Autor Cointelegraph by Robert Lakin

Strategy executive chairman Michael Saylor took to social media on Sunday to detail his “110 reasons” why a proposed temporary fork to limit non-monetary transactions on the Bitcoin network, or BIP-110, is a bad idea.Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-110 was introduced in December 2025 to stop nonfungible token-like Ordinals inscriptions and other arbitrary data from spamming the network and to preserve BTC’s main use as a peer-to-peer cash system.In a roughly 3,700 word post on X.com, the man in control of the largest Bitcoin (BTC) corporate treasury made a case for what he said are “neutral rules, hard consensus, open markets, and permissionless innovation.”Source: Michael Saylor on X.com“Many Bitcoiners I respect support BIP 110. They want to keep validation accessible, protect node operators from unwanted costs and content, preserve affordable payments, and keep Bitcoin focused on sound money rather than general-purpose data storage. Those are serious concerns. I share the objectives. I disagree about the remedy,” Saylor said. He added:“This article critiques the proposal, not the people behind it. I assume good faith. Bitcoin is strongest when we can disagree vigorously without mistaking allies for enemies.”As of 12 p.m. ET, on Sunday, the post had been viewed 879,000 times, with 692 replies and 852 retweets.BIP-110 is one of the more notable protocol-level disputes in the Bitcoin development community since the Blocksize Wars between 2015 and 2017, when ecosystem participants debated whether it was worth risking a chain split to raise the block size limit for scalability. The proposal was introduced by pseudonymous Bitcoin developer “Dathon Ohm” with the support of Ocean protocol founder Luke Dashjr. Opponents include Blockstream CEO Adam Back.Related: Bitcoin nodes running BIP-110 crosses 2% as spam wars heat upLittle certainty on BHP-110 approvalTo be sure, BIP-110 won’t be activated unless 55% of Bitcoin nodes validating blocks are in support of the proposal across a Bitcoin block “period.”In the last period, period number 475 between block 955,584 and 957,599, only 1% of blocks were in support.The dispute comes at a time when Ordinals activity is at near all-time lows, with fewer than 10,000 Ordinals inscribed into the Bitcoin blockchain on a daily basis over the last month, down from the more than 400,000 seen during its peak in August 2023.Change in daily Ordinals inscriptions since December 2022. Source: Dune AnalyticsBock has previously criticized BIP-110, describing it as a “quest to police other people.” He said Bitcoin’s decentralization should mean “you can’t impose your views on others,” calling it incompatible with BTC’s cypherpunk ethos of permissionless, censorship-resistant money.Dashjr and other BIP-110 supporters have called Ordinals-driven bloat a “serious threat” to the network, prompting the need for an imminent fix.They have also argued BIP-110 wouldn’t cause a chain split, as many fear, while adding that the BIP-110 fork imposes a temporary one-year limit and thus wouldn’t invalidate fee-paying transactions over the long term.Features: From Bitcoin critics to blockchain believers: The 5 biggest crypto backflips

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Strategy founder and chairman Michael Saylor again took to social media on Sunday to offer his latest signal to investors as one analyst sees Saylor’s messaging as needing more clarity to help Bitcoin regain its momentum.“Orange dots tell only part of the story,” was Saylor’s message on Sunday in a post that accompanied a chart from Saylortracker.com, similar to previous social media messages that have preceded news of Strategy’s Bitcoin (BTC) purchases, typically announced the day after his posts.In recent weeks, the largest digital asset treasury company and a major BTC holder, has moved away from its long-time “never sell Bitcoin” approach to a willingness to sell the biggest crypto as needed to fund dividends for holders of its STRC preferred stock and to replenish its cash reserves. Earlier this month, Strategy sold $216 million worth of Bitcoin, reducing its total holdings to 843,775 tokens, according to a July 6 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.“Orange dots tell only part of the story.” Source: Michael SaylorDays earlier, Strategy unveiled a capital framework allowing Bitcoin sales to fund dividends, increased the annual dividend rate on its STRC preferred stock to 12%, and disclosed that its US dollar reserve had grown to $2.55 billion.Standard Charter’s global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, believes recent Strategy’s actions — and Saylor’s manner of communicating them — “are muddying the waters for BTC near-term.”“We think effective communication of MSTR’s new strategy (using BTC to back STRC) is key to reassuring markets that wholesale selling is unlikely; this should in turn support BTC prices,” Kendrick wrote in a note to clients on Friday. “Indeed, if this signalling proves effective, it should remove the need for MSTR to actually sell any BTC by supporting STRC’s price,” he said.Related: Crypto Biz: Did Michael Saylor buy the Bitcoin bottom for once?StanChart sees inconsistencies in “never sell” approachKendrick said that Strategy’s long-held “never sell” approach limited what the company could with its industry-biggest digital asset treasury.“The problem with the ‘never sell’ approach is that it limits what MSTR’s BTC holdings can do — or, perhaps more importantly, what they are perceived to be doing,” the StanChart analyst said. “MSTR has started to shift its communication strategy on this in recent months. It has sold BTC twice and recently announced a BTC monetization program.”Source: Standard Chartered BankStill, he sees Strategy’s “market signaling” will improve soon. He expects that to bring clarity to the outlook for Bitcoin, on which StanChart maintains its $100,000 year-end forecast.Shares struggle from year low ahead of earnings reportInvestors who bought into the Strategy narrative have not had an easy time in the past 12 months. The STRC preferred shares were formulated to hold a price of $100 apiece. Shareholders saw that par value fall to the wayside last month, to the lowest value since the preferred stock was introduced a year ago.The common shares, trading under the MSTR ticker, have lost more than 70% of their value since July 2025, closing at $94.64 per share on Friday, down from a 52-week high of $457.22.The company is slated to report second-quarter earnings on July 30, with analysts consensus of $4.28 per share, according to Yahoo Finance data. Earnings have fallen short of analyst forecasts in six of the last eight quarters, according to Fintel.io data, including a 33.76% negative surprise in the first quarter of 2026. Magazine: Will the crypto lobby’s $189M campaign get CLARITY over the line?

The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has issued a broad regulatory blueprint for retail financial services, warning that retail financial services are hurtling toward total automation driven by autonomous “agentic AI.”The landmark report, “AI and the future of retail financial services,” spearheaded by executive director Sheldon Mills, details a structural shift away from periodic, human-led decisions toward continuous, automated financial services that could increasingly rely on programmable financial infrastructure.“The central shift is from human-led, episodic financial activity towards services that are AI-enabled, continuous and delegated,” Mills wrote. In January, the FCA launched a review into the implications of advanced AI on consumers, retail financial markets and regulators. The 147-page report comes at an inflection point where generative AI meets institutional crypto adoption. As financial systems transition to autonomous portfolio and cash management, legacy fiat banking rails are seen as structurally incapable of matching machine transaction speeds. This positions systemic stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits as potential settlement infrastructure for AI-driven financial services.It outlines seven recommendations for the FCA to consider, including enabling “the foundations for agentic finance,” which would support the development of trusted agent protocols that would underpin use of agentic AI and “scaling up the FCA’s AI Lab to support AI models and system innovation in financial services.”Related: UK plans payments rule changes for stablecoins, tokenized depositsFCA envisions agents on “autonomy spectrum”The Mills Report suggests that the catalyst is the rapid evolution of AI from predictive models into independent agents operating on an “autonomy spectrum.” At the far end of this spectrum, humans act as mere “observers” while AI continuously manages capital.Screenshot of table header that sets out how FCA sees operator activities may change as they move across the AI autonomy spectrum. Source: Financial Conduct Authority.The acceleration of this shift has outpaced prior regulatory timelines, with more than 20 frontier models released since late 2025 alone.“Firms are moving from systems that recommend actions to systems empowered and trained to take them, and consumers will soon gain agents that act on their behalf,” Mills said in the report’s foreword. FCA research shows that 20% of UK adults are already open to letting AI make autonomous financial choices.For these AI agents to execute multi-layered transaction strategies seamlessly, they require programmable, instantaneous settlement mechanisms. Traditional multi-day settlement latency remains an operational bottleneck. Because systemic stablecoins and tokenized assets live natively on programmable ledger networks, they provide the friction-free, atomic settlement needed for automated protocols to move capital instantly without human clearance.However, this automation introduces severe corporate governance risks regarding legal accountability. The review highlights growing industry anxiety over this ambiguity, noting that one CEO observed that the financial sector may eventually require a “Turing test” to accurately distinguish between human intent and autonomous algorithmic behavior in the market. “The FCA’s Mills Review reinforces that firms should treat agentic AI as an accountability and governance issue now, while providing greater confidence to innovate responsibly as AI adoption accelerates,” Emma Banymandhub, CEO of The Payments Association, said in a statement. “AI has enormous potential for financial services, but realising that potential will depend on strong governance, clear accountability and maintaining consumer trust.”Mills, who is leaving after eight years at the FCA, told The Financial Times ahead of the report’s release that managers would still need to be accountable for the actions of their AI models. “You need a human on the hook for what they’re doing,” he said.Magazine: AI is banking the unbanked in Africa… faster than crypto

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned that the rapid expansion of stablecoins risks fragmenting the global monetary system and weakening sovereign monetary control, urging central banks and the financial industry to accelerate the development of tokenized forms of central bank and commercial bank money as a safer alternative.In its Annual Economic Report published Sunday, the Basel-based institution delivered a sharp assessment of the approximately $316 billion stablecoin market, arguing that tokens pegged to fiat currencies lack the institutional features required to serve as safe, reliable money at scale. BIS pointed to structural vulnerabilities in reserve asset management and warned that a significant migration from commercial bank deposits into private digital tokens could reduce bank funding and constrain credit to the real economy.The report also provides a signal to policymakers that the current regulatory approach to stablecoins may prove insufficient if private digital currencies continue expanding. Rather than positioning stablecoins as a durable foundation for the future monetary system, BIS said that tokenized commercial bank deposits, combined with tokenized central bank money operating on regulated infrastructures, offer a more robust path toward modernizing payments while preserving monetary stability.Demand for foreign stablecoins connects FX markets with crypto ecosystem. Source: BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.The report focuses particular attention on “stablecoin dollarization,” that is, the growing use of dollar-denominated stablecoins in economies with weaker domestic currencies. According to BIS, this trend could weaken monetary sovereignty, erode the effectiveness of domestic monetary policy, reduce bank intermediation and increase exposure to volatile cross-border capital flows, particularly in emerging market economies.Related: BIS Project Agorá shows tokenized payments can settle in secondsBIS raises fresh concerns about public blockchains’ limitsThe report also delivers one of BIS’s strongest critiques yet of public permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum as a foundation for the monetary system. It argues that decentralized networks relying on distributed validation and lacking a central governance structure struggle to meet the requirements for scalability, legal accountability and settlement finality expected of systemically important financial infrastructure.BIS raises concerns on rising fragmentation across layer 1 and layer 2 networks.Source: BIS Annual Economic Report 2026.At the center of BIS’s critique is the economics of decentralized consensus. The report argues that public permissionless blockchains compensate validators through transaction fees that rise as network activity increases, making congestion, longer confirmation times and higher costs structural features of the system rather than temporary technical shortcomings. According to BIS, these characteristics undermine the efficiency and network effects that are essential for a unified monetary system.The Basel-based institution further argues that permissionless blockchains lack the clear governance and accountability frameworks required for institutional finance. Without an identifiable entity responsible for maintaining the integrity of the system, resolving disputes or ensuring compliance with financial integrity standards, BIS contends that such networks face significant obstacles to supporting large-scale regulated financial activity.Rather than rejecting tokenization itself, BIS advocates a “unified ledger” architecture that combines tokenized central bank money, tokenized commercial bank deposits and tokenized financial assets on programmable platforms operating within regulated legal and institutional frameworks. By preserving the benefits of tokenization, including programmable transactions and faster settlement, while maintaining the institutional foundations of the existing monetary system, BIS said that financial markets can improve efficiency without sacrificing monetary stability, financial integrity or public trust.Related: Why stablecoins and SWIFT may have to coexist