Autor Cointelegraph by Christina Comben

There are now 179 listed companies holding Bitcoin on their balance sheets, all following variations of the same simple formula:Raise capital on traditional markets, buy Bitcoin and attempt to increase the amount of BTC that backs each share faster than the company dilutes shareholders. According to Mark Palmer, managing director and senior equity research analyst at StoneX, that’s how treasury companies attempt to “beat” Bitcoin’s returns.Making that equation work is a lot easier when the price of Bitcoin is going up and investors are happy to fund the next spree of purchases. Unfortunately, the mechanics work in both directions. When the premium evaporates, investor enthusiasm wanes. Financing gets harder, debt and yield obligations remain, and the same structure that outperformed the asset magnifies the losses on the way down. No surprise that the 50 largest Bitcoin treasury companies bled $83 billion in market value since July 2025.Metaplanet’s recent shareholder backlash shows the sort of questions that arise when treasury companies dilute their shareholders too much. Treasury companies are more likely to need to raise money in bear markets, but this creates a potential problem. Palmer says:“Issuing shares at a premium to net asset value and buying Bitcoin with the proceeds increases the Bitcoin backing every existing share. The same issuance at a discount destroys value.”So are the outsize returns on offer during the bull market, worth it for the downside risks during the bear?The math works, until the capital markets stop cooperatingFor all the complexity around Bitcoin treasury companies, the basic test for potential investors is relatively simple. Do shareholders end up with more Bitcoin backing each share over time?Palmer says investors should look past the headline number of Bitcoin a company holds and focus instead on “Bitcoin per fully diluted share, net of debt and preferred stock claims.”179 Bitcoin treasury companies as of September 2026. Source: SatsIntelIssuing new shares is not necessarily a problem. What matters, is whether the new capital generates enough additional value and profit that the benefits to existing shareholders outweigh the dilution.Related: Metaplanet moves 4,800 BTC worth $377M to Coinbase PrimeIf the company issues shares for more than the value of the Bitcoin that backs them, and uses that money to buy more Bitcoin, shareholders can end up with more Bitcoin per share. If it raises money below that value, they can end up with less. That dynamic was very favorable for Strategy during the last Bitcoin bull market, McCarthy says, because Bitcoin was increasing fast. “They were able to take on new debt. They were able to issue new debt because of that.” The first blow is half the battleChoosing the right digital asset treasury is a key decision. With a couple of hundred now on offer, longer established companies have the advantage, explains McCarthy:“It’s a first-mover advantage, right? Like if you’re Michael Saylor or you’re Bitmine and you’ve got this sort of larger-than-life character at the top, it’s a bit different.”Strategy’s executive chairman Michael Saylor has become part of the machinery of the trade itself, and McCarthy says he can keep the story moving even when Bitcoin’s price isn’t. Ethereum treasury company Bitmine has a similarly prominent figure in Tom Lee.Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rise and fall on narratives, so having a storyteller out front helps keep investors interested — especially when the underlying asset is in freefall. But McCarthy warns: “I don’t think there’s enough room for a hundred Michael Saylors; there’s not enough people like that around.” Related: Strategy raises $334M through stock sales but buys no BitcoinMcCarthy says many of the companies that followed Strategy were essentially just buying Bitcoin and hoping the stock price would follow. They “didn’t have an exit plan” for when the dynamics reversed, he says, and he expects the shakeout to be even more brutal still: “I think it’s going to flush out like 95% of it.” The corporate wrapper comes with baggageThere are also simpler ways to get exposure to Bitcoin by just buying it directly on an exchange, or via a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).Spot ETFs let TradFi investors buy Bitcoin through a conventional brokerage account, without having to consider a DAT’s company’s management, financing structure, or governance risks.Creative financial engineering can be difficult for retail investors to understand, says Palmer:“The biggest risk that investors face in buying Bitcoin treasury company stocks is forgetting that common shareholders’ claim is a residual one, as convertible debt and perpetual preferred stock sit ahead of them in terms of priority.”Those instruments, he adds, “carry cash obligations that Bitcoin itself doesn’t generate.”So, can treasury companies beat Bitcoin?Matt Cole, chief executive of Strive, one of the largest Bitcoin treasury companies, says investors should just look at the scoreboard:“Strategy has dramatically outperformed Bitcoin since adopting its strategy. Metaplanet has also outperformed Bitcoin since inception and Strive has outperformed Bitcoin both since announcing our strategy in May 2025 and year-to-date in 2026.” He adds that, “Strive has not sold a single Bitcoin, and during a Bitcoin bear market we have increased our holdings approximately fourfold while outperforming Bitcoin.”David Bailey, chief executive of Nakamoto, makes a similar case for Metaplanet, saying it was “the best performing equity in the world for nearly two years” and is “up 1,300% from genesis.”David Bailey says Metaplanet best performing equity for 2 years. Source: David Bailey.Despite the returns to date, debt maturity and yield obligations may still cause problems down the line. And some companies without the same access to capital, investor following or balance sheet firepower have found out how quickly the trade can work against them. The two most notable examples are Bailey’s own Nakamoto Inc, whose stock fell 99% from its 2025 peak and the UK company Satsuma Technology, which saw a similar decline. McCarthy’s own view is telling. When asked how he would deploy $100,000 for Bitcoin exposure, he says he would “mostly buy an ETF” and might put a smaller amount into Strategy “for the vol.”At the end of the day, buying Bitcoin is a bet on Bitcoin. Buying a treasury company is a bet on Bitcoin plus an additional bet on the people, financing structure, balance sheet and corporate governance wrapped around it.Magazine: Strategy became a symbol of the dot-com crash: Could history repeat?Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

The massive theft of more than 153 million US and Canadian driver’s licenses earlier this month should make one thing abundantly clear: the safest place for a copy of your driver’s license is nowhere at all.The leaked IDs, which appear to have come from an identity verification provider, ended up on a dark web identity service dubbed Nexus, alongside millions of other stolen identity and travel documents.The danger was underscored this week after fintech Revolut revealed it had been tricked by a hacker into handing over reams of sensitive customer data, including copies of passports and verification selfies. The hacker is now drip feeding the identification documents of 680 customers onto the web in an attempt to secure a 10,000 Bitcoin ransom.The irony is hard to miss: Know Your Customer (KYC) processes are designed to make financial systems safer by establishing who customers are and making sure they’re not up to nefarious deeds. But the way KYC is usually implemented requires companies to store vast quantities of sensitive information, which creates valuable honeypots for criminals.And the problem is getting harder to ignore. In the first half of 2026 alone, US data breaches affected at least 343 million people, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Even more frustratingly, it’s already possible to verify an individual’s identity without storing their identity documents using zero knowledge proofs:Efrat Fenigson, host of You’re The Voice podcast, writes and speaks extensively about privacy and KYC. She tells Magazine:“When regulators keep mandating a model that guarantees this outcome — while the technology to verify without storing already exists — it raises a red flag. It implies there is a lack of rational thinking and real will to solve problems.”So how many more of these leaks will it take before that will starts to bend? KYC was built to collect your identity, not just verify itKYC systems today have pretty much evolved around the assumption that institutions should see customers’ passports or driver’s licenses, record the relevant information and then store evidence of the check.343 million people have already been affected by US data breaches in 2026. Source: Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.But there’s an obvious problem with that approach: it has created a vast ecosystem of identity providers, databases, vendors and compliance systems that all store separate treasure troves of your individual KYC data. Every additional copy of your data creates another potential point of failure — and hackers are increasingly creative about devising ways to access it. In the Revolut case, the hacker sent emails requesting the KYC data from a legitimate Italian law enforcement address. Lyudmyla Kozlovska, Open Dialogue president said on X that EU laws meant Revolut had no other option but to comply.“EU AML law imposes no verification duty on the bank and provides no meaningful mechanism to check who is really behind an authenticated state request. Refusal to answer carries fines in the millions. In practice, verification is impossible.” Related: 200,000 fake AI ‘victims’ deployed to scam bait online fraudstersSusie Violet Ward, director and co-founder of Bitcoin Policy UK, warns the real issue is in storing ID data unnecessarily:“We need to stop treating identity verification and surrendering your identity as though they are the same thing.”If a company only needs to know that someone is over 18, she argues it should not automatically need additional details like your full name, address, exact date of birth, and a permanent copy of the relevant identity documents:“The irony is that KYC is designed to make systems safer, but the way we currently implement it can create an entirely different security problem. You can reset a password after a breach, but you cannot reset your identity in the same way.”The technology to stop hoarding IDs already exists For crypto proponents, the obvious solution is to use zero knowledge proofs. That’s a mathematical proof that demonstrates something is true without revealing the details. For example, you can use an phone app to generate a proof confirming your drivers license says you are older than 18, without sending through your birth date, or a picture of the license itself.Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox provides a useful explanation of ZK tech in this video. A useful explanation of ZK tech. Source: Crypto FiresideEvin McMullen, chief executive and co-founder of Billions Network, which develops privacy-preserving digital identity and ZK solutions, tells Magazine:“The technology works and is in production today, across thousands of applications and regulated institutions. What holds it back is that the entire compliance stack was built around collecting and storing copies of documents.”McMullen says the barrier was “never the technology,” but the rules, incentives and infrastructure built around it:“This is a governance and standards problem wearing a technology costume.” If the technology works, what’s stopping it?The European Union is already incorporating ZK technology into its digital identity and age verification systems design, developing privacy-preserving age verification that allows users to prove their age without revealing their full identity or exact date of birth. Related: Fears of AI-driven DeFi hack epidemic overstated for now — but not for longIts Digital Identity Wallet also supports “selective disclosure,” so users reveal only the information needed for a particular transaction. So, why isn’t this being deployed more widely for financial KYC?According to McMullen, “regulation and understanding” are the biggest obstacles to adoption:“The most common blocker is that compliance teams conflate ‘we saw the ID’ with ‘we must keep the ID,’ so they over-collect to be safe.” She says interoperability is another issue, since cryptographic proofs are only useful “if the party relying on it can check it without calling back to whoever issued it.” That requires putting shared standards in place, which is easier said than done. ZK doesn’t magically solve KYC There is another important caveat: replacing an ID document with a zero-knowledge proof doesn’t automatically eliminate every privacy or security problem.Fenigson points out that what a ZK credential remains tied to is equally important: “The incentives point toward control, not privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs let someone prove a fact, like being over 18 or not on a sanctions list […] What’s missing is what that proof gets bound to. Right now it’s usually bound to an account inside someone else’s database.” The EU’s Digital Identity Wallet supports selective disclosure. Source: European CommissionSo it boils down to who ultimately controls the credential. If a person generates a privacy-preserving proof but that proof is tied to an account in somebody else’s database, they’re still dependent on a centralized intermediary.The rules aren’t as clear-cut as you might think In many cases the rules don’t actually require storage of ID data — it’s more of a convention, because that’s the way it’s always been done.The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)’s guidance explicitly considers how digital ID systems can be used to conduct customer due diligence, rather than requiring institutions to rely on physical identity documents. FATF’s recommendations also operate as a risk-based framework, leaving individual countries to implement standards through their own legal and regulatory systems.“In many regimes, the rule is that you must verify identity and retain records of that verification, not that you must keep the raw document image forever,” McMullen says.That means a cryptographically verifiable attestation with a record showing the relevant check was performed could be enough to comply without creating another permanent copy of the ID.But because the guidance is “ambiguous,” McMullen says institutions just default to keeping everything because their compliance teams know auditors and examiners will accept it.In other words, even if the rules technically permit a different approach, nobody is willing to be the first to risk it, as Ward explains:“There is an instinct in regulation that more information means more control and therefore more safety.”It’s hard to see that changing unless the rules are amended to explicitly allow zero-knowledge proofs. And while no system is perfect, at least ZK tech prevents the need to collect and retain so much sensitive information. As McMullen says:“You cannot lose what you never held.”Magazine: 10 of the greatest unsolved crypto mysteriesCointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

For years, the defining characteristic of the artificial intelligence race has been speed.Build a bigger model. Spend more on compute. Release it. Rinse and repeat, with litte regard for the unknown unknowns.The average “p/doom” (probability of AI eventually going catastrophically wrong) among AI researchers was estimated to be between 15% and 20% in 2024. A year later, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei upped the stakes, saying he believed there was a 25% chance “that things go really, really badly.”Even as far back as 2014, xAI chief Elon Musk warned: “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged in 2015 that AI would “probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world,” but that, in the meantime, there would be “great companies created.” With better odds of cheating death playing Russian Roulette, anyone with even a fleeting interest in the topic has had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of their stomach for a while now.So what’s changed? Why are the companies driving the AI race suddenly asking to slam on the brakes?That’s what happened over the weekend, when Amodei published an essay calling for frontier AI development to be “paced,” warning that AI capabilities are advancing faster than the industry’s ability to understand and control them, and that the internet could get taken over by AI swarms within six to 12 months.Related: Nvidia buys Hugging Face for $12.9B in push into AI softwareAltman broadly agreed, saying the world deserves the “confidence” that the companies developing ever-more capable AI will act “responsibly,” and Musk backed Amodei’s proposal, simply commenting: “Dario is right.”The concern is not confined to the companies building the technology either. On Monday, UN rights chief Volker Türk called for “urgent action” on frontier AI, warning of “unprecedented risks” and saying the world is “on the cusp of irreversible change.” If the companies building the most powerful AI models genuinely believe capability is outrunning control, the p/doom slope would appear to be getting steeper. Or is there another explanation here hiding in plain sight?Have AI labs actually hit a new frontier?Amodei’s essay points to AI systems that are becoming more autonomous, including a recent incident where OpenAI’s AI agents hacked their way out of a controlled testing environment and compromised parts of the AI platform Hugging Face. They conducted “cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand,” Amodei said.He also highlighted the prospect of recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI systems become capable of helping build better versions of themselves, which can then help build even better systems, potentially creating a feedback loop in AI development. The people building these systems are also increasingly stepping into the fray, with Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon becoming the latest in a growing list of employees to resign over safety concerns. The AI industry is “gambling with our lives,” he said last week, warning that the AI race is moving faster than the safeguards around the systems. Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon resigns over safety concerns. Source: Anderson Cooper.OpenAI has already said that AI research is becoming increasingly more autonomous, and that coding agents are materially accelerating researchers’ work, using 3.1 agent workdays for every workday of human labor by mid-August. In an interview with Fortune published Sept. 12, Altman said OpenAI would “melt” all its GPUs if that’s what it took to keep humanity alive, to which Satoshi Action Fund CEO Dennis Porter said:“Altman must have peered over the edge into the abyss and saw something that scared the sh*t out of him.”Related: OpenAI says AI models escaped containment to hack Hugging FaceOn Monday, Altman said there are two ways AI progress could go “very badly”: losing control to AI or ending up in a “world with too much concentration of power.”But the question isn’t whether AI is already dangerous enough to shut down, but whether the systems designed to evaluate and control AI are keeping pace, and as Altman said, “pacing” does not mean stopping. It means continuing to develop AI, but more slowly, while safety testing catches up. With spending on AI safety and alignment drastically eclipsed by spending on AI development and capabilities, that gap will be hard to fill.Frontier AI is becoming extraordinarily expensive But what if the calls for a global slowdown are really just a recognition that the economics of the AI race are getting harder to justify? As AI researcher and lecturer, Eli David said:“Perfectly explains Dario’s motivation: Slow down research to cut compute spending that is spiraling out of control, so he can IPO.”AI investor Grant Hummer held a similarly skeptical view, commenting:“Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.” The problem is that the race itself is becoming more expensive, with ever more capable models requiring vast quantities of chips, data centers, electricity and capital. Goldman Sachs estimates that global AI investment will reach around $1 trillion in 2026, including roughly $581 billion in the US. Meanwhile, S&P Global says combined capital expenditure from the six largest hyperscalers, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and SpaceX, is expected to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2027.Global AI investment will reach around $1 trillion in 2026. Source: Goldman SachsOn top of all that, AI companies have yet to prove that those costs can eventually translate into sustainable revenue. On Monday Reuters highlighted the commercial pressure on AI companies to keep pushing despite their calls to slow development down. When every new capability can help justify another funding round, infrastructure investment or higher valuation, halting the gravy train seems like a counterintuitive task.Ed Leon Klinger, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Flock, pushed back on the idea that AI labs are using safety as cover for their commercial interests. He said it makes little sense for frontier labs to invent safety concerns to boost their initial public offerings (IPOs) when that would expose them to heavier scrutiny and potentially delay them going public.“For it to be true, Sam, Dario, Demis, and Elon all have to be lying, along with a big chunk of their execs, chief scientists, and resigning employees… A much simpler explanation at this point: they think the risk is real.”Wall Street and Washington aren’t ready to hit the brakesWith trillions of dollars of investment pouring into the United States and AI infrastructure expected to drive around half of S&P 500 earnings growth this year, neither Wall Street nor Washington appear to be willing to step on the brakes.Global AI stocks balked at the news, with AI-linked Asian stocks falling sharply on Monday following the slowdown calls. SoftBank fell 13.2%, Kioxia 9.8% and SK Hynix 5.3%. The Financial Times reported Monday that President Donald Trump rejected calls for an AI slowdown, arguing that the US needs to maintain its lead over China. He said:“Look, we’re leading China in AI . . . and, frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI, wins.”Trump said guardrails are possible, but he dismissed what he described as exaggerated concerns about AI risks, telling reporters, “They’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”Economist Noah Smith argued that the main objection to “pacing” AI is simple: if American companies slow down, Chinese companies could simply overtake them. That puts the labs in what Smith calls a “Red Queen’s race,” where if they stop building, they fear someone else will build it anyway.AI researchers place the probability of doom between 15% and 20% in 2024. Source: Grace at al.Even if the labs wanted to coordinate a slowdown, that could create another problem. OpenAI has reportedly asked members of Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown could run into US antitrust law, since coordination between competing labs could potentially amount to restricting output. Related: Fears of AI-driven DeFi hack epidemic overstated for now — but not for longFormer White House AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, had a simple response to Amodei and Altman’s call to “pace the frontier”: “go ahead,” he said, arguing that if the labs want to slow down, they are free to do so themselves. Yet, it creates the mother of all catch-22s: if competing AI companies coordinate to slow development, they could run into antitrust rules. If they each slow down independently, they risk losing ground to competitors and countries that keep pushing ahead.So why are they asking to slow down now?Amodei and Altman are not calling for AI to stop. They’re calling for a system where powerful AI models can be developed as safety testing, monitoring and shared standards catch up. “When we talk about “pacing”, we do not mean “stopping,” Altman said, acknowledging that safety cases and monitoring have “significant costs,” but that pacing would be “well worth this cost.”“No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”The problem, though, is that these pressures have not disappeared, and with Trump’s dismissal of the AI chiefs’ cries and the US stock market so deeply intertwined with their companies, they are only getting stronger.Now the very companies that spent years pushing the frontier forward now say the frontier may be moving too fast.Magazine: Recovery specialists crack $1B crypto wallet… but find just $10Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

The HIMS token is designed to track shares of the teleheath company Hims & Hers, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). On Robinhood Chain, traders can buy and sell the tokenized stock alongside other crypto assets like memecoins.And that’s what happened with BONER. The deliberately ridiculous memecoin was paired with HIMS in a liquidity pool, where traders could swap between the two tokens.At one point, the pool contained 31,198 HIMS tokens, which is more than half of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares that were in circulation. That imbalance briefly sent the HIMS token on Robinhood to $132.64, more than four times the $28.84 closing price of the real HIMS shares on the NYSE. It is a bizarre glimpse of what can happen when real-world assets are put onchain and made usable in crypto markets. As Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko, tells Magazine:“A listed stock effectively becomes a composable DeFi asset at an unprecedented scale, in the same way Ether did.”But why would anyone want to trade a memecoin against a tokenized healthcare stock in the first place? And what happens when onchain markets make even more bizarre pairings possible? Onchain finance is for the ‘crazy ones’Cast your mind back to summer 2020, when DeFi pioneers were busy farming for yield, deconstructing legacy finance and trying not to get rugged in the process. As Mike Dudas, co-founder of 6th Man Ventures, puts it: “Onchain finance is for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes.”Robinhood Chain seems to be the next iteration of this phenomenon, finding new uses for tokenized stocks no one had even considered until now. In less than three months after it launched, traders on Robinhood have created some wild crypto-native pairings like BONER/HIMS, AI/NVIDIA and SPACEHOOD/SPCX.Stock tokens where they are the quote asset. Source: DeFi PrimeThe basic idea is simple: instead of buying and holding a tokenized stock on its own, users can put it into a decentralized liquidity pool alongside pretty much any other token, and traders can swap between the two, creating a market around the pair. Related: Robinhood Chain nears $1B TVL as Uniswap drives liquidity: Standard CharteredOne of the launchpads behind the trend, LONG, says its stock-paired markets generated more than $425 million in trading volume over a 24-hour period on Sept. 2, with almost $12 million locked in stock-token liquidity. Sergej Kunz, co-founder of DeFi aggregator 1inch, tells Magazine:“The opportunity tokenized equities present is much bigger than assets appearing onchain. […] this is not just about changing the venue. It is about creating an asset that can plug into an open financial system.”Angelo Aspris, a finance academic at the University of Sydney, notes that this creates an array of new opportunities. “Once equity exposure becomes programmable, it can be used as a quote asset, collateral, loanable inventory or margin for derivatives.”In other words, once a stock becomes a token, it doesn’t have to remain just a stock; it can become one of the building blocks of entirely new DeFi markets.So, is this actually a new market?Looking under the hood, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the plumbing. The markets are built using automated market makers (AMMs), a type of DEX mechanism that uses liquidity pools and algorithms to set prices and which let traders swap one token for another without a traditional order book or a matching buyer on the other side.What is new is what those markets can contain. In a traditional stock market, stocks trade against currencies or other conventional financial instruments. In the wacky world of onchain finance, a tokenized stock can become one half of a market with almost anything else that has sufficient liquidity. Reid Noch, vice president of US equity market structure and electronic trading at TD Securities, says AMMs remain “very novel when compared to traditional markets.” While he finds the idea of making a stock part of the quote and liquidity for another market “interesting,” he says it’s a use case could make institutional adoption a harder sell. He tells Magazine:“As long as they are primarily used to drive liquidity in memecoins, it will be challenging for more traditional players to take them seriously.”Stock-paired markets generated more than $425 million in trading in 24 hours. Source: longdotxyzIt may sound like a strange use for a stock token, but there is a logic to it from a DeFi point of view. Traders don’t really need a reason to pair two assets beyond having a market where they can swap between them. Related: Robinhood takes stakes in Crypto.com, OG.com in prediction markets dealAnd the more important experiment is whether tokenized stocks can become reusable financial building blocks rather than simply digital versions of traditional shares. Does it actually work?The BONER/HIMS episode shows that unconventional pairings can have unconventional results. Aspris says the extreme divergence between the tokenized HIMS price and the underlying stock was largely a consequence of “thin reserves” and “temporarily restricted issuance,” warning: “This creates the conditions for these events and increases the potential for strategic exploitation or manipulation.”Arbitrage would normally pull the tokenized stock price back to the price of the real stock, but that link can break when liquidity is thin or the real-world market is closed, as Probst explains:“Arbitrage relies here on a single actor rather than a continuous competitive mechanism like the one seen in traditional stock markets. These pools can therefore produce unreliable price signals, without any real transmission to the reference market.”Memecoin / stock token pairings are succeeding at scale. Source: @howdymaryNoch is similarly skeptical that these pools will become the primary venue for discovering the price of tokenized stocks: “I still see price discovery happening more in traditional markets, and AMMs being used [by] arbitrageurs to keep the market in line. […] I struggle with how these markets will drive price discovery given their low volumes compared to traditional markets.” Maybe price discovery isn’t the point Memecoin/stock pools may be able to trade around the clock, but these markets are immature and isolated from traditional markets….for now.That said, they’re already generating real demand for tokenized stocks and testing how those assets behave when plugged into DeFi, says Kunz.“Memecoin pairs might not be the number one case for tokenized equities, but are yet another source of demand, volume and liquidity for those assets.”Memecoins may also be just the beginning. If tokenized stocks become established DeFi building blocks, there’s no obvious reason they have to be paired with other stocks or cryptocurrencies. Why not use them against tokenized real estate, commodities, artworks or even tokenized farts? (It’s a thing, look it up).Of course, that doesn’t mean those markets will emerge, or that they would be popular or make economic sense. But the BONER/HIMS experiment shows that once real-world assets become composable onchain, markets can emerge around all kinds of combinations that TradFi would never have dreamed of. Aspris notes we are just at the beginning of this experiment, however: “The experiment is useful and the direction is clear, but calling tokenized equities a finished DeFi primitive would be ahead of the facts.”Magazine: Token buybacks are booming. But are they good for crypto projects?Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.

In an industry built on transparency and verifiability, newcomers might assume that crypto and blockchains leave very little room for mystery. They’d be completely wrong of course, because the murky world of digital assets is rife with underhanded dealings, unsolved enigmas and fortunes disappearing behind pseudonyms.From the identity of Bitcoin’s mystery creator to what really happened to a DAI developer on a beach in Puerto Rico, here are 10 crypto mysteries that remain unsolved. 1. Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?More than 17 years after Bitcoin’s creation, the greatest unsolved crypto mystery persists. We still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, or even whether Satoshi was one person.He, she, or they published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008, mined the genesis block in January 2009 and remained active in its early development before disappearing from public view in 2010. The quest for Satoshi’s identity has since produced an endless parade of possible candidates, from cryptographers and cypherpunks to British academics, early Bitcoin developers and even convicted sex offenders. The latest serious attempt to solve the mystery came in April 2026, when The New York Times published a lengthy investigation naming British cryptographer Adam Back as its leading candidate. Related: Satoshi-era Bitcoin wakes after 16 years of dormancy as 600 BTC movesThe Times claimed there were similarities between his writings and Satoshi’s, their shared cryptographic interests, Back’s work on Hashcash — which was cited in the Bitcoin white paper — and a series of other circumstantial clues, all of which Back strenuously denied.Adam Back’s Hashcash is cited in the Bitcoin Whitepaper. Source: Bitcoin.orgOther suspected candidates over the years have included core developer Peter Todd, cryptographer Hal Finney, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and others. Self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator Craig Wright is the only major Satoshi candidate to have been formally ruled by a UK court not to be Satoshi.There were even some bizarre online claims that notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein could be Satoshi after a newly released tranche of the Epstein files revealed the sex trafficer had been involved in the early crypto industry, and made a 2014 investment in Back’s Blockstream. There is no credible evidence that Epstein was Satoshi, , and so the enigma remains: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and where is he now? 2. Who was the Patoshi miner?If you thought the Satoshi mystery was strange, try digging into Bitcoin’s earliest blocks like blockchain researcher Sergio Lerner.In 2013, he discovered a pattern in the way Bitcoin’s earliest blocks were mined and linked it to a single miner he later dubbed “Patoshi.”Lerner estimated that the miner had accumulated about 1.1 million BTC across 22,000 blocks, which makes the enigmatic figure the largest holder of BTC today, above Coinbase, BlackRock and Strategy.Satoshi Nakamoto is the top Bitcoin holder. Source: ArkhamWhile Patoshi has never conclusively been proven to be the mysterious Bitcoin creator, the pattern is still one of the strongest pieces of evidence linking a huge stash of early Bitcoin to Satoshi. So who was Patoshi? Was it Satoshi operating a single machine, another early Bitcoin enthusiast, or something else entirely? 3. What happened to Mt. Gox’s missing Bitcoin?When Mt. Gox collapsed in February 2014, it claimed that around 850,000 BTC had disappeared — only to later uncover some 200,000 BTC hiding in old-format wallets it previously believed to be empty. To this day, the rest of the coins’ whereabouts remain a mystery. More than 12 years later, creditors are finally getting some of their money back, but what happened to Mt. Gox’s missing Bitcoin has never been resolved. Related: Mt. Gox moves $739M in Bitcoin from cold wallets: ArkhamInvestigators have traced portions of it, including some coins connected to Russian cybercriminals and the BTC-e exchange. US prosecutors have also alleged that Russian nationals stole and laundered roughly 647,000 BTC from Mt. Gox, yet the full story of the stolen coins has not been completely solved. Russian nationals charged with hacking Mt. Gox. Source: DOJWho stole them? How long had the theft been happening? How much was taken through hacking versus internal failures? And more importantly, where are all those coins now?4. What really happened to QuadrigaCX’s missing funds?Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX shot to the top of crypto’s mystery list in December 2018 after its founder, Gerald Cotten, died suddenly in Jaipur, India.The exchange was unable to access millions of dollars in cryptocurrency that customers had deposited, and it was popularly believed at the time that Cotten had taken the exchange’s private keys with him to the grave.An investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission later found that he had actually transferred millions of dollars of client funds to his and his wife’s personal accounts, and had also used client assets to cover his own trading losses and personal expenses.Was Quadriga a massive fraud that collapsed when its orchestrator died? Did Cotten leave behind wallets nobody has found, or did he fake his death and pocket the funds?5. Where is the CryptoQueen?Few crypto mysteries involve a missing person quite as notorious as Ruja Ignatova, AKA the CryptoQueen.The charismatic Bulgarian founder of OneCoin allegedly helped build one of the world’s biggest crypto scams, with the FBI saying the scheme defrauded victims worldwide of more than $4 billion. In October 2017, Ignatova flew from Sofia to Athens and then promptly disappeared, never to be found again.The FBI added Ignatova to its 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list in 2022 and still offers a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest and conviction. In a 2026 update, the FBI said she remains at large and described her as “well-funded” and “well-connected.”Rula Ignatova is still at large, according to the FBI. Source: FBISo, is she still doing the crypto conference circuit undercover today, scheming for her next victims? Was she killed, or did she escape with millions of dollars and is living under a new identity with the aid of extensive plastic surgery? Where is Ruja Ignatova? Maybe she’s sipping Mumbai Mules on a beach somewhere with Gerald Cotten.6. Will James Howells ever get his lost Bitcoin back?Back in 2013, Welsh IT worker James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing the keys to what would later become a massive Bitcoin fortune, unwittingly becoming the poster child for how not to self-custody your BTC.Related: Tips for crypto newbies, vets and skeptics from a Bitcoiner who buried $700MHowells insists that the infamous hard drive ended up in a massive landfill and spent years trying to recover it, even proposing to excavate part of the landfill with specialist equipment and AI-powered sorting systems to search the waste.But after years of legal battles and failed attempts to persuade Newport City Council to let him excavate the site, his efforts to recover the drive have been in vain. A High Court judge ruled that he had no realistic prospect of succeeding in January 2025. James Howells’ BTC is still on the blockchain. Source: Mempool.spaceThe Bitcoin itself, however, isn’t gone; it’s still sitting on the blockchain, visible to anyone who cares to look in the natural history museum of self-custody blunders. 7. Who was the DAO hacker?Remember the 2016 DAO hack that would change Ethereum forever? This epic exploit wasn’t just one of crypto’s biggest early hacks; it helped determine what Ethereum would become.An attacker exploited a vulnerability in The DAO’s smart contract to drain more than 3.6 million ETH into a child DAO, siphoning over 30% of the DAO’s funds before the attack stopped.The attacker was never identified, and the aftermath would change crypto history, ultimately splitting Ethereum into two blockchains: the one we all know today and a smaller purist version, Ethereum Classic. In 2022 Laura Shin claimed the attacker was Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch, but he denied the claims and has never been charged.The DAO hack raised questions that persist today about whether code is law and blockchain transactions are immutable, or whether they can be rolled back if we don’t like them.8. Who really stole the $400 million from FTX?FTX’s collapse was already one of crypto’s biggest disasters when, just hours after the exchange filed for bankruptcy, hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets began disappearing from its wallets. About $415 million in crypto was ultimately reported stolen.Of course, the timing immediately raised suspicion, with FTX in chaos, employees trying to secure assets, bankruptcy proceedings beginning and different groups racing to determine who actually controlled the exchange’s wallets. The US Department of Justice eventually seized hundreds of millions of dollars in assets linked to FTX and investigators have traced parts of the movements, but the identity of the attacker remains an unsolved crypto mystery. Was it an opportunist outside hacker who happened to strike at the perfect moment? Was it somebody with inside access, or did the swirling chaos around the collapse create an opportunity that someone close to the exchange exploited? To this day, we don’t have an answer.9. What really happened to Nikolai Mushegian?Nikolai Mushegian was an early MakerDAO developer and a co-founder of Balancer who helped shape some of DeFi’s first infrastructure.On Oct. 28, 2022, Mushegian was found dead in the waters off Condado Beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Local police said he had been out swimming and was caught by strong ocean currents.Not everybody buys that version of events, however, since Mushegian had taken to Twitter to warn of his impending assassination just hours earlier. In a series of disturbing and paranoid messages, he claimed that the CIA, Mossad and “pedo elite” were involved in a sex-trafficking operation in the area and were planning to frame him and kill him.Nikolai Mushegian alerted his followers of his death before it happened. Source: Nikolai Mushegian The Puerto Rico Justice Department investigated his death for almost a year and determined no criminal involvement, but given his online messages, questions about what happened remain.Was Mushegian really caught by currents, as authorities reported, or was something more sinister going on in his final hours? 10. Why did someone deliberately burn 107 BTC?Perhaps one of the weirdest mysteries of all is why anyone would burn a Bitcoin fortune after HODLing it for more than 12 years? Yet that’s exactly what happened in May 2026.Someone sent 107 BTC, worth about $8.5 million, to a Bitcoin address from which the coins are rendered unspendable, effectively destroying them. The coins had been acquired around 2014, when Bitcoin was trading below $600, making the timing particularly strange. Why would anyone voluntarily destroy millions of dollars in Bitcoin after holding it through a 12,000% rise in its value?Stranger still, one of the five wallets suddenly sent about 20 BTC, worth roughly $1 million, to what appeared to be a large crypto custodian in March. Almost exactly the same amount came back three weeks later, before the Bitcoin was ultimately burned, adding another layer to the mystery. For an industry still in its teenage years, crypto sure has endured its fair share of intrigue. Be careful next time you decide to self-custody your fortune — you might just end up as one of crypto’s next great mysteries.Magazine: Is Bitcoin too volatile to risk your retirement on?Cointelegraph publishes long-form journalism, analysis and narrative reporting produced by Cointelegraph’s in-house editorial team with subject-matter expertise. All articles are edited and reviewed by Cointelegraph editors in line with our editorial standards. Some articles contain affiliate links, from which Cointelegraph may earn a commission. These relationships do not influence which products we review or our editorial conclusions. Content published in here does not constitute financial, legal or investment advice. Readers should conduct their own research and consult qualified professionals where appropriate. Cointelegraph maintains full editorial independence.