The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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Welcome to The Node! This is Marc Hochstein to take you through the latest crypto news. In today's news: There are meme coins about the CrowdStrike outage because of course there are; Polymarket traders bet the CrowdStrike mess will be fixed in short order; Galaxy makes an acquisition; Ryan Selkis leaves Messari. The Takeaway: Hurting for revenue and profit, bitcoin miners are looking to activities outside mining bitcoin, such as hosting AI computers, to make up the difference. It's paying off, at least in their stock prices, writes CoinDesk senior analyst George Kaloudis. 👇 |
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CrowdStrike-Themed Meme Coins Multiply |
Dozens of new crypto tokens named after internet services company CrowdStrike and the infamous Microsoft “Blue Screen of Death” (BSoD) error were issued on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains amid a reported global internet outage that has disrupted several real-world services. Millions of Windows users worldwide are experiencing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error, which causes the system to suddenly shut down or restart. The error has affected businesses ranging from airlines and railways to stock exchanges and is reportedly related to a Crowdstrike software update that went awry. DEXTools and DEXScreener data shows tokens referring to CrowdStrike, STRIKE, Microsoft, bluescreenofdeath and BSoD were issued and actively traded as punters hope to eke out profits from the short-term attention to these topics. Some of these tokens have liquidity of up to $50,000 worth of stablecoins, quickly running to market capitalizations of as much as $1 million on paper. CrowdStrike and Microsoft were trending topics on Solana-based token generator Pump Fun, where users created hundreds of tokens referring to various memes that referred to the companies. Read more. |
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The major global IT outage caused by an update from security software provider CrowdStrike will very likely be resolved by Friday night U.S. Eastern time, if not earlier, Polymarket bettors say. There's an 89% chance the major global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike will be resolved by Friday night U.S. eastern time, bettors say. Traders on the crypto-based prediction market platform are also unconvinced the outage was caused by a hack, with the market giving that a 9% chance of it being the case. Read more |
Galaxy Makes a Staking Acquisition |
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Galaxy Digital, the publicly traded crypto firm led by Michael Novogratz, has acquired substantially all the assets of blockchain node operator CryptoManufaktur LLC, in a deal that will increase the company's Ethereum assets under stake by about 43%. The agreement with CryptoManufaktur, known as CMF, was announced in a press release provided exclusively to CoinDesk. Terms weren't disclosed. CMF, started in 2020, was originally launched to build infrastructure for the blockchain oracle project Chainlink, and later expanded into running automated proof-of-stake node deployment infrastructure on Ethereum. The deal comes with about $1 billion of Ethereum assets under stake, raising Galaxy's total to $3.3 billion. Galaxy has been expanding into blockchain infrastructure, adding to its primary business lines of crypto trading and investment management. Read more. |
Ryan Selkis stepped down as CEO of Messari, the crypto data and research firm he co-founded, following a series of inflammatory tweets about politics. He announced his departure Friday on X, the social media platform where he pumped out a flood of controversial messages this week. "This week was the first week in 6.5 years that my politics and rhetoric put the team in harm's way," he wrote. "As such, I have decided to step aside as CEO." Messari said Chief Revenue Officer Eric Turner will serve as interim CEO. "Ryan recently let us know of his decision to step back from an operational role as the CEO of Messari so that he can focus his time fully on crypto policy and national issues of importance to him," the company posted on X. In addition to building Messari, Selkis laid much of the groundwork for the crypto industry's political fundraising in the U.S. in this election year. He is a former CEO of CoinDesk. A decade ago, as an independent blogger, Selkis published documents revealing the insolvency of Mt Gox, which later went bankrupt. Read more. |
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The Takeaway: BTC Mining Is Back (Kinda) |
By George Kaloudis, senior analyst at CoinDesk With bitcoin’s recent price surge, the stock prices of four of the five largest publicly traded miners (measured by total hashrate, or computing power spent securing the Bitcoin network) are up double-digit percentage points. The one laggard, Iris Energy Ltd (IREN), the fifth largest in this quintet, is down 15% following a report published last week by Culper Research in which the firm disclosed a short position in IREN. The reason Culper's taking a bearish bet: the unsuitability, in the researchers' view, of Iris’ Childress, Texas site for artificial intelligence (AI) or high-performance computing (HPC). AI and HPC might seem unrelated to bitcoin mining, but such diversification has become a way for bitcoin miners to make money, as evidenced by Core Scientific’s (CORZ) 200 megawatt (MW) AI deal with CoreWeave last month, which pumped CORZ’s share price by 40%. (Perhaps if the price of bitcoin continues its upward creep, the unsuitability of IREN’s sites for non-bitcoin mining revenue-generating activities can fall to the wayside as the company shifts resources back to bitcoin mining.) In any event, what “bitcoin mining is so back” really means is “bitcoin mining stocks are back,” because on a pure “are there more miners now?” basis, known pool hashrate has only increased slightly over the last five days (from 663.618 exahashes per second to 668.659 Eh/s) rather than increase by 7% as one might expect. (Note: there is no “perfect” data point for hashrate.) Of course, hashrate not reacting immediately and proportionally to a bitcoin price increase is good for the public companies. But then if you look into the narrative around bitcoin mining and check out what the mining companies are saying, in interviews or public filings, you find that, while they’re still focused on bitcoin mining, there’s much ado about other seemingly unrelated or tangentially related things. Read the rest here. |
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They Saw Crowdstrike Coming ... Back in '99 |
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