🐋 Abraxas-linked wallets are short $1.58B of BTC and ETH on Hyperliquid — and they're bleeding

Two Hyperliquid wallets that Nansen and Arkham tag as Abraxas Capital Management are carrying a combined $1.58 billion net short, and BTC plus ETH are the fattest part of the book. At 2:55 p.m. ET on Oct. 6, 2026 the pair was down about $114.5 million on paper — and still holding. The London firm behind them manages billions, so this isn't some degen who gets flushed on the next wick. Someone with real size is leaning against the tape, in public, where the whole chat can watch.

▪️ Hyperbot's X account flagged the two addresses on Monday; onchain explorers Nansen and Arkham label them Abraxas Capital Mgmt (Heka Funds).
▪️ The BTC and ETH legs alone: 5,120 BTC and 189,400 ETH, roughly $948 million notional, per hypurrscan.io data.
▪️ It's not a two-coin bet — the same wallets are short SOL, HYPE, ENA, XRP, SUI and PUMP. That's a whole-portfolio bearish tilt, not one punt.
▪️ Both addresses logged millions in deposits and hold spot that can offset the shorts, so the perp book alone isn't their net exposure.
▪️ Bitcoin twice tagged $86,000 on Tuesday, helped by the CFTC's proposed crypto rules and fresh SEC news — the tape is not cooperating with the short.

📊 Combined net short: $1.58B
📊 BTC + ETH leg: ~$948M
📊 Paper loss at snapshot: ~$114.5M
📊 ETH short: 189,400 ETH

For retail this is less a signal than a mirror: a whale book this visible drags crowd psychology around, and whales know exactly that — being this loud is itself part of the trade. It can just as easily be a hedge or provisioning for a multi-billion spot book as it is insider conviction, and nobody outside Abraxas can tell you which. What matters is the boxes: the positions stay open, they can flip fast, and if BTC keeps hammering $86,000 while ETH follows, that $114.5 million hole gets deeper and the crowd starts asking who's actually wrong. And when the crowd asks that question, the answer is usually whoever has more money to prove it.

💬 «Spot holdings may offset these shorts, so the positions alone do not establish the wallets' net market exposure.» — Hyperbot

🔮 A $114.5M paper hole and they keep holding. Either Abraxas knows something, or we're all reading a hedge like it's prophecy.

@thisoption

🚨 Uncle Sam moves $71M Bitcoin stash after six-week silence

Tuesday morning Washington finally touched its Bitcoin again — wallets tied to the US Marshals pushed out more than 830 BTC worth over $70 million, the first move since Aug. 26. And these aren't fresh seizures, kids: they're leftovers from two cold cases — the 2016 Bitfinex hack and Hashflare, the fake cloud-mining scam run by Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin.

▪️ On-chain analyst Sani caught it around 11 a.m. Eastern: a dust-sized test ping went to Coinbase Prime first, then a bigger leg into a brand-new wallet. Yeah, the oldest trick in the book.
▪️ The Bitfinex slice traces back to the breach where over 100,000 BTC walked out; feds later caught Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan and clawed most of it back.
▪️ Same hour, forfeited FTX wallets spat out tens-of-millions in BNB right after their own dust-test — different chain, identical playbook. Somebody's running a script.
▪️ The tail end carried coins tied to Potapenko-Turogin's Hashflare operation, which sold hashrate contracts for data centers stuffed with zero actual machines. Zero. Not one rack.
▪️ Everything landed at Coinbase Prime — already custodian for US Marshals 'Class 1' digital assets since Washington swapped open auctions for private custody deals.

📊 Still sitting on: +300K BTC
📊 That pile is worth: +$25B
📊 FTX-linked BNB moved: +$30M

For anyone trading size this matters less than crypto Twitter will pretend: a Coinbase Prime shuffle isn't an auction block and nobody announced squat about selling yet. The tell is timing — six weeks quiet, then three chains swept clean before lunch. That smells like bookkeeping ahead of something bigger, not a dump button. So don't let some account with a laser-eye avatar scare you into believing hundreds of thousands of coins hit the bids tomorrow. Watch the next dust test, not the timeline.

💬 «Most likely a test transaction before sending all the remaining coins.» — 'Sani', on-chain analyst behind timechainindex.com

🔮 'Test transfers are how you count your chips before cashing out. Who's buying, and does retail ever get told?'

@thisoption

📉 Two wallets on Hyperliquid are holding a near-$1B short on BTC and ETH

Morning's red for everyone, and each of you is bleeding a little personally. Two wallets on Hyperliquid are short BTC and ETH for almost a billion combined. Not a named fund, not a desk you can call — two wallets. While you were averaging down on the dip and telling the chat "this is the bottom, bro," somebody quietly built the other side of your trade. Almost a billion against the whole room. Nobody puts on that size by accident, and nobody puts it on to lose.

@thisoption

🔥 Ethereum just cracked its floor — $1.135B of longs queued up for slaughter

ETH got smoked 15.19% in a day down to $12570 and finally ripped through the $12700 shelf that had been holding despite days of institutional selling. Now roughly $11.135 billion worth of leveraged long positions sit below price waiting to get liquidated, against just $1999.178 million's worth of shorts hanging above. That's the setup, and if you're long you're not early, you're the exit liquidity.

▪️ Nearest trigger first: about $1112.183 million's worth of Hyperliquid's Ethereum longs start blowing up near $12511 — yesterday at $12605.165 that gap was a comfortable 17.14%, today it's 13.16%,… so…
▪️ Before anyone even reached those big clusters, CoinGlass says $1233.136 million got liquidated across Ethereum over twenty-four hours — $1221.187 million, or around ninety-five percent, were fucking……
▪️ The twelve-hour window alone ate $1226.122 million, including $1216.111 million from leveraged bulls — plus crypto's single biggest casualty anywhere was one $126.164 million ETHUSDC position… one…
▪️ And people are STILL stacked bullish anyway, because why learn anything ever — Binance ETH USDT accounts show a three-point-three-two long-to-short ratio while OKX sits at two-point-one-three, with……
▪️ Funding flipped negative though — open-interest weighted rate minus zero-point-zero-zero-four-one percent, volume weighted minus zero-point-zero-zero-three-four percent — meaning shorts are paying……
▪️ Meanwhile US spot Ether ETFs bled roughly two hundred-and-two million dollars net on October sixth, their worst day since September sixteenth — sixth straight session underwater totalling about four……

📊 Longs exposed below price: $11.135B
📊 Shorts vulnerable above: $1999.178M
📊 Hyperliquid long cluster: $ 112. 83M near 2511
📊 Total flushed last twenty-four hours: $ 233. 36M

If you're holding leverage here you already know your number. The next layer below twenty-five hundred decides whether this cascade clears excess or finds fresh meat underneath, because positioning data shows bulls didn't actually leave after losing two-hundred-plus millions overnight anyway — those stubborn ratios are still elevated everywhere you look, even with every board bleeding red tonight. Folks, that's not capitulation, that's a trap with extra steps.

🔮 Everyone's calling this capitulation while retail keeps buying every dip with borrowed money again. Classic hive behavior. Honestly predictable. Losers stay losers until they do simple math.

@thisoption

⚠️ $1.35B of ETH longs is 3.6% from getting cooked

BTC $82,946.79, -1.51%, ETH $2,573.63, -1.60% — looks like a sleepy drift down, except it isn't: $1.35B of leveraged ETH longs are already sweating liquidation, and the shorts only get paid if we bounce. Fear & Greed slid to 64 from 71 — still greedy, just with the handbrake on.

▪️ Hyperliquid alone has $112.83M of ETH longs set to liquidate near $2,511 — roughly 3.6% below the $2,605.65 it was trading at. One wick and it's cascade o'clock.
▪️ Gainers: MET +43.3% ($31M vol), RAY +11.8% ($29M), NEAR +10.5% ($190M), SNDKB +3.5%, WLD +0.8%.
▪️ Losers: ZEC -5.7% ($169M), ORCA -5.4%, PUMP -4.6%, LTC -4.3%, XRP -3.9% on $196M — real volume heading for the door.
▪️ Why the movers matter: NEAR's +10.5% rode $190M of actual money. MET's +43.3% rode $31M — that's one whale's playground, not a trend.
▪️ Hyperliquid Labs started pushing $330M of HYPE via OTC and already moved half to five undisclosed buyers. To 'mitigate volatility', apparently. Sure.
▪️ Undisclosed price, unnamed buyers — you'll find out what they paid when the chart tells you.

ETH doesn't fall 6% for fun: that slide is what stacked the $1.35B of longs now sitting on the trapdoor, and $2,511 is the tripwire on Hyperliquid's book. Above us only about $999.78M of shorts are exposed, so a reclaim squeezes them instead. Five anonymous wallets are now holding fresh HYPE at a price nobody will show you — expect the dump rumors before you see the receipts.

🔮 Greed at 64, longs sweating, five mystery wallets full of HYPE — who's the exit liquidity today?

@thisoption

NEAR rips +138% into crypto's top 20 — and its own rails got drained while you were watching BTC

NEAR shoved its way into the top 20 coins Thursday after a month-long run that took it from mid-cap obscurity to roughly $5.51 a token. That's about a $7.2 billion market cap and some $1.2 billion traded in a single day. Not bad for a coin most of you ignored until the green candles started screaming.

▪️ NEAR now sits above Stellar (XLM) by market cap. XLM is parked near $7 billion while everyone was busy staring at BTC. Rank threshold cleared: Stellar. Whether you like it or not.
▪️ The fuel isn't pure vibes: Bitwise's spot NEAR fund launched Sept. 29 on NYSE Arca under ticker NRR. First US exchange-traded product giving boomers-and-desk-guys exposure without touching a wallet.
▪️ The second leg is NEAR Intents, its cross-chain trading layer shoveling over $31 billion cumulative through its explorer. That's real flow, not just Telegram hopium.
▪️ That flow wasn't free rent money for anyone holding bags last week when someone drained about $3 million out of Intents' deposit and withdrawal plumbing. Rails hit: ~$3M. Refund status: returned.
▪️ That got cleaned up fast — too fast for comfort, honestly. GM Alex Shevchenko announced Oct .
▪️ A week before this leg ripping higher, it already printed close-on-$30-billion worth of momentum, nearly plus eighty percent. Close enough to chart-screaming territory.

📊 Rails hit: ~$3M
📊 Refund status: returned
📊 Rank threshold cleared: Stellar

@thisoption

🚨 Uncle Sam just marched $770M of seized Bitcoin into Coinbase Prime — and half of it is vintage Bitfinex hacker loot

The US government moved 9,261 Bitcoin — roughly $770 million — into its seizure address at Coinbase Prime over two days. Half that pile is old Bitfinex hacker loot, part of it came out of Binance seizures, and another 2,456 coins landed from wallets nobody had ever publicly tied to federal law enforcement before. Custody, not a listing desk — but that has never once stopped the chat from sweating.

▪️ The flow landed in the government's seizure address on Coinbase Prime — Coinbase has been the US Marshals Service custody provider for seized assets since 2024.
▪️ Half the stash traces back to the Bitfinex hackers; another slice comes from known Binance seizures.
▪️ The remaining 2,456 BTC came out of previously unknown holdings and may be entirely new law enforcement seizures. Yes, 'may'. Read it twice.
▪️ Precedent exists: in July the feds pushed $297 million in Bitcoin and Ether into the same venue.
▪️ A straight sale would slap straight into Trump's March 2025 executive order saying seized Bitcoin belongs in the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve instead of on your order book.
▪️ Cointelegraph pinged both the US Marshals and the DOJ for comment on these transfers — silence so far. Shocking.

📊 Total moved: $770M
📊 Bitcoin transferred: 9,261 BTC
📊 Unknown-origin coins: 2,456 BTC
📊 July move: $297M

Every time these wallets twitch, half of Crypto Twitter starts shorting ghosts because somebody decided 'custody' means 'about to dump'. A custody provider is not an exchange listing desk — coins parked at Coinbase Prime are not offers sitting on your chart. The tell you actually watch is whether anything moves OUT of those addresses toward a trading venue. That is your signal. Until then you are just paying funding to a rumor somebody posted at 3am.

💬 «An additional 2,456 BTC originated from previously unknown holdings and was sent to the US government's seizure address on Coinbase Prime and may represent new law enforcement seizures.» — Galaxy Research

🔮 'We're not selling,' says an executive order nobody can enforce onchain

@thisoption

💀 Bitcoin knifes straight through its fat 81K bid wall, billions nuked

So much for that fat bid sitting under 81K holding everything up nicely forever. Apparently not. Bitcoin knifed straight through it down to an intraday low near 80K after yet another failed push back toward 87K that nobody trusts anymore.

▪️ Longs ate basically everything that got dumped on them during this 24-hour bloodletting, while shorts barely felt anything happening around them and quietly survived largely unscathed.
▪️ Exchanges force-closed positions whose collateral ran dry, selling whatever remained standing inside books that were already bleeding badly — turning your ordinary dip mechanics directly into full…
▪️ Roughly $700M evaporated inside just four hours, per CoinGlass tracking — and $650M of that came exclusively out of stacked leveraged bullish bets.
▪️ 166,769 separate trading accounts got completely wiped out during those same brutal 24 hours, per the CoinGlass tally published shortly after. That's not a dip, that's a harvest.
▪️ Ethereum actually bled worse than Bitcoin, despite the headlines obsessing over Bitcoin charts exclusively — $324M against Bitcoin's $240M, while ether slipped beneath...
▪️ Biggest single casualty recorded happened somewhere called Hyperliquid, where one ETH-USDT position worth about $20M got forcibly closed — the largest individual liquidation of the lot.

@thisoption

🩸 Longs ate a billion-dollar flush — and OGN still ran +97%

BTC is parked at $82,532 after a wick-flush toward $80K overnight. That dip alone cost crypto longs about a billion dollars on the long side, across derivatives desks worldwide. Total liquidations over the 24 hours: roughly $1.16 billion, both sides counted separately. Shorts? A minor fraction. The rest is rounding error. The downside pain was concentrated on the bulls, overwhelmingly. Yeah, that sentence was redundant — trimmed it. Natural speech, tolerable overlap, moving on.

▪️ OGN ripped +96% while everyone was busy staring at BTC's wick

📊 BTC: $82,532
📊 Long liquidations: ~$1 billion
📊 Total liquidations, 24h: ~$1.16 billion
📊 OGN: +97%

Why: the pain was one-sided. Bulls paid for everyone's exit liquidity, shorts got a papercut — that tells you exactly where the leverage was stacked. Textbook wick: hunt the stops toward $80K, flush the longs, then let price sit back at $82,532 like nothing happened. And OGN ripping +97% on the same tape is the tell — the money didn't leave, it just rotated.

🔮 Spoiler: that $80K wick wasn't an accident, it was someone's shopping trip. Stops hunted, longs flushed, price back where it started. Same script, new day.

@thisoption

⛓️ Empire Market's boss got 40 years and gave back $101M in bitcoin

Raheim Hamilton built Empire Market — a dark web bazaar that pushed over $430 million through drugs alone-ish volumes. The tab came due: 40 years behind the door, and $101M in bitcoin handed back. You get stopped out on a wick and call it bad luck; this guy got a whole federal accounting department on his ass.

▪️ Empire Market: dark web bazaar, over $430 million moved through drugs alone-ish volumes
▪️ Raheim Hamilton: the boss who ran the shop. The sentence: 40 years
▪️ $101M in bitcoin given back — traced, seized, gone. The chain doesn't forget and neither do the feds
▪️ The 'untraceable' pitch died again, and it died loud
▪️ Nobody in the chat got a refund. Nobody ever does
▪️ Same movie as every exit scam: shop closes, operator either gets cuffed or cashes out, retail eats the loss

📊 Sentence: 40 years
📊 Bitcoin handed back: $101M
📊 Volume through drugs alone-ish: $430M+

Here's what they're actually selling you: 'the feds won, justice served, case closed.' Look closer. A $430M+ operation ran for years, and the only money that came back came back to the government. The guy who built it gets 40 years; the people who bought from him get nothing; the people who aped into the tokenized version of the same fantasy get less than nothing. That's the entire market in one headline. Dark web bazaar, DeFi farm, a CEX with the withdrawal page stuck on 'maintenance' — different UI, identical ending. The operator is always anonymous until he isn't, and by the time he isn't, your bags were already his exit liquidity.

@thisoption

💥 Whale eats a forced sale on Hyperliquid and instantly longs again

A Hyperliquid whale got its ether bag force-closed overnight as ethereum knifed down toward its liquidation line — then wired in fresh margin half an hour later and bought straight back into the same trade.

▪️ Trackers picked up the book around early October after margin deposits landed in three linked Hyperliquid addresses holding hundreds of millions in longs across both ether and bitcoin.
▪️ Those positions weren't fresh — they'd been opened roughly two weeks earlier well above where spot was trading when things went bad.
▪️ Lookonchain flagged the danger publicly before it hit: part of the ether leg was sitting right on top of its forced-sale trigger levels.
▪️ Ether blew through them overnight anyway and a chunk of that stack got auto-dumped by the exchange.
▪️ Thirty minutes later the same wallet deposited fresh collateral and reopened a long near where it had just been wiped out.
▪️ The rest still sits split across two addresses running roughly mid-teens leverage — meaning only single-digit percentage downside before round two.

This is what public leverage looks like when someone refuses to tap out — every liquidation level is visible on-chain before it fires, and the whole chat gets a front-row seat to the show. Dude didn't get stopped out, he got reloaded: same wallet, same direction, same neighborhood, thirty minutes later. That's not conviction, that's a hostage situation with extra steps, and the market knows exactly where his line is drawn. Nobody's hunting him — they don't have to. He's got the map taped to his own forehead.

@thisoption

💰 Treasury's about to snatch $1B in Iranian crypto this week — and won't say where it sits

Scott Bessent hopped on Newsmax Thursday and said the quiet part loud: the US is “probably gonna seize a billion dollars of crypto this week,” all tied to Iran sanctions enforcement amid its latest military conflict that kicked off back in February. That’s roughly double what he bragged about clawing back from Tehran back in spring. Where those coins physically sit right now? He pointedly refused to say.

▪️ “We know where it is,and we are isolating them,” Bessent told Newsmax’s Greta Van Susteren at the Policy Summit. No exchange names. No wallet addresses. Nothing you could actually verify.
▪️ He wouldn’t clarify whether these assets come off specific exchanges or out of stablecoin issuers’ hands. That silence usually means somebody upstream already folded and handed over balances.
▪️ OFAC teed this whole thing up back in August by targeting crypto venues funneling money toward Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The trap was set months ago.
▪️ The stated goal isn’t law enforcement theater. It’s cutting off financial networks feeding Tehran “in dollars,in rials,or crypto,” per his own earlier framing.
▪️ Tether spent last year proving how fast freezes land under American pressure, sweeping up hundreds of millions worth of its own token across multiple rounds.
▪️ The UK runs an identical playbook against three exchanges linked to Russian flows. Freeze-first enforcement stopped being an Iran-only sport a while ago. This is the new normal, not a one-off.

📊 Seizure target announced Thursday: ~$1B
📊 Earlier claimed haul (April): $500M
📊 USDT frozen by Tether last year: $550M
📊 Of which single April round: $344M

If you park sizeable bags in stablecoins thinking they behave like dollars, know who actually controls your exit door. An issuer under regulatory heat freezes first and processes appeals never. Nothing here identifies which venue or address gets hit next, Treasury didn’t publish targets, and retail finds out when a withdrawal fails mid-trade. The counterparty risk lives upstream from your chart entirely, and nobody audits those pipes before you wire into them. That’s the part nobody puts on the chart.

💬 «We know where it is,and we are isolating them.»

@thisoption

🧨 Big two snoring while small caps rip and seized coins start walking

Bitcoin and Ethereum are flatlining into the morning while action hides down-cap — gainers running hard on real volume, losers bleeding quietly into nothingburger territory nobody gives a shit about. Meanwhile our newsroom feed reads less like markets and more like a crime blotter settling old scores overnight. Morning mood is greedy again after yesterday's greedy-lite edition.

▪️ MAGIC leads top gainer board climbing triple-digit territory while KAIA trails hot behind at double-digits pace, trailed further by RLC WLD NEAR stacking green candles across mid-caps.
▪️ Sell-side board barely counts as pain — PUMP SPCXB HYPE TRX SOL all slipping fractions despite decent turnover, holders just sitting tight waiting next rotation.
▪️ A Virginia man running dark-web drug marketplace facilitating hundreds of millions narcotics sales gets slapped decades sentence plus agrees forfeiting bitcoin fortune, partner separately…
▪️ A wallet tied straight back to infamous Bitfinex hack wakes up moving thousands bitcoin fresh addresses overnight — reminder stolen supply still parked somewhere waiting moment dump onto market…
▪️ US Treasury Secretary openly says Washington planning seizing roughly billion crypto linked Iran this week, marking latest sanctions-enforcement grab digital assets.
▪️ What happens next depends on whether seized-and-freed coins hit orderbooks same time small-cap pump crowd runs out fresh exit liquidity.

That Bitfinex-linked stack sitting movable means an overhang nobody prices until seller pulls trigger mid-pump. Retail chasing morning green candles should clock who actually owns float they buying into. Iran seizure headlines remind everyone enforcement now routine pipeline not shock event anymore.

🔮 Small caps partying while old stolen coins warm engines never ends well.

@thisoption

🐋 Right on cue: a whale drops a fresh bitcoin short on Hyperliquid

One Hyperliquid account surfaced today holding exactly one position — a bitcoin perp short worth about $32.36 million.

▪️ 391.48 BTC entered around $82,863 on 13x cross leverage, which means the entire account lives or dies on this single trade. No hedge, no plan B, just conviction and a liquidation price.
▪️ Liquidation sits at $99,801 — roughly 20% above current price. That's patient, not reckless. Whoever's behind this isn't sweating the tape.
▪️ $7.19M equity backing the position while controlling close to 1% of the exchange's total open interest, around 38,040 BTC. Small account, big footprint.
▪️ Track record from the tracker service: 4,726 trades, $952,000 weekly perps profit, max drawdown 11%. Not a tourist, not a first-timer — this one has done the reps.
▪️ Position is up $75,532 right now, plus $64,249 already milked out of longs through funding fees. Longs are literally paying this guy to sit there and be right.
▪️ The Coinglass map making the rounds shows $3.3B in shorts stacked between current levels and the $85k zone — forced buybacks up there would light the squeeze the bears keep praying for.

@thisoption

🔍 Fake buyer flipped the Chinese laundering crew — now they're tracing millions from the Bybit haul

North Korean hackers lifted roughly $1. They figured cashing out was easy money. Then a blockchain sleuth walked straight into their Chinese laundering operation pretending to be a paying customer, burning real cash just to buy access info — and that one move helped recover a chunk of the stolen fortune. Sit with that for a second: you don't out-hack these guys, you buy a seat at their table like any other client.

@thisoption

☕️ Majors flatline so you can nap while alts rip double digits

BTC parked at $83K, ETH barely blinked overnight — that boring tape up top is hiding every bit of the action underneath.

▪️ LUMIA exploded higher on thin volume — shallow books, so whoever chased that candle is now somebody else's exit liquidity.
▪️ STRK ran hard too but actually had real money behind it — that's the one move on today's gainers list worth respecting.
▪️ TIA and ERA also popped double digits alongside CHIP — textbook alt rotation while the majors go quiet.
▪️ Flip side: MAGIC got bent over hardest among the losers — everything else just bled quietly by comparison.
▪️ A Hyperliquid trader surfaced holding a massive bitcoin short, right around the anniversary of last October's crash that wiped out billions in leveraged bets.
▪️ ZachXBT went undercover posing as a client inside a Chinese laundering network to trace part of Bybit's stolen billions from February last year.

📊 $12 million traced: $12 million traced

@thisoption

🩸 Selling your bitcoins low and buying them high isn't charity

Japanese treasury outfit Metaplan et sold its own BTC stack and bought it back higher. On purpose. Not charity, not a fat finger — creditors wanted proof management would actually hit sell orders instead of doing the ape cold-storage death grip when the tape gets ugly.

▪️ Oct. 5 filing lays it out: converting coins to cash was part of the credit-rating chase and better financing access
▪️ Lenders wanted confidence management could use the holdings to meet obligations — even though shareholders bought in precisely because of those holdings
▪️ Proving that point wasn't cheap

📊 Sale proceeds: ¥124. 7 billion
📊 Repurchase spend: ¥149. 9 billion
📊 Paid per coin vs sale: rough
📊 Stack at Sept. 30: 44, 000 BTC

Shareholders wait years for price ladders up. Lenders have contracts with dates stamped on them. Same reserve has to please both crowds at once — somehow magically. That's the trick: you can't be a long-term conviction play and a short-term ATM for creditors without someone getting fucked.

🔮 They burned billions just to prove they'd dump bags. Remember that next time some suit shills you 'forever hodl' corporate treasuries.

@thisoption

🔐 Ledger says the box was rigged. Nobody says who had their hands on it before you did

Ledger admits one victim's hardware wallet had an unauthorized implant in it. Investigator Specter reckons total losses may top $86M across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron. The device came from a third-party reseller, CryptoBilis, which Ledger had listed as authorized in Southeast Asia. Ledger's line: the factory was clean, one reseller went rogue, and the box you unpacked is not the box Ledger shipped. Cute. Very cute.

▪️ The victims bought their Ledger devices from CryptoBilis, an authorized Ledger reseller in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Authorized, mind you.
▪️ Ledger confirmed that one impacted user's device had an unauthorized hardware implant. Translation: someone physically messed with the hardware before it reached the buyer.
▪️ Specter estimates losses may exceed $86M across Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tron. Ledger hasn't confirmed the number of affected customers or the value of the losses.
▪️ CryptoBilis has stopped selling all hardware wallet inventory until the investigation is concluded. Ledger says it's in active talks with the reseller on next steps.
▪️ Ledger's advice: if you bought from this reseller and haven't run setup yet, don't start it. If you already set up the device, move your assets to a new Ledger signer with a new seed.
▪️ Ledger says its own infrastructure, systems and services were not compromised. Anyone with info can reach its bounty program at bounty@ledger.fr. Good for Ledger's servers.

📊 Reseller countries: 3

If you bought a Ledger from a third-party seller, especially in Southeast Asia, your seed may have been generated on a device someone else had already touched. Ledger's position is that the factory was clean and the problem is one reseller. But the only safe move it's recommending is to abandon the seed on any box you haven't set up yet and migrate funds on any box you have. Nobody has said how many wallets are affected, so the real count is still a guess. Hardware wallet, they said. Sure.

💬 «Ledger's infrastructure, systems and services were not compromised.» — Ledger

🔮 Ledger's servers are clean. So who was holding the box between the warehouse and your desk?

@thisoption

🔒 Liquid Network: 35 days frozen after ~4,000 BTC drained, and LBTC still can't be redeemed

Liquid Network has been sitting on frozen peg-outs for 35 days after nearly 4,000 BTC got drained. The 'white hat' hacker gave back most of the loot, then quietly kept the rest as a 'bounty'. LBTC holders still can't turn their tokens into real bitcoin. Some bounty program.

▪️ The attacker exploited a vulnerability in Liquid's Elements software and pulled nearly 4,000 BTC out of the L2 network. Nice hole to find.
▪️ By Sept. 7 they had returned about 3,400 BTC, then kept 598.5 BTC and demanded a 10% bounty from Blockstream. Negotiating with a straight face, that takes talent.
▪️ Blockstream refused outright and demanded the rest back. Nothing came back. The 598.5 BTC is still sitting in that wallet, and it's not going anywhere on its own.
▪️ Peg-out operations remain suspended. Liquid's Sept. 29 update said an independent external audit of Elements v23.3.4 is underway. Translation: they're still checking how the door got opened.
▪️ The Liquid Federation is replacing PAK list entries and moving all peg-out keys to cold storage before restarting redemptions. Keys go to cold storage after the fire, very on brand.
▪️ Holders who couldn't wait moved coins out through SideSwap and SideShift.ai, paying roughly 5% in spread and fees, with weeks lost to thin liquidity. Those who waited still get to hold the bag.

📊 Drained from Liquid: ~4,000 BTC
📊 Returned by attacker: 3,400 BTC
📊 Still held by attacker: 598.5 BTC ($49.69M)
📊 Liquid backing: 86%

Every LBTC holder is down 14% on backing, and nobody has a restart date. The attacker's wallet is still getting address-poisoning spam and weird OP_RETURN messages, which is exactly what a dead end looks like. If you hold LBTC, the real question is whether the audit and key rotation finish before the people who paid the 5% exit tax are the only ones who got out.

💬 «Communications have been sparse and inconsistent.» — Sovereign Money

🔮 A 'white hat' sitting on 598 BTC and asking for 10% is not a bounty. It's a ransom with a nicer name.

@thisoption

📊 Majors snoozing green, alts running casino night: one pump, one dump, crowd getting drunk on green candles

BTC +1.40% and ETH +2.36% over 24h. Majors are green and boring, so nobody's panicking. Below them it's a casino, and the house pays out to whoever chased the first green candle. Spoiler: the house is you.

▪️ W +59.6% on $35M and S +26.5% on $42M lead the pumps. CKB +22.8%, MAGIC +17.0%, FIL +14.1% trail behind. The feed doesn't say why any of them moved. So you're buying a story nobody bothered to write.
▪️ LUMIA -26.1% on $25M was the worst drop of the day, MUBARAK -10.1% on $23M second. Same tape, opposite direction. The chat that chased the green is usually the one stuck holding the red bag.
▪️ STRK traded $87M at -0.1%. WLD moved $37M at -0.2%, RLUSD $28M flat. Heavy money parked in place is either accumulation or someone unloading straight into your bid. Pick your poison.
▪️ Metaplanet sold 10,000 BTC for ¥124.7B, then bought back 11,000 BTC for ¥149.9B, paying ~9.3% more per coin. Call it treasury management, I call it paying a premium to look solvent.
▪️ Ledger confirmed an unauthorized hardware implant tied to its devices, losses may top $86M. The company says it looks isolated to one reseller and its Southeast Asian market.
▪️ An attacker exploited a Liquid Network Elements vulnerability 35 days ago and drained nearly 4,000 BTC. Thirty-five days and the bag is still waiting for an answer.

📊 BTC 24h: $84,204
📊 ETH 24h: $2,566.29
📊 Fear & Greed (yesterday 61): 69 Greed

Greed at 69, up from 61 yesterday. The crowd is warming up, and that's exactly when the chat starts buying screenshots of green candles and dumping the dip on whoever's late. Liquid holders can't peg out LBTC to bitcoin until the audit ends. Ledger users are waiting on a company still saying 'isolated' while the loss figure could keep climbing. Hope isn't a strategy, it's a bag.

🔮 Metaplanet paid 9.3% extra per coin to look creditworthy. Greed at 69 says the crowd will pay up too.

@thisoption

🩸 BTC closes the week above $83K and the shorts get cooked

The bears got rinsed again. About $140 million in short positions were liquidated after bitcoin confirmed a weekly close above $83,000, and price is back near $84,000. Kook Capital's heatmap already shows a fresh wall of shorts stacked at $86,000 to $88,000. Same trap, just a floor higher. Bears never learn. They keep buying the ceiling.

▪️ The setup: BTC opened the week of Oct. 5 at $86,530, wicked down to $80,393, and the crowd piled into shorts on that dip. Classic. Someone sees a red candle and decides the world is ending.
▪️ Crypto liquidations topped $1.1 billion over the same stretch. This wasn't a one-coin accident. The whole casino got squeezed.
▪️ Kook Capital data: $26.34M in BTC liquidations, 93.3% of them shorts. ETH shorts lost $29.5M, and 80.9% of that was also shorts. Same story, different ticker.
▪️ Alts got farmed too: Starknet's STRK lost $15.82M in liquidations and NEAR another $7.18M. Small caps bleed harder. Nobody's surprised.
▪️ The trigger: the weekly candle closed near $83,800 Sunday night. Anyone short from $80K got the signal to cover, and covering is exactly the fuel the squeeze runs on.
▪️ Next trap: KillaXBT's map shows dense short clusters from roughly $86,000 to $88,000, with longs sitting lower around $80,000 to $82,500. Read it again.

📊 BTC weekly close: $83,773
📊 Spot BTC ETF outflows, Oct. 5 to 9: $681M
📊 Binance BTCUSDT funding: 0.002% per 8h
📊 Open interest on Binance BTCUSDT: $7.75B

Positioning looks neutral for now: funding is near zero, open interest is flat, and about 58% of Binance accounts are long. Translation: nobody's all-in yet. The weak link is spot. ETFs bled $681M and Coinbase's premium is deep negative, so US buyers are paying less than offshore. Real money in the US isn't buying this dip. The bulls need a consistent spot bid, and until they get one, that $86K to $88K short cluster is the next fuel if price pushes through.

💬 «Everybody piled into shorts after that $80k wick.» — Kook Capital

🔮 Shorts are stacked at $86-88K again. Guess who's going to be the exit liquidity this time?

@thisoption