A Deal Without a Vote, and Miners Pivot to AI

The Week in One Sentence

The CLARITY Act broke its ethics deadlock without producing a vote, the institutional bid returned for seven straight sessions, and Bitcoin's miners kept selling their power to AI.

1. A Deal, and Still No Vote

The deadlock broke on Monday. After weeks of stalemate over an ethics provision barring senior government officials from holding crypto business interests, negotiators reached an agreement, with the president reportedly signing off on the language. An updated bill text followed midweek. The compromise version sunsets the ethics rules in 2029 and gives regulators a year to implement them. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters the CLARITY Act had reached the "1-yard line."

Then the week ended without a floor vote.

That is the whole story, and it matters more than the deal did. The Senate has exactly one window left before the August recess: the week of July 27. Miss it, and the bill falls into a fall calendar consumed by midterm campaigning, which is where legislation needing 60 votes goes to die. Senator Cynthia Lummis has warned that a failure now could push market structure rules out to 2030, or kill them outright when this Congress ends in January 2027 and the whole process has to restart.

The most telling detail is what prediction markets did after the deal. They went down. Polymarket odds on passage this year, which had already fallen from above 80% in February to a record low near 24% in mid-July, rebounded when the compromise landed and then slid back toward the mid-30s. Galaxy Research still puts it near 50%. Traders are saying something specific with those numbers: the constraint was never the text. It is floor time and vote counting. Passing requires 60 votes, Republicans hold 53 seats, and at least two are expected to vote no, so leadership needs roughly seven Democrats, with negotiators reportedly working on the assumption that ten will be needed. Only two Democrats have committed publicly, both conditionally. One clause is still unsettled.

For Bitcoin, the stakes are narrower than for the rest of the market, since its commodity status is already settled in practice. What is actually at issue is durability. The only federal rulebook right now is a piece of joint SEC and CFTC guidance from March, and guidance can be rewritten by the next administration overnight. The question this coming week is whether the rules get written in ink.

2. The Bid Came Back

For three months this newsletter has tracked institutional money leaving Bitcoin. This week it came back. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded net inflows for seven consecutive sessions from July 14 through July 22, pulling in roughly $981 million, their longest positive run in eleven weeks. Total assets across the funds recovered to about $80.9 billion, up from $74.4 billion at the start of the month. Bitcoin rallied with it, touching roughly $66,900 on Tuesday, its best level in weeks and more than 13% above the $57,750 low set on July 1. The reported catalyst was the CLARITY ethics agreement.

Then Thursday erased a chunk of it. The funds shed $225 million in a single session, ending the streak, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for $202.5 million of the redemptions. Bitcoin slipped back through $65,000 and drifted toward $64,000 by the weekend.

Hold both halves of that at once, because the shape of the flows tells you more than the direction. Seven good days restored roughly $981 million. A single bad day on July 13, just before the streak began, took out $424.7 million on its own. Outflows arrive in concentrated bursts; inflows arrive in a drip. For the year, the funds are still down about $4.76 billion, so this week's recovery covers roughly 15% of what June alone took out. And most of the money came through one door: IBIT took $319 million of the $499 million added this week. This is demand returning, not demand recovered.

The macro turned against it late, too. The Middle East conflict escalated again, pushing Brent crude back above $99 and cutting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz by nearly half. Treasury yields rose alongside new tariff policy, which lifts the opportunity cost of holding an asset that pays no interest. That is the exact risk we flagged last week to the cooling-inflation story, arriving on schedule. The Federal Reserve meets Tuesday and Wednesday, and sentiment, at 31 on the Fear and Greed Index, has climbed out of extreme fear for the first time in over a month without getting anywhere near optimism.

3. The Miners Are Selling Their Power to AI

The squeeze on Bitcoin mining has stopped being a rough patch and started being a restructuring. VanEck's mid-July data puts hashprice, the revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power, at roughly $30.60 per petahash per day, near multi-year lows. Daily miner revenue across the network averaged $28.5 million over the past month, down 39.5% from a year ago. June was the first full month to absorb the damage, with revenue falling 25% from May. The cause is a vise: Bitcoin's price is down about 26% on the year while network hashrate sits at a record 930 exahashes, so more machines are competing for less money.

What miners are doing about it is the actual story. This week LM Funding America began trading as PowerCompute, a new name for a company redirecting its 26 megawatts of power toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. It is worth being precise here, because the company is not abandoning Bitcoin. It still mines with about 22 of those megawatts and still holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet. But it told shareholders that a full buildout of that same power for AI could generate $20 million to $50 million a year, and it is running GPUs at its Oklahoma site to prove the model. When the same electricity earns several times more pointed at AI than at Bitcoin, the decision makes itself.

It is happening at scale. CoinShares estimates that Bitcoin miners have signed more than $70 billion worth of GPU hosting and cloud deals with large technology companies, and expects some existing mining capacity to be shut down and cannibalized as those contracts ramp. Meanwhile the competition for power keeps getting better funded. On Wednesday the White House held the first Genesis Mission summit, announcing more than $5 billion in federal commitments across fifteen agencies and 278 selected research projects, an AI-for-science program rather than anything aimed at Bitcoin, but one more well-capitalized bidder for the same grid connections and data center sites.

Here is the part that should temper the alarm. Bitcoin was designed for exactly this. When miners leave, difficulty falls, and the network cut it by 5% earlier this month, which lowers the cost of producing each coin for everyone who stays. Blocks keep coming roughly every ten minutes regardless of who is mining them. And VanEck notes that total miner-held Bitcoin has stayed stable through all of this, meaning operators are managing their treasuries rather than dumping coins in panic. Meanwhile the share of Bitcoin held for more than a year has climbed to 60.8% and keeps rising through the decline. The industry around Bitcoin is being reshaped by the economics of AI. The network underneath it is doing what it has always done.

The Numbers

Metric	Value
BTC Price	~$65,000 (Fri Jul 24), easing toward $64,000 into the weekend
Weekly High	~$66,900 (Tue Jul 21)
From the July 1 Low	up ~13% (low $57,750)
From All-Time High	~48% (peak $126,198)
Fear & Greed Index	31, Fear (out of extreme fear for the first time in a month)
Spot ETF Flows	7-session streak, ~$981M, ended Jul 24 with a $225M outflow
ETF Assets / 2026 Net	~$80.9B total; still ~$4.76B net outflows on the year
Hashprice	~$30.60 per PH/day, near multi-year lows
Miner Revenue	~$28.5M daily, down 39.5% year over year

What to Watch Next Week

The last CLARITY window. The week of July 27 is it. Watch whether Thune schedules floor time, whether the final clause closes, and whether seven Democrats actually materialize. August 7 ends the year's realistic chances.

The Fed, July 28 and 29. Cooling June inflation gave the Fed room, but oil is climbing again. Warsh scrapped forward guidance, so his tone at the press conference is the whole signal.

Whether the bid returns. One outflow day does not undo seven inflow days, but the streak is broken. A quick return to inflows would suggest July was a turn; another week of redemptions would suggest it was a bounce.

Miner announcements. With hashprice near multi-year lows, expect more AI and HPC pivots. Watch whether hashrate keeps climbing anyway, and whether the next difficulty adjustment cuts again.

Free Tools

Track price, sentiment, ETF flows, and network health in one place with Bitcoin Pulse, our free live dashboard. No account required.

Weeks that swing on a Senate calendar and an oil price are the argument for a fixed schedule over reacting to headlines. See what steady buying through the drawdown would have done with the DCA Calculator.

New here? Start with Intro to Bitcoin or browse the Bitcoin Glossary.

Bitcoin Weekly is published every Saturday by 21VOX. Written by Karl. No financial advice. Just signal.