Last week’s Bitcoin Nashville conference dominated cryptocurrency news headlines — largely due to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign speech (and many promises), as well as Senator Cynthia Lummis’ call for a national “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” (We have the bill.)

We walked around the event for four days as we struggled to cover all the news, and took plenty of photos. Bitcoin LARP, anyone?

U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, with a copy of her bitcoin reserve account at the Bitcoin Nashville conference on Saturday, July 27. (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)

RESERVING JUDGMENT:Details of last weekend’s Republican calls for a “strategic national stockpile of bitcoin.” Trump, the party’s presidential candidate, has suggested using the government’s existing holdings of just over 200,000 BTC as the “core” of a new reserve. Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis has proposed going even further, possibly building it up to 1 million BTCor about 5% of the cryptocurrency’s maximum supply.

Lummis said on stage at Bitcoin Nashville that the plan could eventually “wipe out” the national debt – $27 trillion, at last check! – but didn’t really explain how this would work, “beyond the basic math that increasing U.S. government wealth would generally equate to reducing debt,” as CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton said:. Questions have arisen on social media about whether the government really had rights to keep the existing treasuryobtained primarily through seizures and losses associated with criminal activities; in other words, any stolen assets may at some point need to be returned to their rightful owners.

There has also been considerable speculation about what exactly did Lummis mean when she said, “We will convert excess reserves in our 12 Federal Reserve banks in bitcoin over five yearsor if the economics or legality of anything remotely close to it were even feasible. George Selgin, an economist at the conservative Cato Institute, wrote in X that he had “heard from someone in Senator Lummis’ office” who clarified that the plan was actually just to buy about $64 billion worth of bitcoins using balances created simply revaluing the gold at Fort Knox. CoinDesk obtained a draft bill which actually outlines a plan to revalue the Federal Reserve’s gold certificates while setting aside $6 billion of any net profits the U.S. central bank might generate over the next five fiscal years—with the giant caveat that the Fed has been lately losing money at a record pace.

Fun fact: The bill offers a provision for how the US government would handle any airdropped tokens.

Taking things to a higher level, the The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded that “if cryptocurrencies truly are a libertarian vehicle for investing free from political whims, then they should be traded on their own, without government help.”

Bitcoin Nashville Conference in Pictures: Orange Athena, Pink Suits, Polymarket Giveaways, Trump Song

Lightning protocol engineer Lisa Neigut leading an instructional game called “Bitcoin LARP” at last week’s Bitcoin Nashville conference (Bradley Keoun)

Check out our photo blog from last week’s Bitcoin Nashville conference: “Surreal doesn’t even begin to describe the combination of images collected at last week’s festival honoring the oldest and largest cryptocurrency, punctuated by former US President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto campaign speech to an adoring crowd.”

Featuring, in order of appearance: David Tse, Lisa Neigut (above), Adrián Eidelman, Fred Thiel, Justin Sun (not exactly, but sort of), Robin Linus, Jeremy Rubin, Liam Eagen, Weikeng Chen, Andrew Poelstra, Casey Rodarmor, Erin Redwing, Cathie Wood, Michael Saylor, Ron Paul, Donald Trump.

Last week’s top picks from our Protocol Village column, highlighting the main updates and news about blockchain technology.

The Irys project will feature permanent data storage as well as “term data books” (Irys)

1. Irisdescribing himself as a provenance layer for data storage, has announced that it will transition to a new Layer 1 network with the launch of a “programmatic data chain that combines data storage and execution.” According to the team: “Through IrysVM, which is fully EVM-compatible, developers can take advantage of efficient and cost-effective real-time data manipulation. This approach simplifies development processes, improves scalability, and ensures stable and predictable prices for data transactions and storage.” Ecosystem partners building on Irys Layer 1 include Berachain, Eclipse, Injective Labs, Livepeer, Linea, IoTeX, Gateway.fmLit Protocol, NodeKit, Olas, Snapchain, BeraLand and YEET.” Founded in 2021, Irys began its journey as Bundlr, a scaling solution for permanent data storage on Arweave.

2. Router protocola project built using Cosmos blockchain technology, said Tuesday it has launched the mainnet of a new blockchain designed for “chain abstraction” – a concept adopted by many protocols with the goal of making the blockchain user experience more uniform. To make the new Router Chain more uniform across chain interactions, it will focus on lowering “development barriers and streamlining the development of dApps that can seamlessly interact with multiple blockchains and aggregate liquidity from any chain,” according to a press release shared with CoinDesk.

3. Blackbird Labsthe restaurant loyalty platform founded by Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal, announced the Blackbird Pay launcha system that will allow participating restaurants to accept cryptocurrency payments. The new payments platform expands Blackbird’s mission by allowing consumers to pay for their meals using the cryptocurrency $FLY. The tokens can be earned as loyalty points for dining at participating restaurants or purchased in the Blackbird app using the popular Coinbase USDC Stablecoin.

4. The developers of Theoreticaldescribed as an “AI agent base layer”, published its official project whitepaperintroducing the key aspects of their network and outlining its benefits for developing collectives of advanced AI agents. According to the team: “Using a decentralized model, Theoriq will leverage smart contracts to ensure transparency and accountability, while maintaining flexibility to ensure its network will continue to adapt as AI continues to advance in complexity.”

5. DashThe cryptocurrency project focused on paymentsis releasing the Evolution update on July 29, described as “its most important update” to date, featuring a new sidechain. According to the team, the project aims to “enable indexed decentralized storage and decentralized applications.” According to a blog postThe sidechain “is run by EvoNodes, which also secures the legacy Dash chain. It uses the account-based model (single addresses hold balances), as opposed to the UTXO model (multiple addresses hold coins, or UTXOs) of the Core chain. It uses a heavily modified derivative of the Tendermint (Cosmos) consensus called Tenderdash. The main differences between Tenderdash and Tendermint are that the Dash version runs on the same block, meaning you don’t have to wait for the next block after writing new data to query it.”

Hyperbolic CEO Jasper Zhang and co-founder Yuchen Jin (Hyperbolic)

The benchmark CoinDesk 20 Index of blue-chip digital assets returned 3.3% during the month through July 30, nearly matching July returns for gold but slightly outperforming the Standard & Poor’s 500 index of U.S. stocks.

MTD returns through July 30. (Tracy Stephens/CoinDesk Indices)

XRPThe token used in Ripple Labs’ XRP Ledger dominated the month’s big gainers, rising 32%, followed by Solana’s SOL at 20%. Bitcoin was the only other cryptocurrency in the green, up 3.8% month-to-date.

MTD returns through July 30. (Tracy Stephens/CoinDesk Indices)

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