Today in crypto, Bitmine is launching a $300 million perpetual preferred stock offering, more than 100 million agentic payments have been transacted on Base as AI-driven payment rails evolve beyond experimentation and hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor and chipmaker Tropic Square disclosed a TROPIC01 chip vulnerability found during a Ledger Donjon audit on Trezor’s Safe 7 wallet.
Bitmine eyes dividend-paying preferred shares, echoing Strategy’s playbook
Ethereum treasury company Bitmine Immersion Technologies is launching a $300 million perpetual preferred stock offering, borrowing a page from Strategy’s financing playbook.
Bitmine told the SEC on Wednesday that it intends to offer 3 million of its 9.5% Series A perpetual preferred stock at $100 per share, which will trade under the symbol BMNP within 30 days of issuance.
Preferred shares are a hybrid of stocks and bonds. Investors are not directly betting on the company’s growth but lending it money in exchange for regular payments. For every $100 share, Bitmine will pay dividends on a weekly basis, amounting to $9.50 per year.
The firm plans to use income from its staked Ether (ETH) to pay the dividends, similar to offerings from Michael Saylor’s bitcoin treasury company, Strategy.
Agentic payment activity tops 100M transactions on Base
Agentic payment activity on Coinbase’s Base network has surpassed 100 million transactions, signaling that machine-to-machine payments are moving beyond the proof-of-concept stage in onchain environments.
According to a new Chainalysis report, wallets interacting with Coinbase’s x402 protocol generated more than 100 million transactions on Base within roughly nine months of launch.
The x402 protocol allows software agents to make onchain payments directly through web requests. When an agent requests access to a resource, such as a data feed or API, it can automatically complete a stablecoin payment without human authorization.
Much of x402’s early growth was driven by a memecoin experiment called PING, which required users to make a payment through the protocol to mint tokens. The project attracted large numbers of users looking to acquire the token, triggering a surge in transaction activity.
Trezor says Safe 7 chip flaw found by Ledger does not put funds at risk
Hardware wallet company Trezor and chipmaker Tropic Square have disclosed a vulnerability in one of the secure elements used in Trezor Safe 7 hardware wallet, saying the flaw does not put user funds at risk because the chip alone cannot expose a wallet.
The vulnerability was identified during an independent security audit conducted by Ledger Donjon, the security research team at rival hardware wallet maker Ledger, according to a Trezor statement.
Tropic Square provided the affected TROPIC01 Secure Element chip to the Ledger Donjon team for an independent audit. The companies said compromising TROPIC01 alone would not be enough to access a user’s wallet, PIN or funds.
The disclosure offers a rare public look at how hardware wallet makers handle chip-level security flaws and highlights the growing role of independent researchers in testing crypto custody devices.
According to Trezor, the vulnerability was discovered during an independent security review initiated by Tropic Square after the launch of its TROPIC01 secure element in early 2025.
Ledger’s Donjon informed Tropic Square in January 2026 that it had successfully carried out a laser fault injection attack against the chip, allowing researchers to extract some chip-held secrets and bypass firmware signature verification under lab conditions.
