In brief
- Coinbase released a few more worrying details about the data breach it reported last week.
- Strategy got hit with a class action lawsuit, then launched a “crown jewel” of a $2.1 billion stock offering.
- A trio of banks are mulling a stablecoin contender, but it would be used on a permissioned network.
Public Keys is a weekly roundup from Decrypt that tracks the key publicly traded crypto companies.
This week:
Worrying details from Coinbase
The data breach Coinbase told users and investors about last week has gotten a little more worrying.
It’s not that more data has been stolen. But the company filed a disclosure with the Maine Attorney General that included a few key details that were missing from its SEC filing and blog post about the exploit.
The breach occurred on December 26, 2024, and wasn’t discovered until May 11, 2025. That means the company went 136 days without knowing customer data had been compromised. The only spot on Coinbase’s 8-K filing that mentions December is the boilerplate about forward looking statements.
In its blog post, Coinbase described the number of users impacted as “less than 1%” of its monthly transacting users—leaving readers to do the math on their own. But it was more explicit in the Maine filing, saying 69,461 users had data leaked.
Don’t get us wrong. The company’s stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the COIN ticker, has shaken off the post-disclosure investor jitters. It had climbed to $271.95 by yesterday’s close. That’s the highest the price has been since February and was likely spurred along by Bitcoin reaching a new all-time high.
But, uh, is there anything else we should know about that data breach? Asking for about 70,000 friends. With the personal details, including home addresses, of potentially high-net-worth individuals in the wind, TechCrunch and Arrington Capital Founder Michael Arrington is concerned lives could be at risk.
Run that ‘Crown Jewel’ fast
Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor and his company face a new class action lawsuit from investors who allege they were misled about the risks of the company’s aggressive Bitcoin accumulation strategy.
In particular, the plaintiffs take issue with Strategy saying in its latest earnings report that ““[w]e may not be able to regain profitability in future periods, particularly if we incur significant unrealized losses related to our digital assets.”
Filed in a Virginia federal court, the suit claims MicroStrategy downplayed the volatility of Bitcoin, leading to significant investor losses.
But you know the Strategy playbook by now: Bitcoin buying will continue until prices improve. Days later, the company unveiled a “crown jewel” offering of $2.1 billion worth of Perpetual Strife Preferred Stock (STRF).
Investors seem dubious of this latest offering, though. In the same week that Bitcoin twice set a new all-time high, MSTR shares are ending it 7% lower than they were last Friday.
Stable contenders
Recent progress on the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill in D.C. has Wall Street stalwarts JPMorgan, Citi, and Wells Fargo considering a partnership to create their own dollar-pegged stablecoin, according to a report earlier this week from The Wall Street Journal.
It’s potentially big if true, but unclear just how much market share the three banks could nab from the $248 billion worth of stables already in circulation, according to CoinGecko data.
There’s one detail that gives us pause: The banks are exploring tokenized deposit products—all good so far—and permissioned blockchains. That’s where a lot of big institutions start to lose on-chain credibility. (“Permissioned” is techno-speak for “private,” which makes these kinds of networks really just blockchains in name only.)
Compliance teams are still wary of conducting business on a public network. But when you take away the permissionless part, then projects start to look like the same old systems with buzzy new technology that makes them faster and cheaper.
But going the fully permissionless route isn’t a slam dunk, either. PayPal launched its PYUSD stablecoin on none other than Ethereum in August 2023. It’s currently the 110th largest stablecoin with a $880 million market capitalization, according to CoinGecko.
And it drew the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which subpoenaed the company about the stablecoin in November 2023. It recently called off an investigation into PYUSD with no action taken.
It’s gotta be said, though, that fintech payments platform PayPal doesn’t have quite the same gravitas as three Wall Street institutions. If D.C. waves the green flag, things could get interesting.
Other Keys
- Mocking crypto Batman: A bad actor who’s believed to be linked to the Coinbase data breach has been mocking on-chain sleuth ZachXBT. “L bozo,” the hacker wrote Wednesday evening through an Ethereum transaction using the blockchain’s input data message feature. The message was followed by a link to a YouTube meme video showing NBA legend James Worthy smoking a cigar. Gotham needs justice.
- New base unit, who dis? Square CEO and laser-eyed Bitcoin maxi Jack Dorsey has joined the chorus of developers saying that Bitcoin’s base unit should be changed from “satoshis” to “Bitcoins.” This would render sayings like “Stacking sats” meaningless. A Bitcoin is made up of 100,000,000 satoshis, or “sats,” named after the cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
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