FRIDAY, JUL10
1. BitGo quantum-proofs custody, 2. US reactors go critical, 3. Spiral opens AI, 4. The mining case
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. goose
Spiral, the nonprofit open-source bitcoin R&D unit funded by Block, has absorbed the core developers of goose, an open-source AI agent framework, and will evolve it into a development platform called the goose Development Kit, or GDK, according to a July 7 post by Spiral lead Steve Lee. Spiral has spent seven years funding public goods that make money more open and accessible, and it argues the same fight, open versus closed, is now playing out in AI. goose has already been donated to the Linux Foundation and the Agentic AI Foundation, with the code held independently rather than controlled by any one company. GDK aims to give builders shared infrastructure, agent orchestration, model access, memory, and tools, so many applications can be built on a neutral foundation rather than funneled into one corporate product. For a freedom-tech audience, the move extends the bitcoin ethos of user-owned, credibly neutral infrastructure into agentic AI. (Disclosure: goose interoperates with tooling including Anthropic’s Claude Code; Anthropic makes the AI assembling this newsletter.)2. elektron
Elektron chief executive Rapha Zagury has published a long essay pushing back on two claims he hears constantly: that bitcoin mining is a bad business and that it wastes energy, in the company’s monthly letter, shared on X. On the first, he argues mining is the purest commodity business ever created, where operators do not divide into good and bad but into positions on a cost curve, and that most failures came from high-cost fleets, leverage, and public-company overhead rather than mining itself. He makes a pointed distinction between operating and holding: bitcoin treasury companies trading near or below the value of their coins have, in his view, relabeled capital-markets risk as bitcoin yield, since the protocol pays no yield for holding, only for proof of work. On energy, he frames mining as a uniquely flexible load that buys otherwise-wasted power and powers down when the grid is stressed. For a bitcoin audience, the letter is a substantive operator-side argument that the current hashrate bear market may be exactly when disciplined miners outperform.3. bitgo
The digital-asset custody firm BitGo has introduced quantum protection for institutional bitcoin wallets, becoming one of the first major custodians to offer defenses against the future threat that quantum computers could pose to bitcoin’s cryptography, according to The Block. In a related interview, BitGo’s chief executive said only single-digit percentages of bitcoin’s supply are seriously exposed to near-term quantum risk, a measured framing against more alarmist takes. For a bitcoin audience, the launch lands amid the week’s broader quantum debate, from Jameson Lopp’s BIP-361 migration proposal to the contested idea of freezing Satoshi’s dormant coins, and represents the custody industry beginning to act rather than wait. Some experts have argued the greater danger lies in failing to adopt new protections in time rather than in the quantum threat arriving suddenly. The move signals that quantum readiness is shifting from theoretical mailing-list discussion toward concrete product decisions by the firms that safeguard large institutional holdings, even as the protocol-level path to a quantum-resistant bitcoin remains unresolved.4. nuclear
Four new nuclear reactors in the United States have reached criticality, a key milestone marking the first sustained fission chain reaction, though it is only the first step on the path to delivering power to the grid, according to MIT Technology Review. The achievement signals tangible progress for a nuclear sector that has struggled for decades with cost overruns and stalled projects, even as surging electricity demand from AI data centers and broader electrification revives interest in reliable, carbon-free baseload generation. For an audience tracking the energy-and-compute collision, the milestone connects to the same demand story running through bitcoin mining and AI: the computing economy’s appetite for steady, dispatchable power is reshaping the economics and politics of large-scale generation. Bitcoin miners have long argued they can serve as flexible early customers that help fund and stabilize new power infrastructure by providing guaranteed demand during construction and ramp-up. As reactors come online against a backdrop of AI-driven demand, the question of who builds and pays for baseload generation grows sharper.Consider subscribing and sharing OP_Daily with your community.