Friday, September 4th

• Strategy buys again after a 10-week pause

• Bitcoin ETFs post their best week since October

• Fed goes from priced-in hike to coin flip after Waller

• Bitcoin Rallies. Its Miners Don't.

• Maestro’s new website is live

Market Prices

Markets: Bitcoin reclaimed $81,000 on Thursday, up nearly 5% in 24 hours as a pause in U.S.-Iran hostilities eased pressure on oil. The move followed Fed Governor Waller's comments knocking rate-hike odds down from 67% to the low-50s, with the deciding CPI report due September 11.

Market Updates

Strategy Resumes Buying After a 10-Week Pause

Strategy bought 4,603 BTC for $370 million between August 24-30, its first purchase since late June.

• Holdings now stand at 845,050 BTC (~$68.5B), bought at $80,318 per coin, above its $75,412 average cost basis.

Bitcoin ETFs Post Their Best Week Since October

US spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $1.92 billion in the week ending August 22, the strongest week since October 2025, a $3 billion swing from the prior week's outflow.

• Even so, ETFs remain net negative for the year by about $2.8 billion.

The Fed Goes From Priced-In Hike to Coin Flip

A week after Jackson Hole pushed September rate-hike odds above 66%, Governor Christopher Waller said Thursday he'd support holding rates steady if inflation keeps cooling, and odds dropped within minutes.

• The August CPI report, due September 11, lands five days before the Fed's decision and will likely settle which way this goes.

Why It Matters

Bitcoin spent August recovering: an ETF inflow streak, Strategy back buying, hashrate finding a floor even as miners flee it. The one variable none of that controls flipped overnight, a Fed decision that looked like a near-certain hike a week ago is now closer to a coin flip, and the September 11 CPI report will likely decide it before the Fed even meets.

By The Numbers

$70B

Publicly listed bitcoin miners have announced this much in cumulative AI and HPC contracts as of Q1 2026, a strategic pivot away from mining alone.

$21M

TeraWulf's AI infrastructure revenue in Q1, the first quarter it exceeded the company's bitcoin mining revenue.

2015

Global pension funds and insurers have cut dollar-hedging to its lowest level since 2015, one reason analysts cite for bitcoin shrugging off this week's oil spike and geopolitical noise.

The Deep Dive

Bitcoin Enters Its First-Ever Hashrate Bear Market

The Signal

Twenty One Capital CEO Rapha Zagury told a Bitcoin Asia audience in Hong Kong that the network is living through something it has never seen before: hashrate that peaked and then failed to recover for the longest stretch in Bitcoin's history. Difficulty has followed it down.

The Numbers

What Changed

• Bitcoin's hashrate peaked near 1.3 ZH/s in late 2025 and is now running roughly 17-22% below that record, the longest all-time-high-to-recovery gap in Bitcoin's history, according to Zagury's keynote, later filed with the SEC.

• Mining difficulty has fallen 15.1% year-to-date, with 10 of the year's 17 adjustments moving downward, and hashprice hit three separate monthly record lows in 2026, roughly 20% below 2025's worst month.

• Keel Infrastructure shut down every one of its U.S. mining sites in early August after Q2 revenue fell 50% year-over-year, redirecting its $819 million in liquidity toward AI and HPC data centers instead.

• Bitdeer signed a $4.7 billion, 16-year AI lease in Norway in early August; Hut 8 signed a $9.8 billion, 15-year AI lease in Texas back in May, part of an AI infrastructure portfolio now worth $26.6 billion.

• TeraWulf's AI infrastructure revenue passed its bitcoin mining revenue for the first time in Q1.

The Read

• "Pretty much everybody is leaving the industry right now," Zagury said, describing miners operating at scale. That's not a hedge, it's the actual sentence a bitcoin treasury company's CEO used from the stage.

• The twist: this isn't necessarily bad for bitcoin's security. Zagury's own framing is that miners who stay "naturally get a higher share of the market" as weaker operators leave, concentrating hashpower on fewer, better-capitalized hands rather than the network losing security wholesale.

• What's actually happening is a repricing of power. AI tenants can pay more per megawatt than Bitcoin mining, often under long-term contracts, while mining revenue remains exposed to hashprice and the halving cycle. That's a hard economic fact for a miner to argue with, whatever it means for decentralization.

• The AI pivot itself isn't proven out yet financially: listed miners have announced $70 billion in AI/HPC contracts but generated just $341 million in actual first-half AI revenue, against $5.1 billion already spent on the infrastructure. The market is pricing the announcement, not the P&L, revenue on these deals recognizes over 12-25 years.

• Whether this is temporary or permanent depends on bitcoin's own price. CoinShares projects hashrate could climb back to 1.8 ZH/s by year-end if bitcoin reaches $100,000, since a higher price is the one thing that makes marginal mining economics work again without an AI contract.

Watch Next

• Whether AI/HPC revenue actually reaches 70% of listed miners' revenue by year-end, up from about 30% today, as CoinShares projects.

• Whether more miners follow Keel and exit bitcoin mining entirely rather than run AI and mining side by side.

• Whether hashrate stabilizes here or keeps falling before any recovery starts.

• Whether bitcoin has to clear $100,000 before the AI-vs-mining math flips back in mining's favor.

Maestro Updates

Mezzamine Vault Contract Goes Open Source

Maestro Treasury is built on top of a fully open-source protocol. Here's the contracts powering it all: our vault contract, built on ERC-4626, released under MIT license. Inspect it. Build on it.

Maestro's New Website Is Live

Fresh look, same mission. The new site brings institutional vaults, real Bitcoin yield, and miner credit under one experience, because building Bitcoin capital markets starts with making them accessible.

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