print-icon
print-icon

The Flywheel Picks Up Speed

Coinbits's Photo
by Coinbits
Monday, Apr 20, 2026 - 20:23

Bitcoin finally saw some positive price action this week as broader financial markets rallied on the elevated prospects of a resolution between the United States and Iran.

Those who view bitcoin as a risk-on asset are flooding into bitcoin. But the more interesting story, in our view, is how the high-information bitcoin-native investors have been behaving these past few months.

Whales haven’t been sweating the headlines. Bitfinex reports that whale addresses accumulated 270,000 coins in the last 30 days – the largest buying spree since 2013 – while exchange reserves sit at their lowest level since December 2017.

In the UK, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng has stepped in as Executive Chairman of a bitcoin treasury company, writing that bitcoin is a "monetary transition" he spent his career studying, and that missing it at the national level "was a mistake I intend to help correct."

And across the pond in Washington, Sam Lyman, former senior advisor to Treasury Secretary Bessent and now head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, took to Fox Business this week to outline bitcoin's expanding strategic role in geopolitics.

Jeff Park makes a key point: The macro cycle comes and the FUD keeps changing. The bitcoin flywheel doesn’t care — it just keeps picking up speed.

NEWS

Tether goes direct-to-consumer with self-custodial bitcoin wallet

Tether launched tether.wallet this week, a self-custodial mobile wallet that supports bitcoin and Lightning alongside its USDT, USAT, and Tether Gold products. Keys are stored on-device, long addresses are replaced with human-readable “@tether.me” usernames, and the app is live in 160+ countries.

Bitcoin is the only true bearer asset in the wallet

Good to see Tether putting bitcoin front and center and bringing it to its 570 million-user base. One important caveat: bitcoin is the only true bearer asset offered in this product. USDT, USAT, and Tether Gold are all centrally issued tokens that can be frozen or clawed back. Hold your bitcoin, use the stablecoins as needed, and know the difference!

Wall Street's last holdouts capitulate: Schwab launches spot bitcoin, Goldman files income ETF

Charles Schwab, which oversees $12.22 trillion in client assets and 39 million brokerage accounts, began the phased rollout of Schwab Crypto this week, offering direct spot bitcoin and ether trading to retail clients for the first time at a 75-basis-point fee. Separately, Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC for a Bitcoin Premium Income ETF that pairs spot bitcoin exposure with a covered-call overlay to generate yield.

The TradFi kings bend the knee

In 2017, then-Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein called bitcoin "a fraud" and warned it was "a bubble." In 2026, Goldman is filing to manufacture its own yield-bearing bitcoin product, after already amassing over $1 billion of exposure to other issuers' bitcoin ETFs.

Schwab's retail launch, meanwhile, plugs a spigot straight from Main Street savings into bitcoin.

Pakistan ends eight-year bitcoin banking ban, opens financial system to licensed firms

The State Bank of Pakistan formally reversed its 2018 prohibition on banking services for bitcoin and crypto firms, allowing regulated banks to open accounts for licensed virtual asset service providers under the new Virtual Assets Act 2026 framework. Banks themselves remain barred from trading, investing in, or holding bitcoin, and must keep client funds in segregated, non-interest-bearing rupee accounts.

A market 40 million strong rejoins the financial system

Roughly 17% of Pakistan's population is already involved in bitcoin trading despite the ban; the government is finally catching up to its own people. The reversal marks another data point in a very simple trend: every country that tries to ban bitcoin eventually flips and tries to regulate it instead. Prohibition is a losing long-term strategy, and Pakistan just proved it again.

Back-to-back billion-dollar days: Strategy's STRC ATM clears $2.7B in 48 hours

Strategy's variable-rate preferred stock vehicle STRC produced $2.7 billion in trading volume across just two sessions this week, more than all of last week combined. 100% of every tick cleared above the $100 par threshold. That implies roughly 29,914 bitcoins were absorbed in 48 hours, more than doubling last week's five-day total of 13,927.

The machine keeps compounding

Saylor's financial engineering has gone from experiment to industrial-scale bitcoin suction pump. STRC sits at par, yields 11.5%, and quietly converts demand for yield into bitcoin on the balance sheet – capital markets engineering working exactly as designed. Two days of trading this week pulled more bitcoin off the market than a full month of global issuance.

BITCOIN ADOPTION CONTINUES

Investment bank TD Cowen predicted bitcoin will hit $140,000 this year and issued "BUY" ratings for bitcoin treasury companies Nakamoto and Strive.

Stacked (formerly Lightning Pay) launched a self-custodial Lightning wallet, making it New Zealand's only major non-custodial bitcoin exchange.

UK-listed Connecting Excellence Group received bitcoin as payment for executive recruitment services — a first for a UK-listed recruitment business — and retained the coins directly in its treasury.

A solo miner beat 1/100,000 odds to mine block 944,306 and collect the full 3.128 bitcoin reward worth over $222,000.

Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh disclosed an equity stake in bitcoin Lightning startup Flashnet, a Bitwise position, and indirect exposure to more than 20 other bitcoin companies in his pre-Senate ethics filing.

Bitcoin mining hardware maker Canaan reported delivering 89 bitcoins in March and grew its total treasury to a record 1,808 coins while adding over 10 megawatts to its deployed hashrate.

HOW BITCOIN WORKS

Learn one key idea about bitcoin each week. This week:

Avoiding an unnecessary quantum freeze

Quantum computing is suddenly everyone's conversation. Google's Willow chip, IBM's Starling roadmap, and rapid progress in error correction have pulled the theoretical threat of a "cryptographically relevant quantum computer" forward on every timeline, according to many pundits and researchers. For bitcoin, the question is how to protect the roughly 25% of supply sitting in addresses with exposed public keys – without breaking the property that makes bitcoin valuable in the first place.

Earlier this year, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal called BIP-361, "Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset," was released. It proposes a soft fork that first bans sending to quantum-vulnerable addresses for three years, then, in a second phase, bans quantum-vulnerable spends altogether, effectively freezing those coins. Critics argue this undermines bitcoin's core property of censorship resistance, while supporters counter that doing nothing gives a future quantum attacker an open vault of legacy coins.

BitMEX Research, which has already published multiple pieces on related subjects including Lamport signatures, taproot quantum spend paths, and mitigating the freeze's impact, has a fourth proposal worth reading: the "canary" approach.

Rather than activating a blanket freeze on a fixed schedule, the soft fork would designate a single quantum-vulnerable bitcoin address generated using a Nothing-Up-My-Sleeve Number (NUMS) system that cryptographically proves no one knows the private key. The coins at that address are theoretically spendable, but only by someone with a functional quantum computer. Users could optionally donate to a multisig bounty fund to sweeten the pot, making this the most attractive target any quantum attacker could go after.

If the canary address is ever spent, the freeze activates immediately. If it never is, spending vulnerable coins stays permitted — possibly with a safety window (say, 50,000 blocks) before funds become fully liquid again.

The trade-off is more complexity, but the freeze only triggers on actual evidence of a threat. In a network where a significant part of the value proposition rests on not confiscating coins, a proposal that refuses to freeze anyone's bitcoin until a quantum computer actually proves it exists deserves serious consideration.

COIN CHECK

Approximately what percentage of bitcoin's circulating supply currently sits in addresses with exposed public keys, making those coins theoretically vulnerable to a future cryptographically relevant quantum computer?

A. 5%
B. 15%
C. 25%
D. 50%

Check your answer at the end of the page.

FROM THE MEME POOL

Follow us on X for more fresh content

ANSWER

Answer: C. 25% commonly cited estimates range from ~25–30%, driven mostly by legacy pay-to-public-key outputs and reused P2PKH addresses where the public key is already revealed on-chain.

Contributor posts published on Zero Hedge do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Zero Hedge, and are not selected, edited or screened by Zero Hedge editors.
Loading...