netlight's offices on Regeringsgatan, on real problem statements from UNICEF, the Swedish Red Cross, the World Food Programme, Hundstallet and AI Institutet. Six of the eight challenge themes have nothing to do with payments or trading. The week closes on 11 September with the AI x Blockchain Summit at KTH and the award ceremony, with USD 10,000 in AWS credits for the winning team.

Kaupr is media partner, and hosted three open pre-events ahead of it — 20 guests and four and a half hours on why blockchain matters beyond finance. All three are now available in full.

▶️ Pre-event 1 — Blockchain beyond finance ▶️ Pre-event 2 — The challenges and the teams ▶️ Pre-event 3 — What the days actually look like

👉 Read the first Onchain Build

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

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

Wishing you a great Sunday — Kaupr Daily is back tomorrow morning.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor