“I think this is going to be one of the top use cases of Bitcoin in the next 10 years.” 🔗 @SDLerner on AI agents transacting with Bitcoin, and why determinism, irreversibility and permissionless settlement could make bitcoin:native a natural fit for agentic commerce. He also gets into what real Bitcoin security looks like, why defence in depth matters, and the new layers being built to expand what Bitcoin can do. @stonychambers @jakefentonBTC @BitcoinForCorps

Forget price for a moment. Mining finance, hardware, yield, miner revenue and regulation are all changing at once. Tony DiCarlo shares five takeaways from a week in Hong Kong.

Hashrate is becoming something institutions can actually underwrite. At @BITMAINtech's WDMS Global in Hong Kong recently, @RootstockLabs Director of Institutional Propositions Tony Dicarlo joined the panel “From Hashrate to Balance Sheet: Bitcoin Mining as an Institutional Asset Class.” Much of the conversation around mining this year has focused on hashrate leaving for AI and HPC. Tony made the other side of the case: when hashrate leaves the network, difficulty adjusts and the miners that remain have an opportunity to capture a greater share of Bitcoin’s fixed daily reward. For a well-capitalised miner, that could make this one of the more interesting windows in years to grow hashrate market share. But the bigger shift is happening in how mining itself can be financed. Tony’s argument: hashrate is becoming real collateral, alongside hardware and Bitcoin, opening up new ways for miners to access credit and expand without selling BTC.

London next week 🇬🇧 On September 22, @BtcCorpDay brings senior decision-makers together under the Chatham House Rule to talk about how institutions are actually using bitcoin:native. Not whether Bitcoin belongs in a business, but how it’s actually being used: on balance sheets, in payments and settlement, as collateral, and across energy markets. That’s a conversation very close to what we’re building at RootstockLabs: infrastructure for Bitcoin-secured finance and onchain capital markets. Richard Green, Tony Dicarlo and @th3amcofficial will be there for the 2026 Autumn edition at The Honourable Artillery Company in London. If you’ll be in the room, find them.

One of our Rooties got a package last week that he didn’t order. “Are you expecting anything?” his wife asked. “Nothing,” he answered. So she opened it. Inside was an appreciation gift, sent by our People Team for the way he contributes to our culture of appreciation. What does that mean? We have a channel where anyone in the company can recognise good work they’ve noticed. Because sometimes the things that make a real difference are easy to take for granted: the person who always answers, the extra help, the fix nobody saw. We want people to feel appreciated, but also to get into the habit of appreciating others. It takes ten seconds to write a message. But being recognised for something you did well can stay with you much longer than that. He’s one of the people who takes those ten seconds, consistently. The last quarter, we sent 16 appreciation gifts to Rooties who do the same. Reward the work. Reward the people who make it happen.

What makes Bitcoin the safest decentralised network in the world? Watch @RootstockLabs CEO Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar @dieguito share his insights from the inaugural Xapo Summit. You can now watch the entire panel discussion here:

“Without a time-delay lock, a single validation bug and a total loss become the exact same event, because funds move the moment software says ‘yes.’” @RootstockLabs Co-founder and Scientific Advisor @SDLerner spoke to @cryptodotnews about why time-delay locks matter for Bitcoin bridge security, and how @rootstock_io's PowHSMs use a 4,000-block (~36 hour) delay before signing a peg-out. Time can be a security control.

What’s the biggest security problem the industry needs to solve right now? Not quantum computing. “The immediate issue is protocol and bridge hacks.” Richard Green on what the industry needs to prioritise next, speaking recently on the @blockdropspod.

Rootstock’s DevPortal is now Grade A+ for AI agent readiness, scoring 100/100 on @buildwithfern's Agent Score 🎉 The work makes Rootstock docs easier for AI coding agents and LLM tools to discover, retrieve and consume, while preserving the experience for human developers. 🔗 Getting to 100 is not the end of the work. The next challenge is keeping that baseline from drifting as new pages, components and changes are introduced.

Most major financial technologies reached institutions before they reached everyone else. bitcoin:native flipped that order. Individuals were buying, holding and moving Bitcoin long before most large companies were willing to put it on a balance sheet. Developers were building financial applications around Bitcoin while many institutions were still deciding whether they could own the asset at all. Now that gap's starting to close. Bitcoin-native businesses are already exploring lending, collateral, payments, stablecoins and other financial applications. Larger institutions are beginning to look at the same opportunity as custody infrastructure improves and regulatory clarity develops across different markets. But this time, they aren't introducing the technology to everyone else. They're entering an ecosystem that individuals and builders have already spent years using and developing. As @GoldenGatsby said recently in a chat with @HouseofChimera: “For the first time ever, perhaps in history, the individual is ahead of them in terms of adoption.” That may be one of the most unusual things about Bitcoin’s path into finance.

Vaults make onchain finance look less like crypto infrastructure and more like financial products. Deposit an asset, set the strategy and rules, and let the vault handle execution. @toby_box, Product Director at RootstockLabs, explains what a vault is and why it matters.

Why does Rootstock wait ~36 hours before signing a peg-out? Because bridge security is not just about moving bitcoin:native. Rootstock’s PowPeg was designed around that reality, with multiple independent safeguards. That’s one of questions we answer in our new PowPeg security FAQ 👇

Some headlines (in Spanish) have described the depletion of (confirmed) UTXOs in Rootstock as a “bank run.” That’s false. Don’t fall for it. Rootstock continues operating normally. This is a temporary UTXO-management issue caused by the way the PowPeg processes peg-outs. Small peg-ins will create additional UTXOs, enabling more peg-outs to be processed in parallel and restoring normal processing times. New UTXOs are already being created. I estimate that everything will be back to normal within approximately 10 hours. If anything, its proof the peg is operating as expected and I anticipate the unmatched security of Rootstock will drive more users to it.

We’re in Dubai today 🇦🇪 @th3amcofficial is on the ground representing RootstockLabs at @TheCryptoExpo, joining the conversation around Bitcoin’s next phase. We’re helping build Bitcoin’s financial infrastructure for lending, yield and onchain capital markets.

Friday reminder: Bitcoin-backed digital credit currently stands at ~$10B. Against a ~$300T global credit market, even a 1% allocation would imply a $3T opportunity. (@CoinDesk) Still early.