Morning Minute: Move Over, Saylor, There’s a New Top Buyer in Town

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors rebound ahead of CPI; BTC at $83.6k
• Vivek’s Strive bought $280M in BTC last week, 13x Saylor’s buys
• BTC and ETH ETFs flip back to inflows, ETH breaks 10-day outflow streak
• STRC hits $99.90 and highest level since May depeg
• Solana core dev announces Alpenglow live on October 21 on mainnet

🟠 Move Over, Saylor, There’s a New Top Buyer in Town

For five years, “who bought the most Bitcoin this week” had one answer. That’s quietly stopped being true.

Vivek’s Strive Asset Management (Nasdaq: ASST), run by Matthew Cole, just scooped up 3,311 BTC for roughly $280 million between Oct. 5 and 9, buying the dip at an average of ~$84,500 as the market sold off. It’s Strive’s biggest single purchase since January, and it caps a genuine tear: $94.5M in late September, $169M in early October, then $280M. Total stack now sits at 32,773 BTC, about $2.73 billion.

In that same stretch, Michael Saylor’s Strategy bought 250 BTC for about $21.5 million. Strive outbought Strategy by roughly 13 to 1.

This isn’t a one-week fluke of timing. Strategy’s buying has shrunk for two straight weeks, and that same week it spent nearly nine times more buying back its own preferred shares ($192M) than it spent on Bitcoin. Its mNAV just dropped below 1.0 for the first time, meaning the market values the company at less than the Bitcoin sitting on its balance sheet.

Now to level set by total holdings, this isn’t remotely close. Strategy still sits on 848,250 BTC—a ~$51 billion position, more than 25 times Strive’s stack. Saylor isn’t being dethroned as the king of Bitcoin treasuries. But “biggest holder” and “most aggressive buyer right now” have, for the first time, become two different titles.

The newcomer is accumulating at the pace the pioneer has abandoned—and it just told us how it plans to keep going. Strive is selling 5 million shares of a new preferred at $100 a piece, a $500 million raise paying a fixed 15% daily, with proceeds earmarked for more Bitcoin. That’s a 15% annual coupon—$75 million a year in cash out the door—which is a very expensive way to be right. But with STRC at $99.90, Saylor’s BTC faucet is about to turn back on, too. Let the battle of the Bitcoin giants begin…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly green and rebounding; BTC +0.2% at $83.6k; ETH +0.2% at $2,507; SOL +1% at $107; HYPE -1% at $82; ZEC +3% at $1,250
• Top alt movers include PENDLE (+8%), STX (+4%) and VVV (+6%)
• Oil +4% at $96; Gold -0.4% at $4,160
• Stock futures are mixed ahead of CPI; DOW +0.3%, Nasdaq -0.2%
• Coinbase, which custodies roughly 5% of all bitcoin in existence, laid out what Bitcoin needs to survive quantum computers, backing the BIP-360 (P2MR) and P2TRv2 proposals as flexible enough to bolt on new signature types later and pushing a phased rollout where active wallets can spend with either an old key or a quantum-safe one
• Solana core developer Anza scheduled the Alpenglow consensus upgrade for mainnet-beta on October 21, swapping TowerBFT for Votor to cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds and moving validator votes off the chain entirely
• Interactive Brokers switched on ETH staking for its clients through infrastructure provider zerohash, adding a Staking Dashboard to the Client Portal
• A Bitcoin wallet that held through every crash since 2020 moved its entire 4,581.94 BTC balance worth about $377 million on October 12, splitting it across five new addresses
• Binance is shutting down Binance Pool and every service attached to it, disconnecting miners on November 10 and exiting mining after nine years and roughly 2.3% of network hashrate
• BNY and Citadel Securities completed a test transaction using tokenized U.S. Treasuries to move the bonds from settlement into financing, aiming to let firms pledge collateral and recycle cash faster than current systems allow
• Trezor is ending all reseller authorizations on January 1, 2027, days after Ledger’s security team found wallets from a Southeast Asian retailer carrying a hidden component

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw $175M in net inflows on Tuesday; the ETH ETFs saw $25M in inflows and broke a 10-day outflow streak
• Strive is selling a second class of preferred stock to buy more bitcoin, offering 5 million SATS shares at $100 each for $500 million at a fixed 15% dividend paid daily, after lifting holdings to 32,773 BTC worth about $2.7 billion

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were slightly green; DOGE +1%, SHIB even, PEPE +3%, PENGU +1%, TRUMP +1%, SPX +1%, BONK even
• Robinhood chain leaders rebounded 10-25%; Pons +18% to $225M; AI +28% at $107M; Cashcat +18% at $118M; Orbio +18%, Boner +18%, Priors +30% and Shroom +50% led top movers
• Solana top movers included Veil +280%, Altai +1600%, Claudia +80% and Bordr +80%

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Papertrade led onchain protocols with $3.76M in revenue yesterday, followed by Hyperliquid at $2.18M and Pump.fun at $2.17M
• Sui processed its first native quantum-safe transaction on devnet, with Mysten Labs adding ML-DSA-65 signature support in release v1.82.0 and targeting testnet accounts by year-end and mainnet authentication in Q1 2027
• Bybit founder Ben Zhou announced that Bybit is working with Mantle to launch mStocks as their version of tokenized stocks.

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were green and rebounding; Punks even at 31.5 ETH, BAYC +6% at 5.5 ETH, Pudgy +8% at 2.37 ETH
• Credits (+40%), Normies (+29%) and Claus (+17%) led top movers
• zkSnarks announced ‘Apparitions’ as a new character requiring 26 burned zkSnarks to mint