MicroStrategy’s bitcoin empire signals structural challenges


Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy) spent 2025 building the largest corporate Bitcoin reserve the public markets have ever financed, but the scale of that ambition ended up colliding with the logic of its own stock.

What began as an aggressive accumulation strategy, powered by the company’s appetite for leverage and a willingness to dilute existing shareholders, evolved into a structural contradiction that now defines the firm.

A balance sheet swollen by Bitcoin, but a narrative stretched to breaking

Strategy has raised $21 billion across seven securities offerings in a single year to expand its holdings to roughly 641,000 BTC, a figure that now represents close to 3% of the asset’s finite supply.

Yet as the balance sheet grew to historic proportions, the equity story unraveled, leaving the stock 68% below its highs and forcing investors to reassess what kind of company they were actually buying into.

The shift did not happen suddenly. Over the past two quarters, institutions pared their exposure from $36.32 billion to $30.94 billion, a $5.38 billion retreat that reflected broader risk rotation across the market but also genuine discomfort with Strategy’s financing model.

The company no longer trades like a software developer or a technology platform. It moves in near lockstep with Bitcoin itself, yet its capital structure behaves like an experiment in perpetual leverage.

Investors are confronted with an entity that generates multi-billion-dollar profits when Bitcoin rallies and multi-billion-dollar losses when it falls. For many, the volatility was tolerable. It was the dilution layered on top of it that proved untenable.

A year of capital that redefined a company

The mechanics underpinning Strategy’s transformation show how aggressively the firm leaned into its thesis.

The firm stated that it issued $11.9 billion in common equity, $6.9 billion in preferred equity, and $2.0 billion in convertible debt, and used the proceeds to fund a persistent bid for Bitcoin throughout the year.

Strategy's Bitcoin Fundraise
Strategy’s Bitcoin Fundraise YTD (Source: Strategy)

The sequencing of these raises did more than enlarge the treasury; it recast the company’s identity. Each new round introduced more outstanding shares, weakened the claim of existing holders, and signaled that management prioritized reserve expansion over earnings stability or stock performance.

This approach might have been sustainable in a market that rewarded asymmetric exposure to Bitcoin’s upside.

But in a year when investors increasingly sought predictable cash flows and balanced operating models, Strategy’s structure made it difficult for large portfolios to justify continued exposure.

The company’s results are volatile by design, and its dilution is structural rather than cyclical. The combination pushed institutions toward firms with steadier fundamentals, leaving Strategy’s stock as a proxy for Bitcoin with a corporate wrapper attached.

Strategic custody realignment

The strategic shift extended beyond fundraising. Blockchain analysis platform Arkham Intelligence reported that Strategy moved roughly 58,000 BTC, about $5.1 billion, to Fidelity Digital Assets within two months.

It added:

“In total, Strategy holds 641,692 BTC ($56.14B) with a total of 165,709 BTC ($14.50B) sent to Fidelity Custody.”

Stategy's Bitcoin TransactionsStategy's Bitcoin Transactions
Strategy’s Recent Bitcoin Transactions (Source: Arkham Intelligence)

The decision reflects a broader recalibration of operational risk. After years of relying primarily on Coinbase as its custodian, the company adopted a multi-provider model that better aligns with the expectations of lenders and credit analysts, who prefer diversified custody arrangements.

The change came with tradeoffs. Fidelity operates an omnibus custody structure that aggregates client assets on-chain.

This model improves redundancy and satisfies institutional counterparty expectations, but it removes the direct visibility that once allowed analysts to track Strategy’s holdings through identifiable wallet clusters.

In the earlier setup, the company’s solvency profile could be monitored by cross-checking public addresses against corporate disclosures.

The omnibus framework replaces this real-time transparency with custodian statements and internal audit controls, which provide security and operational strength but reduce the external interpretability that retail traders and on-chain researchers once relied on.

Assessing MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin Debt Coverage

As the company’s debt stack grew, management introduced an unconventional metric to reassure bondholders and defend the leverage.

The Strategy “Bitcoin (BTC) Rating” measures the coverage of the convertible notes by comparing the market value of the Bitcoin treasury to the face value of the debt.

This ratio was designed to simplify the credit conversation by focusing on asset coverage rather than earnings variability, and early data suggest that the buffer is substantial.

At a Bitcoin price of $74,000, which aligns with Strategy’s aggregate cost basis, the coverage stands at 5.9 times. Notably, even a significant drawdown to $25,000 reduces the coverage to only 2.0 times, which still exceeds the face value of the obligations.

Strategy's Bitcoin Credit RatingStrategy's Bitcoin Credit Rating
Strategy’s Bitcoin Credit Rating (Source: Strategy)

For creditors, this framing provides comfort. The numbers indicate that Strategy retains significant collateral protection even in adverse scenarios.

Equity holders, however, see something different. The BTC Rating does not address the dilution required to sustain the treasury expansion, nor does it mitigate the volatility that directly flows into quarterly results.

Essentially, this shows that the firm’s creditors receive clarity on risk exposure, while shareholders absorb the structural consequences of continuous issuance.

The limits of the index system

The company’s unique financial profile also interacts awkwardly with index rules.

Strategy meets the market capitalization and liquidity thresholds for the S&P 500, but the index requires four consecutive quarters of positive earnings.

Because Strategy’s profits are mechanically tied to Bitcoin’s price fluctuations, the firm struggles to produce sustained earnings under the accounting framework S&P uses for eligibility.

In quarters where Bitcoin rises, Strategy’s reported profits soar. In quarters where Bitcoin retreats, the losses are equally significant. This volatility effectively bars the firm from the index and eliminates a substantial pool of passive demand that could otherwise support the stock.

That exclusion matters because Strategy’s liquidity and public float are ample enough that index inclusion would typically be a natural next step for a company of its size. Instead, the firm remains dependent on active investors who must evaluate the combined risks of leverage, dilution, and Bitcoin-linked earnings volatility.

The result is an increasingly bifurcated identity: a corporation that built a massive digital asset reserve financed through public markets, but whose equity value reflects the market’s skepticism about the sustainability of the strategy used to build it.

MicroStrategy’s reinvention

Strategy achieved something no other public company has attempted at this scale. It constructed a corporate Bitcoin reserve of unprecedented size, diversified its custodians, and engineered a novel debt coverage metric to stabilize its credit footprint.

The company proved that public markets would finance a multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin accumulation model and that operational infrastructure could evolve as quickly as its balance sheet.

What it has not secured is a stable equity narrative. Investors who once treated the stock as a leveraged proxy for Bitcoin now confront a capital structure that demands ongoing dilution to maintain its pace of accumulation.

Creditors feel protected by the asset coverage, while shareholders remain exposed to earnings swings and capital supply decisions. The market’s repricing reflects this tension.

The company delivered on its ambition to dominate the Bitcoin treasury landscape, but the approach that enabled it continues to weaken the very equity engine that funds it.

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Bitcoin whale bets $2B on market bounce as smart money accumulates


A high-conviction Bitcoin whale placed a $2 billion wager that the worst is over and the market bottom might be in after a brutal leverage washout stripped speculative froth from the crypto market.

On Nov. 24, Deribit, the Coinbase-owned crypto options trading platform, reported a 20,000 BTC notional block trade, which appears to signal that institutional capital is pivoting from damage control to strategic accumulation.

According to the platform:

“[The] trader lifted a long-dated 100k/106k/112k/118k call condor for Dec ’25. Signal is clear: a structured bullish view – expecting BTC to reach the 100–118k zone, not explode past it.”

What does this trade signal?

This position effectively bets that the recent liquidation cascade marked a cycle-defining bottom that has cleared the runway for a march toward six figures.

Indeed, the trade structure is precise. By buying call options at $100,000 and $118,000 while selling calls at $106,000 and $112,000, the investor is targeting a specific profit corridor.

Bitcoin Block Trade
Bitcoin Block Trade (Source: Deribit)

It represents a bet that the BTC will recover and settle into a high valuation band, but without the chaotic volatility that characterized the recent crash.

Meanwhile, this positioning arrives at a critical juncture. While retail investors remain hesitant, the derivatives market is signaling that the structural damage has been repaired.

So, the trade implies that the recent $27,000 plunge from the highs was a necessary cleansing event, resetting the board for the next leg of the cycle.

The 1.3 Million BTC flush

To understand the conviction behind the $1.7 billion bet, one must look at the scale of the wreckage left behind. The market has just endured its sharpest contraction in open interest of the entire cycle.

According to data from CryptoQuant, open interest in Bitcoin terms has plummeted by roughly 1.3 million BTC over the last 30 days. The vast majority of this unwind occurred on Binance, marking a decisive end to the speculative fever that had earlier driven aggregate open interest to record highs.

Bitcoin Open InterestBitcoin Open Interest
Bitcoin Open Interest (Source: CryptoQuant)

This scale of capitulation mirrors the depths of the 2022 bear market. As a result, BTC’s recent drop from $106,000 to roughly $79,500 was primarily driven by mechanical liquidation cascades rather than fundamental decay.

This means that traders holding long positions were swept from the board in a violent feedback loop, turning a healthy correction into a crash.

However, historical patterns suggest these “cleansing phases” are often bullish signals.

By forcing the closure of overly optimistic positions and flushing out weak hands, the market builds a more stable floor. The reduction in speculative exposure implies that selling pressure from distressed leverage is now exhausted.

Whales accumulate, retail flees

Meanwhile, beneath the surface of the derivatives flush, on-chain data reveals a distinct shift in ownership that supports the bottoming thesis.

The market is transitioning from aggressive selling to an orderly unwind. Key stress metrics such as transfer volumes and realized capitalization change have subsided, a hallmark of late-cycle corrections.

More importantly, a clear divergence has emerged between investor cohorts. While retail investors (holding less than 10 BTC) have been net sellers over the last 60 days, mid-sized “sharks” and institutions are stepping in.

CryptoQuant data shows that BTC cohorts holding between 100 and 1,000 BTC, as well as those holding more than 10,000 BTC, have been steadily accumulating throughout the dip. These sophisticated players are absorbing the supply being distributed by fearful retail hands.

Bitcoin AccumulationBitcoin Accumulation
Bitcoin Accumulation Trend Score. (Source: CryptoQuant)

However, the one remaining headwind is the 1,000 to 10,000 BTC cohort, which continues to distribute.

So, for the recovery to transition into a confirmed reversal, this group must slow its selling. As such, the $1.7 billion options bet is an early indicator that the “smart money” believes this shift is imminent.

Macro pivot points

At the same time, the whale’s trade timing anticipates a favorable shift in the macro environment. The week ahead is loaded with heavy economic data releases, including US PPI and PCE figures, which will anchor expectations for the Federal Reserve’s December policy meeting.

With markets pricing in an 81% probability of a rate cut, a dovish data skew would provide immediate liquidity support for risk assets.

Coin Bureau co-founder Nic Puckrin told CryptoSlate that the increased odds of a rate cut had helped push Bitcoin’s recent upward trend above $87,000.

“We could see further upside in the short term if sentiment holds, especially with longs underweighted,” he said, while cautioning that optimism is “tenuous” with the FOMC divided and no confirming data yet.

Puckrin added that the Fed’s next decision could decide whether year-end brings a “Santa rally” or a “Santa dump,” and he expects jitters to persist into the Dec. 10 meeting.

In this context, the Call Condor acts as a strategic vehicle. The sheer size of the position creates massive dealer hedging flows. As prices move toward the $100,000 activation zone, dealers who sold the structure will be forced to hedge their exposure, creating a magnetic pull toward the profit band.

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Custody shuffle continues as 87,464 more Bitcoin leaves institution-tagged wallets in 24 hours


Timechain Index founder Sani reported 87,464 BTC flowing out of institution-tagged wallets between Nov. 21 and Nov. 22, adding that he hadn’t seen such movement in months.

The raw data showed over 15,000 BTC leaving tracked cohorts on Nov. 21 alone, the largest single-day outflow since June 26.

Yet, as Sani clarified in a note, the headline figure overstates actual selling pressure. Most of the movement represents internal reshuffling rather than institutions exiting Bitcoin positions.

Sani explained that pre-processed data can show extreme volatility when large holders move coins between custodians or wallets, but after reconciliation, the net flows often land near zero.

Strategy accounted for 49,907 BTC of the tracked outflows, but CEO Michael Saylor confirmed the company sold no Bitcoin that week. In fact, Strategy added 8,178 BTC last week, according to Bitcoin Treasuries data.

Sani’s assessment indicates that Strategy transferred holdings to new custodians to diversify risk, with some coins appearing in addresses linked to Fidelity Custody. Additionally, that’s the second time the firm has performed such a movement.

This is not unique to Strategy. Sani shared that BlackRock moved Bitcoins out of their known addresses twice as well. The first time happened last year, and the second occurred a few weeks ago, when they moved nearly 800,000 BTC to new addresses. Additionally, Coinbase also reshuffled a similar amount this weekend in a UTXO consolidation exercise.

Back to the over 15,000 BTC in outflows, Bitcoin ETFs bore the brunt on Nov. 21, shedding 10,426 BTC as issuers processed redemptions tied to $903 million in net withdrawals reported Nov. 20.

ETF outflows translate directly to liquidations, as fund managers must sell the underlying Bitcoin to meet shareholder exit requests. Still, the scale fell within normal bounds given the prior day’s redemption activity.

Timechain Index tracks 16 entity categories, including centralized exchanges, miners, ETFs, publicly traded companies, custodians, governments, OTC desks, and payment processors.

The platform aggregates known addresses for each cohort and monitors balance changes in real time.

Sani’s “LiveChangesSummary” data showed Strategy’s 49,907 BTC outflow, Coinbase’s 11,762 BTC outflow, and ETC Group’s 6,973 BTC outflow as the largest movements, with smaller flows across custodians, exchanges, and miners.

Timechain Index data shows 87,464 BTC left institution-tagged wallets on Nov. 21, with MicroStrategy’s 49,907 BTC transfer representing the largest single movement.

Routine custody operations vs. directional bets

The distinction matters because Bitcoin’s on-chain transparency makes wallet movements visible before context arrives.

When 87,464 BTC appears to leave institution-tracked addresses in a 24-hour window, the immediate read can suggest panic selling or a coordinated retreat from crypto exposure.

The post-processing showed the opposite: net institutional holdings remained stable after accounting for internal transfers and standard ETF mechanics.

Strategy’s custody diversification aligns with treasury management best practices for large holders.
Concentrating nearly 650,000 BTC with a single custodian creates operational risk, and spreading holdings across multiple qualified custodians reduces exposure to any single point of failure.

Bitcoin ETFs operate under different constraints. When investors redeem shares, authorized participants return creation units to the issuer and receive the underlying Bitcoin, which they then sell on the market to close out arbitrage positions.

The Nov. 20 outflow figure of $903 million corresponded to roughly 10,400 BTC at prevailing prices, matching the ETF-cohort outflow Timechain Index recorded the following day. The lag reflects settlement timing rather than discretionary selling.

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XRP overtakes Solana in ETF race with aggressive fee strategy


XRP is leading the race for altcoin supremacy in the US crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) market with its record performance since last month.

In less than 10 trading days, the new crop of US spot XRP ETFs has registered cumulative inflows of roughly $587 million, compared with approximately $568 million for their Solana counterparts.

This surge turns the sector’s hierarchy on its head, establishing XRP as the primary venue for non-Bitcoin and Ethereum risk appetite in a market otherwise defined by outflows and defensive positioning.

Solana vs XRP ETFs

Solana ETFs had set the early pace in the sector.

Since debuting on Oct. 28, US spot Solana ETFs logged 20 consecutive days of net inflows, totaling approximately $568 million. This helped push the funds’ total assets to $840 million, representing about 1% of the token’s market capitalization.

Solana ETFs Daily Net Inflows
Solana ETFs Daily Net Inflows (Source: SoSo Value)

However, XRP has compressed that trajectory into a hyper-accelerated window.

As of Nov. 21, US spot XRP products had already amassed $423 million. However, the Nov. 24 entry of heavyweights Grayscale and Franklin Templeton triggered a massive capital injection, adding approximately $164 million in net creations in a single session.

XRP ETF InflowXRP ETF Inflow
XRP ETFs Daily Inflow (Source: SoSo Value)

This brings the XRP complex’s cumulative total to roughly $587 million, vaulting past Solana’s month-long haul in nearly half the time.

On a capital-intensity basis, XRP is now absorbing institutional dollars at almost double the daily rate of its rival.

The race to zero

The velocity of the flip is being driven by a structural “race to the bottom” on costs.

Franklin Templeton has established the most aggressive pricing benchmark in the crypto ETF sector. Its XRPZ fund carries a 0.19% sponsor fee, which is fully waived on the first $5 billion in assets through May 31, 2026.

For institutional allocators and model portfolios, where basis-point friction dictates selection, XRPZ effectively becomes a zero-cost carry trade for the next six months.

Grayscale’s GXRP has adopted a similar posture, waiving its standard fees for the first three months.

This aggressive issuer subsidization coincided with peak demand. The Nov. 24’s $164 million surge suggests that a significant tranche of capital was sidelined, waiting specifically for these low-cost, brand-name wrappers to go live before deploying.

While Solana ETFs also utilized waivers for funds like Bitwise’s BSOL, the sheer scale of Franklin’s $5 billion cap appears to have unlocked a larger tier of institutional flow immediately upon listing.

Momentum vs. gravity

The most telling divergence, however, lies in the relationship between flows and price action.

Solana’s $510 million in inflows has arrived amid a 30% price correction from recent highs. In this context, ETF flows have acted as a dampener, absorbing sell-side pressure from existing holders but failing to reverse the trend.

Effectively, this makes the SOL ETF’s performance a defensive accumulation story.

By contrast, XRP flows are fueling a breakout. The token had also experienced a drawdown of around 17% in the last 30 days but rose roughly 10% following the Nov. 24 session.

This aided XRP’s breakout above $2, with the token trading as high as $2.27. On-chain analysis from Glassnode identifies this region as a “major psychological zone,” where legacy holders typically sell to break even on losses from early 2025.

XRP Realized LossesXRP Realized Losses
XRP Realized Losses Aroudn $2 Zone (Source: Glassnode)

In previous cycles, this supply wall capped rallies. Today, the ETF bid is changing the calculus. With funds absorbing $50 million to $100 million daily, the ETFs are creating a non-price-sensitive demand sink capable of digesting legacy supply.

Unlike Solana, where flows are fighting gravity, XRP flows are acting as a battering ram, turning a historical resistance level into an accumulation floor.

The Path to $2 billion?

With four issuers now live and the $500 million milestone cleared in under 15 trading days, market observers are recalibrating their year-end projections.

The current run rate places XRP on a trajectory that outpaces many analyst expectations for non-Bitcoin assets.

If the current trend persists, which is characterized by daily inflows normalizing in the $40 million to $60 million range following the launch hype, the complex is on pace to challenge the $1.5 billion mark by year-end.

However, a “bull case” scenario is emerging.

If the fee waivers from Franklin Templeton successfully court registered investment advisors (RIAs) and the rotation out of underperforming assets continues, the complex could theoretically approach $2 billion in assets under management (AUM) before the books close on 2025.

 

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Inside the JPMorgan boycott drama defending Bitcoin treasuries being kicked off major indexes


American financial services company MSCI’s October consultation on “digital asset treasury companies” arrived at a time when the mechanics of Bitcoin (BTC) exposure had already begun to fracture.

By mid-2025, three roughly equal-sized channels funneled institutional capital into BTC: regulated spot ETFs managing north of $100 billion, mining operations with embedded BTC exposure, and a newer cohort of public companies whose primary business had become holding crypto on their balance sheets.

MSCI’s proposal targets the third bucket and, in doing so, forces a reckoning over whether these firms are operating companies or passive funds in corporate costumes.

The proposal itself reads like standard index housekeeping.

MSCI floated excluding from its Global Investable Market Indexes any company whose digital-asset holdings exceed 50% of total assets, and invited feedback on whether firms that self-identify as digital asset treasuries or raise capital primarily to stack Bitcoin should face similar treatment.

The consultation window runs through Dec. 31, with a decision due Jan. 15 and implementation penciled in for the February 2026 review.

MSCI frames the question explicitly: do these stocks “exhibit characteristics similar to investment funds,” which already sit outside equity benchmarks?

JPMorgan answered by modeling the fallout. Its November analysis pegged Strategy’s market cap at roughly $59 billion, with about $9 billion held by passive vehicles tracking major indexes.

In a scenario in which MSCI alone reclassifies Strategy, roughly $2.8 billion in passive assets would be forced to sell. If Russell and other providers follow, mechanical outflows could reach $8.8 billion, according to a Barron’s estimate.

The amount is framed as the second index shock after Strategy’s earlier exclusion from the S&P 500, and it triggered a backlash. JPMorgan faced scrutiny over front-running, with public calls to boycott the bank and to short its stock.

The proxy-stock problem

The anger reflects a deeper tension over how Bitcoin beta enters traditional portfolios. DLA Piper’s October advisory documented the sector’s explosive growth.

More than 200 US public companies had adopted digital asset treasury strategies by September 2025, holding an estimated $115 billion in crypto and sporting a combined equity market cap of around $150 billion, up from $40 billion a year earlier.

This is roughly 190 focused on Bitcoin treasuries, with another 10 to 20 holding other tokens. For institutions constrained by mandates that prohibit direct crypto holdings, these stocks offered a workaround: tracking BTC through equity exposure without breaching compliance guardrails.

However, that convenience came with structural vulnerabilities. Many newer treasuries financed their purchases through convertible notes and private placements, and when their stock prices fell below the value of the crypto they held, boards faced pressure to sell coins and buy back shares.

Digital asset treasuries deployed about $42.7 billion into crypto in 2025, with $22.6 billion in the third quarter. Solana-focused treasuries saw their aggregate net asset value drop from $3.5 billion to $2.1 billion, a 40% drawdown, setting up forced liquidations that could amount to $4.3 billion to $6.4 billion if even a modest fraction of positions unwind.

At the same time, spot Bitcoin ETFs crossed $100 billion in assets under management less than a year after launch, with BlackRock’s IBIT alone holding over $100 billion in BTC and roughly 6.8% of the circulating supply by late 2025.

The products offered purer exposure without balance-sheet leverage or the NAV discount problems plaguing treasury stocks.

MSCI’s consultation accelerates a rotation already underway. BTC exposure migrates from treasury equities, which become forced sellers when equity valuations crack, into regulated ETF wrappers.

For Bitcoin itself, the rotation can be neutral or even positive if ETF inflows offset treasury selling; for the stocks, it’s unambiguously liquidity-negative.

For BTC dominance, it arguably reinforces Bitcoin’s structural advantage: the products institutions rotate into are almost entirely BTC-only. At the same time, some treasuries had started experimenting with Solana, Ethereum, and other tokens.

Company Ticker Role in BTC exposure MSCI status in DAT review Approx MSCI parent-index weight* At-risk passive AUM (order of magnitude) Liquidity note
Strategy MSTR Digital-asset treasury BTC Flagged as core DAT candidate ≈ 0.02% of MSCI ACWI IMI ≈ $2.8B MSCI-linked; up to ≈ $8–9B total Main node for forced selling; proxy for BTC beta in equities.
Riot Platforms RIOT BTC miner / proxy stock Listed on preliminary DAT list Very small; fill from terminal Hundreds of millions, not billions Liquidity-sensitive; high ETF/thematic ownership share.
Marathon Digital MARA BTC miner / proxy stock Listed on preliminary DAT list Very small; fill from terminal Hundreds of millions, not billions Similar profile to RIOT; more volatile free float.
Metaplanet 3350 BTC treasury (Japan) MSCI has frozen upgrades/changes Tiny; small-cap / country index Tens of millions Non-US example; shows global reach of rule.
Capital B and other DATs Various BTC-heavy DATs / miners On wider 30–40 name DAT watchlist Tiny individually Collective “long tail” Together, form a second tier of liquidity risk.

Liquidity under stress

The equity-side mechanical flows are straightforward. Index funds benchmarked to MSCI cannot replace Strategy with a Bitcoin ETF. They rotate into whatever fills the index slot.

From BTC’s perspective, this is an equity-liquidity shock, not an automatic coin-selling shock, yet the second-order effects matter more.

Treasury companies facing weaker equity support and tighter funding conditions will either scale back future purchases or, in some cases, liquidate holdings to shore up their balance sheets.

Strategy has signaled it won’t sell BTC to stay under any threshold; instead, it’s reframing itself as a “Bitcoin-backed structured finance company,” doubling down on the idea that it’s an operating business, not a fund.

Smaller treasuries with weaker balance sheets may lack that luxury.

Flow tree of liquidity
MSCI’s proposed rule would exclude companies with over 50% crypto holdings from equity indexes, triggering billions in passive fund outflows and potentially reshuffling Bitcoin exposure into ETFs.

Russell and FTSE Russell have not launched formal consultations on digital asset treasuries, but JPMorgan’s $8.8 billion outflow scenario assumes other major providers will converge on MSCI’s treatment over time.

FTSE Russell remains deeply involved in digital-asset indexing on the token side. However, its equity methodology does not yet carve out treasuries as a separate category, they’re still treated like sector stocks.

DLA Piper’s advisory reads as a warning that regulators and gatekeepers, including indexers, are reviewing treasury disclosures more closely, which supports the plausibility of a copycat wave even if it hasn’t started.

MSCI’s move forces institutions to decide whether Bitcoin belongs in equity benchmarks or in dedicated crypto products.

The consultation is methodological, but the stakes are structural: it determines whether BTC beta sits in ETFs and a handful of large corporate treasuries, or in a more dispersed ecosystem of smaller balance-sheet holders who become forced sellers when markets turn.

The answer reshapes not just index weights, but the concentration of Bitcoin ownership itself.

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Lessons for ETH and SOL client diversity



On Nov. 21, Cardano’s mainnet bifurcated into two competing histories after a single malformed staking-delegation transaction exploited a dormant bug in newer node software.

For roughly 14 and a half hours, stake pool operators and infrastructure providers watched as blocks piled up on two separate chains: one “poisoned” branch that accepted the invalid transaction and one “healthy” branch that rejected it.

Exchanges paused ADA flows, wallets showed conflicting balances, and developers raced to ship patched node versions that would reunify the ledger under a single canonical history.

No funds vanished, and the network never fully halted. Still, for half a day, Cardano lived the scenario Ethereum’s client-diversity advocates warn about: a consensus split triggered by software disagreement rather than an intentional fork.

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson said he alerted the FBI and “relevant authorities” after a former stake-pool operator admitted broadcasting the malformed delegation transaction.

Law enforcement’s role here is to investigate possible criminal interference with a protected computer network, under statutes like the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, since deliberately (or recklessly) pushing an exploit to a live, interstate financial infrastructure can constitute unauthorized disruption, even if framed as “testing.”

The incident offers a rare natural experiment in how layer-1 blockchains handle validation failures.
Cardano preserved liveness, blocks kept coming, but sacrificed temporary uniqueness, creating two legitimate-looking chains that had to be merged back together.

Solana, by contrast, has repeatedly chosen the opposite trade-off: when its single client hits a fatal bug, the network halts outright and restarts under coordinated human intervention.

Ethereum aims to sit between those extremes by running multiple independent client implementations, betting that no single codebase can drag the entire validator set onto an invalid chain.

Cardano’s split and the speed with which it resolved test whether a monolithic architecture with version skew can approximate the safety properties of genuine multi-client redundancy, or whether it simply got lucky.

The bug and the partition

Intersect, Cardano’s ecosystem governance body, traced the failure to a legacy deserialization bug in hash-handling code for delegation certificates.

The flaw entered the codebase in 2022 but remained dormant until new execution paths exposed it in node versions 10.3.x through 10.5.1.

When a malformed delegation transaction carrying an oversized hash hit the mempool around 08:00 UTC on Nov. 21, newer nodes accepted it as valid and built blocks on top of it.

Older nodes and tooling that had not migrated to the affected code path correctly rejected the transaction as malformed.

That single disagreement over validation split the network. Stake pool operators running buggy versions extended the poisoned chain, while operators on older software extended the healthy one.

Ouroboros, Cardano’s proof-of-stake protocol, instructs each validator to follow the heaviest valid chain it observes, but “valid” had two different definitions depending on which node version processed the transaction.

The result was a live partition: both branches continued producing blocks under normal consensus rules, but they diverged from a common ancestor and could not reconcile without manual intervention.

The pattern had appeared on Cardano’s Preview testnet the day before, triggered by nearly identical delegation logic.

That testnet incident alerted engineers to the bug in a low-stakes environment. Still, the fix had not yet propagated to mainnet when a former stake-pool operator, who later claimed he followed AI-generated instructions, submitted the same malformed transaction to the production network.

Within hours, the chain had split, and infrastructure providers faced the question of which fork to treat as canonical.

Safe failure without a kill switch

Cardano’s partition resolved itself through voluntary upgrades rather than emergency coordination. Intersect and core developers shipped patched versions of node, 10.5.2 and 10.5.3, which correctly rejected the malformed transaction and rejoined the healthy chain.

As stake pool operators and exchanges adopted the patches, the weight of consensus gradually tipped back toward a single ledger.

By the end of Nov. 21, the network had converged, and the poisoned branch was abandoned.

The incident exposed an uncomfortable gap: two canonical ledgers existed simultaneously, but several boundaries prevented it from cascading into a deep reorganization or permanent loss of finality.

First, the bug lived in application-layer validation logic, not in Cardano’s cryptographic primitives or Ouroboros’ chain-selection rules. Signature checks and stake weighting continued to operate normally. The disagreement centered solely on whether the delegation transaction met ledger validity conditions.

Second, the partition was asymmetric. Many critical actors, including older stake pool operators and some exchanges, ran software that rejected the bad transaction, ensuring substantial stake weight remained behind the healthy chain from the start.

Third, Cardano had pre-positioned a disaster-recovery plan under CIP-135, which documented a process for coordinating around a canonical chain in more extreme scenarios.

Intersect is prepared to invoke that plan as a fallback, but voluntary upgrades proved sufficient to restore consensus under normal Ouroboros rules.

The narrow scope of the bug also mattered. The flaw affected a specific hash deserialization routine for delegation transactions, a bounded attack surface that could be patched and closed without requiring broader protocol changes.

Once fixed, the exploit path disappeared, and no generalizable class of malformed transactions remained available to trigger future splits.

Time (UTC) / Date Phase What happened Detection / signal Mitigation step
Nov 20, 2025 – evening Testnet precursor Malformed delegation transaction is submitted on the Preview testnet and exploits a dormant deserialization bug in the hash-handling code, creating a split between a “poisoned” and “healthy” testnet chain. Engineers and SPOs see anomalous behaviour on Preview; incident is logged and a technical response prepared overnight because the bug is clearly reproducible. Core teams begin developing and testing a hotfix and updated node binaries so the same malformed pattern can be rejected in future.
Nov 21, 2025 – around 08:00 Malformed tx hits mainnet (T0) An almost identical malformed delegation transaction is broadcast on Cardano mainnet from a wallet later tied to a former stake-pool operator. Newer node versions accept it; older versions reject it, creating two competing chains. Block explorers and monitoring dashboards begin to diverge; some SPOs notice inconsistent tip hashes and slowed block production. Initial containment is procedural: exchanges and infrastructure teams are told to watch for anomalies while engineers confirm that the mainnet behaviour matches the Preview testnet bug.
Nov 21, 2025 – minutes after T0 Formal detection and public flag Intersect and IOG classify the situation as a “temporary chain partition” between a poisoned and healthy chain. Teams across Intersect, IOG, Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, and major SPOs join a coordinated incident bridge. Internal alerts fan out to SPO channels; Intersect notes that teams were “alerted within minutes.” Shortly after, the “Mainnet Incident Update” post is published on X to warn the wider ecosystem that a malformed transaction has triggered a partition. Exchanges are pausing ADA deposits and withdrawals as a precaution; SPOs are advised not to blindly upgrade and to await patched binaries that will converge on the healthy chain.
Nov 21, 2025 – late morning to afternoon Hotfix release and upgrade campaign Core developers confirm the root cause as a legacy hash-deserialization bug present in specific recent node versions and absent in older ones. With the cause understood, the risk of repeated malformed transactions is assessed and shared with SPOs, CEXs, and infra providers in coordination channels. Patched versions 10.5.2 and 10.5.3 of the node are released with the deserialization bug fixed. SPOs, relays, and exchanges are instructed to upgrade so that their stake weight moves to the healthy chain; a CIP-135 disaster-recovery plan is prepared as a fallback if upgrades lag.
Nov 21, 2025 – by ~22:17 Network reconverges As upgraded nodes reject the poisoned branch and follow the healthy chain, Ouroboros consensus density shifts decisively toward the healthy ledger. The poisoned chain continues only on a shrinking minority of un-upgraded nodes. Monitoring shows that block production and tip hashes are again consistent across major pools, explorers, and exchanges. Intersect confirms that Cardano “never went offline,” only slowed during the partition. Intersect reports that all nodes voluntarily joined the main chain at about 22:17 UTC and that the network converged back to a single healthy chain within roughly 14.5 hours of the malformed transaction. A reconciliation working group has been set up to handle any transactions that existed only on the poisoned branch.
Nov 22–23, 2025 Post-incident mitigation and disclosure Attacker “Homer J” publicly admits to crafting the malformed transaction using AI-generated instructions; FBI and other agencies are notified. Full “facts at a glance” report and ongoing after-action review are published by Intersect. Community and media receive a precise reconstruction of the event; myths about a “protocol hack” or a “total outage” are explicitly debunked. Long-term fixes are scoped to expanded test coverage for legacy code, accelerated upgrade cycles, stronger monitoring, and a renewed emphasis on responsible disclosure and bug bounties rather than mainnet experimentation.

Ethereum’s multi-client insurance policy

Ethereum treats client diversity as a first-order resilience property. Since the Merge, Ethereum has run separate execution and consensus layers, each supported by multiple independent implementations.

On the execution side, Geth, Nethermind, Erigon, and others process transactions and compute state transitions. On the consensus side, Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, and Lodestar handle validator duties and finality.

The architecture is deliberate: no single codebase should be able to impose an invalid block on the network, and bugs in one client should result in localized penalties rather than chain-wide failure.

The strategy has been tested. In early 2024, a consensus-impacting bug in Nethermind caused validators running that client to fall behind during block processing.

Those validators suffered missed-reward penalties, but Ethereum’s canonical chain persisted on majority client implementations, and no fork occurred.

The incident validated the core thesis: if a minority client fails, the network continues. If a majority of clients fail, there is enough redundancy to prevent a false chain from finalizing.

Cardano’s split offers an unintended comparative case. The bug lived inside a single node codebase, but version skew between patched and unpatched releases effectively created two competing clients that disagreed on validity.

The partition manifested as a live fork rather than a clean rejection of invalid blocks, because both versions had enough stake weight to sustain separate chains.

Ethereum’s multi-client model tries to make that kind of disagreement survivable by default: if Geth misinterprets a transaction but Lighthouse, Teku, and others reject it, the network should follow the majority of independent implementations rather than any single binary.

The model has weaknesses. Geth often accounts for more than half of Ethereum’s execution layer, and Prysm has held an uncomfortable share of the consensus layer at various points.

Ethereum’s client-diversity advocates explicitly frame these concentrations as systemic risks and push for more even distribution precisely to avoid a Cardano-style split at the majority-client level.
But the principle remains: independent implementations with independent bug surfaces reduce the likelihood that a single validation failure cascades into a network-wide event.

Solana’s halt-and-restart trade-off

Solana occupies the opposite end of the design space. The network runs a single validator binary and runtime, and when that implementation fails, consensus typically halts outright rather than splitting.

In September 2021, bot traffic flooding a Grape Protocol token launch pushed Solana past 400,000 transactions per second, exhausted validator memory, and caused vote transactions to stop propagating.

Consensus broke down, and the network remained offline for roughly 17 hours until validators coordinated a restart with a patched binary.

In February 2024, a bug in the Berkeley Packet Filter loader, a core component of on-chain program execution, caused block finalization to halt for about 5 hours.

Engineers identified the faulty upgrade path, released a patched client, and restarted the cluster.
The pattern is consistent: Solana prioritizes chain uniqueness over liveness, accepting periodic complete outages as the cost of a monoclient, high-throughput architecture.

When the client fails, the chain freezes and restarts under human coordination. Cardano’s incident demonstrates the inverse trade-off: liveness persisted, but software divergence created two chains that both kept producing blocks.

Ethereum’s multi-client strategy attempts to avoid both failure modes by ensuring that no single bug can halt the network or split it into competing histories.

Takeaways for protocol designers

Cardano’s split underscores the need for aggressive fuzzing and fault injection around serialization and deserialization code, especially for legacy features or rarely exercised validation paths.

The bug hid in a hash deserializer introduced years earlier and only triggered by a narrow class of delegation transactions, exactly the kind of dormant flaw that standard testing often misses.

Differential testing across client versions, and ideally across entirely separate implementations, is the more fundamental lever.

Chain Client diversity DoS surface Gossip hardening Replay protection
Ethereum ✅ (multi-client on both EL/CL, diversity an explicit goal) ⚠️ (MEV, mempool spam, blob/DA attack surface growing) ✅ (gossip subnets, scoring, DOS-hardened fork choice) ✅ (post-DAO, replay mitigations standard; chain IDs)
Solana ⚠️ (effectively one dominant validator client) ⚠️ (history of DoS / congestion and runtime bugs) ⚠️ (QUIC, localized fixes, but outages show residual fragility) ✅ (no simple cross-chain replay; restarts coordinated)
Cardano ⚠️ (single main node codebase, multiple versions) ⚠️ (recent malformed-tx split shows sensitive paths) ⚠️ (gossip solid but version skew + malformed certs still hurt) ✅ (no obvious cross-chain replay; partitions resolved by consensus)

Ethereum research now treats client diversity as something to measure and incentivize, not just recommend, precisely to ensure that no single bug can silently redefine validity rules for the entire chain.

Cardano’s use of a pre-written disaster-recovery plan under CIP-135, combined with public incident communication from Intersect, kept the partition from escalating into a coordination failure.

The plan was never fully invoked, but its existence created a clear focal point for stake pool operators and exchanges to align around the same chain.

That process discipline, documented playbooks, fire drills on governance testnets, and transparent post-incident analysis, is arguably the strongest part of the response.

Finally, the incident highlights a cultural gap around bug disclosure. The attacker chose to run a testnet exploit on mainnet rather than submit it through Cardano’s bug bounty program.

Intersect stressed that the same behavior on testnet could have been rewarded instead of criminalized, a reminder that clear, well-compensated disclosure pathways remain the best way to prevent “try it on mainnet and see what happens” from becoming the default researcher posture across all layer-1 blockchains.

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Why exchange internal transfers fooled traders



Over the weekend, Coinbase shuffled nearly 800,000 BTC, roughly $69.5 billion at prevailing prices, between its own wallets, describing it as a scheduled internal migration.

On-chain alert bots registered the movement as a historic spike in spent outputs, triggering headlines about 4% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply suddenly “moving” and speculation that a massive liquidation was underway.

For retail traders watching raw transaction volume without entity attribution, the tape looked apocalyptic.

For anyone who understood what was happening, it was routine custody housekeeping: Coinbase was consolidating unspent transaction outputs, rotating keys, and preparing wallet clusters for proof-of-reserve snapshots.

These are all best practices for large custodians that, when filtered through the wrong analytics lens, can resemble selling pressure.

The incident shows how Bitcoin’s transparent ledger can produce misleading signals when context is missing.

Exchanges control enormous on-chain footprints. Arkham estimates Coinbase alone holds about 900,262 BTC as of press time, or roughly 4.3% of total supply, and when they reorganize that inventory internally, the raw numbers can dwarf actual market flows.

The challenge for traders is distinguishing genuine liquidity shocks, where coins move from cold storage to exchange deposit addresses and hit order books, from internal reshuffles that change where an exchange stores its keys but leave the total float unchanged.

UTXO consolidation as exchange plumbing

Bitcoin’s transaction model treats every incoming payment as a discrete unspent transaction output.
When a user deposits 0.1 BTC to an exchange, that deposit creates a new UTXO in the exchange’s wallet; when another user deposits 0.05 BTC, that makes a second UTXO.

Over time, an exchange accumulates thousands of small UTXOs from customer deposits, mining payouts, and internal transfers.

Each UTXO must be referenced as an input when spending, and Bitcoin transaction fees scale with data size, not value. A withdrawal that draws on 50 small UTXOs costs far more in fees than one that spends a single consolidated UTXO of equivalent value.

Exchanges solve this by periodically consolidating UTXOs, batching many small inputs into a single self-spend transaction that creates one or a few large outputs.

Casa’s technical primer explicitly recommends consolidation during low-fee periods, when bundling dozens of UTXOs is inexpensive and the resulting efficiency gains compound over time.

For an exchange the size of Coinbase, which processes hundreds of thousands of deposits and withdrawals daily, UTXO consolidation is infrastructure maintenance that keeps withdrawal fees predictable and transaction construction tractable.

Coinbase announced the migration on Nov. 22, framing it as moving BTC, ETH, and other token balances into fresh wallets already labeled as Coinbase entities by block explorers.

The exchange described the move as “a well-accepted best practice that minimizes long-term exposure of funds,” unrelated to market conditions and not in response to any security breach.

The language pointed to key rotation, a standard custody procedure in which private keys are rotated, and funds are moved to new addresses to limit the window during which any single set of keys controls large balances.

Why the tape looked catastrophic

On-chain dashboards registered a spike in spent outputs because they track UTXO consumption, not directionality or entity flows.

CryptoQuant’s real-time feed highlighted a “673k BTC spent output spike” on Nov. 22, noting that exchange transfers dominated the pattern.

For analytics tools that aggregate raw transaction volume, the migration looked like 600,000 to 800,000 BTC suddenly “moving,” a figure large enough to dwarf typical daily exchange inflows by an order of magnitude.

The reality was more prosaic. Coinbase was spending UTXOs from its old wallet cluster and creating new UTXOs in its new wallet cluster, all within the same custodial boundary.

No coins left Coinbase’s control, no new BTC arrived at deposit addresses from external whales, and the amount available for trading on Coinbase’s order books remained unchanged.

CryptoQuant itself acknowledged the data distortion, warning users that Coinbase’s wallet migration would “affect the exchange reserve data” and promising adjustments once the migration finished.

The distinction matters because on-chain transparency does not automatically produce clarity. Bitcoin’s ledger records every transaction, but it does not annotate intent or counterparty relationships.

A 100,000 BTC transaction from one Coinbase cold wallet to another Coinbase cold wallet looks identical to a 100,000 BTC transaction from a private holder to a Coinbase deposit address, the one that actually threatens to increase sell-side liquidity.

Analytics platforms attempt to bridge that gap by clustering addresses into entities and labeling exchange wallets. Still, during large-scale migrations when address ownership is in flux, those labels lag reality.

Proof-of-reserves and the custody transparency trade-off

Coinbase’s migration also reflects the operational demands of proof-of-reserve disclosure. Proof-of-reserves frameworks are snapshots that demonstrate an exchange holds sufficient on-chain assets to cover customer liabilities.

To support that, exchanges maintain clusters of known wallets whose balances can be cryptographically verified or audited.

The transparency comes with security trade-offs: proof-of-reserves increases auditability but also puts large custody addresses in public view, making them attractive targets.

Custodians respond by periodically rotating keys and migrating funds to new addresses as best practice, even in the absence of a breach.

Coinbase’s Nov. 22 migration fits that pattern: moving 800,000 BTC to new wallets limits the time any single set of keys controls such a large balance, refreshes the custody architecture, and prepares clean address clusters for the next proof-of-reserve snapshot or auditor review.

For Bitcoin’s broader custody ecosystem, the incident highlights how exchange-scale operations can dominate on-chain metrics.

When an entity controlling 4% of all Bitcoin reorganizes its internal storage, the resulting transaction volume can eclipse all other network activity for that period, without changing the fundamental supply-demand balance.

Scale and context: what actually moves markets

The distinction between internal reshuffles and genuine liquidity shocks becomes clearer when mapped against total supply and typical exchange flows.

Bitcoin’s circulating supply sits near 19.95 million BTC. Coinbase’s 874,000 BTC represents about 4.1% of that total, and the 800,000 BTC migration accounted for about 4% of the circulating supply moving between wallets already under Coinbase’s custody.

By comparison, daily spot trading volume across all exchanges typically ranges from 300,000 to 500,000 BTC, and net exchange inflows, coins moving from external holders to exchange deposit addresses, run an order of magnitude smaller, often in the low tens of thousands of BTC per day.

When 800,000 BTC “moves” on-chain without increasing the total BTC held by exchanges, it produces no net change in available sell-side liquidity.

Exchange reserve charts from Glassnode and CryptoQuant track aggregate BTC balances across all major platforms.

If those balances remain flat or decline during a period when spent outputs spike, it confirms that the activity was internal housekeeping rather than the arrival of new coins.

Bitcoin ETF flows offer another cross-check. Spot Bitcoin ETFs collectively manage over $100 billion in assets and represent a major structural buyer of BTC.

During the period around Coinbase’s migration, ETF flows remained modest and showed no signs of panic liquidations.

Price action followed broader macroeconomic drivers rather than showing the sharp downside pressure that would accompany an actual 800,000 BTC supply shock.

How custody operations fool retail sentiment

The gap between what on-chain data shows and what it means creates recurring opportunities for misinterpretation.

Retail traders relying on alert bots that track raw BTC movement see large numbers and assume they represent new selling pressure.

Market commentators amplify the signal, framing internal wallet migrations as potential liquidity crises.

By the time analytics platforms publish clarifications, adjust exchange reserve data, relabel wallet clusters, and explain the migration, the narrative has already moved markets or spooked sentiment.

For exchanges and custodians, the incentive is to pre-announce migrations and communicate clearly.
Coinbase did both, warning on Nov. 22 that it would undergo internal wallet migrations and describing the move as planned, routine, and unrelated to market conditions.

Analytics platforms can help by building entity-aware filters that distinguish internal reshuffles from genuine deposit flows, and by flagging known migrations before they distort aggregate metrics.

For traders, the lesson is that address changes are not liquidity changes. When 800,000 BTC moves between wallets controlled by the same entity, the number of coins available for sale remains unchanged. The tape can look dramatic, but the market impact is zero.

What matters is net flows, coins moving from external holders to exchange deposit addresses and from cold storage to hot wallets connected to order books.

Until those flows materialize, even the largest on-chain transactions can be pure theater, signaling custody hygiene rather than directional bets.

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Malicious worm compromises crypto domains in supply-chain attack



On Nov. 24, security firm Aikido detected a second wave of the Shai-Hulud self-replicating npm worm, compromising 492 packages with a combined 132 million monthly downloads.

The attack struck major ecosystems, including AsyncAPI, PostHog, Postman, Zapier, and ENS, exploiting the final weeks before npm’s Dec. 9 deadline to revoke legacy authentication tokens.

Aikido’s triage queue flagged the intrusion around 3:16 AM UTC, as malicious versions of AsyncAPI’s go-template and 36 related packages began spreading across the registry.

The attacker labeled stolen-credential repositories with the description “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming,” maintaining theatrical branding from the September campaign.

The worm installs the Bun runtime during package setup, then executes malicious code that searches developer environments for exposed secrets using TruffleHog.

Compromised API keys, GitHub tokens, and npm credentials are published to randomly named public repositories, and the malware attempts to propagate by pushing new infected versions to up to 100 additional packages, five times the scale of the September attack.

Technical evolution and destructive payload

The November iteration introduces several modifications from the September attack.
The malware now creates repositories with randomly generated names for stolen data rather than using hardcoded names, complicating takedown efforts.

Setup code installs Bun via setup_bun.js before executing the primary payload in bun_environment.js, which contains the worm logic and credential-exfiltration routines.

The most destructive addition: if the malware cannot authenticate with GitHub or npm using stolen credentials, it wipes all files in the user’s home directory.

Aikido’s analysis revealed execution errors that limited the attack’s spread. The bundling code that copies the full worm into new packages sometimes fails to include bun_environment.js, leaving only the Bun installation script without the malicious payload.

Despite these failures, the initial compromises hit high-value targets with massive downstream exposure.

AsyncAPI packages dominated the first wave, with 36 compromised releases including @asyncapi/cli, @asyncapi/parser, and @asyncapi/generator.

PostHog followed at 4:11 AM UTC, with infected versions of posthog-js, posthog-node, and dozens of plugins. Postman packages arrived at 5:09 AM UTC.

The Zapier compromise affected @zapier/zapier-sdk, zapier-platform-cli, and zapier-platform-core, while the ENS compromise affected @ensdomains/ensjs, @ensdomains/ens-contracts, and ethereum-ens.

GitHub branch creation suggests repository-level access

The AsyncAPI team discovered a malicious branch in their CLI repository created immediately before the compromised packages appeared on npm.

The branch contained a deployed version of the Shai-Hulud malware, indicating the attacker gained write access to the repository itself rather than simply hijacking npm tokens.

This escalation mirrors the technique used in the original Nx compromise, in which attackers modified source repositories to inject malicious code into legitimate build pipelines.

Aikido estimates that 26,300 GitHub repositories now contain stolen credentials marked with the “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming” description.

The repositories contain secrets exposed by developer environments that ran the compromised packages, including cloud service credentials, CI/CD tokens, and authentication keys for third-party APIs.

The public nature of the leaks amplifies the damage: any attacker monitoring the repositories can harvest credentials in real time and launch secondary attacks.

Attack timing and mitigation

The timing coincides with npm’s Nov. 15 announcement that it will revoke classic authentication tokens on Dec. 9.

The attacker’s choice to launch a final large-scale campaign before the deadline suggests they recognized the window for token-based compromises was closing. Aikido’s timeline shows the first Shai-Hulud wave began Sept. 16.

The Nov. 24 “Second Coming” represents the attacker’s last opportunity to exploit legacy tokens before npm’s migration cuts off that access.

Aikido recommends that security teams audit all dependencies from affected ecosystems, particularly the Zapier, ENS, AsyncAPI, PostHog, and Postman packages installed or updated after Nov. 24.

Organizations should rotate all GitHub, npm, cloud, and CI/CD secrets used in environments where these packages were present, and search GitHub for repositories with the “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming” description to determine if internal credentials were exposed.

Disabling npm postinstall scripts in CI pipelines prevents future install-time execution, and pinning package versions with lock files limits exposure to newly compromised releases.



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Charting a Broader Course Beyond Chain-Centric Islands



Disclosure: This is a paid article. Readers should conduct further research prior to taking any actions. Learn more ›

The memecoin market is at a subtle inflection point. Amidst sector-wide consolidation, hype flickers across different public chains—Solana one day, Base the next, with no one knowing where it will land tomorrow. Countless traders find themselves adrift in a sea of a thousand islands, where each island (chain) is rumored to hold treasure, but a lack of guidance forces them to frantically navigate using a motley fleet of boats (wallets) and a jumble of maps (DEXs). When you’re always sailing to and fro on the high seas looking for your next haul of gold your focus is scattered, your energy is dissipated, and your results suffer.

This is the limitation of the old paradigm of “island mining.” A trader’s vision is constrained by the telescope of a single chain. When your capital and attention are locked on Chain A, the explosive opportunity on Chain B slips away. This liquidity fragmentation and operational complexity lead not only to missed chances but also to ubiquitous security risks and managerial chaos. The market isn’t short on opportunities; it’s short of a “base” that allows one to calmly command all opportunities.

Thus, we are observing a paradigm shift from the role of a “sailor” to a “navigator.” Top traders are no longer content with being proficient rowers; they aspire to become navigators who command the big picture. Their core competency is evolving from operational efficiency to strategic vision. They need not a faster boat, but a readable and verified map that reveals all waters and charts every hidden treasure.

It is within this trend that platforms like Alph.AI demonstrate their value. It is not another new ship for you to laboriously pilot, but rather the coveted unified command post and panoramic nautical chart.

  • It provides a unified “bridge”: Acting as a secure and reliable frontend, Alph.AI allows traders to escape the browser tab hell, seamlessly accessing memecoin opportunities across all major hot chains from within a single, unified platform.
  • It possesses unparalleled “sensors”: With a deep understanding of the user’s need to chase trends, Alph.AI is consistently among the very first to support the most promising new chains. When a new “island of opportunity” appears on the horizon, it is always the first to chart it, ensuring navigators are never left behind.
  • It carries a reassuring “flag”: Trust is paramount when sailing unknown waters. Backed by the established CEX Bitrue, the platform offers security and credibility far beyond ordinary DeFi projects, providing peace of mind for every “voyage.”

The appeal of this new paradigm is resonating within the community. The ongoing Cross-Chain Trader Campaign by Alph.AI can be seen as a public drill in panoramic navigation. It encourages traders to break out of their silos and experience the efficiency revolution of unified operations firsthand by trading on at least three different chains. Meanwhile, its prediction contest cleverly blends community wisdom with brand philosophy—when operations are simplified, true Alpha vision shines. The customized Alph.AI Broader Vision Club honor roll for correct predictors serves as a coronation for this new generation of navigators.

Now, Alph.AI is taking this trading revolution a step further with its Zero Fee Campaign, creating the ultimate environment for Base chain traders:

  • Zero Trading Fees: Maximize your profits with no commission costs
  • Instant Access & First-Mover Advantage: Be the first sniper to spot and capture emerging opportunities
  • Volume-Based Benefits: The more you trade, the greater your advantages

The memecoin goldrush is far from over; it has merely entered a phase that demands greater wisdom, vision, and tools. The future belongs to traders who can master complexity, not be enslaved by it.

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