Crypto Talkies November 24th 2025

Tonight’s crypto tape felt like a collision of two worlds: deepening fear in prices and regulation, and a quiet but very real build‑out of new infrastructure and products. Let’s start where everyone is staring: Bitcoin (BTC). After a bruising 30–35% slide that knocked BTC into the mid‑$80Ks to $90K range, the market is trying to decide whether this is the bottom or just a rest stop on the way down. Volatility has spiked, open interest has dropped to six‑month lows as leveraged traders get flushed out, and ETF flows have swung from fuel to headwind. NYDIG is blaming the selloff on the same structural forces that powered the last rally: spot ETF inflows reversing, corporate treasuries pulling back, and shrinking stablecoin liquidity. Yet under the surface, long‑term whales and institutions are quietly adding, pushing exchange balances to eight‑year lows. Some analysts see classic capitulation and a potential base forming here, especially with the possibility of Fed cuts next year. Others say don’t expect a full‑on recovery until easier monetary policy arrives, maybe not before spring 2026. In the meantime, even Satoshi isn’t immune: the crash shaved roughly $42 billion off his paper fortune and dropped him to around 18th on the global rich list. This turbulence is creating fault lines in how big players think about Bitcoin’s future. VanEck CEO Jan van Eck openly raised the specter of quantum computing and privacy gaps undermining BTC’s long‑term encryption, saying his firm could meaningfully cut or exit positions if the network were ever viewed as “broken.” On the flip side, Michael Saylor and Strategy Inc. are doubling down on their reserve strategy, arguing that despite the stock hit and market jitters, their BTC stack still outperforms top tech names over the cycle and remains core to the company’s identity. Regulators and banks are also tightening the screws. South Korea’s Financial Intelligence Unit is rolling out its harshest crackdown yet after anti‑money laundering failures, targeting Korbit, GOPAX, Bithumb, and Coinone with penalties right on the heels of a record fine for Upbit operator Dunamu. Ironically, Dunamu is now plotting a merger with tech giant Naver and eyeing a Nasdaq IPO, positioning itself as a global fintech heavyweight even as its domestic peers are being hauled in over AML lapses. In Europe, the ECB is ringing alarm bells around stablecoins, warning that even with low current adoption, large‑scale euro stablecoin use could siphon off bank deposits and pose financial stability risks. They’re calling for close oversight now, before these tokens scale. Meanwhile, in the U.S., crypto’s uneasy relationship with big banks resurfaced after JPMorgan abruptly closed Strike CEO Jack Mallers’ personal accounts. That follows fresh calls from Bitcoin advocates to boycott the bank over index provider MSCI’s exclusion of crypto treasury firms and longstanding controversies around JPMorgan’s broader conduct. For many, it feels like “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” never really left. Security and privacy were another big undercurrent. A violent home invasion in San Francisco, where a fake delivery driver forced a homeowner to hand over credentials to $11 million in crypto, underscored that digital wealth can translate into very real‑world risk. Vitalik Buterin added to the privacy debate, criticizing X’s new country‑tagging feature as both easy to fake and dangerous for legitimate crypto users who don’t want their location or activity profile painted with a broad, public brush. Developers weren’t spared either. A major supply‑chain attack hit the NPM ecosystem, compromising more than 400 packages, including key Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and crypto libraries. The Shai Hulud malware targeted developer credentials and CI/CD secrets. ENS Labs stressed that user domains and assets weren’t impacted, but the incident is a fresh reminder that in crypto, the weakest link is often the tooling developers rely on. Onchain, not all the drama was invisible. Cardano (ADA) went through a temporary network split after a hidden bug met what founder Charles Hoskinson called a “premeditated” attack. The fallout: FBI involvement, a myths‑versus‑facts explainer from the project, vocal critics questioning security practices, and some developer resignations that raised questions about internal accountability. Market‑wise, this has been one of the harshest stretches for structured crypto products since 2018. Nearly $5 billion has left crypto investment products over the past four weeks, with about $1.9 billion in the latest week alone. The outflows mirror the retreat in prices and risk appetite, but there were small green shoots late in the week and a noticeable appetite for XRP. XRP is having a very different conversation than most of the market. It broke back above $2, flashing bullish technical patterns as optimism builds around its expanding ETF lineup. Grayscale’s new GXRP and Franklin Templeton’s competing XRP ETF both launched on NYSE Arca, with Franklin juicing early flows through fee waivers. For many institutions, these products represent the cleanest, most regulated way to get XRP exposure, and the price action is starting to reflect that. Meme and alt‑beta corners stayed volatile. Dogecoin (DOGE) broke a key support on its drop from around 0.185 dollars to 0.145, stoking fears of a deeper breakdown just as broader sentiment soured and Elon Musk shuttered his D.O.G.E. project team. But Asian trading sessions saw DOGE firm up, helped along by fresh optimism around a possible Grayscale Dogecoin ETF and a sense that the worst of the washout might be over. Not all meme platforms inspired confidence. Pump.fun’s PUMP token saw a 24% slide after on‑chain sleuths noted roughly $436 million in USDC moving through Kraken and Circle since mid‑October, with large withdrawals and slower official communications fueling fears of a quiet cash‑out. The team hasn’t fully calmed nerves yet, and in a market already on edge about liquidity, that uncertainty hits harder. On the build‑side, Solana (SOL) and the emerging Monad (MON) ecosystem stole some of the infrastructure spotlight. Wormhole Labs launched Sunrise, a new liquidity gateway on Solana designed as an on‑ramp for external tokens, with Monad’s MON as the flagship listing. Monad’s own mainnet went live with staking active and a large portion of MON supply locked and vesting through 2029. Early trading was underwhelming, but gMON via Magma aims to give users a more liquid way to gain exposure as the ecosystem spins up. Ethereum (ETH) quietly sat at a key multi‑year support level while whales and aggressive buyers made their move. BitMine, despite a slump in its own stock and billions in unrealized losses, added another $82 million in ETH in a month, lifting holdings by around 30%. Bitmine Immersion Technologies, backed by Tom Lee, has gone even further, accumulating 3.63 million ETH worth over $11 billion by buying every major dip. That long‑horizon conviction stands in sharp contrast to the nerves showing up in ETF flows. Mining more broadly is in flux. China, despite its formal 2021 ban, has crept back to about 14% of global Bitcoin hashrate thanks to cheap power and the rapid build‑out of data centers in energy‑rich provinces. Regulators seem to be looking the other way for now. In the U.S., JPMorgan is telling clients that listed miners are entering a new phase: less about raw hashrate and more about high‑performance computing. Companies like Cipher and CleanSpark are being rewarded for pivoting toward AI‑oriented HPC, turning their power assets into diversified revenue machines rather than pure Bitcoin leverage. Regionally, exchanges are chasing new capital markets. Thai platform Bitkub is exploring a Hong Kong IPO as early as next year, targeting roughly $200 million in fresh funding as its home market wobbles and Hong Kong doubles down on its digital asset pitch. In Japan, meanwhile, top asset managers are preparing the country’s first crypto trusts, aided by new, friendlier regulations and tax treatment that could unlock tens of billions of dollars in demand by around 2026. DeFi and onchain speculation haven’t taken the night off either. Myriad (XMY), a Web3 prediction market, has crossed $100 million in USDC trading volume in just three months, with over 400,000 active users and more than 6 million trades. That’s 10x growth in a quarter, a strong signal that even in choppy markets, traders want liquid, decentralized venues to express views on everything from politics to prices. Still, looming over all of this are supply dynamics and unlocks. More than $566 million in token unlocks are queued for late November, led by Hyperliquid’s HYPE with over $314 million set to come into circulation. After a prominent whale bought $4.1 million of HYPE, traders are split between seeing it as a vote of confidence or just a prelude to heavy sell pressure. Arthur Hayes remains firmly in the latter camp, arguing that unlocks, almost by definition, inject uncertainty and extra supply at the worst possible time. Put together, tonight’s picture is a familiar crypto paradox: fear in the charts, experiments in the trenches, and regulation catching up at very different speeds across regions. Prices may be struggling, but new rails, products, and narratives are already lining up for the next cycle.

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