Core Scientific shareholders vote “No” on CoreWeave acquisition

Core Scientific shareholders voted against a proposed acquisition by the company’s principal AI partner, CoreWeave. CoreWeave offered to purchase Core Scientific earlier this year in an all-stock deal valued at $9 billion. - link

OUR TAKE: What’s the old saying, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Well, this isn’t like that at all, really. It’s more like, “Why sell the cow when it’s squirting golden milk?”

But too much has changed in the last few months from when the deal was proposed. Since CoreWeave announced the deal, valuations for bitcoin miners-turned-AI-darlings popping off left and right, and it became very clear to investors over the summer that CoreWeave’s deal undervalued Core Scientific’s assets.

Let’s take a look at Riot, for example, a company that has only discussed retrofitting its Corsicana site for AI/HPC and which has no anchor tenant for this load. Riot is currently valued at $7.8 billion, just a buck and 20 cents shy of CoreWeave’s valuation of Core Scientific under the failed merger.

Why should Core Scientific sell its business, which includes 590 MW of contracted capacity with CoreWeave for $10 billion over 12 years, for a song and a dance, investors argued? The math is even less appealing when you consider that Core Scientific has another 400 MW of bitcoin mining capacity that could be allocated to AI/HPC workloads.

Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan said that it plans to phase out its bitcoin mining operations entirely over the next three years to focus solely on AI/HPC workloads. The company is currently evaluating additional power opportunities that would bring its total capacity from 1.5 GW to 3.3 GW.

So a failure today for Core Scentific’s management, which certainly missed out on a nice pay day, will likely translate into a much dearer win later on.

One final thought on all of this: we can’t help but wonder what this means for all of those Proto miners that Core Scientific ordered. Core Scientific was a helluva anchor tenant for an ASIC manufacturing newcomer which may have unfortunately launched a U.S.-first mining product at a time when U.S. bitcoin mining is on the out…

-CMH

AWS outage leaves L2s and NFT platforms offline

On Monday a major service disruption at AWS’s us-east-1 region triggered failures across a number of blockchain-adjacent services, including the Base L2 and major NFT platforms. While this didn’t impact block production on chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, many users complained of inaccessible or degraded performance on L2s and crypto platforms.

OUR TAKE: The emperor has no clothes because everything’s just an API. (Obligatory “Bitcoin will never go offline” – well except for that one time).

But why did “crypto” struggle when it’s supposed to be decentralized?

This is where the difference between a “blockchain” and an “application” really matters.

For example, Ethereum itself didn’t go down or stop creating blocks, but the applications that run on servers accessing Ethereum went down.

Many users found that their favorite web wallet such as Phantom or Metamask wouldn’t show their balances or worse: display their NFTs 😱 

These applications rely on centralized servers (probably at the infamous us-east-1) that went down.

Basically, your Bored Ape didn’t disappear from Ethereum; it disappeared from Amazon.

I’m far from the only person saying this: cloud is clearly a hidden systemic risk for crypto.

We’ve seen that pretty much every blockchain except Bitcoin has made design choices that push users farther away from autonomous, direct use of the chain. This means that most users are functionally reliant on centralized services, even the power users.

Hopefully this was a wakeup call for the crypto community. 

Perhaps they’ll also wake up to the fact they should have been buying Bitcoin this whole time.

-CBS

Global Hashrate Heatmap: Q4 2025 Update

The USA controls 37.8% of Bitcoin's network. Russia and China follow. But who else made the top 10? Our latest heatmap reveals the shifting geography of mining power.

→ Explore the interactive map

Core Scientific, OpenAI named in worker comp lawsuit alleging “transformer explosion”

A man who claims to have worked on a Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) facility in Denton, Texas is suing the bitcoin miner, its key partner CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV), and even OpenAI, alleging that he “sustained catastrophic burn injuries when electrical transformers exploded at a worksite in Denton, Texas,” according to a lawsuit filed by Arnold & Itkin LLP - link

Nevada halts crypto custodian Fortress Trust amid massive liquidity deficit

The Nevada Financial Institutions Division issued a cease-and-desist order on Oct. 22 against Fortress Trust (now Elemental Financial Technologies Inc.), citing a severe liquidity mismatch: roughly $8 million in fiat and $4 million in crypto owed to clients, while the firm reportedly holds less than $200,000 in cash. - link

Metaplanet Inc. launches $500M share buyback after mNAV dips below 1x

Metaplanet ($MTPLF) has adopted a new Capital Allocation Policy that pauses common-share issuances when the multiple on its net asset value (mNAV) falls below 1x, and it also authorized up to ¥75 billion worth $500M in buybacks and issuing perpetual preferred shares to fund further bitcoin acquisitions. - link

Standard Chartered predicts bitcoin will dip below $100K before rebounding

In a recent note, Standard Chartered analyst Geoffrey Kendrick called a drop below $100,000 “inevitable” in the near term, while also flagging it as perhaps the “last time Bitcoin is ever” under six figures. - link

Canaan wins 4.5 MW mining server contract to support Japan’s power grid stability

Canaan Inc. (CAN) announced in a press release that it has secured a sales contract to deploy 4.5 MW of its Avalon A1566HA-488T hydro-cooled mining servers for real-time grid balancing and energy efficiency optimization with a major Japanese utility company - link