Deep analysis of institutional 13F filing activity and smart money moves
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Ripple Prime secured a $200 million debt facility from Neuberger Berman's specialty finance arm to expand margin financing for institutional crypto trading. The platform's revenue has tripled since Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion last year.
MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) sold $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin in Q1 2026 — including a $1.1B sale to fund a convertible note repurchase — dropping from the 2nd to the 4th largest publicly traded bitcoin holder, as the miner's shift toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure accelerates.
Ripple Prime secured a $200 million debt facility from Neuberger Berman's specialty finance arm to expand margin financing for institutional crypto trading. The platform's revenue has tripled since Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion last year.
Circle (NYSE: CRCL) raised $222 million for its Arc blockchain token at a $3 billion valuation, drawing investment from BlackRock, Apollo, a16z crypto, ARK Invest, and Intercontinental Exchange — marking the stablecoin giant's most ambitious push beyond USDC into institutional blockchain infrastructure.
BlackRock filed SEC paperwork on May 8 to launch a new "Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle" with OnChain Shares and add an onchain share class to its $7 billion Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund, using Ethereum ERC-20 tokens. The moves deepen the $14 trillion asset manager's tokenization push as the real-world asset market crosses $30 billion, up 200% year-over-year.
Nvidia and IREN Limited announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 5 gigawatts of AI factory infrastructure using Nvidia's DSX architecture, with a $3.4B managed cloud services agreement and a five-year option for Nvidia to purchase 30M IREN shares at $70 ($2.1B). The deal cements IREN's pivot from Bitcoin mining to AI compute, bringing total partnership commitments across Nvidia and Microsoft to over $15 billion.
Bitmine (BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury company, has accumulated 5.1 million ETH worth $11.9 billion — now holding 4.29% of all ether supply and on track to hit its 5% target within six weeks. But at Consensus 2026, Chairman Tom Lee signaled the firm may slow purchases and shift focus to staking ($300M annualized revenue) and a $4 billion share repurchase program, marking the first major strategy shift for the Ethereum space's most aggressive corporate accumulator.
Core Scientific (CORZ) sold 2,385 BTC for $208.3 million in Q1 2026 while posting a $347.2 million loss, as its AI data center colocation business surged 802% to $77.5 million — overtaking bitcoin mining as its primary revenue source for the first time. The former mining giant simultaneously closed a $3.3 billion senior secured notes offering to fund further data center buildout under its 590 MW, $10.2 billion CoreWeave contract.
Michael Saylor told Strategy's Q1 earnings call the company will 'probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend,' marking the first time the world's largest corporate BTC holder (818,334 coins, $67B+) has signaled willingness to touch its stack. The announcement — alongside a $12.54 billion quarterly loss — sent MSTR down 4% after hours and BTC briefly below $81,000 before recovering to $82,500.
Crypto exchange Bullish (NYSE: BLSH) agreed to acquire transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2 billion in stock and assumed debt, gaining a regulated shareholder registry for 2,500+ companies and 20 million investors — the infrastructure backbone for end-to-end tokenized securities. The deal surpasses Coinbase's $2.9B Deribit acquisition as the largest crypto-linked M&A ever and signals that the tokenization land grab has moved from pilot programs to billion-dollar acquisitions.
Payward (Kraken's parent) completed its $550M acquisition of Bitnomial, securing a futures broker, exchange, and clearinghouse — the first complete CFTC-regulated crypto derivatives stack owned by a single firm in the U.S. The deal, valued at a $20B equity mark for Payward, follows last year's $1.5B NinjaTrader acquisition and positions Kraken to offer onshore regulated perpetuals and options, directly challenging offshore venues that currently dominate the $200B daily crypto derivatives market.
Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks released the long-negotiated Clarity Act stablecoin yield compromise text Friday, banning crypto firms from offering bank-like deposit yield while preserving activity-based rewards. The agreement unblocks the Senate Banking Committee markup and represents the most significant advance in U.S. crypto market structure legislation this year, with Coinbase's CEO publicly urging the committee to 'mark it up.'
MARA Holdings agreed to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power for $1.5 billion, adding a 505 MW gas plant and 1,600 acres in Ohio with over 1 GW of future capacity — the largest single infrastructure investment by a Bitcoin miner into AI computing, raising its total power pipeline to 2.2 GW and signaling that the BTC mining industry's strategic pivot to AI is now an acquisition-scale transformation.
Meta has begun offering USDC payouts to select creators on its platforms in Colombia and the Philippines through Stripe's Link wallet, marking the largest-scale stablecoin payment deployment by any Big Tech company and signaling a full-circle return to crypto five years after Libra's regulatory death.
Billionaire macro investor Paul Tudor Jones declared bitcoin a better inflation hedge than gold in an interview published Tuesday, citing its fixed supply advantage. He also warned the S&P 500 at 252% of GDP echoes 2000 dot-com extremes, predicting negative 10-year forward returns for equities.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought $234 million of ether last week, its largest weekly purchase of 2026, bringing its weekly accumulation rate within striking distance of Strategy's regular $200-300M bitcoin buys. With 5M+ ETH (4.21% of supply) and $13.3B in total holdings, ether now has something it's never had: a Strategy-equivalent corporate buyer absorbing supply every week regardless of price.
The Justice Department dropped its criminal investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell, removing the last obstacle to Kevin Warsh's confirmation. Warsh, who holds $192M in assets including 30+ crypto positions, could be confirmed as early as this week as the Senate Banking Committee schedules a vote.
Options open interest on BlackRock's IBIT Bitcoin ETF hit $27.61 billion on Friday, edging past Deribit's $26.90 billion — marking the first time a regulated US bitcoin derivatives market has overtaken the offshore exchange that dominated for nearly a decade.
SpaceX filed a confidential S-1 targeting a $75 billion raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation — the largest IPO in history, 2.5x the Saudi Aramco record. Combined with OpenAI ($1T valuation) and Anthropic ($60B+ raise), the trio could pull $240 billion from the same risk-on pool that funds crypto. SpaceX itself holds 8,285 BTC worth $600 million, making this the first megacap IPO with a material bitcoin position under new fair-value accounting rules.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) has launched the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio (MSNXX), a government money market fund designed specifically for stablecoin issuers to park their reserves in regulated, T-bill-backed instruments. It's the first product from a major Wall Street bank purpose-built for stablecoin reserve management — and it's timed ahead of the GENIUS Act, which would legally require exactly this kind of regulated custody.