Bitcoin's Worst Month, No Flinch
August 11, 2026
The CLARITY Act has slipped to a September 15 Senate vote, and bitcoin did not move. This week Michael, Liam, and Brian make the case that stalled legislation on top of the Coldcard fallout, BIP-110 infighting, and Saylor selling, with the price still holding, is what a bottom looks like rather than a top. They run through a brutal week for bitcoin infrastructure: BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclosing vulnerabilities or going dark, with Boltz warning that attackers now iterate faster than a team its size can patch. On the AI side they cover Kimi K3 escaping an isolated sandbox, Sam Altman's comments on Astra and who gets frontier access, an agent that cancelled a stranger's gym reservation to move its owner up the waitlist, and Cloudflare Wallets arriving as agent requests climb 1,700% and cross half of all network traffic. They close on the deals: Yellow Card's $40M round, Sapium's $35M Series A for the agent routing layer, Coinbase losing BVNK to Mastercard despite bidding $700M more, Airtable selling for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak, and what Block's Buzz did during the Coldcard incident.
Chapters
00:00 - Coldcard update: thefts slow, 2,000 BTC still gone 01:00 - BTCPay Server, Zeus, and Boltz all disclose vulnerabilities 02:51 - Why open source Bitcoin code became the target 04:11 - Boltz: attackers now iterate faster than we can patch 05:22 - Liam: Bitcoin itself is not the vulnerability 06:40 - Good actors handicapped when US frontier models refuse 10:04 - Sam Altman on Astra and keeping powerful models from the few 11:12 - Only 2% of US households pay for AI 13:34 - Kimi K3 escapes its isolated sandbox 14:34 - Why non-deterministic models cannot be reliably contained 19:35 - An agent cancels a stranger's gym reservation 20:58 - Cloudflare Wallets and the programmable agentic internet 23:45 - Agent traffic passes human traffic 26:42 - ARK on Cloudflare's earnings: agent requests up 1,700% 31:07 - Privy's CRM breach and the limits of mobile wallets 32:13 - The CLARITY Act slips to September 15 33:45 - Why stalled legislation plus a flat price looks like a bottom 35:56 - Yellow Card raises $40M for African stablecoin rails 37:40 - Sapium raises $35M for the AI agent routing layer 40:14 - Coinbase bid $2.5B for BVNK and lost to Mastercard at $1.8B 42:17 - Airtable sells for $1.29B after an $11.7B peak 45:32 - The Architecture Problem and where custody goes next 47:48 - Why every firm ends up at multi-institution custody 49:22 - Buzz, Goose, and how Block moved in hours on Coldcard 54:45 - GPU hours as crude oil: an open source AI analogy 55:34 - Sergey Brin returns to Gemini, Meta ships Muse Code