PlanB Stands by 2025 Spot ETF Shift, Saying He Has "No Regrets

PlanB Stands by the 2025 ETF Move

Bitcoin analyst PlanB says he has no regrets about moving his Bitcoin (BTC) holdings into a spot ETF in 2025, a call that, judged against the week's hardware-wallet failures, would leave exchange-traded custody looking safer than the devices built to replace it in the first place. PlanB is the pseudonymous analyst behind the widely followed stock-to-flow valuation model. The statement, his October 12 post on X, reopens a dispute the 2025 decision had already ignited: at the time, placing keys with a regulated fund drew criticism as a break with self-custody, the principle that a holder keeps the keys and trusts no intermediary, an orthodoxy long defended by adherents of Bitcoin maximalism. A spot ETF, by contrast, holds the underlying coins with a custodian and trades on a stock exchange, exactly the arrangement the self-custody camp set out to avoid. What has changed the tone since is the Ledger breach. The wallet maker disclosed on October 9 that it was investigating losses reported by customers who had bought its devices through CryptoBilis, its official distribution partner in Southeast Asia, and asked the channel to halt sales while the inquiry ran. On October 10, one victim's device was found to carry an unauthorized hardware implant, a physical component added somewhere along the route between factory and customer, not a software bug in the device's own firmware. Loss estimates attached to the case exceed $86 million. No audited total has been published; the $86 million figure is an estimate circulating with the investigation. He argued that the string of hardware-wallet incidents since 2025 shows the earlier decision was the right one, and that the ETF route he took has so far cost him nothing while hardware bought through a legitimate, authorized channel has drained eight figures from holders who believed they had followed every rule.

@100trillionUSD · X post

His October 12 post on X.

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Back and Lopp Split on the Remedy

The Ledger case is not the first hardware failure this year. At the end of July, attackers exploited a flaw in Coldcard's key-generation process to siphon funds from its users. Taken together, the two incidents show where the risk has moved: less inside the sealed device than in everything around it, the reseller, the firmware, the channel between factory and desk, each a link the buyer cannot inspect. Adam Back, the Blockstream CEO and Hashcash inventor, wrote on X that remarkably few manufacturers had understood the generic forms these attacks take, and that the industry's threat modeling is overdue for a catch-up. Jameson Lopp, the security researcher, carried the other half of the argument: self-custody remains a robust choice, he posted, but a hurried, simultaneous migration to new custody arrangements would create fresh single points of failure of its own. The caution was aimed at holders tempted to move everything at once in the days after the implant disclosure. The two men are not arguing about whether the losses are real; they are arguing about what should change next. The structural reading follows from both posts. Self-custody risk has migrated from the device to the distribution channel, and capital is responding by moving toward ETF wrappers. It is the same mechanism that pushed PlanB's own holdings into a fund in 2025, long before any implant surfaced. But that shift carries a concentration problem of its own: the coins behind the funds sit with a small set of custodians, so a wrapper that looks diversified to the buyer is, at the custody layer, a shared dependency. An on-chain observer would read those custodian wallets as whale-scale clusters for the same reason, a handful of addresses carrying many owners' coins. In markets where crypto ETFs are not approved, such as Japan, the working fallback is narrower: buy hardware only through official channels and split holdings across devices rather than trust a single box.

@lopp · X post

He posted.

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The primary record here is short enough to read in full: PlanB's post, Back's post and Lopp's post, three public statements about one breach cycle. What holds regardless of whether PlanB's wager ages well is narrower. The attack surface for holding your own keys has moved from the device to the distribution channel, where the buyer cannot audit anything, and the old HODL habit is only as safe as the last reseller in the chain. If he is right, ETF custody absorbs more of that demand; if he is wrong, the concentration Lopp warned about becomes the next lesson. Custody disputes also have a habit of ending in court, as the UK High Court ruling over 61,000 seized Bitcoin demonstrated.