read yet another massive data breach in the crypto space. Now, 250,000 plus people have had their data exposed to potential hackers, exploiters and criminals. What are we doing here? We're going to talk about that and everything else happening in the crypto market today. Let's go.
What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. We've only got 15 minutes and we have a lot of ground to cover today. First of all, it's Monday. So strategy released another episode of what are we doing with all these securities? starring Michael Sailor. Listen, I did this in the last 30 seconds, this image. I was going to make it like an 80s game show, but I kind of like the Miami Vice
vibe as well. So what happened with strategy? Well, spoiler, they didn't buy Bitcoin, they didn't sell Bitcoin, they did some financial wizard wizardry with MSTR. You can see the announcement right here. They raised approximately 333.7 million by selling 3.46 million MSTR shares last week. They bought no Bitcoin and sold none. Company added 150 million to their dollar reserve, which brings it up to 4.8 billion dollars
in cash reserves. Of course, that's not going to be used to buy Bitcoin in the future. That is backing and being held for all of their financial obligations and the preferred etc. And they also spent approximately 132 million repurchasing STRC preferred shares. That's been floating between $94 and $95, not yet back to par, but certainly not the existential crisis of being in the $70 region that we saw not so long ago. They still hold 840,
447 Bitcoins. Yes, we're obligated every Monday morning to update you on what's going on with Sailor. The answer is not very much, and I think that that is a very good thing for the market. Right now, they're actively managing their capital structure, not buying Bitcoin, although they have said they intend to more buy more Bitcoin before the year is out. And the next story is a fun one right here. US regulator approves bank charter for Trump backed crypto company World
Liberty Financial. Okay, so this is the image that uh, people seem to have in their heads when I brought this up. This one right here, you can see it. You can see it. You can see it. Trump World Liberty Financial, the bank for the people, especially me. Chat TBT whipped this up. I can't take uh, responsibility necessarily for this one, but it was the image for my newsletter that I wrote this morning, which is everyone got Trump's World Liberty Financial Bank story
wrong. So, of course, you have two takes and they're both pretty poor. So the first one is the apoplectic anti-Trump army who says they only got this approval because it's Trump. Listen, Trump they own like 40% of World Liberty Financial here. They do have a financial interest in this, so I can understand that, but it's not really what's going on here. The second take, obviously, was that all of a sudden World Liberty Financial and Trump are going to become JP Morgan and start opening
branches like that image that I showed you all over the country. That's not happening either. This is an OCC conditional approval of effectively a limited trust bank, which means that they'll be able to custody assets, but they're not going to have customers and fractional reserve banking and lending and we've seen this already with a whole slew of people in the crypto industry in a long line that is still waiting. So the real reason for this and the real story is that
they have a pretty successful stable coin from World Liberty Financial called USD1. This will allow them to maintain the reserves and provide institutional custody for their own stable coin. They won't have to use a third party. They currently use Bitgo, I believe. They'll be able to do it themselves. We've already seen this with Paxos and Circle and others. This is not a story in this case. You know that I can be critical. This is not a story in this case of Trump using political
influence to get something done. This is the natural progression of the genius act allowing issuers of stable coins to be able to custody and back those in a transparent manner that is highly regulated. This is actually something probably that we should all be cheering for. We want to know that our stable coin is fully backed and that there is a regulator watching like a hawk the activities of that company. Interestingly, even though we did see last week that Tether now fully
backed Tether first big four audit. They're the only ones effectively who have not filed or are not in line necessarily to become a trust bank here in the United States. Now, we have another very quick story here. Hives Buzz HPC signs 350 million AI cloud services agreement with investment grade enterprise customer. What does that word salad all mean? It means that once again, we have a Bitcoin miner pivoting to AI and a publicly traded Bitcoin miner
at that. This is a continuation of a trend that I have been pounding the pavement on here, which is that Bitcoin miners are now just AI data centers. And they're added AI data centers who may mine Bitcoin into the future. So, we don't have all the information on exactly what this is, but it's very clear that Bitcoin miners are diversifying. They're quietly admitting that AI offers a better return on their electricity. I mean, it seems that even though we were sold
them as Bitcoin miners for all these years, the valuable asset was never exclusively Bitcoin mining. It was the power, land, cooling, data center access. And in a weak mining economy where it costs on average $74,000 to mine a Bitcoin, those assets migrate towards the highest bidder. And right now, that highest bidder is obviously AI and Hyperscalers. There's no surprise here that this is happening, but you're going to hear these announcements continually. I'm going to cover them because I think
that it's still relevant, but just know that this is not a trend that's likely to reverse unless Bitcoin starts trading at $250,000 at some point in the exceptionally near future. Bitcoin miners become AI data centers because building an AI data center is regulatorily challenging, especially in a lot of blue states. We saw the news in New York. Bitcoin miners are uniquely well positioned already to just flick a switch and become data centers. And that's what they've been pitching
for a very, very long time. Now we're seeing it happening in real time. Next story here. Again, I should have put these back to back so I could have done another funny Trump picture. Trump expected to attend White House meeting with crypto CEOs, sources say. Those involved in the meeting of CEOs from the worlds of crypto prediction markets and AI, I anticipate President Donald Trump will take part in next week's gathering. I remember the first crypto round table right when he was elected
and it was all of our favorite billionaires in crypto and they just literally went around the table and kissed the ring. It was like, I'd like to thank uh President Trump for allowing my presence in this room and for freeing us from the Biden administration and Gary Gensler. The check is in the mail. Nothing productive happened there. And I would imagine that nothing productive is going to happen here. So of course on a coin coin desk headline, this is about a meeting with crypto CEOs, but
as you saw there, it's actually crypto CEOs, prediction market CEOs, AI CEOs, uh and even the DTCC and the big banks. It's literally everybody, which is, I mean, this is great news, right? Paul Atkins will be there, Chair Mike Seg will be there. Coin based Ripple Chainlink A16Z, Paradigm Calshi, Crack and Gemini, but also New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq executives, but this is the CFTC's new Innovation advisory Committee.
Right? So this is not for those who are construing it as something to do with the clarity act or anything like that, it has nothing to do with that. This is the CFTC's Innovation advisory Committee, which includes multiple industries coming together to discuss. Now, it is interesting that we do have a pause in legislation, seemingly once again, nothing can get done once midterms happen. We know we're going to probably go into gridlock and get nothing done.
It is nice to see that the regulators are moving forward regardless of that and this could be beneficial to crypto in the long run, but this is not a crypto meeting. This is not, as I saw some say, a replacement for the meeting that was canceled on Friday at the SEC that we told you about. And this is not a meeting to sit down and discuss the next rules for crypto. It just isn't. But still exciting that we have a seat at the table uh to kiss the ring. Now, uh it's 13F season for those
who celebrate, which means we find out what institutions have bought, sold, or increased, decreased their exposure to crypto. The answer is it's really nuanced and not that exciting, but worth reporting. UBS, for example, increased its Ibit call option exposure more than 25 fold, which means that they're aggressively hedging, not really increasing their exposure to Bitcoin, but they did actually increase their Bitcoin, excuse me, Ibit holdings, which is what these 13Fs are largely around the
Blackrock ETF. uh by 12%. But if you take a deeper look, most of this is some sort of trade, right? If you're increasing your spot holdings but also increasing your options, you're probably looking for some kind of carry trade to earn a yield. Well, the big story here was that Harvard did not sell, which was good, but they had sold in the past. So it was good news that they have hold. Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council maintained their shares. JP Morgan increased
its position from approximately 8.3 million to 10.4 million shares, but Morgan Stanley slightly reduced by 4.5%. The biggest story here from the 13Fs that was being reported was Paul Tudor Jones, Mr. fastest horse in the race who set the 2020 Bitcoin bull market ablaze and really is uh considered the guy who fired the starting gun for that. He has increased direct Ibit holdings to 18.9%, 688,529 shares, but
uh also reported Ibit puts worth slightly more than the direct position. He is also aggressively hedging here. So the takeaway here is that Wall Street is buying Bitcoin, the Wall Street Way through seven layers of options, hedges and plausible deniability. Now, perhaps the biggest story and the one I tipped you to at the top. We don't have to talk about the fact that Treasure obviously had a data leak. I was forced over the weekend when we saw the safe pal, neither safe or your pal,
announcement that they had lost another 40,000 customers, bringing the total to 55,4867 owners of hardware wallets data exposed. Great. And I was just going to get ready to report that when I saw today, Israel's largest crypto broker Bits of gold hit by data breach affecting 200,000 customers, 253,000 people in crypto now at physical risk because nobody can seem to protect their data. Oh, meanwhile, not crypto related, but French taxpayer data
stolen in cyber attacks, French Finance Minister says six over 600,000 people, many who are crypto holders, where we've already had a problem in France, also having their data exposed. What the hell are we doing here? You can buy a self-custody wallet and know that your private keys are safe, but does it really matter if someone can knock on your door with a gun and ask you for those private keys? We have an existential crisis right now in self custody that we are going to continue to
dive into and this also, of course, on the back of cold card where people actually lost their money in an exploit. Now listen, I want to do something here at the end and just talk about an idea because I keep hearing that this bear market cannot be over because we've not experienced this cycle's FTX or Luna, right? Which assumes that every bear market has to end with some sort of explosive spectacular event. But I would present to you that in 2022, we had a vertical collapse.
Right? We had uh Luna collapsed and lost tens of billions and then that caused three capital collapse, which caused Voyager Celsius block fight collapse, ultimately FTX was a fraud and that put in the bottom of that bear market. Well, this time we have hundreds of companies quietly or not so quietly capitulating. It's more of a horizontal collapse, right? 2022, we can say it was a skyscraper crap collapsing. In 2022, we have the entire neighborhood going quietly vacant and turning
the lights off without anybody noticing. Look at this, I I made an infographic myself. I typed it. Crypto crash of 2026, 2022 was a demolition, 2026 is vacancy. I didn't even know it said that. But I just said that before. Look at all of those, right? At the end, all these major exploits. We have these exchanges, Bitmex, Bitmart, Ascendex, a whole bunch you've never heard of. Bitmart right now, maybe not solving. We don't know but people saying they can't make their withdrawals after
they shut down the CEO, exited uh was fired the day before this happened without any knowledge that it was going to happen. History does not repeat, but it can sometimes rhyme, right? I mean, let's think about the things that could be happening here that caused the bottom. We've had all these major exploits which caused an existential crisis in Dfy. We have the existential crisis in self custody that I told you about with cold card and all of the data breaches that are happening.
Right? We have Michael Sailor and strategy have been selling Bitcoin. Think about that, right? He buys the top, he sells the bottom. It is what it is, and buys everywhere in between to be fair. But this was supposed to be the worst case scenario and the signal of any bear market was when Michael Sailor and strategy would become a force seller. Given, the market has actually absorbed all of this bad news and stayed flat, which is why I continue to think that the bottom is likely in. said 250,000
people who hold crypto's data exposed in the past four days. Sailor has been selling and now is doing financial wizardry with MSTR to support other assets that aren't Bitcoin. His entire strategy has changed. We have a new exploit seemingly every day. We have North Korean hackers literally going on podcast and being asked to, you know, uh, say something bad about Kim Jong uh Kim Jongun and they like freeze, right? We have all of the quiet bottom signals that we could possibly
be looking for and to some degree, it's existentiallly even worse than 2022. No, people don't believe right now and I don't either that the industry is going to zero, which is what they thought in 2022. But right now, you don't know how to hold your Bitcoin, where to hold your Bitcoin, if your Bitcoin's safe, if you need a complete armory full of guns because you ordered a Treasure wallet. And you don't know if your money is safe in defy or if your data is safe anywhere. It may not
be 2022, but it's still pretty bad out there and Bitcoin remains strong in the face of it. That's why I think the bottom could still be in. I'll see you tomorrow. Peace.