CLARITY Act Under Siege, Bear Market Bottom Signal, Gold Below $4K, OpenAI's 9-Month Chip, Ark Wallets on Mainnet

Your daily bitcoin and macro intelligence briefing. AI-generated audio from the TFTC Bitcoin Brief newsletter, written and curated by Marty Bent. • The CLARITY Act's BRCA provision faces opposition from 82 Catholic leaders, four law enforcement associations, Wall Street, and Native American tribes. Without it, writing non-custodial software equals money transmission under federal law. • Checkmate says we're at the "pointy end of the bear market" with cyclically low volumes, SOPR below 1, and STH deeply underwater at a $71,236 realized price. • Gold crashes below $4,000 for the first time since November 2025, down 30% from January highs as hawkish Warsh prioritizes price stability. • OpenAI and Broadcom unveil "Jalapeno," a custom AI inference chip designed and taped out in 9 months, with gigawatt-scale deployment targeted for late 2026. • Cursor trains a 1.5 trillion parameter model on 100K+ GPUs, becoming the first app-layer company to build frontier-scale compute. • Unsloth AI compresses a 754B parameter model to 217 GB. It runs on a Mac Studio at 21 tokens per second. • Bark goes live on Bitcoin mainnet with three consumer wallets: Arke, Noah, and Alby Hub with Ark backend. • Congress passes a 4-year CBDC ban; Digital Asset Clarity Act clears committee 15-9. Get the full written brief with all links, sources, and on-chain data — subscribe free at tftc.io/bitcoin-brief