Hey,
Michael Saylor spent six years telling the world that selling Bitcoin is a mistake. “You do not sell your Bitcoin,” he said in October. Strategy, his company, bought 843,775 BTC at an average price of $74,476 per coin.
BTC is at $62,000 right now.
Last week, Saylor sold $216 million worth BTC. Strategy’s largest Bitcoin sale ever. To pay dividends.
Meanwhile, the RBI just told the Indian government it wants to ban crypto.
Busy week. Let’s get into it.
Strategy didn’t sell because they wanted to. They sold because they had to.
Strategy borrowed billions to buy Bitcoin, then issued preferred stock (called STRC) to raise more capital. That preferred stock pays dividends. Bitcoin is at $62,000, well below their $74,476 average buy price. The STRC stock broke its $100 peg. Dividends still need to be paid.
So Saylor sold 3,588 BTC between June 29 and July 5 at around $59,000 to $60,000 per coin, raising $216 million to cover those obligations.
The market absorbed it without breaking. BTC barely moved. A $216 million forced sale from the world’s most watched Bitcoin holder. The price held. Whoever was on the other side of that trade bought everything Saylor threw.
But the lesson here isn’t about Saylor. It’s about leverage.
Strategy built its entire model on borrowed money buying an asset it believed would only go up. When the asset went down 43% from its peak, the obligations didn’t go down with it. Dividends still get paid. Debt still gets serviced. And the only way to cover that is to sell the asset you said you’d never sell.
This is the same trap retail traders fall into with leveraged positions, just at a different scale. The conviction doesn’t matter when the margin call comes. Position sizing and debt always matter more than belief.
One more thing worth noting: Strategy still holds 843,775 BTC, about 4% of the entire Bitcoin supply. They’ve proven that even the most committed Bitcoin holder has a price at which the real world forces their hand.
On July 8, Reuters published government documents showing the RBI has formally told the Union government its position on crypto: “lean toward prohibition.”
The RBI wants banks and financial institutions barred from holding, trading, or gaining any exposure to crypto. It opposes both dollar-pegged and rupee-pegged stablecoins. It told the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance that cryptocurrencies are a threat to monetary stability, potentially used for terror financing and narcotics, and that the tax evasion problem is severe.
The numbers behind that last point are real. In the financial year ending March 2023, fewer than 25% of the 645,000 individuals who transacted in crypto declared those gains on their tax returns. The Enforcement Directorate has separately found over Rs 2,500 crore in unauthorized cross-border crypto transactions. The Income Tax Department has sent notices to over 44,000 taxpayers for undisclosed crypto income.
The RBI is not making this up. There is a genuine compliance problem. And that compliance problem is being used to justify the policy position.
Here’s what this actually means for the 39 million Indians currently holding crypto:
No ban is imminent. The RBI has wanted to ban crypto since 2018. The Supreme Court struck that ban down in 2020. Any new prohibition requires fresh legislation, a parliamentary process, and would almost certainly face another Supreme Court challenge. The government has not adopted a formal prohibition. A policy discussion paper from the Department of Economic Affairs has been “in final drafting” since May 2025 and has been shelved five times. The RBI’s preference and government policy are not the same thing.
But the pipes are tightening. When the RBI publicly tells banks to stay away from crypto, bank compliance teams hear it loud and clear, even without a formal directive. Expect fewer smooth INR on-ramps, more friction around stablecoin transactions, and some exchanges tightening services as their banking partners get cautious. The USDT premium in India already hit 8.5% above the USD/INR rate in late June, which is what on-ramp friction looks like in practice.
The regulatory grey zone is getting narrower. India has 39 million crypto investors holding roughly Rs 20,436 crore in digital assets, one of the largest retail crypto markets in the world by user count. That number is big enough to make a hard ban politically complicated. But “not banned” is not the same as “protected.” Every trader operating on FIU-registered exchanges in India is in a more stable position than someone using offshore platforms, because that’s exactly the population that becomes collateral damage when enforcement tightens.
Conclusion: The RBI’s position hasn’t changed since 2018. What’s changed is the context around it. The US has passed regulatory frameworks, Europe has MiCA, and India is increasingly the odd one out. That contrast is making the RBI’s position harder to maintain politically. Whether the Indian government eventually moves toward regulation rather than prohibition is the real question, and that answer likely comes in the monsoon parliamentary session. A standing committee report is due. Watch that.
Coinbase Premium: Negative for 50 straight days
The Coinbase Premium tracks the price difference between BTC on Coinbase (US) and BTC on Binance. When it’s negative, BTC is cheaper in the US than everywhere else, meaning US buyers are less aggressive than the rest of the world.
It’s been negative for 50 consecutive days. Combined with 8 straight weeks of ETF outflows before last week’s reversal, this tells you that American institutional money has been leaving, not leading, the current recovery.
The recovery you’re seeing in BTC right now is being driven by buyers outside the US, the same pattern we saw in Edition 2 with whale accumulation. When US demand eventually returns, it tends to accelerate moves that are already in progress.
Watch: if the Coinbase Premium turns positive and holds for a week, that’s the signal that US institutional money is back in. That’s when the recovery gets more credible.
On July 6, someone spent $4 million buying BONK tokens, used that stake to dominate a governance vote with 99.9% of the votes cast, and legally transferred $20 million from the BONK DAO treasury to their own wallet.
No code was hacked. No vulnerability was exploited. The voting system worked exactly as designed. Seven wallets voted total. One of them owned almost all the votes.
This is a governance attack, and it is becoming the most common form of crypto theft because it requires zero technical skill. Just capital and a poorly designed voting system.
The mechanics: BONK DAO used token-weighted voting, meaning whoever holds the most tokens controls the vote. The attacker bought just over 1% of BONK’s supply, the minimum quorum threshold, spent six days letting the proposal sit there while almost nobody else voted, then passed it and moved the treasury.
The broader lesson isn’t about BONK specifically. It’s about any project where:
Governance token supply is concentrated or cheap to accumulate
Voter participation is consistently low
Treasury funds can be moved in a single proposal with no timelock
Every DAO you’re invested in has this attack surface. The projects that survive governance attacks are the ones with timelocks (a waiting period between a vote passing and execution), higher quorum requirements, and multisig treasury controls that require multiple parties to approve any transfer.
If you’re holding a governance token in any project, spend five minutes understanding who controls the votes and what protections exist between a proposal passing and funds moving. Most people don’t and that’s why these attacks keep working.
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See you next week.
— Team Crypto Cult
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