Welcome to the Crypto News Rundown, where we are kicking off our weekly analysis, getting right into the major crypto events, the big structural shifts in the market, and some really surprising regulatory moments that are reshaping the landscape.

It was a week of well, really start contrasts, a fascinating clash.

You could say a clash.

How So, on one side you had this pretty dramatic volatility, priced dips that reflect a lot of short term fear, mostly in the retail market.

But on the other side, that fear was met and I mean aggressively countered by these powerful, almost undeniable institutional moves, a real sense of long term conviction from some of the biggest players out there.

Exactly.

It's like we're tracking these institutional footprints and they're just getting deeper and deeper in the same So today we're going to unpack a few critical stories that are really going to define the market as we head towards the end of the year.

For sure, we're starting with Bitcoin's hard fought recovery.

We'll get deep into the huge black rock etf news, and then break down what's happening at major corporate treasuries.

We're talking strategy Metaplanet and even Elon Musk's SpaceX.

And we also have a major security crisis to talk about the breach that hit up it South Korea's biggest exchange and what that means for Salona security everywhere.

From there, we're looking at the let's call it the alt coin ETF report card.

Huh I like that?

Yeah, Comparing the really stellar performance of XRPU, which is all about regulation against the well, the disappointing start for doge coin, and some of the shifts we're seeing in the Salona funds.

Yeah, we'll wrap up by looking at how this is all playing out globally, from the SEC giving a really crucial green light to depin to stable coins basically acting as legal tender and emerging markets.

It's a lot, it is.

Okay, let's unpack this starting with the king coin, Bitcoin and the institutional flow that's holding up the market.

So let's start with the big story over the US Thanksgiving holiday.

On paper, it was, let's be honest, an undeniable disappointment.

Bitcoin hit ninety one thousand dollars, which is an incredible number in a vacuum, an amazing number, but it failed to top the twenty twenty four high of ninety five thousand, seven hundred and thirty seven dollars, and.

That gap, that little bit of failure to set a new high.

That's the psychological friction the market's dealing with right now.

I mean, if you zoom way out, we are in an incredible bull cycle, of course, but when you zoom in on just this recent performance, while not clearing last year's peak, it just highlights how much higher investors really expected twenty twenty five to go.

And historically a year over year drop like this is it's pretty rare, isn't it.

It's very rare.

I mean, the journey is just insane.

Yeah, from zero in two thousand and nine, crossing one thousand dollars in twenty thirteen, and then you hit those first two years of holiday price drops twenty fourteen down to three sixty nine twenty fifteen down to three fifty six.

Painful years.

Oh, they were brutal, real existential doubt in the community back then.

Then you get the massive spike to over ninety five grand twenty twenty four.

Seeing it at ninety one now it just means we're in one of those rare years like fourteen and fifteen where we didn't set a new holiday high.

That context helps a little, but even with.

That price dip, the the underlying mechanics are telling a different.

Story, right, but a much more bullish story.

If you look at the footprint charts, you can see what analysts are calling a persistent bid, absorbing any and all declines below ninety thousand dollars.

And what does that mean?

Exactly?

A persistent bid.

It means every time the price dips below ninety thousand, big buyers are stepping in.

And this isn't you know, small retail investors making panic buys.

This is a large, deliberate, almost programmatic buying pressure.

It's institutional accumulation.

So they're defending that ninety thousand dollars level.

They're defending it, and they're consuming the supply from passive sellers who are stacked up just under ninety two thousand.

The whole dynamic is shifting from just being defensive to something that feels more like it's in well full attack mode.

So if that buying pressure is so persistent, what are the technical markers we should be looking for?

What suggests a reversal might actually be setting up well?

Technically the market's already showing a very clear higher low structure.

Okay, for anyone who isn't glued to the charts all day, what does that mean?

It just means that after the price tested a recent low point, it bounced, and then on the next stp it didn't go all the way back down, it found its footing at a higher low.

That's a classic sign that the bearers are losing steam and the buyers are slowly building a bullish structure.

And we're seeing other signs too.

Yeah, we're seeing increasing intra day volume, so more money is actually moving during the day, and the RSI, the relative strength index, is recovering.

That suggests the asset isn't seen as oversold anymore, and momentum is building back up.

And you could draw a straight line from this buying pressure directly to what's happening in the broader macro environment.

Absolutely, the institutional buying is lining up perfectly with these improving macro tailwinds.

We're seeing treasury yields falling, inflation expectations are coming down.

Which all points to the FED.

It all points to a December FED rate cut.

The CME Group's FED watch tool it now puts the probability of a twenty five basis point cut at eighty five percent.

Eighty five percent, and what was it last week?

That's the crazy part.

It's a forty six percent jump in probability in just one week.

Wow.

So why does a jump like that hit bitcoin so hard?

What's the direct connection?

Because bitcoin, for all intents and purposes, acts like a long duration asset.

It's a bit like a tech growth stock.

Okay, So when interest rates are expected to fall, the present value of future value it goes up.

Lower rates also mean cheaper money, so big institutions are encouraged to move capital out of safer things like treasuries and into riskier, high growth assets like bitcoin.

That massive jump in probability, it's a huge green light for them.

It confirms the risk on trade is back.

Speaking of institutional conviction, black rocks, I bid it.

It is just show incredible durability right now.

It's a huge psychological milestone.

Holders of the Aisher's Bitcoin Trusts ETF have officially flipped back into profit.

We're talking a cumulative gain of three point two billion.

Dollars and that's after a pretty scary dip.

A very scary dip.

Yeah, just four days before that, the cumulative profit had shrunk all the way down to six hundred and thirty million.

So this rapid V shaped recovery, it just reinforces confidence, especially for the big players who bought that dip.

And it wasn't just ibit.

No, the spot bitcoin ETFs as a whole had two straight days of inflows, only twenty one million total, but it was enough to end a painful two week outflow streak.

But ibit is still in the class of its own, isn't it It is.

According to K thirty three research, ibit is the only spot bitcoin ETF to maintain net positive inflows throughout the whole of twenty twenty five.

That is an incredible statistic.

It says everything about black Rocks distribution power and the trust that institutions put in that brand.

The momentum is so strong that i bit is now getting what people are calling the mag seven treatment from regulators.

Yeah, this is huge.

Nasdaq's eyes proposed increasing the trading limits for ibit options to one million contracts one million.

That is putting bitcoin derivatives on the exact same level as the biggest stocks in the world.

We're talking Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, the magnificent seven.

So what does that actually do for the market.

Well, ibit already holds over eighty six billion in bitcoin.

Analysts are thinking this move could inject more than five billion dollars in new derivatives activity, and that creates this powerful feedback loop.

How soo more derivative demand means market makers and institutional hedgers have to go out and buy the underlying asset, the actual BTC, to cover their positions.

It just pours fuel on the fire.

It's a huge validation of bitcoin as a core financial asset.

And then, as if that wasn't enough validation, we get the news out.

Of Texas, a truly landmark moment.

Txis became the first US state to purchase bitcoin for its public treasury.

Which accelerates this whole state level crypto treasury race that's been bubbling under the surface.

Absolutely.

The purchase happened in mid November at an average price of around eighty seven thousand dollars, and they did it through Black Rocks Ibit ETF.

So not self custody.

They use the ETF, and that's the strategic part.

By using the ETF, they get immediate regulated exposure to the asset.

They get to bypass all the complex legal and custodial hurdles that would come with trying to hold the keys themselves.

So why is this so important for the rest of the market.

What's the precedent here?

The precedent is that it signals to every other state treasury and every public pension fund in the country that these regulated products, these spot bitcoin ETFs are now viable and acceptable tools for long term strategic allocation.

It's not just a speculative venture anymore.

Exactly, Texas is treating bitcoin as a legitimate hedge against federal monetary policy and inflation, while at the same time they're laying the groundwork for future self custody if and when the state's own regulatory framework evolves to allow it.

It's a very smart two step play.

Now, this recent volatility has been a huge stress test for the corporate treasuries that followed this playbook.

Let's start with Strategy formerly micro strategy.

They rolled out a whole new credit dashboard basically to calm investor nerves after the price dip, and their confidence is well remarkably high.

They're not worried, not at all.

They claim they have a seventy one year dividend payment runway to service their debt, even if the price of bitcoin just stayed flat for.

Decades, seventy one years.

Yeah, their debt coverage ratio, what they call their BTC rating is at five point nine times their debt and that's because their average cost basis is so low around seventy four thousand dollars.

So the liquidation fears that we saw in the last cycle, that's pretty much off the table for strategy for them.

Yes, their debt is well managed, and crucially, their MNAV ratio, that's the enterprise value of the company divided by the value of its crypto holdings, is still above one.

It's at one point one six.

Okay, can you break that down for us?

What does an m and AV ratio of one point one six actually tell us?

It's basically a measure of market confidence.

If the ratio is above one, it means the market values the company for more than just the bitcoin it holds.

They're pricing in a premium for its ability to keep executing its accumulation strategy.

So the market thinks strategy itself is worth sixteen percent more than all its bitcoin and its software business combined.

Exactly, and that gives them the power to raise more money by issuing new stock if they want to.

It's a very powerful signal of stability and market trust.

Now you contrast that incredibly strong position with what's happening over at Japan's Metal.

Planet, a much much more precarious situation.

The market is really holding its breath on this one.

Why what's the problem?

Well, Metaplanet is nearing a serious inflection point.

They hold thirty thousand Bitcoin, but their average cost is way higher than the current price.

It's around one hundred and eight thousand dollars per.

Corn ouch, So with Bitcoin trading around eighty seven thousand, they're what's seventeen percent under.

Water almost exactly.

That's about six hundred and forty million dollars in unrealized losses right now.

And to make it worse, they just added a ton of leverage.

Precisely, they recently borrowed an additional one hundred and thirty million dollars using their existing bitcoin as collateral.

So for them to just break even, Bitcoin needs to get back to one hundred and eight thousand dollars.

Just to break even for their whole leveraged investment, model to actually work to make a profit and service that debt analysts think Bitcoin needs to get above one hundred and thirty thousand dollars.

That seems optimistic in this market.

So what's the timeline here?

What's the immediate risk?

The risk is huge because they have two massive dates coming up in December.

First is December eighteenth, the Bank of Japan's interest rate decision.

If the Boja Titans policy, the yen gets stronger, and that could push bitcoins rice down even further in local currency terms, which.

Would look really bad right before their shareholder vote exactly.

The second date is December twenty second.

That's a critical shareholder vote on a one hundred and thirty five million dollar fundraising plan, which they desperately need.

So if the Boja Titans the vote could.

Fail, it absolutely could.

We're already hearing whispers that some of the big institutional shareholders are getting nervous.

If that vote fails and Bitcoin dips further, you could start seeing margin call scenarios.

It's a very tight spot for them.

Okay, shifting gears to Elon Musk.

SpaceX made a big move this week that got a lot of analysts talking, Yeah.

They transferred one hundred and sixty three bitcoin that's worth about one hundred and five million dollars to new wallets linked to coinbase Prime.

And this isn't to sale.

No.

Analysts at Arkham Intelligence are very firm on this.

It's not a sale or a liquidation.

It's about professionalizing their custody, so.

Moving it somewhere safer, more regular.

That's the consensus.

Moving funds to coinbas Prime is what you do when you're a major corporation and you view this asset as a long term strategic reserve.

It's about higher security, regulatory compliance, all of that.

SpaceX is still the fourth largest private holder of bitcoin, with over six thousand coins worth more than half a billion dollars.

This is just them growing up.

From the professionalization of custody.

We now have to turn to a very stark reminder that centralized exchanges are still well massive honeypots.

Yeah, this is a serious incident.

This week, South Korea's biggest crypto exchange, upbit, suffered a major breach.

How much are we talking.

Unauthorized withdrawals totally?

About thirty six point nine million US dollars or fifty four billion Korea in one and The timing just amplified the shock.

It happened right after upbits parent company Dunamu announced this massive ten billion dollar acquisition deal and revealed plans for a us IPO, And the.

Timing was disturbingly precise, wasn't it?

It lined up with a previous hack.

The timing is unsettling, to say the least.

The hack happened on November twenty seventh, That is the exact same calendar date as a major breach back in twenty nineteen which was linked to North Korean state actors.

Wow.

Is there a confirmed length this time?

No confirms link yet, but that coincidence alone has sparked some really intense speculation about a sophisticated recurring attack.

So what were the hackers targeting.

The focus was exclusively on Solana ecosystem tokens and they were all held in the exchange.

As hot wallet, so the operational wallet, not the cold storage.

Right, the vast majority of user funds and cold storage remained completely secure.

The attackers just drained a whole basket of high value Solana tokens, sol USDC, bomanc, jup Ray, Render, a bunch of others.

Do we have any idea how they got in.

Was it a private key compromise, a software bug an insider.

Exchanges rarely give up the specifics, but analysts are looking at three main theories.

First, a sophisticated zero day exploit in the Salana software up it was running.

Second, a simple private key compromise which can happen with operational.

Hot wallets, And the third theory.

Given the history with the twenty nineteen breach, an insider threat or a very deep social engineering attack is still a high probability, especially because the theft was so fast and so targeted.

So once upbit figured out what was happening, what did they do?

Their crisis management was a pretty textbook to be honest.

They immediately suspended all deposit and withdrawal services across every single.

Network, locked everything down everything At.

The same time, they started this massive emergency transfer of every remaining asset into Ultrasecure cold storage, and launched a full security audit of their entire system.

Here's where it gets really interesting, though.

The part that I think changes the whole story for users is the immediate guarantee of reimbursement.

It absolutely does.

The CEO of dunamo Oh Kunzuk issued an immediate, unequivocal guarantee of full user reimbursement, no questions asked none.

The company announced they would use up its own corporate money to cover the thirty seven million dollar loss.

They turned it from a user problem into a corporate expense.

And you think back to the history of big crypto hacks Mount Gox, ftx, customer funds were just gone or frozen for years.

This feels like a huge shift.

It's a complete industry shift up its move prevents customer panic, it maintains trust, and it completely avoids a potential bank run either just absorbing the loss to protect their members.

And on top of that, they've already started recovery efforts, successfully freezing about twelve billion one worth of one of the stolen tokens.

But this puts a huge spotlight on Solana security across the board, not just at upbed.

That's right.

The fact that they targeted a basket of sol ecosystem tokens suggests a very sophisticated attack focused on that high speed Layer one liquidity, you know.

The CEO of Treasure noted that over two and a half billion dollars has been stolen just in twenty twenty five.

This is a sharp reminder to all exchanges that security is a perpetual moving target.

Okay, let's shift our focus now to the very competitive world of ald coin ETFs, and we are seeing a huge divergence in performance here.

A massive one, and it really separates the assets that have regulatory clarity from the ones that are well still relying on pure meme speculation.

So let's start with a clear winner, XRP.

Yeah, XRP is definitely winning the alt coin etf race right now, almost entirely because of its regulatory standing.

The XRP ETFs are showing impressive cumulative net inflows of six hundred and forty three million.

Dollars and they have a perfect daily inflow streak, which is the most powerful contrast you can make with say, the recent outflows in the Salona funds.

It really is.

It speaks directly to institutional conviction, and analysts think this is just the warm.

Up, the warm up.

Yeah, the current products from Grayscale, Franklin, Templeton.

Bit wise, they're just the early movers.

The real institutional heavyweights, the black Rocks and Fidelities of the world.

They haven't even filed for a spot xrpetf yet, and when they do, some analysts are betting that when that volume hits, the XRP rally could actually be bigger than the one Bitcoin had.

We're also seeing big shifts in the supply dynamics for XRP.

Right we are.

The amount of XRP held on exchanges, especially Binance, is collapsing.

It's at its lowest point.

Since August, which is a bullish sign.

It's a long term bullish indicator.

Yeah, less supply in exchanges means less cell side pressure.

It makes the price more elastic if and when a wave of demand kicks in.

So you've got tightening supply and strengthening ETF demand happening at the same time.

And on top of all that, Ripple scored a huge win for its stable coin r l USD this week.

This is a massive win in the Middle East.

It really cements our LUSD as a piece of foundational financial infrastructure.

Ripple's stable coin was officially recognized as an accepted FIAT reference token in the Abu Dhabi global market.

So it already had a strong regulatory footing in the US.

In New York.

What does this dual USUAE compliance actually mean for institutions.

It's transformative.

It means licensed banks, custodians, payment firms, and n one in one of the world's most sophisticated financial hubs, can now legally hold transfer and use RLUSD for regulated financial.

Activities like collateral lending.

Collateral lending, settling, cross border payments, you name it.

It moves RLUSD from being just another crypto tooken into a globally compliant tool for serious financial institutions.

Okay, now, let's turn to the other side of the old coin ETF market, where things have been a lot more turbulent.

Starting with the debut of Grayscales spot doge coin ETF Gdog, it.

Was, to put it mildly, a flop, a dud, a total dud.

I mean, despite all the media hype, the fund only logged one point four million dollars in trading volume on day one.

The forecasts were for ten to twelve million.

It missed by a huge margin, and the momentum just died almost immediately, which suggests that institutional appetite for pure meme exposure is basically zero.

Well, on day two, inflows collapsed by eighty percent, They dropped to just three hundred and sixty five thousand dollars.

The market treated it like a one day headline, nothing more.

And is this really fundamental question?

When regulators have given you a perfectly good path for exposure, why are the big institutions still shunning a high profile meme asset like doge coin.

What's the consensus on that.

The consensus is that institutions are looking for assets with real demonstrable utility or a clear regulatory status like XRP, and if they are going to take on more risk, they want something that offers a compelling staking or yield mechanism.

And dogecoin offers none of that, none of it.

So listing gdog just proved that having a regulated wrapper isn't enough if the underlying asset doesn't have a foundational purpose.

Meanwhile, the salona ETFs had a pretty big speed bump this week.

They recorded their first ever day of net outflows.

That's right, about eight point one million in net outflows, and it was mostly driven by one fund, the twenty one shares Salona etf or TSL.

It saw a massive single day withdrawal of thirty four million dollars.

But other Salona funds are still doing well.

Right, let's drive divergence.

The outflows from TSOL look like profit taking, especially with the market volatility, and that uppits security incident.

But the overall Solana ATF category is still resilient because the funds that offer yield are still attracting money.

Like the staking ETFs exactly.

The bit wise Solana staking ETF BSOL is still seeing inflows.

It pulled in over thirteen million, and that suggests that the more sophisticated investors are favoring those staking features.

They're treating those products as long term revenue generating holds, not just short term trading vehicles.

Okay, moving over to Ethereum, the network is getting ready for some major technical upgrades.

It is.

This week Ethereum validators pushed the main net block gas limit up to sixty million.

That's the highest it's been in four years.

What does that actually mean for the network?

It effectively doubles the previous cap, which means it can handle a lot more transactions.

It's a huge boost for throughput and efficiency, especially with the big Fusaka upgrade coming on December third.

Getting ready for a lot more activity from the layer twos, and.

While the network itself is scaling up, we're seeing some huge, high risk leverage bets being placed on the asset.

Yeah, we tracked a move from a prominent whale trader goes by ten to eleven short.

He opened a highly leveraged forty four million dollars long position.

That's fifteen thousand ETH.

Wow, what's his liquidation point?

It's set down at two three hundred and twenty six dollars.

So it's a very clear, high risk, high reward bet.

It shows this intense individual conviction that ETH is about to break to the upside.

At the same time, we're also seeing more cautious long term buying from the corporate side.

That's the other side of the coin bitmin Immersion Technologies, which is listed on Nasdaq.

They added almost seventy thousand more ETH to their holdings last week.

How much do they hold now?

Their total treasury is up to three point six three million ETH.

That's roughly three percent of the entire circulating supply.

Now they're reporting huge unrealized losses on that position, about three point four billion, but the fact that they're still accumulating just shows their long term conviction and ethereum's future.

They're willing to stomach the volatility.

And then we shift to the pure meme sector and the picture for something like sheba Enu is much gloomier.

Yes, the data here is pretty unambiguous.

About two hundred billion efrizig were moved back onto exchanges this week, which is a huge number.

And that's typically a very strong bearish signal.

It's classic analyst shorthand for cell side preparation is underway, and the move is significant because it happened right as the price was trying to make a little technical recovery.

It just squashed it.

And the technicals don't look great either.

No, the chart structure is overwhelmingly bearish.

Shizib is trading below all the major moving averages, the fifty, one hundred, the two hundred day.

The overall trend is down.

That little price bounce was just a technical reaction to being oversold, not a real reversal.

So with all this new supply hitting the exchange is what's the most likely sinnery from here?

The most likely scenario is just more of the same bearish continuation.

That massive inflow suggests ISSHAB is going to retest support at point eight or maybe even head down towards point seven four and no bullish.

Break is just low probability.

Right now, very low.

For that to happen, you'd need to see two things, a huge wave of withdrawals from exchanges and a clear daily close above the key resistance levels.

Right now, that's just not in the cards.

We've talked a lot about institutional adoption in the developed world.

Let's look globally now where regulation and just pure real world necessity are driving huge adoption, especially for stable coins.

Yeah, stable coins are really starting to move beyond just being for crypto trading.

They're getting integrated into the backbone of traditional finance.

Visa just made a huge move this week.

What do they do.

They partnered with an infrastructure provider called Aqua Now to expand settlement using approved stable coins like USDC across the Samia region that's Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

So they're just trying to cut out the slow traditional banking layers for cross border payments exactly.

They're using stable coins to digitize the back end of money movement.

It enables twenty four to seven near instant settlement, and we're seeing the same thing in Europe, where Deutsche Burs is integrating a euro pegged stable coin into its institutional custody service.

But even as adoption is rising, the biggest stable coin, Tether's USDT, got hit with a big downgrade this week from SMP Global.

They did, SMP Global downgraded ustt's stability rating from constrained down to weak.

Why what was the reason.

The core reason was Tether's increased exposure to volatile assets.

They pointed out that Bitcoin now makes up over five point six percent of USDT reserves, which is higher than the buffer they had previously stated, and SMP also highlighted the sammeled concerns about transparency and disclosure.

How did that rating affect the market, especially somewhere like China where USDT is basically the only game in town.

It triggered a really mixed reaction in China's huge underground crypto market.

I mean, they rely completely on USDT for trading.

So while some of the veteran traders just dismissed it as the usual Tether fud, others expressed real panic.

They're terrified of a collapse.

For them, any instability in USDT is an existential threat.

To their access to digital assets.

That reliance on stable coins is even more intense in economies that are just being crushed by hyperinflation.

Oh absolutely, I mean in these places, crypto isn't a speculative investment, It's a necessary tool for survival.

Like in Bolivia.

Take Bolivia.

Yeah, they're facing over twenty two percent inflation and a chronic shortage of US dollars.

So the government did a complete u turn and lifted its crypto ban last year.

Now banks can custody digital assets and the government even permits crypto based accounts and loans.

How does that dollar shortage actually affect the average person there?

It means importers can't get physical US dollars to pay for essential goods.

You get empty shelves, long lines for basic stuff.

So in response, businesses just started pricing things in USDT really.

Yeah, big car manufacturers like Toyota and Yamaha are accepting stable coins because they literally can't get physical dollars through official channels.

Stable coins are acting almost as legal tender there, and.

The situation is even more extreme in places like Venezuela and Argentina.

Venezuela's inflation is somewhere between one hundred seventy and two hundred and seventy percent.

Citizens are so reliant on stable coins they just call them binance dollars.

And in Argentina, even with the new president's austerity measures, inflation is still over thirty percent.

They recorded nearly ninety four billion in crypto transaction volume last year.

Wow.

And then Turkey shows a slightly different behavior, right, they're moving beyond just stable coins.

Yeah, Turkey's inflation is at thirty two percent and they have a staggering two hundred billion in crypto volume.

But the market there is shifting away from just holding stable coins and more towards alt coins.

Speculas why is that.

Economists think it's a kind of desperate yield seeking behavior when your purchasing power is just evaporating, holding a dollar pegged asset isn't enough.

People are taking on way more risk, just trying to find some way, anyway to keep up with inflation.

Okay, let's move over to Russia, where the government's attempt to regulate crypto mining is running into some problems.

That's right.

The problem is all the unregistered miners operating in what they call the shadows.

So an advisor to the state.

Duma has proposed an amnesty for illegally imported mining equipment.

So mining is legal there now, but people aren't complying.

It was legalized in twenty twenty four, but the law requires you to register and pay taxes if you use more than six thousand kilowad hours a month, which is a pretty low threshold, and it's just been widely ignored.

What's stopping them from complying if it's legal.

About sixty percent of miners are still unregistered, and the core issue is the fear of asset forfeiture.

They want a register, but they're afraid the government will not just find them, but actually sees and confiscate their expensive mining rigs because they were imported illegally.

And this shadow economy is causing real infrastructure problems.

Absolutely.

The Siberian regions, with their cheap electricity and cold weather, are perfect for mining, but now they're suffering severe power shortages because of all the unauthorized operations, so local authorities are cracking down, which just shows the conflict between wanting to tax this industry and needing to manage their strained power grid.

The amnesty is the proposed solution to bring them into the legal system.

On the regulatory front in the US, we got a very rare and pretty significant no action letter from the SEC this week.

This was a massive victory for utility driven crypto projects.

The letter was for Fuse, a Salana based deepin project focused on decentralized energy, specifically solar.

Channels, and a no action letter basically means the SEC is saying we won't recommend enforcement action against you.

It's a green light.

It's a huge green light.

And the core of it was successfully arguing that they're token is a utility token, not a security under the HOWI test.

How did they manage to do that?

It was a very sophisticated legal strategy.

The how we test requires an expectation of profit from the efforts of others.

FEWS successfully showed that their tokens are primarily for consumptive use.

So for rebates and discounts on your energy bill exactly.

The argument is that people are buying the token to use it to get cheaper energy, not to speculate.

On the success of the Fuse management team, that functional utility is what separates it from being a speculative security.

And this is a big regulatory shift with support from Commissioner Hester Pierce.

It is this is the second DEPEN project to get a letter like this.

It really reinforces the view that the SEC is willing to embrace deppin as a quote novel way of organizing human behavior and capital resources.

They get that these tokens are functional incentives to build out infrastructure, not just shares of stock.

So we've established the markets getting more professional, more institutional, and the stakes are much higher, which brings us to a whole new sector that's focused on information asymmetry.

Yeah, the launch of the Layer one MONAD this week was a perfect example of why real time on chain information is so critical now.

A lot of people got burned on this one they did.

Monad launched with this massive three billion dollar valuation and the price surged eighty percent almost instantly, and it shocked a lot of retail traders who were betting against that high valuation.

What was the key piece of information they were missing?

They didn't have immediate access to the circulation data.

The key was that only ten percent of the total token supply was actually available in circulation at.

Launch, so there was extreme scarcity.

Extreme scarcity.

The advanced traders who were using real time on chain standers saw that low circulating supply, and they anticipated the squeeze.

They were able to front run the retail market that was betting the other way.

So the difference between winning and losing was just knowing the true circulating supply at the exact right.

Moment exactly, and that reality has just fueled the rise of all these new AI powered tools.

This is the new technological arms race.

Isn't it AI tools monitoring on chain data to try and fix this information gap?

It is We're seeing whole projects dedicated just to this, offering AI agents that monitor everything price, liquidity, supply movements, whil transactions to give users that critical information faster than anyone else.

We're also seeing a new vision for Bitcoin that tries to address its biggest structural weakness, the fact that it's too slow to be a currency.

This is the idea behind bitcoin hyper.

The classic critique is that Bitcoin's base layer is just too slow and expensive for lots of small transactions.

So bitcoin hyper is trying to solve that by creating a Salona grade execution layer, specifically for wrapped BTC.

So how does that work without breaking Bitcoin's core security?

It's a layered system.

You lock up your real BTC on the secure bitcoin base chain, and then it mints a wrapped version that can move super cheap and super fast in this high velocity DAP environment.

But the final settlement is still anchored back to the main bitcoin chain exactly.

It's anchored to the secure base layer, and the native token hypr is what you need for gas, for staking, and for governance on this execution layer.

The argument is that this turns dickcoin from just being static collateral into active transactional capital.

All right.

Finally, let's look at a fascinating little niche shift that's being driven by regulation, the sudden exodus of crypto traders from offshore gambling sites.

Yeah, the Wild West era of offshore crypto casinos is coming to a very abrupt end, and it's because of two things, predatory compliance and enhanced enforcement.

So the operators lure you in with promises of no KYC.

They do.

They'll let you deposit as much as you want with no questions asked.

But then the trap springs when you try to withdraw.

Precisely, the user tries to make a six figure withdrawal, and suddenly the operator freezes the funds and demands a USID for verification.

When you provide it, they ban you for violating their terms of service about US residents, and they just confiscate your funds.

It's a bait and switch, an aggressive one, and it's become standard practice.

And on top of that, US exchanges are now proactively stopping funds from even reaching these sites.

Exchanges like Coinbase are using advanced chain analysis tools.

If they detect a transfer to or from a known gambling wallet, they just shut down your account immediately.

So it's become a survival strategy for US crypto users to avoid these sites completely.

So compliant platforms like these sweepstakes models are emerging as the only real alternative.

Yeah, they are, and the legal genius is that they use a mechanism that removes the element of consideration.

Why is that distinction so important.

Because US lottery law says you need three things for it to be illegal gambling, a prize, chance, and consideration, which is money exchange for the chance to win.

These sweepstakes platforms use a dual currency system.

You buy gold coins for entertainment, which have no value, but you get sweeps coins as a free bonus, and because the valuable sweeps coins are given away for free, it legally removes that element of consideration.

Which makes the whole system compliant with US.

Law exactly, and it allows for instant crypto redemptions usually USDC straight back to a white listed exchange wallet without any fear of your account being closed or your funds being confiscated.

You know, if we look at the week as a whole, the market volatility was definitely heavy, but that underlying narrative of professionalization, of maturation, it just remains constant.

We saw major institutions really solidifying their Bitcoin positions.

We saw a coin ETFs finding these specific utility driven footholds, with XRP showing that strong conviction.

While dogecoin just struggles well.

Dogecoin struggles exactly, and the regulatory frameworks are evolving so fast now to embrace actual utility in the deep in sector and for stable coins all over the world.

This week was really defined by this growing chasm between the speculative mean coins that just rely on hype and the utility driven assets that are getting real, measurable institutional and regulatory support for you.

The difference between winning and losing now is so often tied directly to getting the right on chain information and understanding where the regulated capital was actually flowing.

So what does this all mean for you?

If US state governments are buying bitcoin ETFs and globally compliance stable coins are enabling regulated finance in major hubs like Abu Dhabi while also acting as legal tender and developing nations.

How long until the distinction between traditional finance and crypto finance just dissolves entirely