Bhutan Times the Top, CLARITY Hits Markup, and the Onchain Pokemon Card Boom | The Breakdown

Bhutan's sovereign fund Druk Holdings has sold approximately 70 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, with its largest single offload of close to half a billion dollars occurring around October 2025, just before Bitcoin peaked. Holdings had reached nearly 1.5 billion dollars in July of last year, meaning the fund timed its exit almost perfectly. Bhutan has shown no inbound transfers from mining pools for roughly 10 months, suggesting it has stopped mining entirely and is now exclusively selling. The original mining operation was economically logical because it relied on hydropower from natural resources, and the fund also had deposits to Celsius, acts as an Ethereum validator receiving small payouts of around 50 dollars at a time, and has activity on chains beyond Bitcoin.

Bhutan sold Bitcoin for approximately 467 million dollars more than the dollar value at the time of mining, though that figure does not account for operational overhead. Marathon has been selling more Bitcoin than Bhutan for most of the recent period, with both entities now selling roughly similar amounts, and miners including Marathon are pivoting to AI services, reducing the need to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets. When plotted on the same chart, Strategy's Bitcoin purchases vastly outweigh the combined selling from both Bhutan and Marathon, and Bitcoin ETF net flows for the most recent week recorded the best inflows on record since January.

The CLARITY Act is scheduled for markup on Thursday May 14th, the final stage of debate before a bill moves forward, meaning its language remains subject to amendment. Gabriel Shapiro described the new version as much better than previous iterations at respecting decentralization, noting it removes what he called the we did not promise anything so we are unregulated loophole. The act identifies two triggers for a chain being deemed non-decentralized: a single person or group under common control being able to alter functionality, operation, or consensus rules, or being able to restrict, censor, or prohibit protocol use or user activity. Shapiro said corporate chains will struggle to meet the new standard and that L2 security councils will need to be quite narrowly scoped.

Based on the current proposed language, only approximately 10 to 20 chains or protocols in the entire crypto industry would qualify as compliant. The act includes a safe harbor giving teams a few years to decentralize after launch. The definition of decentralization in the act appears subjective and may ultimately require courts to decide, as was the case with Ripple, with enforcement potentially dragging on for another five or six years.

Collected Crypto, a platform running on Solana that tokenizes physical trading cards for on-chain trading, reached its highest revenue week of approximately 2.5 million dollars at the end of April, with roughly 60 percent of that appearing to be gross profit and approximately 350 to 500 active addresses using the platform daily. Last week was its third biggest on record, and an overwhelming majority of transactions occur in USDC. Courtyard, which runs on Polygon, is the largest on-chain digital collectibles platform by revenue and handles not only Pokemon cards but also sports cards, watches, and other real-world collectibles. Discussion about these platforms is occurring primarily in Pokemon and trading card game circles rather than crypto-native ones.

Data from Pokey Data showed a price spike in at least one grade of a Mega Starmie card from the end of April, but Gengar card prices stayed exactly flat and Meowth showed only a slow and uncertain rise, making it difficult to determine whether on-chain trading is yet driving up prices for individual physical cards. Whether rising on-chain collectible activity could be a precursor to a second NFT season or shift demand toward pure digital art trading remains an open question, with the analysis described as an early observation from Wednesday May 13th with more data expected by Friday.