TUESDAY, JUL07
1. CLARITY stalls in Senate, 2. TeraWulf's $19B AI lease, 3. LLMs go local, 4. Crusoe raises $3B
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. clarity
The CLARITY Act, the crypto market-structure bill that passed the House in July 2025, missed the White House’s informal July 4 target for passage and now enters what analysts call its final realistic window, with the Senate returning July 13 and roughly three weeks before the August recess, according to CoinSpeaker. Three disputes still block the votes needed to clear the 60-vote threshold. The one most relevant to a freedom-tech audience is Section 604, which shields non-custodial software developers from money-transmitter and Bank Secrecy Act obligations, a protection the developer community considers the bill’s most significant provision. A prosecutors’ association argued the section would impair criminal investigations, keeping it unresolved. The other sticking points involve stablecoin yield and an ethics provision over government officials’ crypto holdings. For builders, Section 604 is the language that would keep writing open-source financial software from carrying criminal liability, the same principle at stake in recent prosecutions. Whether the Senate resolves these disputes in July likely determines the bill’s fate before the midterms.2. terawulf
The bitcoin miner TeraWulf has signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic to provide roughly 401 megawatts of computing capacity at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a deal expected to generate about 19 billion dollars in contracted revenue over its initial term, according to CNBC. Separately, TeraWulf agreed to sell its 50.1 percent stake in the Abernathy, Texas joint venture to an investor group led by Fluidstack for roughly 530 million dollars, monetizing a 450-million-dollar investment at a premium. First power is scheduled for the second half of 2027, ramping to full capacity by early 2028. For an audience tracking the miner-to-AI migration, TeraWulf is among the clearest cases yet of a company built to mine bitcoin repositioning as a landlord for hyperscale AI, with its Kentucky grid access and power infrastructure now its most valuable asset. The lease is backed by investment-grade credit, and its scale underscores how thoroughly the mining sector has been repriced around the physical constraints of the AI buildout. (Disclosure: Anthropic is the tenant in this deal and is also the maker of the AI used to assemble this newsletter; written from public reporting.)3. local
Bitcoin Core contributor James O’Beirne has published a GitHub repository collecting what he has learned about running large language models locally, writing that he is impressed with results from GLM-5.2 REAPs paired with opencode and that performance is getting close to Claude-class quality on local hardware, in a post on X. He invited readers to file issues so he can keep expanding the guide. For a freedom-tech audience watching the open-versus-closed AI fight, the post is a builder’s benchmark rather than a venture narrative: incremental open-weight progress is real, yet closing the gap to frontier-class private compute remains the bottleneck for sovereignty-minded workflows. O’Beirne has been shipping local tooling rather than theorizing about it, which makes the observation a practical datapoint on how close permissionless intelligence is to everyday use. The same instinct that drives running your own node, verifying rather than trusting, applies to running models on hardware you control instead of querying someone else’s server.4. crusoe
Crusoe, the energy-focused data-center company that pioneered using stranded and flared natural gas to power computing, is reportedly in talks to raise about 3 billion dollars at a valuation near 30 billion dollars, underscoring investor appetite for AI data-center infrastructure, according to TheMinerMag. The raise would roughly triple Crusoe’s valuation from prior rounds and cement its position among the best-capitalized players building the physical layer of the AI boom. For an audience tracking the energy-and-compute collision, Crusoe is a telling case because its origin story runs through bitcoin: the company built its early business on monetizing wasted energy that would otherwise be flared at oil wells, the same stranded-power logic that drew bitcoin miners to remote sites. Now that model is being scaled and repriced for AI, where demand for power-rich compute far outstrips supply. The size of the reported raise reflects how capital is flooding toward operators who can secure energy and land, the two inputs that have become the real bottleneck for both AI and mining as they compete for the same scarce resources.Consider subscribing and sharing OP_Daily with your community.