Macquarie Group, the Sydney-based financial services and investment banking firm, disclosed in a first-quarter 2026 13F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it cut its position in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), by about 19.3%, reducing its stake from 5.126 million shares to 4.139 million. The Australian institution also trimmed its holding in BlackRock’s spot Ether ETF (ETHA) by roughly 9.5%, and simultaneously opened a fresh equity position in BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company, valued at approximately $41.53 million as of March 31.

Two passive wrapper positions cut, one new operating-company stake built. Taken together, the disclosure sketches a deliberate portfolio decision to reduce index-style crypto access while adding equity with considerably higher leverage to Ethereum’s next price move.

Two ETF Cuts, One New Equity Bet

The mechanics of the repositioning are legible in three line items from the 13F. Macquarie’s IBIT stake fell from 5.126 million shares in Q4 2025 to 4.139 million in Q1 2026. The dollar value of that holding dropped to $159 million from $255 million, a combined result of deliberate selling and Bitcoin’s steep price decline through the period.

The Ether ETF followed a similar path. Holdings contracted from 3.634 million shares to 3.289 million, and the stake’s value fell from $81.5 million to about $52.1 million. BlackRock launched its iShares Bitcoin Trust spot ETF product in January 2024 and added ETHA that July; Macquarie built positions in both products as the spot ETF market attracted institutional capital through 2024 and into 2025.

The new entry is BMNR. Macquarie carried no prior position in the Ethereum treasury operator. The March 31 valuation placed the fresh stake at $41.53 million, making it a net addition to the book rather than a direct substitution within an existing line item.

Bitcoin’s Worst Quarter in Several Years

The market backdrop for Q1 2026 was punishing for passive crypto holders. Bitcoin fell from approximately $87,000 at the start of January to roughly $66,000 by the end of March, its steepest quarterly decline in several years. Oil prices pushed above $100 per barrel on Strait of Hormuz tensions, the Federal Reserve shelved any prospect of near-term rate cuts, and crypto ETFs bled capital through January and February before a partial March recovery returned approximately $1.3 billion in industry-wide inflows to the Bitcoin ETF complex.

The Bitcoin fund absorbed those swings while maintaining roughly $54 billion in assets under management and commanding close to 49% of the U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF market by assets through the quarter. The broader institutional bid held even as prices fell, though Macquarie was clearly among those reducing rather than adding to their exposure during the downturn.

The spot Ether fund had a steeper run. The product declined about 20% through the first quarter, consistent with Ethereum’s heightened sensitivity to macro risk-off conditions relative to Bitcoin. Some of the dollar-value contraction in Macquarie’s two ETF stakes was therefore automatic, a direct function of lower asset prices applied to unchanged share counts. The deliberate reductions in share count on top of that price effect represent the active portfolio decision that shows up in the filing.

BitMine’s Ethereum Treasury Machine

BitMine Immersion Technologies operates as a corporate Ethereum treasury, with a stated business purpose of acquiring the token, holding it on its balance sheet, staking it for network yield, and accumulating more through ongoing capital raises. The company targets ownership of 5% of Ethereum’s total circulating supply, a goal it has been approaching rapidly.

BitMine’s April 9, 2026 NYSE uplisting 8-K filed with the SEC confirmed the company’s transition from NYSE American to the main exchange, marking a significant shift in institutional profile. Thomas Lee, Chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, described the move as a milestone for the company. The uplisting came after a period of rapid ETH accumulation that established the firm as the largest single corporate holder of the token globally.

Today, Bitmine achieved a major milestone by being uplisted to the Big Board NYSE.

Thomas Lee, Chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, in an April 9, 2026 announcement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

As of May 17, 2026, per BitMine’s May 2026 8-K with the SEC, the company held 5.278 million ETH at $2,191 per token, a position representing 4.37% of the 120.7 million token circulating supply. Its MAVAN infrastructure, the Made in America Validator Network, had 4.71 million of those tokens staked with annualized revenues of $289 million at a 2.8% yield.

Key metrics from the company’s most recent SEC filing:

• 5.278 million ETH held in treasury as of May 17, 2026
• 4.37% of the total Ethereum circulating supply controlled by a single corporate entity
• $289 million in annualized staking revenues via the MAVAN platform at 2.8% annual yield
• $12.6 billion in combined crypto holdings, cash, and equity stakes including positions in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings

Institutional backers listed in BitMine’s SEC filings include ARK Investment Management, Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, Kraken, Digital Currency Group, and Galaxy Digital.

ETF Wrapper Versus Operating Equity: The Risk Calculus

Holding a spot crypto ETF is a clean transaction. At 0.25% in annual fees, IBIT and its Ether counterpart deliver Bitcoin and Ethereum price performance with minimal operational friction. There is no management team whose decisions affect returns, no net-asset-value premium or discount to worry about, and exit works precisely the same way as entry.

Holding an Ethereum treasury company is structurally different. The share price reflects supply and demand for the equity rather than the underlying token value in any mechanical way. When institutional optimism is high, treasury-company stocks frequently trade at a sustained premium to net asset value. Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR) ran this playbook with Bitcoin for much of the past two years, and its equity returns substantially outpaced Bitcoin in rising markets precisely because the NAV premium compounded on top of the asset appreciation. BitMine is running the same model for Ethereum, with the added dimension of MAVAN staking yield generating ongoing cash flows alongside the treasury appreciation thesis.

That operating leverage cuts both ways. The treasury stock’s 52-week share range of $3.20 to $161.00 illustrates what the downside of that structure looks like. A spot Ether fund tracks Ethereum lower in a transparent, proportional way. A treasury operating company in a prolonged crypto correction can reprice below net asset value, adding execution risk and structural discount on top of the underlying decline. Ongoing equity raises to fund fresh token purchases also dilute existing shareholders, introducing a headwind that passive ETF holders never face.

Macquarie’s $41.53 million stake in the treasury operator sits alongside a $159 million position in the Bitcoin fund that remains the largest line item in its crypto book. The construction is additive and calibrated: broad Bitcoin ETF exposure at scale, a trimmed Ether ETF position, and a treasury-company bet that amplifies returns if Ethereum moves higher. The relative sizing reflects deliberate risk management rather than wholesale conviction in the treasury-company format.

The Payoff If Ethereum Moves, Scored Two Ways

Scenario one: Ethereum re-rates above $3,000 through the remainder of 2026. The company’s treasury grows in absolute dollar terms, the 2.8% MAVAN staking yield applies to a larger base, and any NAV premium the equity market assigns to the treasury stock amplifies the equity gain above what the spot Ether fund alone would deliver. In that scenario, trimming the Ether fund and buying the treasury equity looks like the correct call, and the Q1 repositioning earns a favorable reading on the Q2 filing.

Scenario two: crypto extends its first-quarter slide or grinds sideways. The Ether fund tracks Ethereum lower in a clean, proportional way. The treasury stock potentially drops faster, because the market discounts not just the token decline but the execution risk and dilution drag from a company continuing to raise equity capital to purchase more of a falling asset. The $41.53 million position would shrink by more per dollar than an equivalent spot Ether ETF stake would.

The MAVAN staking yield provides a limited buffer in the flat scenario. At 2.8% annualized on 4.71 million ETH staked, it generates cash flows tied to Ethereum’s network utilization rather than its spot price. That yield does not protect against a serious correction, but it converts part of the position from pure price speculation into a yield-generating operation, changing the cost-of-carry calculus for a long-term holder willing to ride out volatility.

Macquarie’s Q2 2026 13F filing is due 45 days after June 30. If the Ethereum treasury stake grew as a share of the crypto book in the second quarter, the conviction call is deepening. If it shrank, the Q1 trade looks more like a tactical experiment than a structural shift in how one of Australia’s largest financial institutions thinks about crypto equity versus crypto wrappers.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Holdings in IBIT, ETHA, and BMNR involve significant financial risk, including the potential for total loss of invested capital. Consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions. Figures cited are accurate as of publication on May 21, 2026.

SpaceX’s S-1 filing confirms the company holds 18,712 Bitcoin on its balance sheet, with a fair value of $1.29 billion as of March 31, 2026, more than double the roughly 8,285 BTC that blockchain analytics firms had estimated based on observable on-chain data. When Space Exploration Technologies Corp. filed its prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on May 20, the gap between market estimate and official disclosure came to more than 10,000 coins. The reason is one that will matter to public investors long after SPCX begins trading: SpaceX does not self-custody.

The filing sets the stage for what may be the largest initial public offering in the history of global capital markets. SpaceX is targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation and a raise of approximately $75 billion, with shares pricing June 11 and trading expected to begin on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12.

Custodians Hid Half the Stack

The SpaceX S-1 registration statement filed with the SEC explains the discrepancy in a single paragraph. Blockchain analytics firms can only track addresses they can link to a known entity. Coins held inside a regulated custodian’s omnibus account leave no readable trail back to the corporate client, because the custody firm controls the address, not SpaceX.

The Company has ownership of and control over its digital assets, which consist of bitcoin, and utilizes, and expects to continue to utilize third-party custodians to hold its bitcoin.

That sentence explains why Arkham Intelligence had SpaceX’s position pegged at roughly 8,285 BTC in the days before the filing dropped. The on-chain estimate captured only the coins that SpaceX or its affiliated wallets had moved through observable addresses. The remaining 10,427 coins were sitting in a custodian’s books, invisible to any tracker working from blockchain data alone.

The custodian’s identity is not named anywhere in the S-1. SpaceX says it expects to continue utilizing third-party custodians after going public, meaning the arrangement is not a temporary pre-IPO measure. Investors buying SPCX will be taking on a Bitcoin position they cannot independently verify through on-chain data, the same way the market could not before the filing.

SpaceX Among Corporate Bitcoin Holders

The S-1 disclosure places SpaceX roughly 11th globally among known corporate Bitcoin holders. The position is larger than Tesla’s current stake, but it sits on a different scale entirely from Strategy, the company formerly known as MicroStrategy, which has built Bitcoin accumulation into its core capital allocation thesis. Per corporate Bitcoin treasury data compiled by Bitcoin Treasuries, Tesla currently holds 11,509 BTC and Strategy holds 843,738 BTC.

Strategy’s 843,738 coins are roughly 45 times larger than SpaceX’s stack. The more revealing comparison is Tesla, where Musk’s other publicly traded company sold the bulk of its Bitcoin in 2022 and now holds 11,509 coins, about 38% fewer than SpaceX carries today. Both Musk-linked companies started accumulating around 2021, around the same period Tesla made its well-publicized $1.5 billion Bitcoin purchase. The two companies took different paths from there: Tesla trimmed aggressively, SpaceX held.

A Silent Hold Through Four Years of Losses

SpaceX’s total cost basis for the position is approximately $661 million, implying an average acquisition price of about $35,324 per coin. At March 31 prices, with Bitcoin trading near $69,000, the holding carried a fair value of $1.29 billion. By the time the S-1 was filed, with Bitcoin moving above $77,000, the estimated value of the position had climbed toward $1.45 billion.

Four figures from the filing put the holding in context:

• ~$35,324 average cost per coin, an entry point that has roughly doubled at Bitcoin’s price at time of filing
• $1.29 billion fair value on March 31, 2026, per the S-1 balance sheet
• ~$629 million unrealized gain as of March 31, based on cost basis versus the fair value disclosed in the filing
• $0 in Bitcoin sold despite a cumulative operating deficit of $41.3 billion as of March 31 and a 2025 net loss of approximately $4.9 billion

SpaceX posted a $4.28 billion net loss in the first quarter of 2026 alone, driven by Starship development costs, Starlink satellite manufacturing, and the February 2026 absorption of xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence venture. Through all of it, the Bitcoin position stayed put. The S-1 contains no language on why SpaceX acquired Bitcoin, whether it plans to add more, or when it might reduce the position. Investors are inheriting a conviction bet with no stated thesis attached to it.

Fair Value Accounting Changes the Investor Calculus

Public companies holding Bitcoin now operate under a different accounting landscape than existed during the last crypto cycle. Three terms define how SPCX shareholders will read SpaceX’s Bitcoin line starting with the first quarterly report after listing:

FASB ASU 2023-08

The Financial Accounting Standards Board’s ASU 2023-08 fair-value standard, effective for public business entities with fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2024, requires Bitcoin holdings to be marked to market each quarter. Gains and losses route directly through the income statement, not a reserve account.

Mark-to-market accounting

An asset is recorded at its current fair market value at each reporting date, not its original purchase price. For SpaceX, a 10% swing in Bitcoin price translates to roughly $145 million of earnings impact at the $1.45 billion portfolio value estimated at filing.

The old impairment model

Under the prior standard, companies could only write Bitcoin down when prices fell below cost. Recoveries never flowed through earnings. That regime punished holders like Strategy and Tesla in 2022 without giving them a corresponding gain when Bitcoin later recovered.

Strategy felt the new regime in Q1 2026. The firm reported a $12.54 billion net loss, almost entirely from an unrealized mark-down as Bitcoin slid from roughly $87,000 in January to $68,000 in late March. SpaceX’s position is about 2.2% of Strategy’s stack, so the quarterly earnings impact will be far smaller in absolute terms. It will not be invisible.

Some investors will treat SpaceX’s Bitcoin as a modest alpha-generating treasury reserve, bought at favorable prices and held with conviction through years of operating losses. Others will read it as an undisclosed complication on a balance sheet already carrying multi-billion-dollar deficits. The S-1 does not settle the debate, and the filing’s silence on intent means the market will have to form its own view.

There is also a timing dimension. SpaceX recorded a $112 million unrealized loss on its Bitcoin holdings in its most recent full reporting year, following a $955 million unrealized gain the year before. That swing illustrates exactly how much quarterly noise a 18,712-coin position can generate under the new FASB standard, depending on where Bitcoin trades during any given three-month window.

The $1.75 Trillion Offering and Its Bitcoin Footnote

Bitcoin makes up roughly 0.08% of SpaceX’s target $1.75 trillion valuation. The company’s core story runs through reusable rockets, a Starlink satellite internet constellation, and artificial intelligence infrastructure. The prospectus describes SpaceX as targeting the largest addressable market in human history, putting that figure at approximately $28.5 trillion across space, connectivity, and AI combined.

Revenue Growth and Operating Losses

SpaceX generated $18.67 billion in 2025 revenue, up from roughly $14 billion in 2024, a gain of about 33% in a single year. First-quarter 2026 revenue came in at $4.69 billion, offset by a $4.28 billion net loss driven by Starship development costs, Starlink satellite manufacturing, and AI infrastructure spending through xAI. The S-1 reports an accumulated deficit of $41.3 billion as of March 31.

Starlink’s connectivity segment was already profitable last quarter, posting $1.19 billion in operating income on its subscriber base of more than 10 million paying customers. Launch services remain globally dominant: SpaceX accounted for more than 80% of global mass sent to orbit in 2025 and had completed roughly 650 launches by end of March, with 85% using at least one reused booster. Per SpaceX’s public disclosures, the company is also seeking FCC approval to eventually operate up to 1 million satellites, and plans to begin deploying orbital AI compute satellites as early as 2028.

Governance, Anchor Capital, and the June 12 Countdown

Elon Musk, who also controls Tesla, xAI, and social platform X, will retain 85.1% of voting control through a super-voting share class. He has publicly said he will not sell any SPCX shares. The dual-class structure places public-market shareholders in the position of holding economic exposure without equivalent influence over the company’s direction, a tradeoff standard for founder-led tech listings but one that institutional governance advocates routinely raise.

Key facts from the S-1 and associated reporting:

• Pricing date: June 11, 2026
• First trading day: June 12, 2026 (Nasdaq, ticker SPCX)
• Target raise: approximately $75 billion
• Target valuation: $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion
• Roadshow start: June 4, 2026
• Reported anchor investor talks: BlackRock in discussion for $5 billion to $10 billion
• Retail allocation: reported at 30% of shares, roughly three times the typical IPO norm

If SpaceX prices at the top of its target range and lists as scheduled, the deal would surpass Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of approximately $35 billion raised and become the largest initial public offering in the history of global capital markets. That context, not the Bitcoin line, is what Wall Street will focus on when the roadshow opens June 4. The Bitcoin footnote will get its own attention on the first earnings call after listing.

If Bitcoin holds near current prices through SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, expected in early November, the $1.45 billion line item reads as a quiet paper gain inside a revenue story worth $18.67 billion a year. If Bitcoin corrects sharply before that first quarterly print, the mark-to-market hit lands inside an income statement that public investors are just beginning to learn to read. Either way, the number the market was triangulating from on-chain data now has an official figure attached to it: 18,712 coins, $661 million paid, and no stated plan for what comes next.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. Investing in publicly traded securities, initial public offerings, and digital assets involves significant risk, including the potential loss of principal. Readers should consult a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision. Figures are accurate as of publication on May 21, 2026.

Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (Italy’s financial crimes police) traced more than €1 million ($1.16 million) in undeclared capital gains to a single suspect who used Bitcoin Ordinals to mint, sell, and reinvest digital assets while simultaneously collecting unlawful government subsidies. Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm whose Reactor tool mapped the flows from a single seized hardware wallet, disclosed the case on May 20. The firm offered a crisp summary: “the technical novelty of crypto does not equal anonymity.”

The disclosure arrived on the same day a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers reintroduced the PARITY Act, a crypto tax reform bill that still has not settled which digital-asset gains must be reported, or when. Enforcement agencies can now follow money through inscription protocols that most tax regulators had never heard of two years ago. The rules those authorities enforce have not caught up.

From Foggia to Rome: The Investigation Opens

The probe began as a routine inquiry into unreported income. Investigators from the Economic and Financial Police Unit of Foggia and the Special Unit for Privacy Protection and Technological Fraud of Rome, both divisions of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, expected a narrow case when they started looking at a suspect’s undeclared earnings. What they uncovered was considerably more complex.

The pivot came during a home search, when officers seized a Ledger hardware wallet, a compact physical device designed to store the private keys that control cryptocurrency holdings on the blockchain. That single device, a rectangle smaller than a thumb drive, became the investigative entry point for a multi-year financial structure spanning dozens of wallet addresses, inscription marketplaces, and accounts at centralized exchanges.

Key figures from the case, as disclosed in the Chainalysis Ordinals investigation blog post on May 20:

• €1 million+ in undeclared capital gains linked to Bitcoin Ordinals and BRC-20 token trading
• A multi-year operation running in parallel with unlawfully received public subsidies
• One Ledger wallet connected to dozens of receiving addresses forming a traceable single financial cluster
• Judicial disclosure requests to centralized exchanges, which held Know Your Customer (KYC, identity-verification) records that matched on-chain activity to a named individual

Chainalysis said both the Ordinals activity and the subsidy fraud advanced as interconnected threads of the same investigation, with blockchain evidence and exchange records reinforcing each other at every stage.

How the Inscription Cycle Generated Undeclared Gains

Bitcoin Ordinals, introduced in 2023, assign a unique serial number to each satoshi (the smallest unit of bitcoin) and allow arbitrary data, including images, text, and code, to be permanently embedded in a transaction’s witness field. This makes individual satoshis distinguishable and capable of carrying digital artifacts directly on Bitcoin without any separate token contract. BRC-20 tokens extend the mechanism by using text-based inscriptions to deploy, mint, and transfer fungible tokens on Bitcoin, bypassing the smart contracts required on Ethereum and most other programmable blockchains.

Chainalysis said the suspect used this structure as a repeating income engine. Satoshis moved to inscription services, where data was embedded and new assets created. Those assets were listed on marketplaces and sold for multiples of their original cost. Bitcoin proceeds returned to the primary wallet cluster. Then the cycle started over: proceeds from earlier rounds funded new inscriptions, new listings, and new sales, compounding through multiple iterations until total undeclared gains exceeded €1 million.

The asset format complicated the investigation’s early stages because Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens do not appear as standard exchange balances. They live on Bitcoin’s own ledger, outside the familiar patterns of spot trading or simple transfers. But that same structure, every inscription recorded permanently on a public blockchain, is exactly what made the entire operation traceable once investigators had tools capable of reading it.

One Seized Wallet, Dozens of Addresses, One Suspect

Modern hardware wallets are designed with privacy in mind. A Ledger device generates a fresh receiving address for every incoming transaction, spreading a user’s history across Bitcoin’s Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO, Bitcoin’s method of tracking coin ownership) model. To an untrained observer, dozens of addresses suggest dozens of unrelated actors moving independently across the network.

Chainalysis Reactor resolved that fragmentation using common-input-ownership heuristics, an analytic technique that groups wallet addresses when they appear together as inputs in a single transaction, indicating shared control. Reactor probabilistically clusters what looks like scattered activity into a single controlling entity. From there, the full transaction flow becomes readable as a continuous narrative rather than disconnected fragments.

No matter how sophisticated a scheme appears, the underlying technology leaves a permanent, immutable trail.

Chainalysis published that assessment in its May 20 case summary. The investigative sequence that followed the wallet seizure moved in five steps:

1. A Ledger hardware wallet is seized during a home search, with no visible transaction history accessible without the private key.
2. Chainalysis Reactor applies ownership heuristics to group dozens of associated receiving addresses into a single cluster representing one controlling entity.
3. Transaction graph analysis maps the recurring inscription-listing-sale cycle across Bitcoin inscription services and crypto marketplaces.
4. The wallet cluster’s cashout points connect to accounts at centralized cryptocurrency exchanges.
5. Judicial disclosure requests obtain KYC documentation from those exchanges, matching pseudonymous on-chain activity to a named individual.

The final link was the oldest one in financial crime investigation: identity records held by regulated institutions. Exchanges that collect government identification as part of compliance requirements became the bridge between blockchain pseudonymity and a real person. The blockchain recorded every transaction. The exchanges recorded who made them.

A Compliance Gap Wider Than One Italian Case

The Numbers Authorities Already Have

Italy’s case is notable for its asset format. The broader pattern of crypto tax underreporting, though, is not new. A 2026 paper in the Review of Accounting Studies found that IRS data captured only between 32% and 56% of estimated U.S. crypto owners, based on comparisons with surveys and other public datasets. A separate National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, an American nonprofit economic research organization) working paper on Norway found that crypto tax noncompliance was broad even among investors using exchanges that voluntarily share identity-linked data with tax authorities, with the paper concluding that enforcement needs to be targeted or low-cost because many crypto investors owe relatively small amounts.

The IRS’s own projections put the scale of the overall problem in stark relief. For tax year 2022, the agency projected a gross tax gap of $696 billion, with underreporting accounting for $539 billion of that total. Digital assets are not the only driver of that figure, but as adoption has expanded, they have become a growing share of the underreported base. Chainalysis noted in its case write-up that as new digital asset classes emerge and generate income streams, the gap between actual on-chain wealth and declared tax positions “will become a primary target.”

The Flood of New Reporting

One exchange’s recent disclosure shows how much the formal reporting landscape has already shifted. Kraken, a major U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, filed 56 million Form 1099-DAs with the IRS for the 2025 tax year, one form for every reportable transaction its customers made. The breakdown exposes a structural mismatch between the sheer volume of activity and the administrative framework built to capture it:

In the Kraken blog post on the case for digital asset tax reform, the exchange argued that 18.5 million of those filings covered transactions worth less than one dollar, and that three out of four covered amounts under $50. “The hours taxpayers spend reconciling these micro-transactions, often with incomplete data, generate costs wildly disproportionate to any revenue the IRS will collect from them,” Kraken wrote. The exchange is now pushing Congress for a broad, inflation-indexed de minimis exemption and an option for taxpayers to choose when staking rewards become taxable income.

Congress Adds Rules While Questions Pile Up

The Stablecoin Safe Harbor

The Italian case surfaced on the same day as the latest version of the PARITY Act (Digital Asset Protection, Accountability, Regulation, Innovation, Taxation and Yields Act), reintroduced on May 20 by Reps. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) and Max Miller (R-Ohio), members of the House Ways and Means Committee, joined by Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) and Mike Carey (R-Ohio). The PARITY Act legislative overview from Rep. Max Miller’s office frames the bill as a push for “long-overdue clarity and parity for consumers, investors, and businesses.”

The bill’s May version would treat gains on regulated payment stablecoins as non-taxable unless the taxpayer’s cost basis falls below 99% of the stablecoin’s redemption value, a structure that effectively eliminates most stablecoin payment taxes without a hard dollar cap. It would also allow miners and validators to defer income recognition on staking and mining rewards for up to five years, or until the point of actual sale, addressing what the industry has labeled phantom income taxation. The House Ways and Means Committee held a closed-door bipartisan session on May 14 specifically to discuss crypto tax rules, one week before the May 20 bill arrived.

Bitcoin and Ordinals Stay in the Old Framework

Rep. Miller has said publicly that he expects the PARITY Act to advance before August 2026. What the bill does not do matters as much as what it does. The Act does not extend de minimis relief to Bitcoin or other volatile cryptocurrencies. Buying bitcoin, holding it while it appreciates, and spending a fraction of it on any transaction still triggers a taxable event requiring basis calculation and Form 8949 reporting, regardless of the amount involved. Ordinals and BRC-20 activity sit entirely outside the stablecoin provisions being debated, meaning any gain from minting and selling inscriptions remains as taxable under the PARITY Act’s current draft as it was before the bill was written.

Some investors have responded to the traceability of transparent blockchains by seeking out privacy-focused alternatives. The sharp Zcash rally after Multicoin Capital disclosed a wealth-tax hedge position in early May shows how quickly that thesis can move markets when a major institutional fund names it publicly. But privacy coins address a different problem than the one the Italian case exposed. The Foggia suspect did not use a privacy chain. Bitcoin Ordinals are traceable by design, written permanently into the base layer.

Chainalysis said as much in the case summary, arguing that the Italy investigation demonstrates that emerging token systems produce traceable records regardless of how technically complex their transaction structures become. The IRS digital asset income reporting requirements have applied to convertible virtual currencies, stablecoins, and non-fungible tokens since 2019. Bitcoin Ordinals profits sit in that framework now, whether the taxpayer understands the inscription protocol or not.

If the PARITY Act passes before August, stablecoin payments and some staking income move to cleaner ground. If it stalls, millions of crypto holders enter another filing cycle under rules designed before inscription protocols existed, while enforcement agencies carry tools that can follow every satoshi that ever moved through them.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax or investment advice. Cryptocurrency and digital asset tax obligations vary by jurisdiction and individual circumstances. Readers should consult a qualified tax professional before making decisions based on this content. Figures cited are accurate as of the date of publication.