RIOT PREPAID THE COINBASE CREDIT LOAN IN FULL — THE PLEDGE OVER ITS BITCOIN, USDC AND CASH AT COINBASE CUSTODY WAS RELEASED — AND THE EARLY TERMINATION FEE CALCULATED OUT TO ZERO

On 21 September Riot Platforms paid off every dollar it owed Coinbase Credit and shut the facility down. The company had been borrowing against a pledge of its own financial assets, and the filing names them: bitcoin, USDC and cash, all held in the custody of Coinbase Custody Trust Company. That pledge is now gone. The 8-K says the security interests granted in favor of the lender were released.

Read that again, because it is the whole story. A public bitcoin miner had its coins sitting in someone else's vault with a lien on top of them. Two claims stood between Riot and its own bitcoin. The custodian held the keys and the lender held the pledge. As of 21 September only one of those is left.

The fee part is almost funny. Riot prepaid early, and early prepayment is supposed to cost something. The credit agreement calculates that penalty with a thing called the Day Count Fraction, and because the payment landed after the four month anniversary of the original maturity date, the filing says that fraction was zero. No fee. They waited out the clock and the penalty deleted itself.

None of this tells you the amount. The facility allowed up to two hundred million dollars, and the company did not say how much was actually drawn when it wrote the check. That is worth remembering before anyone puts a number on it. What the filing does say is that the lien is off, and for a company that measures itself in coins, that is the line that matters. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,041.