by Coinstrooper Crypto Articles
Quick Take
  • Then margin calls took its entire stock book in one trade.
  • A quarter of that fund’s last reported stock holdings were Bitcoin miners.
  • That was not an accident, and it is why crypto investors are reading this story closely.
  • OpenAI hired him for its Superalignment team in 2023 and let him go in April 2024.

What Happened

A quarter of that fund’s last reported stock holdings were Bitcoin miners. That was not an accident, and it is why crypto investors are reading this story closely.

Market Context

It had also bet against software firms such as Adobe. That trade pays off when a stock drops. Those shares rose instead. The wider market went the same way. The Nasdaq-100 fell 10% from its early June peak.

When prices fell, its lenders wanted more money behind those loans. That demand is a margin call.

Why It Matters

Borrowed money turned a bad month into a forced one. The fund had used loans to hold more stock than its own cash could cover.

Details

Situational Awareness made 439% in six months. Then margin calls took its entire stock book in one trade. Ken Griffin’s Citadel bought it.

Who Is Leopold Aschenbrenner?

OpenAI hired him for its Superalignment team in 2023 and let him go in April 2024. He has said he was pushed out for raising safety concerns.

In June 2024 he published an essay series called Situational Awareness. Its central claim was blunt.

“AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible,” Leopold Aschenbrenner, in his essay series Situational Awareness, June 2024.

Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens

AGI means software that matches humans at most tasks. But the essay did more than predict it. One chapter argued the real bottleneck would be physical. Power contracts, transformers and electricity supply, not chips.

He then built a hedge fund on that idea. Its first stock disclosure, covering December 2024, listed six holdings worth $254.8 million.

Every one was a power or chip company. Not one was crypto. That changed quickly.

What Happened to Situational Awareness This Week

July went badly. The fund owned memory chip makers like SK Hynix, which fell hard in the AI memory stock selloff.

CNBC named Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as the brokers involved. It also reported the fund had grown to $45 billion by the start of July.

Then it unwound every public stock position, CNBC said. Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund agreed to buy them. Millennium Management and Jane Street looked and passed, Bloomberg reported.

Where Do Bitcoin Miners Come In?

Crypto readers mostly missed this part. Situational Awareness became one of mining’s larger shareholders, and it happened fast.

Big US funds must list their stock holdings every three months on a form called a 13F. Five exist for this fund. Read in order, they show a bet being built.

The latest filing lists 29 holdings worth $5.52 billion. Miners and their data center arms make up $1.38 billion of it.

Core Scientific was the largest at $418.7 million. IREN came next at $328.6 million, then Applied Digital at $278 million.

Cipher Mining, Riot Platforms, Hut 8, WhiteFiber, Bitdeer, CleanSpark and Bitfarms made up the rest.

The whole disclosed book grew nearly 22 times in a year. The mining share went from nothing to a quarter of it.