"Saylor hints at more buys" Jun 29, 2026

Michael Saylor posted Strategy's Bitcoin acquisition chart on X with his customary pre-Monday disclosure teaser, signaling another likely purchase. As of June 22nd, Strategy held 847,363 BTC at an average cost of roughly $75,646 per coin. With Bitcoin trading near $60,000 at the time of the report, the treasury was approximately $13 billion underwater and MSTR shares had fallen to their lowest level since February 2024. The most recent disclosed purchase was 520 BTC for about $35 million, the fourth consecutive week of buying, and the company added $300 million to its dollar reserve, bringing that total to $1.4 billion. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse publicly called the accumulation model flawed, and on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant urged Strategy to stop buying and rebuild cash instead.

India's USDT premium surged above 9 percent, more than double its usual range, after the country's enforcement directorate raided five crypto payment firms. Authorities alleged the firms helped move approximately $265 million in unauthorized cross-border transfers using virtual digital assets. Non-resident Indians had been using USDT as a faster and cheaper substitute for bank wires by depositing rupees, converting to stablecoins, moving funds overseas, and selling back through Indian exchanges, bypassing FEMA and anti-money laundering rules. Following the raids, market makers and liquidity providers pulled back from sourcing USDT abroad, tightening domestic supply and driving the premium higher. India's parliamentary standing committee on finance is scheduled to meet the Reserve Bank of India and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India on July 2nd to discuss crypto regulation, suggesting the policy environment is tightening further.

Loopring, described as Ethereum's first ZK roll-up project, is shutting down its decentralized exchange after acknowledging it never achieved meaningful adoption. The team cited the early design's lack of a virtual machine, composability, and real-world payment use cases as core reasons for the failure. Loopring will publish final layer 2 balances, allow a two-week review period, and then use team-controlled whitelisted addresses to move remaining user funds out on users' behalf, with Loopring covering transaction costs. The closure follows a series of earlier retreats including the shutdown of dual investment and Portal products, the end of its wallet service, and CEO Steve Guo stepping down in August 2025.

Kebum Securities, a major South Korean financial firm, is reportedly in talks to acquire a stake in Bithumb through a third-party allocation involving new share issuance. The size and percentage of any stake remain undecided and Bithumb stated nothing specific has been finalized. Bithumb is preparing for a future IPO with KPMG advising through end of 2027, and CFO Jong-Sung Gi-Yoon indicated the listing will likely occur in 2028.

The Bank for International Settlements argued that stablecoins fail four key monetary qualities: singleness, elasticity, interoperability, and integrity. The BIS pointed to prices drifting from their pegs, friction in the redemption process, and tokens behaving more like ETF shares than true payment instruments as evidence of these shortcomings. The BIS put total stablecoin market value at approximately $320 billion at the end of May 2026 and argued that even if the market grew to $1 trillion, $2 trillion, or $3 trillion, the net economic effect would likely be modest and slightly negative over the medium term. The mechanism cited was higher bank funding costs and weaker lending capacity resulting from deposit migration into stablecoins. Rather than accommodating stablecoin growth, the BIS pushed for a regulated tokenized system built around a unified ledger combining tokenized central bank reserves, commercial bank money, and regulated private money, pointing to Project Agora as a working cross-border payments prototype already in development.