FRIDAY, JUL17
1. OJ raises $40M for bitcoin M&A, 2. BPI Q2 report, 3. Inkling open AI, 4. STRC post-mortem
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. oj
Orange Juice, a bitcoin treasury and permanent capital company backed by Jeff Booth and Lyn Alden, has raised 40 million dollars to acquire businesses and hold bitcoin on their behalf rather than forcing owners into a cash exit or ceding control to traditional buyers, according to The Block. The model lets business owners exchange equity for a stake in a bitcoin-denominated vehicle, participating in bitcoin’s appreciation without a forced liquidity event. For a bitcoin audience, the structure brings the bitcoin standard into mergers and acquisitions: rather than deals funded by fiat debt, Orange Juice accumulates businesses whose cash flows are redenominated into bitcoin. The backing of Booth and Alden, both known for arguing that bitcoin resolves the purchasing-power destruction of fiat-denominated capital, signals the firm is building on that thesis rather than using bitcoin as a treasury curiosity. The raise positions Orange Juice as one of the first permanent capital vehicles designed around bitcoin as the unit of account for business valuation.2. bpi
The Bitcoin Policy Institute has published its Q2 2026 quarterly report, describing it as the strongest quarter in BPI’s history for earned media, according to the July 15 report. Highlights include an investigative report on Chinese influence operations against American AI infrastructure that prompted a public call from Senator Tom Cotton for a DOJ inquiry and was cited on the front page of the New York Times; testimony at an Armed Services hearing where Admiral Paparo, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, confirmed for the first time that the military is studying how bitcoin can strengthen American cybersecurity and that his command runs a bitcoin node; and the CLARITY Act clearing the Senate Banking Committee with its developer-protection language intact. BPI also launched Satoshi Scholars, a weekly educational program for senior Congressional staffers, with 11 participants in its inaugural cohort. Separately, BPI has filed to intervene as a defendant in the New York lawsuit seeking legal title to 39,000 dormant bitcoin addresses, citing its own long-term bitcoin holdings.3. inkling
Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup co-founded by Mira Murati and Soumith Chintala of PyTorch, has released Inkling, its first in-house foundation model, as a fully open-weights 975-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts system available on HuggingFace under Apache 2.0, according to TechCrunch and multiple outlets. The model was trained for calibration, instruction following, and what the company calls censorship resistance, meaning it is designed to answer directly on topics that may be subject to suppression rather than defaulting to refusal. For a freedom-tech audience, that design philosophy puts Inkling in explicit contrast with the alignment approaches of closed frontier labs, treating openness and non-censorship as properties to optimize rather than risks to manage. Thinking Machines does not claim Inkling is the strongest model available; it frames the weights themselves as the product, available for fine-tuning on its Tinker platform so organizations own specialized models rather than depending on a closed provider. The model supports text, image, and audio, and a lighter Inkling-Small preview is also available.4. strc
Trey Sellers, who writes the FIRE BTC newsletter on using bitcoin for financial independence, published a post-mortem on his STRC trade after Strategy’s preferred stock fell to a record low of $82.53, well below the $100 par value the instrument is designed to hold, according to his newsletter. Sellers had bought STRC with borrowed money as a bitcoin-denominated cash-flow strategy, receiving monthly distributions he converted into bitcoin, and walks through the updated math: the capital loss has partially offset distributions received, and the trade is now underwater on a mark-to-market basis though still generating cash flow. For a bitcoin audience, the piece is a useful real-world look at the risks in Strategy’s capital markets machine: STRC is not a stablecoin but a preferred stock whose dividend economics depend on Strategy’s ability to issue equity at accretive prices, and when that mechanism strains the instrument reprices sharply. The post is a model of transparency, walking through actual entry economics and leverage mechanics rather than rationalizing the drawdown.Consider subscribing and sharing OP_Daily with your community.