WEDNESDAY, JUL08
1. Dormant coins defended, 2. Galaxy exits for AI, 3. Hashrate may flatten, 4. SBI closes pool
From Proto and Bitkey - part of the Bitcoin ecosystem at Block, Inc.
1. dormant
The Digital Chamber, which describes itself as the oldest and largest US digital-asset trade association, has filed an amicus brief urging a New York court to dismiss the lawsuit seeking ownership of 39,069 dormant bitcoin wallets, arguing that treating long-inactive addresses as abandoned property would create what it called a pervasive cloud on title across all self-custody wallets, according to Cointelegraph. It is the second amicus brief in the case, after attorney Ian Cohen’s May filing, and warns that a ruling for the plaintiffs would undermine the foundational principles of digital property ownership with ripple effects reaching traditional finance. For a freedom-tech audience, the brief marks the industry mobilizing institutionally around a case that strikes at the core of self-custody: the principle that a coin left unmoved is held, not abandoned. The suit, brought by a pseudonymous party and two Wyoming entities over wallets collectively holding an estimated 3.8 million BTC, faces a July 14 hearing. Even the plaintiffs’ path to control is unclear, since no court order can move bitcoin without the private keys.2. galaxy
Galaxy Digital has completed the first phase of its Helios data-center campus in West Texas, delivering roughly 200 megawatts of gross power, including 133 megawatts of critical IT load, to the AI cloud provider CoreWeave under a 15-year lease, according to a July 6 company announcement. The milestone marks Helios’s transition from a former bitcoin mine, which Galaxy bought from the distressed Argo Blockchain in 2022, into a revenue-generating AI data center, with rent commencing in the second quarter and a larger 260-megawatt second phase already under construction. For an audience tracking the miner-to-AI migration, Helios is the archetype: Galaxy exited bitcoin mining entirely, cleared the racks, and leased the energized site to a hyperscale AI tenant, because the asset that mattered was never the mining hardware but the power and grid interconnection. The campus is approved for up to 800 megawatts and could eventually support far more. It is the same logic reshaping the whole sector, from TeraWulf’s Anthropic lease to Crusoe’s raise: grid access built for mining has become the scarce resource AI operators will pay billions to secure.3. radar
The team behind Cake Wallet has announced Radar, an app that combines private messaging with self-custodial bitcoin Lightning payments in one experience, built on Signal’s network so that a user’s existing contacts carry over, according to the company’s launch announcement. The pitch is that messaging and money belong together and neither should require surrendering custody or privacy: payments are self-custodial, and the messaging layer inherits Signal’s encryption and social graph rather than asking users to rebuild their contacts elsewhere. For a freedom-tech audience, Radar sits at the intersection of two sovereignty tools that have largely developed separately, encrypted communication and non-custodial bitcoin, and tries to make using both as ordinary as sending a text. Cake Labs has a track record of shipping privacy-first bitcoin features, including Silent Payments, PayJoin, and a self-custodial Lightning integration earlier this year, which lends credibility. Whether Radar gains traction depends on adoption, but the design reflects a coherent thesis: that private speech and permissionless money are pieces of the same freedom.4. sbipool
SBI Crypto, the mining arm of Japanese financial conglomerate SBI, will shut down its bitcoin mining pool on July 31, ending a service that as of late June commanded a seven-day average hashrate of 20.9 exahashes per second, roughly 2.2 percent of the entire bitcoin network, according to Blockspace. The company gave no reason and urged miners to keep directing hashrate to the pool until the cutoff so final payouts calculate correctly, pointing them to Luxor, Braiins, and NeoPool as alternatives. For a bitcoin audience, the shutdown matters for mining decentralization: when a pool controlling more than two percent of the network winds down, that hashrate redistributes, and where it lands shapes how concentrated block production becomes. Pools are a persistent centralization pressure, since they decide which transactions enter blocks unless miners run their own templates. The closure is a reminder that the pool landscape is fluid, and that healthy decentralization depends on displaced hashrate spreading across many operators rather than consolidating into the largest incumbents.Consider subscribing and sharing OP_Daily with your community.