What caught our eye this week

New filings shed more light (and raise more questions) about the Swan Mining situation.

Hot on the heels of Swan Mining last week filing suit against former employees, new documents call into question whether or not Swan ever owned a mining business to begin with. Said employees walked out en-masse in August to newly formed companies to continue operating Tether-backed mining sites.

Swan framed August’s employee walkout as a corporate coup, branding it a conspiracy orchestrated by key internal personnel who ran Swan’s mining division. Concurrent with the walkout, Tether informed Swan on August 9 that it placed Swan’s former team members and contractors in charge of the mining operations, under the umbrella of their newly formed company, Proton Management.

Per the investor deck, the mining operation at the center of the suit required $400 million of capital and generated $84 million in the first half of 2024 alone. It appears, though, that Swan was not contractually entitled to any of this revenue. 

The Summer 2024 investor deck states that Swan and Tether constructed the joint-venture in such a way that Swan would only begin profit sharing once investors received a return on their capital. Blockspace Media obtained a July 2024 Swan shareholder letter that reiterates this point.

These findings reveal a struggle between Swan & Tether for it’s mining business. Blockspace’s Colin Harper breaks down the events timeline & obtained documents in our story published earlier this week.

Attend OP_NEXT, the Bitcoin scaling conference!

Enjoy our content and live in the Boston area? Come to OP_NEXT on Saturday, November 9! We’re talking Bitcoin scaling proposals with the authors of various BIPs, Bitcoin core developers and Bitcoin startups! Use code OCTOBER to get 25% off a general admission ticket today! Click the banner to learn more!

Chart of the week

Ordinals lending volume on track for 4 consecutive weeks of growth, as floor price of “blue chip” Ordinals collections continue to rise over the past few weeks.

Around the block

MagicEden is making moves

Step aside, Opensea, MagicEden has taken the baton for NFT marketplaces. MagicEden has been aggressively expanding cross-chain to Polygon, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Ordinals asset market. Notably, MagicEden is launching a token $ME only claimable through their newly launched cross-chain wallet. 

Murad is the new Memecoin ascendant

You may remember Murad Mahmudov of early “Pomp Podcast” and “The Ultimate Bitcoin Argument” fame. Well he’s back but this time he is the newly ascendant memecoin whisperer. Last week Murad joined the likes of Ansem as his giga-bullish memecoin presentation from Token2049 went viral. TL;DR: Murad is long a select set of cultish memecoins going into 2025.

Covenants on Bitcoin without a soft fork?

Mikhail Komarov of startup [[alloc] init] published a paper describing a method to implement covenants on Bitcoin without a soft fork. Bitcoin “PIPE” (Polynomial Inner Product Encryption) is a cryptographic technique to do advanced covenants on Bitcoin without altering Bitcoin’s core protocol.

CZ is out of jail a few days early

The $60 billion crypto titan CZ wrapped up his 4 month prison sentence and tweets “gm” to a giddy crypto twitter.

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