A 21Rates newsletter  The five tweets that moved us this week, and why each one matters. | Friday, October 9, 2026 | 4 min read |
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| New this week The Daily Stack is now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.The show is live on both apps. Same hosts, same takes on bitcoin, stocks and AI, now in your ears on the commute or at the gym. Tap either button and hit follow so new episodes land in your feed. | ★★★★★ One small favor. If you like the show, leave a 5-star rating or review. It takes about 10 seconds and it really helps the show grow. More ratings means more new listeners find us. On Apple: open the show page, scroll down to Ratings & Reviews and tap the fifth star. Write a line if you have one. On Spotify: open the show page, tap the three dots at the top, then Rate show. Rate it on Apple → Rate it on Spotify → |
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| Oct 2 to 8 The five tweets that moved usEvery week we pick five tweets that moved us and tell you why each one matters. This week: one warning about bitcoin security, a fight over digital credit, a broker buying bitcoin, a holder chasing income and an ETF that went wild. Then the week ahead. | 01 | Justin Drake @drakefjustin
An Ethereum Foundation researcher says get your coins into bunker mode. | | 02 | Luke Gromen @LukeGromen
Luke Gromen says digital credit means bitcoin never hits $1M. Saylor fired back. | | 03 | Matthew Sigel @matthew_sigel
Robinhood just put bitcoin on its own balance sheet. | | 04 | British HODL @BritishHodl
A $7M holder swapped his spot bitcoin for IBIT and now sells covered calls. | | 05 | Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas
Brazil’s ETF just had its biggest day in 25 years. |
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| Wed Oct 7 · 6M views · 16.2K likes An Ethereum Foundation researcher says get your coins into bunker mode. Why it matters Quantum computing has always been the long-dated threat to bitcoin’s signatures. Drake’s new worry is that ECDSA, the signature math behind bitcoin and ethereum, gets cracked first by AI-driven math on a large GPU cluster, worst case in months. The mechanism is what matters. A coin is only exposed once its address has revealed a public key, which happens the first time it signs a transaction. So his fix is cheap and boring: move to an address that has never signed, and rotate after every spend. The big exposed pools are custodians. He named Binance, Robinhood, Bitfinex and Tether. Watch whether any of them announce a key rotation. | The timeline is Drake’s opinion. His claims about an OpenAI math release and government censorship are his, and we couldn’t verify them. Nothing public shows ECDSA has been broken. |
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| Mon Oct 5 · 616K views · 883 likes Luke Gromen says digital credit means bitcoin never hits $1M. Saylor fired back. Why it matters Gromen’s model is gold. In his telling, London started selling gold credit in the mid-80s, more paper claims than metal, and that capped the price. He thinks Strategy’s preferred stock could do the same to bitcoin. Saylor’s answer checks out: the STRC IPO paid for 21,021 BTC at about $117K each in 2025, per Strategy’s filing. The newer detail is in the Oct 5 filing. Strategy is buying STRC back, $176M from Sep 28 to Oct 4, while holding 848,000 BTC. It also paid $142.5M of dividends and interest that week from a $4.88B dollar reserve. If those payouts ever get funded by selling coins, Gromen’s argument gets teeth. | The credit gold comparison is Gromen’s view. |
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| Wed Oct 7 · 15K views · 383 likes Robinhood just put bitcoin on its own balance sheet. Why it matters The size is a rounding error. $25M is under 0.5% of the $5.36B cash Robinhood reported at June 30, and crypto chief Johann Kerbrat said himself it won’t change the company’s trajectory. The signal is the reversal. On its Q3 2025 earnings call, management said it was still debating whether owning bitcoin helped shareholders who can already buy it in the app. Now a broker with over 28 million funded customers holds it as a treasury asset, which gives every other fintech board cover to do the same. Watch the next quarterly filing for the exact amount, and whether a recurring buy program follows. | Kerbrat disclosed it in an interview at Digital Asset Summit Asia and on X, per CoinDesk and CryptoSlate. No SEC filing on it yet. Tweet by Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. |
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| Thu Oct 8 · 88K views · 923 likes A $7M holder swapped his spot bitcoin for IBIT and now sells covered calls. Why it matters This is a custody story as much as a yield story. He moved after this summer’s Coldcard wallet exploit, which CoinDesk put at nearly 600 BTC, about $38M, stolen as of Jul 31. The math: weekly calls far out of the money, aiming for about 4% a year, roughly $300K on $7M. The trade-offs are real. IBIT’s 0.25% fee costs about $17.5K a year at that size. A sharp rally can get the shares called away, which caps the upside bitcoiners hold for. And far out of the money calls pay little, so 4% needs volatility to stay high. Bitcoin-backed loans are the other way to raise cash without selling. | One unnamed person, as relayed by the author. We can’t verify it, and his tax-free claim depends on where he lives. Not advice. |
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| Mon Oct 5 · 118K views · 577 likes Brazil’s ETF just had its biggest day in 25 years. Why it matters The trigger was Brazil’s Oct 4 first round. Flávio Bolsonaro finished ahead of President Lula, 47.03% to 45.16% per Brazil’s electoral court, against the late polls. On Oct 5 EWZ jumped 12.5% and traded about $8.2B, roughly 8 times its 20-day average. Balchunas has it third among all ETFs that day, behind SPY and QQQ. The catch is that nothing is settled. The runoff is Oct 25, so a lot of hope got priced into one session. Single-country ETFs are where US money expresses a view on a country fast, and where it leaves fast too. Watch the real and Brazil’s long bond yields into the 25th. | Balchunas’ line about a country moving to the right is his read. Volume and price from Yahoo daily data. |
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| Mark your calendar The week aheadBig Wednesday. The Empery vote, September inflation and the Beige Book all land the same day. | WED 10/14 | Empery Digital shareholder vote. Activist ATG Capital owns about 16% and runs four nominees. ISS, Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones all back its card, Glass Lewis for three seats. Empery held 1,144 BTC plus $66M cash on Sep 15 but is valued near $89M, so the vote decides who runs a treasury the market prices at about 55 cents on the dollar. | | WED 10/14 | September CPI, 8:30 AM ET. A hot number pushes yields up and makes rate cuts harder to price. The Fed’s Beige Book follows at 2 PM. | | THU 10/15 | Fed Chair Warsh, 11:30 PM ET. A fireside chat with IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva in Bangkok. It’s his only appearance on the Fed’s calendar between CPI and the Oct 28 rate decision. | | WATCH | Bitcoin vs $75,441. Strategy’s average cost on 848,000 BTC, per its Oct 5 filing. At $82,362 (2:05 AM ET Oct 9) bitcoin is 9.2% above it. Below that line the biggest corporate stack is under water on paper, and MSTR and its preferreds trade on that headline. |
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| 📊 This week’s poll · one tap Who wins the Empery Digital vote on Wednesday? The activist owns about 16% and all three proxy advisers back it. The chairman’s fund owns about 17%. Votes are counted Wednesday. Tap an answer right below this card. Results next Friday. ↓ |
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