Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital closed a $1.4 billion secured term loan facility to accelerate the development of its Helios artificial intelligence datacenter campus in Texas. 

On Friday, the company announced that the loan will cover roughly 80% of the construction costs for the first phase of the project, with Galaxy Digital contributing $350 million in equity. According to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the loan is secured by all assets of Galaxy Helios I, a subsidiary of Galaxy Digital, and it matures on Aug. 15, 2028. 

The capital will fund the expansion of the Helios AI datacenter to deliver power for AI workloads under a long-term agreement with the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) cloud provider CoreWeave starting early 2026. 

The move highlights how digital asset firms leverage their capital-raising capabilities and repurpose infrastructure to tap into the increasing AI compute demand. This suggests that the broader compute and digital assets infrastructures may be converging. 

Galaxy Digital expects $1 billion in annual revenue from its CoreWeave deal

Galaxy also announced that the AI services provider CoreWeave brought its total commitment to a full 800 megawatts of approved capacity at the Helios campus. This means that CoreWeave is leasing power, cooling and physical infrastructure for its AI and high-performance computing (HPC) operations. 

Galaxy Digital said that it expects an annual revenue of over $1 billion from its CoreWeave deal, which has a 15-year term. If it goes as planned, the company will earn an estimated $15 billion in total revenue from its contract with CoreWeave. 

The company said it expects the Helios datacenter to have a power capacity of 3.5 gigawatts at full buildout. Minus its deal with CoreWeave, the data center will have an extra 2.7 gigawatts to provide to its clients, potentially earning more. 

Related: Core Scientific’s largest shareholder to vote against CoreWeave buyout offer

Crypto firms dive into AI

Galaxy Digital’s move into AI is part of a broader trend among crypto-native firms seeking new growth avenues as institutional capital goes to AI. 

CoreWeave, originally a crypto mining company, announced on July 7 that it acquired the miner Core Scientific in a $9 billion all-stock transaction to expand its data center capacity to support its AI and HPC workloads.

Meanwhile, the Helios data center was also originally acquired for Bitcoin mining initiatives. In 2022, Mike Novogratz said that its Helios acquisition was done to increase its exposure to Bitcoin mining. 

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Bybit has returned to a 1:1 backing of client assets and has fully closed the “ether gap” it faced after an unprecedented $1.4 billion hack hit the exchange late Friday.

The exchange has received 446,870 ether (ETH), worth $1.23 billion at current prices, through loans, large deposits, and ether purchases in the past two days, on-chain tracking service Lookonchain said in an X post on Monday.

Address activity suggests more than $400 million were purchased through over-the-counter trading, with another $300 million brought directly from exchanges. Nearly $300 million were sought as loans; the rest are from addresses apparently belonging to crypto funds.

ETH prices rose upto 4% over the weekend amid the apparent buying activity, but are down 2% in the past 24 hours as sentiment isn’t fully lifted.

Meanwhile, Bybit said late Sunday that all deposit and withdrawal activity had “fully recovered to normal levels — with total deposits “slightly exceeding” withdrawals as on Saturday in a sign of market confidence.

Friday’s attack targeted one of Bybit’s offline “cold” wallets, which are typically considered secure due to their lack of internet connectivity, in a heist that allowed $1.4 billion in ETH to be withdrawn.

Hackers gained control by exploiting a sophisticated method involving a manipulated user interface (UI) and URL. This allowed the attackers to alter the smart contract logic, redirecting the funds to an unidentified address. The stolen assets were then split across multiple wallets and swapped on decentralized exchanges.

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT linked the hack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacking collective notorious for crypto thefts. Lazarus was behind several high-profile crypto attacks, including the $600 million Ronin Network hack in 2022, and a $230 million drain on Indian exchange WazirX in 2024.

CORRECTION (Feb. 22, 19:16 UTC): Reworks the story throughout to clarify and include more context of the so-called “rollback” and the criticism around it. Also removed the percentage of ETH held by hackers in 2016).

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and major ether (ETH) holder, asked Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin if he would be willing to entertain the idea of rolling back the network to assist hacked exchange Bybit, which lost nearly $1.4 billion in ether (ETH) on Friday.

“@VitalikButerin will you advocate to roll back the chain to help @Bybit_Official,” Hayes said in the social media post.

“My own view as a mega $ETH bag holder is $ETH stopped being money in 2016 after the DAO hack hardfork. If the community wanted to do it again, I would support it because we already voted no on immutability in 2016 [wh]y not do it again?” he added

Buterin was yet to reply as of time of publication.

While some, including Unchained’s Laura Shin, wondered if Hayes’s post was a joke, it did raise a serious question about whether rolling back is even feasible. CoinDesk reached out to Hayes about the post and hasn’t received a comment at the time of writing.

“I wish we could roll back for the Bybit hack, I’m not against the idea. But the DAO hack was 15% of ETH with a clean recovery path. Today, a rollback would break bridges, stablecoins, L2s, RWAs and so much more. ETH ecosystem is just too interconnected now for a clean solution like 2016,” said Gautham Santhosh, co-founder of Polynomial.fi.

The problem with “rollback”

Hayes’ suggestions of rolling back the blockchain as one of the potential ways to address hacking involves reverting the blockchain to a state before a specific event, in this case, the hack. That way, malicious transactions resulting from the hack can be erased, effectively restoring lost or stolen funds. Implementing a rollback requires consensus from the network participants.

For instance, in 2016, the Ethereum network saw a controversial revision of the network using a hard fork to reverse a theft of $60 million in ether from The DAO (the percentage the hackers took control of is still up for debate). The hard fork split the chain into two – Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

However, the term “rollback” was never used during that revision; it was referred to as an “irregular state transition.” The move still triggered huge and important debates over so-called “immutability” in blockchains.

Immutability is a security feature that prevents data from being changed after it’s added to the blockchain, making it trustworthy and tamper-proof.

A similar controversy played out in the Bitcoin community in 2019 when Binance’s CEO Changpeng Zhao and his team considered pushing for a “rollback” approach (the term was later rephrased by CZ as “re-org” and decided not to pursue the approach) on the Bitcoin network following a $40 million hack. However, the Bitcoin mining community criticized the idea of going back against the principle of decentralization and immutability.

Similarly, the Ethereum community criticized the idea of “rollback” in this case, noting that the idea wouldn’t even have been considered by the community.

Theoretically, an actual “rollback” won’t be possible on Ethereum, as the network uses something called “accounts” to store the ether, which can be analogous to bank accounts. When the 2016 hack occurred, the nodes upgraded to new software, and the ETH held was moved to new addresses.

However, the idea of reversing a transaction in light of a hack isn’t a new one; at least one smaller blockchain network, Vericoin, actually executed such a procedure previously.

The Bybit hack came into light on Friday when on-chain sleuth ZachXBT noted suspicious outflows of over $1.4 billion from the exchange, with the attacker quickly swapping mETH and stETH for ether through a decentralized exchange.

The hackers were later identified by ZachXBT as the North Korean Lazarus Group.

The attacker then split 10,000 ETH to 39 different addresses and another 10,000 ETH to nine addresses, Polynomial.fi’s Santhosh said on X.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said that the hacker “took control of the specific ETH cold wallet and transferred all the ETH in the cold wallet to this unidentified address.” Zhou confirmed that the exchange “is solvent even if this hack loss is not recovered.”

Margaux Nijkerk contributed to the revised story.
Read more: Ether Price Spikes Further on Reports of Bybit Starting to Buy ETH

Crypto exchange Bitget has transferred 40,000 ether (ETH), worth $105 million, to Bybit, offering crucial support to its industry counterpart in the wake of the over billion-dollar hack suffered by the exchange.

The funds transferred are from Bitget’s own reserves, not user deposits, which remain securely stored on the platform and can be cross checked through the proof of reserves, the exchange’s CEO, Gracy Chen, said in a note shared with CoinDesk, while assuring more support if needed.

“At Bitget we strongly believe in supporting the community and everyone contributing towards the growth of crypto,” Chen said.

A suspected North Korean entity drained approximately $1.4 billion in ether from Bybit on Friday. The hack prompted an unprecedented wave of withdrawal requests from users, with the exchange successfully processing 99% of them, effectively facing a significant market stress test.

Part of the stolen funds started to move during Asian afternoon hours on Saturday with over 5,000 ETH moved through eXch mixer – a service that masks wallet address – before being sent to bridge protocol ChainFlip where the stash was converted to bitcoin (BTC).

In an X post, ChainFlip said it couldn’t block fund movements as it was a fully decentralized applications that relies on automated smart contracts, but that it had “turned off some frontend services to stop the flow.”

On the other hand, Bitget has blacklisted wallets tied to the hacker that drained ether worth millions from Bybit on Friday.

“We will block any transactions flowing in from illicit addresses to the exchange once it has been monitored. Our team of security, and researchers, are currently tracking these activities,” Chen said.

Despite the hack, Bybit had managed to process over 350,000 withdrawal requests and has since restored normal withdrawal operations, per an X post.