Weekly Roundup 06/26/26 (Quantum EOs, STRC's selloff, more MSTR) (EP.727)

Trump signed an executive order accelerating federal quantum preparedness from 2035 to 2031 and targeting a commercially relevant quantum computer by 2028. Google and Cloudflare have both stated a post-quantum cryptography transition is coming by 2029 or 2030. Bitcoin developers had not begun work on a post-quantum upgrade as of mid-2026, and speakers estimated the transition would take two to three years even after a BIP is written and software is deployed. Speakers called it perplexing that Bitcoin developers dismiss quantum risk as fantasy given these government and major tech company timelines, and predicted Bitcoin will be dangerously late if it does not start the post-quantum clock immediately.

STRC preferred stock is theoretically priced at $100 with an 11.5 percent yield but hit a low of $73 on the day of recording and was trading at $77. The market is demanding a higher yield than Saylor is offering: at a 15 percent required yield STRC would need to fall to $76, and at 20 percent it would need to fall to $57. MicroStrategy has approximately 9.8 months of cash to service STRC payments and has not currently funded preferred dividends. Saylor can suspend the STRC dividend at any time, making it not a true debt instrument, and speakers argued there is no economic floor to STRC because it is not rational for Saylor to buy it back given put obligations. STRC also has negative convexity because cash obligations increase as the collateral declines.

The more acute concern is MicroStrategy's convertible bond put schedule, which totals $6.7 billion. MSTR must pay $1 billion in September 2027 if the stock is not at $183, $2 billion in March 2028 if not at $433, $1.5 billion in June 2028 if not at $672, $800 million in September 2028 if not at $150, $604 million in September 2028 if not at $233, and $800 million in June 2029 if not at $204. Funding the first three puts entirely with Bitcoin would require selling 74,000 BTC, and funding the full schedule would require selling roughly 111,000 BTC. Defaulting on convertible bonds would jeopardize the company and franchise in a way that letting preferred trade low would not. Speakers believe MSTR should frontload Bitcoin sales to address the put schedule but predict Saylor will instead wait, sell equity as needed, and hope Bitcoin and the premium recover. MSTR's MNav is approximately 1.03 even by the company's own calculation, which speakers consider incorrect and argue investors should compute independently. One speaker compared MicroStrategy more to Terra Luna than to GBTC because of the number of overlapping securities. A speaker also noted that Saylor reportedly used GPT-4.0 to help design STRC and criticized that choice on the grounds that GPT-4.0 is the most sycophantic of available models, meaning Saylor likely received validation rather than rigorous worst-case analysis.

PolyMarket created fake mirror versions of its own site and paid influencers to post fabricated winning trades on social media, with speakers asserting those trades never hit the tape and that a law was broken. Kalshi is reportedly in discussions to raise at a $40 billion valuation and go public next year, and a Supreme Court case over state versus federal regulation of prediction markets as sports books is expected. Speakers argued the CFTC's position that it alone can regulate prediction platforms is weakened by continued bad behavior from those platforms. Meta is reportedly developing its own prediction market called Arena, potentially using a points-based system rather than cash.

OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange formed a joint venture to tokenize listed equities, co-chaired by Andrew Cuomo. The Ethereum Foundation cut 20 percent of staff and 40 percent of its budget, and five former researchers announced a separate nonprofit called ETH Labs. Vitalik Buterin appears to prefer a Balkanized Ethereum development structure with many teams rather than a large foundation. The Bank of England dropped plans to cap individual stablecoin holdings and instead capped issuers at 40 billion pounds per issuer, which speakers described as less bad but still not a great idea. Tether briefly reached the number two position on CoinMarketCap neck and neck with Ethereum, and speakers predicted stablecoins as a cohort will eventually surpass Bitcoin in market capitalization.

Researcher Alex Waltz published an investigation concluding Dustin Trammell, who runs a Bitcoin venture fund called TVP, was an early Bitcoin miner operating between Satoshi and Hal Finney. The Wall Street Journal reported that CoinX was used by Iranian entities to move $3.8 billion in close conjunction with the central bank of Iran. The Treasury is cracking down on scam compounds in Cambodia, Laos, and similar locations running pig-butchering romance scams that extract tens of billions of dollars per year largely from elderly Americans, with local governments believed to be receiving payments from the syndicates running them.