Morning Minute: Fidelity Is Cautiously Bullish on Crypto

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our new daily news show covering all of the top stories in 5 minutes or less, downloadable on Apple Pod or Spotify.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors tumble as oil jumps to $100; BTC at $76,400
• White House advisor teases major Strategic BTC Reserve announcement soon
• Fidelity says crypto is finding a floor, ETF demand could break 4-year cycle
• Bitcoin dev announces plans for hard fork into eCash, would reassign Satoshi coins
• Gemini becomes first regulated exchange to launch agentic trading

💰 Fidelity Says The Crypto Market Is Finding Its Floor

Fidelity Digital Assets published its Q2 2026 Signals Report on Monday, and the read is cautiously bullish.

Despite Bitcoin’s 52% drawdown from its October 2025 all-time high, three key underlying metrics—unrealized profitability, momentum, and network usage—are all improving.

• Bitcoin’s NUPL turned positive for the first time since January.
• BTC dominance is rising as capital concentrates in the most liquid asset, a pattern that has historically preceded broader altcoin rotation
• Negative futures funding rates look bearish but are likely tied to institutional hedging

ETH and SOL show divergence between price and network activity, with protocol-level usage holding up despite lagging token prices. Fidelity frames this as a positive.

On the bear case: a traditional four-year cycle bottom would point to November 2026, and prior cycles saw 70%+ drawdowns from the all-time high. Bitcoin’s February low was roughly 52% off the peak, short of that threshold.

But Fidelity does share that ETF inflows and corporate treasury demand create structural buying pressure that didn’t exist in prior cycles—and thus the bottom may in fact be in…

⑃ A Bitcoin Developer Wants to Fork BTC and Spend Satoshi’s Coins to Fund It

LayerTwo Labs CEO Paul Sztorc announced plans to hard fork Bitcoin into a new chain called eCash, launching in August at block height 964,000.

Every BTC holder gets eCash 1:1 at the fork. The chain is built around Drivechains, Sztorc’s decade-old scaling proposal that Bitcoin Core developers have repeatedly refused to merge.

There is some controversy, as Sztorc planned to reassign up to 500,000 of Satoshi’s ~1.1 million dormant BTC to early investors as a funding mechanism, marking the first time any Bitcoin fork has proposed touching Satoshi’s stack. Community reaction was roughly 80-85% negative.

Sztorc has since posted a revised version removing the Satoshi coin component, though the final structure remains unconfirmed and no major miners or exchanges have signaled support.

🤖 Gemini Launches the First AI Agent Trading Tool on a Regulated US Exchange

Gemini launched Agentic Trading on Monday, becoming the first regulated US crypto exchange to offer direct AI agent integration for live trading.

Built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, the product lets users connect Claude, ChatGPT, or any MCP-compatible AI to their Gemini account to autonomously execute trades, monitor markets, and manage risk based on predefined strategies.

Pre-built Trading Skills modules handle market data, spread analysis, and historical price retrieval at launch, with more planned. Coinbase’s x402 protocol and Stripe-backed Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol are building similar infrastructure on MCP as well.

💸 Strategy Pulls Back, Bitmine Keeps Pushing

Strategy purchased 3,273 BTC for $255 million last week, a 91% drop from the prior week’s $2.54 billion buy. The pullback was expected as STRC has been trading just below its $100 par value since its April 14 ex-dividend date, limiting Saylor’s new buying (it’s been his biggest driver).

Meanwhile, Bitmine made its largest Ethereum purchase of 2026—233,600 ETH for ~$233.7 million, crossing the 5 million ETH milestone. Tom Lee commented that “ETH has outperformed the S&P 500 by 1,696 basis points since the Iran War started.”

Notably, ETH was flat on the week despite Tom Lee’s biggest weekly buy of the year. A sign that there are some big sellers out there…

🟠 White House Signals Major Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Announcement Coming Soon

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas that a significant Strategic Bitcoin Reserve announcement is coming within the next few weeks.

Witt said the administration has been working through the legal and operational framework needed to implement Trump’s March 2025 executive order, which directed the government to treat its approximately 200,000 seized BTC as a permanent reserve asset.

The expected announcement will address the accumulation framework—how the reserve grows beyond existing seizure-based holdings. Separately, Rep. Begich of Alaska said he is days from reintroducing the SBR legislation, now called the American Reserves Modernization Act, which would codify the reserve into law and direct the government to acquire 1 million BTC over five years.

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors deeper in the red as oil surges; BTC -2% at $76.4k; ETH -2% at $2,280; SOL -2% at $84; HYPE -5% at $40
• BCAP (+28%), HASH (+17%), and PI (+8%) led top movers
• Oil +4% at $99.6; Gold -2% at $4,610
• Stock futures are mixed ahead of a big day of earnings and FOMC tomorrow
• Arthur Hayes called for $125k Bitcoin by end of year at the BTC Conference in Vegas, driven by liquidity from war spending
• The Solana Foundation shared a new post-quantum solution called Falcon that Anza and Jump researchers independently found
• MARA Holdings CEO Fred Thiel announced the MARA Foundation at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas on Monday, pledging to fund Bitcoin protocol research, open-source development, quantum resistance work, self-custody infrastructure, and policy advocacy

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE +1%, SHIB even, PEPE even, TRUMP -3%, BONK -1%, PENGU +4%, SPX -5%, FARTCOIN -1%
• SCAM (+270x), Either (+20%) and GDER (+100%) led notable movers
• SCAM pumped 40,000% to $16M after Elon referred to Sam Altman as “Scam” Altman ahead of their trial starting in California (now $10M)

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• DeFi United released a plan for restoring KelpDAO and the missing rsETH
• ZetaChain faced an attack targeting internal team wallets, causing them to pause cross-chain transactions

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were slightly green on the day; Punks even at 31 ETH, BAYC +3% at 9.7 ETH, Pudgy +1% at 5.32 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 365 HYPE
• Proxies (+40%), Winds of Yawanawa (+14%) and Otherdeeds (+14%) were other notable winners
• Pudgy Penguins announced that Paxos Crypto Brokerage now supports $PENGU, making the token eligible for listing on retail trading platforms and exchanges used by over 500 million people worldwide