Circle's strategic shift to blockchain infrastructure could enhance USDC demand, impacting stablecoin circulation and financial ecosystems.

The post Circle beats Q3 estimates as Arc mainnet goes live with 100+ partners appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Anthropic's financial risks and strategic partnerships could reshape tech industry dynamics, influencing future data-driven innovation landscapes.

The post Dario Amodei envisions ‘a country of geniuses in a data center,’ Anthropic’s IPO filing reveals financial risks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AMD's massive purchase commitments reflect confidence in AI growth but pose risks if demand falters, impacting inventory and finances.

The post AMD reports $48.8 billion in purchase commitments as AI chip demand climbs appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI-driven event data access via USDC micropayments could revolutionize autonomous agent capabilities, enhancing efficiency and scalability.

The post Belong’s Long Events lets AI agents buy event data with USDC appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI's inability to reliably forget data raises significant privacy concerns, necessitating advancements in precise memory management to protect users.

The post Tsinghua University study finds AI agents rarely honor forget requests appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Tether Holds 150,000 Bitcoin CEO Says, 50,000 More Than Its Reserve Report Shows

Tether holds about 150,000 bitcoin, worth some $11.5 billion at current prices, CEO Paolo Ardoino said, a figure that exceeds the holdings implied by the company’s latest reserve attestation by roughly 50,000 coins.

“We have give or take 150,000 bitcoin ourselves. It’s not much, but it’s honest work,” Ardoino said during his keynote at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, the city where Tether has run a bitcoin and stablecoin adoption program since 2022.

At that size the stack would rank Tether among the largest corporate holders of bitcoin, behind Strategy’s 848,517 BTC (as of Q3) and ahead of most public miners and treasury companies. 

Ardoino did not say where the additional coins sit, when they were bought or whether they belong to the stablecoin issuer or to Tether Investments, the arm that holds the group’s venture and equity positions. The remark does not indicate a new 50,000 BTC purchase.

Tether International’s third-quarter reserve report, published Oct. 30 with an attestation from BDO, lists $8.37 billion in bitcoin valued at $83,621.23 per coin as of Sept. 30. That implies about 100,060 BTC, up around 1,130 from the roughly 98,930 held at the end of June. Most of the quarter’s $2.57 billion rise in the bitcoin line came from price, not purchases.

The gap between the report and Ardoino’s figure has a plausible home. Tether has said the investments it makes from profits are kept apart from the reserves backing USDT, so coins held by Tether Investments would not appear in the attestation. 

Tether’s bitcoin exposure extends past its own wallets. It took full control of Twenty One Capital in May after buying out SoftBank, backs Adecoagro’s mining in Brazil, and runs mining and energy ventures in Latin America. Whether any of those positions sit inside the 150,000 figure is unclear.

Tether’s buffer built on bitcoin and gold

The disclosure lands as Tether’s balance sheet grows more dependent on the two assets. The Q3 report shows $191.45 billion in reserve assets against $183.50 billion in liabilities, an excess of $7.95 billion, up from $4.11 billion in June when the cushion had halved. 

Bitcoin at $8.37 billion and gold at about $19.1 billion together exceed that buffer several times over, so a sharp drop in either would eat into it. Treasury bills remain the bulk of reserves at about $132.4 billion.

Tether earned about $1.5 billion in the quarter and $4.5 billion in the first nine months. In August it completed its first independent audit with KPMG, ending years of reliance on attestations alone. Ardoino said at the forum that USDT has more than 730 million users and is adding about 30 million wallets a quarter.

Bitcoin traded near $77,600 Tuesday, which puts Tether’s stated holdings at $11.6 billion and its attested holdings at about $7.8 billion, below the Sept. 30 mark. The company has not said whether it plans to publish a breakdown of the coins held outside the reserve.

This post Tether Holds 150,000 Bitcoin CEO Says, 50,000 More Than Its Reserve Report Shows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

TD Cowen: Democratic Congress Would Sink CLARITY Act for Two Years

A Democratic sweep of Congress would end the CLARITY Act’s chances for the next two years and sour the political climate for crypto, TD Cowen’s Washington analyst Jaret Seiberg wrote to Bitcoin Magazine and clients in an election-day note.

Seiberg wrote that TD Cowen agrees with polls and prediction markets that Democrats are likely to take both chambers, with the caveat that polls taken a month out, which were more mixed, tend to beat those taken on the eve of a vote. 

His conclusion for crypto is blunt: “Democrats will likely investigate Trump including his crypto entanglements. We see this as souring the political environment for crypto, which is why we do not expect the Clarity Act to pass over the next two years.”

The market structure bill passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 and failed a Senate cloture vote 49-50 on Sept. 15. If it does not pass before the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3, it dies and must be reintroduced. 

Seiberg added that crypto’s influence may shrink further in Congress if Sherrod Brown wins his Ohio Senate race, a contest the industry spent to lose.

In Congress, the Senate is the lever

The note treats Senate control as the bigger prize. A Democratic majority could block Trump’s nominees and use that power to force him to fill Democratic seats on the FDIC, SEC and CFTC, the three agencies at the center of crypto policy. 

It could pressure the White House to drop its effort to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve board. Trump could answer with acting chiefs, Seiberg wrote, but that risks handing authority to career staff, an outcome “Team Trump” does not want.

Senate control would elevate Sen. Elizabeth Warren to chair the Banking Committee. Seiberg sees room for populist bills such as interest rate caps, limits on bank buybacks and a government credit score, and he thinks Warren and Trump could find common ground on some of them.

Rep. Maxine Waters would take House Financial Services, with a focus on housing and tighter scrutiny of the FHFA.

“That means a focus on housing though we are dubious that she will find GOP support for down payment help and public housing renovations. FHFA scrutiny will increase,” the note read.

For banks, the note says the election changes little: regulators will keep easing capital, liquidity and tiering rules whichever party wins. Divided government does raise the odds of a shutdown or a debt-ceiling standoff, since Trump is expected to reject spending conditions Democrats attach.

Bitcoin on election day

Bitcoin traded near $77,500 Tuesday afternoon eastern time, up from a dip to $76,300 in the morning and about $2,000 below where it opened the month. The price has absorbed a record $6.34 billion Binance hack, two days of spot ETF outflows and a Fed that is leaning toward a December hike. 

Prediction markets on Kalshi give Democrats a 94% chance at the House and 74% at the Senate, so much of Seiberg’s scenario is in the price.

What is not priced is the lame-duck session. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a CLARITY negotiator, has said the bill could pass before January even if a Democratic Congress would not make it a priority after. That said, if it fails during that window, she doubts a Democratic-controlled Congress will make it a priority in the future.

According to various reports, crypto groups have spent more than $200 million on the cycle to avoid the outcome Seiberg now expects. The CFTC, for its part, moved without Congress on Tuesday, clearing equity perpetual futures for U.S. exchanges. If the Senate and Congress flips, that agency-by-agency approach, and who sits on those agencies, becomes the whole game.

This post TD Cowen: Democratic Congress Would Sink CLARITY Act for Two Years first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Binance Says $6.34 Billion Hack Began With Fake Job Interview 

The $6.34 billion theft from Binance began with a fake job interview and ran for five months before a single coin moved, the exchange said Tuesday in its first public account of the Oct. 29 attack.

Another initial incident report from Binance, released alongside a media briefing by co-CEO Richard Teng and chief security officer Jimmy Su, describes a campaign that combined a poisoned software download, a staged recruitment process, malware that evaded endpoint detection and an internal AI tool the attackers turned against the company’s own wallet engineers. 

Binance said it has frozen or intercepted about $2.85 billion of the stolen assets and replenished 98% of affected tokens from its own funds, with the balance being bought on the open market.

“This wasn’t one mistake or one breach — it was a months-long campaign,” Teng wrote on X. “We’re publishing the full report because the lessons go far beyond Binance.”

The FBI has attributed the attack to North Korea. Binance’s report cites that finding but stops short of its own attribution. Pyongyang rejected the claim Monday, with Kim Yo Jong, sister of leader Kim Jong Un, calling it a “grave political provocation” through state media.

The Binance hack had five months of preparation

According to Binance, the first foothold for this hack came in June. A wallet DevOps engineer searched for a popular AI coding tool and downloaded a tampered Homebrew installer. 

Binance’s security team caught the anomaly, replaced the device and rotated credentials, but the episode exposed the engineer’s role and the names of colleagues on the wallet infrastructure team.

In September, a second engineer was approached on a legitimate job platform by someone posing as a project director. A video interview with a purported HR representative followed, with the interviewer sharing a personal social media account to build trust. A second interview with a supposed CEO ended with an “assignment”: a code repository the engineer was told to install on his work machine. 

The repository replaced a legitimate pyenv component with a malicious version and opened a channel to an attacker-controlled server. Binance said the zero-day malware was not flagged by its endpoint tools at the time.

On Oct. 20, the attackers used that machine and an internal AI tool to reach two more wallet engineers, one of whom held a container deployment token. On Oct. 29, between 17:15 and 19:56 UTC, they logged into a third engineer’s computer, deployed a container with the stolen credentials and launched the drain. Binance said it blocked 57 other suspected North Korea-linked attempts this year using similar lures.

Four hours to contain

The money left fast. Between 20:05 and 20:09 UTC, five hot wallets sent 233.46 million XRP to an attacker address. Wallets on Solana and Optimism followed with about 970,500 SOL and 44.2 million OP. A Binance hot wallet then sent 18,270 BTC. 

The attacker used the compromised signing service to invoke Ethereum’s EIP-7702, which lets an account delegate execution rights to a smart contract without exposing its key, and gave an attacker-controlled contract partial control of a Binance hot wallet.

Suspending withdrawals did not stop that last channel. The attackers had submitted 50 signing transactions to establish on-chain delegations that operated outside Binance’s withdrawal infrastructure. Because the wallet used multi-party computation, no single key existed to revoke them, and the team had to build a procedure on the spot. The final unauthorized transfer, 2,961.9 ETH, settled at 23:56 UTC. 

Binance cleared the delegation at 00:10 UTC on Oct. 30.

The report acknowledges the gap. “These challenges extended the time required to fully contain the unauthorized asset movements,” it says, adding that the company is reviewing its signing policy coverage and hot wallet controls.

Customers withdrew $10.97 billion in the 46 hours after withdrawals reopened Sunday, with net outflows of $5.28 billion, according todata Teng shared Tuesday. By 03:00 UTC hourly deposits exceeded withdrawals, a shift Teng called a sign of stabilization. Binance reopened withdrawals for dozens more assets across nine networks on Tuesday.

The breach has become a talking point in Washington. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the hack “proves our exact point” about the need for a federal registration path for offshore exchanges, and on Tuesday the agency cleared equity perpetual futures for U.S.-regulated venues, extending the onshoring push it began with Kalshi’s bitcoin perp in May.

Binance said it has rebuilt the wallet system and the internal AI tool in new environments, replaced affected devices, revoked the engineers’ credentials and expanded behavioral anomaly detection. 

It is commissioning an independent review, raising spending on endpoint and developer-environment security and planning a research fund on AI security with outside firms. Some technical details, the report says, will stay private. 

This post Binance Says $6.34 Billion Hack Began With Fake Job Interview  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Andrew Hohns: Why Bitcoin Can Fix America’s Debt Spiral

U.S. federal debt has grown 40x in 45 years, from $1 trillion in 1981 to over $40 trillion. Andrew Hohns, founder and CEO of Battery Finance, explains why he doesn’t expect tax hikes or spending cuts to fix it, and how a strategic Bitcoin reserve could help defease the national debt. He also makes the case for the Treasury to pilot BitBonds.

Chapters:
00:00 Andrew Hohns on Bitcoin and the Midterms
00:47 Bond Market Volatility and America’s Fiscal Outlook
01:22 40x Federal Debt Growth in 45 Years
02:55 A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to Defease the Debt
03:20 Why BitBonds Haven’t Come to Market Yet
05:12 Higher Borrowing Costs and the Digital Credit Boom
06:15 Battery Finance’s Bitcoin-Backed Real Estate Loans
07:03 The $2 Trillion Real Estate Refinancing Wall
08:52 How Battery’s Loans Avoid Margin Calls
11:03 Which Property Types Are Under Pressure
13:34 The Future of Bitcoin and Real Estate Financing
16:25 Digital Credit and Institutional Bitcoin Adoption

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Andrew Hohns: Why Bitcoin Can Fix America’s Debt Spiral first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

CFTC Opens U.S. Stock Market to Equity Perpetual Futures

Perpetual futures on individual stocks can begin trading on U.S.-regulated exchanges for the first time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said Tuesday, extending a product that was confined to offshore crypto venues a year ago into the equity market.

In a statement, CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig said the contracts, which he called “Equity Perps,” were deemed approved under Commission Regulation 40.3 as security futures products. 

They may list on exchanges that hold a CFTC designated contract market registration and a notice registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a national securities exchange for security futures.

“This expansion marks a significant step towards allowing U.S. market participants, consistent with applicable law, to avail themselves of the advantages of perpetual futures,” Selig said. He said bringing the products inside the agency’s framework means Americans no longer need to “turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues.”

The contracts fall under the Commodity Exchange Act, federal securities law and the rulebooks of both agencies. The statement names no exchange, lists no contracts and sets no launch date. 

Those details are expected to come from the designated contract markets themselves.

CFTC: From bitcoin perps to stock perps in five months

Perpetual futures have no expiration date. Instead of settling on a fixed day, longs and shorts exchange periodic funding payments that keep the contract price tied to spot. The structure has dominated crypto derivatives for years, with most volume on platforms outside U.S. jurisdiction.

The CFTC approved the first U.S.-listed bitcoin perpetual, Kalshi’s BTCPERP, on May 29, and Kalshi went live with the product soon after. The same day, staff granted no-action relief that lets Coinbase Financial Markets route U.S. clients into offshore perp and options liquidity. Kalshi added gold and silver perpetuals in September. 

In his statement Tuesday, Selig described the equity contracts as an extension of that May decision “beyond digital commodities and into traditional securities.”

The legal basis is older. The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 created a joint CFTC-SEC regime for security futures products, and the two agencies signed a memorandum of understanding on March 11 to coordinate rulemaking and enforcement. 

Selig cited both, and repeated SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins’s description of security futures as stranded in a regulatory “no man’s land” for lack of harmonization. The agencies had set out a joint crypto asset taxonomy earlier in the year.

Not everyone accepts the CFTC’s reading. CME Grou  sued the agency in June over the Kalshi approval, arguing that a contract built on exchanged funding payments is a swap under Dodd-Frank, not a future. 

That case is pending. An equity version adds the SEC’s jurisdiction to the mix and may draw a new set of objections from securities-side participants.

The onshoring argument after Binance

The approval lands five days after the largest theft in crypto’s history. On Oct. 29, attackers that TRM Labs and Chainalysis link to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group drained about $6.3 billion from Binance’s hot wallets in roughly 20 minutes. 

Binance reopened withdrawals on Sunday and says it has replenished about 95% of affected assets.

Selig used the breach to press the case he made in Tuesday’s statement. 

“The real issue here is that these are unregulated offshore exchanges, and they don’t have the same sorts of safeguards that we have in our financial markets here in the United States,” he told CNBC on Oct. 30. 

He said the hack “proves our exact point” about the agency’s October proposal, an advance notice of rulemaking that would create a voluntary federal registration path for crypto exchanges with cybersecurity, proof-of-reserves and custody requirements. Selig has said the CFTC cannot make that registration mandatory without Congress.

The equity perp approval works from the same premise. Perpetuals built the offshore derivatives business; moving them onto dual-registered U.S. exchanges puts the margin, clearing and surveillance rules of two federal agencies around them. 

Selig framed it as a choice between regulated access and “being forced to turn to offshore, and often unregulated, venues.”

This post CFTC Opens U.S. Stock Market to Equity Perpetual Futures first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Binance reported about $11 billion in withdrawals between 06:00 UTC on Nov. 1 and 04:00 UTC on Nov. 3, after reopening services following its record $6 billion hack on Oct. 29. Deposits of about $6 billion offset just over half the withdrawals, leaving roughly $5 billion in net outflows over the same period, according to…

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The no-action position covers three types of network participant under counsel’s described model and gives no binding legal conclusion.

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The FSC also requested stronger transfer monitoring, response staffing and reserves, while exchange implementation and any new custody threshold remain unspecified.

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SideSwap reports full L-BTC backing, while customer payouts still depend on its own Bitcoin wallet and manual refills.

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Justin Sun accused the President Donald Trump-backed crypto firm World Liberty Financial of concealing UAE citizenship to escape his federal lawsuit. The Tron founder said on Nov. 3 that his lawyers had requested sanctions against World Liberty Financial and its attorneys after the company disclosed foreign ownership connections months into litigation over his $45 million…

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What is documented: the DVOL volatility index of options exchange Deribit fell after the US election night from 40.89 points on Tuesday to 37.03 points on Wednesday morning, back where it stood before the Fed week at the end of October. On Wednesday morning, November 4, Bitcoin trades at $78,442 or €69,723, 2.0 percent above the previous day and 2.3 percent above the 100-day line at $76,663. Our assessment follows further down: the options market has unwound the election premium but still expects a range through Friday in which the 100-day line stays within reach.

The short answer: yes, based on options market prices, the 100-day line is more likely to hold than to break before Friday's expiry. The priced-in volatility implies a probability of around 19 percent that Bitcoin will be below it on Friday morning. That is not a call on direction but a translation of what traders pay for protection. Our Bitcoin price prediction covers where the price could head over a horizon of months. This piece sticks to the coming days and to what the options market reveals after the election.

DVOL after election night: the election premium is gone

The DVOL measures the volatility the Bitcoin options market prices in for the next 30 days, annualised. A reading of 37 means traders pay for options as if they expected annual volatility of 37 percent. The figure is therefore not a price forecast but the price of uncertainty.

On Tuesday, US election day, the index climbed as high as 40.89 points during the day. During election night it fell in steps: 38.98 at 00:00 UTC, 38.47 at 07:00, 37.03 at 10:00. The data come from Deribit's public DVOL series. A drop of almost 4 points in less than a day is the typical pattern after an event the market had priced in beforehand: once it is over, the premium that buyers of protection paid for it decays.

Compared with the Fed week: on October 28 the DVOL closed at 37.26 points, and on October 30 it hit an intraday high of 44.25 points. Today's reading is therefore slightly below the level before the rate decision. The market has thus fully priced out the two big events of the past two weeks.

What volatility of 37 means for the Bitcoin price through Friday

The annual figure can be scaled down to shorter periods by multiplying it by the square root of the fraction of the year. From Wednesday morning to the expiry of the weekly options on Friday at 9 a.m. CET there are around 45 hours. That yields a priced-in standard deviation of about 2.65 percent, or roughly $2,080.

In price terms: a range of roughly $76,360 to $80,520 covers, by this calculation, about two thirds of the outcomes the options market considers possible for Friday morning. Over a full week the standard deviation grows to 5.1 percent, a little over $4,000. The calculation assumes normally distributed returns, which Bitcoin does not have; large swings occur more often than it allows. It still works as an order of magnitude, because it shows how much movement is already in option prices.

Applied to the 100-day line at $76,663: the gap of 2.3 percent equals roughly 0.86 standard deviations. On paper, that gives Bitcoin a probability of about 19 percent of being below the line on Friday morning. For a jump above $82,000, Friday's most important call strike, the figure is around 5 percent.

The November 6 options expiry: $2.46 billion

On Friday, Bitcoin options covering 31,377 contracts expire on Deribit, each representing one bitcoin. At the current price that is $2.46 billion in notional value. The split is lopsided: 23,315 contracts are calls, rights to buy, and only 8,062 are puts, rights to sell. The put-call ratio stands at 0.35.

Most open calls cluster at $82,000 with 6,174 contracts and at $85,000 with 5,152. On the put side, the largest blocks sit at $74,000 with 1,267 and at $75,000 with 995 contracts. The so-called max pain point, at which buyers of all options together would suffer the largest loss, is $79,000. That is only 0.7 percent above the current price.

Important for context: the many calls at $82,000 and $85,000 are not a bet that the price will rise there by Friday. The two strikes are 4.5 and 8.4 percent above the current price. Without a strong rally in the next two days, these calls expire worthless. They therefore play a smaller role in price discovery through Friday than positions close to the market.

Put wall on November 13: protection moves back a week

The expiry a week later paints a different picture. For November 13 there are 10,164 puts against 4,793 calls, a put-call ratio of 2.12. At $74,000 alone, 4,098 puts are open, followed by $68,000 with 1,474 and $72,000 with 1,348 contracts. Anyone wanting to hedge against a setback has therefore done so not for Friday but for the week after.

The $74,000 level thus appears in two places: as the largest put position for Friday and as by far the largest position for November 13. It lies 5.7 percent below the current price and just above the 200-day line at $73,163. If the price approaches this zone, traders who sold those puts have to adjust their hedges. That can accelerate a move lower there, because the other side then sells bitcoin or futures.

The large monthly expiry on November 27, with $4.58 billion in notional value, is led by calls again, with a max pain point at $80,000. Thinking in weeks, you see a cautious middle of the month and more optimistic positioning towards month-end.

Since Monday's mining analysis: low at $75,695, recovery above $78,000

On Monday, in our Bitcoin price prediction on mining difficulty, we had the price at $77,657 and named $77,204 as the level below which things get serious. That level has since been broken and reclaimed. During election night Bitcoin fell as low as $75,695, the daily low according to CoinGecko. Our colleagues described the move in the morning in the Bitcoin price after election night.

Bitcoin now trades at $78,442, $785 higher than on Monday, a gain of 1.0 percent. The 50-day line, at $81,932 then, is at $81,911 today and remains the ceiling. The 200-day line has barely moved and stands at $73,163. What is new is the view from the options market: on Monday the DVOL was still at 39.3 points, today it is 37.0. The uncertainty the market pays for has fallen, even though the price was lower in between.

Sentiment and the Fear and Greed Index: fear, but less than on election day

The Fear and Greed Index from alternative.me stands at 34 points on Wednesday, in the fear zone. On Tuesday it was 26, on Monday 37 points. The index combines volatility, trading volume, dominance and search queries into a value between 0 and 100. A jump of 8 points in one day fits the picture in the options market: after the election, nervousness has eased without confidence returning.

On a monthly view Bitcoin is down 9.2 percent, on a weekly view 3.8 percent. The price is 37.8 percent below the all-time high of $126,080 from October 2025. The recovery of the past 24 hours does not change that picture yet; it only prevents last week's decline from turning into a break of the 100-day line.

Bitcoin levels to expiry: $74,000, $76,663, $79,000 and $82,000

The options market and the moving averages together produce a set of levels for the coming days that reinforce each other:

• $82,000: the largest call position for Friday and also just above the 50-day line at $81,911. A close above it would be the first sign that the downtrend since early October is turning.
• $79,000: the max pain point of Friday's expiry. It serves as a reference in the options market; whether it actually pulls the price towards it is statistically disputed.
• $76,663: the 100-day line. It gave way only briefly during election night and had already been reclaimed by Wednesday morning.
• $74,000: the put wall for November 6 and November 13, with the 200-day line just below at $73,163.

If you bet on these levels with a leveraged product, keep the liquidation threshold in view. At ten times leverage, a counter-move of around 10 percent is enough to close the position; today that would mean a fall to about $70,600 or a rise to about $86,300. Our comparison of crypto brokers shows which providers offer leverage under European supervision.

Our assessment: calm in the options market is not yet a bottom

In the editorial team's view, the drop in the DVOL suggests the election is done as a burden. The evidence: the index fell within a day from 40.89 to 37.03 points, the Fear and Greed Index rose from 26 to 34, and Bitcoin reclaimed the 100-day line at $76,663 after the low of $75,695. Against that stands the positioning for November 13, with a put-call ratio of 2.12 and 4,098 puts at $74,000. Professionals are still hedging against a setback next week. On top of that come outflows of more than $1 billion from US spot ETFs, which cryptoticker.io reported on Wednesday morning in its piece on Bitcoin ETF outflows after the midterms.

Our conclusion: through Friday, sideways trading between $76,000 and $80,000 is more likely than a breakout. The direction after that will be decided more at the 50-day line and the put zone around $74,000 than at the expiry itself. This is not a buy or sell recommendation. Cryptocurrencies can swing all the way to a total loss.

Bitcoin options and tax: how Germany treats them differently from spot purchases

If you hold bitcoin directly in Germany, you benefit from the holding period: gains from private disposal transactions under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act are tax-free after one year. Within the year, an exemption limit of €1,000 per year applies to all private disposal gains together. We track where the debate about abolishing the holding period stands on our page on the state of the holding period reform.

This does not apply to options and futures on bitcoin. Under the prevailing view, gains from such derivatives are treated as capital income and are subject to the 25 percent flat-rate withholding tax plus solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax. There is no holding period. So if you use options to bet on a quiet Friday, clarify the tax treatment with a tax adviser beforehand and document every trade carefully. With many individual trades, tools that record buy and sell times automatically help; our comparison of crypto tax tools gives an overview.

How to read the DVOL yourself

Deribit publishes the index free of charge. The exchange's statistics view shows its history over days and weeks. Three readings help with context: a DVOL below 35 stands for a quiet phase, as seen in September when the index fell to 33.09 points at times. Values between 35 and 45 are normal for Bitcoin. Above 45 the market prices in larger swings, as most recently in August with readings around 45 points.

To convert to a single day, divide the DVOL by about 19, the square root of 365. A reading of 37 thus gives an expected daily move of about 1.9 percent, just under $1,500 at the current price. If Bitcoin moves much more than that, the options market has underestimated the situation, and the DVOL usually rises in response. If you do not trade derivatives but want to buy bitcoin directly, you will find regulated providers in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

Bitcoin volatility at 37: below $76,663 the picture flips

1. Choose how to buy: If you want to get into Bitcoin after the election, use an exchange licensed under the EU's MiCA regulation. The exchange comparison lists the providers.
2. Limit leverage: A bet on Friday's expiry needs a stop below $76,663 or above $82,000. Our perp DEX comparison presents platforms for perpetual futures.
3. Document the holding period: Record the date and price of every Bitcoin purchase so the one-year holding period can be proven. The crypto tax tools help with this.

(As of November 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Uniswap (UNI) is trading above $7 again, and so above the very level that analytics firm Santiment called decisive after the latest surge in new addresses. On Wednesday morning one UNI cost $7.37 according to Coinpaprika (as of 7:50 a.m. CET), up 4.4 percent on the previous day. The question behind the price: are the many new addresses of the past week new investors, or just tokens moving back and forth between wallets and exchanges?

Santiment counted 13,137 new UNI addresses on a single day at the end of October, the highest figure since September 2020. As BeInCrypto reported on October 29, the number of daily active addresses rose at the same time to 14,591, the highest in a year. This article puts the figure in context, sets it against the protocol's trading data and shows which price levels now matter.

Uniswap price at $7.37: the week in numbers

Over the week UNI is up 2.8 percent according to Coinpaprika, but down 17.6 percent over 30 days. In euro terms the token cost €6.57 on the Kraken exchange on Wednesday morning. Market capitalisation stands at around $4.47 billion.

The week had one single, violent swing. On the afternoon of October 29 UNI hit its weekly high of $7.51 on Kraken; a few hours later the low was $6.25. That is a fall of 16.8 percent within one trading day. The trigger was the sale of altcoins from the Binance attack: according to data from analytics service Lookonchain, the attacker dumped 7.02 million UNI, as cryptoticker.io reported on October 30. By the following day UNI had already closed at $7.13 again, and since then the price has moved between $7.07 and $7.21 on a daily closing basis.

Uniswap is a long way from its all-time high. The token reached its record of $45.01 on May 3, 2021, according to Coinpaprika; today's price is 83.6 percent below that.

Santiment data: 13,137 new UNI addresses in one day

With its network growth metric, Santiment measures how many addresses interact with a token for the first time. An address is the public identifier of a wallet on the blockchain, comparable to an account number but with no name attached. The spike at the end of October was the strongest since autumn 2020, when Uniswap distributed the token by airdrop to earlier users of the exchange.

A second metric supports the finding. Daily active addresses count every wallet that sends or receives UNI on a given day, whether new or not. At 14,591, this figure was as high as it had been in a year, according to BeInCrypto. Santiment linked the rise to the protocol's latest features, including the Aggregator Hooks that Uniswap launched on October 22. With this extension Uniswap can also route orders through third-party liquidity pools.

The move had shown up a week earlier. On October 23, the news site Blockonomi reported, citing Santiment, that the number of newly created UNI wallets had reached its highest level since November 2022. Two data points within seven days show that this is not a single outlier.

Network growth versus price: why new addresses are not the same as new buyers

The metric has a limit that Santiment itself points out. It counts every wallet that sends or receives the UNI token. That includes transfers by exchanges spreading their holdings across new omnibus addresses, and investors moving their tokens to a second wallet. A single person can thus create several new addresses without buying a single additional token.

In the last week of October there was a special factor. The attacker behind the Binance incident spread the loot across numerous addresses and sold it on decentralised exchanges. Buyers of those tokens and intermediate stops in the laundering chain also appear in the statistics as new addresses. How large that share of the 13,137 addresses is cannot be read from the published data.

Santiment therefore attached a condition to the figure. If activity stays high and UNI holds $7 at the same time, a price of $8 comes within reach, the analytics firm said according to BeInCrypto. If UNI instead drops below $7 while activity fades, that would point to a short-lived flash in the pan. Santiment named a price of $7.50 as early evidence of more momentum. On the day of the report UNI traded at $6.98, just below the threshold. Today the price is above it.

Uniswap trading volume according to DefiLlama: $5.97 billion in one day

A second look goes to the protocol itself, because the UNI token and the Uniswap exchange are two different things. UNI is the governance token holders use to vote on the protocol's rules. The exchange is a set of smart contracts, self-executing programs on the blockchain, through which anyone can swap one token for another. Data portal DefiLlama shows daily how much is traded there.

In the seven days from October 22 to 28, Uniswap handled an average of $1.74 billion a day. On October 29, the day after the Binance attack, volume jumped to $5.97 billion, 3.4 times the average. On October 30 it was still $3.84 billion, after which it fell back to between $1.17 billion and $1.95 billion a day. In the seven days up to and including November 3 the total came to $18.4 billion, and $64.1 billion over the past 30 days.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on November 4, 2026. It is based on DefiLlama's daily figures for trading volume, fees and token holder revenue, evaluated for the 13 days from October 22 to November 3, 2026.

The peak on October 29 coincides with the address surge. Traffic then returned to pre-attack levels, yet UNI still held the $7 mark.

Fees and burn: what reaches UNI holders

Since Uniswap flipped the fee switch, part of the trading fees no longer goes only to liquidity providers but into buying back and destroying UNI. This is called a burn: tokens are sent to an address from which nobody can move them again, and supply shrinks permanently.

According to DefiLlama, Uniswap generated fees of $24.2 million in the seven days to November 3. Of that, the portal attributes $2.8 million to token holders. On October 29 alone, fees were $9.6 million and $1.19 million went to holders, compared with $1.74 million and $0.19 million on an ordinary day such as November 2. Measured against a market capitalisation of $4.47 billion, the weekly return flow is small. But it grows with every day of heavy trading.

UNI price levels: $6.25 below, $7.50 and $8 above

The levels follow from the week's price action and from the thresholds that Santiment and a chart analyst have named publicly. All five are observation points, not price targets.

• $8.00: Within reach according to Santiment if UNI holds $7 and activity stays high.
• $7.50 to $7.51: Santiment's early evidence of more momentum, and also the weekly high of October 29 on Kraken.
• $7.00: The threshold Santiment calls decisive. The price is around 5 percent above it.
• $6.25: The weekly low on the evening of October 29, when selling from the Binance attack pushed the price down.
• $5.00: The line drawn by analyst DonWedge. In his post of October 26, according to BeInCrypto, he sees a long-term support zone between $5 and $6.60 and considers a target of $18 achievable as long as UNI does not close a week below $5.

Both views stand side by side. In favour of the optimistic one: UNI recovered from the wave of selling after the Binance attack within a day. Against it: the distance to the high. Over 30 days UNI has lost 17.6 percent, and the $18 target is the view of a single analyst.

Buying UNI in Germany: MiCA exchange or decentralised swap

There are two ways to buy. The first runs through a crypto exchange or broker licensed under the European MiCA regulation. MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and has governed since the end of 2024 who may sell and hold crypto assets for euros in the EU. In Germany, BaFin grants this licence. The advantage: deposits by bank transfer, a contact person when problems arise and supervised custody.

The second way is Uniswap itself. If you already hold Ether or stablecoins in your own wallet, you can swap them for UNI directly there. A decentralised exchange carries no BaFin licence and has no customer service. On top come network fees and slippage, the gap between the displayed price and the price actually achieved on larger orders.

For custody, the holding period decides. If you only trade UNI briefly, you will often leave the tokens on the exchange. If you hold them for longer or want a say in votes on the protocol, you transfer them to your own wallet. A hardware wallet stores the private key offline on a small device. The recovery phrase of 12 or 24 words belongs on paper or metal, never in a photo or a cloud.

Holding period and tax: the rules for UNI gains in Germany

For tax purposes, crypto assets such as UNI count as private disposal transactions under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. If you sell UNI at a profit within one year of buying, the gain is taxed at your personal rate. After one year it is tax-free. If all private disposal gains in a year together stay below €1,000, no tax is due either; this is an exemption limit, not an allowance.

Important for Uniswap users: swapping one token for another also counts as a disposal. If you swap Ether for UNI on Uniswap, you are selling your Ether for tax purposes, and the one-year period starts again for the new UNI. Since January 2026, crypto exchanges in the EU have been recording their customers' transactions under the DAC8 directive, with reporting to the tax authorities from 2027. A clean record of all purchases, sales and swaps saves a lot of time when filling in your tax return.

UNI with leverage: what the October 29 swing would have cost

Many exchanges also offer UNI as a perpetual future, a futures contract with no expiry date that lets you bet on rising or falling prices. Leverage multiplies both gains and losses. If the price moves too far against the position, the exchange closes it by force; this is called liquidation, and most of the posted collateral is then lost.

October 29 shows how quickly that happens. From the weekly high of $7.51 to the low of $6.25, UNI fell 16.8 percent. At five times leverage this drop would have wiped out 84 percent of a long position's margin on paper; at ten times leverage the position would have been liquidated after a fall of around 10 percent. If you want to trade UNI derivatives, the comparison of perp DEX platforms sets out fees, leverage limits and the differences from centralised exchanges.

Uniswap price: Santiment sees the first proof from $7.50

The address surge is documented; its substance is not yet. Whether 13,137 new addresses turn into lasting demand will be shown by daily active addresses in the coming days and a price above $7.50. Three steps help you assess the situation yourself:

1. Choose how to buy: Check whether your exchange holds a MiCA licence and lists UNI. You will find an overview in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Sort out custody: If you hold UNI for more than a few weeks, a wallet of your own is worth it. The hardware wallet comparison shows which devices support UNI.
3. Document for tax: Note the date and price of every UNI purchase and every swap on Uniswap so you keep track of the one-year period. The crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers can help.

(As of November 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A product that was born on offshore crypto exchanges and perfected by $Hyperliquid is now legal on Wall Street. On 3 November the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) confirmed that perpetual futures on individual stocks can begin trading on registered US exchanges for the first time. HYPE jumped on the news. Here is what changed, what a stock perp actually is, and whether this helps or hurts Hyperliquid.

What did the CFTC approve exactly?

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said that perpetual futures on single equities passed the agency's 45-day review under Regulation 40.3 without objection. The contracts are classified as "security futures", a category created by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which puts them under joint CFTC and SEC oversight and means no new law was needed.

Only exchanges registered with both regulators can list them. Kalshi has already announced plans for 58 perpetual contracts on 55 stocks, including Apple and Tesla. Coinbase, Bitnomial and OG.com are also lining up.

What is a stock perpetual future?

A perpetual future, or "perp", is a futures contract that never expires. Instead of rolling positions every quarter, traders pay or receive a funding rate, usually every few hours, that keeps the contract price close to the spot price of the underlying stock. You get leveraged long or short exposure, 24/7 trading and no delivery date.

Crypto traders have used perps for years. In the past month alone, perpetual futures recorded more than $630 billion in trading volume according to DeFiLlama. Until now, US residents could only trade stock perps on offshore or unregulated venues.

Why is Hyperliquid at the center of this?

Because Hyperliquid is where most onchain stock perps already trade. Through its HIP-3 framework, outside builders can launch their own markets on the chain, and the biggest of them, trade.xyz, runs the stock and index perps. Before the CFTC decision, Hyperliquid's stock and commodity markets held about $4.1 billion in open interest.

The Wall Street link is real: Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, invested in trade.xyz this year and has said it wants to offer 24/7 US futures trading on Hyperliquid. President Trump said in August that the CFTC is working on bringing Hyperliquid under federal rules. The Hyperliquid Policy Center had lobbied for exactly the "security futures" classification the CFTC chose.

Does the CFTC decision hurt Hyperliquid?

It cuts both ways. On one side, regulated US exchanges can now offer the same product with investor protections, which reduces the appeal of an offshore DEX for American traders. Hyperliquid still geoblocks US residents. On the other side, the decision validates the entire perp model, and if ICE builds its US offering on Hyperliquid infrastructure, the chain earns fees from regulated volume it could never touch before.

HYPE traded around $81 to $82 after the announcement, up about 2 percent, with $78.4 as the first support to watch. You can follow the live price on our crypto prices page.

What could still go wrong?

Two lawsuits. CME Group sued the CFTC in June over the first Bitcoin perp approval, arguing that contracts with no expiry and recurring funding payments are swaps, not futures. And on 3 November the Capital Markets Alliance, backed by Cboe, Citadel Securities and the Healthy Markets Association, filed a suit in New York to overturn the stock perp approval. If a court sides with them, the whole framework could be sent back to square one.

Meanwhile the tokenized-stock front is heating up too: SpaceX and Tesla have joined Amazon in opposing OKXICE's plan to list tokenized versions of their shares. Wall Street is happy to adopt crypto's trading model. It is less happy to let crypto trade Wall Street.

Chainlink no longer delivers Asian stock prices from Tokyo and Seoul alone. Since this week, the network's developer documentation lists six exchanges as available: the Korea Exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges, the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong exchange. Chainlink announced the expansion on Tuesday, according to the portal Cryptowisser, and says the equity markets involved are worth more than $40 trillion combined. The LINK token has barely reacted: on Wednesday morning it trades at $11.18, about €9.94, and remains below its 100-day moving average.

For investors in Germany, the news is mainly a question of context. The new data streams strengthen the business through which Chainlink earns revenue. Whether that turns into demand for the token depends on how many exchanges and protocols actually take up the prices and pay for them. This article explains what sits behind the feeds, which LINK price levels matter now, and what you should keep in mind when buying, when staking and when dealing with the tax office.

Chainlink APAC Equities: six exchanges instead of two since the June launch

The APAC Equities Streams are a data product from the series of so-called RWA Streams. RWA stands for real world assets, meaning assets from traditional finance such as shares, bonds or commodities that are represented on a blockchain. A stream is a continuously updated price that a smart contract can call, for instance to settle a bet on the share price of Samsung or Toyota, or to value a loan secured by tokenized shares.

At launch in June, the streams covered only two venues: the Korea Exchange, with prices in won, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with prices in yen. Chainlink listed the region's other exchanges as "coming soon" at the time. The table in the documentation now shows the status "Available" for all six. New additions are the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, quoting in yuan, the Taiwan Stock Exchange in Taiwan dollars and the Hong Kong Exchange in Hong Kong dollars.

There is a technical difference that the documentation states openly. For Japan and Korea, Chainlink supplies only quotes, that is bid and ask prices. For China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, actual traded prices are added. Anyone building a product on this data therefore gets a denser data basis from the new markets than from the first two.

Chainlink Data Streams: fees paid in LINK flow into the reserve

For news about new data feeds to matter for the price, it has to be clear how Chainlink earns money from them. The mechanism is simple to describe. A protocol that pulls prices from Chainlink pays for them. Chainlink converts the revenue, whether it arrives on-chain in crypto or off-chain from companies, into LINK and places it in the so-called Chainlink Reserve. The reserve is a project fund from which, by Chainlink's own account, no withdrawals are planned for several years.

That is the lever through which a data product can touch the token: more paid requests mean more LINK that Chainlink buys on the market and locks away. The path is long, however. Months pass between the activation of a feed and meaningful fees, because an exchange or protocol first has to build a product, test it and find users. A new row in a documentation table is therefore an offer, not yet revenue.

This fits the run of announcements over recent days. At the end of October, Chainlink launched 24/7, with continuous prices for tokenized stocks at weekends too, with Aave as the first partner. Shortly before that came CustodySync with Anchorage Digital, for loans against assets held in custody. The Asia feeds are the third building block of the same strategy: Chainlink wants to be the data line between traditional markets and blockchain applications.

Trading hours in Asia: what the Chainlink feeds deliver after the close

One detail in the documentation deserves attention, because reports on the expansion make it sound different. It says products built on the feeds can run outside local trading hours as well. That is true for the products, not for the prices. The APAC streams deliver prices only during regular sessions from Monday to Friday, including the lunch break in Tokyo, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. When an exchange is closed, the feed holds the last price until the next session opens.

Unlike US equities, there is no stream from after-hours trading for Asia. Chainlink explicitly advises protocols not to base liquidations solely on the price gap at the open and to slow down trading in the first minutes of a session. So if you come across a perpetual bet on a Chinese stock on a crypto platform that runs around the clock, keep in mind that the underlying price does not move between the close and the open, and it can jump at the open.

LINK price on Wednesday morning: $11.18 and a daily low of $10.62

On Wednesday morning LINK stands at $11.18, according to the price on the Kraken exchange. Since midnight UTC the token has gained about 1.5 percent, and over the past 24 hours it traded between $10.62 and $11.29. Bitcoin rose by about 1.2 percent to around $78,280 over the same period. LINK is thus moving in step with the wider market, and the price shows no boost of its own from the Asia news.

The low of $10.62 came during the night after the US election, when the entire market was under pressure. LINK recovering more than half a dollar from there by the morning is a rebound with the market, not a reaction to the feeds. Anyone who wants to measure the effect of the expansion must therefore look at other figures than the daily price: at announcements from exchanges that use the feeds, and at the growth of the reserve.

Since November 2: the 100-day moving average stays out of reach

On November 2 we described how Chainlink had slipped below its 100-day moving average and long bets shrank by a third. The price has barely moved since. LINK closed at $11.10 on November 2 and at $11.02 on November 3, and this morning it stands at $11.18. The 100-day moving average, the mean of the closing prices over the past 100 days, sits at about $11.44 according to Kraken's daily data. That puts the gap at just over 2 percent.

Two things are new since then. First, LINK did not retest the October 30 low of $10.25 even in the election-night sell-off, turning instead at $10.62. Second, with the Asia feeds Chainlink has delivered news that concerns the business and not just sentiment. Nothing has broken, though: the line the price struggled with two days ago remains the next hurdle.

Chainlink price levels: $10.25 below, $12.62 above

Three levels can be derived from the price data for the coming days. The first is at $11.44, the 100-day moving average. A daily close above it would be the first since October 31, when LINK briefly reached $11.93 and closed at $11.63.

The second level is markedly higher, at about $12.62. That is where the 50-day moving average runs, and it shows how much the price has lost since early October: on October 1 LINK still closed at $14.39, and the high of the past 90 days was $15.77. On the downside, the October 30 low of $10.25 is the level that matters. Below it lies the 200-day moving average at about $10.05, which LINK has not fallen below since the summer.

These levels are calculations from past prices, not a forecast. Where the price could head over a horizon of months, and which assumptions lie behind that, is set out on the Chainlink prediction page linked at the end of this article.

Buying LINK in Germany: the route via MiCA-licensed exchanges

If you want to buy LINK, do so through an exchange licensed under the European crypto regulation MiCA. MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and has governed EU-wide since the end of 2024 which providers may offer crypto services. A licensed exchange must hold client funds separately and is subject to supervision, in Germany by BaFin.

The differences lie mainly in costs. In our overview Buying Chainlink in Germany we compared five licensed providers with fees of 0.15 to 1.875 percent per purchase. On a purchase of €1,000 that is €1.50 at one end and €18.75 at the other. If you buy regularly, look not only at ease of use but at the spread and the fee for withdrawing to your own wallet. A current overview of providers is in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

Chainlink staking: a 28-day wait and limited places in the pool

Many investors wonder whether they can not only hold LINK but also put it to work for a return. Chainlink offers its own staking for this, version 0.2. Staking here means you deposit LINK in a smart contract that secures the network and receive a reward in return. According to Chainlink's staking page, the pool is capped at 45 million LINK, of which 40,875,000 LINK are reserved for the community of token holders. Each address may stake 1 to 15,000 LINK, and only when there is free space in the pool.

The lock-up matters more than the yield. If you want to exit, you start a 28-day cooldown and then have a seven-day window to withdraw the LINK. Miss that window and the waiting period starts again. In a falling market you cannot sell during those four weeks. Chainlink puts the reward at a floor of 4.5 percent a year with a full pool, minus a 4 percent share for node operators, so about 4.32 percent for the community at the launch of this version. The rate is variable.

If there is no space in the official pool, staking remains possible via exchanges and platforms that deploy LINK for their customers. There you carry counterparty risk, and the terms vary widely. Which providers offer staking for which coins, and at what rate, is shown in our comparison of the best staking platforms.

LINK and the German tax office: holding period and staking income

For tax purposes, LINK in Germany falls under the same framework as other crypto assets. Gains from a sale are tax-free under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act if more than one year passes between purchase and sale. If you sell earlier, the gain is taxable once all private disposal gains for the year together reach €1,000; this exemption limit has applied since 2024. Whether the holding period will remain is politically open; our page on the crypto holding period reform summarises the current state.

Staking does not change the holding period for the LINK you deploy. In its letter of March 6, 2025, the Federal Ministry of Finance confirmed that staking does not extend the period to ten years. The staking income itself, by contrast, counts as other income under Section 22 No. 3 and is taxable in the year it is received if, together with other such income, it reaches €256 a year. For the LINK you receive, a separate one-year holding period begins on receipt.

In practice, record the date, amount and euro value for every purchase tranche and every staking credit. Exchanges provide exports for this that can be imported into a tax tool. If you buy and stake across several platforms, such a tool saves you a lot of manual work on your tax return.

Chainlink after the Asia expansion: no price boost without paying users

The expansion to six Asian exchanges is verifiable progress in Chainlink's business. It has not shown up in the price so far, and that is logical: fees only arise once products run on the feeds. Until then the overall market drives the LINK price, and the levels at $11.44 above and $10.25 below remain the reference points. Three steps help you sort out the situation for yourself:

1. Check how you buy: Compare fees and spread before you buy LINK, and use a MiCA-licensed exchange. The overview is in the comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Weigh the lock-up: Decide whether you accept a 28-day wait in official staking or prefer a platform with a shorter lock-up. Terms and risks are covered in the staking comparison.
3. Keep records: Document purchases and staking income with date and euro value so that holding period and exemption limits can be proven cleanly. Suitable tools are in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of November 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

November has started the way October ended for the US spot Bitcoin ETFs: with money leaving. Three sessions in a row, more than a billion dollars out, and BlackRock's IBIT doing most of the selling. Meanwhile $Bitcoin is trying to hold the $76,000 to $77,000 zone after the Democrats swept the midterms. Here is what the flows are telling us.

What happened to the Bitcoin ETF flows this week?

According to SoSoValue, the spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded three consecutive days of net outflows:

• 30 October: $643.3 million, the largest single-day exit since late June. This was the first trading session after Binance confirmed its $6.3 billion hack.
• 2 November: $398.6 million, the first outflow day of the new month.
• 3 November: $115.6 million, a much smaller figure, but still negative.

That adds up to roughly $1.16 billion in three sessions. The Ethereum ETFs added to the pain with another $139.8 million of outflows on 2 November alone.

Who is selling Bitcoin ETFs?

Almost entirely BlackRock's IBIT. The fund lost $233.7 million on 30 October, $405.3 million on 2 November (more than the entire group's net figure that day) and about $95 million on 3 November. Fidelity's FBTC flipped from a $201.4 million outflow on 30 October to small inflows this week, and Bitwise's BITB actually attracted $21.9 million on 3 November.

In other words: one very large allocator is cutting exposure, while the smaller funds are quietly buying the dip. The total net assets of the spot Bitcoin ETFs now sit at about $99.2 billion, roughly 6.3 percent of Bitcoin's market cap, with cumulative inflows since launch still above $56 billion.

Why are Bitcoin ETFs seeing outflows now?

Three things hit at once:

1. The Binance hack. The biggest theft in crypto history triggered a wave of de-risking on the Friday after the breach, and ETF investors were part of it.
2. The midterms. Markets had priced a Republican-friendly, light-touch regulatory path for crypto. A Democratic House and Senate changes that calculation, and institutions hate uncertainty.
3. Underwater holders. Bitcoin is down roughly 12 percent year to date and many ETF buyers from the first half of the year are sitting on losses, which makes every bounce a selling opportunity for them.

Is the Bitcoin ETF selling slowing down?

The trend in the numbers says yes: $643 million, then $399 million, then $116 million. The pace is clearly fading, and the inflows into BITB and FBTC show that not everyone is heading for the exit. But one shrinking outflow day is not a reversal. What would flip the picture is a string of green days above $200 million, something we have not seen since the second half of October.

Bitcoin price prediction: what do the flows mean for BTC?

Bitcoin dipped to about $75,700 during the election count and has since bounced back above $77,000. The zone between $75,500 and $76,500 is the support that matters now. Hold it, and a relief rally toward $80,000 is on the table, especially if the ETF flows turn positive. Lose it, and the 200-day average near $73,000 becomes the next target, roughly 5 percent lower.

You can follow the live price on our Bitcoin price page and the broader market metrics, including liquidations and the Fear and Greed Index, on our charts page.

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TLDR

• SpaceX has objected to tokenized versions of its shares being listed on OKXICE, according to a Nov. 2 notice.
• SpaceX is now one of 56 companies objecting to the listings, along with Tesla and Amazon.
• The SEC’s Innovation Exemption gives companies 30 days to object to third-party tokenized trading of their shares.
• Offshore SpaceX tokens from Backpack and Kraken recorded about $1.93 billion in onchain volume in June.
• OKXICE co-chair Andrew Cuomo said on Oct. 30 that more companies will participate over time.

SpaceX has objected to the listing of tokenized versions of its shares on OKXICE, a new trading venue aimed at US investors. The company used a 30-day objection window that the Securities and Exchange Commission gave issuers under its new rules.

The objection was disclosed in a public notice from OKXICE dated Nov. 2. OKXICE is a joint venture between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange.

SpaceX is now one of 56 companies that have objected to the proposed listings on the venue. Tesla and Amazon are also on that list.

How the Objection Process Works

The SEC introduced a five-year Innovation Exemption in September. It lets platforms such as OKXICE offer trading in tokenized versions of US stocks without registering as national securities exchanges.

The framework also gives listed companies a voice in the process. Companies have 30 days to object when a third party plans to offer tokenized trading of their shares.

An objection effectively keeps those tokens off the venue. This means a company can stop its stock from trading in tokenized form on OKXICE.

Tokenized stocks are blockchain-based versions of company shares. They let investors gain exposure to traditional stocks onchain, often around the clock.

Some tokens are backed by actual shares, depending on how they are built. However, the rights given to tokenholders can differ from those held by regular shareholders.

SpaceX Tokens Already Trade Offshore

The objection comes after tokenized SpaceX shares had already started trading on platforms outside the US. Those tokens have drawn heavy trading since the company’s public offering in June.

Before the listing, Backpack Securities and crypto exchange Kraken both prepared tokenized versions of SpaceX stock. Backpack is a stock brokerage and tokenization platform, and each product was designed to be backed by actual shares.

Backpack’s SPCX token recorded $1.08 billion in onchain trading volume in June. Kraken’s SPCXx token, offered through its xStocks product, recorded $852 million that same month.

Together, the two tokens handled about $1.93 billion in onchain volume in June. That activity made SpaceX one of the biggest drivers of onchain stock trading in recent months.

OKXICE differs from Backpack and Kraken because it would open tokenized stock trading to US investors. It would operate under the SEC’s new framework, giving it potential access to the world’s largest equity market by capitalization.

Nasdaq warned companies in September that they “must be cautious about their participation” in the venture. The exchange argued that tokenized stock trading could fragment liquidity and undermine long-term shareholder value.

OKXICE co-chair Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor, told Cointelegraph on Oct. 20 that the venture expected more objections. He said companies were avoiding being the first to test the model.

Cuomo addressed the issue again at an Oct. 30 press conference. He said that as people see the benefits of tokenization, “you’ll see more and more companies participate.”

The post SpaceX Uses SEC’s 30-Day Objection Rule to Keep Its Tokenized Shares Off OKXICE appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company holds about 150,000 Bitcoin, worth roughly $11.5 billion.
• Tether’s Q3 reserve attestation implies only about 100,060 BTC.
• The gap of roughly 50,000 coins is worth close to $3.8 billion.
• Ardoino did not say where the extra coins are held or when they were bought.
• Tether’s Q3 excess reserve cushion rose to $7.95 billion, nearly double June’s level.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company holds about 150,000 Bitcoin. That stake is worth roughly $11.5 billion at current prices. The number is about 50,000 coins higher than what Tether’s latest reserve report shows.

Ardoino made the comment during a keynote at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland. “We have give or take 150,000 bitcoin ourselves. It’s not much, but it’s honest work,” he said.

Tether has run a Bitcoin and stablecoin adoption program in Lugano since 2022. The company used this year’s event to share several figures about its size and holdings.

Two Numbers, One Gap

Tether’s third-quarter reserve attestation covers the assets that back its USDT stablecoin. It lists $8.37 billion in Bitcoin, valued at $83,621 per coin. That works out to about 100,060 BTC.

The difference between that figure and Ardoino’s claim is close to 50,000 coins. Those coins are worth about $3.8 billion. Tether’s public filings do not yet account for them.

Ardoino did not say where the extra Bitcoin is held. He also did not say when the coins were acquired. His remark does not point to a new purchase of that size.

Tether has long said its corporate Bitcoin investments are kept apart from the reserves that support USDT. The Q3 attestation covers only the assets backing the stablecoin. Ardoino did not give a breakdown of the two pools during his talk.

Bitcoin recently traded near $78,576, down about 3.6% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. The price drop since the end of September means the coins in Tether’s report are now worth less than the $8.37 billion listed.

Tether has been building its Bitcoin stack for years. In May 2023, the company said it would put up to 15% of its net realized operating profits into Bitcoin. It also said it would hold the coins itself instead of using outside custodians.

Large profits have funded those purchases. Tether reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit in the third quarter alone. It has posted billion-dollar quarterly profits throughout the year as USDT supply has kept growing.

Reserve Cushion Nearly Doubles

The Q3 report shows $191.45 billion in assets against $183.50 billion in liabilities. That leaves an excess cushion of $7.95 billion. In June, the buffer stood at $4.11 billion.

U.S. Treasury bills make up most of the reserves. They total about $132.4 billion, according to the report.

Tether has faced years of questions about whether USDT is fully backed. For most of its history, the company has published quarterly attestations rather than full financial audits.

This year, Tether began its first full financial audit with KPMG. The move is a long-awaited step toward addressing doubts about its reserves.

Ardoino also spoke about Tether’s reach at the Lugano event. He said the company now serves more than 730 million users worldwide. Tether is adding roughly 30 million wallets each quarter, he said.

He used the stage to pitch a suite of open-source technologies. Tether funds those projects with its profits.

The post Tether Says It Owns 150,000 Bitcoin, but Where Are the Other 50,000 Coins? appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• The HKMA and HKUST launched a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Toolkit for banks on November 2.
• Hong Kong’s banking sector scored 2.3 out of 10 on the HKMA’s Quantum Preparedness Index in July 2026.
• The regulator’s target is a full score of 10 by 2030.
• The toolkit helps banks inventory cryptographic assets, set priorities and build timelines with suppliers.
• The launch is a preparation step and does not mean quantum computers have broken bank or crypto encryption.

Hong Kong’s banks have a long way to go before they are ready for quantum computing. The city’s banking regulator measured the sector’s readiness at 2.3 out of 10 earlier this year. It now wants that score to reach 10 by 2030.

To help close that gap, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) launched a Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Toolkit on November 2. The project was developed with support from industry participants.

Where the Readiness Score Stands

The HKMA launched its Quantum Preparedness Index, or QPI, in July 2026. The index measures how prepared the banking sector is for quantum-safe cryptography.

The first QPI score came in at 2.3 out of 10. According to the HKMA, this showed that banks had begun addressing quantum-related developments, but overall readiness for the switch to PQC remains at an early stage.

The regulator’s goal is full quantum readiness, meaning a QPI score of 10, by 2030. The new toolkit is meant to help banks turn awareness into concrete action toward that target.

Banks use cryptography in many places, including certificates, customer logins, links between banks, software updates and stored data. Moving those systems to new standards can take years, because devices, vendors and older applications must keep working together.

The sector also has a reason to start early. As NewsBTC noted, data captured today can remain sensitive long after the original connection has ended.

What the Toolkit Asks Banks to Do

The toolkit sets out a structured framework to guide banks through their PQC transition. It covers four main areas: setting governance and accountability, assessing cryptographic exposure, identifying transition needs and monitoring progress.

It also includes practical tools to help banks get started. These include taking stock of cryptographic assets and dependencies, setting transition priorities, working more closely with suppliers and building realistic timelines.

Arthur Yuen, Deputy Chief Executive of the HKMA, said the index “has established a clear starting point for the sector.” He added that the next step is to help banks turn that understanding “into clear responsibilities, informed priorities and practical plans.”

Yuen said the toolkit gives banks a common foundation they can adapt to their own needs. “Our aim is to make it easier for banks to begin the work and sustain progress throughout the transition,” he said.

Prof. Frederik Anseel, Dean of HKUST Business School, described quantum preparation as “a leadership challenge.” He said banks can build knowledge and capability “even while the timing of the threat remains uncertain.”

The launch is a preparation program. It does not mean that quantum computers have broken banking or cryptocurrency encryption, and NewsBTC reported that no credible reading of the announcement suggests Bitcoin private keys are being routinely cracked by quantum machines.

The toolkit’s results are also an input for planning, not a replacement for independent engineering and formal testing. Different cryptographic methods face different levels of risk, and some newer methods can affect key size, speed or compatibility.

NewsBTC said the next things to watch are whether participating banks publish migration road maps, change how they buy technology and test post-quantum login systems with core platforms. Each of these would be a step toward the 2030 goal.

The HKMA said the toolkit will be updated over time to reflect new technology, international standards and lessons from banks. It is now available in the Fintech Knowledge Hub section of the HKMA website.

The post Hong Kong Banks Scored Just 2.3 Out of 10 on Quantum Readiness, Here Is the Plan to Fix It appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party has formally proposed delaying the country’s crypto income tax.
• The tax is set to start on Jan. 1, 2027, and would charge 22% on gains above 2.5 million won.
• Party leader Kim Min-seok wants the Digital Asset Basic Act passed before the tax begins.
• If approved, this would be the fourth delay since the tax became law in 2020.
• The presidential office was reportedly discussing pushing the tax to 2029.

South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party has formally proposed delaying the country’s tax on crypto income. The tax is currently scheduled to begin on Jan. 1, 2027.

Party leader Kim Min-seok made the proposal at a supreme council meeting held at the National Assembly. Local news outlet News1 reported his comments on Wednesday.

If the government approves the plan, it would be the fourth time the tax has been pushed back. Lawmakers first passed the levy in 2020.

Law Before Tax

Kim said party members agreed on a clear order of steps. They want the country to pass the Digital Asset Basic Act before any crypto tax takes effect.

The Digital Asset Basic Act is a planned legal framework that would set broad rules for crypto in South Korea. Kim said companies and investors need time to adjust once those new rules are in place.

The decision came after several rounds of talks. Kim said the party consulted through the Strategy and Finance Committee, held talks with the government, and met with crypto asset businesses.

Under the current plan, the tax would apply to yearly gains from transferring or lending crypto assets. The rate would be 22%, which includes local tax.

Investors would only pay tax on gains above a basic deduction. That deduction is set at 2.5 million won, or about $1,868.7.

This means an investor with yearly crypto gains below that amount would owe no tax under the current plan. Gains above that amount would be taxed at the full 22% rate.

A Promise of a Firm Timeline

Kim acknowledged that the tax has been delayed several times before. He said the party would set a clear deferral period this time.

He also listed tasks that need to be finished before the tax can start. These include using overseas transaction information and verifying the IT systems that would handle the tax.

Taxpayer guidance is also on the list of prerequisites. Kim said the party would prepare these items thoroughly during the delay.

The proposal does not change the law on its own. The current start date of Jan. 1, 2027, remains in place unless the delay is approved.

Last week, South Korea’s presidential office was reportedly discussing pushing the tax back to 2029. That would be two years later than the current start date.

The reported 2029 timeline is tied to the United States. It would line up with when the U.S. plans to join the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework.

The framework is designed to let tax authorities in different countries share information about crypto transactions. Kim’s mention of overseas transaction information as a prerequisite connects to this type of data sharing.

With the ruling party’s formal proposal now on record, the decision on a fourth delay moves forward. The government has not yet announced final approval of the deferral.

The post South Korea Wants Crypto Law First, Proposes Fourth Delay to 22% Crypto Tax appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Justin Sun has asked a federal judge to sanction World Liberty Financial and its lawyers.
• The company expanded its ownership disclosure from one entity to 22 in August, including UAE citizenship.
• World Liberty then argued its UAE ties remove the federal court’s jurisdiction over the case.
• A UAE-backed vehicle agreed to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty for $500 million in January 2025.
• Sun plans to pursue his $45 million dispute in California state court after the sanctions ruling.

Tron founder Justin Sun has asked a federal judge to sanction World Liberty Financial and its lawyers. He claims the Trump-linked crypto company waited months to reveal ownership ties to the United Arab Emirates, then used those ties to challenge the court’s authority over his case.

Sun announced the request on X on Nov. 3. The move is the latest step in his lawsuit over a $45 million investment in the company.

From One Owner to 22

At the start of the case, World Liberty listed only Florida citizenship in its court disclosures, according to Sun. He said court rules required the company to identify the members of its ownership structure.

In August, the company filed an updated disclosure. It expanded the list from one entity to 22, with citizenship in Florida, Delaware, Puerto Rico and the UAE.

That filing came six days after an Aug. 20 hearing on World Liberty’s request to move the dispute into arbitration. Sun said the judge had signaled that some claims should stay in open court while others could go to arbitration.

World Liberty then argued that its UAE citizenship removed the federal court’s jurisdiction. Its reasoning was that foreign parties now appeared on both sides of the lawsuit.

Federal courts can hear certain cases based on the citizenship of the parties, under what are called diversity rules. A company organized in the US can still take on foreign citizenship for these purposes through its owners.

Sun said his lawyers had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the arbitration request. He argued the ownership details could have settled the jurisdiction question at the very beginning.

“World Liberty was proudly American when it was selling tokens. It discovered its UAE roots only when it needed a way out of an American federal courtroom,” Sun wrote on X.

The UAE Stake Behind the Filing

The foreign ties trace back to January 2025, days before Trump’s inauguration. An investment vehicle backed by UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan agreed to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty for $500 million.

Eric Trump signed the agreement. About $187 million went to entities controlled by the Trump family, according to reporting on the deal.

Sheikh Tahnoon is a brother of the UAE president and oversees investments in artificial intelligence and advanced technology. The deal drew scrutiny after the Trump administration expanded UAE access to advanced American AI chips, and Democratic lawmakers raised conflict of interest questions.

World Liberty has denied that the investment influenced government decisions. President Trump has said he did not know about the deal and that his sons run the business.

The company’s Gold Paper says it is not organized offshore. It describes World Liberty as an American corporation working to bring decentralized finance to the US.

Sun first bought tokens in November 2024, before the UAE deal. The investment became public months before World Liberty changed its court disclosure.

Sun sued in April, claiming the company used fraud to secure his investment and unlawfully froze his tokens. World Liberty has rejected those claims and accused him of misconduct in a separate defamation lawsuit.

In his sanctions request, Sun argues that either World Liberty gave its lawyers wrong information or the lawyers failed to properly check the ownership structure. The WLFI token traded near $0.05, down 4.65% over 24 hours.

Sun said he plans to pursue the original dispute in California state court once the federal judge rules on sanctions. The judge will decide whether the late disclosure warrants penalties against the company or its legal team.

The post World Liberty Financial Went From 1 Owner to 22 in Court, Now Justin Sun Wants Sanctions appeared first on Blockonomi.

The US midterm elections expectedly brought a new wave of fluctuations for bitcoin, whose price dumped to a new seven-week low before it rebounded by almost $3,000.

With the political uncertainty now out of the way, most altcoins have turned green, led by ZEC’s major breakout above $1,300. XRP, ETH, and HYPE are also in the green, and so is NEAR.

BTC Reclaims $78K

The previous business week also ended with a massively volatile trading session prompted by the largest hack in terms of USD value in crypto history against Binance. As reports started to emerge on Friday morning that the leading exchange was compromised for an unprecedented $6.3 billion, BTC’s price dived from $81,000 to a multi-week low of $76,400.

Its initial bounce failed, and the asset quickly dipped to $76,100. It finally rebounded slightly over the weekend, and even neared $79,000 on Monday morning. However, the predominantly bearish market sentiment returned, and BTC slipped to $76,500 on Tuesday morning.

More volatility ensued after the US midterm elections, in which the Democrats won convincingly. Bitcoin’s initial reaction was a nosedive to a seven-week low of $75,600 before the bulls stepped up and pushed it to $78,500 as of now.

Its market cap has rebounded to $1.570 trillion on CMC, while its dominance over the alts continues to flirt with 60%.

Alts Turn Green

Ethereum has jumped past $2,300 after a 2.6% daily increase. XRP has challenged the $1.30 resistance following a 3% increase, while a similar pump from HYPE has pushed it to almost $87. BNB, SOL, XMR, DOGE, and ADA are also slightly in the green, while ZEC has stolen the show with a massive 14% surge to well over $1,300.

NEAR has reclaimed the $4.00 level after a 7% increase, while ENA, PUMP, ONDO, MORPHO, and PEPE have jumped by up to 8%. BTW has rocketed by 24% daily.

The cumulative market cap of all crypto assets has risen by 2% in a day to $2.630 trillion on CMC.

The post ZEC Explodes by 13% Daily as BTC Price Reclaims $78K After Midterm Elections: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Last week’s Binance security breach was the most devastating attack in crypto history. It exposed the risks facing exchanges and the customers who trust them with their assets.

The incident has now prompted South Korean regulators to reconsider how much customer money exchanges should keep in offline storage. The latest reports suggest that discussions are underway to raise the existing requirement significantly.

Cold Storage Rule

According to News1, the Financial Services Commission held an emergency security meeting with major virtual asset exchanges and custody firms to examine ways to strengthen asset protection. Under the existing Virtual Asset User Protection Act, exchanges are required to keep at least 80% of customer assets in cold wallets, which remain disconnected from the internet, while the rest can be held in hot wallets to facilitate withdrawals and other transactions.

However, regulators are now discussing whether the minimum should be brought closer to 99%, a level already maintained by some major platforms.

The proposed change could create major challenges, particularly for smaller exchanges that may not have the same operational capacity as larger competitors. Although cold wallets offer stronger protection against online attacks, accessing funds stored in them involves additional approval and signing procedures. This means exchanges could have less money readily available to process customer withdrawals.

The concern is not limited to inconvenience.

In a market where crypto prices are highly volatile, delayed withdrawals could prevent investors from moving their holdings when they need to sell or transfer them. If an asset is rapidly losing value, waiting for funds to be released from offline storage could leave investors exposed to further losses.

There is already an example of how this can happen. Bithumb experienced withdrawal delays of approximately 13 hours for certain altcoins in August after insufficient hot wallet balances forced the exchange to move additional assets from cold storage.

Weak Links Behind the Heist

More than $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen in the Binance breach, which the FBI has attributed to the North Korea-linked hacking group TraderTraitor. Pyongyang has denied responsibility. Kim Yo Jong, department director of the Central Committee of North Korea’s Workers’ Party, dismissed Washington’s allegations as politically motivated.

The incident has also prompted scrutiny of how exchanges secure their internal systems. CoinEx founder Haipo Yang, for one, identified three security weaknesses at Binance that he believes could have been avoided. First, he said the exchange had not properly “isolated” its development and operations environments. Employees with access to production systems should use dedicated machines, with coding, messaging, and web browsing kept on separate devices.

His second concern was the lack of meaningful two-factor authentication for production access. The exec said a single compromised key was enough to give an attacker access to live systems. Yang suggested using AWS Session Manager with hardware security keys to ensure that one stolen credential would not be sufficient.

Questions were also raised about Binance’s multisignature security setup. Yang pointed out that the different parties involved in approving transactions were not independently verifying them. He said this defeated the purpose of having multiple signers, as compromising one node could put the entire system at risk.

The post After Historic Binance Hack, South Korea Considers 99% Cold Wallet Rule for Crypto Exchanges appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin endured another volatile trading session as the US midterm results initially rattled risk markets and pushed the cryptocurrency to its lowest price tag in almost 7 weeks at around $75,600.

Interestingly, though, this sell-off was rather short-lived, with the asset rebounding to just over $78,000 as of press time as political uncertainty faded and buyers stepped back in.

Dem Sweep Sent BTC South

As many expected, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, handing President Donald Trump a divided government for the final two years of his term. What was less expected was that Democrats flipped several seats in traditionally Republican states and secured majorities in both chambers.

Bitcoin’s immediate reaction was quite painful, as the asset was rejected at $77,000 and tumbled to its lowest level since September 17 at $75,600. The decline wasn’t isolated: Nasdaq 100 futures also plunged sharply in the early election reaction, while the dollar weakened and Treasury yields fell.

The concern for crypto is rather straightforward: Democratic control of Congress could complicate parts of the Trump administration’s pro-industry legislative agenda, while increasing scrutiny of areas such as technology and financial regulation. At the same time, the political outcome is likely to create gridlock because Trump retains veto power over legislation passed by Congress.

The initial fear quickly faded, though, as the largest cryptocurrency erased most of the losses and jumped to just over $78,000. According to market commentators, the political outcome reduced uncertainty, while significant call-option buying also emerged during the rebound.

Local Bottom Found?

While crypto analyst Bren believes BTC might revisit the $56,000 bear-market low, Ali Martinez shared a contrasting opinion. He highlighted bitcoin’s short-term holder realized price, which currently sits around $75,800, indicating that the latest leg down brought the asset almost directly into that zone.

Such tests during previous uptrends have historically coincided with local bottoms, Martinez added. In March 2023, bitcoin bottomed at $20,000 while the metric stood at $19,800. Similar behavior was seen in June 2023 and May 2024 before the cryptocurrency jumped higher.

Meanwhile, Lacie Zhang, Research Lead at Bitget Wallet, offered a similarly constructive assessment in comments sent directly to CryptoPotato:

“Bitcoin has fully erased its early-session decline and is trading near $77,000, up roughly 1.8% over the past 24 hours after holding above the $75,700–$76,000 support zone. The recovery suggests spot demand has been sufficient to absorb residual selling pressure from recent liquidations and ETF outflows, helping Bitcoin stabilize after the latest bout of volatility.”

Zhang added that the broader trend remains consolidative below key resistance at $80,000, but BTC needs to reclaim that level so that the market flips constructive and bullish again.

The post Bitcoin Whipsaws After Democratic Sweep: BTC Reclaims $78K appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Crypto analyst Bren expects Bitcoin to go back to its $56,000 bear-market low before it starts a stronger recovery, with the US midterm elections adding uncertainty to an already fragile market.

But despite his short-term caution, the trader believes 2027 could bring a new all-time high for the OG cryptocurrency, potentially after a bullish first and second quarter.

$56K a Likely Bear Market Bottom?

In a post on X on November 4, Bren explained that his immediate market outlook is bearish, with BTC not being able to sustain its recovery after hitting the $78,000 level, as well as a wedge/channel formation on the Ethereum chart making him reluctant to increase his exposure to riskier assets.

In a video accompanying the X post, the trader described the current correction as being in its last stages, which would put Bitcoin’s likely bear market bottom at $56,000. According to him, the price structure that has been developing since September is very likely to produce a higher low than another extended downturn.

However, for the analyst, early next year looks very bullish, especially Q1 and Q2, and at some point, he says BTC will register a new record.

“I think sometime in 2027 Bitcoin will make a new all-time high,” he said in the video.

According to him, if the primary crypto moves back above the $80,000 to $81,000 level, then it could make many market participants more risk-on and lead to them taking bigger altcoin positions, although he expects the buying to stay low until then.

Midterm Results and Bitcoin’s Price Backdrop

Bren’s outlook came against a rapidly changing political backdrop.

“Elections are always tough. Upsets are common,” the analyst wrote on X. “And the consensus result often produces an outcome that makes us go, ‘WTF?'”

Indeed, Democrats have reclaimed both chambers of Congress in the aftermath of the November 3 midterm elections, with projected results at the time of writing giving the party 255 House seats and 53 Senate seats.

As CryptoPotato reported before, midterms in the past have produced mixed implications for crypto investors, with Bitcoin falling more than 45% within 71 days of the 2014 polls and nearly 50% in 39 days after 2018’s. However, as trader Dealer.eth pointed out, those post-election lows went on to become the bear market bottoms of their cycles, with BTC gaining an average of 54% in the 12 months after the events.

At press time, the asset was within touching distance of $78,000 after gaining almost 2% in 24 hours. Nonetheless, that small pump was not enough to mitigate the drops across other timeframes, with BTC’s 7-day chart showing it almost 4% in the red, while across one month it was down over 9% and more than 27% lower than where it was one year ago.

The post Bitcoin to $56K Before a 2027 ATH? Analyst Shares His Forecast appeared first on CryptoPotato.

One analyst has said that XRP could reach $5 to $8 in 2027, although it may have to face further weakness before the end of this year.

The forecast is based on a long-term chart pattern that he says has repeatedly guided the Ripple token through major market cycles.

Another Reset Before a Recovery

In a recent series of posts on X, ChartNerd described the $5 to $8 range as “more than achievable” and identified 2027 as the target window. However, he first expects “Q4 turbulence” and is framing the market cycle as a peak, followed by a reset, then an expansion, with the whole setup repeating after that.

The chart accompanying his posts tracks XRP from 2014 into projected 2027 and 2028 price zones, with past cycle peaks identified near 2018, 2021, and the July 2025 all-time high of $3.65. These were followed by pullbacks toward a rising lower trend bar that ChartNerd is treating as a long-term support level that hasn’t failed ever in the chart’s history.

Back in June, with XRP about 70% below its ATH, the analyst suggested that a historical bottom could form in the following months, and now, he believes the asset is getting close to another such reset. However, he also warned of a so-called “Bart pattern” unfolding after the token lost the $1.30 support level, and in his opinion, unless the price goes back to that threshold, XRP could drop to between $1.16 and $1.04.

XRP Under Pressure

At the time of writing, XRP was trading near $1.25 per CoinGecko data, having changed very little in 24 hours but shaving off more than 3% of its value in seven days. It was also down more than 16% over one month, and about 48% lower than where it was a year ago, which has contributed to keeping it 65% below its record high.

Earlier, ChartNerd had shared some caveats on XRP’s long-term performance, arguing that it may have to revisit a historical demand zone against Bitcoin before it could start another period of outperformance. As he pointed out, XRP has underperformed BTC for at least 8 years, even after several catch-up rallies that came after the world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency went back to the aforementioned zone.

Another popular analyst, EGRAG CRYPTO, has made even bolder claims, setting targets for the asset Ripple calls its “North Star” of $8, $13, and $30. However, he says the only way that outlook has a chance of ever becoming real is if XRP hits a monthly close above $1.65.

The post XRP Bull Eyes $5-$8 in 2027 Despite Short-Term Headwinds appeared first on CryptoPotato.