Tag: Business – Decrypt

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes or less, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors up 1%; BTC at $72K
• ZEC and MON rally 20% leading top movers; HYPE +5%
• CZ and OKX founder Star publicly dispute, CZ calls for $1B “divorce” bet
• Bessent and Brian Armstrong both say it’s time to pass the Clarity Act
• WLFI falls 10% after team reveals using 5B tokens to borrow $75M

🌎 Bitcoin breaks $73K on ceasefire hopes, STRC

Bitcoin topped $73,000 briefly on Thursday, per data from CoinMarketCap, reversing an early sell-off after Netanyahu signaled Lebanon negotiations. It bounced off that level and is holding just above $72K this morning.

The Bitcoin options market is even more bullish. Data shows that the $80,000 level is seeing the most volume in June expiry contracts with over $1.6B in open interest, a full 10% move from current levels.

As for why traders are bullish—well, it could be Saylor-driven. Strategy‘s STRC had another massive day Thursday with over 3M preferred shares moved, generating capital to purchase 2,000+ Bitcoin ($144M). Wednesday’s numbers were similar, and the totals historically rise into the dividend cutoff date (next Wednesday). So expect 3 more days of increasing STRC flows.

It’s a strong setup for Bitcoin near-term.

Key Details:

• Bitcoin topped $73,000 Thursday, up ~9% over the past month as crypto decouples from software stocks, which are down 12% over the same stretch
• June $80K Bitcoin options showing $1.6B in open interest, most concentrated target
• Saylor’s STRC moved 3M shares, enough to buy $144M in Bitcoin; on pace for well over $300M in purchases this week

📊 Galaxy profit rockets, stock jumps

The headline number from Galaxy’s 2025 annual report, a $241M net loss, buried the more important one: The firm’s Digital Assets segment generated $505M in adjusted gross profit.

GLXY closed up 11.3% Thursday, second-best crypto equity on the day.

The thesis Mike Novogratz is selling isn’t a crypto trading story anymore. It’s AI infrastructure. Galaxy’s Helios campus, once one of North America’s largest Bitcoin mines, is an 800-megawatt facility fully leased to CoreWeave that’s beginning to generate compute revenue in 2026. “The most consequential shift right now is the move from narrative to infrastructure,” he wrote.

That pivot from BTC mining to AI is clearly paying off…

Key Details:

• Galaxy posted a $241M 2025 net loss driven by unrealized losses and one-time costs; core Digital Assets segment generated $505M in adjusted gross profit
• GLXY closed up 11.3% at $21.15; total assets on platform hit $12B with $2B in net inflows during 2025
• The Helios play: 800MW Texas facility fully leased to CoreWeave; AI compute revenue begins 2026; Galaxy is pitching itself as half crypto financial firm, half AI infrastructure company

🦅 Gemini is on sale, but nobody wants the whole thing

Potential buyers are circling Gemini, but not in the way the Winklevoss twins might want.

Per CoinDesk, interested parties are evaluating an acquisition of Gemini’s shuttered EU and UK operations specifically to obtain MiCA and FCA regulatory licenses. Nobody is pursuing a full takeover.

The backdrop is stark. Gemini IPO’d at $28 in September 2025 and now trades around $4.70, down 83%. The company cut 25% of its workforce in February, exited the EU, UK, and Australia, lost three senior executives, and faces a shareholder class-action lawsuit filed in March.

GEMI stock jumped 11% on the acquisition reports, but has already shed some of those gains.

Key Details:

• Potential buyers are circling Gemini’s shuttered EU and UK operations for MiCA and FCA licenses; no full takeover interest
• The distress context: $28 IPO September 2025, now $4.70 (down 83%); 25% workforce cut; exited EU/UK/Australia; three executives departed; class-action lawsuit filed March 2026
• MiCA wrinkle: license doesn’t transfer in an acquisition; change of control triggers full regulatory reassessment; buyers face scrutiny equivalent to a new applicant

⚖️ Bessent to the Senate: Pass the Clarity Act

Treasury Secretary Bessent made his most direct push yet Thursday, urging the Senate to pass the Clarity Act and resolve the stablecoin yield dispute still stalling the bill.

This comes just one day after the White House Council of Economic Advisors mathematically dismantled the banking lobby’s core argument, finding a yield ban would boost lending by just $2.1B, a 0.02% increase.

The only remaining variable is whether Senate Democrats and holdout Republicans will accept a stablecoin yield framework that Coinbase can live with.

And we may have gotten a signal from Brian Armstrong last night, who tweeted “It’s time to pass the Clarity Act” in union with Bessent.

Key Details:

• Bessent urged the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, calling for resolution on stablecoin yield provisions; follows the White House CEA report that undercut the banking lobby’s deposit-flight argument
• What’s left: Senate Banking Committee markup; stablecoin yield language is the last unlock for the full US crypto regulatory stack
• Odds of the Clarity Act passing in 2026 rose 3% to 59% on Thursday

🤖 Florida goes after OpenAI

Florida AG James Uthmeier launched a formal investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT Thursday, citing the chatbot’s alleged role in the April 2025 FSU mass shooting that killed two people, child safety concerns, and the risk of OpenAI data reaching the Chinese government.

The quote Uthmeier posted to announce it is the week’s most ironic AI headline: “AI should advance mankind, not destroy it.”

The investigation arrives as AI infrastructure, specifically data centers, are coming under attack. Per Bloomberg and Sightline Climate, 30-50% of the data centers planned to come online this year are facing delays or outright cancellations. Of the 12 gigawatts of capacity announced for 2026, only a third is currently under construction. Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act in March to stop all new construction until federal safeguards are in place. It’s not going anywhere, but it signals the political mood around AI is shifting.

Key Details:

• Florida AG Uthmeier launched a formal OpenAI investigation, citing ChatGPT’s alleged role in the 2025 FSU shooting, child safety, and CCP data concerns; subpoenas forthcoming; arrives as OpenAI eyes a $1T IPO
• 30-50% of US data centers planned for 2026 are facing delays or cancellations per Sightline Climate
• The political pressure: Sanders and AOC introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act in March, calling for a full construction halt until federal safeguards are in place; fringe bill, real signal

🌎 Macro crypto and markets

• Crypto majors are slightly green; BTC +1% at $72.1k; ETH +1% at $2,210; SOL +2% at $84; HYPE +5% at $41
• DEXE (+30%), ZEC (+20%), and MON (+20%) led top movers
• Oil -3% at $94; Gold even at $4,764
• The Bitcoin options market is showing concentration at the $80,000 price level for June expiry contracts with over $1.6B in open interest
• Treasury Secretary Bessent urged the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, pushing for resolution on stablecoin yield provisions still stalling the bill
• The Treasury will share cybersecurity intelligence with crypto firms, giving the industry access to the same threat data distributed to traditional financial institutions
• Former SEC official Brett Redfearn joined Securitize as president ahead of the BlackRock-backed tokenization firm’s anticipated public listing
• Binance founder CZ got into a public dispute with OKX founder Star, escalating to the point that CZ bet Star $1B that he is “officially divorced” from Binance

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were slightly green; DOGE +1%, SHIB +1%, PEPE +1%, TRUMP -2%, PENGU +4%, SPX +5%, FARTCOIN +2%
• SBTI (25x), triplet (+102%), chillguy (+32%), and hodl (+38%) led notable onchain movers

💰 Token, airdrop & protocol Tracker

• Tether released its QVAC SDK, a toolkit enabling AI apps to run locally on devices without cloud servers, extending Tether’s push into AI infrastructure
• Nunchuk released open-source tools letting AI agents interact with Bitcoin wallets via multi-sig, without giving agents unilateral control over funds
• DeFi lender Sky is restructuring its products to pursue a formal credit rating, targeting institutional capital as DeFi protocols push further into TradFi
• Binance enabled prediction market trading in-app via Predict.fun, giving 240M+ users direct access to event contracts as the CFTC battles states over federal jurisdiction
• WLFI fell 10% after the team revealed that it borrowed $75M against 5B tokens

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mostly flat again; Punks -1% at 28 ETH, Pudgy -1 at 4.2 ETH, BAYC even at 6.39 ETH; Hypurr’s +!% at 392 HYPE
• Nouns (+69%) and Kodas (+13%) led notable movers

OpenAI is currently building a cybersecurity product it plans to release exclusively through its “Trusted Access for Cyber” program, according to Axios. The program was previously announced in February, and it’s meant to be a controlled rollout that keeps certain products away from the general public and in the hands of defensive security operators only.

OpenAI launched the program after releasing GPT-5.3-Codex, currently its most capable cybersecurity offering, and is backing participant access with $10 million in API credits.

The news comes amid growing worry among cybersecurity experts over the potential for increasingly powerful AI products overwhelming existing systems. Just earlier this week, Anthropic spooked itself with its own creation, Claude Mythos.

Anthropic said Mythos is the company’s most capable AI model, and turned out to be so effective at finding security vulnerabilities—zero-days in every major operating system and browser—that it decided only a handpicked group of organizations should have access to it.

Now OpenAI is, reportedly, doing something similar.

Anthropic is currently fighting a legal battle after the Pentagon designated it a supply chain risk after the company refused to lift usage restrictions on Claude for surveillance and autonomous weapons applications. Federal agencies have been scrutinizing AI companies’ safety protocols with increasing intensity since early April.

As of now, OpenAI has not shared any public information officially confirming or denying the reports.

The reason for the restrictions isn’t subtle. Anthropic’s Mythos Preview, which leaked before its official rollout, was found capable of identifying “tens of thousands of vulnerabilities” that even advanced human bug hunters would struggle to locate. The model is described as “extremely autonomous” and reasons with the sophistication of a senior security researcher. That kind of capability, available to anyone with an API key, is the kind of thing that keeps security teams up at night.

Anthropic’s response was Project Glasswing—a controlled access initiative that gives Mythos Preview only to vetted organizations: Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks, and roughly 40 others involved in maintaining critical infrastructure.

OpenAI’s decision to lock down products like this one looks like an attempt to get ahead of that regulatory pressure. By voluntarily restricting access before a government agency tells them to, OpenAI positions itself as the responsible actor in a space where Anthropic is getting hammered.

The restrictions also reflect something deeper than caution about one specific model. Anthropic’s own safety report acknowledged that Cybench, the benchmark used to evaluate whether an AI poses serious cyber risk, “is no longer sufficiently informative of current frontier model capabilities”—because Mythos cleared it completely. The tool built to measure the danger is no longer adequate for what’s being built. Anthropic added that its overall safety determination “involves judgment calls” and that many evaluations leave “more fundamental uncertainty.”

Anthropic committed up to $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations as part of its rollout. OpenAI has not announced a comparable commitment alongside its access program, though both companies are framing their restricted programs as a net benefit for defensive security—the idea being that giving better tools to defenders before attackers get them is worth the tradeoff of limiting general access.

The pattern emerging across the frontier AI industry is that the most capable models will no longer arrive as broad product launches. They’ll be distributed more like classified research—selectively, under agreement, to organizations with the infrastructure and intent to use them responsibly.

Canary Capital thrust Pepe into the limelight on Wednesday with an application for an exchange-traded fund that tracks the meme coin’s price, but the token’s muted reaction may serve as the latest sign of Wall Street’s tepid appetite for assets that trade on vibes.

On Thursday, Pepe changed hands around $0.00000359, up about 0.6% over the last day, according to CoinGecko. The day before, trading volume rose 10% to $432 million.

Not long ago, meme coins served as key growth drivers for firms like Wintermute. Yet the crypto market maker acknowledged last year that its prediction of a core asset manager debuting a meme coin ETF, particularly Dogecoin, was intended to be tongue-in-cheek.

Today, four crypto asset managers offer U.S.-listed Dogecoin ETFs. Still, it remains “very hard for institutional investors to construct a credible investment rationale around something like Doge, which is perhaps more geared towards the retail audience,” James Butterfill, head of research at crypto asset manager CoinShares, told Decrypt.

Dogecoin is ranked 17th out of all crypto ETFs that CoinShares tracks, generating $13 million worth of year-to-date inflows. Outside of ETFs tracking Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP, Butterfill noted that ETFs tied to other altcoins represent 9% of total assets under management.

“They’re just not popular with investors,” he said. “It’s the big four and not much else.”

Decrypt has reached out to Canary for comment.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins indicated last November that most cryptocurrencies, including meme coins, shouldn’t be treated as securities. That sentiment was bolstered by SEC guidance published last month, which categorized meme coins as a form of “digital collectibles.”

Under generic listing standards for crypto ETFs established last year, exchanges are able to list commodity-based ETFs without requiring case-by-case approval. Among key factors, digital assets underlying them have to have a six-month history of regulated futures trading.

Pepe futures currently trade on crypto exchange Kraken. Canary’s filing noted that contracts for the meme coin “are typically traded on regulated or registered trading venues.”

Canary has filed applications for ETFs that track other meme coins, including Mog, Pudgy Penguins’ PENGU, and President Donald Trump’s meme coin, TRUMP. Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas expressed skepticism that the Trump-related ETF would pass when Canary’s application landed on the SEC’s desk last year, citing a lack of futures trading.

Balchunas once noted to Decrypt that the ETF industry is famous for “throwing spaghetti at the wall.” Meanwhile, Butterfill described a flurry of filings across ETFs from some issuers on Thursday as a “machine gun approach.”

Tuttle Capital Management, in some ways, has taken further steps to appeal to degens. In January, the ETF issuer filed applications for leveraged TRUMP, BONK, and MELANIA ETFs. But the SEC hasn’t offered a final verdict on those applications yet.

Enterprise revenue now makes up more than 40% of AI behemoth OpenAI’s total revenue, according to the company. And it’s on pace to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026.

OpenAI hit $25 billion in annualized revenue in February, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025.

“I have never seen this level of conviction spread so quickly and consistently within the industries,” OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser, who spent more than a decade at Salesforce before running Slack, wrote in an official note on Wednesday.

Companies at the front of this wave have moved well past using AI to write emails or summarize documents. They’re now deploying what Dresser calls “teams of agents,” basically groups of AI systems that coordinate with each other, hold context across sessions, and take action inside business tools without constant human oversight. The question seems to have shifted from “should we use AI?” to “how many agents should we run?”

OpenAI launched its enterprise agent platform to build a user base beyond everyday retail consumers, who are still its core revenue stream. Codex, its AI coding agent, has already crossed 3 million users, a figure that was, according to Dresser, “almost zero” at the start of the quarter. Paying business users hit 9 million in February, up from 5 million in August. Weekly active users across all of OpenAI’s products reached 910 million.

The company also launched ChatGPT Agent, which can plan trips, book hotel rooms, research competitors, generate slide decks, and place online orders without a human in the loop.

But as hyped up as agentic AI is, Dresser believes companies need a straightforward path to integrate the tech without rebuilding their business structure.

“What’s really missing still for most companies is just a simple way to unleash the power of agents as teammates that can operate inside the business without the need to rework everything,” she said. OpenAI’s agent platform wants to be the answer to that problem.

OpenAI recently brought on Peter Steinberger, founder of the world’s most popular open source agentic AI platform OpenClaw, to lead its push into personal AI agents—a signal that the company isn’t only building for corporations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has positioned multi-agent systems at the center of OpenAI’s next product phase, and the momentum behind enterprise adoption suggests that framing is holding up in the market.

The company is also preparing for an IPO, with CFO Sarah Friar confirming this week that retail investors will get a share of the allocation. OpenAI projects reaching $85 billion in revenue by 2030—a number that only makes sense if agents become the default way businesses interact with AI, not just a feature layered on top of a chat interface.

Researchers from the Google Cloud AI team have introduced PaperOrchestra, an AI framework that autonomously transforms messy lab notes and scattered research data into submission-ready academic manuscripts.

Unlike existing AI writing tools that focus on text generation, the system aims to tackle the full intellectual workflow of academic paper creation—from organizing raw materials to generating figures and conducting literature reviews.

The system employs five specialized agents working in parallel: Outline Agent, Plotting Agent, Literature Review Agent, Section Writing Agent, and Content Refinement Agent. Each agent handles specific aspects of manuscript preparation, from structuring arguments to creating visualizations and ensuring proper academic citations through API-grounded references.

To evaluate performance, researchers created PaperWritingBench, the first standardized benchmark reverse-engineered from 200 top-tier AI conference papers. In side-by-side human evaluations, researchers noted, PaperOrchestra achieved win rate margins of 50%-68% for literature review quality and 14%-38% for overall manuscript quality compared to autonomous baselines.

PaperOrchestra emerges as AI systems are increasingly making inroads on knowledge work and specialized domains that are traditionally the preserve of humans, with the emergence of AI research agents and growing evidence of AI ghostwriting in academic papers.

The framework’s multi-agent approach—where specialized components tackle different aspects of a complex task—mirrors similar architectures being deployed across legal document analysis, financial modeling, and other domains requiring multi-step intellectual processes.

The use of AI tools in academic research has proved divisive, however, with some scholars dismissing the practice as “vibe coding,” and noting that the flood of AI-assisted papers in certain fields is putting “considerable strain” on peer-review systems.

Meta and CoreWeave have expanded a long-term artificial intelligence infrastructure agreement worth about $21 billion, extending their partnership through December 2032. Both companies have seen their shares rise Thursday following the announcement.

CoreWeave announced the expanded deal Thursday, describing it as an extension of the companies’ existing relationship and an increase in infrastructure supporting Meta’s AI operations.

“This is another example that leading companies are choosing CoreWeave’s AI cloud to run their most demanding workloads,” CoreWeave co-founder, CEO, and Chairman Michael Intrator said in a statement.

The agreement gives Meta access to AI cloud capacity from CoreWeave to support the development and deployment of its AI systems, including inference workloads that run trained models at scale.

The infrastructure will be deployed across multiple locations and will include some of the first deployments of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. CoreWeave said the distributed deployment is intended to optimize performance, resilience, and scalability for Meta’s AI systems, and reflects rising demand for infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale AI workloads.

Meta and CoreWeave previously struck a $14 billion AI infrastructure deal in 2025, under which the cloud provider agreed to supply computing power to Meta through 2031.

The news comes as Meta accelerates its push into advanced AI systems. On Wednesday, the company introduced Muse Spark, a natively multimodal model capable of processing text, images, and voice and designed to tackle complex reasoning tasks using multiple AI agents.

Meta has also outlined a new Advanced AI Scaling Framework that expands how it evaluates risks and tests its most capable models before deployment.

“As we build more capable and more personalized AI, reliability, security, and user protections are more important than ever,” Meta said in a statement. “Advanced models require an advanced approach to safety—one that scales with the technology.”

Shares of Meta and CoreWeave rose after the companies announced their expanded AI infrastructure deal. Currently, Meta (META) is trading above $630 per share, up about 3% on the day, while CoreWeave (CRWV) has jumped 5.5% to a recent price of $93.70.

OpenAI has paused its planned Stargate artificial intelligence infrastructure project in the United Kingdom, citing high energy costs and regulatory uncertainty, according to a report by CNBC that was confirmed by a company spokesperson.

The ChatGPT giant first announced the Stargate UK infrastructure project in mid-September 2025, in partnership with chipmaker Nvidia and infrastructure provider Nscale. The plan called for deploying up to 8,000 GPUs beginning in the first quarter of 2026, with the potential to scale to about 31,000 GPUs over time.

“Everything starts with compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement at the time. “Compute infrastructure will be the basis for the economy of the future, and we will utilize what we’re building with Nvidia to both create new AI breakthroughs and empower people and businesses with them at scale.”

The Stargate project had been expected to support local computing infrastructure for AI systems in the country. Proposed locations included sites such as Cobalt Park in northeast England, part of a designated “AI Growth Zone.”

A critical factor in the decision to halt the project stems from industrial electricity cost in the U.K., which averages about 24 pence per kilowatt-hour for medium-sized businesses—and AI data centers require far more power than typical industrial sites. Often, data centers run at 50–100 megawatts continuously, and more than 140 projects are already waiting for grid connections totaling over 50 gigawatts.

At current prices, operating a 100-megawatt data center could cost roughly $125 million to $250 million a year, highlighting the growing energy demands of AI infrastructure.

The Stargate U.K. project followed OpenAI’s July 2025 memorandum of understanding with the U.K. government, focused on adopting frontier AI systems in public services. It also comes months after the Trump administration announced a Stargate AI infrastructure initiative in January 2025.

While Altman and OpenAI have not made a public statement regarding the status of Stargate UK, OpenAI told CNBC it continues to evaluate the project and may proceed if conditions improve.

“We continue to explore Stargate U.K. and will move forward when the right conditions such as regulation and the cost of energy enable long-term infrastructure investment,” OpenAI said in a statement.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) was uplisted to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday, with shares of BMNR concluding trading on the smaller NYSE American exchange with Wednesday’s market close. 

Shares in the firm are up nearly 1% since opening on the new trading venue, recently changing hands around $21.75. 

“Today, BitMine achieved a major milestone by being uplisted to the ‘Big Board’ NYSE,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement. “The NYSE is the envy of capital markets around the world, and BitMine is proud to be the newest company traded on this exchange.”

Alongside its uplisting, the firm also announced its board of directors approved an increase in its previously established share buyback program, raising its limits from $1 billion to $4 billion. 

“BitMine’s expanded $4 billion buyback reflects our commitment to shareholders,” said Lee. “There may be a time in the future when BitMine shares are trading below intrinsic value, and the Company wants to be in a position to accretively retire common shares.”

It doesn’t appear that BitMine has actually used funds to repurchase shares to date. Decrypt reached out to the company for confirmation and clarification, but did not immediately receive a response.

Other publicly traded digital asset treasuries have similarly approved share buyback programs to repurchase outstanding shares when their mNAV—the ratio of their market cap compared to the value of the net assets they hold—trades below 1, or at a discount. 

For example, competing Ethereum treasury firm Sharplink (SBET) has remained committed to only acquiring ETH when its mNAV is above 1. At all other times, the firm repurchases shares of SBET in a move that is deemed more beneficial for shareholders.

While Lee indicates the firm may repurchase shares in the future when they are trading below “intrinsic value,” publicly available data shows that the firm is currently trading below an mNAV of 1. 

Nevertheless, it has sought to consistently purchase Ethereum, not shares of BMNR, adding around $150 million worth of ETH last week.  

At the time of writing, its intraday market cap is around $9.81 billion, according to data from Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, its Ethereum tokens alone—of which it has more than 4.8 million—account for more than $10.6 billion in net assets as ETH changes hands at $2,216. 

The firm also maintains around $14 million in BTC and total cash holdings of $864 million, giving it around $11.4 billion in total holdings, according to a Monday press release.

Shares of BMNR have fallen around 63% in the last six months of trading as Ethereum itself has slid 55% from its August all-time high of $4,946.

Morgan Stanley became the first major U.S. commercial bank to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF on Wednesday, with its MSBT product posting inflows of $30.6 million in its first trading day according to data from Farside Investors.

Despite the newcomer’s first-day performance, Wednesday marked a second day of net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs, with the funds shedding $124.5 million. Nevertheless, the investment products remain in the black for the week, thanks to Monday’s $471 million one-day haul, their biggest since February.

MSBT’s 0.14% expense ratio makes it the cheapest Bitcoin ETF available, undercutting category leader BlackRock’s IBIT by 11 basis points. The launch intensifies competition with BlackRock’s IBIT, which holds $56 billion in assets while charging 0.25% annually; on Wednesday, IBIT drew in $40.4 million.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart suggested that the product “might be a loss leader,” arguing that “this is their way of, potentially trying to get some crypto millionaires—a lot of people with a lot of money—to join their wealth management product.”

In a tweet, Seyffart’s colleague Eric Balchunas called MSBT’s debut “arguably biggest btc launch since they began” and projected first-year assets under management of $5 billion.

Earlier this week, Balchunas told Decrypt earlier this week that Morgan Stanley’s offering is “not going to knock off BlackRock and become the biggest, but I believe it will do well,” adding that. “What Morgan Stanley has going for it is a captive audience. It’s got its own army of advisors.”

Bitcoin is currently trading at $71,260, down 0.6% on the day and up 6.6% on the week, per CoinGecko data. On prediction market Myriad, owed by Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan, users are evenly split on the cryptocurrency’s prospects, putting an even chance on its next move taking it to $84,000 or $55,000.

BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo has revealed that he donated $5.4 million (£4 million) to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, saying he was motivated to become politically active for the first time by what he described as a failing UK political system.

Delo, who is based in Hong Kong, wrote in a Daily Telegraph op-ed that he made the contribution earlier this year before the introduction of a £100,000 cap on donations from British citizens living abroad. He said the funding would help build Reform into “a genuine alternative party of government”.

In the article, Delo said the UK faced a “grave threat” driven by “self-deception” among political elites and argued that Reform was gaining support by recognising the scale of the country’s problems.

Delo co-founded BitMEX, one of the crypto industry’s earliest derivatives exchanges. In 2022, he pleaded guilty in the U.S. to breaching the Bank Secrecy Act after failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls, paying a $10 million criminal fine. He later received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump, describing the case in his op-ed as “a regulatory failing that isn’t even a crime in the UK.”

His donation adds to significant backing for Reform from internationally based donors, including £11.4m from Thailand-based Tether investor Christopher Harborne.

Reform UK and crypto

The funding comes as Reform positions itself as the UK’s most crypto-aligned political party. It has accepted cryptocurrency donations, promoted pro-crypto policies and built ties with industry figures, distinguishing it from more cautious approaches taken by Labour and the Conservatives.

That stance has placed Reform at the centre of a broader debate over crypto and political finance. Government ministers have moved to tighten rules on overseas donations and imposed a moratorium on cryptocurrency contributions following a government-commissioned review into foreign financial influence. The review recommended capping donations from expatriates and highlighted risks around transparency and enforcement in crypto-based funding.

Reform has branded these recommendations an attack on its party specifically and has pushed back, arguing existing rules can accommodate crypto and that tighter restrictions risk disadvantaging newer parties. Critics, including transparency campaigners, argue that crypto donations could create new channels for opaque or foreign-linked funding.

Reform leader Nigel Farage, who last month invested in a Bitcoin treasury firm and has made tens of thousands of dollars from speaking engagements at crypto conferences, retweeted Delo’s op-ed, stating that “the scheming and dishonest Keir Starmer will not stop us.”

“In fact, his actions have only made brave people like Ben Delo even more determined to beat Labour at the next election,” he added.

Farage has also advocated crypto-friendly policies, including lower taxes on digital assets and the creation of a national Bitcoin reserve.

Reform described Delo as “a true patriot”.

Delo said he intends to relocate to the UK, which would allow him to continue donating without restriction. He said the move reflected both personal reasons and a desire to play a more direct role in the country’s future.