ECB Wants to Establish Blockchain-Based Payment System: BBG

*SEC LAUNCHES CYBER AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES UNIT

*SEC CYBER UNIT WILL COMBAT FRAUD IN CRYPTO AMONG OTHER AREAS

SEC STAFF HAS AGREED IN PRINCIPLE TO DISMISS ITS UNLAWFUL ENFORCEMENT CASE AGAINST COINBASE, SUBJECT TO COMMISSIONER APPROVAL: LINK

*TRUMP EYES TARIFFS TO COUNTER DIGITAL TAXES HATED BY BIG TECH

President Trump is expected to sign a memorandum on Friday that allows for levies in response to digital services taxes imposed by some countries on US tech giants

*APPLE PULLS CLOUD ENCRYPTION FEATURE IN UK AFTER BACKDOOR ORDER

Apple is removing its most advanced, end-to-end encrypted security feature for cloud data in the United Kingdom, in a stunning development after the government ordered the company to build a backdoor for accessing user data.

*UK government ordered Apple to build a backdoor into customer data globally.

Currently monitoring suspicious outflows from Bybit of $1.46B+ will update as information becomes available

0x47666Fab8bd0Ac7003bce3f5C3585383F09486E2

ZachXBT: My sources confirm it's a security incident

BYBIT CEO CONFIRMS A ETH COLD WALLET WAS HACKED FOR $1.4B+ (401K ETH)

*Hacker took control of the specific ETH cold wallet we signed and transfered all ETH in the cold wallet to unidentified address. Please rest assured that all other cold wallets are secure. All withdraws are NORMAL.

Bybit Total Assets: $15.727B (per defillama)

Bybit Processing Withdrawals Normally: Onchain

*BYBIT CEO: Bybit is Solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of clients assets are 1 to 1 backed, we can cover the loss.

Ethena Labs : Not a single dollar of spot backing value is held on any exchange, including Bybit.

Update: the $30m of unrealised PNL noted in the prior post has been reduced to $10m and we expect to have zero unrealised PNL exposure to Bybit within the next hour.

There are currently $2.0b of liquid stablecoins in USDe backing which can be redeemed immediately if users wish.

2nd Update: The unrealised PNL exposure to Bybit has been reduced to zero

BYBIT CEO Livestream on the Latest ETH Wallet Incident: LIVE NOW

https://www.bybit.com/en/press/live/eth-wallet-incident

https://www.youtube.com/live/Pso66cnmdWk

*BTC DOWN 2.6%
*GOLD UP 0.3%

*SPX DOWN 1.3%
*NVIDIA DOWN 2.6%

*MICROSTRATEGY DOWN 5%
*COINBASE FALL 5.3%, NOW DOWN 18.5% SINCE EARNINGS ANNOUNCED LAST WEEK

Ethena Crypto Project Raises $100 Million to Fund Finance Foray: BBG

The fundraising, which hasn’t been previously reported, was completed in December and drew investors including Franklin Templeton and F-Prime Capital, the venture capital firm affiliated with Fidelity Investments.

MICROSTRATEGY ACQUIRES 20,356 BITCOINS AT AN AVG. PRICE OF $97,514 BETWEEN FEB. 18 & 23, 2025

Total Holdings: 499,096 BTC
Average Price: $66,357/BTC

The Week Ahead | @infinityhedge

•Trump to host first official Cabinet meeting on 26

•U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearing on “Exploring Bipartisan Legislative Frameworks for Digital Assets” on 26

•Amazon Event in NY that may include the launch of a revamped “Alexa” with AI on 26

•Nvidia Earnings on 26

•Fed’s Michael Barr to speak on novel activity supervision, like crypto-assets on 27

•US Core PCE ⚠️ (expected to cool to the slowest pace since June) on 28

•Deepseek’s Open Source Week, they'll be open-Sourcing 5 repos: whole week

Anthropic is finalizing a $3.5 billion funding round that values the startup behind the chatbot Claude at $61.5 billion: WSJ

*TRUMP: TARIFFS ON CANADA, MEXICO WILL GO FORWARD

Bybit Hack Forensics Report: Bybit

https://docsend.com/view/s/rmdi832mpt8u93s7

Bybit Hack Forensics Report: Link

⚠️ The root cause of the attack is malicious code originating from Safe{Wallet}'s infrastructure.

*AWS S3 or CloudFront account/APl Key of Safe Global was likely leaked or compromised.

*No indication of compromise was identified within Bybit's infrastructure.

SAFE Statement: Safe smart contracts unaffected, an attack was conducted by compromising a Safe {Wallet} developer machine which affected an account operated by Bybit....Safe{Wallet} has added security measures to eliminate the attack vector.

Tldr: Lazarus (hackers) compromised safe's AWS infrastructure to deploy a targeted java noscript payload specifically targeting Multisig Cold Wallet of Bybit. The attack was designed to activate during the next Bybit transaction. The JS code changed the content of the transaction during the signing process.

*TRUMP: WILL NOT STOP TARIFFS

*TRUMP: TARIFFS WILL GO ON, NOT ALL, BUT A LOT OF THEM