FRIDAY, MAY22
1. Bitcoin as national security, 2. SpaceX's $1.29B BTC, 3. Passport Prime, 4. Sparrow Silent Payments
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. bitcoin
In a CoinDesk op-ed, Congressman Lance Gooden (TX-05) argues that bitcoin has crossed a threshold from financial asset into national security imperative. Gooden frames the U.S.-China digital competition as a two-front conflict: Beijing is deploying the digital yuan to build payment systems that route around the U.S.-led financial order while simultaneously stockpiling bitcoin, which the Bitcoin Policy Institute estimates at roughly 194,000 BTC. The United States holds approximately 328,000 BTC, the largest state reserve in the world. Gooden cites testimony from both Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and INDOPACOM Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo confirming bitcoin’s operational role. Paparo stated the military is “using it to monitor, and we’re doing a number of operational tests to secure and protect networks using the Bitcoin protocol.” Gooden calls on Congress to secure mining infrastructure, establish clear regulatory frameworks, and integrate digital assets into the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act before China forecloses the option.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. spacex
SpaceX’s S-1 registration statement filed with the SEC discloses that the company held 18,712 bitcoin on its balance sheet as of March 31, 2026, at a fair value of $1.29 billion against a cost basis of $661 million. As reported by Helene Braun in CoinDesk, the filing came alongside plans for an IPO expected next month that could become the largest in history, with SpaceX targeting a valuation above $1.5 trillion. The bitcoin position puts SpaceX in a small group of major corporations holding significant amounts, behind Strategy’s 843,738 BTC and well ahead of Tesla’s 11,509 BTC. The S-1 also reported 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion, up from $14 billion in 2024. CoinDesk analysts note a potential liquidity wrinkle: if SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic all debut in a similar window, investors may rotate capital out of risk-on assets including bitcoin to fund the offerings, briefly pressuring digital asset markets at a moment of otherwise strong institutional accumulation.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. passport
Foundation has raised $6.4 million in a Fulgur Ventures-led round, with participation from Arche Capital, bringing total funding to $16.5 million. Writing in Bitcoin Magazine, Micah Zimmerman notes the capital will support the launch of Passport Prime, which Foundation describes as the first “Human Authority Hardware” device — a category designed to ensure critical digital actions require direct human approval through isolated, secure hardware rather than software environments that can be compromised by autonomous agents. The launch responds to a real shift in threat surface: as AI agents gain the ability to execute transactions, manage credentials, and operate across enterprise systems, browser prompts and mobile notifications can no longer serve as trusted checkpoints when the same environment may host the software making the request. Passport Prime combines a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO authentication, 2FA storage, and 50GB of encrypted storage running on KeyOS, a Rust-based open-source microkernel Foundation developed over three years. Priced at $349, it began shipping in March 2026. Cake Wallet, with over one million users, is the first external app built on the platform.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. sparrow
Sparrow Wallet v2.5.0 ships receive-side Silent Payments wallets alongside a public Frigate server for fee sourcing, completing the full send-and-receive cycle for BIP-352 privacy in a widely used desktop wallet. Silent Payments allow senders to derive a unique on-chain address from a single static identifier without any coordination from the recipient, eliminating address reuse at the protocol level. The longstanding adoption barrier has been scanning cost: detecting incoming payments requires processing nearly every Taproot output in every block, which is computationally heavy for light clients. Frigate, the Electrum-compatible server built by Sparrow creator Craig Raw, offloads that scanning to the server using GPU acceleration, keeping the client experience lightweight. Keys are held in RAM for the duration of the session only, not persisted, keeping the trust model close to how public Electrum servers already handle watch-only wallets. The v2.5.0 release pairs receive support with a publicly accessible Frigate instance, removing the self-hosting requirement that had limited Silent Payments to more technical users. Sparrow’s iterative rollout — sending in v2.3.0, hardware wallet support in v2.4.0, and full wallet support here — has made it the de facto reference client for BIP-352 adoption.
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