BTCurrent Weekly v1: Jun 13, 2025

Quote of the Day:

The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in a free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed.

- The Fiat Standard by Saifedean Ammous

Welcome to the first publication of BTCurrent. Not including that one-off in September 2022 of course, but no need to look back at that.

BTCurrent is here to bring Bitcoin (and only Bitcoin) news which is readable by all. BTCurrent Weekly will be delivered to your inbox—if subscribed, of course—every Friday morning (EST). I focus on Bitcoin-only topics in three sections: The Latest which identifies a few major events from the week, The Signal which focuses on a major story headline, and The Chart which visualizes important data moving behind the scenes.

There is a lot of noise in the Bitcoin reporting space and I attempt to filter that all out to deliver a clear and concise report.

In addition to the weekly edition, I will be posting a monthly special to deep dive into a major story of the month. BTCurrent Monthly is released on the last Sunday of each month.

Follow @BTCurrent on Nostr and X for additional content.

No AI was used in the writing of this newsletter.

Thanks for tuning in. Let’s get to it!

• Bitcoin Price Edges Closer to Record High.1

  • Summary: Bitcoin hit its all-time high on May 22nd at nearly $112,000. It has been hovering in the $103,000-$110,000 range this past week.

  • Impact: Catalysts will continue to pile up over time. Most importantly, bitcoin has stayed above $100k for the last 30 days (and counting).

• BlackRock’s Bitcoin fund IBIT 0.00%↑ blows past $70B in record pace for ETFs2

  • Summary: Not only did $IBIT reach $70 Billion in AUM in record pace, it reached it nearly 5 times faster than the previous record of SPDR Gold Shares GLD 0.00%↑ (341 days vs 1,691 days). BlackRock now is the second-largest holder of bitcoin in the world behind only Satoshi’s dormant bitcoin wallets. “Holder” in BlackRock’s case is a bit misleading as “Coinbase Custody, not BlackRock, holds the private keys for the BTC in IBIT, safely storing client assets offline and backed by commercial insurance.3”

  • Impact: If anyone doubted the appetite for bitcoin in traditional financial markets, well there you go. Don’t get me wrong, I am in the camp of owning actual bitcoin in a hardware wallet. However, IBIT does offer bitcoin exposure in traditional investment vehicles where actual bitcoin can’t be purchased. I don’t like BlackRock “holding” over 650,000 bitcoin any more than you do, but it does strengthen the network. Not your keys, not your coins.

• Paul Tudor Jones promotes Bitcoin4

  • Summary: Wednesday morning on Bloomberg, Paul Tudor Jones recommends a portfolio of “vol adjusted bitcoin, gold, stocks.”

  • Impact: Paul Tudor Jones is a billionaire hedge fund manager. Institutional investors continue to recommend (and act upon) shifting away from bonds. The bond market is currently worth over $142 trillion. Bitcoin is worth a bit over $2 trillion. People are not going to go and sell their bonds and buy bitcoin directly. But sell bonds and buy gold, cash, or low volatility stocks paired with bitcoin? Now that is one way to chip away at those market cap disparities.

• Bitcoin hashrate is up 40% in 2025 and at an all-time high5

  • Summary: Think of hashrate as the total computational power used to process transactions on the Bitcoin network. The more hashrate, the stronger and more secure the network. High hashrate = good for Bitcoin network.

  • Impact: The Bitcoin network adjusts its difficulty about every two weeks to balance out changes in hashrate (see Bonus Chart at the end of the newsletter). Increased difficulty means miners have to dedicate more computational power to mine bitcoin. Bitcoin difficulty is also at an all time high. A higher hashrate indicates more miners are joining the network or increasing operations and therefore is harder and more competitive to mine bitcoin. Almost 95% of all bitcoins have already been mined. I will let you think through the implications on that one.

• CleanSpark Releases May 2025 Bitcoin Mining Update6

  • Summary: CleanSpark is “positioned to become the first public bitcoin miner to achieve 50 EH/s entirely through self-operated infrastructure”. CleanSpark continues to have lean operations and improving their key metrics. They “are now the sixth-largest public bitcoin holder, all mined directly through our own operations.”

  • Impact: Now I don’t know how many non-public bitcoin miners achieved 50EH/s through not-self-operated infrastructure, but being the first in something is good even if that’s a cherry-picked stat. CleanSpark is currently the fourth largest bitcoin miner by market cap. Most everything in their May report indicated continued strength of the company. Strong bitcoin miners are critical to a healthy Bitcoin network.

Financial Times calls them a “Japanese hotel group”7. That would be quite misleading.

As per their Company Manifesto8, they are “Japan’s first and only publicly listed Bitcoin Treasury Company.” In 2024 they pivoted from the hotel business to financial engineering and stacking sats. In fact, they now only own one hotel, The Bitcoin Hotel, set to open in Q1 2026. Metaplanet currently has a market cap of $6.21 billion which would put it in the 800-850 range of the largest American companies - slightly above Crocs ($5.88B) and below Etsy ($6.42 B)9. It’s difficult to find information on the company itself before their bitcoin strategy went live. Their website is scrubbed of anything not Bitcoin-related.

At its peak, Metaplanet had 5 operational hotels. By summer of 2022, all hotel-related investments were sold except for the to-be-released The Bitcoin Hotel. Metaplanet underwent multiple business transformations and acquisitions from their founding in 1999 as a CD/DVD company10. Metaplanet plans to purchase 210,000 bitcoin by the end of 2027 which is 1% of the total bitcoin supply of 21 million. They currently own 8,888 bitcoin (.042% of total bitcoin supply).

I am sure Metaplanet has been heavily influenced by Microstrategy. A glaring difference between the two is that Microstrategy promotes their core software product and had annual revenue of $463 million in 202411. Metaplanet has risked it all on a Bitcoin strategy with minimal outside revenues.

Converting company assets towards bitcoin, and leveraging traditional financial markets to do so, will continue to gain popularity. Metaplanet has taken a bigger risk in that they no longer have a core product. They are fully reliant on financial engineering to purchase bitcoin, and therefore bitcoin’s price for company success. This will lead to short-term volatility and extreme risk with an extended bitcoin drawdown. But it is certainly a risk Metaplanet understands and is ready to take on.

As long as “the existing financial system operates on endless expansion, debt monetization, and systemic opacity”12, more and more companies will continue to take advantage. Twenty One Capital started by Jack Mallers, the CEO of Strike, has this exact goal. Who needs a product when you can take advantage of traditional financial systems to stack sats.

The Metaplanet Market Cap to Bitcoin NAV is ~6.4x13.

In comparison, the Microstrategy Market Cap to Bitcoin NAV is ~1.92x14.

In a perfect world, Metaplanet’s market cap should be close to Bitcoin NAV (this is not financial advice). As Keynes once said: “The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” And no, I certainly do not support Keynesian Economics, but he did get that one right.

Bonus content to see the relation between Total Hash Rate (Blue) and Network Difficulty (Black) over the last year.15

No AI was used in the writing of this newsletter.

Follow @BTCurrent on Nostr and X for additional content.

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