GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #933 slidin‘ on by… 🛷🥜

We're the crypto newsletter that's more horizon-ready than a captain reading the wind shift before the enemy clears the fog… 🌊🧭

What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: BitMEX to shut down permanently 11 years after Arthur Hayes co-founded crypto exchange

BitMEX invented the perpetual swap. Last year perps traded $61.7 trillion.

The company that built them is shutting down…

BitMEX announced Thursday it closes for good on September 23, ending an 11-year run.

New signups are already off. Traders have until August 26 to open positions, and anything still open at the deadline gets force-closed.

The perpetual swap arrived in 2016 - a futures contract with no expiry date, so a leveraged bet can be held indefinitely. Up to 100x.

It became the most traded product in crypto and got copied by nearly every venue on earth.

At its peak, BitMEX held 57% of the global derivatives market and cleared more than $1 trillion a year.

It went looking for a buyer in early 2025, reportedly around $1 billion. Nobody bit.

So what actually killed it?

Competition took the first bite. Binance and Bybit pulled the liquidity away years ago, and decentralised venues are now pulling it from them.

Perp DEXs have climbed to 13.5% of all open interest, with Hyperliquid ranked second behind Binance. Centralised perp volume fell 10% last quarter.

Then there's the legal hangover.

BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations, paid $100 million, and watched its founders resign under criminal charges.

CZ blames the previous administration's "war on crypto" for the decline.

Trump pardoned the founders in March 2025, by which point the liquidity had long since gone elsewhere.

Arthur Hayes says he's proud of what they built and that the exchange is closing on its own terms.

BMEX token holders had a rougher week - it dropped more than 90%.

On September 23 at 04:00 UTC, BitMEX force-closes whatever's left and switches off.

The perps market it invented will clear another few trillion without it.

AI is moving from experiment… to essential.

Every major industry is integrating it.
Every major company is investing in it.

By late 2025, AI was already an $800B market — growing at a pace that could push it well beyond $1 trillion in the years ahead.

Cloud infrastructure is scaling fast.
AI-enabled devices are multiplying.
Automation is becoming standard.

But here’s the real question…

When trillions flow into this transformation — which stocks stand to benefit most?

Our new report reveals 10 AI stocks positioned across the backbone of this shift — from the companies powering the infrastructure… to those embedding intelligence into everyday systems.

If you want exposure to one of the defining growth trends of this decade, start here.

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In her latest interview on Monetary Matters, Lyn Alden explained why the AI giants may capture far less of this boom than the internet giants captured of the last one.

Alden is the founder of Lyn Alden Investment Strategy and one of the most respected macro analysts working today.

Her framework is simple: value accumulates where there are bottlenecks or network effects.

The old internet giants had both. Search engines, social networks, app stores. Once they hit escape velocity, tiny capex held enormous market share, and nobody could switch away. That's how you get multi-trillion dollar companies.

The AI era looks nothing like it.

A brutal arms race, eye-watering spend, and customers who can move in an afternoon. So where do the gains land instead?

The businesses and people getting more productive capture it. Not the model providers.

Where she still sees a real bottleneck: semiconductors. The chipmakers and the companies building the manufacturing equipment. Physical constraints nobody can route around.

Scarcity beats abundance. Same lesson, different asset. ⚙️

Today we’ll be taking a look at the amount of wallets that hold at least some Bitcoin. (anything greater than 0)

This metric offers a bird’s-eye view of user activity and adoption across the Bitcoin network.

But there’s a slight catch…

One wallet does not equal one user. A user can have many wallets.

What matters here is the trend of the chart.

59,352,449 wallets now hold Bitcoin. That's 38,419 more than two weeks ago (59,314,030).

Another record - but the pace cooled sharply.

The holder base pushed to a fresh high, its fifth straight gain since that brief dip a few editions back. So the climb continues. But this fortnight's 38,000 addition is a fraction of the 150,000-plus we'd been printing - the slowest step up in a while.

New wallets are still being added, and the trend's direction hasn't changed. It's just that growth throttled back this fortnight rather than powering ahead.

Next marker, 59.5 million, sits about 148,000 wallets out. Still coming - just maybe not as fast as the last few prints suggested.

New holders keep showing up, even if the pace ebbs and flows. 🔥

Brazilian Farmers Are Tokenizing Cows to Get Farm Loans—And It's Working. Brazil’s first exchange-listed tokenized-livestock deal is giving dairy farmers another source of credit.

BlackRock, Coinbase, Strategy in a new group pledging $15 million to prepare Bitcoin for quantum threats. Nine firms will fund post-quantum Bitcoin security research without taking a network-governance role.

SEC sets September talks on move toward 24-hour stock trading. Nasdaq, Cboe, and the London Stock Exchange are among the venues moving toward longer trading hours.

LayerZero, Keeta enable tokenized bank deposits across Ethereum, Solana and Base. The partnership enables native transfers of tokenized bank deposits across four networks.

Want to get even smarter? Check these out.

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Select your answer below and you’ll be redirected to the results page. (answer explanation can be found after “Meme Corner”)

Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: A site or app that gives users small amounts of crypto, often for learning or completing tasks. 🥳

Faucets helped early users experiment with crypto by distributing tiny amounts without requiring an initial purchase.

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