A Major Exit: Bullish ETH?

Plus, 📉 Traders in turmoil, 💰 Boost for Bybit, ⚖️ Another SEC crypto probe closed, and more!

Author

Juan Aranovich
February 26, 2025

Hi! 

In today’s edition:

  • 🔄 Ethereum Foundation exec exits

  • 💥 Bitcoin: Liquidation situation

  • 💸 Bybit’s massive ETH injection

  • 🦄 UNI up as Uniswap probe stood down

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By Tikta

Ethereum Foundation Director Steps Down

Aya Miyaguchi, the Ethereum Foundation’s executive director since 2018, says she will be stepping down from her current role and transitioning to a new position as the foundation's president.

She said she had “made this decision a year ago” but that “recent events” had given her “the perfect opportunity to reflect on what truly matters.”

Miyaguchi had been facing calls to leave the foundation for months as Ethereum has tried to manage a crisis around issues such as its technical roadmap, the fact that new developers were more drawn to Solana last year, and ETH’s lackluster price action compared to the two other most established chains, Bitcoin and Solana.

Both Miyaguchi and Ethereum creator Viltalik Buterin came under fire for poor marketing, the foundation’s lack of support for DeFi, and the fact that it used the chain only to sell ETH rather than using DeFi to earn interest on ETH. 

The community was also incensed by an old interview in which Miyaguchi said she had tried to guide the foundation to “reject the culture of competing and winning.” 

Her new role appears to be less hands-on than the one she is leaving, and will see her focus on enhancing institutional partnerships and promoting Ethereum's cultural narratives.

Buterin praised Miyaguchi’s stewardship in past Ethereum hard forks, client interoperability workshops, and other events during her seven years on the job. 

The move at the top comes after Buterin announced “large changes to [the] EF leadership structure” last month. 

The goals of restructuring include improving the technical expertise of the foundation’s leadership and boosting two-way communication between the foundation and ecosystem actors.

Some Ethereum community members remained unimpressed by the leadership change. Eric Conner, a formerly prominent Ethereum advocate whose frustrations with the EF caused him leave Ethereum a month ago to focus instead on crypto and AI, wrote on X, “I can't fully comment if I'm bullish or bearish the Aya and EF leadership change. No one knows what ‘President’ is. No one knows the new leadership structure is. No one knows who the new ED is. Guess we will eventually see.”

Bitcoin sank to its lowest level in three months, hitting a low of $86,008 on Tuesday before recovering to around $88,000 at 8 p.m. ET.

The selloff triggered large-scale liquidations — a total of $1.09 billion was wiped off crypto exchanges in a 24-hour period, according to data from CoinGlass.

Traders betting on higher prices suffered the most pain, accounting for 80% of all liquidations, with Bitcoin long liquidations alone exceeding $535 million.

Crypto was just one casualty on a day that saw investors pull money from risk assets en masse. 

The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq touched one-month lows amid gloomy consumer confidence data and heightened fears about the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the domestic and global economies. 

Crypto venture firm Mirana Ventures has injected $600 million worth of ETH into its strategic partner and anchor capital provider, Bybit, over the course of three days, data from blockchain analysis platform Arkham show.

Mirana’s deposits helped Bybit fill a gap in its reserves, which took a massive hit following a $1.5 billion exploit last weekend that is suspected to have been carried out by North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus.

Mirana acquired the ETH by selling $500 million of BTC and $100 million of USDT through over-the-counter market makers FalconX, Galaxy Digital, and Wintermute, according to Arkham.

Mirana’s selling likely contributed to the massive BTC liquidations that took place on Tuesday. 

“Sometimes feels like everyone is just passing around the same bag while the music plays,”tech journalist Jacob Silverman wrote on X.

North Korean hackers just pulled off the biggest heist in crypto history — and quite possibly all history. Here’s how they get into systems and why they bide their time before striking.

Another potential crypto lawsuit has bitten the dust — this time it was Uniswap, the largest decentralized exchange, declaring a win.

“The SEC has officially closed — with no action — its multi-year investigation into Uniswap Labs,” the exchange said in a blog post, referring to the Wells Notice it received from the regulator last April.

In the past month alone, the SEC has dropped investigations of Coinbase, Robinhood, and OpenSea amid what appears to be a significant shift in the approach to crypto under the Trump administration.

Uniswap's native UNI token rose 4.6% to an intraday high of $8.53 following the news, even as the broader crypto market tracked lower.

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  • 💻 Chainflip is deploying a crucial upgrade to prevent the Bybit hackers from using its cross-chain decentralized exchange, with new risk management measures designed to protect liquidity providers from illicit flows.

  • 🔒 Aave’s vote to restrict lending on Polygon’s proof-of-stake chain could result in a loss of more than $300 million in total value locked due to concerns over Polygon’s riskier yield generation methods and vulnerability to bridge exploits.

  • 🐍💰 Kaspersky warns that hackers are embedding malicious code in fake GitHub projects such as Telegram bots and gaming tools to steal Bitcoin, with one victim losing over $400,000 in a single attack.

  • 📉 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw their largest-ever single-day outflow of $1 billion, bringing the six-day money drain to $2 billion.

  • 💵 Crypto index fund manager Bitwise raised $70 million in equity to enhance its balance sheet and expand its investment capabilities, including further developing its spot BTC and ETH exchange-traded funds.

  • 💸 Mavryk Dynamics closed $5.2 million to advance its layer 1 blockchain focused on tokenizing real-world assets and integrating decentralized finance, aiming to make digital asset ownership more accessible.

  • 🛰️ Geodnet secured $8 million, led by Multicoin, to enhance its hyper-accurate location network for industrial use, offering mapping data as precise as the dimensions of a golf ball, catering to farming drones and robots.

  1. Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain (Redux) by Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan

  2. From Breach to Resilience: Building a More Robust Crypto Infrastructure in the Wake of the Bybit Hack by Eliézer Ndinga, head of strategy and business development at 21.co, the parent company of 21Shares

  3. DL News: Crypto is digesting the end of the memecoin era. But four sectors offer hope

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