On y'all. Welcome back to Blockspace Live, presented by CleanSpark.
For today's lead story, we cover SEC filings that disclose that, that Nvidia owns nearly 10% of Nebius through some of the warrants it has for the company shares.
We're gonna take a look at that, plus Nvidia's ownership of other key companies in the AI sector.
Following that, we have David Lawant, the head of research at-- of Anchorage, on to discuss what the hell is going on with Bitcoin's price. Are we back, or is this just a fake-out before we go further down from here?
After that, we will be covering big bombshell news in the Bitcoin Treasury landscape today.
Jack Maller is stepping down as CEO of 21 Capital, and Strike exiting the proposed Tether merger of 21 Capital, Strike, and Electron entirely.
After that, Anthropic settling w- at, uh, with $1.5 billion with authors who filed a suit against copyright infringement on the frontier AI lab.
And then we will top off the show with a quick note on GreenEdge having a rebrand and also raising a pipe raise. That's right.
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This show is brought to you by CleanSpark, NASDAQ-listed, ticker CLSK. More on CleanSpark later on in the show. Colin, let's talk about Nvidia. Also, can I co- point of order?
Uh, the official way to pronounce this company's name is Nvidia. Yeah. So not Nvidia, Nvidia. It actually derives etymo- etymologically from the Latin word invidius, which means to be envious.
That is the canon nomenclate. That's the canon history behind the name Nvidia, so. That's cool. Yeah. I'm still gonna call it Nvidia. Oh my God. [laughs] I don't know. It seems fair to me, man. Yeah.
Okay, so what's going on with Nvidia? All right. Nvidia. We're gonna start with Nvidia, Charlie, and specifically Nvidia reporting a 9.3% beneficial ownership of Nebius.
And this is coming at us from Blockspace. Quoting directly from the article here, "Nvidia disclosed Monday that it beneficially owns 22.25 million Class A shares of Nebius Group, represent- representing a 9.3% stake."
Um, this position includes 1.19 million shares of Nvidia that were already-- uh, that Nvidia already held, and twen- roughly 21 million shares issuable through a pre-funded warrant acquired from N- Nebius on March 11th.
So this was part of a $2 billion raise that Nebius had, that Nvidia was a part of. They've already purchased these share-- The, they've already, you know, purchased this through the equity raise, more or less.
There is a strike price on the warrants that is more or less just, um, kind of a formality, so, because they have to pay something, uh, for them to exercise the warrants.
And the reason why these are being count, uh, count, uh, counted as beneficial ownership, they're still warrants, but the SEC classifies them as beneficial ownership, considering that there's almost no chance that they don't exercise these, 'cause they already paid for the equity itself.
So part of the reason why I wanted to flag this, Charlie, is this obviously falls into the criticism of the whole AI landscape where companies like, specifically Nvidia, is investing in the companies that use its GPUs.
And people say that this circular financing shows that the actual credit profile of all these companies is a little too concentrated within all the other ones. Also, that you have one king maker in the entire space.
But Nvidia has quite a few stakes in some of the key companies within the AI landscape. I'm gonna go through the big ones here. In Frontier Labs, they hold f- a $30 billion stake in OpenAI.
Um, so scaled back from an original framework announced in September 2025, where Nvidia intended to invest up to 100 billion into OpenAI, um, specifically as OpenAI rolled out 10 gigawatts of Nvidia GPUs.
Um, but Jensen Huang has said that the $100 billion is probably not in the cards, and that $30 billion might well be the last check that they write for OpenAI before their IPO. In Anthropic, they have roughly 10 billion,
um, which is paired with Anthropic's commitment to spend roughly 30 billion on Microsoft Azure Compute and buy Nvidia Grace, uh, future Grace Blackwell's Invira Rubin systems.
And also, Nvidia participated in a $6 billion round for xAI, and separately committed up to 2 billion in equity towards a planned $20 billion xAI funding round.
Also, structured to help them basically buy more hardware, hence the circular financing criticisms. In NeoClouds, we just talked about, uh, this one here. Um, they have a 9.3%, uh, stake in Nebius-
CoreWeave, they have a roughly $2 billion invested for about a 9% equity stake. In Crusoe, they have-- they participated in a $1.4 billion Series E.
And in, Inscale, they participated in a $433 million raise for In-Inscale as well.
They also have up to 2.1 billion invested in Airen, 3.2 billion-- up to 3.2 billion invested in Corning, and they also have stakes in Cursor and Wave.
And roughly two, uh, there was also roughly two dozen other additional private rounds across quantum computing, com- uh, robotics, biotech, et cetera. L- Fingers in a lot of pies here for, for NVIDIA. Yeah.
So, um, uh, I, it's hard to do the math.
It's hard and if we're gonna narrow, like N-N-NVIDIA's like investment to just like [chuckles] to just, uh, you know, data center related plays, uh, it's, it, you know, the portfol- their portfolio went from like low three billions to low 20 billions.
And so these are not just investments in the customers. They're, in, in these companies. They're investments in the customers.
So it's like now if, if the CapEx cycle ends, NVIDIA, uh, they kinda takes it on the chin twice here, both from reduced purchasing of their ch- purchase orders of their chips and for, uh,
and for, uh, uh, just, uh, drawdown in their investments. I'll also
point out that you said you use the term kingmaker, uh, as, uh, as if N-N-NVIDIA is, uh, choosing, picker, picking ch- winners and losers. And it's almost as...
I think they're less like a kingmaker, and they're more like assembling their cabinet.
It's, it seems like they're more as, uh, building their roundtable of, uh, companies who have crossed the threshold into being va-viable players because they've invested in pretty much the entire sector, and they've done it, I would say, indiscriminate of different like strategy or however, you know, whichever company pays fealty to them the most.
They are kind of trying to ensure that whoever wins, they win by using NVIDIA silicon, so.
Yeah, I like that complication of the analogy 'cause my point in saying it was that if you have N-NVIDIA on your cap table, like you obviously want that, right?
And they have deep pockets, and it can make financing a little bit easier. You also wanna be as close to them as possible for making sure that you're getting, uh, priority access to their suite of infrastructure.
All that being said, though, lots of money sloshing around in the companies that they are tapping for hosting their GPUs. So I'm sure that we'll get a few other announcements before the year's up of other investments.
Be curious to see how they play the Anthropic and/or OpenAI IPOs once those come to pass. One last data point, Charlie, before we move on to our next segment and the ads in between.
So far in 2026, NVIDIA has committed more than $40 billion in AI equity investments, more than its entire 2025 pl- uh, placement-- uh, pace combined.
So company filings show private company infrastructure fund holdings grew from $3.39 billion to $22.25 billion in roughly a year, so a lot of capital being committed. Yep. So-
I think we can wrap up. Yeah, we can wrap up there, but man, I'm taking a look at the markets, Colin, and the-- everything is soaring. Everything that NVIDIA has touched is-- has turned to gold.
Cipher's up 18, going on 20%. Uh, Airen up 5%. Cores, CleanSpark, Mara, man, everything is ripping right now. The tales of compute's death were greatly- Vastly overstated... vastly exaggerated.
So Colin, uh, you gotta, you, you bears out there, you've gotta, you gotta go back into hibernation 'cause I think the bull is raging, and he wants for the market to go higher. Well, the AI stocks to go higher.
Sorry to all those ho- of you holding real assets or, uh, tail risk assets.
Speaking of tail risk assets and crypto, we have in the audience David with Anchorage, a head of research, and we will bring him on up here in just a moment after a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark.
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[upbeat music] If Bitcoin's actually the best money, and it's the thing that people should accumulate, and it's the best risk-adjusted asset, I lose zero sleep about whether or not that's gonna happen.
I, I just ask the question of when. [upbeat music] It's literally matrix math that you're running on large pieces of data. The Bitcoin miners can absorb that energy.
And, and, and in many ways, this feels like a second bite at the apple to build a new internet. [upbeat music] All right, Charlie, I'm gonna get David up here.
Let's do a quick checkup on the market. David Lawant, welcome to the show, sir. Hey, Colin and CB. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Yeah, g-great to see you, man. And yeah, we're happy to have you.
Thanks for, again, for taking the time. I felt like this would've, this was a timely interview just with regards to what we're seeing with the market kind of reversing for AI stocks, now they're bouncing.
But also Bitcoin staging something of a rally here, and I think that's a good place to start. You've had a tweet recently where you said that so far
you're not totally convinced that we're actually rebounding for good here because volume is still too thin. But then I also saw you retweet a tweet that said, "It looks like the bottom might be in."
So what do you think- Yeah... is actually happening? Pick a side, David. What's going on? Let's go.
Um, I think it's important to just keep in mind that, um, it's important to pay attention to all these kind of liquidity trends, I say.
Like, there's a bunch of father indicators that I think help contextualize what's going on with the price. Uh, I'll tell you what my short-term view is.
Um, if you talk to any institutional investor or trading desk for the past six to nine months, they would have expected Bitcoin to range trade between 60K and 80K, and that's mostly what we have seen.
You can see this in a number of liquidity indicators.
The one that I like to pay attention to in order to kind of look at these boundaries is that whenever we got to the 80K level, the Bitcoin spot order book got very skewed to the sell side, meaning you had all these ask orders, all these sell orders sitting on the book, and they kind of put a cap on the price.
And kind of the inverse happened when we got to the 60K level. Um, I think what we're seeing, uh, right now, for now, is, um, a, a, a textbook exemp- e- example of, uh, seller exhaustion.
So basically, again, we got to the 60K level, we even brushed a little bit under it.
And then whenever Bitcoin gets to that territory, uh, what, what we see in terms of the underlying dynamics is that the selling pressure quickly exhausts itself.
You also start to see a bunch of new, uh, volume trading in.
So, like at the 60K level, we see this at our desk, uh, I'm sure, uh, other big trading desks also see that the amount of money that starts coming in is very relevant.
And all of that is happening in a market with relatively thin liquidity. So that's, to me, a very textbook scenario of a, a short-term bottom.
But in order for me to be convinced that we are now sustainably marching or we are now engaging in a full-fledged bull market, I think we need to see a lot more.
And just to finish my answer here, just to put into context how illiquid the market is right now.
Um, maybe if you asked me about a year ago or so what would be a normal day, uh, for Bitcoin trade volumes on, on the spot side? And I would tell you it's something between $15 to $25 billion a year ago, right?
So $25 billion would be a good day for Bitcoin trading volume, and 15 would be a relatively weak one. Nothing outstanding, but that would be normal. Today, those numbers are between four to six billion.
So we're trading a lot less than what we used to. Some of that volume is now trading on ETFs, some of that volume is now moving to things like prediction markets.
Uh, so it's not that there is no trading activity, but it still has been sharply reduced.
Um, also just to give a statistic, uh, just two or three days ago, Bitcoin had its lowest spot trading volume day since, like, October 2023.
So, uh, we're talking about a very, very thin market, and it's relatively easy to move prices when Bitcoin is trading a third or a fourth of what it used to.
Uh, so that's one of the things that I would like to see in order to be more confident that we are, again, engaging in this full bull market. For now, I think we're probably gonna continue to range trade.
60K to 80K is probably a good range. Uh, now we're on the bottom part of it, so there's probably room to go a little bit further up.
But in order to be convinced of, uh, of, of a new trend, a new sustainable trend, I think we need to see a few more things here. That stat about us having the lowest volume since before the ETF, that's pretty crazy.
You said, uh, lowest since, like, October 2023. I mean, I think that really contextualizes it. So obviously you just said you, you wanna see more volume before you can reliably say that we're in an uptrend.
Are there any other indicators that you would mark to- Yeah... uh, indicate that we've reversed? Yeah, there's, there's many indicators I like to follow. So, um, definitely volumes is one.
The volumes is, like, the easiest one and the first one to see. Uh, usually if you see a price movement with strong volumes, that tends to be a better signal than a price movement on weak volumes.
Uh, the order books are also very important to watch.
So what the order books are telling us is that, uh, seller pressure has been mostly exhausted in the sense that the Bitcoin order book right now is mostly skewed to, to the buy side, actually in a way that it hasn't been very often this year.
It's been skewed to this point only two times this year. So what is pointing in the very short term is that, uh, selling pressure is relatively weak. Uh, demand for leverage is also, uh, a big indicator to watch.
That's usually also a signal, uh, of market strength. Uh, here we're recovering a little bit from the bottom. So if you look... I, I mean, I think CME is a good proxy, especially for institutional leverage.
Um, the CME basis is now a little over 5%, which is still historically low, but better than what we saw, uh, recently. So still- I need to see a little bit of pickup there.
Um, and there's a bunch of signals in the options market. So like, uh, the, a, a few of them are starting to flash. That's, that's a, that's the interesting thing.
We're not, um, we're starting to see some of them flash, but we probably need, uh, a lot more. Uh, on the options market, uh, a big one is what we call the implied volatility, uh, term structure.
Uh, meaning what is the market pricing in terms of volatility, let's say, in the near term versus in the longer term.
And, and over the last six months or so, Bitcoin has been in this perpetual state of near-term anxiety. So the market was very worried about the short term, and actually not that much worried about the longer term.
This is an unusual state of affairs, right? Usually you, you expect more things to go wrong within a month than within a week. So, uh, interesting to see that, uh, this curve has been inverted.
It just now started to un-invert a little bit. Um, and then the other positive highlight, I mean, there's, there's a bunch of these indicators, but just to, to wrap this up here.
Uh, the other one that I, I really like to follow, and has been a pretty good s- uh, indicator over the past couple of years, is the amount of flows that are coming from the US. Because
especially since the ETFs launched, and I would say even a little before that, it's very rare for you to see a sustainable rally in the Bitcoin price without US participation.
So things like the Coinbase Premium or how much of the trading activity is happening during US hours. These are things that are also starting to flash positive.
So the Coinbase Premium right now is in positive territory, uh, meaning that the US, uh, demographic is participating in this rally, which is encouraging to see. I mean, a bunch of things here.
Some are flashing, s- some are not. What I would say is that for now, feels like we're still in that range. We're probably rebounding from that range, and we'll continue to do that.
So David, you know, against this backdrop, we have what feels like kind of a shift in what the strong crypto assets are. Um, Ethereum, top of everyone's mind years ago.
I don't know what, what the institutional sentiment is.
Solana had its, uh, had a couple of incredible cycles, but it's flagged behind, I would say, the new meta, which is the revenue generating assets like Hyperliquid, similar protocols.
And you had a good tweet recently, I think it was... Yeah, it was today. Um, showing the, the... Saying, "This is what Bloomberg's crypto monitor screen looks like."
Quote, "Try to find a relatively mainstream, high quality revenue generating asset like HYPE," and it's got, you know, just basically top, uh, you know, c- top, top 15 of CoinMarketCap sans HYPE. What's going on?
I- is, is there a disconnect? Is once again crypto Twitter maybe a little bit more, uh, dialed in than the institutional folks?
This is, this is a great question, and I think one of the most important ones in the market right now. First of all, no shade to Bloomberg. I'm, I'm a huge fan of Bloomberg, big user of their product.
It's just that I think on the crypto side, maybe it's in, in a few of their monitors, they need to catch up a little bit. Um, what I would say is that it's still early. That it's earlier than most people think,
uh, with regards to these, let's say, high quality revenue generating assets. Uh, one thing that to me is very interesting is that if we think about all this maturation process that Bitcoin went through, right?
So, which is the, uh, the beginning of, uh, treasury companies accumulating a big part of the, or a meaningful part of the flow. Uh, ETFs starting to become a marginal, uh, a big marginal buyer.
Even the development of a listed options market, right? So today, the Bitcoin options market has more open interest than the futures market. So all these things happened in Bitcoin throughout the better part of a decade.
It took, like, many, many years for that to happen. You guys have been covering this in the show very well. Uh, the interesting thing with assets like HYPE is that that whole process is happening in three months.
So we just had, like, the first, uh, spot HYPE ETFs launching, I think, in May. Uh, and, and we saw the amount of hy- uh, uh, or the amount of HYPE spot trading volume go up by like 6X.
Um, the HYPE debts, they started mostly in Q4 2025, and they already hold something like 13% of the outstanding supply. The options market is still lagging here.
Uh, Deribit's just listed HYPE options, uh, I think about a month ago or less than a month ago. Still very small.
Uh, so it's not that everything is moving, uh, at, at, at warp speed, but the market structure of HYPE is changing completely.
Like a year ago, the typical HYPE holder would be the crypto native player, uh, this deep ve- bench of crypto native VCs and, and hedge funds. Now HYPE is starting to become more of a mainstream asset.
I think the, the point of that tweet is that I think we're still in the beginning of that process. I'm still very bullish, um, about that, that narrative going forward.
Assets like HYPE and others that have, um, a product market fit, that have a way to tie, uh, the, the amount of value that they generate and the amount of revenue that they generate to the price of the token.
Uh, I think this will be one very persistent and, and positive narrative in crypto, and I think we're still in the early days of that.
And, um, double tapping a little bit on HYPE and leading into, uh, soliciting some comments on prediction markets.
HYPE's launching some prediction markets, or maybe become outcome markets, and this gets into, and I want, you know, you, you are, uh, optimistic about them, I think, and they have a lower fee structure.
But compare this against what's going on, uh, domestically with Calchi, uh, kind of taking a lot of the market share for the average, uh, crypto user, or really prediction markets user in the US.
And a lot of this is downstream of regulations and regulatory, uh, approval.
I'm kinda curious, what do you think it looks like, uh, you know, with Hype, Polymarket, Kalshi, and the, the future of regulatory, uh, treatment towards prediction markets domestically here in the US? Amazing.
There's a lot in there. We could, we could probably talk about for an hour on this. Yeah. Um, my perception is that, well, first of all, clearly, uh, Hype's main risk is still the regulatory state, right?
I think there's a lot of effort being done, uh, by the Hyperliquid Policy Institute and some other institutions like those, uh, to start to see how Hype can interact, uh, with the regulated commodities and futures, um, environment.
That question is not solved yet.
Uh, the CFTC, and just, just like the SEC, by the way, they've been making major strides in order to integrate crypto into the traditional financial system, but there are a few questions that are harder, and that will probably take them a longer time to, to tackle.
And I think this is one of the main ones. Uh, we'll see how, how that goes. Um, I think there is a path.
Uh, and, and, and there's a possibility that we're going to start to see, uh, Hype getting more integrated, uh, with, um, just traditional regulated US futures market, but it's very hard to tell right now h- how this is gonna look like.
Definitely the main, let's say, risk, or maybe the main disadvantage that Hype has. Um, on the other side, Hal, a- as you very well said, Hype has a fee structure that is very competitive.
I just saw an analysis on Twitter k- kind of trying to compare trades on Hype versus Polymarket and Kalshi, and we're talking about, like, an order of magnitude, uh, of, of difference.
So we'll see how this shape out over time. I'm, I'm, I'm bullish on Hype. I think these guys obviously have been, uh, executing very well. They have a very, uh, very loyal, um, user base and a growing user base.
Also a sophisticated user base, right? These are guys that are already very, um, well-acquainted with relatively complex instruments like perps. Uh, so we'll see, we'll see how that goes. I'm, I'm...
But I'm bullish on it. I think Hype is... I, I mean, I think this whole market will grow, and probably Hype has, has room to, to gain some market share. David, zooming out to the larger market, you've
engaged in some discourse on Twitter, tweeting about and also retweeting tweets that reference this, but the idea that AI is sucking the liquidity out of Bitcoin right now. Yeah.
I'm wondering if you buy into theses that say that we could see a capital rotation event at some point back into Bitcoin as people divest themselves of some of the gains in the AI sector.
Do you see that as possible within the next year, or do you think that's just totally off the table as long as we're in this massive AI CapEx cycle? Uh, I think that's very possible.
And I, I mean, you guys obviously cover AI very well. We were just talking about it. I was listening to it. Very interesting stuff happening on that side.
Uh, the one thing I would say is that obviously there's no question that AI is a transformative technology that's gonna be around, and it's, it's, it's definitely here to stay.
But valuation cycles and investment cycles, they can sometimes run ahead of themselves. And basically, this is, this has been the case of pretty much every single technological revolution over the past many decades.
There is, I, I would say, a good chance that it happens with AI. Um, I think that's very true. That is a consensus view, I would say, in the market, especially in the more institutional crowd.
Uh, I've been saying this for a long time. I think by now it's consensus that, uh, w- Bit- assets like Bitcoin, they're just out of favor. And you guys have been around for a long time.
We've seen that Bitcoin comes and goes out of favor. Um, the, the good news is that the fundamental case for Bitcoin is still there, right? Governments are still, uh, spending way more than they earn.
Uh, there's all the question of, uh, multipolarity on monetary systems. Of course, Bitcoin, uh, offers an alternative that can be very compelling in many different ways. So the fundamental case is still here.
But investor interest can fade sometimes, and I think we are in one of those stages. Um, we'll see how the AI frenzy...
Well, I, I actually even hesitate calling it a bubble because, uh, I don't think this is something that is unsustainable, but there's definitely some valuation frenzies, uh, that we can see here and there.
So let's see how it behaves.
But yeah, I think it would be possible to see, or I would argue, actually, even, even, even, even more than that, I think most institutional investors are now waiting for this capital rotation to happen.
Uh, maybe the consensus now is that this can happen within the next 6 to 12 months, uh, but obviously it's gonna be very path dependent. But yeah, uh, um, I think we're now living...
AI is making us live in this age of abundance, but the, the world always exerts scarcity, uh, at some point. And that, these are the times when, when Bitcoin tends to shine.
Uh, it's gonna happen again, as it has happened many times. Just very hard to say when. Well, we'll be keeping an eye on those indicators and the 80K level, hoping we can see that rotation sooner rather than later.
My bags would greatly appreciate it. Let's go. [laughs] David, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate the time and the insights. Uh, we'll have to have you on again sometime soon. 100%, guys. Thank you so much.
Always great chatting. Thank you, David. Thanks, David. Take care. Sharp guy. Can talk anything Hype, regulatory, Bitcoin, TradFi. Love a good Renaissance man researcher.
We're gonna keep on going. We are gonna cover Jack Maller's dropping out of 21, and then we'll wrap up with some Anthropic and Greenridge. Before we go to Jack, a word from our sponsor, Luxor
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So if you'd like to learn more, go to luxor.tech/commander to get started. All right, Charlie, should we start with the clip? Yeah, we'll start with the f- uh, the first few seconds from the clip.
So here's the clip that Jack Mallers, the Bitcoin wunderkind, posted five hours ago, early this morning. Roll tape. Hey, everyone. I have decided to step down as the CEO of 21 Capital.
I wanted to tell you that myself, in my own words, because you deserve to hear it from me directly. That's the headline. So Jack announces he's stepping down.
He basically says, TLDR, he and the board of 21 Capital disagree on what the company should look like. No hard feelings, he says, in as many words.
Um, I like to joke, however, that this is Jack's humiliation ritual for wearing very expensive boots, uh, to a conference a few weeks ago that went viral on Twitter.
But then also, a lot of folks have been wondering, what the heck is Jack doing with Tether and dollars and these Italian, you know, treasury buyer guys? And the answer is, nothing anymore, because Jack is out.
Um, and, uh, Rafa Zguri, CEO of Electron, the mining arm of Tether, is in. He is now the president.
Now, a lot of this is pending the completed merger, the three-way merger, originally three-way merger between 21 Capital, Electron, and Strike. Uh, so with Strike now following Jack, as I understand,
uh, it is now pending the merger, or the finalization of the merger of Electron and 21. Um,
quote, "The proposed combination of 21 Capital with Electron remains under evaluation and the transaction remains at a preliminary stage, with no assurance that a definitive agreement will be signed or that any transaction will be approved or completed."
So that's the news. I'll toss it to you, Colin, before maybe we can add some more color to this. Well, yeah, I think that the big story here is less so Jack stepping down as CEO of 21 Capital.
I mean, that is the story, but all, the bigger part of it is the fact that Strike is stepping away from that merger entirely.
So to, to rewind for a second, in April, Tether came out and said that it planned on merging 21 Capital, Strike, and Electron. All of these are Tether portfolio companies. They have interests in all of them.
And Jack was going to be the CEO. Now, as you said, Charlie, Rafa Zguri, which is the CEO of Electron, which manages Bitcoin, or, uh, Tether's Bitcoin mining assets, is going to step into that role instead.
And if you looked at, if you watch the video, part of the reason why Strike and Jack are separating from this, or rather why Jack is stepping down, is he mentions that he had disagreements on the direction of the company.
He wanted to turn it into a cash-flowing business, and as, uh, with a Bitcoin treasury component.
But he said that he was met with disagreements on that front from other people involved in 21 Capital, and I assume Tether as well,
which s- strikes me as really interesting because that's kind of the whole existential problem for Bitcoin treasury companies right now at all, is- Yeah...
okay, does this mean actually- I thought that was the original pitch. I thought that was- Yeah... the original mission. I thought that's what everybody was doing, which is, okay, uh, let's do the treasury thing.
Uh, we've got to turn it into a real business somehow. And, uh, very few people have actually managed to execute on this.
Does this mean 21 is pivoting from actually trying to build revenue-generating assets beyond Electron? S- so. Yeah, or maybe 21 will just be the treasur- you know, [laughs] like- Yeah... the piggy bank for Electron.
I don't know. It's all very strange, and you can tell that this was concocted at a time when the treasury companies were doing really well last year, and they were just late to the punch in getting it off the ground.
I, I, I'm not really surprised to see this happening, especially when you consider Strike alone is enough probably for him to manage. You know, it's- It, it really, yeah... uh, uh, yeah, it's a big company.
They've got their payment platform. They've got like cross-border payments through it, a wallet. You can purchase Bitcoin through it.
So that's probably enough for him to deal with without having to navigate the capital markets to figure out how to accumulate more Bitcoin, especially at a time when no one wants to give you money [laughs] to buy Bitcoin.
Yeah, I mean, uh, I'm gonna put my speculation hat on. This is Charlie's read between the lines speculation hat on. Entirely my opinions and speculation here.
Look, Jack has a pretty clear way out to tell a story of why he's no longer in the treasury game anymore. It's not a good look to be in the Bitcoin treasury game. It's not a good look to be the front man.
That's absolutely what Jack's role was here, to leverage his ability to speak plainly from an empty closet and on a stage, uh, about why Bitcoin is this supercharged, quantum-resistant, world-changing asset, you know, force for good.
But when Bitcoin's going down and the treasury company thesis is looking not just shaky, but like downright depressing- You don't want to be the front man. You don't want to be the fall guy.
So if you can take an elegant way out based upon a plausible, like, you know, polite disagreement with the board, you take that. Get out, go back and run your company.
Build what you intended to do two years ago, frankly. And so I think this is good. I think this is smart. Nobody wants to be the front man of a treasury company.
Shout out to the few guys who are still there in the arena. Some of them are still fighting. They've got a few arms and legs chopped off, but they're not dead yet. Someone's got to take the brunt. All right.
Should we move on to- Yeah, let's move on. Let's move on to- Copyright law... yeah, let's move on to, uh, AI again, but this time a little take the feather out of the cap of Anthropic.
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All right, Charlie, what are the authors up in arms about here? Is it that they don't want their work used to train models? That seems unreasonable. Not a point of- Yes... judge, though.
Yes, and, um, I'm currently trying to find my own way to circumvent, uh, pop-ups on Reuters.com. But basically, [laughs] uh, here's the story. Um,
just gonna pause for just a moment as I, uh, let the ad blockers run wild. Okay, here we go. Here's the story. Oh my goodness. [laughs] I can go ahead and launch into it so- [laughs]... because I have some notes here.
Okay, launch into it. Go for it.
A, a federal judge in San Francisco gave a final approval Monday to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit, the largest known settlement in a US copyright case, and the first major AI training copyright case to actually settle among the dozens working through the US courts right now.
The case came up in 2024, I'm sorry, in 2024, when a group of authors sued Anthropic, alleging the company used pirated copies of their books to train Claude without permission.
Notably, there are two distinct legal findings in the case. A, a now retired Judge William Alsup ruled last June that training Claude on the author's work was fair use, a landmark finding that stands as law today.
But he separately found Anthropic violated author's rights by retaining more than seven million pirated books in a central library that wasn't necessarily even used for training.
That's the piracy claim, and that's why there's a $1.5 billion settlement. It's, uh, related to hol- retaining that library, but not necessarily to the, for the training and the use itself.
So a trial to determine damages for that piracy is scheduled, uh, for last September, uh, had been scheduled for last September with potential exposure running into the hundreds of billions of dollars [laughs], which gives context for why the settlement number, while historic, still is, drew objections from people, because they're like, "This is still crazy low," considering what was, uh, originally, or wh- what, what the, the scope and the purview of the copyright infringement being alleged.
So more than 91% of eligible authors and publishers have already claimed their share of the payment. Some authors and publishers opted out entirely and are pushing a separate lawsuit against Anthropic.
Pretty interesting, the, the fact the judge is saying, "This isn't, you can train on these books," but I guess he's also saying you can't, but that you can't have them pirated.
You know, like if you buy the book, then you can use it, but- Yeah... you gotta have a, the legitimate copy. Yeah. Um- Which kinda makes sense to me, you know? I hate to say it, but- It makes sense, but, um,
you know, I'm not legally, legally allowed to download my movies from amazon.com or screen record them and save them myself.
That counts as piracy and DMCA violation, and Amazon is allowed to remove my purchased films from my library because I don't own them.
And now, somehow, Anthropic's allowed to train their super intelligence on intellectual property that they purchase and convert to a different medium for themselves. Tell, I'll tell you how I feel about this.
You know, in a landscape, i- if, if Anthropic were not telling this story that they are to be trusted with the future guiding hand of humanity, and that they alone possess the judgment to guide us on the golden path, like Paul Muad'Dib Atreides or Leto II, down this golden path, threading the very n- you know, the needle here to not let us destroy ourselves.
Um, if they weren't telling that story, um, then I'd be like, oh yeah, this just st- sound like corporate, you know, gonna, gonna ex- extricate as much as you can. However, that's not the story Anthropic tells.
Um, if Anthropic were like, "We're a business. We're gonna make money. We have, we're gonna be valued at a trillion dollars. What's $1.5 billion? How much could a banana cost, Michael?" So that would make sense. Um,
do you want to garner trust? 'Cause this is not how you do it. And apparently this happened, what, in 2024 and 2025? Wasn't Dario still just publishing blogs about how good they were back then? So, um-
You know, this is one of those things that if you are a person who hates AI, and it's really difficult to articulate why you do- It's another thing to point to, see, this is awful... yeah, they're bad.
They're stealing from you. And especially because, like, one of the more near-term things of a critique of AI are people and their intellectual property. People want their own creative work to be preserved.
Artists, creative professions, uh, are, are looking at a very bleak future.
And, uh- Yeah, and that was one of the earliest criticisms, 'cause, you know, everyone was just enthralled by the image-generating ca- capabilities of all these models early on.
And you had a bunch of artists going on Twitter saying, "This is just ripping off my work. It's like people are doing art in my style because the models are trained on it." And I do think that's a legitimate criticism.
And it, it just continues to muddy the waters of what is actually intellectual property on the internet. I mean, we know what it actually is, but it's impossible to contain, right? Yep.
And going back to what you were saying earlier about, uh, you know, the fear of people's intellectual property just being used wantonly and without any guardrails, that's part of what Alex Karp's CNBC interview was, was about, or Bloomberg interview, whichever it was.
Yeah. It- Where he was talking about how companies- It was CNBC, and also-...
companies don't wanna be using these models if it's going to tr- be trained on their alpha and their own internal, you know, business documents. Yeah. Am I all of a sudden starting to, like, kinda be an Alex Karp fanboy?
Am I kind of, like- [laughs]... becoming broke down here? This is how they get you. Because, you know, this is the, it, it, the... I'd say it's not cool right now.
Everybody's like, "Oh, but we wanna be ethical, you know, corporate titans, ethical industrialists." And yet show me an e- show me a good example of that in the modern age. So,
uh, yeah, I mean, whether or not the seven million books does, like, s- huge permanent damage to whatever, um, uh, remains to be seen.
But the thing is, if this is what they were caught doing and proved in court, imagine the other stuff they're doing. This is, this is how it always goes. They're, uh, they're...
If you use Anthropic, of which I do, 'cause I want to be a productive person, they're also training on your current, uh, on, on everything that you are, uh, uh, everything that you're giving them.
So let's run to the last segment real quick and wrap this up. Colin, I'll tag you in. Yeah, so a point of order, Charlie, it's Greenidge, not Greenridge. [laughs] Okay. Okay, we're even. [laughs] So
yeah, this one is coming to y'all from Blockspace. Greenidge Generation renames to Vulcan Infrastructure, raises 39.4 million in a private placement. We'll go through this one quick. It's kind of like a news bite.
Uh, or, you know, it's, or a news flash, excuse me. It's not really too much to cover here. The basic idea is that better late than never to the party, I guess. So Greenidge is a Bitcoin mining company.
They've rebranded to Vulcan Infrastructure & Power, and they just raised that three point, 39.4 million in a private placement.
And the pipe includes 17.15 million Class A shares priced at $1.71 each, matching J- the stock's closing price on July 17th.
The investors include affiliates of Machine Investment Group, Atlas Creek Reinvestment Holdco, and Conversant PIF Aggregator, along with company executives and a board member. Uh, importantly,
Green- Greenidge, now Vulcan, intends to use the proceeds to redeem about 33 million of its remaining 8.5% senior notes due in October 2026. So this is largely a refinancing event.
Now, but by, by paying down that debt, maybe they can free themselves up to actually pursue AI and HPC in earnest. I'm not totally sure what else they have on their
balance sheet in terms of debt or what else they have to clean up.
But as most people who have tracked the Bitcoin mining stock market will know, before it became the AI [laughs] stock market, Greenidge has kind of fallen behind in terms of its positioning amongst all of these other Bitcoin miners.
So now it seems like they're seriously making a run at the AI pivot. Cleaning up this debt will be a good first step, but we'll see what they can do from here.
The small caps on, on this front are kinda having a, a month or so that Soluna, for example, on a run. So. Yeah. Let me be, let me, I'm gonna coin the phrase, small cap, big moves. We're seeing a lot of these.
Uh, we will have some, uh, the Soluna execs on the show at a future date. The, the booking minions are currently working around the clock. So if you wanna see any of those folks, send us your questions.
We'd love to get some Qs from the audience so we can hit 'em with it. This is Blockspace Live.
We do this every single weekday, Wedn- Monday through Friday at 1:00 PM Eastern, featuring quick hits on AI, data centers, markets, and emerging technology.
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I'm Charlie. I'm Colin. We'll see you tomorrow. [upbeat outro music]