Hi! In today’s edition:
🥪 Ethereum's biggest sandwich bot, jaredfromsubway.eth, was drained for $7.5 million after an attacker turned its own logic against it
🟠 Michael Saylor teased more Bitcoin buying with a "more dots" post as Strategy's holdings hold at 846,842 BTC
📊 Charles Schwab is working with Cboe on yes-or-no S&P 500 options, its first prediction-markets move
⚡ A new proposal would let a validator majority redirect up to 10% of staking rewards to ecosystem funding
After Years of Sandwiching Traders, ‘jaredfromsubway’ Bot Gets Robbed
Jaredfromsubway.eth, one of Ethereum's most infamous MEV bots, was drained of more than $7.5 million after an attacker turned the bot's own automated logic against it. Security firm Blockaid said this was neither a phishing attack nor a contract bug. Instead, the attacker spent weeks deploying counterfeit tokens and pools mimicking WETH, USDC, and USDT that looked like easy profits.
The trap worked. Jared's bot issued token approvals to attacker-controlled helper contracts, and later trades left those permissions in place rather than spending them. The attacker then siphoned the funds out, with some routed to the attacker wallet and, per separate reporting, part of the haul moving through Tornado Cash.
The irony is hard to miss since Jared's bot has accounted for roughly 70% of Ethereum sandwich attacks, which drain traders of about $60 million a year. On June 22, the bot's wallet offered a 50% white-hat bounty for the return of 2,150 ETH within 48 hours.
More Dots? Saylor Signals Strategy Isn't Done Buying
Michael Saylor signaled another Bitcoin purchase on Sunday, posting Strategy's holdings tracker with the caption "Looks better with more dots." The chart plots the company's buys as orange dots against Bitcoin's price alongside its average purchase price.
The timing is conspicuous. Strategy's latest filing logged a small Bitcoin sale, not a buy, and the firm has gone three weeks without a new purchase. According to its official site, Strategy holds a Bitcoin reserve of 846,842 BTC, worth about $54,326 million at a current price of $64,143.
The tease arrives during an obvious lull. A June 1 filing showed Strategy sold 32 BTC for $2.5 million to cover preferred dividends, an unusual step for a firm built on hoarding. Its STRC preferred shares now carry an effective yield of 12.98%, an obligation it must service in cash. Monday's routine update will reveal whether the dots grew.
Schwab Plots S&P 500 Prediction Markets With Cboe
Charles Schwab is teaming up with Cboe Global Markets on a new options contract that would let customers place yes-or-no bets on where the S&P 500 lands, the brokerage's debut in prediction markets, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Where Polymarket and Kalshi lean on futures-style event contracts, Schwab's product behaves like a binary option: it pays a set sum or nothing, depending on whether the index finishes above or below a chosen level. The launch is slated for the coming months.
The two are also weighing a version built on Cboe's "Plus Zone," which hands traders a partial payout for near-misses. Schwab intends to stick to measurable market outcomes, steering clear of politics and sports. The push lands after Coinbase and Robinhood staked out their own positions in the sector.
Ethereum Proposal to Fund Devs From Validator Rewards Splits the Room
A new Ethereum proposal would let validators redirect part of their staking rewards toward ecosystem funding, and it is already dividing the community. Authored by Clément Lesaege, founder and CTO of Kleros, the plan would make a redirect rate mandatory for all validators if a majority agree, capped at 10% of rewards.
The design avoids hardcoding any recipient or funding minimum. Validators signal preferred recipient addresses, and execution clients aggregate them into a splitter contract through a "king of the hill" mechanism.
Reactions ran hot. Gnosis co-founder Martin Köppelmann called it the first public-goods funding idea he wouldn't dismiss immediately. Ex-Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist mocked the framing, quoting Gabriel Shapiro, who argued such proposals reflect insiders resisting a shift toward a more capitalistic Ethereum.
📺 Two Shows. Zero Fluff. Live Today. 🔴
Matt Cole, Chairman & CEO of Strive, makes the case that bitcoin treasuries are entering a more sophisticated phase — driven by new preferred equity instruments like SATA and STRC — and unpacks what they mean for credit markets, tokenization, and institutional sentiment.
Then Austin, Ram, and Chris take the desk: Strategy's stock keeps sliding, Coinbase just launched "real" tokenized stocks, regulators are circling the perps market, and the Kalshi vs. Polymarket rivalry is adding a wrinkle to the CFTC standoff — plus whether the AI trade is the next shoe to drop.
Two shows, back to back: Unchained live at 3:30pm ET, Bits + Bips at 4:30pm ET.
📊 Polymarket paid creators to post deceptive videos depicting fake winning bets, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. The reported scheme used a spoofed site to stage roughly $1.9 million in fabricated trades, drawing fresh regulatory attention to the prediction-market platform.
🏦 Franklin Templeton filed with the SEC for two "Bitcoin DRIP" ETFs that hold baskets of US stocks and reinvest the dividends into bitcoin rather than back into shares. Each fund starts at a 5% bitcoin weighting capped at 20%, with a potential launch around early September.
🔒 Taiko disclosed a compromise of its chain-state verification mechanism on June 22, warning that bridge security can no longer be relied on and urging users to withdraw funds immediately. BlockSec Phalcon pegged losses above $1.7 million and traced the likely cause to an exposed Raiko SGX enclave signing key on GitHub that let the attacker register rogue provers and pass fraudulent state proofs.
🟡 Altura is winding down its vault after processing more than 8.5 million USDT in instant redemptions over 24 hours, with CEO Ranveer Arora citing sustained withdrawal demand and market sentiment. The decision followed an earlier Altura statement that it had no exposure to the depegged Mainstreet (MSY) token, even as withdrawal pressure mounted across the sector.
🚨 Secret Network lost roughly $4.67 million in a June 10 exploit of a modified CW20-ICS20 bridge contract, according to a Common Prefix analysis published this week. The contract minted Secret-wrapped Axelar assets without verifying the source channel, letting the attacker forge deposits over a self-controlled channel and redeem real assets out of escrow.
⚖️ The Garcia brothers pleaded guilty to robbery after kidnapping a Minnesota family at gunpoint and forcing the transfer of more than $8 million in crypto, the DOJ said. The Texas siblings agreed to pay over $8 million in restitution, and each face up to 20 years in federal prison.
📉 Sonic Labs lost three board members as Michael Kong, Andre Cronje, and David Richardson resigned, with Matt Visser stepping in as CEO and Kosta Kourkoumelis as COO. The S token sits just above its June 21 all-time low of $0.02695, and new leadership framed the next 100 days around rebuilding trust.
🇰🇷 Toss Bank signed an MOU with the Solana Foundation to build cross-border payment infrastructure, becoming the first South Korean internet-only bank to partner with the organization. The bank will run a phased proof of concept for remittances and stablecoin transfers on Solana, with its 15 million customers as the eventual target market.
🇯🇵 Japan's National Business Pension Fund plans to invest about 1% of its roughly 21.3 billion yen in assets into crypto during fiscal 2026, a rare move for a domestic pension fund, per Nikkei. The Okayama-based fund, covering some 1,200 member companies, framed the allocation as currency-risk diversification away from a weakening dollar, investing through a passive fund.
💸 Coinbase Ventures invested in Multipli through the Base Ecosystem Fund, backing the real-world-asset and tokenized-credit protocol that manages about $300 million in assets. The deal follows Multipli's earlier $20 million round led by Pantera Capital, with Spartan Group and Sequoia participating.
Jesse Myers: On STRC’s depeg and what it means
