Crypto today: Corporate crypto accumulation has outpaced Bitcoin mining production by three times over since July. JPMorgan executives warned that some stablecoin designs could threaten the regulated banking system, while security firm SlowMist traced a $26 million Truebit exploit to a smart contract bug.
Crypto treasury buying outpaces Bitcoin supply at 3-to-1
Corporate digital asset treasuries (DATs) added a net 260,000 Bitcoin to their balance sheets over the past six months, far outpacing the estimated 82,000 coins mined over the same period.
Over the past six months, Bitcoin treasuries held by public and private companies have increased from approximately 854,000 BTC to 1.11 million BTC, on-chain analytics provider Glassnode reported on Tuesday.
This equates to an expansion of around 260,000 BTC, worth roughly $25 billion at current market prices, or 43,000 BTC per month.
Bitcoin miners, which produce on average 450 BTC per day, mined around 82,000 coins over the same period, which could indicate a favorable supply-demand dynamic at play.
Yield-bearing stablecoins risk 'dangerous' parallel banking system: JPMorgan CFO
Stablecoins emerged as a topic during JPMorgan Chase’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, with executives expressing support for blockchain technology while warning that certain stablecoin designs could threaten the regulated banking system.
The comments came in response to a question from Evercore analyst Glenn Schorr, who asked about stablecoins in light of recent industry lobbying by the American Bankers Association and ongoing congressional markups related to digital asset legislation.
Responding to the question, JPMorgan chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum said the bank’s position aligns with the intent of the GENIUS Act, which seeks to establish guardrails around stablecoin issuance.
Barnum warned against the use of interest-bearing stablecoins that replicate traditional banking without the equivalent oversight.
“The creation of a parallel banking system that sort of has all the features of banking, including something that looks a lot like a deposit that pays interest, without the associated prudential safeguards that have been developed over hundreds of years of bank regulation, is an obviously dangerous and undesirable thing,” he said.
Barnum added that while JPMorgan welcomes competition and innovation, it remains firmly opposed to the emergence of a parallel banking system operating outside established regulatory protections.
As Cointelegraph reported last May, the US banking lobby views yield-bearing stablecoins as a major disruption to its business model, with one industry insider describing the response as a full-blown “panic.” The concern is not without merit.
Stablecoins have grown rapidly as tools for payments, onchain settlement and dollar access, offering faster transactions and lower costs. The prospect of yield-bearing versions only sharpens the threat, particularly as banks continue to offer depositors relatively modest interest rates.
Truebit exploit exposes smart-contract flaw behind $26 million token mint
A $26 million exploit of the offline computation protocol Truebit stemmed from a smart-contract flaw that allowed an attacker to mint tokens at near-zero cost, highlighting persistent security risks even in long-running blockchain projects.
Truebit suffered the $26 million exploit that resulted in a 99% crash for the Truebit (TRU) token, Cointelegraph reported on Friday.
The attacker abused a loophole in the protocol’s smart-contract logic, which enabled them to mint “massive amounts of tokens without paying any ETH,” according to blockchain security company SlowMist, which published a post-mortem analysis on Tuesday.
“Due to a lack of overflow protection in an integer addition operation, the Purchase contract of Truebit Protocol produced an incorrect result when calculating the amount of ETH required to mint TRU tokens,” SlowMist said.
The smart contract’s price calculations were then “erroneously reduced to zero,” enabling the attacker to drain the contract’s reserves by minting $26 million worth of tokens “at nearly no cost,” the post mortem said.
Since the contract was compiled with Solidity 0.6.10, the prior version didn't include built-in overflow checks, which caused calculations exceeding the maximum value of “uint256” to result in a “silent overflow,” causing the result to “wrap around a small value near zero.”
