Summary

Three layers, three different states of knowledge

The core of this investigation is that AS210860 can be described at three layers, and each layer is in a different evidentiary state.

The first layer is routing. An autonomous system exists in the operational internet only insofar as it originates prefixes that other networks accept and propagate. For AS210860, that quantity has been zero since 26 March 2026. The RIPEstat data page for the ASN reports no currently announced prefixes, and the Hurricane Electric BGP toolkit's historical attribution shows exactly one prefix ever credited to the network: 193.21.248.0/21 https://stat.ripe.net/AS210860 https://bgp.he.net/AS210860. Independent routing observations also record zero RPKI-originated-valid prefixes for the ASN. This is not an anomaly that a monitoring alert would flag and clear; it is a sustained absence, running from late March through the beginning of October 2026 — roughly six months.

The second layer is the registry. The aut-num object AS210860 was created on 24 August 2021 and last modified on 27 October 2021, with as-name edeka_digital, organisation ORG-EDG14-RIPE, and admin-c and tech-c pointing to the role handle DA9499-RIPE (DFINFRA) https://ip.cc/topic/asn/AS210860/. The third-party mirror text of this object is the most complete verbatim registry rendering available, because the authoritative source cannot currently be read directly: the official RIPE Database lookup endpoint returned only an application shell — JavaScript without readable object values — in the September 2026 research sessions https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/lookup?key=AS210860&type=aut-num. This is the evidentiary concession BTW's earlier coverage carried, and it carries forward: every registry value quoted here is a dated observation of a specific mirror, not a first-party registry fact.

The third layer is corporate. The Hamburg commercial register does not derive from RIPE output and is not subject to the RIPE layer's failures. It is where the corporate reality behind ORG-EDG14-RIPE can be anchored. And it is here that this investigation finds something the registry layer never showed.

What the Hamburg register records

Two companies matter.

The first is EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH, registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg under HRB 90516. Its status is recorded as active, its address is New-York-Ring 6, 22297 Hamburg, it was founded on 7 May 2004, and its share capital is EUR 240,000 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20Verwaltungs-%20und%20Beteiligungs%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%2090516 https://www.online-handelsregister.de/handelsregisterauszug/hh/Hamburg/HRB/90516/EDEKA-Verwaltungs-und-Beteiligungs-GmbH. Its registered corporate purpose is holding and managing participations in companies of any legal form. Two independent register-aggregator sources agree on the HRB 90516 assignment and the address.

The second is EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH, registered under HRB 113314 at the same New-York-Ring 6 address. It was entered in the register on 7 April 2010 — originally as Lunar GmbH — and renamed EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH by shareholder resolution of 13 December 2018, with the renaming entered on 28 December 2018 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20DIGITAL%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%20113314 https://www.online-handelsregister.de/handelsregisterauszug/hh/Hamburg/HRB/113314/EDEKA-DIGITAL-GmbH. Its share capital was EUR 100,000, and its registered purpose covered IT product brokerage, development and maintenance, consulting and IT project leadership. Its record is now marked deleted and no longer active.

The decisive entry is dated 5 August 2025: a Verschmelzung — a merger — by which EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH was absorbed into EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH. The absorbing company's register sheet records the merger, and the absorbed company's record reflects it through its deleted status https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20Verwaltungs-%20und%20Beteiligungs%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%2090516 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20DIGITAL%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%20113314.

Read against the registry layer, this entry does three things at once.

First, it disambiguates the register numbers. The register number Hamburg HRB 90516 — the one visible in the IPIP.NET rendering of ORG-EDG14-RIPE — belongs to EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH, not to EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH, whose number is HRB 113314 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20Verwaltungs-%20und%20Beteiligungs%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%2090516 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20DIGITAL%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%20113314.

Second, it resolves the mirror contradiction temporally. In October 2026 BTW documented that two public mirrors rendered the same organisation object ORG-EDG14-RIPE with two different legal names and two different last-modification dates. With the merger entry in hand, those renderings stop looking like competing claims about the present and start looking like snapshots of different moments of one corporate timeline: one name that was current when the registry objects were frozen in 2021, and one name that became current as the group consolidated. The names are one entity across time https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20DIGITAL%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%20113314 https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20Verwaltungs-%20und%20Beteiligungs%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%2090516.

Third, it establishes what the group-level structure looked like before the merger. EDEKA's own FY2023 financial report, a first-party corporate document, lists both EDEKA Verwaltungs- und Beteiligungs GmbH and EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH as 100% consolidated subsidiaries of EDEKA ZENTRALE Stiftung & Co. KG as at 31 December 2023, and describes EDEKA DIGITAL as the operator of the group's cross-stage merchandise-management IT systems — functions that were subsequently bundled into EDEKA IT Stiftung & Co. OHG https://verbund.edeka/verbund/finanzbericht_edeka-zentrale-konzern_2023.pdf.

What the corporate layer does not prove

The register is the strongest anchor available, and it is worth being precise about what it anchors and what it does not.

It anchors the corporate identity behind ORG-EDG14-RIPE. It does not anchor any network operations. The registered purpose at HRB 90516 is holding and managing participations; nothing in the register records inspected for this article describes operating or selling network services https://www.northdata.de/EDEKA%20Verwaltungs-%20und%20Beteiligungs%20GmbH,%20Hamburg/HRB%2090516 https://www.online-handelsregister.de/handelsregisterauszug/hh/Hamburg/HRB/90516/EDEKA-Verwaltungs-und-Beteiligungs-GmbH. EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH's purpose was IT systems for a retail group, not public internet services. No revenue or commercial evidence surfaced in this investigation ties AS210860 to a trading business of any kind.

This matters because the most persistent third-party claim about the network is a commercial one. A PeeringDB-derived record still presents EDEKA DIGITAL as the operator of AS210860, self-declaring ten IPv4 prefixes and one IPv6 prefix, network type "Other", scope "Not Disclosed", and an open peering policy https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/210860. Republished on a third-party directory, it remains unchanged and unreconciled https://hostdir.net/networks/as210860-edeka-digital. Against zero announced prefixes observed since March 2026, the declaration has no counterpart in any independent measurement. It is a self-declaration without a witness — and after this article's findings, it is also a declaration in the name of a company that no longer exists as a separate legal entity.

The registry layer, still unreadable

The original evidentiary constraint has not lifted. In both September 2026 research sessions, the authoritative RIPE Database endpoint — the db-web-ui lookup for AS210860 as an aut-num — returned only a JavaScript application shell, with no readable registry values https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/lookup?key=AS210860&type=aut-num. BTW's earlier coverage documented the same failure, and this article preserves the same discipline: no registry value here is treated as a first-party fact https://btw.media/en/governance/rir-watchdog/ripe-ncc/story/dfinfra-as210860-zero-announced-prefixes.

The retained corpus shows exactly one post-2021 registry movement: a 13 May 2026 modification of the ORG-EDG14-RIPE organisation object, observed through mirrors and predating the September coverage window https://btw.media/en/dfinfra-as210860-state-difference-september-2026. The content of that modification is not visible in the mirrors. Whether it ever becomes readable from the authoritative endpoint is one of the open questions this article leaves standing.

What would close the gap

Three specific, cheap, public reads would settle the remaining questions, and none has happened.

The first is a readable RIPE Database object. If the authoritative endpoint ever returns the aut-num and organisation objects with readable values, every mirror-derived value in this article's record becomes checkable, and the 13 May 2026 organisation-object change becomes interpretable.

The second is a PeeringDB reconciliation. Either the self-declared ten-prefix, open-peering record is corrected to match the observable zero, or it is withdrawn. Until then, a static self-declaration stands against six months of measured absence.

The third is a corporate decision. EDEKA DIGITAL GmbH no longer exists as a separate legal entity; its functions were consolidated; the register shows the absorbed company deleted. The AS registration outlived the legal entity whose name it carries. Whether the group consolidates or dissolves the registration is a business decision that the public record will eventually reflect — or conspicuously not.

Until at least one of those reads happens, the honest summary of AS210860 is this: a corporate layer that is now verifiable, a verification layer that lags it, and an operational layer that has said nothing for six months.