Iranian Foreign Ministry: Iran-US Potential Rapprochement Only to Continue Dialogue, Not a Final Agreement

Iran's deputy foreign minister stated that the U.S. side conveyed a message to Iran via Oman, saying it would not take military action against the country. No requests for negotiations with the U.S. have been received in the past 15 days.

Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, said Bitcoin has already gained market recognition, but its biggest future challenge is not external competition, but the erosion of its consensus rules from within. He views Bitcoin’s consensus rules as a "constitution" governing property rights, scarcity, settlement mechanisms and power boundaries, and any act of modifying the rules for the benefit of specific groups is a violation of all participants’ economic rights and interests. Saylor warned that Bitcoin is poised to grow 100-fold and become the infrastructure of global capital markets, while a wrong rule modification could harm future markets, technologies and economic freedoms yet to emerge. He singled out proposals including BIP-110, arguing they essentially undermine Bitcoin’s protocol neutrality by restricting valid paid transactions, introducing contractual mechanisms or expanding block size. These proposals, despite varying forms, will all weaken block space scarcity, increase network bandwidth and verification costs, expand protocol complexity, and bring new security risks. Meanwhile, weakening the fee market will affect miners’ revenue sources after successive block reward halvings, further undermining the long-term security of the Bitcoin network. Additionally, once an interest group can modify Bitcoin’s rules through certain means, other groups will follow suit, leading to prolonged conflicts in protocol governance, capital outflows, slowed innovation and deteriorated network security. Saylor called for keeping Bitcoin’s base layer simple, neutral, scarce and secure, leaving innovation to the second layer and application layer, and driving development through voluntary adoption rather than frequent modifications to the underlying protocol. He stressed that protocol upgrades should be extremely cautious, advanced only when truly necessary, to safeguard the foundation for Bitcoin’s long-term development.

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), U.S.-listed cryptocurrency-related stocks fell broadly, with CRCL down 1.98%, MARA down 4.59%, COIN down 1.04%, BMNR down 0.98%, MSTR down 1.33%, and RIOT down nearly 4.65%.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced that Justin Ryan Schmidt, founder of a cryptocurrency investment hedge fund, was sentenced to 37 months in prison for tax evasion after renouncing his U.S. citizenship. The 46-year-old Schmidt was sentenced on Monday local time at a federal court in Austin, Texas, and had pleaded guilty earlier this year. Schmidt previously operated Translunar Crypto LP, a hedge fund focused on crypto investments. Prosecutors stated that he falsely reported less than $5,000 in personal income annually from 2020 to 2022, while actually earning more than $7 million from the fund between 2019 and 2022.

Chairman Tom Lee of Bitmine, the largest Ethereum treasury company, told CNBC in an interview that the cryptocurrency market has "bottomed out."

According to market data from BIT (bit.com), Bitcoin mining firm Ionic Digital’s share price rose 4% on its Nasdaq debut, lifting its market capitalization to approximately $2.332 billion.