variant

Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin stated in her market thoughts for Q4 2026 that the bottom of the crypto market likely occurred at some point in July. She wrote in early July that the bottom seemed close, with Bitcoin at $59,000, Ethereum at $1,600, and ZEC at $420. She mentioned that the question has shifted to whether the bull market is genuinely starting or if it's a false rally, and which projects will benefit the most in the early bull market, assuming the market is in the early stages of a new crypto bull market.Levin indicated that the increasingly formed consensus is that marginal funds are most likely to flow into value storage protocols as currency and protocols that can generate income. She believes Bitcoin is the dominant asset for digital value storage currently, while other competing assets may be valued based on their market capitalization relative to Bitcoin's market cap and its changes. For income-generating protocols, she expects investors to examine whether the income comes from crypto-native activities (like Pump) or traditional financial activities (like Hyperliquid), whether it persists during market downturns, and profit margins; projects with exposure to real-world assets and stablecoin growth, which are expected to attract institutional users and are still led by founders after surviving a bear market, are more likely to achieve higher multiples.She also categorized on-chain projects that can benchmark against non-crypto businesses as a third category, believing that most belong to narrative trading rather than long-term investment. Themes include routing, reasoning, computing power, data collection, and interface-related directions in artificial intelligence, and she is skeptical about whether most scenarios require blockchain; if such projects significantly outperform, she would view it as a signal of nearing the top.

The non-custodial fixed-rate lending platform Tenor announced the completion of its seed round financing, led by Variant, with participation from Nascent, Prelude, Coinbase Ventures, Lattice, Very Early, and several angel investors continuing to provide support. The amount of financing has not been disclosed.Tenor is built on the fixed-rate lending underlying protocol Midnight based on Morpho. It is currently live on the Base network and will expand to more chains in the future, supporting features such as automatic extensions, OTC quotes, and floating interest rates for pending orders. The platform currently supports crypto asset collateralized lending and plans to expand into the foreign exchange and credit markets.

According to Slow Fog's disclosure, a new variant of Shai-Hulud Hades has been found attacking PyPI. The malicious package drops a .pth file that executes automatically when Python starts, and checks if Bun is installed locally; if not installed, it downloads the official Bun binary from GitHub Releases, and then executes a multi-layer obfuscated JavaScript payload to steal credentials from GitHub, npm, AWS, and cloud services.Slow Fog stated that this variant uses the same RSA public key and infrastructure as previous Shai-Hulud attacks, and has capabilities such as encrypted exfiltration, persistence, CI/CD injection, and GitHub Actions injection.

According to Fortune, the crypto-focused venture capital firm Variant has completed the fundraising of its new fund, Variant 4, totaling $222 million. The fund will invest in projects at their earliest stages, focusing on the theme of "autonomy" to integrate AI and crypto applications.Partner Jesse Walden stated that in the future, the label "crypto investor" will disappear, and crypto will become a universal "underlying pipeline" like internet infrastructure. The core is to provide users and businesses with greater autonomy and security through decentralized and contract security architecture, supporting the development of applications including DeFi platforms Uniswap and Morpho.

Investment firm Variant's Chief Legal Officer Jake Chervinsky posted on the X platform: "Today is my last day working full-time at the company, after which I will transition to an advisory role."

The Chief Information Security Officer of Slow Fog Technology, 23pds, has issued a security alert regarding the latest variant of the NPM supply chain attack, "Shai-Hulud 3." All project teams and platforms are advised to take precautions. It was previously suspected that the leak of the Trust Wallet API key could have led to the Shai-Hulud 2 attack.Shai-Hulud is a series of self-propagating worm-like supply chain attacks targeting the NPM ecosystem, aimed at stealing developer credentials, cloud keys, and environment secrets. The latest variant (referred to by the community as Shai-Hulud 3 or new strain) was discovered on December 28, 2025, by Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen. The current spread is limited and may only be in the testing phase.

Chief Information Security Officer of Slow Fog Technology 23pds issued a security alert, the latest variant of the NPM supply chain attack "Shai-Hulud 3" is once again on the rise. All project parties and platforms are advised to take precautions. It was previously suspected that the leak of the Trust Wallet API key might have led to the Shai-Hulud 2 attack.

According to 23pds, the Chief Information Security Officer of Slow Fog Technology, a new variant of the information-stealing malware MacSync has emerged, successfully bypassing the macOS Gatekeeper security mechanism, resulting in the theft of user assets.This malware employs various techniques to evade detection, including file inflation, network connection validation, and self-destruct scripts after execution. Attackers can use this software to steal sensitive data from victims, such as iCloud keychains, browser passwords, and cryptocurrency wallets. Users should remain vigilant, avoid downloading software from unknown sources, promptly update operating system security patches, and take additional measures to protect the security of their crypto assets.

According to CoinDesk, Solana yield trading protocol Pye Finance has completed a $5 million seed round financing, led by Variant and Coinbase Ventures, with participation from Solana Labs, Nascent, Gemini, and others.The startup is building an on-chain marketplace on Solana for time-locked staking positions, aimed at making locked equity transferable and easier to construct into fixed-term products.

According to Ember Monitoring, a suspected Variant Fund address transferred 8.23 million UNI to Coinbase Prime again within nearly 45 minutes.

The security agency BlockSec's on-chain tracking platform BlockSec Phalcon posted on platform X, stating, "Balancer and several of its fork projects were attacked a few hours ago, resulting in losses exceeding $120 million across multiple chains. This was an extremely complex attack.Preliminary analysis indicates that the root cause was the attacker's manipulation of the invariant calculation for BPT prices, distorting the BPT price calculation and allowing the attacker to profit from a single batch transaction from a specific stablecoin pool.Taking the attack transaction on Arbitrum as an example, the batch swap operation can be broken down into three stages: 1. The attacker exchanges BPT for the underlying asset to precisely adjust the balance of one token (cbETH) to bring it close to the rounding boundary (amount = 9). This creates conditions for precision loss in the next step; 2. The attacker then uses a pre-constructed amount (= 8) to swap between another underlying token (wstETH) and cbETH. Due to rounding down when scaling the token amount, the calculated Δx slightly decreases (8 0.918 to 8), resulting in an underestimated Δy, which causes the invariant (D) in Curve's StableSwap model to also decrease. Since BPT price = D / total supply, the BPT price is artificially suppressed; 3. The attacker then reverses the exchange of the underlying assets back to BPT, restoring balance while profiting from the drop in BPT price.

ChainCatcher news, MetaDAO has currently raised a total of $9.9 million in funding, with the following sources: Variant: invested $2.5 million at a price of $8.6 per token; 6MV: invested $1.5 million at a price of approximately $6.35 per token; Paradigm: invested $5.9 million at a price of $7.83 per token, increasing investment and adding to existing positions.

ChainCatcher news, following 6 MV, Variant and Paradigm announced that they will purchase MetaDAO tokens from the open market. Variant will buy $2.5 million worth of tokens at an average price of $8.6, while Paradigm plans to buy $5.9 million worth of tokens at $7.83.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, predicts that the market startup Melee has completed a $3.5 million funding round, jointly invested by Variant, DBA, and angel investors, to launch its pioneering "viral prediction market" platform.The company draws on successful examples like Polymarket, allowing users to create prediction markets on any topic. Its core mechanism achieves decentralized pricing by rewarding early accurate traders, distinguishing it from the traditional model that relies on professional market makers. The platform places particular emphasis on the creator economy, supporting influencers to set up markets around fan interests and profit from them, for example, streamers can initiate prediction markets on game release dates.

ChainCatcher news, Slow Mist Technology's Chief Information Security Officer 23pds posted on X platform that a variant of the AMOS espionage Trojan, Odyssey, is distributing fake AI tool advertisements through channels like Twitter, enticing users to download malware disguised as AI tool clients.It uses AppleScript as the main payload to steal sensitive data such as system information, browser data, and cryptocurrency wallet information.