Autor Cointelegraph by Christina Comben

Bitcoin is trading in a market that’s getting harder to define.Hovering around $64,000 at the time of writing, Bitcoin is down by almost 50% from its cycle peak. That’s a much shallower draw down than previous cycles, but the bull run this time around did not reach the same heights. The 2025 rally was driven by exchange-traded fund (ETF) inflows, post-halving momentum and renewed institutional demand, pushing the market to a new all-time high of more than $126,000 in October 2025.Since then, the trend has been inexorably downward, but analysts are split on what that decline signifies. According to Standard Chartered and other bullish institutional desks, Bitcoin may have already reached its cycle bottom last month, with structural demand from ETFs and treasury companies, and improving long-term capital flows reducing the likelihood of a deeper draw down. Other analysts take a more cautious approach, seeing Bitcoin as likely in the final stages of its bear market but not at a confirmed bottom yet. Bitcoin’s four-year cycles. Source: GalaxyGalaxy Research, for example, argued in June that traditional cycle signals have not fully reset, meaning the risk of further pain cannot be ruled out. Curiously, analysts are no longer just divided on price targets but on what a “cycle bottom” actually means in a market increasingly shaped by ETFs, macro liquidity, and shifting global capital flows.Some analysts still see further downside ahead At the most cautious end of the spectrum is Russell Thomson, chief investment officer at Hilbert Capital asset management firm.Speaking to Cointelegraph, Thomson said he believes Bitcoin remains in a downcycle and is likely to break below recent lows before forming a durable base. He said that the current structure is still dominated by global macro conditions and liquidity rather than crypto-native signals.Related: $60.4K Becomes ‘most important area’: Five things to know in Bitcoin this weekThomson expects Bitcoin to first revisit the $56,000-$52,000 range, representing summer 2024 lows, before potentially extending losses further to between $40,000 and $45,000, an area he associates with prior consolidation phases in the early 2024 market structure.Timing-wise, he sees Bitcoin’s broader cycle rhythm still broadly intact, with a potential low forming around October 2026, although he stressed that macro policy shifts could pull that forward.“Fed rate cuts and/or [the CLARITY Act] passing could put the bottom in earlier than that,” he said.He argued that institutional capital has not insulated Bitcoin from macro cycles, but rather deepened its sensitivity to global liquidity conditions, making it behave more like a “high-beta macro instrument” than a “detached crypto-native asset.” That view is echoed by analysts at Citibank, who cut their 12-month price target for Bitcoin to $82,000 from $112,000 on July 1, highlighting how Bitcoin’s growing integration into traditional financial markets has strengthened its correlation with risk assets and macro liquidity conditions rather than reducing volatility.Late-stage bear market, but not confirmed bottom yet A more positive but still cautious view comes from André Dragosch, head of research (Europe) at Bitwise.Dragosch told Cointelegraph that the current environment resembles a “late-stage bear market,” arguing that multiple indicators already suggest downside exhaustion.He noted that sentiment has deteriorated to levels last seen after the collapse of FTX in 2022, a period typically associated with seller fatigue.Dragosch also does not believe the cycle low has been confirmed. “I don’t think that we have seen the final bottom just yet, although we are probably very close,” he said, emphasizing that no single indicator can reliably identify a cycle bottom.Related: Dormant $1.9M Bitcoin tied to New York lawsuit moves after nearly 15 yearsHe also highlighted the structural shift in the market, pointing to the rise of ETFs and institutional participation, which have increased off-chain trading and reduced the reliability of some historical cycle indicators.Despite this uncertainty, he said downside risks appear increasingly limited at current levels, adding that Bitcoin could begin outperforming artificial intelligence equities over the coming months if macro conditions stabilize.Bitcoin price and its cycle bottoms. Source: GalaxyIn Galaxy’s base-case scenario, the firm pointed to a potential slide to between $40,000 and $46,000, depending on how liquidity and macro conditions evolve. ‘When will Bitcoin bottom?’ could be the wrong question A more structural interpretation comes from Dean Chen, an analyst at Bitunix Exchange.Chen told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin is still in a decline, but one increasingly defined by global liquidity competition rather than internal crypto market structure.“I believe Bitcoin remains in a down cycle, although it has entered a relatively stable valuation range supported by the structural capital base created after the approval of US spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024,” Chen said.While ETFs have created a more persistent institutional bid, Chen argued that Bitcoin is now competing directly with other major global capital narratives, particularly artificial intelligence and equity markets, for marginal liquidity.Related: Tim Draper says Arkham got Bitcoin wallet attribution ‘wrong’“The bigger challenge isn’t Bitcoin itself; it’s the competition for global liquidity,” he said. “Capital continues to flow toward AI infrastructure, equities, and other high-growth opportunities.”In his view, this changes how cycle analysis should be understood altogether.“The wrong question is ‘when will Bitcoin bottom?’” Chen said. “The more important question is: ‘when will crypto once again become the most attractive destination for global risk capital?’”He noted that derivatives markets now play a significantly larger role in price discovery than in previous cycles, with funding rates and open interest increasingly driving short-term volatility.That means Bitcoin may not form a sharp V-shaped bottom at all, he said, but instead spend an extended period building a structural base.A Bitcoin cycle that no longer looks like previous cycles Beyond price targets, what emerges from these competing views is a deeper disagreement over how Bitcoin’s cycle structure should even be defined. Thompson sees Bitcoin as still firmly inside a macro-driven down cycle, where liquidity conditions have not yet fully turned.Dragosch sees a late-stage bear market where exhaustion signals are already visible, even if confirmation is still pending.Chen argues that Bitcoin is now competing directly with global capital allocation themes such as AI and equities, making traditional bottom-calling frameworks increasingly incomplete.In this cycle, it seems, the debate is not just about where Bitcoin bottoms but whether a “bottom” is still a single moment at all.Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

Most crypto investors still obsess over price charts. But in 2026, a growing share of attention is shifting back to improving the fundamentals of the protocols. Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are preparing some of their largest protocol upgrades in years, while Coinbase’s Base network rolled out its Beryl hard fork last Friday in a bid to streamline the network, with a native token standard and shorter withdrawal windows.Bitcoin development however, remains frozen, with developers still arguing over controversial covenant proposals and post-quantum computing upgrades.Tim Sun, a senior researcher at Hong Kong-based asset manager HashKey Group, told Cointelegraph that protocol upgrades have historically focused on adding features, speed and throughput. However, in 2026, he said the emphasis is shifting toward reliability, predictable governance, and institutional-grade infrastructure that can support large-scale financial use cases.Here are the top five major blockchain upgrades to watch in the second half of 2026.Ethereum: GlamsterdamGlamsterdam is arguably the most consequential upgrade this year, and its already being tested on devnets. According to Ethereum’s public roadmap, Glamsterdam is designed to improve scalability, harden the layer-1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected sometime in the second half of 2026.Sun said the upgrade should improve processing speeds by allowing more transactions to be processed simultaneously, expand capacity so Ethereum can handle more data at higher throughput, and reduce database bloat. Those changes should make the chain better suited for stablecoin settlement and real-world asset use cases, he said.Related: Ethereum’s much-hated staking ‘tax’ may already be obsoleteHolly Atkinson, chief product and technology officer at 1inch, told Cointelegraph that Glamsterdam is viewed by many as Ethereum’s most significant upgrade since The Merge in September 2022, which transitioned the blockchain from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Glamsterdam. Source: Ethereum.orgShe said enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) is a key change because most validators still depend on a small set of specialized builders and relays, which concentrates control over transaction ordering. That setup amplifies maximal extractable value (MEV), censorship and centralization risks, she said. ePBS is designed to pull block building and proposing back into the protocol and make the process more transparent and accountable.Pavan Kaur is a Solana Foundation judge and founder of RuleSpark, a compliance engine for digital asset marketing. She told Cointelegraph that ePBS is better understood as one step in Ethereum’s broader roadmap and does not eliminate MEV or fully solve builder centralization. “Practices like sandwich attacks may therefore migrate rather than disappear,” she said.Solana: AlpenglowSolana’s biggest change this year is Alpenglow, a consensus upgrade that reworks the network’s core protocol. Alpenglow has been billed by many, including Solana ecosystem lead David Liang, as the chain’s “most significant consensus upgrade yet.”After being overwhelmingly approved through a governance process in September 2025, Alpenglow remains under development but is expected to ship alongside the Agave 4.1 validator client release later in 2026. Arun Krishnakumar, vice president of institutional capital at R3 enterprise software firm, told Cointelegraph that Alpenglow will be a major tailwind that will reinforce the ‘internet capital markets’ thesis even more strongly. Solana Network Updrades. Source: SolanaAt its core, Alpenglow is designed to dramatically speed up how quickly the network reaches finality. Instead of relying on Solana’s existing TowerBFT-based consensus mechanism, it introduces a redesigned system built around a new voting component called Votor.Related: Solana treasury firms resist Forward Industries’ consolidation pushThe practical impact is a major reduction in confirmation times, with finality targeted at roughly 100-150 milliseconds in optimal conditions, compared to around 12.8 seconds today.Beyond speed, the upgrade also removes onchain vote transactions, which currently account for a significant portion of network activity. By streamlining how validators communicate and agree on the state of the chain, Alpenglow is intended to make Solana both lighter and more efficient under load.Hadley Stern, board director, DeFi Development Corp, told Cointelegraph that removing onchain vote transactions is the “real story” for institutional allocators because it “cleans up validator economics and gives you honest telemetry, which matters when you’re underwriting SOL as a treasury asset.” He said that a network that can migrate its consensus layer as cleanly as is planned, would show the kind of “governed adaptability legacy financial infrastructure can’t match.”Base: BerylBase’s Beryl hard fork went live on Friday, following a short sequencer-related outage, when block production stalled for around two hours following an invalid block that triggered a temporary consensus failure. Base co-founder Jesse Pollak said user funds were unaffected during the incident. While he stressed that “all funds are safe,” he added that “a halt is not okay” and said that lessons learned from the episode will be used to further strengthen Base as a platform for “global, 24/7 finance.”Jesse Pollak speaks about the chain halt. Source: Jesse PollakAccording to Base’s documentation, Beryl introduces a set of changes aimed at tightening the network’s performance and reducing friction at the edges. These include the B20 native token standard, a shortening of withdrawal finality from seven days to five, and integration with Reth V2, which is expected to reduce node storage requirements while improving execution efficiency.Related: Coinbase’s Base resumes block production after 2-hour outageSun said Base has been moving toward a more unified “stack” approach, giving it greater control over how the network is built and upgraded, and allowing changes to ship more quickly than under the earlier Optimism Superchain model.The trade-off, he said, is that liquidity, which once moved more freely across the broader Superchain ecosystem, may become more fragmented, even as Base deepens its integration with Coinbase’s wider user base.Avalanche: OctaneAvalanche’s next chapter is less about a single branded hard fork than a broader push to improve performance while courting institutions and tokenized asset issuers.Sun told Cointelegraph that Avalanche’s recent Etna hard fork replaced the old subnet model with sovereign Avalanche L1s, cutting the cost of launching a dedicated blockchain by more than 99% and making the network more attractive to institutional players. It’s already seen success in this regard. Sun pointed to Progmat, which he said accounts for roughly 63% of Japan’s national security token market, which migrated more than $2 billion in tokenized assets to a dedicated Avalanche L1, as well as the Avalanche Payments Collective backed by firms including Franklin Templeton, VanEck and WisdomTree.Progmat Migrates $2B+ of its Tokenized Securities to Avalanche. Source: AvalancheAtkinson said Avalanche is also pushing two upgrades aimed at making its C-Chain one of the fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) environments. Related: Avalanche Treasury falls 16% as it debuts on NasdaqShe described Streaming Asynchronous Execution as a way to separate transaction execution from consensus so the chain can run more continuously and size capacity closer to normal demand. For users, she said, the practical effect should be higher throughput and lower, steadier fees during periods of heavy activity.Bitcoin: OP_CATBitcoin is the outlier here because its biggest developments in 2026 are not scheduled upgrades but a continuation of passionate debates over whether the protocol should become more programmable and how urgently it should be hardened against quantum threats.Bitcoin has not activated a major soft fork since Taproot in 2020, which upgraded Bitcoin’s scripting to make transactions more flexible and improve privacy. Since then, discussion around covenant-related proposals such as OP_CAT, CheckTemplateVerify (CTV) and Lightning-focused ideas like LNHANCE has intensified. None of these changes has an agreed path to activation.Researchers have also been debating BIP-360 and related proposals as ways to make it easier to migrate coins into quantum-resistant spending paths, if and when the quantum computing threat becomes real.Atkinson described Bitcoin as the wildcard of the group. She said covenant proposals could unlock safer storage and richer scripting, but the subject remains divisive and subject to much debate. Sun said those proposals could improve self-custody security, fee management and protocols such as Lightning and Ark, while giving institutions more programmable custody logic directly on the L1.Bitcoin development is infamously slow, and any change to the protocol is pored over from every angle. There is general agreement that no covenant opcode is on track for activation this year, and reaching consensus on proposals like OP_CAT or CTV is still some distance away.On the post-quantum side, BIP-360’s authors estimate that a full migration to quantum-resistant addresses and signatures would take years even under optimistic assumptions. It seems unlikely at this point that a quantum-resistance upgrade will be implemented before the end of 2026.Magazine: How AI just dramatically sped up the quantum risk for Bitcoin

With Bitcoin plunging below $60,000 and Strategy’s share price down by more than 70% from the high, some crypto investors are questioning if Strategy could become this cycle’s Terra/LUNA — a highly leveraged bet on crypto market structure that explodes under stress.The company’s response? A new capital framework released on Monday aimed at addressing investors’ fears.The package includes up to $1 billion in buybacks for MSTR, up to $1 billion in buybacks for STRC and related securities, an increase in STRC’s dividend to roughly 12%, and a cash buffer expansion to $2.55 billion. Of particular note for a company famed for its maximalist approach to Bitcoin, Strategy also said it may sell up to $1.25 billion in BTC holdings if required to meet dividend or debt obligations.Markets responded positively to the news, with both STRC and MSTR shares rallying more than 12% in after-hours trading. STRC is currently trading at $84.86, a significant improvement on the $72.06 it was trading at on June 26. STRC share price rallied by over 12% in after-hours trading. Source: Yahoo Finance.But is the plan enough to assuage fears that STRC’s structure — famously cooked up by CEO Michael Saylor with the help of an LLM — could expose Strategy to a “death spiral” of reflexive funding risks during periods of market stress? What is STRC and why is it controversial?STRC is part of Strategy’s capital structure linked to its broader Bitcoin treasury strategy. It sits between traditional equity and debt-like instruments, offering investors yield while maintaining exposure to the company’s Bitcoin holdings. Related: Strategy’s MSTR may plunge 80% if it repeats this dot-com-era fractalStrategy describes STRC as a perpetual preferred stock paying a 12% annual dividend on a $100 par value, funded from its cash reserve and Bitcoin-linked capital framework. While the structure is designed to provide financing flexibility without issuing traditional debt, analysts have questioned whether its stability depends on continued investor demand in secondary markets, particularly during periods of Bitcoin volatility or tighter liquidity conditions. By contrast, Strategy’s common stock is called MSTR and it represents an equity ownership stake in Strategy along with voting rights. The fate of the two securities is closely aligned, but they are different. Similarly, Strategy’s position as the largest buyer of Bitcoin (and perhaps in future as a seller) means its fate is closely intertwined with the price of Bitcoin at present.Perpetual goldbug and Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff has repeatedly called out Strategy’s model, pointing out that it “can’t sell Bitcoin without crashing the price of Bitcoin. Even if Strategy merely stops buying Bitcoin, that change alone would crush the market.”Strategy describes STRC as a short-duration, high-yield credit. Source: StrategyYet Taran Dhillon, head of digital assets at Kula, told Cointelegraph that “Bitcoin volatility alone is unlikely to break a structure like Strategy’s.” He said that a more meaningful test is “whether Bitcoin remains under pressure while access to capital becomes progressively more expensive or difficult.”The Bear case: feedback loops and liquidity dependencySome argue that Strategy’s entire fundraising and equity model is inherently reflexive, compounding both upside and downside cycles. The same flywheel that amplifies gains in bull markets can accelerate losses during the bear, when falling Bitcoin and share prices collide with weaker demand.Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse made that exact point on CNBC this week. “Financial engineering does not drive long term value,” he said. Kyle Rodda, senior analyst at Capital.com, told Cointelegraph that Strategy effectively operates as a momentum-driven Bitcoin accumulation vehicle, in which capital raises funds for Bitcoin purchases that, in turn, support the company’s valuation. However, he warned that the dynamic can reverse under stress.“Strategy’s business definitely compounds momentum in both directions,” Rodda said, adding that in weaker conditions, rising funding costs and declining investor appetite can reinforce downward pressure.Related: Grayscale’s Pandl says Strategy should sell $3B Bitcoin to restore confidenceHe also argued that secondary market liquidity is a structural dependency, meaning large-scale selling or refinancing pressures could have wider spillovers into Bitcoin markets themselves.Among Bitcoiners, Charles Edwards, the founder of Capriole Investments, is one of Strategy’s most hawkish commentators of late. He compared stressed conditions in digital asset treasury companies to broader crypto deleveraging events, warning that feedback loops can accelerate losses when leverage and sentiment deteriorate.“Anyone else getting LUNA 2022 vibes on MicroStrategy?” he posted on June 26.Comparing Strategy to Terra/LUNA. Source: Charles EdwardsThe neutral view: the real risk is funding markets, not BitcoinWhile the bearish sentiment around Strategy piles up on X, Dhillon told Cointelegraph that stress would likely first appear in funding conditions, pointing to widening discounts, higher yields, and reduced issuance capacity as early warning signals.In his view, Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings are less relevant than whether the company can continue refinancing or rolling capital efficiently during periods of market stress. And while failure of STRC to maintain its “peg” of $100 has caused much consternation, STRC isn’t pegged to $100 in the way a stablecoin is pegged to the value of $1. The yield simply gets more attractive the further the price falls under $100, which in theory, should see buyers push the price back to $100 at some point.A Bitfire Research report shared with Cointelegraph said that STRC’s recent price dislocations should not be interpreted as structural failure.The firm argued that de-pegging events are largely driven by sentiment and liquidity conditions rather than changes to Strategy’s underlying fundamentals or solvency profile.“Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) faces no near-term insolvency risk,” the firm wrote.Bull case: stress is not insolvency Strategy supporter Adam Livingston, a Bitcoin advocate and author, ran what he described as a “three-year MSTR stress test” under extreme conditions, including a 55% Bitcoin drawdown, closed capital markets, and sustained cash burn requiring large Bitcoin sales to meet obligations.Related: CryptoQuant warns on Strategy’s dividend coverage as cash reserve falls 38%In his model, Strategy’s senior claims expand sharply in Bitcoin terms, while the company’s “common equity Bitcoin exposure” (CEBE) compresses significantly. He described this as “CEBE getting annihilated”, falling from 138,161 sats per share to 7,884 sats per share at the trough of the simulation.Death spiral? This model says no. Source: Adam LivingstonThe model assumes no new Bitcoin purchases or equity issuance during the downturn, with approximately 115,727 BTC sold over the three years to service obligations before stabilization conditions return.Despite the severity of the drawdown, Livingston’s model ultimately shows Strategy surviving the cycle, ending with over 700,000 BTC remaining on its balance sheet and a recovering net asset structure once market conditions normalize.What Strategy actually changedThe new framework represents the most explicit attempt yet by Strategy to address concerns around liquidity and reflexivity risk.Key components of Strategy’s June 29 8-K filing that aim to restore confidence in the company, include buybacks for MSTR shares and STRC and a big focus on expanding cash reserves to pay dividends. The nuclear option of selling up to $1.25 billion in Bitcoin holdings to pay dividends is included partly as a way to assure markets Bitcoin maximalist Michael Saylor will reluctantly sell assets if he’s forced to.Related: Bitcoin price is down over 40% since STRC launched: Is Strategy ‘fine’?Strategy’s 8-K filing, June 29. Source: US Securities and Exchange Commission Dhillon said the framework “meaningfully improves” transparency around how Strategy would respond under stress, with the expanded $2.55 billion reserve and clearer Bitcoin monetization plan helping strengthen investor confidence.But Schiff pointed out that the current market cap of MSTR is $30 billion, while the current value of its Bitcoin is $50 billion. “Until MSTR’s market cap rises above the value of its Bitcoin, any Bitcoin bought by issuing MSTR shares creates a negative Bitcoin yield,” he said.A stronger toolkit, same core betWhile the framework strengthens Strategy’s ability to manage short-term stress, it does not eliminate its reliance on capital markets to sustain its broader Bitcoin accumulation strategy.As Dhillon told Cointelegraph, the key test will be whether funding conditions remain accessible during periods of market stress, rather than Bitcoin price action alone.He added that the update clarifies Strategy’s capital allocation playbook, and gives management a more defined order of operations, which makes its overall strategy more credible.For critics like Rodda, the underlying concern persists. Strategy’s structure remains exposed to feedback loops if liquidity tightens across both equity and credit markets.While Strategy’s move introduces clearer liquidity buffers, buybacks, and contingency options, including potential Bitcoin sales, the debate over structural reflexivity has not yet been fully resolved.The question now is not whether STRC is inherently fragile in theory, but whether Strategy’s expanded toolkit can withstand a prolonged period of capital market stress, and whether investors still want exposure to a vehicle that amplifies Bitcoin’s cycles and adds risk, rather than simply tracking them.Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt

The road from believing “crypto is a scam” to “Bitcoin is a legitimate asset class” is a long way to travel, fraught with many a twist and turn.Yet against all the odds, a surprising number of high-profile skeptics have undertaken the journey unscathed and, perhaps more remarkably, without ever admitting they were wrong.The very naysayers who once warned of a “crypto apocalypse” have begun preaching the virtues of blockchain rails and launching tokenized products of their own.From Bitcoin exchange-traded funds to tokenized gold, here are five of the biggest crypto backflips. Born-again crypto convertsLarry Fink: ‘Index of money laundering’ to ETF kingLarry Fink may be the archetypal born-again crypto convert. In 2017, the BlackRock chief executive cast Bitcoin as an “index of money laundering,” nicely capturing mainstream finance’s view at the time of a market they believed was dominated by wild speculation and dubious flows. As a side note: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. While money laundering in crypto was estimated at $82 billion in 2025, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $800 billion to $2 trillion is laundered the old fashioned way each year.Related: BlackRock Bitcoin ETF sees near-record outflows as BTC dips below $75KIt’s not entirely clear why Fink decided to recalibrate but by 2020 he started acknowledging its potential, in 2023 he was actively defending BlackRock’s crypto push, and today BlackRock has become one of the most important institutional access points to Bitcoin via spot ETFs, helping pull the asset into the heart of the regulated investment universe. In his annual shareholder letters, Fink now waxes lyrical about tokenization and writes impassioned OpEds about how it is set to transform the financial system. Reluctant but will make money anywayJamie Dimon: still hates Bitcoin, loves the railsIf Fink is a born-again believer, Jamie Dimon sits squarely in the reluctant and still skeptical camp. The JPMorgan chief has called Bitcoin a “fraud,” crypto investors “stupid,” and warned that BTC will blow up on more than one occasion, not to mention using Congressional hearings as a platform to reiterate his distaste for the asset.But watch what he does, not what he says as JPMorgan has quietly become one of Wall Street’s biggest blockchain infrastructure providers.The world’s largest bank has built out its Onyx division, rolled out JPM Coin, experimented with linking bank infrastructure to crypto wallets, and developed tokenized collateral platforms to move cash and securities around more efficiently.Oh sure, Dimon still trashes Bitcoin in public, but JPMorgan now sells many of the rails that make institutional digital asset markets viable. Peter Schiff: gold forever, but now onchainPeter Schiff hasn’t softened his rhetoric as prices and adoption grow. If anything, each Bitcoin rally only amplifies his warnings about bubbles, “greater fools,” and inevitable collapse. It’s a highly effective form of advertising for Schiff’s beloved gold industry.Peter Schiff’s infamous “greater fools” comment. Source: Peter SchiffYet even the perpetual goldbug has edged into the digital asset world by launching a tokenized gold platform, T-Gold.com, in December 2025, that uses blockchain to represent vaulted bullion as transferable tokens. The product lets users buy physical gold and silver stored in segregated vaults and receive digital tokens representing specific quantities of the metals, with ownership recorded on a blockchain. Related: Tucker Carlson presses Peter Schiff on Bitcoin as new global reserve currencyFor Schiff, this is not apostasy but reinforcement: a way to tell crypto-native investors “you can keep the rails, but swap the asset for something with thousands of years of monetary history instead.” Nouriel Roubini: Technodollars, not BitcoinNouriel Roubini, once known in crypto circles as “Dr. Doom,” might seem like an unlikely candidate for any kind of crypto conversion. He has spent years describing most digital assets as “useless,” warning of a “crypto apocalypse,” and cataloguing the sector’s governance failures, conflicts of interest, and investor harm.Yet this week, he published a whitepaper co-authored with Atlas Capital and announced USAFi, a tokenized instrument marketed as a regulated permissionless security, designed to embody what he calls the “Technodollar.”USAFi whitepaper. Source: Atlas AI LabsRoubini insists this is “not a reversal,” telling Cointelegraph he “remains skeptical of unbacked crypto assets whose value depends primarily on speculation rather than fundamentals.”The Technodollar, he argued, is about “modernizing the financial system through regulated, asset-backed digital instruments that can be trusted by institutions and individuals alike.” He added that he still believes most crypto assets “suffer from excessive speculation, weak governance, conflicts of interest, and insufficient investor protections.”Don’t understand it, but happy to cash inDonald Trump: vibes over whitepapersPerhaps unsurprisingly, Donald Trump belongs in a category of his own. The same politician who once said Bitcoin “seems like a scam” and warned that it could undermine dollar hegemony later rebranded himself as the “crypto president.” Trump has flirted with nonfungible token drops, launched his own meme coin and one for his wife, and pitched himself as the defender of domestic crypto innovation against overreaching regulators (all while reportedly pocketing over $2.3 billion from his various crypto endeavors since 2024). Trump promised to end Joe Biden’s war on crypto. Source: Vivek RamaswamyHe may not be able to tell you the difference between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, but he does understand his constituencies. Related: Trump crypto company’s USD1 stablecoins backing UFC event bonusesThe crypto industry has matured into an important voting bloc, and its donors are increasingly strategic. What matters is the ability to read a room full of HODLers and say the right words about freedom, innovation, and firing Gary Gensler.What changed: faith, incentives, or both?Born-again converts like Fink have reframed crypto and tokenization as extensions of their existing mission, encouraged by clear demand and the opportunity to graft new fee streams onto enormous asset management franchises. The reluctant skeptics, on the other hand, have tried to draw bright lines between “bad crypto” and “good digital finance,” and the opportunists, well, they’ve learned that even a shallow embrace of digital assets can unlock both support and riches.Of course, whether these moves represent genuine intellectual evolution or a simple instinct to follow the money remains to be seen. But perhaps the bigger question is: which crypto skeptic will be the next to see the light? Is it too much to hope that Warren Buffett will review his famed opinion about Bitcoin that it is “rat poison squared?”Magazine: Bitcoin will not hit $1M by 2030, says veteran trader Peter Brandt