Japan will host a final assembly plant for the AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile after Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth agreed on Oct. 28 to build the facility as part of joint U.S.-Japanese missile production, Nikkei reported. The two met for about 30 minutes in Cebu, the Philippines, on the […]
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TL;DR: Bitmine says its Ethereum holdings reached approximately 6.04 million ETH after it added 12,535 tokens over the past week.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies has pushed its Ethereum treasury past the six-million-token mark, reporting holdings of 6,041,481 ETH as of October 18. The company said it acquired another 12,535 ETH during the preceding week.
The size is striking even by corporate crypto-treasury standards. Bitmine describes its position as roughly 4.9% of Ethereum’s circulating supply and says more than five million of its ETH are staked.
That staking component matters. Unlike a Bitcoin treasury that generally depends on price movements, a large Ethereum holding can also earn network rewards by participating in validation. Rewards are not risk-free, however, and the economics depend on staking performance, technical operations and protocol conditions.
Bitmine valued its wider portfolio of crypto assets, cash, marketable securities and other investments at about $15.1 billion. Its holdings therefore represent a substantial bet on Ethereum as both a long-term asset and a productive network.
The company’s disclosure offers investors a clearer look at the scale of that wager, though headline token counts are not the same as shareholder returns. Equity valuation, financing arrangements and the market price of ETH all affect what ownership in the company is ultimately worth.
As more listed firms build dedicated crypto treasuries, those distinctions are likely to become increasingly important.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Bitmine says its Ethereum holdings reached approximately 6.04 million ETH after it added 12,535 tokens over the past week.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies has pushed its Ethereum treasury past the six-million-token mark, reporting holdings of 6,041,481 ETH as of October 18. The company said it acquired another 12,535 ETH during the preceding week.
The size is striking even by corporate crypto-treasury standards. Bitmine describes its position as roughly 4.9% of Ethereum’s circulating supply and says more than five million of its ETH are staked.
That staking component matters. Unlike a Bitcoin treasury that generally depends on price movements, a large Ethereum holding can also earn network rewards by participating in validation. Rewards are not risk-free, however, and the economics depend on staking performance, technical operations and protocol conditions.
Bitmine valued its wider portfolio of crypto assets, cash, marketable securities and other investments at about $15.1 billion. Its holdings therefore represent a substantial bet on Ethereum as both a long-term asset and a productive network.
The company’s disclosure offers investors a clearer look at the scale of that wager, though headline token counts are not the same as shareholder returns. Equity valuation, financing arrangements and the market price of ETH all affect what ownership in the company is ultimately worth.
As more listed firms build dedicated crypto treasuries, those distinctions are likely to become increasingly important.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Up to a quarter of active-duty Army members could receive a low testosterone result from mandatory military screening, despite the true prevalence of the condition likely being a tiny fraction of that figure, according to a study published Thursday in JAMA.
The finding adds to concerns that the mandatory screening announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in July will lead to a cascade of unnecessary medical evaluations for military members. Those evaluations could result in inappropriate testing, inaccurate results and diagnoses, and overtreatment that could cause harm, including infertility. Medical experts, including the Endocrine Society and the American Urological Association (AUA), have recommended against blanket screenings for these reasons. Still, the Pentagon has moved forward with the plans, releasing clinical guidance in September.
The JAMA study highlights the reasons why testosterone levels are not measured in men without symptoms—and also offers a glimpse of how many Army members could become ensnared in the clinically dubious screenings.
© Getty | Win McNamee
© The Associated Press
© AP Photo/Alex Brandon
© AP/Patrick Semansky
Optimism’s latest op-reth release is a maintenance update with two things infrastructure teams tend to take seriously: breaking command removal and dependency security patches.
Version 2.5.0 was published October 1 and is recommended for all op-reth operators.
The release does not change the economic rules of the OP Stack. It changes the software used to execute and maintain those rules.
Pre-Bedrock import commands are goneThe most visible breaking change is the removal of `import-op` and `import-receipts-op`.
Those commands were used for importing legacy pre-Bedrock OVM history. Operators who still depend on that workflow need to move to the Bedrock state-bootstrap process before upgrading, with pre-Bedrock history served from an l2geth instance.
This is the kind of cleanup mature chains eventually have to perform. Old compatibility paths are useful during migrations, but maintaining them indefinitely increases software complexity.
Bitcoinist recently covered another piece of the same maintenance cycle when Optimism shipped a required op-batcher upgrade and when native account abstraction work moved toward the OP Stack.
Two dependency vulnerabilities are patchedop-reth v2.5.0 updates `rustls` to version 0.23.45 to address RUSTSEC-2026-0285. The issue involved TLS 1.3 handshake messages being accepted at the wrong encryption level rather than the connection being closed.
The release notes state that the handshake remained authenticated, meaning the bug did not let an attacker alter or complete the handshake, but operators still get the patched dependency.
The update also moves `imbl` to 7.0.2 for RUSTSEC-2026-0292, fixing a double-free condition in a component used by the transaction pool when an element destructor panics.
Those are software-security fixes, not evidence that an OP Stack chain was actively exploited.
Infrastructure upgrades are becoming a steady operational workloadLayer 2 networks increasingly look less like a single protocol and more like a suite of coordinated programs.
Sequencers, batchers, execution clients, fault-proof components and cross-chain services all need their own release cycles. Bitcoinist’s coverage of Superchain interoperability testing shows why that stack keeps expanding.
For end users, op-reth v2.5.0 should be invisible. For node teams, the release notes are clear: update the client, account for the removed legacy commands and take the security patches.
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This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Lido’s long-running effort to give stETH holders more influence over protocol governance has moved another step forward.
Onchain Vote #214 has passed, implementing parameters associated with Lido’s Dual Governance system on Ethereum mainnet.
The vote received support from 58.2 million LDO participating tokens.
Traditional DAO governance gives voting power to holders of the governance token.
For Lido, that means LDO.
The complication is that the people economically exposed to the staking protocol are not necessarily the same people holding large amounts of LDO.
stETH holders may have substantial value inside Lido while having little direct ability to stop governance decisions that affect the protocol.
Dual Governance is designed to narrow that gap.
The framework gives stETH holders a mechanism to contest or delay certain governance actions before they are executed.
That does not replace LDO voting.
It creates an additional check around it.
The idea is particularly important for a liquid staking protocol because governance controls smart contracts handling very large amounts of user-deposited ETH.
Vote #214 also extends the relevant emergency governance delay window to 14 days.
A longer delay gives stakeholders more time to respond when an action is disputed.
That can make governance slower.
It can also make a hostile or controversial change harder to rush through before affected users have time to react.
Lido has been developing Dual Governance as a way to reduce one of the structural risks around decentralized protocols: governance-token holders making decisions that may not align with the interests of users whose assets sit inside the system.
The latest vote does not make Lido governance perfectly decentralized or remove every governance risk.
It does change the balance.
LDO remains the governance token, but stETH holders now have a more meaningful role in the safety architecture around major decisions.
For a protocol whose main product represents staked ETH, that is a significant shift in who gets a voice when governance and user capital collide.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
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