Kevin Warsh is set to become the first Federal Reserve chair with disclosed crypto holdings, and the first whose policy instincts could still squeeze the sector harder than his predecessors.
Most Americans don't follow Fed personnel drama closely, but they feel its aftershocks every month through mortgage rates, savings yields, and the temperature of equity markets.
Bitcoin feels those same currents even more acutely than most traded assets, which is why the question of who leads the central bank matters to crypto long before that person says a word about digital assets. When Warsh's odds of becoming Fed chair were rising, Bitcoin sold off, as traders read him as a central banker who favors a smaller Fed balance sheet and a tighter monetary regime.
Most Americans don't follow Fed personnel drama closely, but they feel its aftershocks every month through mortgage rates, savings yields, and the temperature of equity markets.
Bitcoin feels those same currents even more acutely than most traded assets, which is why the question of who leads the central bank matters to crypto long before that person says a word about digital assets. When Warsh's odds of becoming Fed chair were rising, Bitcoin sold off, as traders read him as a central banker who favors a smaller Fed balance sheet and a tighter monetary regime.
This is not Cake Wallet’s first inroad into advanced Bitcoin features. Unlike most multi-coin wallets such as Binance’s popular Trust Wallet, Cake has gone a lot further than just supporting basic on-chain addresses. Cake has deployed some of Bitcoin’s more sophisticated technology, such as Silent Payments and Payjoin, powerful privacy technologies that most other blockchains and crypto wallets are not even close to. Features of this sort protect users from a wide range of risks, such as targeted scams, as third parties have a harder time tracking user behaviour across the blockchain.
The Lightning Network integration brings Cake wallet into a small group of wallets that support Bitcoin’s fast payments layer with self-custody and privacy in mind. The update is powered by the Breez SDK and Spark, which unlocks self-custody control for users without the need to manage a lightning node.
On the privacy front, Cake has a custom implementation of the Spark suite, which further protects user privacy. In a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, the company said, “Lightning transactions in Cake Wallet do not embed your Spark address in Lightning invoices, and transaction data is not published to public explorers by default. Visibility is intentionally limited, reducing unnecessary exposure of user activity and safeguarding user privacy.”
The Lightning Network integration brings Cake wallet into a small group of wallets that support Bitcoin’s fast payments layer with self-custody and privacy in mind. The update is powered by the Breez SDK and Spark, which unlocks self-custody control for users without the need to manage a lightning node.
On the privacy front, Cake has a custom implementation of the Spark suite, which further protects user privacy. In a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, the company said, “Lightning transactions in Cake Wallet do not embed your Spark address in Lightning invoices, and transaction data is not published to public explorers by default. Visibility is intentionally limited, reducing unnecessary exposure of user activity and safeguarding user privacy.”
Riot Platforms sold 3,778 bitcoin in the first quarter of 2026, generating $289.5 million and marking a shift in strategy as the miner redirects capital toward infrastructure and high-performance computing.
The volume sold exceeded the company’s quarterly production of 1,473 BTC by roughly 2.6 times, signaling a drawdown of treasury holdings rather than routine profit-taking. Riot ended the quarter with 15,680 BTC, down 18% from 18,005 BTC at the close of 2025.
The selling appears to have extended beyond the reporting period. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence flagged a 500 BTC outflow from a wallet linked to Riot following the end of the quarter, suggesting continued liquidation activity.
The imbalance between production and sales comes as Riot accelerates its expansion into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing colocation. The company has begun repositioning its business model away from sole reliance on bitcoin mining, seeking to monetize its energy assets and data center footprint through long-term infrastructure contracts.
The volume sold exceeded the company’s quarterly production of 1,473 BTC by roughly 2.6 times, signaling a drawdown of treasury holdings rather than routine profit-taking. Riot ended the quarter with 15,680 BTC, down 18% from 18,005 BTC at the close of 2025.
The selling appears to have extended beyond the reporting period. Blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence flagged a 500 BTC outflow from a wallet linked to Riot following the end of the quarter, suggesting continued liquidation activity.
The imbalance between production and sales comes as Riot accelerates its expansion into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing colocation. The company has begun repositioning its business model away from sole reliance on bitcoin mining, seeking to monetize its energy assets and data center footprint through long-term infrastructure contracts.
Revolutions leave behind artifacts — not always weapons or flags, but the quieter objects that carried a message before anyone knew how far it would travel. A wheat-pasted broadside on a Los Angeles overpass. A hand-lettered cardboard sign held up in the snow outside a Tokyo office building. A newspaper headline, pulled from the front page of The Times of London and encoded permanently into a piece of software that would go on to challenge the architecture of global finance.
The works gathered in Relics of a Revolution at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas trace a specific lineage of dissent — one that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself. Mear One (b. 1971, Santa Cruz, CA) has spent nearly four decades using the walls of Los Angeles as a medium for political and economic confrontation. He pioneered the Melrose graffiti art movement in the late 1980s, was the first graffiti artist to exhibit at the 01 Gallery on Melrose and at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake — where Banksy would later debut his first North American show — and in 2004 joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour, a nationwide series of anti-war street art interventions during the Bush administration. His work was part of the landmark Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011 and resides in the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum among others. From anti-Gulf War broadsides in the early 1990s through the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, Mear One has been making work that insists the root problem is the system itself — not the politicians or the policies, but the underlying architecture of money and power.
The works gathered in Relics of a Revolution at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference in Las Vegas trace a specific lineage of dissent — one that connects street-level protest to the birth of Bitcoin itself. Mear One (b. 1971, Santa Cruz, CA) has spent nearly four decades using the walls of Los Angeles as a medium for political and economic confrontation. He pioneered the Melrose graffiti art movement in the late 1980s, was the first graffiti artist to exhibit at the 01 Gallery on Melrose and at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake — where Banksy would later debut his first North American show — and in 2004 joined Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Be the Revolution tour, a nationwide series of anti-war street art interventions during the Bush administration. His work was part of the landmark Art in the Streets exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011 and resides in the permanent collections of the Laguna Art Museum among others. From anti-Gulf War broadsides in the early 1990s through the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, Mear One has been making work that insists the root problem is the system itself — not the politicians or the policies, but the underlying architecture of money and power.
It is also why every bull market ends up replaying the same argument. Block space gets tight, fees jump, users complain, and builders promise solutions that live somewhere above the base layer.
This week, Vitalik Buterin showed up with a very different claim about Ethereum’s future, one that lands directly on Bitcoin’s turf.
In a post on X, he argued the blockchain “trilemma” is solved by pairing PeerDAS on mainnet with zkEVMs reaching “alpha” performance, while security work continues.
He sketched a 2026–2030 path where proofs increasingly replace re-execution as the way Ethereum validates blocks.
He also pointed to a third pillar: more distributed block building over time, so transaction inclusion is harder for a small club of builders to capture.
This week, Vitalik Buterin showed up with a very different claim about Ethereum’s future, one that lands directly on Bitcoin’s turf.
In a post on X, he argued the blockchain “trilemma” is solved by pairing PeerDAS on mainnet with zkEVMs reaching “alpha” performance, while security work continues.
He sketched a 2026–2030 path where proofs increasingly replace re-execution as the way Ethereum validates blocks.
He also pointed to a third pillar: more distributed block building over time, so transaction inclusion is harder for a small club of builders to capture.