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BlackRock Lowers Bitcoin Bar, China's CBETS & Riot's $9.1B AI Pivot | Ep.1
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
BlackRock slashes its iShares Bitcoin Trust minimum by 96%, China's PBOC launches CBETS wholesale digital yuan rails, and Riot Platforms signs a $9.1B energy deal with Anthropic — reshaping what a Bitcoin miner actually is. Six stories driving institutional finance today, from MENA payments infrastructure to Hormuz macro risk.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Yuno just closed a forty-five million dollar Series B, and the lead investor is GlobalPayTech, with Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global both participating. That's the largest MENA fintech deal in weeks, and it lands at a moment when most institutional capital is sitting on its hands.
While that deal was closing, China was moving on a different kind of payment infrastructure entirely. The PBOC's e-CNY Centre just signed agreements with twenty-six direct participants for a new system called CBETS, which handles blockchain-based cross-border settlements in digital yuan.
In institutional crypto, the development that matters most this cycle is BlackRock cutting the minimum conversion threshold for its iShares Bitcoin Trust by ninety-six percent. The floor dropped from twenty-five million dollars to one million.
UBS expanded its IBIT call option position twenty-four-fold. Paul Tudor Jones raised his IBIT position by eighteen-point-nine percent to twenty-two-point-nine million dollars.
One story that reframes what a Bitcoin mining company actually is: Riot Platforms signed a twenty-year, one hundred ninety-one megawatt energy lease with Anthropic at its Rockdale campus. Projected revenue is nine-point-one billion dollars.
The macro wildcard is the Strait of Hormuz. Daily vessel transits have collapsed from one hundred thirty ships to under ten.
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