Greetings Bitcoiner,

Welcome to Issue #385 of Bitcoin Breakdown, where every Tuesday and Thursday, we bring you the latest must-read Bitcoin thought leadership articles and the newest tools and projects you should know about.

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Now for today’s Top Stories:

• 🪙 Fed Worried GENIUS Act Loophole Could Birth Bitcoin-Backed Stablecoins

• 🛠️ AWS Sneezes, Centralized Crypto Catches a Cold

• 📊 Roxom Turns Wall Street into Satoshi Street

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Oct 21, 2025

TODAY’S TOP STORIES

🪙 Fed Worried GENIUS Act Loophole Could Birth BTC-Backed Stablecoins

The GENIUS Act’s broad reserve definitions may let clever issuers back stablecoins with BTC, thanks to El Salvador’s legal tender status. Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr recently warned of the Act’s potential to let stablecoins use BTC-backed reserves through overnight repurchase deals involving assets recognized as legal tender abroad, letting Bitcoin slip into stablecoin reserve structures. While he acknowledges that stablecoins can help with remittances, trade, and treasury operations, he says regulatory holes remain. This indeed sounds like an orange-pill beachhead into regulated finance worth watching. CoinCentral

🛠️ AWS Sneezes, Centralized Crypto Catches a Cold

A massive Amazon Web Services outage knocked major centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase, Robinhood, MetaMask and Ethereum layer-2 networks offline, exposing how supposedly ‘decentralized’ systems still lean heavily on centralized infrastructure. With AWS hosting over a third of Ethereum’s execution nodes, a single glitch rippled across Polygon, Optimism, Base, and other vaporware. While user funds stayed safe in cold storage, the incident exposed crypto’s ironic reliance on centralized infrastructure, as AWS convenience continues to trade genuine resilience for speed and cost efficiency in the crypto, not Bitcoin, world. CCN

📊 Roxom Turns Wall Street into Satoshi Street

Roxom, a company building Bitcoin-native financial market infrastructure, has launched the first Bitcoin-denominated perpetual futures for the S&P 500 and gold, letting traders benchmark traditional markets in sats instead of dollars. The move rides the global de-dollarization wave, positioning Bitcoin as a neutral, transparent unit of account. Notably, both assets have slumped when priced in BTC over the past year, underscoring Bitcoin’s rise as the ultimate store of value, further hinting at a structural shift toward a Bitcoin-based financial standard. Bitcoin Magazine

POLL #385

PREVIOUS POLL RESULTS

OPINION & ANALYSIS

• Sylvain Saurel, author of the 'In Bitcoin We Trust' newsletter, covers how Amazon Web Services outages crippled major financial services including Coinbase and Venmo, while Bitcoin's decentralized network of nodes continued operating flawlessly, demonstrating the resilience of truly distributed financial infrastructure (Oct 21 | 8 min read).

• Harrison Rush of Amboss, introduces MPFlow, an AI agent using deep graph reinforcement learning to optimize Lightning Network liquidity placement, achieving 11.3% higher payment throughput than traditional autopilot algorithms, marking a milestone for scaling Bitcoin payments without compromising decentralization (Oct 20 | 3 min read).

• Che Kohler of The Bitcoin Manual argues that Bitcoin mining's waste heat can power water desalination systems, transforming environmental criticism into sustainable infrastructure that produces fresh water while securing the Bitcoin network (Oct 19 | 7 min read).

• Allen Farrington, General Partner at Axiom, and Harris Irfan, Co-Founder and CEO of Cordoba Capital Markets, argue that contemporary Islamic banking contradicts core Islamic principles by operating as fractional reserve institutions creating money through debt, while Bitcoin's proof-of-work mechanism and finite supply naturally align with Islamic Finance's risk-sharing, anti-riba principles (Oct 18 | 58 min read).

• Jaran Mellerud of Hashlabs argues that current low transaction fees averaging 0.036 BTC per block since 2010 are misleadingly distributed, with the top 1% of blocks capturing 32% of all fees, warning miners and analysts against underestimating future fee volatility as block subsidies decline (Oct 17 | 6 min read).

• Robert Breedlove, host of the 'What Is Money?' show, explores how Nikola Tesla's concepts of energy, frequency, and vibration form the fundamental triune underlying all reality, from physics to markets, arguing that understanding these principles reveals how everything interconnects through complex dynamical systems centered around absolute voids (Oct 17 | 10 min read).

• Onramp, a Bitcoin financial services company offering Multi-Institution Custody solutions, identifies 3 common corporate conversations that stall bitcoin adoption: board meetings derailed by custody complexities, vendor calls lost in crypto jargon, and internal pitches delayed by implementation concerns (Oct 16 | 2 min read).

• Alex Bergeron, Head of Ecosystem at Ark Labs, argues that bitcoin treasury companies must embrace Bitcoin-native on-chain infrastructure rather than custodial solutions to unlock productive capital opportunities, as the treasury model faces market headwinds and differentiation becomes critical for success in an increasingly competitive landscape (Oct 16 | 4 min read).

• Bobby Shell of Voltage argues that Lightning Network's peer-to-peer architecture will enable stablecoins to achieve global scale by avoiding the bottlenecks that constrain Ethereum and other shared-state blockchains, with Tether's 2025 Lightning integration marking a watershed moment for instant, low-cost digital dollar payments worldwide (Oct 16 | 7 min read).

• DarthCoin, a Bitcoin OG and enthusiast documenting his remote mountain citadel construction, shares his fifth year building progress where he completes 95% of his first earthbag house structure using only local materials and manual labor in an isolated location accessible only by hiking trail (Oct 15 | 11 min read).

TOOLS & PROJECTS

• New on Geyser: BitBiashara launches a Kids Space program in Kenya's Tena estate, providing structured activities for children aged 6-16 during a 7-week December pilot to combat street loitering and crime recruitment through creative engagement.

• New on Geyser: Citadel Scouts - Argentina is a documentary that explores freedom in the country amid economic crisis through interviews with artists, bitcoin experts, and entrepreneurs.

• Ark Labs launches Arkade, a programmable Bitcoin platform enabling developers to build financial applications without base layer changes through off-chain payment batching technology.

• Lightspark launches Grid, a platform that enables real-time money movement across 65 countries through Bitcoin settlement, aiming to connect 14,000 banks and serve 5.6B people with fiat, stablecoin, and Bitcoin transfers.

• Miles Suter, Bitcoin lead at Cash App, says the app will integrate BTC Map and feature both Square and non-Square merchants where users can spend their bitcoin.

• 21bitcoin, an Austrian Bitcoin platform, partners with VR Bank Bayern Mitte and Sopra Financial Technology to launch Europe's first institutional-grade Bitcoin-backed lending pilot, enabling regulated credit solutions.

• Yopaki launches _terminal, a Bitcoin payment system, across seven major Mexican cities to enable 50M cardholders and merchants to process lightning network transactions seamlessly.

• Amboss announces major upgrades including liquidity gifting to public nodes and private channel purchases via Magma for AI-optimized payment enhancement.

• LND Notify is a customizable Lightning Network node monitoring system that tracks payments, channels, and transactions with batched notifications across multiple platforms including Discord and Telegram.

• Tether open-sources its Wallet Development Kit to enable humans, machines, and AI agents to build secure self-custodial wallets.

• Starknet Foundation partners with Alpen Labs to develop trust-minimized bridge using Glock cryptographic verifier technology for native BTC DeFi applications.

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