**AI Computing Power Market Shifts Towards Cloud Vendors (2026-07-05)**

Analysis: The AI computing power market is undergoing a shift, with funds flowing from storage chips to cloud vendors.

On July 5th, Garrett Jin, the agent for “1011 Insider Whale,” published an analysis indicating a significant shift in market structure this week. Funds within the AI industry chain are being reallocated, and the storage chip market is showing signs of a phased peak.

Micron’s stock price encountered resistance and fell near $1,250. Despite reporting better-than-expected earnings, the stock declined on increased volume, exhibiting typical top characteristics of weakening after a “buy the rumor, sell the news” event. SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics in the South Korean market also weakened.

Data shows that foreign capital has withdrawn over 100 trillion Korean won (approximately $65.00 billion) from the South Korean stock market in the past two months. The actual direction of capital absorption is not towards small and mid-cap AI concept stocks, but rather towards core cloud computing giants represented by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

[PANews]

Lenovo ships its first global-configured laptops equipped with YMTC-manufactured SSDs.

Citrini analyst jukan posted on X that according to Notebookcheck’s new review of the ThinkBook 14 G9, Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo has started shipping global configurations of laptops equipped with SSDs manufactured by YMTC for the first time.

[Odaily]

South Africa proposes crypto tax guidance under existing rules

South Africa’s Revenue Service (SARS) has published draft guidance on how crypto assets should be taxed under the country’s current tax laws. The proposal seeks public feedback until August 31, 2026, before SARS moves toward a final version.

The draft does not create a new crypto tax law. It explains how current rules under the Income Tax Act, 1962 may apply to people who buy, sell, swap, spend, mine, stake or receive crypto assets. SARS says the guide covers selected income tax and capital gains tax issues linked to crypto, noting that value-added tax (VAT) remains outside the scope of this document.

The draft repeats SARS’ long-held position that crypto assets are not legal tender or foreign currency. Instead, SARS treats them as intangible assets for tax purposes, stating that “crypto assets are not ‘currency’ and, consequently not ‘foreign currency’.” This classification places crypto under current income and capital gains rules rather than foreign exchange rules.

Tax treatment depends on the facts of each case. A person who trades often may face income tax treatment, while a long-term holder may fall under capital gains tax. The draft covers crypto-to-crypto swaps, payments for goods or services, mining, staking, airdrops, hard forks, and decentralized finance activity.

SARS places strong weight on the taxpayer’s intention, assessing why a person bought the asset, how long they held it, and how often they traded. The agency noted that “a taxpayer’s intention regarding an asset may change over time.” Additionally, the draft indicates that donations tax may apply when crypto is given away without payment.

Taxpayers must declare crypto gains or losses in the tax year in which they receive or accrue them, and failure to do so can lead to interest and penalties. South Africa has also adopted the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), which requires crypto service providers to report user and transaction data to SARS. The first CARF reporting period runs from March 1, 2026, to February 28, 2027.

This draft arrives as South Africa remains a significant crypto market, with Chainalysis reporting that the country received about $26 billion in crypto value over a one-year period in its 2024 regional report. For now, SARS is seeking clearer treatment under existing law rather than a separate tax system for digital assets.

[Crypto.news]

9 Things Michael Saylor Believes About The Next Decade for Bitcoin

Michael Saylor thinks Bitcoin (BTC) will win the next decade by doing almost nothing. No new features. No faster blocks. The executive chairman of Strategy says the base layer should barely change while the financial system reorganizes around it. His nine Bitcoin predictions add up to one contrarian bet. Where most technology projects chase speed and new features, Saylor argues Bitcoin should do the opposite and force everything else to adapt to it.

Change Less, Matter More: The network matters more everywhere else, he believes, precisely because it refuses to change at its core. 1. Bitcoin evolves by changing less. Most tech projects race to ship. Saylor wants the opposite for Bitcoin. Its job, he says, is to move slowly and not break, leaving wallets, layers, and institutions to handle the fast-moving parts. The base layer hardens while everything built on top competes and iterates. He treats that restraint not as stagnation but as the source of Bitcoin’s strength, pointing to the same fixed rules that have run without interruption since 2009.

1. The protocol gets harder to change. Saylor calls hard consensus Bitcoin’s immune system, since any change to the base layer needs overwhelming agreement from nodes, miners, and users. That bar has only risen with time. The last major upgrade, Taproot, activated back in 2021, and nothing comparable has followed. The current Bitcoin soft fork debate over spam and ordinals shows how fiercely even modest changes get fought today, echoing the block-size wars that divided the community years earlier. For Saylor, that resistance is a feature, not a flaw.

2. Bitcoin is digital capital, not digital cash. Forget buying coffee with it. Saylor frames Bitcoin as scarce global capital built for final settlement rather than everyday spending. About 20 million of its 21 million coins already exist, and no authority can print more. Bitcoin’s spot price sits near $62,700, about 50% below its record near $126,000 from October 2025, yet he argues the long-term case is unchanged. Treasuries, collateral, and large settlements belong on the base layer, while smaller payments can run on the faster networks layered above it.

3. Capital flows, not halvings, drive the cycle. The halving no longer runs the show, Saylor says. The 2024 halving cut new issuance to 3.125 Bitcoin per block, but supply is no longer the main story. Since US spot ETFs launched in January 2024, demand has turned increasingly institutional, moving with balance sheets rather than retail hype. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust alone grew from $51.5 billion to $67.4 billion in net assets during 2025, according to its annual filing. In Saylor’s view, capital flows now set the trajectory that halvings once seemed to dictate.

4. Digital credit turns capital into money. Here is the chain reaction Saylor sees happening. Digital capital enables digital credit, and credit in turn enables new forms of digital money. He points to gold and real estate, which grew far more useful once banks, lenders, and markets were built around them over the past century. Bitcoin, he argues, is now entering that same phase of financialization. The main difference is speed, since the plumbing is being built on open networks rather than paper and vaults.

5. The interfaces become the battleground. Everyone will want Bitcoin, but few will hold it the same way. Self-custody, ETFs, banks, and credit products all compete to sit between people and their coins. Saylor says the real fight is keeping that exposure tied to actual Bitcoin rather than IOUs. Even critics of his model warn about too much paper Bitcoin stacked on top of a limited supply. It is a danger the 2022 collapse of FTX made concrete, and one the 2014 Mt. Gox failure had already foreshadowed.

6. Five real risks define the work ahead. Saylor does not pretend the path is clean. He names five threats to watch. They are protocol corruption, paper Bitcoin, custodial centralization, regulatory capture, and a shaky fee market. The last one matters most over time, because the block subsidy keeps halving toward zero, so transaction fees must eventually pay for network security. Recent warnings about leverage risk around large corporate holders suggest the paper-claims danger is already here, not merely theoretical.

7. Mining becomes energy infrastructure. Mining turns raw electricity into monetary security, and Saylor expects it to keep maturing into a serious energy business. Since China’s 2021 ban scattered the industry, much of it relocated to the US and other markets, growing more industrial and better capitalized. The strongest operators will win on power contracts, grid relationships, and balance sheets, not simply faster machines. Increasingly, miners act as flexible buyers of surplus or stranded power, turning otherwise wasted energy into revenue.

8. Bitcoin anchors global finance by 2036. By 2036, Saylor expects Bitcoin to sit on the balance sheets of individuals, companies, and governments alike. That shift has already started. In March 2025, a US executive order created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve built from coins seized in criminal and civil cases, with a stated policy of never selling them. If more states follow, he argues, Bitcoin becomes a neutral reserve asset that anchors credit and settlement worldwide.

The vision is bold, and Saylor is far from a neutral observer. Strategy, the firm once called MicroStrategy, holds more than 847,300 BTC worth over $53 billion, per its filings. That single corporate stash is roughly 4% of all the coins that will ever exist. Whether the rest of the world chooses to build on a foundation that refuses to change may decide Bitcoin’s next decade.

The Ethereum Foundation funded Argot with 2,469 stETH, approximately $4.34 million.

According to on-chain analyst Yujin, one hour ago, the Ethereum Foundation granted 2,469 stETH to Argot, a non-profit Ethereum development organization, valued at approximately $4.34 million.

In July last year, the Ethereum Foundation provided Argot with a three-year operational funding grant totaling 7,000 ETH. After receiving the funds, Argot sold 4,826.6 ETH from this grant at an average price of $3,194, acquiring 15.417 million USDC.

Today, Argot received its fourth-year grant from the Ethereum Foundation, amounting to 2,469 stETH. Next July, Argot will receive its final fifth-year grant, also totaling 2,469 stETH. On-chain transaction data shows that this funding has already been transferred to Argot’s associated address.

[Foresight News]

Kalshi and other prediction markets face legal disputes in multiple US states, with North Carolina nearing taxation

The prediction market industry, represented by Kalshi, is facing legal disputes in multiple US states and argued in intensive court hearings this week that state regulators should not have jurisdiction.

The related legal disputes continue in Nevada and Michigan, with live debates in Minnesota, and the cases may be appealed to the US Supreme Court. Meanwhile, North Carolina is close to imposing state taxes on prediction market revenue.

[CoinDesk]

Dragonfly Partner Haseeb: VVV’s essence has been misinterpreted; Venice is fundamentally a company, not a decentralized network or on-chain protocol.

On July 5, Haseeb, a partner at Dragonfly, posted a video on X stating that Venice is fundamentally a company—not a decentralized network or an on-chain protocol—and the vast majority of its customers are not crypto users.

There is a clear misconception in the market regarding its token, VVV: VVV does not represent equity in the company nor does it possess attributes akin to “network rights.” Even after the airdrop, the company’s founders continued to fund operations with millions of dollars of their own capital and did not raise funds by selling tokens.

Haseeb pointed out that no founder would voluntarily give away 50% of their company’s equity for free at an early stage; therefore, the narrative equating the token with equity is logically unsound. He also denied claims of “unclear information,” stating that the project team has consistently clarified VVV’s intended role.

[PANews]

The Ethereum Foundation awarded Argot its 4th year grant, valued at 2,469 stETH worth $4.34 million

According to on-chain analyst Yujin, one hour ago, the Ethereum Foundation disbursed the Year 4 grant funding of 2,469 stETH—valued at $4.34 million—to Argot, a non-profit Ethereum development organization.

In July last year, the Ethereum Foundation provided Argot with a 3-year operational funding grant of 7,000 ETH. After receiving the funds, Argot sold 4,826.6 ETH at an average price of $3,194, converting them into 15.417 million USDC.

Next July, the Ethereum Foundation will disburse the final Year 5 grant to Argot, amounting to 2,469 stETH.

[Odaily]

Iranian Parliament Speaker: Reaching consensus with the United States is possible

Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Ghalibaf stated that Iran believes reaching a consensus with the United States is possible despite the difficulties. [Odaily Planet Daily]

Nigel Farage failed to declare funding from crypto gambling figure convicted of fraud: Sunday Times

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage received extensive undisclosed financial support from George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster involved in an offshore crypto gambling platform, and appears to have breached MPs’ disclosure rules by failing to declare it.

The newspaper reported that Cottrell paid for Farage’s private security, drivers, social media staff and accommodation in the year before his election as MP for Clacton on July 4, 2024. Cottrell confirmed through lawyers that he hired staff for Farage’s private office and paid them by bank transfer, per the report.

House of Commons rules require newly elected MPs to register benefits worth more than £300 received in the 12 months before their election if they relate “in any way” to their political activities, though purely personal gifts are excluded. Farage reported a £9,253 trip to Belgium funded by Cottrell and a later £15,276 flight donation, and no other support from him.

Cottrell, 32, was arrested in 2016 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport while traveling with Farage, and served eight months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud in a money laundering sting. He later moved to Montenegro, where The Sunday Times described him as a key player in Tether.bet, an offshore bookmaker that accepts large wagers in cash or crypto, including Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

The platform’s website was registered days after Farage, Cottrell and Christopher Harborne had lunch together in Mayfair in July 2020, according to the report. Harborne, a Thailand-based billionaire, holds an estimated 12% stake in USDT issuer Tether and has donated more than £12 million to Reform UK.

The Sunday Times also alleged that as late as 2022, UK customers’ deposits to Tether.bet were routed through two British shell companies, one of them owned by Reform’s current data protection officer. Providing unlicensed gambling services to UK customers can constitute a criminal offense under UK law; Cottrell denied personally seeking clients for the platform.

Farage is already under investigation by Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Daniel Greenberg over a roughly £5 million personal gift from Harborne in 2024, which he did not declare. Farage has said that money was given to cover his personal security, though the new reporting indicates Cottrell had been paying for his security in the months before the gift arrived.

A spokesperson for Farage dismissed the story as “baseless and contrived,” saying no rules were broken because the support came before Farage was an active politician. Liberal Democrat MP Josh Babarinde wrote to the standards commissioner on Sunday requesting an investigation; a serious breach finding in the Harborne matter could bring a Commons suspension and a possible recall petition in Farage’s Clacton seat.

Both Cottrell and Harborne hold financial interests in the crypto sector Farage has championed. The Reform leader has pledged a Bank of England bitcoin reserve and a capital gains tax cut on crypto if his party wins power, and in March took a 6.3% stake in UK bitcoin treasury firm Stack BTC.

His crypto advocacy has drawn separate complaints, including an April request from Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper for an FCA probe into whether his promotion of digital assets amounts to market abuse. Farage has denied any connection between his personal financial relationships and his policy positions.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

[The Sunday Times]

Bitcoin Options Turn Call-Heavy Before July 8 FOMC Minutes: Will BTC Break $63,000?

Bitcoin (BTC) options expiring July 8 have turned call-heavy, with traders positioning for higher prices. The expiry lands the same day the Federal Reserve releases minutes from its June meeting. Call volume has outpaced puts across the contracts. Glassnode says fading demand for downside protection could mark early optimism returning to the market.

Call volume reached 6,258 contracts over 24 hours against 3,610 puts on Deribit as of this writing, delivering a put-call ratio of 0.58. Open interest leans the same way, with 370 call contracts against 257 puts. Still, the expiry is small, holding about 628 contracts worth $39.3 million in notional value. That is a fraction of the late-June monthly settlement, which cleared billions across Bitcoin and Ethereum. Its direct settlement impact is limited, so the signal lies in the positioning itself.

The heaviest call bets sit well above spot, including a large cluster near the $69,000 strike. Put open interest stays between $58,000 and $62,000, which points to lighter downside hedging. Bitcoin’s spot price sat near $62,645 as of this writing, down 0.3% over 24 hours. The $63,000 has remained elusive for the pioneer crypto since the last week of June, with the weekend breaching proving short-lived.

Max pain marks the strike where the most options expire worthless, leaving sellers the smallest payout. The max pain theory suggests prices may drift toward the strike where option sellers face the smallest payout, but evidence for this effect is mixed. As the Wednesday FOMC minutes and economic forecast report approaches, therefore, the Bitcoin price could drift toward the $63,000 level in quiet trade, though a small expiry exerts only a mild pull.

The minutes from the June 16 to 17 meeting arrive at 2 p.m. ET on July 8. Policymakers held rates at 3.50% to 3.75%, the fourth straight hold. The meeting was the first led by new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. His hawkish policy debut sent Bitcoin and gold lower on June 17. Nine of 18 officials projected a rate hike later in 2026, and the statement dropped its easing bias. The minutes will show how firm that hawkish turn was.

Against that backdrop, Glassnode reads the options market as unusually calm. It frames the fading demand for downside protection as a possible turning point. Still, that calm cuts both ways. Light hedging means any surprise in the minutes could move price sharply into the expiry. Whether Bitcoin holds above $63,000 into Wednesday may hinge on how traders read the minutes. The coming session will show whether call buyers or the Fed set the near-term tone.

Banks Have Stopped Asking If Stablecoins Belong in Finance, Now They’re Considering How

When Standard Chartered (STAN) said it would offer institutional clients direct access to minting and redeeming Circle Internet’s (CRCL) USDC this week, it wasn’t simply adding another digital asset service.

Rather, it was joining a growing list of global financial institutions building product offerings around stablecoins, the fiat-pegged tokens that were once retail investors’ refuge from crypto-market volatility and are increasingly becoming part of the plumbing of financial institutions worldwide. Chainalysis estimates stablecoin settlement volumes could reach a quadrillion dollars a year by 2030.

Standard Chartered’s announcement came just days after BNY, the world’s largest custody bank, expanded its support for USDC by allowing institutional clients to custody, mint and redeem the stablecoin using its infrastructure rather than building their own. Both Standard Chartered and BNY, which has $59 trillion in assets under management, are considered global systemically important banks by the Bank for International Settlements’ Basel Committee.

Their decisions reflect a pattern among some lenders toward using established stablecoin networks rather than creating their own. The moves also suggest the conversation inside banking has shifted. The question is no longer whether stablecoins belong in finance, but how banks fit into the networks forming around them.

“Banks aren’t asking whether they’ll use stablecoins anymore. They’re deciding how they’ll use them,” said Andrew MacKenzie, the founder and CEO of Scotland-based stablecoin issuer Agant, in an interview.

The discussion intensified this week after Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responded to the introduction of OpenUSD, a rival stablecoin backed by companies including Coinbase (COIN), payments company Stripe and asset manager BlackRock (BLK). Allaire said USDC’s position rests on nearly a decade of building liquidity, banking relationships and regulatory approvals.

Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic, a co-founder and partner at Steakhouse Financial, which advises institutions on decentralized finance, agrees that the surrounding ecosystem is key.

“The network is what creates the value,” he said in an interview. “The stablecoin itself becomes almost secondary.

Even so, new stablecoins continue to appear, especially in Europe where there’s less of an established network and there’s concern about the preponderance of dollar-pegged tokens, which account for more than 99% of the total stablecoin market cap.

Jan-Oliver Sell, CEO of Qivalis, a group of 37 European financial institutions developing the Euro On-Chain (EUOC) stablecoin, noted that Europe already has regulatory oversight under the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework. What it lacks is enough euro-denominated liquidity to keep settlement activity from migrating to dollar-backed stablecoins.

“If we don’t have a euro on the blockchain, the banks will use the dollar because it’s there, it’s available and it has a lot of liquidity,” Sell told CoinDesk. Rather than each bank issuing its own euro stablecoin, Qivalis is encouraging them to work together in a single shared network.

Sell said Qivalis is not trying to compete directly with USDC. Its goal is to give European banks, businesses and payment firms a regulated euro alternative as tokenized finance expands. That would allow institutions to settle in euros rather than converting assets into dollars and back again.

As more banks join, the consortium also benefits from the same network effects driving USDC’s adoption. “The more banks we have in the consortium, the better. Our network has stronger network effects,” Sell said.

Investing in infrastructure

Agant’s MacKenzie said he sees the same trend emerging in the U.K.

Banks are no longer focused only on digital assets, he said. Instead, they are investing in the infrastructure needed to connect stablecoins with traditional finance for payments, treasury operations and settlement. Businesses generally prefer settling obligations in their own currencies, he said, rather than converting into U.S. dollars first.

That may be the impetus for introducing non-dollar stablecoins, such as Societe Generale’s EUR CoinVertible (EURCV), Credit Agricole’s EURXT and Qivalis’ impending offering. But existing is insufficient. It’s how the bank deploys the stablecoin to its customers that will determine its success.

“Anybody can issue a stablecoin,” said Steakhouse Financial’s Cachinero Vasiljevic. “But if nobody uses the stablecoin, the stablecoin is worthless. The value of the stablecoin is the network.”

Nvidia’s New Way to Profit From the AI Boom: Will Startups Pay Up?

Nvidia (NVDA) will let AI startups use its chips now and pay with a share of future revenue. The company detailed the revenue-sharing program in a July 1 blog post. The move casts Nvidia as a financier of the AI buildout rather than a pure hardware seller.

From Chip Sales to Compute Royalties: Nvidia normally earns a single payment when it sells a graphics processing unit (GPU). This program adds a second, recurring stream on top. Cloud partners buy Nvidia systems, then sell access to startups that lack the capital for their own data centers. In return, Nvidia takes a cut of the cloud revenue those chips generate. The plan builds on Nvidia’s new AI compute model and widens the base beyond big buyers now trimming their orders.

A Deeper Moat, and Rising Competition: Startups that take the credits stay tied to Nvidia’s chips and software for years. Sharon AI will install up to 40,000 Grace Blackwell GB300 chips under the program, while Firmus is building a 360-megawatt campus in Batam, Indonesia, for up to 170,000 more GPUs. Sharon AI frames its buildout as sovereign compute for markets outside the United States. The lock-in matters as rivals gain; China recently trained a large model without Nvidia chips, and buyers keep testing cheaper options.

A Bigger Bet on the AI Boom: The design echoes what critics call circular financing. Nvidia has pledged up to $100 billion to OpenAI and owns about 7% of CoreWeave, a customer that buys its chips. Analysts liken the loop to vendor financing from the dot-com era, with skeptics like Michael Burry seeing the setup as feeding AI bubble fears.

The sums are vast. Morgan Stanley expects Big Tech’s AI capital spending to top $800 billion in 2026, a figure that could reach $1.1 trillion in 2027, rivaling the US defense budget. Meanwhile, markets stayed calm. NVDA closed at $194.69 on July 2, the last session before the holiday break. Its value sits near $4.8 trillion, still below its 52-week high. The coming quarters will show how much revenue the program adds and whether startups treat Nvidia as a partner or a landlord.