The last time yields were this high, markets crashed in a day

The companies that made bitcoin respectable are leaving for AI. The 30-year yield is at a 2007 high. And Coinbase just picked Abu Dhabi to build its tokenization empire. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ SPONSORED BY Tuesday, August 11, 2026   The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield is at its highest level since 2007 — and Fidelity’s Jurrien Timmer is sounding a warning that echoes history. When risk-free rates rose sharply in the 1960s through the mid-1990s, they competed aggressively for capital with stocks. Investors who ignored that dynamic were handed the 1987 Black Monday crash, still the largest single-day percentage drop in Dow history. Today the same structural competition is in play, and bitcoin has no earnings or cash flow to justify its price against a 30-year real yield near a 20-year high. Separately, the companies that gave bitcoin its institutional legitimacy — Strategy, MARA and a cohort of corporate treasury buyers — are now pivoting to AI data centers, draining the corporate cover that supported BTC. And yet in the onchain world, the “strongest hands” are quietly accumulating: wallets holding at least 10,000 BTC climbed to a six-month high of 90. Meanwhile Coinbase just secured Abu Dhabi regulatory approval to build the world’s first platform treating tokenized equities simultaneously as securities, blockchain tokens and DeFi collateral. Read today’s full report → Market snapshot As of 8am EST Asset Price 24h BTC $64,200 −2.00% ETH $1,882 −1.80% SOL $74.20 −2.30% XRP $1.01 −2.10% Prices approximate. Visit coindesk.com/price for live data. A message from RealFi Most stablecoins leave capital sitting still. RealFi is different. It connects on-chain capital to real-world markets like US Treasuries, money market funds, and private credit. Real transparency. Real impact. RealFi. RealFi is launching August 2026. Join the Testnet now at realfi.co Find out more CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. What matters today Markets   Story 1 of 3 When safe assets compete with risk: lessons from the 1960s–90s for bitcoin and stocks. The risk-free rate — the yield on U.S. Treasury securities — is rising again. Fidelity Investments’ director of global macro Jurrien Timmer has drawn a pointed historical parallel: when Treasury yields rose sharply from the 1960s through the mid-1990s, government bonds became a genuine competitor to stocks and other risk assets for capital. Investors who missed that shift were handed Black Monday in 1987 — a 22.6% single-day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, still the largest one-day percentage decline in history. Today the 30-year yield is at its highest level since 2007 and could rise further if Wednesday’s CPI reading beats estimates, validating higher-for-longer Fed expectations. Timmer’s read is that yields have been broadly rising since 2020, echoing the start of the multi-decade uptrend that began in the late 1950s. For equities, the argument is straightforward: higher opportunity cost demands stronger earnings. For bitcoin, the situation is more complex. The cryptocurrency has neither earnings nor cash flow; its value rests entirely on its appeal as perceived digital gold and a hedge against fiat currency depreciation. That’s a harder case to make when investors can earn a guaranteed real return above inflation for 30 years in a government bond. None of this makes a crash inevitable — but there is no denying that capital that once chased narrative and momentum now has a safer alternative. In that context, Timmer notes, $500,000 or $1 million price targets for bitcoin look stretched. Bitcoin’s implied volatility index BVIV has rebounded from its long-standing 36% support level, coinciding with renewed spot weakness — a historically bearish configuration worth watching. Whale wallets holding 10,000+ BTC hit a six-month high of 90, up 7.1% over eight weeks — the “strongest hands” quietly accumulating while price drifts. The SEC separately announced it will hold a meeting on August 24 to propose its first formal Reg Crypto rule for a legal issuance pathway for digital assets. Read more → Finance   Story 2 of 3 Coinbase picks Abu Dhabi for its global tokenized asset push. Coinbase is establishing its international tokenization hub in Abu Dhabi after receiving a Financial Services Permission from the FSRA of Abu Dhabi Global Market, allowing the exchange to arrange investment deals and provide custody for tokenized securities. The license gives Coinbase a regulatory base to offer digital securities backed by underlying shares, to be registered and issued under FSRA oversight. What makes this architecturally significant is the framing: Coinbase Institutional co-CEO Brett Tejpaul describes the ambition as building a platform that treats tokenized equities “simultaneously as securities, blockchain-native tokens, and DeFi-composable assets” — something no major financial center has yet achieved. The Abu Dhabi operation builds on Coinbase’s existing UAE footprint: Project Diamond, launched in 2023 to let institutions issue and trade digital debt instruments on Base, and last month’s deal in which Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Capital tokenized a private-market strategy on blockchain infrastructure including Base, with Coinbase taking exposure to the fund. The Abu Dhabi hub will sit alongside Coinbase’s derivatives business in Dubai, giving it two regulated UAE bases. Abu Dhabi introduced its virtual asset regulatory framework in 2018 and has spent the past seven years positioning itself as the leading test bed for tokenization of real-world assets — a $2 trillion asset class that is now getting serious institutional infrastructure. The move is strategically timed: as U.S. regulatory clarity remains stalled in Congress, Coinbase is betting that offshore licensing frameworks allow it to build the tokenized securities rails that its U.S. business cannot yet offer. Read more → Markets   Story 3 of 3 Bitcoin slips as corporate BTC enthusiasm moves to AI. Bitcoin fell 2% to around $64,200 on Tuesday, with the broader crypto market losing 2% to $2.18 trillion, roughly ten coins declining for every one that gained. The proximate cause identified by FxPro chief market analyst Alex Kuptsikevich is structural: the corporations that provided bitcoin with institutional legitimacy — Strategy above all, but also miners like MARA that spent two years rebranding themselves as AI data-center operators — are now pivoting toward AI, selling bitcoin to build liquidity or rotating capital into that trade. The dynamic is almost the inverse of how corporate adoption began. Corporations joined crypto when it flattered their image as tech-forward; as the AI investment opportunity grows, the same companies are retreating, handing bitcoin back to the retail base that built it. The institutional cover they provided is draining, and Kuptsikevich warns that BTC position liquidation could accelerate over the coming weeks. Bitcoin is sitting just above its 50-day moving average, which has traded nearly flat for three weeks — a standoff between sellers distributing and buyers absorbing. Whether that line holds will be closely watched. The Iran-Oman Hormuz peace talks also hit an impasse, with oil rising again on renewed U.S.–Iran standoff. Notable items: Riot Platforms surged 20% in premarket trading after announcing a $9.1 billion deal with Anthropic, further illustrating how corporate capital that once went to BTC treasury strategies is now flowing to AI. Luke Dashjr was removed as Bitcoin BIP editor following the failed BIP-110 fork. Nvidia separately announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure push that analysts say further widens the gap between AI compute valuations and crypto compute assets. Read more → CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. Crypto Daybook Americas: A newsletter from CoinDesk Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences

Bitcoin's free-market lesson: the fork, the miners, the result.

Bitcoin forked. The fork died in two blocks. The Senate punted the Clarity Act. BTC is above $65K anyway. Here's why none of that is contradictory. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ SPONSORED BY Monday, August 10, 2026   This weekend delivered a lesson in how bitcoin actually works. The BIP-110 fork — a proposal to restrict Ordinals inscriptions, rejected by distributed consensus — went live at block 961,632. Miners, choosing the most profitable chain, abandoned it after two blocks. No regulator intervened. No committee overruled anyone. The market decided. “Bitcoin worked exactly as designed,” Michael Saylor said. Meanwhile the Senate couldn’t muster the 60 votes needed for the Clarity Act and adjourned for recess — but bitcoin broke above $65,000 anyway, up 3.7% on the week, as the weak jobs report softened the dollar, ETF inflows kept coming ($853 million over the weekend alone), and hedge funds turned net long on CME for the first time in months. The market found its own signal while Washington punted to September. CPI data this week will be the next test. And separately: Coinsbuy was drained of $8 million in a coordinated cross-chain attack across TRON and Ethereum — the industry’s $972 million hack tab for the year keeps climbing. Read today’s full report → Market snapshot As of 8am EST Asset Price 24h BTC $65,013 +0.17% ETH $1,925 +0.50% SOL $76.40 +1.20% XRP $1.03 −0.60% Prices approximate. Visit coindesk.com/price for live data. A message from RealFi Most stablecoins leave capital sitting still. RealFi is different. It connects on-chain capital to real-world markets like US Treasuries, money market funds, and private credit. Real transparency. Real impact. RealFi. RealFi is launching August 2026. Join the Testnet now at realfi.co Find out more CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. What matters today Markets   Story 1 of 3 Bitcoin’s BIP-110 episode is free-market capitalism in purest form. The BIP-110 story that played out over the weekend is worth reading as a case study in decentralized governance. The proposal aimed to restrict non-financial data — Ordinals inscriptions specifically — from the Bitcoin blockchain to free up block space. It was debated openly by the developer community, failed to secure broad consensus, and was rejected. Crucially, no central authority made that call. Then BIP-110 supporters exercised their right to fork — creating a new chain at block 961,632 to implement their preferred rules. Miners, acting on economic incentive, chose the more profitable chain: the original Bitcoin. The BIP-110 fork, inheriting Bitcoin’s full mining difficulty but attracting only a fraction of the hashpower, produced two blocks and ground to a halt. The original network continued uninterrupted with virtually all activity, liquidity and security intact. Michael Saylor summed it up on X: “Bitcoin worked exactly as designed.” The counterpoint he draws is instructive: in conventional economies, falling corporate profitability should trigger layoffs and restructuring, but governments often block that process for electoral reasons, prolonging industrial sickness. Bitcoin had no such circuit breaker — the market ran its course. On spot price, BTC remains near $65,000, range-bound but in the upper half of its summer channel, as Ichimoku Cloud analysis puts it inside a consolidation zone, with a sustained close above the cloud required before a trend-change signal is confirmed. CPI data this week will be the next meaningful macro input. Read more → Markets   Story 2 of 3 BTC above $65,000 even as the Senate punts the Clarity Act to the fall. Bitcoin held near $65,200 on Monday, up 3.7% on the week — a recovery from an early-August low near $62,000 — even as the U.S. Senate left the Clarity Act unpassed and broke for its August recess. The bill mustered 51 of the 60 votes needed for cloture, pushing any action to September 14 at the earliest. That the market held its gains confirms what strategists argued last week: the delay was largely priced, so the failure to pass landed as confirmation of an existing expectation rather than a fresh negative. The bid is coming from flows and macro, not Washington. Spot bitcoin ETFs strung together consecutive days of inflows — $853 million poured in over the weekend alone, with BlackRock’s IBIT taking the bulk. The dollar softened following the weak July jobs report, loosening the backdrop that had pinned bitcoin through summer. Hedge funds trading bitcoin futures on the CME turned net long, a rare positioning shift that signals professional traders are increasingly betting on prices rising rather than structurally shorting the basis trade. Michael Saylor posted Strategy’s bitcoin-buy chart on X over the weekend captioned “Doing business,” widely read as signaling another purchase is coming, days after the firm disclosed selling about 1,638 BTC to fund share buybacks. ETH also held gains near $1,925. XRP underperformed, down about 5% on the week to $1.03, despite four consecutive weeks of XRP ETF inflows — a divergence analysts flagged as puzzling. Iran-Oman deal talk eased Hormuz concerns further, lifting oil-sensitive risk assets. CPI data due this week is the next macro test. Read more → Finance   Story 3 of 3 Crypto exchange Coinsbuy loses $8 million in coordinated two-blockchain attack. Crypto exchange Coinsbuy lost more than $8 million in a coordinated attack across TRON and Ethereum on August 9, according to onchain data reviewed by blockchain security researchers. The attacker began with a 5 USDT test transaction before draining eight TRON wallets of 6.04 million USDT in roughly an hour. Simultaneously, three Ethereum wallets were emptied of 1.89 million USDT and 77 ETH, swapped via 1inch through a wallet created the same day. Onchain records tie both chains together through cross-chain swapper Bridgers, whose Ethereum payout contract sent funds directly into the swap wallet, connecting what appeared to be separate operations into a single incident. The attacker routed roughly 79% of the stolen funds through instant exchange FixedFloat using approximately 50 single-use addresses. ChangeNOW froze a six-figure sum. About 282 ETH, worth roughly $542,000, remains unmoved across five addresses. Within 24 hours, Coinsbuy refilled the drained wallets to within 0.05% of their pre-attack balances — a behavior that researchers say suggests the team does not believe private keys were compromised, pointing instead to a withdrawal-path vulnerability. The attack vector has not been identified and Coinsbuy has not issued a public statement. The incident adds to an increasingly costly year: the industry had already seen roughly $972 million stolen through late July. The week’s other notable finance story: Mastercard is acquiring stablecoin firm BVNK for $1.8 billion, and Robinhood has launched no-fee crypto trading in the UK as part of an AI-powered all-in-one app. Read more → CoinDesk Disclosure: The information contained in this newsletter, and any information linked through the items contained herein, is not intended to provide sufficient information to form the basis for an investment decision. You should seek additional information regarding the merits and risks of investing in any cryptocurrency or digital assets. L1.co Disclosure: This material is for informational purposes only, and the content contained herein should not be considered investment advice or a solicitation, offer, or recommendation to sell or buy any asset, strategy, or product. Investing in digital assets involves a high degree of risk, including the loss of principal. Crypto Daybook Americas: A newsletter from CoinDesk Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.  Copyright © 2026 CoinDesk, All rights reserved.  CoinDesk, Inc., 61 9th Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10011, USA Unsubscribe Manage preferences

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