Gm, and happy Thursday! 

Crypto slipped lower as equities closed Wednesday’s session in the red and futures traded lower overnight. ETFs continue to show outflows while STRC trades off par, adding pressure to the persistent bear. 

Meanwhile, Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile acquires Helium Mobile. What does Noble see that others might have missed?

BTC traded back down to $61.3K following five straight days of negative price action. This marks the lowest price in 100 days as the rally of Q2 has largely retraced and proved to be counter-trend. While BTC is knocking on the lows, equities remain ~1.3% off of their all-time highs. Notably, within crypto, BTC is leading to the downside. Over the past week, the majority of crypto indices have outperformed BTC, raising the question of whether breadth and dispersion shows internal health, or if correlations move back towards 1 for the next move lower in alts. Perps remain the top performing sector on the week, as LIT, HYPE, and MYX trade strong.

ETF flows haven’t found their floor, either. For BTC and ETH, daily net flows remained stubbornly negative throughout the second half of May, with the selling continuing into June. Meanwhile, SOL and HYPE ETFs show modest inflows.

With persistent negative returns on BTC, Saylor is under pressure as STRC closed Wednesday at $95, $5 off par. Strategy’s moves over the past week, using cash to buy back convertible notes and selling 32 BTC, may have led to some unintended consequences. To begin, the viability of STRC embeds the assumption that the BTC purchased with proceeds from STRC issuance will appreciate in excess of the dividend obligation, net of price impact, which has certainly not been the case since issuance began amid BTC’s bear market. Similarly, a reduced cash pile from the convertible repurchase lowers Strategy’s cash runway for dividend payments, raising the concern that MSTR would need to sell more BTC to cover this. The market smells this out, with BTC moving risk-off in advance of these flows. Effectively, STRC trading off par is like credit spreads widening, with the market demanding an elevated effective dividend yield to carry the risk on the instrument.

Strategy has a few options in this position; raise the dividend yield further, increasing the dividend obligation and the amount of BTC that would need to be sold to cover this, or buyback and retire some of the STRC issuance while it trades off par, sunsetting a leg of this experiment. Ultimately, BTC finding its floor and resuming an uptrend would put a quell on these concerns, but that remains an assumption; one that some people have levered. 

Perhaps not reading the room, BMNR announced its own perpetual preferred stock, offering a 9.5% dividend yield and seeking to raise $300 million in proceeds from the issuance. At least with ETH, BMNR can use the staking yield on reserves to finance this dividend obligation, but will in-kind earnings always meet the dollar-denominated liabilities?

— Luke

It Was Never Really About the Phone Plan

Helium Mobile, the direct to consumer MVNO built by Nova Labs, announced on Tuesday that it has been acquired by Noble Mobile, the carrier Andrew Yang founded in 2025 around affordability. While the terms of the acquisition were not publicly disclosed, Noble will inherit the Helium Mobile subscriber base, which Fortune reports has more than doubled in cumulative sign-ups over the past year to ~700K (a figure that includes churned users). Noble has committed to route its own traffic over the Helium Network, rather than relying solely on its current T-Mobile network backhaul.

The Helium Network sits with the Helium Foundation, and HNT remains governed by the DAO. The sale realigns Nova around protocol development, coverage growth and international expansion, and it fits a pattern. In September 2024, Nova sold its IoT data platform, 1663, to LoneStar Tracking. The consumer MVNO is the next operating business to leave the building. Helium Mobile was the proof of concept for the network, a way to show coverage built by individuals could carry real traffic. With that demonstrated, Nova no longer needs to run a retail phone plan to make the point.

The consumer carrier is no longer the main source of network activity. The Helium Network serves ~2.7 million daily users across Helium Mobile and major carrier partners, carried by ~45K hotspots operated by individuals.

Mobile data carried over the network has climbed to roughly 3,400 TB per month, with two carriers accounting for most of that figure. Helium Mobile's own traffic is a minority, with the bulk of usage coming from offload agreements with large operators, including the multiyear deal Nova signed with an undisclosed major US carrier at the end of 2025. Selling the retail plan removes an operating cost without giving up the usage that drives the network.

Network revenue, measured in Data Credits burned, has run around $1.5 million per month recently, with the Mobile network accounting for the vast majority of it. The IoT network that made Helium a household name in 2021 now contributes well under 1%.

The split within Mobile is the more telling part. Carrier offload drives the overwhelming majority of Data Credit burn, while Helium Mobile's consumer traffic is a thin sliver on top. As recently as 2024 the consumer plan was the larger share. Offload overtook it through 2025 and has not looked back.

What Noble acquires is a growing consumer book. Helium Mobile subscriber revenue, the subscription and add-on fees paid to the MVNO, reached ~$1.5 million per month in May, up from ~$250K in December.

Noble is a small operator, a young MVNO that does not disclose subscriber counts and ran on fewer than 10 full-time employees at launch, so its direct contribution to offload is modest for now. The significance is that another carrier has committed to the Helium Network and that Helium Mobile's subscribers consolidate under an aligned operator. For HNT, the bull case rests on whether scaling offload across Noble and larger MNOs converts into sustained burn. That is the line to watch as Nova's focus narrows to the network and the consumer business moves off its books.

— Nick

1. SOL Value Accrual

Blockworks Research published an analysis of SOL token holder value accrual following SIMD 96, which eliminated priority fee burn in February 2025 and reduced daily SOL burn from over 10K SOL to roughly 700. The report examines three proposals to improve SOL economics: SIMD 547, a resource-based fee burn tied to requested cost units estimated to offset 4.3% to 10.7% of daily issuance depending on the lamport parameter; SIMD 550, which would double Solana's disinflation rate to accelerate the path to 1.5% terminal inflation; and SIMD 123, which would enable in-protocol priority fee-sharing with stakers. The report supports all three but flags execution risk, noting Alpenglow, the 100M CU increase, and SIMD 123 dependencies remain unresolved on mainnet.

2. VARIANT 4: AUTONOMY

Variant published a post announcing Variant 4, a $222 million venture fund, alongside an evolution of its founding thesis. The firm is expanding beyond digital ownership toward a broader frame it calls "autonomy," defined as increasing user agency over assets, identity, markets and infrastructure. The fund leads at the earliest stage and participates in liquid and growth investments as projects mature. Variant distinguishes autonomy from automation, with the key test being whether a technology serves the user or an intermediary.

3. State of Token Markets

Delphi’s State of Token Markets report argues that the 2024-2026 cycle exposed deep structural problems in token markets, with most altcoins failing to reclaim prior highs, new listings rapidly underperforming, and retail investors absorbing persistent losses from low-float launches, unlocks and airdrop-driven sell pressure. The report finds that markets are increasingly rewarding tokens tied to real revenue, durable demand, buybacks and enforceable value accrual, while punishing narrative-only assets and emissions-heavy designs. Its proposed path forward is a more capitalistic token market built around supply discipline, performance-gated unlocks, community-first cap tables and tokens that behave more like claims on real protocol traction rather than speculative distribution vehicles.