So here’s some info that may make you pucker a bit - feel free to pick whatever it is that you want to pucker but The University of Michigan’s May consumer sentiment survey came in at 48.2 — the lowest reading in the survey’s nearly 80-year history.
Worse than 2008. Worse than COVID. Worse than June 2022, when inflation was running at 9%.
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About a third of respondents spontaneously mentioned gas prices. Nearly 30% mentioned tariffs. The U.S.-Iran conflict is keeping crude oil elevated and national gas averages crossed $4.55 a gallon, with diesel above $5.65. The real economy, by this measure, feels broken.
During this time Bitcoin jumped 11.8% in April — its strongest monthly gain since April 2025. It has since extended that rally by another 6% to sit around $81,000. The Nasdaq hit 29,000 for the first time ever. The tech sector just posted its best six-week run on record, outpacing anything from the dot-com era.
CoinDesk put it plainly: Bitcoin and Nasdaq investors are celebrating while U.S. consumers turn gloomy.
It’s hard not to read the divergence as troubling especially since Bitcoin has been historically a retail trading driven asset.
One America is watching their paper gains climb higher and higher. The other wondering if they should fill up their gas tank all the way.
But there’s another reading.
Consumer sentiment measures how people feel about the dollar economy and whether their paycheck stretches further or shorter than it used to and right now it’s stretching about as far as an old leather shoe.
When dollar purchasing power feels most under pressure and will continue to be for the foreseeable future it’s when the case for a fixed-supply asset (Like Bitcoin) is strongest.
The Michigan sentiment index isn’t a Bitcoin bear signal. It’s a Bitcoin thesis signal and one I’ll be looking into further over time.
The people most hurt by inflation caused by things outside of their controls are the ones with the most to gain from an alternative like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin ETFs Just Logged Five Straight Weeks of Inflows Because The Fog Around CLARITY Seems To Be Clearing.
Institutional investors poured more than $700 million into Bitcoin products last week alone, according to CoinShares. That extended an unbroken five-week inflow streak and pushed year-to-date flows to $4.9 billion.
The streak now represents the strongest sustained institutional buying window since the ETFs launched.
And what pray tell was the reason for this inflow?
According to CoinShares’ head of research James Butterfill attributed the surge specifically to improving sentiment around the CLARITY Act.
The irony of CLARITY is that as the legislative fog starts to clear out that’s a meaningful signal. It means institutions aren’t just buying Bitcoin because the price is moving by itself.
It’s what I’ve been saying for a long time now… the money that’s been sitting on the sidelines waiting for CLARITY to come through is champing at the bit to do it. (Trust me it’s champing at the bit, not chomping).
Each dollar that flows in through an ETF is a dollar that locks up a Bitcoin for longer than if it was just sitting on a regular centralized or even decentralized exchange.
The CLARITY Act hasn’t passed yet though.
Senator Tim Scott called it “the red zone” a week ago. If it does pass this session — Senate floor vote targeted for late June or July this inflow streak likely accelerates sharply.
$4.9 billion in five months. Imagine what the number looks like in January 2027 with CLARITY on the books.
If you want the full framework for how these institutional flows connect to Bitcoin’s path toward $1 million, it’s all in the book:
75% of Bitcoin’s Mining Power Just Agreed to Give Up Control and Decentralize Further.
So here’s something you may not have known.
Although Bitcoin is considered a decentralized protocol about 75% of all Bitcoin mining and transaction processing took place across just 7 mining pools.
Obviously this is a point of contention for some in the community and I count myself among their ranks because part of Bitcoin’s goal is to become so decentralized that even a few key players can’t take out the protocol entirely.
The 7 pools served as a potential danger to the system.
Foundry, AntPool, F2Pool, SpiderPool, MARA Pool, Block Inc., and DMND all joined the Stratum V2 working group — an open-source protocol that does something the existing system has never done and gives individual miners control over which transactions get included in each new block.
To understand why this matters, you have to understand what Stratum V1 actually was.
The existing mining protocol, which has governed most of Bitcoin’s block production since 2012, puts the pool operator — not the individual miner — in charge of selecting transactions.
That means a small group of companies, running a handful of large pools, have historically controlled which transactions get confirmed and in what order and every miner pointed at those pools was supplying computing power to a block assembled elsewhere.
That was a quiet centralization risk hiding in plain sight.
Stratum V2 inverts the model. Miners construct their own block templates. The pool handles reward distribution. Transaction selection the actual choice of what goes into Bitcoin’s ledger returns to the people doing the work.
Stratum V2 has been available since 2020. The working group was co-founded by Braiins and Spiral in 2022. For four years, adoption was limited. What changed in 2026 is that the biggest names in mining all moved at once.
That means that they see their future intrinsically being assured by keeping Bitcoin decentralized and free from any over arching authority… even themselves.
It makes Bitcoin’s infrastructure more censorship-resistant and the network becomes materially harder to coerce, surveil, or manipulate.
Second, it makes the case that Bitcoin’s development is still happening — that the protocol’s technical architecture continues to get stronger, more efficient, and harder to attack even as it ages. Critics who describe Bitcoin as technologically stagnant just got handed a counterexample.
Hard to bet against a protocol that gets more decentralized as it scales.
Alright that’s it for today see you later on this week.
Anthony “You’ll never, ever hear me say ‘Happy Monday’” Hall