Here’s what happened in crypto today

Today in crypto, Strategy added to its BTC treasury for the first time in two months. Cronos halted its network after a Tectonic exploit involving an estimated $75 million, with most attacker-controlled assets remaining onchain, while Real Trump Coins denied launching or authorizing the Trump Digital GOLD token, blaming “third-party bad actors” for its promotion.

Strategy buys $370M Bitcoin in first corporate purchase since June

Michael Saylor’s Strategy acquired 4,603 Bitcoin for $370 million, marking the first acquisition from the largest corporate Bitcoin holder in two months.

Strategy acquired 4,603 Bitcoin (BTC) at an average purchase price of $80,318, pushing its holdings to 845,050 BTC, acquired for a total of $63.3 billion at an average price of $75,413, according to a Monday 8-k filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Bitcoin purchase was funded by the net proceeds of a 602 million MSTR common stock sale. The company used $30 million of the net proceeds to increase its USD Cash reserve and $151.8 million to repurchase its preferred STRC stock.

Nasdaq-traded MSTR was up less than 1% in Monday’s pre-market activity, after dropping more than 7% on Friday.

The move marks Strategy’s first corporate Bitcoin acquisition since mid-June, when the company last acquired 1,587 BTC for roughly $100 million. 

Cronos halts network after Tectonic exploit involving estimated $75M

Cronos halted its blockchain after an exploit targeting decentralized lending protocol Tectonic involved an estimated $75 million, most of which remains on the Cronos network at the time of writing. 

On Sunday, Cronos said it identified an exploit in Tectonic and halted the network, promising updates. Tectonic separately warned users not to interact with the protocol while it investigated. Neither project has confirmed the cause or loss, and no restart timeline had been announced at publication.

Researcher Weilin Li said the attacker exploited TONIC’s 20% collateral factor and thin liquidity, pumping the governance token’s price 100-fold within 20 minutes before borrowing other assets. Li described it as a “Mango-market style” pump-and-borrow attack. 

Li initially estimated $66 million was affected. He said the attacker bridged about $6 million to Ethereum before the halt, leaving $60 million on Cronos. Li later identified another attacker-controlled address holding about $8 million, bringing his estimated loss to roughly $75 million. 

Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek said the company’s app and exchange were unaffected and operating normally, adding that funds there were safe. 

Cronos and Tectonic have not said whether they will restrict the attacker’s addresses, recover the assets or compensate affected users. Cointelegraph contacted both projects and Crypto.com for comment. 

Real Trump Coins denies launching GOLD token, blames ‘bad actors’

Real Trump Coins denied launching, promoting or authorizing the Trump Digital GOLD token, blaming “third-party bad actors” after the Solana-based token appeared on its X account and RealTrumpCoins.com.

“Trump Coins has not authorized and will not launch, promote, or authorize any digital token,” the company said, adding that it was working with authorities to investigate.

The X posts promoting GOLD were later deleted, and the account links to a separate website, TrumpCoins.com. However, it had directed customers to RealTrumpCoins.com as recently as Aug. 25, and that site was still promoting GOLD at the time of publication.

Trump also continued to follow the Real Trump Coins X account, one of 53 accounts he followed on the platform.