According to a new report from Bloomberg, federal authorities have quietly been digging into Bitmain, the Beijing-based bitcoin mining hardware manufacturing giant, over fears that its devices could serve as a backdoor for Chinese espionage or even deliberate blackouts on the U.S. electrical grid. The Department of Homeland Security is said to have been running a secretive probe dubbed “Operation Red Sunset” for months, with agents tearing apart imported machines at ports in search of hidden kill switches or remote-access tricks.
The worry is these application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) bitcoin mining computers, which are often deployed in massive data centers near energy hot spots that double as sites for military bases, could theoretically be flipped from afar to spy on sensitive areas or trigger chaos in critical infrastructure.
The investigation builds on years of red flags, from a 2024 Biden-era block on a Bitmain-powered mining site too close to a Wyoming nuclear missile base, to a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee warning this summer about “disturbing vulnerabilities” in gear that might let Beijing pull strings remotely. Bitmain, for its part, is calling the whole thing nonsense, insisting there’s zero way to control its Antminer rigs from China, and that it’s never heard of any “Operation Red Sunset.”
Of course, fears of Beijing slipping backdoors into hardware have been prevalent for over a decade, with claims ranging from People’s Liberation Army operatives forcing subcontractors to solder rice-grain-sized spy chips onto Supermicro server motherboards to Vodafone admitting it found hidden backdoors in Huawei telecom gear deployed across Italy. Just this year, reports surfaced of undocumented cellular modems lurking inside Chinese solar inverters sold across Europe and the U.S., quietly pinging home even when powered off, prompting frantic teardowns and emergency firmware nukes.
That said, hard proof of intentional state-level sabotage oftentimes remains murky (or potentially classified).
Trump Family’s Business Connection to Bitmain
The Bitmain investigation is also interesting from the perspective of the Trump family’s seemingly-endless involvement in the crypto industry. Eric and Don Jr. are knee-deep in a mining outfit called American Bitcoin, and In August, the company snapped up 16,000 Bitmain devices in a $314 million deal.
Of all the Trumpworld crypto plays, this one at least looks like straightforward mining rather than the pump-and-dump grifting or decentralization theater that is common in the industry more generally. Other controversial crypto operations involving the Trump family include alleged corruption around the pardon of a former crypto exchange CEO, a dubious memecoin, and the tokenization of a Trump-branded real estate development.
Despite the potentially-cleaner optics of operating a business that simply mines bitcoin, one has to wonder: How deep will a national security review of Bitmain go when the president’s kids are literally powering their operation with hardware from the company?
This is Not the First Time Bitmain Has Been Accused of Hidden Capabilities
It’s also notable that Bitmain has already been accused of having backdoors in their hardware during Bitcoin’s “block size wars” around 2017, when the community was tearing itself apart over how to scale the network. Pretty much 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 signal support.
Bitmain, whose AntPool controlled a massive chunk of hashrate, was a major holdout in SegWit’s activation, as co-founder Jihan Wu pushed hard for a controversial hard fork to just jack up the block size instead, a move that risked splitting the chain and that the broader ecosystem largely rejected.
Supporting evidence that Bitmain wasn’t just ideologically opposed to SegWit eventually came out, as they were allegedly protecting a secret sauce called covert ASICBOOST, a sneaky optimization baked into their Antminer hardware that exploited a quirk in Bitcoin’s proof-of-work to shave up to 30% off mining costs. It turned out that SegWit would kill that potential advantage.
Bitmain claimed this was a smear campaign, but the damage was done: it looked like the world’s dominant miner was willing to hold the network progress hostage for a competitive edge. SegWit would eventually find its way into Bitcoin without an attached hard-forking increase of the block size limit.
Some months later, Bitmain faced another controversy in the form of Antbleed, which was a “feature” (critics called it a straight-up backdoor) in Antminer firmware that let the company remotely shut down mining rigs. Bitmain claimed this backdoor was not added maliciously and eventually removed it.
wen knots/chainalysis partnership announcement? they have pretty good tech for identifying unsavory transactions.
— Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) November 18, 2025
These ghosts from Bitcoin’s past keep haunting the present, because mining centralization remains a serious concern. Ideas like MIT’s old ChainAnchor proposal (a wild “bribe miners to only include verified transactions” scheme that got slammed as a permissioned takeover attempt and never happened) are still out there in the ether, and the recent controversy over the use of transaction filters by nodes shows some Bitcoin users are willing to adopt software that potentially opens the door to concepts that aren’t completely dissimilar.
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