THURSDAY, MAY07
1. BPI UK launch 2. First hashrate decline in 5 years 3. First memory-safety CVE in Core 4. K Wave drops BTC treasury for AI
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. uk
The Bitcoin Policy Institute on May 5 launched its first international initiative, opening a UK policymaker-engagement track funded by a charitable grant from Wences Casares’s Xapo Bank. Executive director Grant McCarty framed the expansion plainly: “BPI has spent years informing conversations around Bitcoin policy in the U.S. Now, the world is watching how the UK approaches digital asset policy.” The timing tracks the British regulatory calendar — the FCA’s digital-asset application gateway opens later in 2026, and the Financial Services and Markets Act framework takes effect in 2027. Joey Garcia, Xapo’s chief strategy and policy officer, will partner with BPI on regulator education and white-paper output. The London push imports the playbook BPI ran on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the GENIUS Act, and the CLARITY Act — direct briefings to lawmakers and regulators, not lobby-shop optics. For Bitcoin policy observers tracking transatlantic alignment, the launch signals that the U.S. think-tank model is now exportable, and that Britain’s emerging framework will be shaped by the same Bitcoin-native voices that shaped Washington’s.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY2. hashshift
Bitcoin network hashrate posted its first negative-growth quarter in five years, falling roughly 4% in Q1 2026 as a wave of public miners redirected compute into AI workloads. Marathon, Riot, CleanSpark, Bitdeer, and Core Scientific collectively sold more than 32,000 BTC during the quarter to fund AI data-center buildouts, while CoinShares’ Q1 note pegged hashprice at $29 per PH per day and put up to 20% of the global fleet at break-even or worse. Core Scientific is converting a 1.5 GW Texas facility with 300 MW already redirected from mining to compute hosting; Riot booked $33.2 million in Q1 from its data-center business; HIVE Digital reported a 219% YoY revenue jump driven by HPC. Bitcoin spot is roughly flat YTD, yet mining-stock returns have ranged from 5% to 85% as the market reprices the equity from “leveraged BTC” to “AI infrastructure operator.” For bitcoin miners and energy-infrastructure operators, the Q1 print is the first hashrate signal that the AI bid for behind-the-meter power has crossed from thesis into measurable network impact.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY3. core
Bitcoin Core developers on May 5 disclosed CVE-2024-52911 — what maintainer Niklas Gögge described as “the first ever memory safety issue” in Core’s disclosure history. Cory Fields of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative discovered the use-after-free flaw in the script-validation engine, where Core cached transaction input data for background threads in a way that let one thread read freed memory while another was still using it; Pieter Wuille shipped the patch via PR #31112. The bug entered the codebase in Core 0.14.1 and remained live through 28.4 — meaning every node from 2017 to last month was technically vulnerable. The fix landed in v29.0 in April 2025, and the 28.x branch reached end-of-life on April 19, 2026. Exploitation required a miner to burn substantial electricity producing invalid blocks with no reward path, which kept the bug obscure and likely unused. Roughly 43% of nodes still ran vulnerable software at disclosure, a function of Core’s voluntary-upgrade norm. For freedom-tech operators, the disclosure underscores both the rarity of memory-safety bugs in Core’s hand-audited C++ and the long tail of unupgraded nodes that any future RCE-class flaw would inherit.
-EDITOR·OP_DAILY4. kwave
Nasdaq-listed K Wave Media disclosed in a May 4 Form 6-K that it is redirecting up to $485 million from a previously announced Bitcoin treasury into AI infrastructure — data centers, GPU compute, and acquisitions — under an amended financing arrangement with Anson Funds. The original $500 million facility, set up in June 2025, was earmarked explicitly for BTC accumulation as part of the K-pop media company’s repositioning during the bitcoin-treasury equity-premium era. Management cited 85%-plus AI-infrastructure contract margins and multi-year revenue visibility against miners’ production costs near $80,000 per coin and more volatile cash flows. The pivot also eliminates ~$48 million of debt, divests the legacy K-pop subsidiary, and proposes a rebrand to Talivar Technologies — all up for vote at the early-July annual meeting. The market read it as a downgrade: KWM stock fell almost 25%. For long-term holders and treasury operators, K Wave is the cleanest data point yet that the “announce a Bitcoin treasury, get a multiple” trade has lost its asymmetry, and that capital allocators are now publicly choosing AI infrastructure over BTC on margin and visibility grounds.
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