Weekly Wrap: Strategy Sells BTC While XRPL Bets Big on Stablecoins

• Strategy sold Bitcoin below its own cost basis for the first time, days after its CEO admitted investors value cash more than BTC liquidity.
• XRP Ledger cemented its stablecoin identity this week, even as a connected bridge lost 200,000 XRP and analysts questioned whether RLUSD cannibalizes XRP itself.
• Institutions kept shipping new products, from Metaplanet’s BitBonds to Binance’s bStocks overtaking a rival, while Citigroup’s CEO added fresh weight behind the CLARITY Act.

The story that mattered most this week came in two parts, four days apart, and together they said more than either did alone. It started with Strategy CEO Phong Le admitting that the company had learned a hard lesson: institutional and short-term investors in its preferred stock products don’t treat Bitcoin the way they treat cash, no matter how liquid Bitcoin was. Strategy had built up $4.75 billion in dollar reserves specifically because that assumption didn’t hold.

Days later, the theory turned into a transaction. Strategy sold 1,690 BTC between August 3 and 9 at an average price below the company’s own $75,385 cost basis, the first time the firm has booked a loss on a Bitcoin sale rather than simply trimming a winning position. The proceeds went straight into buying back discounted STRC shares, not new Bitcoin. Read together, these aren’t two separate news items. They’re the same shift in Strategy’s identity, told first as an admission and then as an action.

XRP Ledger’s Stablecoin Bet Comes With a Catch

XRPL had one of its more interesting identity weeks. Schwab’s Head of Crypto Research told a podcast that XRPL is shifting away from its original payments use case and toward becoming dedicated stablecoin infrastructure, alongside RLUSD’s supply on the ledger climbing past $1.5 billion. That’s a real vote of confidence in the network’s specialization. But the same week raised an uncomfortable follow-up question: could Ripple’s own stablecoin be undercutting demand for XRP itself, the asset the ledger was originally built to move?

Then came the part nobody was asking about. A bridge connecting Coreum to the XRP Ledger lost nearly 200,000 XRP to a logic flaw that tricked the bridge’s relayer network into treating fake deposits as real ones. Every withdrawal carried a fully valid multisignature approval. The security model worked exactly as designed and still lost the funds, which is arguably a scarier outcome than a straightforward hack.

Put the three stories side by side and XRPL’s week looks like a network gaining real institutional credibility while quietly exposing how much trust that credibility still depends on infrastructure nobody’s fully stress-tested yet.

Institutions Kept Shipping, Regardless

Outside the Strategy and XRPL storylines, the rest of the week read like a checklist of the industry building products rather than waiting on anything. Metaplanet denied reports it had sold $320 million in Bitcoin and used the moment to unveil BitBonds instead, a new fixed-income product tied to its Bitcoin treasury. Bitmine added 7,391 ETH in a single week, pushing its holdings to the edge of 5% of Ethereum’s entire supply. And Binance’s tokenized stock product, bStocks, passed a two-month-old rival to become the market leader in tokenized equities, a fast turnaround in a niche that barely existed a year ago.

The regulatory side got a genuine boost too. Citigroup’s CEO publicly backed the CLARITY Act despite reservations about how it treats stablecoins, adding a major bank’s name to a bill that lost momentum and Republican votes just last week. Whether that kind of institutional weight is enough to revive the bill once Congress returns from recess is still an open question, but it’s a different kind of pressure than the bill has had behind it so far.

Stablecoin Security Had a Rough Week Too

Two stories this week landed on opposite ends of the same theme. The Bank of England pushed its Digital Pound Lab into a second phase, testing how a potential CBDC might interoperate with stablecoins in real trade finance scenarios. That’s a central bank cautiously exploring what stablecoin infrastructure could look like under its own roof.

Meanwhile, a stablecoin that’s already live ran into exactly the sort of problem that kind of caution is meant to prevent. Analysts flagged serious security gaps in HKDAP, the Standard Chartered-backed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, including broken KYC revocation controls and a governance structure centralized enough that a single key could mint, freeze or burn tokens. The product is still in a beta phase limited to institutional distributors, but a bank-backed stablecoin shipping with that many unresolved issues is a reminder that regulatory backing and technical readiness aren’t the same thing.

What It Adds Up To

Line up all five threads and a pattern emerges that’s a little different from last week’s. Last week was about a gap between Washington’s paralysis and an industry building anyway. This week was about something closer to home: the industry’s own confidence wavering in exactly the places it’s supposed to be strongest.

Strategy, the company that built its entire identity on never selling, sold at a loss. XRPL, gaining real institutional respect as stablecoin infrastructure, had a bridge fail in a way that had nothing to do with stolen keys and everything to do with trust assumptions nobody had tested. A bank-backed stablecoin shipped with governance flaws serious enough for outside analysts to call out publicly.

None of this is a crisis. Bitmine kept accumulating. Binance kept shipping. Citigroup put real weight behind crypto-friendly legislation. But the week’s most interesting stories weren’t about the industry expanding, they were about cracks showing up in places that had looked solid a month ago.

What to Watch Next Week

Whether Strategy’s below-cost sale was a one-time balance sheet move or the start of a pattern is the biggest open thread. A second sale below cost basis would turn this week’s story from an isolated event into a genuine shift in how the company manages its Bitcoin position.

On XRPL, watch whether RLUSD’s growth keeps outpacing XRP’s own price and utility narrative, and whether Coreum or other bridge operators start requiring deposit verification that goes beyond checking that a transaction merely exists on-chain. And on the stablecoin security front, keep an eye on whether Anchorpoint addresses the HKDAP findings before its planned retail rollout at the end of 2026, since a beta-phase flaw becomes a much bigger story if it’s still unresolved once ordinary users can access the product.