GM. This is the Never Die Newsletter, where I share whatever crypto news and content I feel like, every week, short and sweet, right to your beautiful little inbox.
This week we have:
📺 Latest Episode: What Bitcoin Is Doing Right Now Shouldn't Be Happening
📰 News: MicroStrategy Sells Bitcoin for First Time Since 2022
🌟 Narrative of the Week: The Zcash Crash
NEWS📰
🟠 MicroStrategy Sells Bitcoin for First Time Since 2022
MicroStrategy has executed its first Bitcoin liquidation since 2022, selling 32 BTC for $2.5 million at an average price of $77,135 per token. According to an SEC 8-K filing, the sale was utilized to fund distribution obligations on its preferred stock, directly addressing recent investor anxiety over whether the firm's leveraged financing model would eventually force a divestment.
📉 Spot Bitcoin ETFs Bleed $4.4B
Bitcoin ETFs have extended their historic redemption streak to 13 consecutive trading days, bleeding an additional $396.6 million on Wednesday to bring total cumulative withdrawals to roughly $4.4 billion. This aggressive institutional exit has coincided with a sharp 21% correction in Bitcoin's price, dragging the asset down from $80,000 to $63,400 since mid May. BlackRock’s IBIT bore the brunt of the capital flight, accounting for 75% ($3.3 billion) of the total redemptions.
💳 Mastercard Expands Settlement Network
Mastercard has announced a major expansion of its global payment network, allowing card issuers and acquirers to settle transactions using regulated stablecoins. The new capabilities introduce intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement options, supporting major tokens such as USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD across eight diverse blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, and Arbitrum.
🇺🇸 Treasury Sec. Bessent Advances Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed during a Senate Finance Committee hearing that his department is "proceeding with all deliberate speed" to implement President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve. While the US currently holds roughly 328,372 seized BTC worth about $215 billion and Bessent declined to comment on whether a recent $1 billion digital asset seizure from Iran would be added to the stockpile, the Treasury reportedly has no immediate plans for further open market acquisitions.
What Bitcoin Is Doing Right Now Shouldn't Be Happening
In this video, I break down why Bitcoin is holding up far better than most people expected. I’ll explain what my models are saying, the key macro forces driving the market, and the catalysts that could determine Bitcoin’s next big move.
Narrative Of The Week: The Zcash Crash
The privacy sector took a massive hit this week. Zcash ($ZEC) dropped over 30% in 24 hours, erasing roughly $3B in market cap and trading below $400 after devs disclosed a critical flaw in the Orchard shielded pool. The twist? The bug was uncovered by a security researcher using Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8. Here is the breakdown of what happened:
The Flaw: Security engineer Taylor Hornby discovered a vulnerability that allowed a bad actor to mint an unlimited amount of fake ZEC. The bug sat undetected in the Orchard zero knowledge proof circuit since its activation in May 2022.
AI Changes the Auditing Game: On May 29, Hornby used a custom AI auditing framework paired with Opus 4.8 to find an under constrained element in the code. He built a working exploit in a local test environment and successfully generated fake tokens.
The Fix and the Fallout: The Zcash Open Development Lab pushed an emergency hard fork between June 1 and June 3 to patch the vulnerability. While the fix is live, the market panicked, where Heavy hitters like Arthur Hayes publicly dumped their entire ZEC bags.
The Privacy Paradox: Here is the specific reason the market dumped, because Zcash's Orchard pool masks transaction data, devs cannot prove that the vulnerability wasn't exploited over the last four years. We don't know if fake ZEC is circulating right now, and the network's privacy architecture makes it impossible to verify the true supply.
This event exposes the double edged sword of privacy, where it can be a bug and a feature at the exact same time. It also proves that AI can now figure out exploits faster than the average person or auditing firm. If bad actors beat devs to finding these bugs, the next few months in crypto will be filled with a lot of exploits and hacks.
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