Week 24 (2026) · BTC Weekly

Coinbase won CFTC clearance to route US customers into Deribit's global Bitcoin perpetuals — the first approval of its kind for a US exchange

On June 11, the CFTC issued a no-action clearance to Coinbase Financial Markets, the exchange's US broker-dealer arm, to intermediate domestic customers into Deribit's global perpetual futures order book under Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) supervision — the first such approval for a US exchange. Deribit is the offshore derivatives platform Coinbase acquired in May 2025; the clearance extends to any digital commodity perpetual contract currently listed there, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and other tokens with no expiration dates and funding-rate mechanics that previously required offshore access. US traders could previously reach Deribit's products only through foreign accounts or VPNs, both carrying regulatory and compliance exposure. The FCM approval came two days after Kalshi's domestically listed BTCPERP contract crossed $1 billion in cumulative trading volume on June 9 — exactly one week after its June 3 launch — a milestone Kalshi's original prediction-market business required 40 months to reach.

US investors now have two CFTC-regulated pathways to Bitcoin perpetual futures: a domestically listed contract on Kalshi and Coinbase-brokered access to Deribit's global order book, closing the regulatory gap that directed this category of derivatives activity offshore for most of the prior decade.

(CNBC, Cryptonomist)

Bitcoin's hash rate exodus to AI triggered the network's 11th-largest difficulty decline on record

Bitcoin's mining difficulty fell from 138.96 trillion to 125.19 trillion at block height 953,568 on June 13 — a 10.3% downward adjustment, the second-largest of 2026 and the 11th-largest negative adjustment in the network's history. The correction followed a sustained decline in global hash rate to 878 exahashes per second (EH/s) as listed mining operators redirected energy capacity and capital toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing data centers. Post-halving economics accelerated the shift: with block rewards at 3.125 BTC and Bitcoin's price declining toward $63,000, the margin between revenue and operating cost narrowed enough that repurposing power contracts for AI workloads became more profitable than running ASICs for a growing list of public operators. A lower difficulty is mechanical relief for miners that remain online — each unit of hash rate earns a proportionally larger share of block rewards when fewer machines compete for the same subsidy.

The scale of the miner-to-AI reallocation is now visible in the protocol's self-regulating difficulty mechanism: a 10.3% downward adjustment confirms the migration was large enough to leave a measurable imprint on Bitcoin's network security budget.

(CryptoBriefing, CryptoSlate)