Tether has listed its gold-backed token XAUT on Maxbit, making the Thai platform the first in the country to offer access to the blockchain-based precious metal asset. Stablecoin issuer Tether is bringing its gold-backed token, Tether Gold (XAUT), to Thailand…

Tether brings gold-backed stablecoin to Thailand as inflation hedge demand grows

Venture capital firms remain critical to infrastructure development in the 
Bitcoin ecosystem, despite pushback from some in the community, according to 
builders speaking at the Token2049 conference in Dubai. 
Charlie Yechuan Hu, CEO of Bitcoin layer-2 protocol Bitlayer, shared his 
insights on venture capital (VC) firms in the Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem.
Hu told Cointelegraph that he views many VC firms in the space positively, as 
they offer support to early ventures that need capital to build 
infrastructure.
&#8220;You need developers, you need to open up the whole ecosystem foundation, 
everything,&#8221; Hu said. &#8220;You need to pay for the cloud, like AWS or RPCs, all 
that, servers […] So, we have to have VC on that.&#8221;
Hu argued against the usual Bitcoiner ethos that argues against outsider 
capital, saying, &#8220;It&#8217;s difficult to say, okay, let&#8217;s do a fair mint, and then 
have a very successful, healthy treasury, and you have to pay all this stuff.&#8221;
&#8220;It doesn&#8217;t work that way,&#8221; he said.
_**Related:**__**StarkWare researchers propose smart contracts for Bitcoin 
with ColliderVM**_
## Lightning-only stance sparks debate
Not everyone agrees. Mike Jarmuz, a managing partner at Bitcoin venture 
capital firm Lightning Ventures, told Cointelegraph that Lightning is the only 
L2 his company has invested in and is interested in.
He said, &#8220;Anything with a &#8216;token&#8217; that allows for &#8216;staking&#8217; and earning some 
absurd APY interest on your Bitcoin should be avoided.&#8221;
Jarmuz said that Lightning Network, on the other hand, is growing very quickly 
and makes Bitcoin transactions instant, nearly free and scalable. Bitcoin 
Visuals data shows that the Lightning Network has a cumulative capacity across 
all channels equivalent to almost $452 million at the time of writing. He 
added:
&gt; &#8220;There is no &#8216;token&#8217; when using the Lightning network. It&#8217;s Bitcoin. That to 
&gt; me is the only real L2, at least as of right now.&#8221;
_Lightning Network capacity chart. Source:__Bitcoin Visuals_
Jarmuz said that projects not meeting his criteria are &#8220;masquerading as 
useful&#8221; while doing nothing for Bitcoin. He claimed that sidechains like the 
Liquid Network and newer protocols such as e-cash and federations or Ark &#8220;are 
not widely used&#8221; but &#8220;are at least interesting.&#8221;
He recognized that those &#8220;do not involve a staked token, promising yield,&#8221; 
with projects that have those features, &#8220;just waiting for rug pulls and 
issues.&#8221;
&#8220;We don&#8217;t invest in that area,&#8221; he added.
_**Related:**__**Spar supermarket in Switzerland starts accepting Bitcoin 
payments**_
## VCs seen as enablers of Bitcoin growth
According to Hu, VCs bring liquidity, resources and experience to new startups 
while opening &#8220;up all the institutional ideas and connections.&#8221; He said that 
those were important additions to Bitlayer&#8217;s resources as well, noting that 
&#8220;we wouldn&#8217;t have that if those people didn&#8217;t invest in us.&#8221;
He also argued that VCs tend to back long-term infrastructure efforts rather 
than speculative projects like memecoins or non-fungible tokens.
That experience was echoed by Walter Maffione, lead engineer at Lightning 
Network-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Kaleidoswap, who told Cointelegraph 
that the protocol started as an open-source project and raised a pre-seed 
investment from Fulgur Ventures and Bitfinex Ventures.
&#8220;Those funds were used to pay open-source developers and accelerate protocol 
development, not to build a token or capture governance rights,&#8221; he said.
Hu claimed that VCs have contributed significantly to developing layer-2 
scalability solutions, wallets, Bitcoin lending and staking protocols. He 
added:
&gt; &#8220;All of them are VC-backed, including us. And some of them are listed on top 
&gt; exchanges.&#8221;
Vikash Singh, principal at Bitcoin VC firm Stillmark, told Cointelegraph that 
when selecting Bitcoin layer-2 protocols to invest in, they consider 
demonstrated security and robustness, proliferation and adoption of non- 
speculative use cases and growth of the application layer. Much like Jarmuz, 
he said that Stillmark believes that proof-of-work is the superior consensus 
model.
Still, unlike Jarmuz, Singh said proof-of-stake or Byzantine fault-tolerant 
consensus &#8220;may be suitable for Bitcoin sidechains and rollups.&#8221;
_**Magazine:**__**&#8217; Bitcoin layer 2s&#8217; aren&#8217;t really L2s at all: Here&#8217;s why 
that matters**_

Bitcoin builders defend role of venture capital in layer-2 growth

Robinhood announced Tuesday it will acquire Canadian crypto firm WonderFi in a 
C$250 million (US$178 million) all-cash deal, marking the brokerage’s latest 
move to grow its global crypto footprint. The deal gives Robinhood access to 
over C$2.1 billion in assets…

Robinhood acquires WonderFi to drive Canadian expansion

In the latest episode of The Bitcoin Layer, host Nik Bhatia invited on-chain 
analyst James Check—better known as “Checkmate”—to dissect the forces that 
have carried bitcoin past six figures and to explain why he believes the 
market still points toward a move to roughly $150,000. From the outset, Check 
framed his analysis in sweeping macroeconomic terms. Since the 2008 financial 
crisis, he said, dollar strength has been “a big up-trend” that rewarded 
foreign investors who benchmark in other currencies, buy dollars, and place 
those dollars into US equities. But that era, he argued, is giving way to a 
“sound-money dominance regime”: “My favorite chart is the S&amp;P 500 priced in 
gold. You get about ten years where equities trounce gold, then ten years 
where gold trounces equities. Since 2022 that chart flipped in gold’s favor, 
and for the first time in history we have a mature, trillion-dollar bitcoin 
sitting right alongside it. We’re watching the rules shift, and it’s not going 
to happen overnight—it’ll take a decade, maybe longer, to fully play out.” Why 
$150,000 Is Next For Bitcoin The conversation quickly moved from macro 
currents to market structure. After the spring sell-off that drove prices from 
the mid-$90,000s to the mid-$70,000s—an “air pocket” where little historical 
supply had transacted—bitcoin clawed back the dense supply cluster around 
$95,000 with surprising ease. Related Reading: Bitcoin Nears All-Time High as 
$312M BTC Exit Binance Following US-China Trade Deal “People were willing to 
just sit tight and allow the market to find its level. They’d bought at 
$100,000, watched it fall to $75,000, bought some more, and now they’re up on 
the whole stack. That kind of behavior is a real boost of confidence.” Shortly 
after that consolidation, the market printed a local high near $105,000. For 
veteran participants, the psychological shift was palpable. “$100,000 was the 
target for the last decade,” Check said. “Now it’s the floor. Bitcoin has 
proved it belongs at a trillion-dollar market cap, flipped silver, and feels 
perfectly natural sitting among the five largest monetary assets on earth.” 
Check’s quantitative framework hinges on the market-value-to-realized-value 
(MVRV) ratio, which benchmarks price against the aggregated on-chain cost 
basis. Translating historical MVRV extremes into forward levels puts the 
present cycle’s statistical ceiling near $166,000: “If price goes to $166,000, 
my objective analyst self has to say, ‘We’re two standard deviations above the 
mean, and we’ve only stayed higher than this five percent of the time.’” That 
band—roughly $150,000 to $160,000—marks the altitude where he expects the 
first serious wave of profit-taking. Yet the level remains plausible precisely 
because it is rooted in realized behavior, not in the supply-halving calendar: 
“There’s a reason MVRV only gets so high. When people look at their portfolio 
and see a house sitting there in green numbers, a chunk of them will hit the 
sell button. You don’t need everyone to sell—just enough to overwhelm new 
demand.” Derivatives, “Time Pain” And The Halving A maturing derivatives 
market is central to Check’s thesis. He expects perpetual-swap funding rates 
to breach 20 percent annualized on a rapid run toward $150,000, inviting basis 
traders to short futures and collect the premium. Options desks, meanwhile, 
can harvest fat volatility premia by selling calls. “Big asset managers must 
hedge. If they can’t lay off a billion-dollar position in options they won’t 
take the position in the first place. Derivatives aren’t papering over 
demand—they’re the plumbing that lets real capital scale into the asset.” 
Related Reading: Bitcoin Price Targets $110,000 All-Time High After 
Consolidation Trend Ends Those instruments also reshape corrections. Where 
2017 pullbacks were 40% plunges that reversed in days, today’s market prefers 
shallower, longer consolidations—episodes that impose what Check calls time 
pain. “Depth pain is easy to see—your coins are 30% underwater. Time pain is 
harder. Three months of chop at the same level will wear investors out, and 
boredom is a powerful seller.” Perhaps one of the most striking element of the 
interview was Check’s deliberate break from the four-year, halving-centric 
cycle model. After studying the August–September 2023 pullback, the mid-2024 
range, and the latest sell-off, he concluded that the short-term-holder cost 
basis now functions less as a binary floor or ceiling and more as a mean- 
reversion anchor. “People are now using bitcoin to respond to the world rather 
than us responding to bitcoin. Macro sentiment—not scheduled supply shocks—is 
steering the big flows.” Treasury Adoption And The Confidence Machine When 
tracking corporate treasuries, ETFs, and other large holders, Check zooms out 
to a 30-day change in realized cap—the cleanest view of net dollar inflows. 
Even March-April ETF outflows, he noted, were nearly matched by falling CME 
open interest, implying “mechanical cash-and-carry unwinds rather than lost 
conviction.” Closing the conversation, he returned to first principles: 
“Markets are a big confidence machine. The dollar cycle, the gold-equity 
rotation, the cost of hedging—all of that feeds straight into bitcoin order 
books, option smiles, and on-chain ledgers. The only real question is: what’s 
the fair macro premium for digital sound money?” For James Check, the chart 
already sketches an answer: somewhere around $150,000, the confidence machine 
will stage its next major test. At press time, BTC traded at $102,573. 
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Bitcoin Rally Is Far From Over—Top Expert Predicts Surge To $150,000

The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened around 150 points lower on Tuesday 
while the S&amp;P 500 and Nasdaq indices inched higher. This comes after Monday’s 
monster rally that saw the Dow gain more than 1,100 points amid encouraging 
Washington–Beijing trade…

Dow dips after Monday’s rally as CPI slows and S&P 500 outlook improves

The incident highlights the growing risk of physical threats to individuals in 
the crypto industry, underscoring the need for enhanced security measures.
The post Crypto tycoon&#8217;s daughter escapes kidnapping attempt in central Paris 
appeared first on Crypto Briefing.