According to a new report from bloombergFederal authorities have been quietly investigating Bitmain, the Beijing-based bitcoin mining hardware manufacturing company, over fears that its equipment could serve as a backdoor for Chinese spying or even cause deliberate blackouts on the US electrical grid. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have been running a covert investigation called “Operation Red Sunset” for months, in which agents are breaking into imported machines at ports looking for hidden kill switches or remote-access tricks.
The concern is that these application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Bitcoin mining computers, which are often deployed in massive data centers near energy hot spots that also serve as sites for military bases, could theoretically be flipped on remotely to spy on sensitive areas or cause chaos in critical infrastructure.
The investigation is based on red flags years from the Biden-era to 2024 block At a Bitmain-run mining site very close to a Wyoming nuclear missile base, according to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee alert in gear this summer about “troubling vulnerabilities” that could allow Beijing to exercise coercion from afar. Bitmain, for its part, is calling the whole thing nonsense, insisting that there is no way to control its Antminer rigs from China, and that it has never heard of “Operation Red Sunset.”
Of course, fears of Beijing’s backdoor entry into hardware have been rife for more than a decade, with claims from People’s Liberation Army operatives. Forcefully Subcontractor to sell rice-grain-sized spy chips to Vodafone on Supermicro server motherboards Accept It found hidden backdoors in Huawei telecom gear deployed throughout Italy. Just this year, reports came out Undocumented cellular modems hidden inside Chinese solar inverters sold in Europe and the US silently ping the house even when the power is off, prompting frantic teardowns and emergency firmware atom bombs.
That said, strong evidence of deliberate state-level subversion at times remains unclear (or potentially classified).
Trump family’s business relationship with Bitmain
The Bitmain investigation is also interesting from the perspective of the Trump family’s endless involvement in the crypto industry. Eric and Don Jr. are deeply engaged in a mining organization called American Bitcoin, and in August, the company purchased 16,000 Bitmain devices in a deal worth $314 million.
Of all the crypto dramas at Trumpworld, this one least looks like straight mining rather than the pump-and-dump grifting or decentralization theater that is so common in the industry. Involved in other controversial crypto operations involving the Trump family alleged corruption Around the pardon of a former crypto exchange CEO, A questionable memecoinand this Tokenization of Trump-branded real estate development,
Despite the potentially neat sight of operating a business that only mines Bitcoin, one has to wonder: How deep will a national security review of Bitmain go when the president’s children are literally powering their operations with the company’s hardware?
This is not the first time that Bitmain has been accused of hidden capabilities
It’s also notable that Bitmain has already been accused of having backdoors in its hardware during Bitcoin’s “block size wars” around 2017, when the community was tearing itself apart over how to scale the network. Almost the entire developer ecosystem and most users were rallying behind the Segregated Witness (SegWit) proposal; However, activation of this upgrade required 95% of miners to have signal support.
Bitmain, whose Antpool controlled a large portion of the hashrate, was a major obstacle to SegWit’s activation, as co-founder Jihan Wu pushed hard for a controversial hard fork to increase the block size, a move that risked splitting the chain and was largely rejected by the broader ecosystem.
supporting evidence Bitmain wasn’t just ideologically opposed to SegWit, it was eventually revealed, as they were reportedly protecting a secret sauce called ASICBOOST, a secret optimization baked into their Antminer hardware that exploited a quirk in Bitcoin’s proof-of-work to cut mining costs by up to 30%. It turns out that SegWit would eliminate that potential advantage.
Bitmain claimed it was a smear campaign, but the damage had been done: it seemed that the world’s leading miner was willing to hold the network’s progress hostage for a competitive edge. SegWit will eventually find its way into Bitcoin without hard-forking increases in the block size limit.
A few months later, Bitmain faced another controversy antbleedWhich was a “feature” in the Antminer firmware (critics called it a straight-up backdoor) that let the company remotely shut down mining rigs. Bitmain claimed that this backdoor was not added maliciously and it was eventually removed.
Wayne Knots/ChainAlysis partnership announced? They have very good technology to identify suspicious transactions.
– Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) 18 November 2025
These ghosts of Bitcoin’s past continue to haunt the present, as mining centralization remains a serious concern. thoughts like MIT’s old ChainAnchor proposal (A wild “bribe miners to include only verified transactions” scheme that was spun off as a permitted takeover attempt and never happened) still exists in Ether, and Recent controversy over the use of transaction filters by nodes This suggests that some Bitcoin users are willing to adopt software that potentially opens the door to concepts that are not entirely dissimilar.