Crypto Talkies November 27th 2025

Crypto’s sundown comes with a familiar mix today: regulators circling, banks doubling down, miners improvising, and memes refusing to die. Bitcoin (BTC) spent the day wobbling near key levels, but the bigger story was where that hash power is actually coming from. Despite Beijing’s sweeping 2021 ban, China has quietly clawed its way back to a major share of global mining, now estimated at roughly 30% of the network and back in the No. 3 spot globally. Cheap electricity, local incentives, and softer enforcement are pulling rigs back on‑grid even as Q4’s drawdown has crushed miner profitability. On-chain, Bitcoin looks caught between “is this the top?” and “is this just another shakeout?” With volatility compressing, some traders are calling an end to the bull market, while others point to renewed whale accumulation, a contrarian boost from high-profile bearish calls, and a pre‑holiday rally vibe as hints there’s still gas in the tank. Wall Street, at least, seems convinced Bitcoin’s not going away. JPMorgan filed to roll out a new leveraged structured note tied to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), offering up to 1.5x upside with conditional principal protection. On the exchange side, Nasdaq’s ISE is pushing to quadruple options limits on IBIT to one million contracts, putting Bitcoin derivatives in the same league as major blue-chip stocks. For institutions, BTC exposure is looking less like an experiment and more like just another line item. If Bitcoin is the blue chip, Solana (SOL) is today’s drama stock. Korean exchange Upbit was hit by a roughly $36 million exploit targeting Solana-based tokens, forcing a halt in withdrawals and prompting a regulatory look at local markets. The exchange has promised to make users whole, but the hack triggered big token flows and fresh questions about hot wallet risk. Despite that, Solana itself is still a magnet for institutional money: spot ETFs have racked up an eye-catching 20‑plus day inflow streak totaling around $568 million as SOL hovers near $140–$143. Yet the first crack in that wall appeared today, with Solana ETFs logging their first meaningful outflows, led by a $34 million withdrawal from 21Shares’ TSOL. The net picture: demand is strong, but not invincible, and ETF flows are finally starting to look like a two-way market. Risk is showing up in smaller corners of the Solana ecosystem too. A malicious Chrome extension called “Crypto Copilot” masqueraded as a trading helper but quietly skimmed SOL from Raydium (RAY) swaps by injecting hidden fees, reminding everyone that browser extensions and DeFi don’t mix unless you absolutely trust the code. Over in Ethereum-land (ETH), the story is more about scaling and separation. The network’s block gas limit has doubled to 60 million in under a year, a key throughput milestone backed by validators and the broader community. Vitalik Buterin is signaling that future growth will be more strategic and uneven to avoid introducing new bottlenecks. Markets liked the direction: ETH reclaimed the $3,000 mark on the back of ETF inflows, whale buying, and optimism ahead of the Fusaka upgrade, with some traders arguing ETH is finally starting to trade on its own fundamentals instead of just shadowing Bitcoin. Buterin also spent some of his own ETH in a very literal way, donating 256 ETH to privacy-focused messaging apps Session and SimpleX Chat. The move highlights a growing thesis that encrypted messaging and crypto-native identity/privacy tools are core infrastructure, not niche products. Privacy, meanwhile, is exactly what’s making regulators nervous. Grayscale wants to convert its Zcash Trust into the first U.S. spot Zcash (ZEC) ETF, a proposal that would effectively bring a full-blown privacy coin inside the U.S. ETF wrapper. That’s already sparking debate across both the privacy-coin community and policy circles. And in Thailand, the hammer came down hard on Worldcoin (WLD). Authorities ordered the project to halt operations and delete over 1.2 million iris scans collected in the country, citing consent issues and biometric privacy violations. For regulators, this is the nightmare version of “data on-chain forever”; for Worldcoin, it’s a high-profile warning that global expansion won’t just be about growth metrics. The regulatory lens is widening beyond specific projects. Australia advanced a sweeping new bill that will put crypto exchanges and custodians squarely under existing financial services rules, complete with licenses and direct ASIC oversight. In the U.S., major stock exchanges like Nasdaq are urging the SEC not to give tokenized stock platforms any special “innovation exemptions,” arguing that lighter-touch rules would hurt investors and undercut public markets. And at the global level, the Bank for International Settlements is now flagging tokenized money market funds—nearly $9 billion of them—as carrying the same liquidity and contagion risks as their off-chain cousins, even if they live on more transparent rails. Traditional finance, for its part, is not sitting on the sidelines. Visa teamed up with Aquanow to expand stablecoin settlement across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, promising lower cross-border costs and less friction. In Switzerland, AMINA Bank and Crypto Finance used Google Cloud’s Universal Ledger to settle fiat payments near-instantly, 24/7, with programmable commercial money, a glimpse of what future compliant payment plumbing might look like. Klarna is taking a similar route for its own needs, announcing plans for a KlarnaUSD stablecoin by 2026 to cut cross-border costs using Stripe’s Tempo blockchain stack. Stablecoins themselves were in the spotlight from another direction. Tether (USDT) found itself locked in a shouting match with S&P after the rating agency gave USDT a weak stability grade. CEO Paolo Ardoino dismissed the move as outdated legacy thinking, pointing to the firm’s growing Bitcoin and gold reserves as proof of strength rather than risk. At the same time, a fresh analysis suggests Tether has quietly become the world’s largest gold buyer, with roughly 116 tons backing its XAUT token and more bullion buying than some central banks. Between gold, Bitcoin, and dollar reserves, Tether is increasingly behaving like a private central bank—one that regulators and rating agencies are only just starting to process. Not all stablecoin stories were defensive. Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin is scaling fast, with 10 million new tokens minted on the XRP Ledger and a market cap around $1.26 billion. It also picked up an important green light in Abu Dhabi, where RLUSD is now approved as a Fiat-Referenced Token within ADGM’s financial zone—a stamp of legitimacy that could matter for institutional use. XRP itself has clawed back above $2, stabilizing around $2.20 with technicals hinting at a possible grind toward $2.55, even as volatility keeps traders on edge. Off-exchange, Binance’s XRP reserves have dropped by about $640 million since early October, fueling a “supply shock” narrative as more coins move into long-term storage. On the alt and meme side, Dogecoin (DOGE) is having another moment. The first U.S. spot DOGE ETF has launched, whales are accumulating, and price has broken out around $0.15 on the back of a clean inverse head-and-shoulders pattern. Signals are mixed—some ETF and whale flows look toppy—but the broader picture is renewed institutional curiosity about whether DOGE is just a meme or a permanent part of the crypto trading stack. Other corners of the market were less cheerful. Pump.fun sent another $75 million USDC to Kraken, bringing total exchange deposits to $480 million since mid‑November. With PUMP down about 38% and accusations of treasury dumping swirling, the project is becoming a case study in how fast sentiment can flip on high-flying platforms. Arthur Hayes’ about-face on Monad (MON)—from loud bull to vocal bear—had a similar effect, slamming price and underscoring how fragile low-float altcoins are when one big voice changes its mind. DeFi, despite the chop, is still drawing serious capital. DWF Labs rolled out a $75 million fund aimed at builders working on liquidity, settlement, credit markets, on-chain risk management, dark pool and perpetual DEXs, and yield protocols—the boring, unsexy rails that large institutions actually need to participate at scale. There was no shortage of courtroom and celebrity drama, either. Do Kwon is asking a U.S. court to cap his sentence at five years for his role in the Terra collapse, even as he faces up to 40 years in South Korea and prosecutors plan to suggest as much as 12 years stateside. In a different kind of cage match, Conor McGregor resurfaced online to accuse rival Khabib Nurmagomedov of scamming fans with a $4.4 million NFT sale—despite McGregor’s own failed REAL memecoin. The episode is another reminder that star power plus crypto usually equals volatility, not necessarily value. Finally, a few quieter but notable builders kept shipping. Pi Network teamed up with CiDi Games to weave PI payments into new Web3 titles and improve tooling for studios, as it eyes regulated trading in the EU. And behind the scenes, tokenized finance continues to scale as a whole, drawing both institutional money and scrutiny from global watchdogs. As the day closes, the throughline is clear: crypto is no longer a single story. It’s a patchwork of institutional products, regulatory pushes, privacy battles, and speculative manias all colliding at once. Bitcoin may be debating its next move, but the broader ecosystem is marching ahead, one hack, lawsuit, ETF filing, and protocol upgrade at a time.

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