The Daily: Strategy buys another 250 bitcoin for $21.5 million, holdings reach 848,250 BTC, and more

The following article is adapted from The Block's newsletter, The Daily, which comes out on weekday afternoons.

Happy Monday! Bitcoin is trading around $83,000, while Strategy bought another 250 BTC for $21.5 million, bringing its total holdings to 848,250 BTC.

Also in today's newsletter, Morgan Stanley plans to support tokenized equities in early 2027, former CFTC Acting Chair Caroline Pham discusses the agency's regulatory reach, XRP Ledger patches a decade-old bug that could have minted trillions of XRP, and more.

Meanwhile, Standard Chartered launches custody for Ripple's RLUSD, Evernorth names a former Coinbase executive to oversee its XRP treasury, Bitmine adds 12,532 ETH, and DeFi Development Corp increases its SOL holdings by 12%.

P.S. Don't forget to check out The Latent, our sister website covering AI. Get The Latent Daily here and all other The Block newsletters here.

Strategy buys another 250 bitcoin for $21.5 million, holdings reach 848,250 BTC

Strategy acquired another 250 bitcoin for around $21.5 million last week, bringing its total holdings to 848,250 BTC, worth around $70.6 billion.

• The company bought the latest bitcoin at an average price of $86,194 per coin between Oct. 5 and Oct. 11, according to its Monday announcement.
• Strategy has spent around $64 billion building its bitcoin holdings, at an average purchase price of $75,444 per BTC, including fees and expenses.
• Its holdings now represent more than 4% of bitcoin's maximum 21 million supply, with around $6.6 billion in unrealized gains at current prices.
• Strategy funded the latest purchase with proceeds from selling 125,183 MSTR shares for around $21 million and another $500,000 from its USD cash holdings.
• The company also repurchased around $192.4 million of STRC preferred shares last week. Meanwhile, TD Cowen recently raised its bitcoin forecasts but maintained its $260 price target on Strategy, citing dilution and financial obligations.

Morgan Stanley expects to support tokenized equities in Q1 2027

Morgan Stanley expects to support tokenized equities on its alternative trading system (ATS) in the first quarter of 2027, later than its previous target of the second half of 2026.

• Amy Oldenburg, the bank's head of digital asset strategy, said the infrastructure is being built, but more time is needed because the products and client demand are not yet there.
• Oldenburg pointed to DTCC's upcoming tokenization service and the GENIUS Act coming into effect in January as developments the bank is watching. Morgan Stanley is also developing wallet infrastructure and has established a Digital Asset Lab to test blockchain technologies.
• She expects the tokenized real-world asset market to reach between $3 trillion and $10 trillion by 2030, with private shares, structured notes and private funds among the near-term opportunities.

Former CFTC Acting Chair Caroline Pham says agency can regulate almost everything

Former CFTC Acting Chair Caroline Pham said the agency already has broad authority to regulate crypto without new legislation, with the Commodity Exchange Act covering nearly everything except onions and movie box office receipts.

• Pham, now chief legal officer and chief administrative officer at MoonPay, said the CFTC's principles-based framework is flexible enough to cover new markets, even after the Clarity Act failed to pass last month.
• She supported the CFTC's recent proposal for federally regulated leveraged retail crypto trading, saying regulated exchanges would offer better protections than a patchwork of state rules.
• Pham also said tokenized deposits are better suited than stablecoins for wholesale settlement and expects the NYSE and Nasdaq to list "real" tokenized shares with meaningful trading volume within two years.

XRP Ledger patches decade-old bug that could have minted trillions of XRP

XRP Ledger developers have fixed a critical bug dating back to 2015 that could have allowed an attacker to create trillions of XRP in a single transaction, with no evidence that the flaw was exploited.

• The vulnerability involved an overflow in the network's payment engine. Veria Labs co-founder Cayden Liao said the firm's AI agent discovered the bug and demonstrated an exploit that could have created around 18 trillion XRP, far above the 100 billion XRP created at launch.
• Veria reported the issue on Sept. 22, and RippleX released a fix three days later. The patch took effect as servers upgraded rather than waiting for the network's usual two-week validator approval process.
• Liao said Veria received a $250,000 bounty. The update also fixed a separate bug in the Batch feature that could have stalled the network.

Sui Foundation invests $30 million in DATA Network as AI data protocol moves to Sui

Sui Foundation is investing $30 million in DATA Network through a partnership that will move the AI training data protocol onto Sui and integrate it with onchain storage platform Walrus.

• DATA Network will retire its independent blockchain and migrate its DATA token to Sui on a one-to-one basis. The existing network will continue operating until the transition is complete, with a detailed timeline to follow.
• Walrus will become the default storage layer for DATA Foundation's applications. Its Trace registry, which tracks AI training data origins, usage rights and payments, has recorded more than 250 million contributions and processes over 3 million receipts daily on average, according to the foundation.

In the next 24 hours

• September small business optimism, existing home sales and monthly Treasury balance data are due Tuesday. Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin is also scheduled to speak at Howard University.
• ECB Executive Board members Frank Elderson and Philip Lane are scheduled to speak Tuesday.
• The IMF is set to release its updated World Economic Outlook on Tuesday as its annual meetings with the World Bank continue in Bangkok.
• No major token unlocks are scheduled for Tuesday.

Never miss a beat with The Block's daily digest of the most influential events happening across the digital asset ecosystem.