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Bitcoin Magazine

U.S. Treasury Cuts Off MEXC From U.S. Financial System Over Alleged $16 Billion in Illicit Flows

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued a final order Friday that will cut offshore exchange MEXC Global off from the American banking system over alleged links to sanctions evasion by Iran, North Korea and Russia, the department said.

FinCEN’s order, published as a PDF pending Federal Register placement, finds MEXC a “primary money laundering concern in connection with Russian illicit finance” under section 9714(a) of the Combating Russian Money Laundering Act. Thirty days after that Register notice, covered U.S. financial institutions will be barred from any funds transfer — including convertible virtual currency — to or from MEXC.

Reuters reported the same cut-off Friday afternoon. Treasury framed the move as part of Operation Economic Outcast. It is not an OFAC sanctions designation: the order says it does not rewrite Bank Secrecy Act duties or OFAC rules, and it is a FinCEN funds-transmittal ban rather than a Section 311 proposed rulemaking.

Treasury alleges MEXC facilitated at least $16 billion in illicit flows from May 2021 through May 2026, including nearly $1.5 billion tied to Russian sanctions evasion and about $22 million linked to Iran’s Central Bank and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force. The platform was still processing trades with sanctioned Garantex and successor Grinex as recently as June 2026, more than four years after OFAC designated Garantex, the release says.

What the order does — and when

The order, signed by FinCEN Deputy Director Jimmy L. Kirby, covers MEXC Global and named affiliates operating outside the United States, including Seychelles-incorporated MEXC Global Ltd / MX Global Ltd, Estonia’s MEXC Estonia OÜ, Switzerland’s GIDA Technology AG and the U.K.’s MXC Global Ltd, plus successors. Covered institutions face civil or criminal penalties for willful violations.

Until the Federal Register publishes the notice, the 30-day clock has not started. As of Friday evening eastern time the Register’s public index still showed no MEXC document, matching the order’s own cover note that publication is pending.

Background on MEXC

Founded in 2018 and formerly branded MXC, MEXC ranks among the world’s 20 largest centralized crypto venues by volume. Treasury puts daily turnover above $1 billion and reserves near $5 billion as of mid-2026, with access claimed across more than 170 countries. The exchange already lists the United States as a prohibited jurisdiction in its user terms, so Friday’s action mainly hits any remaining dollar rails, banking partners and counterparties that still touch U.S. institutions.

Regulators elsewhere have been circling for years. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority put MEXC Global Ltd on its warning list in March 2024 as unauthorized. Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission warned the same month that the platform was marketing to local investors without a licence. Seychelles’ Financial Services Authority said in May 2026 it took action against MX Global Ltd for unlicensed virtual-asset operations — footnoted in FinCEN’s order.

Those compliance gaps matter because the illicit-flow thesis is specific, not guilt by association. Beyond Russia, FinCEN cites about $1 billion in direct traffic with more than 40 Iranian crypto exchangers, nearly $26 million with the OFAC-sanctioned A7 sanctions-evasion network, and almost $200 million tied to the A7A5 stablecoin. DPRK facilitators and cybercrime flows are also alleged. MEXC has not issued a public response to the Friday order; its main X account kept posting marketing content through the afternoon.

Why it matters for bitcoin markets

Practically, once the order bites, U.S. banks, money transmitters and other covered firms cannot move dollars or crypto to MEXC wallets or accounts. Offshore users may keep trading peer-to-peer, but dollar on-ramps and any bank that still clears for MEXC become legal risk. The template tracks earlier 9714 cut-offs of venues such as Bitzlato, and it lands beside a busy sanctions week that has already seen North Korea crypto designations, an Iranian exchange action, and Russia’s push to put bitcoin trading on the Moscow Exchange.

Whether MEXC contests the finding, seeks an exemption, or quietly reroutes liquidity is the open question. For now the paper trail is clear: a final FinCEN order under 9714(a), a 30-day fuse after Federal Register publication, and Treasury’s claim of at least $16 billion in illicit volume sitting behind the cut-off.

This post U.S. Treasury Cuts Off MEXC From U.S. Financial System Over Alleged $16 Billion in Illicit Flows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Magazine Books Opens 333-Copy Genesis Book Collector Edition for 3rd Anniversary

Bitcoin Magazine Books opened a third-anniversary campaign Friday for Aaron van Wirdum’s The Genesis Book, offering a redesigned Collectors Edition limited to 333 hand-signed, individually numbered hardcovers in an exclusive Genesis Block slipcase.

Each Collectors Edition hardcover is hand-signed and hand-numbered by van Wirdum, the former Bitcoin Magazine editor-in-chief whose book traces the people, projects and ideas that preceded Satoshi Nakamoto’s peer-to-peer cash design. The standard package is priced at $221 and pairs the book with a limited trading card carrying a Certificate of Authenticity, a collector pin, a sticker sheet, the slipcase and a digital package.

Two one-of-one packages sit outside the ordinary number queue. The #1 package is listed at $5,000 and the #21 package at $2,500; each includes the matching numbered copy, a matching one-of-one collector card and the same accessories as the standard collector package.

Standard collector numbers are assigned in purchase order starting at #2 and skipping #21, the campaign FAQ says. Once preorders close, the signed Genesis print run will not be reproduced.

What ships with the anniversary editions

Beside the signed run, Bitcoin Magazine Books is selling a Premium Edition hardcover for $160 with foil stamping, a ribbon marker, stained page edges and custom endsheets. That edition is not limited, signed, numbered or slipcased, and it does not include the collector accessories or digital files.

A standalone Digital Package at $9.99 delivers the ebook in EPUB and the audiobook in MP4 immediately after purchase, independent of whether the physical campaign clears its funding bar.

Physical collector and premium orders are scheduled to ship in calendar year 2027.

Van Wirdum, who discovered bitcoin in 2013 and later led Bitcoin Magazine‘s editorial desk, frames The Genesis Book as a history of computer scientists, privacy activists and heterodox economists who chased government-independent digital money long before the 2008 white paper — from early cypherpunk culture through experiments such as David Chaum’s ecash, Wei Dai’s b-money, Adam Back’s Hashcash and Hal Finney’s reusable proof of work.

Store images for the slipcase and accessories are artistic renderings; the campaign page notes that color, materials and finishes may vary in production. The campaign is operated by BTC Inc., which publishes Bitcoin Magazine.

This post Bitcoin Magazine Books Opens 333-Copy Genesis Book Collector Edition for 3rd Anniversary first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Thailand SEC Files Criminal Complaint Against Bitget Ahead of Dec. 5 Access Block

Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission filed a criminal complaint Thursday against BG Limited, the operator of cryptocurrency exchange Bitget, alleging it ran an unlicensed digital-asset exchange for Thai users from 2022 to 2025, and notified the government to block the platform from Dec. 5.

The complaint, lodged with the Economic Crime Suppression Division, also names Mr. Kritsana Kritsananuwat as an alleged supporter who promoted Bitget through Facebook and YouTube channels, the SEC said in statement No. 241/2026.

From 2022 through 2025, the regulator found, Bitget offered a trading system in the ordinary course of business, charged fees, ran a Thai-language website that could show values in baht, and solicited Thai users on social channels including “Bitget Thailand” on X, “BGB Thai Holder” on Telegram and “bitgetthailand” on TikTok.

That conduct amounts to operating a digital-asset exchange under Section 3 of the Emergency Decree on Digital Asset Businesses B.E. 2561 (2018) without a license, a violation of Section 26 punishable under Section 66, the SEC said. The case now moves to an inquiry official, then prosecutors and the courts.

Separately, the SEC submitted Bitget’s website, other domains and its app to the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society under a 2025 royal decree that authorizes access blocks on unlicensed trading platforms. From Dec. 5, the public “will be unable to access the platform,” the statement said, and investors still holding assets there were told to consider acting before the cutoff.

A licensed path that now sits next to a criminal case

The enforcement push lands weeks after Bitget announced a planned acquisition of GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics (Thailand), a Bangkok digital-asset exchange and brokerage that already holds Thai licenses, through its interest in BTGT Management (Thailand) Ltd.

Under that deal, GMO Internet and its Thai holding company would transfer their entire stake in GMO-Z — about 49% and 50.94%, respectively — to BTGT or a designee at completion, a Sept. 24 GMO Internet filing showed. Bitget said completion remains subject to regulatory approval and, after a change-of-control nod, it intends to introduce its trading platform to Thai users under local rules.

“Thailand is an important part of Southeast Asia’s digital asset landscape, and this acquisition gives us a great opportunity to establish local operations,” Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said in the Oct. 20 release.

The timetable has already slipped. GMO Internet Group pushed the effective date of the share transfer from Oct. 31 to Nov. 30, citing careful work on Thai regulatory applications and closing procedures. That revised date sits five days before the planned Bitget access block.

CoinDesk reported that Bitget’s own terms of use, updated in October, already list Thailand among jurisdictions where its services are prohibited, and that the SEC has not said whether the criminal complaint will weigh on the GMO-Z change of control.

What the block does and does not settle

Thailand has used the same access-blocking tool before. In mid-2025 the SEC referred Bybit, OKX and three other unlicensed platforms for a June 28 cutoff, telling users to move assets first. The Bitget action follows that template — and adds a criminal complaint against the exchange operator and a named promoter.

Licensed venues still sit at the center of Bangkok’s policy mix. Thailand has approved a multi-year capital-gains tax break only for trades on SEC-regulated platforms, and has been expanding regulated crypto products in derivatives and capital markets. Unlicensed platforms get the opposite treatment: investor alerts, access blocks and, now for Bitget, a police referral.

What is not yet clear is whether a criminal case against BG Limited for the 2022–2025 period bars, slows or leaves untouched BTGT’s bid to take over a licensed local operator. The SEC statement does not mention GMO-Z. Bitget has not publicly answered the complaint in a statement posted with the acquisition release.

For Thai users still on Bitget, the practical clock is Dec. 5. For Bitget, the test is whether Nov. 30 closes a regulated door into Thailand — or whether the complaint filed Thursday makes that licensed path the next question the ECD and the SEC have to answer.

This post Thailand SEC Files Criminal Complaint Against Bitget Ahead of Dec. 5 Access Block first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Stealing $2.47 Million in Crypto From Investigations

A former FBI agent pleaded guilty Thursday to stealing about $2.47 million in cryptocurrency with wallet credentials the bureau had collected in its own cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced.

Patrick Steven Yaroch, 37, of Ashburn, Virginia, entered pleas to wire fraud and money laundering in federal court in Alexandria. U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles accepted the plea. He faces up to 20 years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing on March 4, 2027.

Court papers put the illicit haul at $2,474,380.66. Prosecutors say Yaroch made roughly 100 fraudulent transfers using credentials tied to 35 separate FBI investigations, drawing on wallets controlled by investigation subjects, adversarial nation-state actors and at least one wallet the FBI itself had created for an operation.

The Justice Department Office of the Inspector General had flagged the case in August after Yaroch’s arrest on a criminal complaint. That earlier account described a smaller set of transfers — about 10 moves totaling roughly $1 million — and noted that Yaroch self-reported the activity to two department employees on July 29, 2026. The plea figures are larger.

From 2017 through early 2025, Yaroch worked in the FBI Boston Division on a squad focused on an adversarial nation-state. From February 2025 through July 31, 2026, he served in the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division at headquarters, with access to systems that stored cryptocurrency credentials gathered in investigations.

How the FBI credentials turned into cash

Beginning no later than December 2024, Yaroch used that access to move coins out of those wallets and into ones he controlled. After the transfers, he swapped the stolen cryptocurrency into other digital assets and ran further transactions meant to obscure its source, nature and ownership.

Between Nov. 25, 2025, and Jan. 13, 2026, he moved about $93,082 into one of his accounts, then shuffled funds among other accounts to cover debts, including credit cards, car payments and loans, the office said.

FOX 5 DC, citing the same U.S. Attorney’s Office release, noted the Portugal planning that appears in the plea papers. Yaroch asked ChatGPT how to maximize investment returns and where to live in the European Union. After the chatbot suggested buying a vineyard in Portugal, he gave Portuguese lawyers a power of attorney on June 15, 2026, to register him with the Portuguese Tax and Customs Authority, obtain a tax identification number and collect the password to his finance portal. He arranged travel to Portugal for September 2026.

What the plea says the FBI lost

The agreed statement of facts goes beyond the dollar figure. Yaroch’s conduct compromised multiple FBI investigations into criminal groups and nation-state adversaries, the office said, and it compromised FBI sources and methods used in foreign intelligence collection and criminal cases. It also “deprived FBI employees of their ability to carry out their functions to protect public safety and national security.”

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Theophani K. Stamos and Daniel S. Wierzbicki, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence Division, announced the plea. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kathleen Robeson and Russell Carlberg are prosecuting, with help from the National Security Cyber Section of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and the DOJ inspector general’s Mid-Atlantic region. The case is 1:26-CR-208 in the Eastern District of Virginia.

The admission lands in a week when federal crypto-crime stories keep stacking up — from a failed bitcoin kidnapping plot that produced its own guilty plea last month to FBI tallies putting U.S. crypto fraud losses above $11 billion in 2025, a figure the White House has used to frame a wider crackdown.

What sentencing will do with the gap between Yaroch’s July self-report and the $2.47 million plea figure is still open. So is how many of the 35 FBI cases can be repaired after an insider treated the bureau’s own wallet credentials as a personal ATM. March 4, 2027, is when Judge Giles gets to answer the first question.

This post Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Stealing $2.47 Million in Crypto From Investigations first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strive (ASST) Posts $474.8 Million Common Net Income as Bitcoin Yield Hits 63.2%

Strive reported $474.8 million of net income attributable to common stockholders for the third quarter ended Sept. 30, a print that arrived Friday alongside a company claim that Class A total return had outperformed bitcoin by 103.7% year to date through the same date.

GAAP net income was $509.0 million, or $5.24 a share on a fully diluted basis. Almost all of that came from a $533.7 million unrealized gain on digital assets marked to fair value. Operating revenue for the quarter was just $2.7 million, so the earnings line is a treasury mark, not a fee business.

In a post on X that led with the outperformance figure, Strive also highlighted a year-to-date bitcoin yield of 63.2% and a bitcoin dollar gain of $9.00 per assumed diluted share outstanding, both measured through Sept. 30. Chairman and CEO Matthew Cole tied those metrics to the stock’s relative showing against the asset.

“Strive has continued to successfully execute on its treasury management strategy, delivering a strong bitcoin yield year to date in 2026, which I believe is the primary driver of our common equity’s outperformance relative to Bitcoin so far this year,” Cole said in the earnings release.

Bitcoin yield, buys and the preferred stack

Bitcoin yield, as Strive defines it, is the percentage change in bitcoin per share over a period — not a cash yield. On that measure the company posted 18.5% in the third quarter alone and 19.3% from Oct. 1 through Oct. 30, after the SATS preferred debut.

Strive acquired 8,136 bitcoin in the third quarter at an average cost of about $78,885 and 20,373 bitcoin over the nine months ended Sept. 30. Another 15,124 coins followed between Oct. 1 and Oct. 30. Holdings stood at 28,000 bitcoin on Sept. 30 and 43,124 by Oct. 30, keeping Strive among the largest public corporate stacks after recent multi-thousand-coin buys and smaller weekly adds that still trailed Strategy.

Digital assets at fair value were $2.34 billion on the Sept. 30 balance sheet. Cash had risen to $490.4 million by Oct. 30, and Strive still held Strategy’s variable-rate STRC preferred with a fair value of about $50.1 million.

The capital stack that funded the buys is mostly perpetual preferreds. On Oct. 20 Strive closed a registered offering of 7 million shares of its 15% Series A perpetual preferred (SATS) for about $609 million in net proceeds. Preferred dividends of $34.2 million in the quarter are what turned the $509.0 million GAAP profit into the $474.8 million common figure.

Strip the story to nine-month GAAP and the picture flips. For the nine months ended Sept. 30, Strive posted a net loss attributable to common stockholders of $88.4 million. The third-quarter profit is real under fair-value accounting, but it is concentrated in one mark-to-market line.

What ASST stock has done over the past year

ASST itself has not moved in a straight line with the company’s bitcoin-yield scoreboard. Shares closed at $20.59 on Thursday, down about 10% on the day, and traded near $20.70 early Friday. That leaves the stock roughly 29% below its level a year earlier, when Yahoo Finance data put the close near $29, and about 33% under its Oct. 21 local high of $30.75.

The 52-week range on Yahoo Finance runs from $7.02 to $34.40. Year to date, the price path from the Jan. 2 close near $17.30 into the mid-$20s is a gain of roughly 20%, with a February low near the 52-week floor and a September push back toward $30. Through Sept. 30 — the cutoff on Strive’s outperformance claim — ASST had risen about 70% from that January close while bitcoin was down roughly 7% over the same window on Yahoo Finance data, a wide gap even before the company’s own total-return methodology.

The longer chart still carries the scar of 2025, when Asset Entities became the public shell for Strive’s bitcoin-treasury reverse merger and the share price spiked into triple digits on weekly closes before collapsing. Investors who held through that conversion saw a different ride than the tidy year-to-date relative-return figure Strive put at the top of Friday’s note.

Cole said the recent SATS issuance leaves Strive “never been in a better position to generate long-term returns in excess of Bitcoin for our common equity shareholders.” The test for ASST from here is whether another quarter of bitcoin yield and preferred-funded buys can reopen the gap to bitcoin after a year in which the stock still sits well below where it traded twelve months ago, even as the treasury has climbed past 30,000 then 40,000 bitcoin.

This post Strive (ASST) Posts $474.8 Million Common Net Income as Bitcoin Yield Hits 63.2% first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

The indicative fee estimate accompanies a changing XRP–RLUSD portfolio, with different outcomes from all-XRP and untouched 50/50 holdings.

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Bitcoin Revolution is an online trading platform that has been promoted for years with supposed endorsements from celebrities. In a decision dated December 16, 2021, Germany's financial regulator BaFin ordered the operator of the German-language site to stop immediately the financial portfolio management it was providing without authorisation. According to BaFin, the platform holds no licence from the regulator.

Behind the advertising lies a pattern that consumer advocates have described for years: fake videos featuring well-known faces, a minimum deposit of €250, calls from supposed account managers, and account balances showing profits that cannot be withdrawn. What is advertised is almost always trading in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, often with the promise of software that generates profits automatically.

This guide sets out what the authorities have published about Bitcoin Revolution and similar platforms, how to recognise the scheme and how to check a provider before making a first deposit. How investigators from seven countries seized more than 100 servers of a suspected supplier of such platforms in early November is covered in our article on the raid on fake trading platforms.

What is Bitcoin Revolution? A trading platform for contracts for difference

According to BaFin, German customers could open trading accounts on the platform through which deals in contracts for difference on crypto and fiat currencies were executed. A contract for difference, or CFD, is a bet on the price change of an underlying asset: you do not own a single coin, only a contract with the provider over the difference between the entry and exit price.

BaFin lists a company with addresses in the United Kingdom as the site's operator. According to the regulator, staff make investment decisions for customers on their own responsibility, in part, by the operator's own account, on the basis of an algorithm. That is exactly what sets it apart from an ordinary broker: anyone who decides on other people's money on their behalf is carrying out financial portfolio management and needs a licence for it in Germany.

The Bitcoin Revolution name does not appear at only one address. In its notice, BaFin refers to the domain bitcoinrevolution.org/de/ and points to an earlier notice from 2019 on business activities under the same name. Regulators in other countries have also warned about offers under this name.

BaFin order of December 16, 2021: portfolio management without a licence

The BaFin notice of January 2022 is brief and unambiguous. The regulator classifies the activity as commercial financial portfolio management under Section 1(1a) sentence 2 no. 3 of the German Banking Act. Neither the trading platform nor its operator holds the required licence, so the operator is acting without authorisation. The cease order is an administrative act, not a criminal conviction.

For you as an investor, the practical side matters more than the legal provisions. A provider without a licence is not subject to German supervision. Nobody checks whether your money is held separately from the operator's assets, whether the prices displayed are correct or whether a withdrawal is possible at all. No deposit guarantee or compensation scheme applies.

BaFin publishes such cases in its database of consumer warnings. A missing entry there is not a seal of quality, however. The regulator itself points out for every series of platforms that operators carry on their sites under new names and addresses.

Fake celebrity ads: forged talk-show appearances as bait

The entry point is almost always the same. On social networks or as an advert on news sites, a post appears that looks like an article from a well-known outlet. In it, a presenter, an athlete or a politician supposedly revealed on a television programme how they got rich with trading software. It links to a sign-up page.

Germany's consumer advice centre, the Verbraucherzentrale, makes clear that these videos are all fake: the celebrities never spoke positively about the platform being promoted, and no such appearance ever took place on the programmes. With software for faking images and voices, so-called deepfakes, such clips can now be produced in minutes. A deepfake is a video created or altered with artificial intelligence in which a real person says things they never said.

Those affected include the celebrities themselves as well as readers. Several well-known people have stated publicly in recent years that they have nothing to do with the adverts. One rule of thumb follows naturally: no celebrity reveals on television a piece of software that makes you rich without risk. The promise itself is the giveaway.

A €250 minimum deposit and pressure on the phone

After sign-up, the platforms usually first ask for a small starting capital of €250, according to the Verbraucherzentrale. Shortly afterwards a personal account manager calls. He presents himself as an experienced financial broker, helps with the set-up, installs software on your home computer and then pushes hard for larger deposits.

The software installed is often a remote access program. With it, the caller can see and control your screen. Anyone who opens their online banking during such a session gives access to accounts and approvals. No reputable broker and no regulated exchange asks you to give a staff member remote access to your computer.

Fake profits in the customer account: why withdrawals fail

The customer account shows rising balances, charts and individual profitable trades. According to the Verbraucherzentrale, this looks genuinely professional to laypeople, but no trading takes place at all. The money does not flow into trading activity; it disappears through concealed payment channels.

At the latest when you try to withdraw money, the situation turns. Supposed fees, taxes or checks then appear that have to be paid in advance. Each further payment triggers the next demand until contact breaks off. According to the Verbraucherzentrale, several hundred consumers complained to the consumer advice centres about this scheme within twelve months, and investigating authorities speak of tens of thousands of victims a year.

One principle helps with any platform: an exchange or a broker deducts fees from your balance. Anyone who demands that you first transfer new money in order to withdraw is not showing you a real withdrawal.

Platform series with changing names: Bitcoin Prime, Bitcoin Profit and AI trading

Bitcoin Revolution is not an isolated case. BaFin has published notices on a whole family of similar-sounding names: on Bitcoin Profit it stated in 2020 that it had granted no licence under Section 32 of the German Banking Act, and in 2022 it investigated the operator of a site offering Bitcoin Prime. The names vary; the scheme stays the same.

Since 2025 the regulator has increasingly warned about entire series of platforms. On May 13, 2026, a warning concerned sites with the slogan that they were revolutionising trading, using invented names built from fragments such as GPT, AI or Crypton. According to BaFin's findings, such sites pass on the data from their contact forms to operators of unauthorised trading platforms. They have no legally valid imprint.

Bitcoin has thus become AI. The new names no longer promise a crypto robot but an artificial intelligence that predicts prices. For checking a provider, that changes nothing: what matters is who is behind the site and whether that provider holds a licence.

MiCA licence and BaFin authorisation: how to recognise licensed providers

Since the MiCA regulation, anyone offering crypto-asset services in the EU needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and is the EU's single rulebook for crypto assets. The European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA, collects the authorisations in a public register.

How small this circle is shows in our analysis of August 6, 2026: of 329 authorisations in the register, only 21 related to trading platforms; the details are in our article on the MiCA register. Anyone offering CFDs also needs a licence under securities law and must observe the regulators' leverage limits for retail clients, at most 2 to 1 for cryptocurrencies.

How to check a platform before your first deposit:

• Find the imprint and note the company name, not the brand name used in the advertising.
• Search for the company name in BaFin's company database and in ESMA's MiCA register.
• Check whether the platform's web address matches the registered company.
• Enter the name together with the word warning into a search engine.

If any of these is missing, do not deposit anything. A list of licensed providers is in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

Recovery scams after the loss: the second wave of the scheme

Anyone who has once lost money to such a platform often ends up on a second list. Supposed lawyers, authorities or consumer advocates then get in touch and offer to recover the money in return for an upfront fee. This is the so-called recovery scam: the perpetrators profit a second time from the same victims.

The Verbraucherzentrale points out that its staff never call unsolicited and never ask for money for their help. How the scheme works in detail and which sites have already been taken down is shown in our guide to the recovery scam.

Money lost: bank, police and consumer advice centre as first points of contact

If you have already paid in, time matters. The Verbraucherzentrale rates the chances of getting deposited money back as very low, because the operators act from abroad. For payments by credit card or PayPal, a chargeback can still succeed if you act quickly. Inform your bank immediately, change passwords and uninstall any remote access software the caller set up.

Also file a report with the police, which in Germany can be done online via your federal state's internet police station. Keep emails, chat histories, bank statements and screenshots of the customer account. Which documents you need and in which order to proceed is set out in our guide crypto stolen or scammed.

Incidentally, an amount lost to fraud is not, for German tax purposes, a loss from a private disposal transaction, because you did not sell anything. Whether you can claim it in some other way is something a tax adviser has to clarify case by case.

Trading apps with celebrity ads: no licence, no deposit

1. Licence before advertising. Buy cryptocurrencies through providers authorised under MiCA. Our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges offers a selection with licensing details.
2. Leveraged products only with supervised brokers. If you want to bet on price moves with CFDs, do so with a licensed broker that applies leverage limits for retail clients. Which brokers offer this is shown in our crypto broker comparison.
3. Keep your own coins in self-custody. Long-term holdings belong in your own wallet, which no caller can access by remote control. Suitable devices are in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Blockpit charges between €49 and €549 per tax year for its crypto tax report. Which of the five plans applies to you depends solely on the number of your transactions in the tax year concerned, not on the value of your portfolio and not on the number of connected exchanges. That is what Blockpit's pricing page shows as of November 8, 2026.

If you bought Bitcoin a few times during the year and sold once, you end up in the smallest package. If you trade with bots, use DeFi or have staking rewards credited daily, you quickly break through the 1,000-transaction limit. On top of that come two add-ons with their own price: the Blockpit Plus subscription at €59 a year and the Expert Service from €99. You need neither of them for the tax report itself.

This guide works through the plans, shows the pitfalls when catching up on several years and explains what the report can and cannot do at the German tax office. A hands-on review of the software, covering usability and imports, is in our Blockpit review.

How much does Blockpit cost? Five plans for the crypto tax report

Blockpit sells the tax report as a one-off purchase per tax year. It is explicitly not a subscription, so it does not renew automatically. The packages are named after clothing sizes and differ only in their transaction limit:

The right-hand column is our own calculation from the price list: price divided by the transaction limit. Prices are identical on the German, Austrian and international pricing pages. You can pay by credit card, PayPal, Klarna Sofort, Apple Pay or Google Pay. If you buy in the app, payment runs through the App Store.

Transactions in the tax year: how Blockpit calculates the price

What counts is the number of transactions in the tax year concerned, not your entire transaction history since your first purchase. Someone who was very active in 2021 and only ran a savings plan in 2025 pays for the 2025 report according to the quiet year. That works in favour of long-term investors: old holdings still have to be imported so that Blockpit knows the acquisition costs, but they do not drive up the price of the current report.

A transaction is any event the software books individually: purchase, sale, coin-to-coin swap, deposit and withdrawal, transfer between your own wallets, every staking credit. This is exactly where the calculation trap lies. A savings plan executed weekly generates 52 purchases a year and already breaks the Small limit. Staking with daily payouts adds up to 365 credits per coin. Anyone staking three coins exceeds 1,000 events from that alone and needs at least Large.

So before you buy, check how many events Blockpit actually shows after the import. That costs nothing, because importing and checking the calculation are free. You only pay when you want to download the report.

Price per transaction: those who use their package fully pay the least

The table shows a pattern common in tax software: the larger the package, the cheaper each transaction. In the Small package, one event costs almost a euro at full use; in X-Large, just over two cents. For choosing a plan, though, that is secondary. What matters is that you do not buy too small.

A worked example from the price list: with 60 transactions a year you are ten events above Small and need Medium for €99. With 1,050 transactions you are just over Medium and pay €149 for Large. The steps between the tiers are €50, €50, €80 and €320. The last step from X-Large to XX-Large is by far the largest. If you are just under 10,000 events, count carefully before the turn of the year whether automated micro-purchases, for example, can be consolidated.

Tax software providers differ less at entry level than in the upper tiers. For an overview of which crypto tax calculators exist besides Blockpit and what they cost, see our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

Transaction limit exceeded: the upgrade only costs the difference

What happens if a forgotten exchange turns up after you have bought? According to the FAQ on the pricing page, Blockpit blocks the report download as soon as you exceed your package's transaction limit. Upgrading to the next package makes the report available again immediately. You only pay the difference to your previous package, and your data is retained.

An example: you buy Medium for €99, then import an old wallet and end up with 1,400 transactions. The upgrade to Large then costs you €50, so €149 in total. That makes it no more expensive than necessary; the only nuisance is the second payment. The better order is still to import everything first and buy afterwards.

Catching up on several tax years: each report is paid for separately

Every additional tax year needs its own report, including past years. Blockpit says so in its guide to the tax report. Anyone who has to catch up on three years and had between 50 and 1,000 transactions in each pays for Medium three times, or €297.

This is the key difference from providers that work with annual subscriptions. There, one paid year often covers the evaluation of the entire imported history. At Blockpit, by contrast, you pay for each year you want to file. For amended returns at the tax office this adds up: anyone wanting to correct 2022 to 2025, for instance, buys four reports.

Conversely, you pay nothing for years in which you need no report. A year without a profitable sale and without income from staking or lending often does not need to appear in the German tax return at all. Whether that applies to you depends on the exemption limits: €1,000 of gains a year from private disposal transactions under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG), and €256 for other income such as staking. Where each figure goes in the tax return is explained in our guide crypto in your tax return.

Blockpit Plus for €59: holding period tracker and source of funds in a subscription

Blockpit Plus is a separate subscription at €59 a year, cancellable at any time to the end of the term and available as a 14-day trial without payment details. It contains the premium features that go beyond the tax report: holding periods for all holdings at a glance, tax simulation of sales in advance, spotting opportunities for loss offsetting, daily automatic sync, extended portfolio charts and an unlimited number of source-of-funds statements.

The holding period is the core of this offer. Crypto assets held for more than a year can be sold tax-free in Germany. A tracker that shows for every single tranche when the period ends saves you working through purchase dates. Whether the rule will stay is politically open: the German government had not passed the planned abolition by early November, and we follow the status in our article on the crypto holding period 2027.

A source-of-funds statement is a document that proves where your crypto wealth comes from. Banks and exchanges require it under anti-money-laundering law for larger deposits from crypto sales. Its price has changed: according to our price comparison of September 2, 2026, Plus was then listed on the pricing page at €3.99 a month with annual billing, and source-of-funds reports were available as credits from €19.99 each. Today, unlimited statements are included in the annual subscription. Anyone needing two or more statements a year is better off with the subscription. Why a missing statement can block a deposit is shown in our guide to source of funds at crypto exchanges.

Expert Service and Expert Check: €99 for 30 minutes, €199 per hour

If you have no time for the import or get stuck on DeFi transactions, you can pay Blockpit staff to do it. The offer has three tiers. An initial 15-minute call is free and serves as an assessment. The Expert Check costs €99 for 30 minutes and covers a review of data quality, the assessment of complex transactions and an action plan. Full preparation costs €199 per hour: setting up the account, cleaning up transactions, closing data gaps and preparing the report.

Important for your budget: the Expert Service covers only the experts' work. You buy the tax report for the tax year concerned separately, and Blockpit Plus as well. Anyone needing two hours of Expert Service for a year with 2,000 transactions therefore pays €398 for the work and €149 for the report. This is not tax advice within the meaning of the German Tax Advisory Act. If you have questions about how your income should be classified, you still need a tax adviser.

Free portfolio tracking: import and check without buying

Portfolio tracking at Blockpit costs nothing. You can connect wallets and exchanges, import transactions and track your holdings without paying. As import routes, Blockpit lists read-only API connections for exchanges such as Bitpanda, Binance, Kraken or Coinbase, public wallet addresses for blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana, and CSV import for platforms without a direct connection.

The portfolio tracker is therefore also the test environment for the tax report. You can see whether all categories are right, whether transfers between your own wallets are correctly recognised and how many events add up. You only pay at download. For choosing a plan, that is the most important point in this article, because it saves you from buying a package that is too small.

Free does not mean without a trade-off: connecting an exchange via API gives Blockpit read access to your trading data. Create a key for this that can only read and does not allow withdrawals. Larger holdings you keep for the long term are safer in your own wallet than on the exchange, and you import their public address in the same way.

The tax report at the German tax office: Anlage SO, ELSTER and WISO export

The Blockpit tax report download consists of several files: the tax report as a PDF with results by category, the transaction details with acquisition cost, proceeds and result per event, filling aids for the Anlage SO and Anlage KAP tax forms for transfer into ELSTER, the complete transaction history as a CSV and an export file for WISO Steuer.

Is Blockpit accepted by the German tax office? The report is not an official document. Blockpit itself writes that it would be incorrect to describe it as an official report, a tax certificate, certified by the Federal Ministry of Finance or guaranteed to be accepted. It is a tax calculation that prepares and documents your return. The tax office may additionally request the underlying files and records. So keep the report, transaction details and export files together and unaltered.

For the costs, this means: the €49 to €549 buy you calculation work and auditable documentation, not a guarantee towards the tax office. From the 2026 tax year, crypto service providers in the EU report customer data to the tax authorities under the DAC8 directive. Discrepancies between your return and these reports are therefore more likely to be noticed than before, and a clean record of every transaction becomes more valuable.

Blockpit vs CoinTracking: price per tax year against annual subscription

Which is better, CoinTracking or Blockpit? On cost, the answer depends on the pattern of your years. CoinTracking sells annual subscriptions which, according to our analysis of November 7, 2026, cost between €39 and €769 a year depending on transaction count and term. The details are in our guide to CoinTracking pricing.

Blockpit, by contrast, charges per tax year. If you trade a similar amount every year and only file the current year, you pay a fixed annual amount under both models. If you catch up on several past years at once, Blockpit charges for each year separately. If, on the other hand, you only sell in some years, Blockpit only charges in those years and you have no subscription to cancel. Beyond price, what counts is the integration with your own exchanges and wallets, the handling of DeFi transactions and usability. You can test that yourself in both providers' free import.

Blockpit pricing: import your data first, then pay for the plan

1. Count your transactions before you buy. Connect all exchanges and wallets for free and read off the number of events in the tax year. Only then choose between Small, Medium, Large, X-Large and XX-Large. Which other providers are worth considering is shown in our tax tool comparison.
2. Keep records ready for the bank. If you plan larger payouts from crypto sales to your current account, you need proof of the source of funds. When you sell via a regulated crypto exchange, the necessary statements and trading data are cleanly available.
3. Keep long-term holdings separate. Coins you hold beyond the one-year holding period are safer in your own wallet. Which devices are suitable is shown in our hardware wallet comparison; you then import the public address into the tracker for free.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The Ethereum price came under pressure on Sunday evening. At around 23:40 German time one Ether cost $2,120, or €1,907, according to CoinGecko, almost 5 percent less than 24 hours earlier. What is documented is that a wave of forced selling of leveraged long positions accompanied the decline, and that Ether was hit harder than Bitcoin. Our assessment follows further down and addresses whether the sell-off has already run its course.

The figures for the evening: in the hour to 23:21 German time, positions worth $745 million were forcibly closed on the derivatives market, TokenPost reported, citing exchange data. Around 96 percent of that, $715 million, were long positions, in other words bets on rising prices. Over 24 hours, $343 million of liquidations fell on Ether and $229 million on Bitcoin. The largest single liquidation hit an Ether position in the ETH/USDT pair on Binance, worth $48.16 million.

Readers with a longer horizon will find the scenarios for the coming months in our Ethereum outlook. This article stays with the evening itself: what happened, why leverage makes the price fall faster than selling without credit, and which levels matter now.

Ethereum price on Sunday evening: from $2,243 to $2,063

The 24-hour high was $2,242.93, according to CoinGecko. On the way down, Ether reached a low of $2,063.29 on the OKX exchange before recovering slightly to around $2,130. From high to low, that is a drop of 8.0 percent. Bitcoin gave up only 1.9 percent over the same period and traded at $74,288.

Measured by CoinGecko's daily closing prices, Ether was last lower on August 19. Over seven days the loss comes to 6.1 percent, over 30 days to 14.4 percent. The price is now 57 percent below the all-time high of $4,946, reached on August 24, 2025.

In euro terms, Ether now sits just below €1,910. Yesterday evening we described the €2,000 mark as the test; it has since been breached by a clear margin.

What is a liquidation in the crypto market?

A liquidation is the forced closure of a position opened with borrowed money. Anyone who buys Ether with ten times leverage puts up only a tenth of the position's value as collateral, the so-called margin. If the price falls far enough that the margin no longer covers the loss, the exchange closes the position automatically to limit its own credit risk.

The mechanism amplifies price moves. Every forcibly closed long position is a sale at market price, and that sale pushes the price lower still. As a result, the next positions slip below their liquidation threshold. On the derivatives market this is called a cascade. The fact that 96 percent of the liquidations in that evening hour hit long positions shows how one-sided the market was positioned before the decline.

A worked example with Sunday's figures

Anyone who bought at Sunday's high of $2,243 with twelve times leverage loses, on paper, the entire collateral on a price decline of just over 8 percent. That is exactly the range Ether covered down to the low of $2,063. With 20 times leverage, a fall of 5 percent is enough, to roughly $2,130. Because of the maintenance margin and fees, the actual liquidation threshold sits somewhat earlier still. Without leverage, the same evening means a book loss of 8 percent, but not the total loss of the position.

Why Ether fell harder than Bitcoin: $343 million against $229 million

Bitcoin is worth roughly six times as much as Ether in the crypto market, yet Ether liquidations on Sunday were half as large again. The reason lies in positioning. Leveraged long positions on Ether had built up after the decline of November 5 and 6, when many traders bet on a recovery. When the price then falls again, those positions are hit in a cluster.

On top of that comes the weaker backdrop for funds. On Friday, net outflows of around $93 million left the US spot Ether ETFs, according to AltcoinBuzz. In the week before, we had described the sixth consecutive week of outflows, at a net $365 million, in our Ethereum price report from Saturday. When funds supply no fresh money, the spot market lacks the buyer who could absorb a leveraged sell-off.

What has happened to the Ethereum price since Saturday

On Saturday evening Ether hovered around $2,235, within a daily range of only $25. At the time we described the €2,000 mark as the line that would show whether buyers would return after the sixth week of ETF outflows. A good 24 hours later the answer is clear: the line did not hold. Ether is almost €100 below it.

What is new is the derivatives market as the driver. On Saturday, ETF flows and exchange balances were the topic. Sunday shows that a quiet weekend market with thin trading is particularly vulnerable when many traders have levered up in the same direction. The supply side offers no tailwind at the moment either: as our article on Ethereum issuance and burn from Sunday shows, 2,982 new ETH were added in a single day, while only 10 were burned.

Ether against Bitcoin: the ETH/BTC ratio falls to 0.0286

A second look at the ratio of Ether to Bitcoin is worthwhile. It shows how much Bitcoin one Ether costs and so measures relative strength independently of the dollar. On Sunday evening the value stood at 0.0286 BTC, according to CoinGecko. Thirty days ago it was 0.0301 BTC, so Ether has lost around 5 percent of its value against Bitcoin.

Measured by daily values over the past twelve months, the ratio was last lower on July 14. The range for the year runs from 0.0248 BTC on June 7 to 0.0361 BTC on January 20. Ether therefore sits in the lower third of that range. For investors who hold both coins this matters: when ETH/BTC falls, the weighting in the portfolio shifts towards Bitcoin by itself.

Why the ratio matters for investors in Germany

Anyone who switches between Ether and Bitcoin is, for tax purposes, exchanging one coin for another. In Germany that counts as a sale. If the Ether was bought less than a year ago, a taxable gain or an offsettable loss arises. Switching after a price slump like Sunday's can therefore realise a loss that can be offset against gains from other private disposal transactions in the same year.

Ethereum price levels: $2,063, $2,000 and $2,243

On the downside, the evening's low of $2,063 is the first level. That is where the liquidations ended and buyers lifted the price again. If Ether falls below it once more, the market loses this experience as a footing. The next level is the round figure of $2,000, which Ether last fell below in August, according to CoinGecko's daily closing prices.

On the upside, the 24-hour high stands at $2,243. Ether would need to reclaim this area for Sunday's decline to count as an outlier. Halfway between $2,063 and $2,243 lies roughly $2,150; Ether traded just below it late in the evening.

In euros, €1,900 is the evening's floor and €2,000 the level that would have to be regained. Anyone comparing euro prices should watch the exchange rate: a weaker dollar makes the euro price of Ether fall more than the dollar price.

Buying Ether without leverage: what Sunday shows

Sunday evening separates two kinds of investor. Anyone who bought Ether on an exchange without credit holds the same amount of ETH after the decline as before. Anyone who bought with leverage may have lost the position, even though the price then recovered slightly. Leverage turns a fluctuation into a final loss.

For retail investors in the EU, leveraged crypto products are heavily restricted. For CFDs on cryptocurrencies, BaFin rules cap leverage for retail clients at 2 to 1. Unregulated derivatives exchanges outside the EU, by contrast, offer many times that. If you want to invest in Ether for the long term, our crypto exchange comparison lists providers licensed under the European MiCA regulation, where buying without credit is the norm.

Ether losses in Germany: holding period and loss offsetting

Anyone who holds Ether for more than a year sells tax-free in Germany. Sunday's slump changes nothing about that as long as you do not sell. For purchases made in the past twelve months the picture is different: many of these positions are in the red, because a year ago Ether cost considerably more than it does today. A sale realises the loss, and that loss can be offset against gains from other private disposal transactions in the same year or carried forward to later years.

For gains, an exemption limit of €1,000 a year has applied since 2024. If the total of all gains from private disposal transactions stays below it, the amount remains tax-free; if the limit is exceeded by even one euro, the entire amount becomes taxable. Our page on the crypto holding period summarises the current state of the debate. According to the Federal Ministry of Finance's guidance, staking does not extend the holding period to ten years.

Our assessment of the Ethereum price after the liquidations

Our assessment: Sunday's sell-off has the cause the figures suggest, namely too many leveraged long positions in a market without fresh fund money. The evidence for this is the 96 percent long share of liquidations in the evening hour, the $343 million of Ether liquidations over 24 hours and Friday's $93 million of ETF outflows. A clear-out of this kind can relieve the derivatives market, because fewer leveraged positions are left afterwards that could be forcibly sold again.

Against this, nothing has changed in the underlying picture. The ETFs have delivered no money for six weeks, the ratio to Bitcoin is falling, and the supply of Ether is currently growing faster than it is burned. In our view, a recovery above $2,243 would therefore only have substance once the funds report inflows again. Until then, the low of $2,063 remains the most important level.

Ether at $2,120: without fund money, $2,063 stays the test

1. Choose how you buy: If you want to add Ether, do it on an exchange with a MiCA licence and without credit. The exchange comparison shows fees and licensing for each provider.
2. Document losses: Note the purchase date and purchase price of every Ether position. A tax tool from our crypto tax software comparison calculates holding periods and realised losses automatically.
3. Secure your holdings: What you hold for the long term does not belong in an account with leverage. Self-custody from the hardware wallet comparison separates your holdings from trading.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Shiba Inu trades at around $0.00000445 on Sunday evening, November 8, 2026, roughly €0.00000399. In the afternoon SHIB slipped to $0.00000442 on Kraken, its lowest level since August 19. At the same time, exchange data from CryptoQuant point the other way: within 24 hours a net 20 billion or so SHIB left the major trading venues.

What the data show: the ten largest addresses sent only just over two billion SHIB to exchanges over that period, and withdrew considerably more. Our assessment follows further down. The outflow takes some selling pressure out of the market in the short term, but in dollar terms it is smaller than the figure of 20 billion suggests. For investors in Germany it is a good moment to put their own custody in order.

Shiba Inu price on Sunday evening: $0.00000445 and a new low since August

Sunday passed without a big swing, but the direction was clear. On Kraken, SHIB opened against the US dollar at $0.00000448, with a daily high of $0.00000449 and a daily low of $0.00000442. That put the token just below Thursday's low of $0.00000444. According to CoinGecko, SHIB is down 0.5 percent over 24 hours, 5.0 percent over seven days and 17.6 percent over 30 days.

Bitcoin held up far better over the same period. The largest cryptocurrency trades at around $75,700 on Sunday evening, down 7.9 percent over 30 days. SHIB has therefore lost more than twice as much. Measured against the October high of $0.00000604 on October 5, the token is now a good 26 percent lower; compared with November 8, 2025, when SHIB cost just under $0.00000996 on Kraken, the gap is around 55 percent.

Turnover stayed thin, as is typical at weekends. By the evening, a little over 40 billion tokens had changed hands in the SHIB/USD pair on Kraken. On Thursday, when the wider market slid after liquidations of more than $1 billion, the figure was almost 87 billion, and on October 30 it reached 199 billion.

A net 20 billion SHIB withdrawn: Sunday's CryptoQuant figures

The exchange flow figures come from the analytics firm CryptoQuant and were analysed on Sunday at midday by U.Today. An exchange flow measures how many tokens arrive at addresses of known trading venues and how many leave them. The difference is the netflow. When it is negative, more coins are leaving exchanges than arriving.

For the 24 hours to Sunday midday, the analysis puts the netflow across the major exchanges at minus 20.07 billion SHIB. Over the same period the ten largest SHIB addresses sent 2.28 billion tokens to exchanges and withdrew about 3.48 billion. CryptoQuant puts the reserves of all tracked exchanges at 86.16 trillion SHIB, equivalent to roughly $384 million.

A point that matters for interpretation: in crypto jargon a whale is an address with a very large holding. When such addresses send many tokens to exchanges, that often signals planned sales. When they withdraw tokens, the coins usually end up in self-custody, in cold-storage addresses or with custodians. Both are indications rather than proof, because transfers between addresses belonging to the same exchange also show up in this kind of data.

Exchange outflow instead of inflow: what has turned since November 4

Four days ago the picture was reversed. On Wednesday, November 4, we reported on net inflows of around 153 billion SHIB to exchanges. The price stood at $0.00000473 at the time, and the zone around $0.0000045 had just passed its second test. Since then SHIB has lost almost 6 percent, and the zone has given way.

On Saturday came the slide below $0.0000045, with the token at around $0.00000449 at midday. The level we named there as the next marker, Thursday's low of $0.00000444, failed to hold on Sunday afternoon. What is new is the direction of the exchange flow: after Wednesday's inflow, the large addresses are withdrawing tokens again while the price keeps falling.

This pattern is not unusual in falling markets. Anyone buying at lower prices who does not want to leave the coins on the exchange withdraws them. Anyone who wants to sell deposits. A look at the individual figures shows that both are happening at once: billions of SHIB went to exchanges on Sunday as well, only more came back out.

Exchange reserves of 86 trillion SHIB: why 20 billion still counts

A figure of 20 billion sounds large, yet at a price of $0.00000446 it comes to just under $89,000. Measured against exchange reserves of 86.16 trillion SHIB, the outflow equals about 0.02 percent. CryptoQuant shows exactly this decline in reserves. Wednesday's 153 billion was likewise worth only a little over $700,000.

A comparison with trading volume adds further context. The 40 billion SHIB traded on Kraken on Sunday alone are worth around $178,000, and Kraken is only one of many venues. A single day of outflows therefore barely moves the price of a token with a market value of a good $2.6 billion.

The figure only becomes meaningful as part of a series. If the outflows continue for several days, the supply that can sit on the order books in the short term shrinks. If they flip back into inflows after a day, it was a transfer without consequences. SHIB holders should therefore not react to a single day's reading but watch whether the netflow stays negative into the middle of the week.

SHIB futures market: futures netflow falls to minus $207,000

Alongside the spot market, the futures market offers a second angle. According to a second analysis by U.Today based on data from Coinglass, $10.39 million flowed into SHIB futures contracts over three days while $10.60 million flowed out. That left the netflow at minus $207,230.

A futures contract, which in crypto trading usually comes as a perpetual future with no expiry date, lets traders bet on rising or falling prices, often with leverage. When money flows out on a net basis, traders are closing more positions than they open. That points to less speculation on credit, though not automatically to weaker buying interest in the token itself.

Taken together with the spot picture, the market looks calm but weak. Traders are retreating from the futures market, exchange balances are edging lower and the price is slipping on low volume. A high-volume sell-off looks different, and so does a trend reversal.

Levels below the price: $0.00000442 and the June low for the year

The first level is Sunday's low at $0.00000442. U.Today sees local support there, between $0.00000440 and $0.00000442. If it breaks, the next target according to the same analysis is $0.00000410. That level roughly matches the low of July 17, when SHIB fell as far as $0.00000406 on Kraken.

According to Kraken's daily data, the 2026 low stands at $0.00000405, reached on June 25. That is a good 9 percent below the current level. A close below it would mark a new low for the year, and there would then be no nearby support left from this year.

Resistance above the price: the 20-day line at $0.00000480

The first level above the price is $0.00000480. This is where the average of the past 20 daily closes on Kraken runs, and where SHIB lost an important support according to U.Today. To get there, the price would have to rise by almost 8 percent. Only a close above it would break the series of lower highs since early October.

The 50-day line sits at $0.00000526, a good 18 percent above the current level. Above that lies the zone between $0.00000540 and $0.00000550, which SHIB tested in October and which U.Today names as a recovery target. According to the second analysis, the 50-week moving average runs at $0.00000586.

Withdrawing SHIB from an exchange: network and receiving address

What the whales do on a large scale is worth doing on a small scale for many retail investors: coins you plan to hold for longer do not necessarily belong on an exchange. An exchange holds your tokens in trust, and in the event of insolvency or a freeze your access depends on it. In your own wallet you control the keys yourself and carry full responsibility for them.

Shiba Inu is a token on the Ethereum blockchain that follows the ERC-20 standard. Some exchanges also offer SHIB withdrawals on other networks. Choose the network your receiving wallet supports, which for SHIB is usually Ethereum. If the tokens land on a network your wallet does not recognise, recovering them is laborious or impossible.

The first time, send a small test amount and check that it arrives. Compare the receiving address character by character, at least at the beginning and the end, because malware swaps addresses copied to the clipboard. For later transfers from your own wallet you will also need some ether to pay the network fee. An overview of tested devices is available in our hardware wallet comparison, and for smaller amounts in our software wallet comparison.

One feature of EU rules: since December 30, 2024, the Transfer of Funds Regulation has also applied to crypto-assets. For withdrawals of more than €1,000 to a self-hosted wallet, the exchange must verify that the address belongs to you. Expect a query or a short confirmation, for example by signature or screenshot. Whether your exchange is licensed in the EU as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA is shown in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Self-custody and tax: the holding period keeps running after the transfer

For tax purposes, moving coins from the exchange to your own wallet is not a sale. No gain or loss arises, and the one-year holding period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act continues to run from the original purchase date. If you sell SHIB after more than a year, any gain is tax-free in Germany. Within that period, gains remain tax-free up to an exemption limit of €1,000 a year, with all private disposal transactions counted together.

To prove this later, you need the exchange's purchase records. Download your transaction history before withdrawing the coins, and note the date, amount and destination of the withdrawal. Without these records it is hard to show the tax office when the tokens in the wallet were bought. If you made many partial purchases, a tax tool helps assign the tranches.

Leverage on SHIB at the weekend: liquidations in thin trading

Anyone trading SHIB with leverage carries a particular risk when volumes are thin. A liquidation is the forced closure of a position when the collateral posted no longer covers the losses. At $0.00000445 and five-times leverage, a fall of just under 20 percent is enough to wipe out a long position including the stake; at ten-times leverage it takes about 10 percent, roughly the distance to the low for the year.

Retail investors in Germany mostly trade crypto derivatives through CFD brokers. For them, BaFin has set a maximum leverage of 2:1 on crypto-assets. Higher leverage is mainly offered by exchanges outside that framework. Anyone using it should avoid placing stop levels directly below obvious supports such as $0.00000442, because many orders cluster there and weekend price spikes can easily trigger them.

Our view: the outflow offers support but settles nothing yet

In the editorial team's view, Sunday's exchange outflow is a friendly signal in a weak market, and no more than that. In its favour: the ten largest addresses sent only just over two billion SHIB to exchanges within 24 hours, and leveraged positions are being unwound in the futures market. Both reduce the risk of a forced sell-off.

Against it stands the scale: a net outflow of just under $89,000 compares with a market capitalisation of a good $2.6 billion, and the price marked a new low since August on the same day. As long as SHIB closes below the 20-day line at $0.00000480, the downtrend that began in early October remains intact. Earlier in the day we described the looming sixth losing week. Cryptocurrencies such as SHIB can be highly volatile, and a total loss is possible.

Shiba Inu price: above $0.00000480 the losing streak ends

Three readings will be in focus over the coming days. The first is the netflow on exchanges: if it stays negative into the middle of the week, that supports the idea of large holders who do not want to sell. The second is the level at $0.00000442, whose break would clear the way to the low for the year at $0.00000405. The third is the 20-day line at $0.00000480, above which the picture brightens.

1. Settle how you buy: if you want to add to your position, choose an exchange with an EU licence and low fees; our crypto exchange comparison gives an overview.
2. Sort out custody: SHIB you plan to hold for longer can be moved to your own wallet, after a test amount and with ether for later fees; suitable devices are listed in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Keep your records: export your transaction history before every withdrawal so that the purchase date and holding period remain provable; the crypto tax software comparison helps with matching tranches.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

FOMO stands for “fear of missing out”, the fear of missing a price rally. FUD stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt”, the anxiety that pushes investors to sell. Together the two terms describe the emotions that move the crypto market more than almost any news item: greed drives buyers into rising prices, fear drives sellers out of falling ones. If you understand the mechanics, you will recognise them in your own behaviour and make better decisions.

How strongly these emotions are at work right now can be measured. The best-known gauge, the Crypto Fear & Greed Index from alternative.me, stood at 28 out of 100 on November 8, 2026, and at 25 the day before. That is the fear zone. As recently as September 22, the same index showed 78, which is extreme greed. Between the two readings, Bitcoin lost about 12 percent. This guide explains what lies behind FOMO and FUD, how the index is calculated, what role social media plays according to Germany's financial regulator, and which rules protect you from costly gut decisions.

What does FOMO mean in crypto?

FOMO is short for “fear of missing out”. It describes the feeling of missing an opportunity that everyone else seems to be seizing. In the crypto market, FOMO typically shows up when a coin gains double digits within a few days, friends talk about their profits and headlines report new records. The urge to buy then comes not from analysis but from comparing yourself with others.

The problem is timing. FOMO purchases almost inevitably happen late in an upswing, because only a visible rally creates the pressure. Buying at that point often means paying prices close to a local high and riding the next correction with your full stake. Typical signs of FOMO in your own behaviour are:

• You buy a coin whose project you had never heard of three days ago.
• You spontaneously raise the amount you planned because the price is “doing so well right now”.
• You buy with a market order at any price instead of setting a limit.
• You turn to leveraged products to catch up on missed gains faster.
• You check the price every few minutes after buying.

A related term is FOMO trading: short-term purchases that rely purely on momentum. If you deliberately trade short term, you need fixed entry and exit rules, as is common in swing trading crypto.

FUD: fear, uncertainty and doubt as the counterpart to FOMO

FUD is the mirror image. The abbreviation stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt” and refers to anxiety and scepticism generated by negative news, rumours or deliberate scaremongering. The expression originally comes from computer industry marketing in the 1970s, where it described the tactic of unsettling customers with vague warnings about competitors. In the crypto world it has become a catch-all term for anything that pushes prices down by spreading uncertainty.

The distinction between legitimate criticism and FUD matters. A confirmed hack at an exchange, a court ruling or a ban are facts that investors should react to. FUD begins where unverified claims, numbers taken out of context or anonymous rumours trigger a panic that goes beyond the actual facts. In forums the term is also misused: some project supporters label every critical question “FUD” to brush it off. That is a warning sign too.

To separate FUD from real danger, ask three questions: who is the source, and can it be verified? Does the news affect the project itself or only the sentiment around it? And has anything actually changed in the fundamentals, such as usage, fees or development?

Herd behaviour and loss aversion: the psychology behind FOMO and FUD

Both phenomena rest on well-researched patterns from behavioural economics. Herd behaviour describes the tendency to follow the majority because the crowd seems to know more than the individual. When everyone is buying, waiting feels like a mistake. When everyone is selling, holding feels reckless.

Loss aversion completes the picture. It refers to the observation that losses weigh considerably more heavily on us psychologically than gains of the same size. A loss of €1,000 hurts more than a gain of €1,000 pleases. In a downtrend this leads to panic selling, because investors want to avoid the pain of further losses, often right at the bottom.

Then there is confirmation bias, the tendency to notice only information that fits your own opinion, and the anchoring effect: if you have seen Bitcoin at a high, every lower price feels “cheap”, regardless of whether the value can be justified. The crypto market amplifies all of these effects because it trades around the clock, is highly volatile and is shaped by retail investors who get their information through the same channels.

Fear and Greed Index: six data sources measure market sentiment

The Crypto Fear & Greed Index translates sentiment in the crypto market into a number between 0 and 100. A reading of 0 means extreme fear, a reading of 100 extreme greed. According to alternative.me, six data sources feed into it with fixed weightings:

The logic behind it: high volatility and falling prices point to fear, while rising volumes in an up-market and falling Bitcoin dominance point to greed, because investors then move into riskier altcoins. The index is a sentiment indicator, a measure of market participants' psychology, and not a price prediction tool. You will also find the current reading alongside other market data on the cryptoticker.io chart overview. If you want to analyse sentiment data, on-chain metrics and charts in one place, the comparison of crypto analytics platforms lists suitable tools.

One limitation of the index is worth knowing: it mainly measures Bitcoin. Sentiment around smaller coins can differ considerably, and readings can shift sharply within a single day. On November 5, 2026 the index still stood at a neutral 50, on November 6 at 28. Over the same period Bitcoin fell from about $80,400 to about $76,000, based on CoinGecko daily prices.

Bitcoin between index readings of 5 and 78: a year of market sentiment in numbers

How closely sentiment and price are linked becomes clear from the extreme readings of the past twelve months. The prices come from CoinGecko daily data and are rounded.

The arithmetic is sobering for FOMO buyers. Anyone who bought on the day of peak greed in September is about 12.5 percent down at the start of November. Anyone who bought on the day of peak fear in February is about 16 percent up. This does not amount to a trading rule, because nobody knows the bottom in advance, and extreme fear can be followed by more fear. But the numbers show why experienced investors tend to read extreme readings as a warning about their own gut feeling rather than an invitation to follow the crowd.

The distribution is revealing as well. In the 90 days to November 8, the index showed greed or extreme greed on 60 days, fear or extreme fear on 18 days and a neutral reading on 12 days. Long stretches of good sentiment are therefore more the rule, and the reversal often comes quickly.

Finfluencers and social media as FOMO amplifiers, according to a BaFin survey

Germany's Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, BaFin, has examined how strongly social media shapes purchasing decisions. In its article “Social media drives crypto investments” of October 1, 2026, BaFin analyses an online survey of 4,340 people aged 18 to 59, conducted from March 26 to April 6, 2026. It evaluated the answers of 1,000 people who hold or have held crypto assets.

The results read like a description of FOMO in figures:

• Around half of crypto investors pay attention to recommendations from finfluencers, people who talk about investing on social media.
• 30 percent have followed finfluencers' tips when investing.
• 35 percent of this group bought because the finfluencer claimed now was the right time.
• 29 percent bought because, according to the finfluencer, many others were doing so. BaFin explicitly calls this “fear of missing out”.
• 19 percent of respondents have already bought memecoins.

The regulator thus makes visible something that often gets lost in everyday life: the reasoning “everyone is buying right now” says nothing about the crypto asset itself. How to recognise paid or self-interested recommendations is explained in our guide to finfluencer crypto tips.

Typical FUD triggers: hacks, bans and rumours in the crypto market

FUD follows recurring patterns. If you know them, you can classify new reports more quickly:

• Ban reports: stories about an alleged crypto ban in a large country regularly trigger waves of selling. On closer reading they often concern only individual business models or are long known.
• Hacks and technical outages: an attack on an exchange or a bridge is a real risk. It becomes FUD when rumours follow about the solvency of other, uninvolved providers.
• Statements by prominent people: a single post by an entrepreneur, politician or bank chief can move prices in the short term without anything changing in substance.
• Wallet movements by large holders: when coins from a well-known address move to an exchange, this quickly becomes a “sell-off”, although the reason may just as well be an internal transfer.
• Numbers taken out of context: high liquidation totals or outflows sound dramatic but say little about the situation without a point of comparison.

The counter-strategy is called “do your own research”, or DYOR: read primary sources such as the exchange's announcement, the ruling, the text of the law or the on-chain data, instead of relying only on summaries on social networks. Scammers exploit a particular form of fear: after losses, supposed recovery services get in touch. How this scheme works is explained in our article on the crypto recovery scam.

Savings plans, limit orders and fixed rules against emotional trading

Structure helps more against FOMO and FUD than willpower. The most effective tools are decisions you make before the market puts you under pressure.

A savings plan takes timing out of the decision

With dollar-cost averaging, you regularly invest a fixed amount, for example every month. When prices are high you automatically buy fewer coins, when they are low you buy more. The entry point loses importance, and the question “now or later?” no longer arises with every headline. A savings plan does not guarantee profits, but it prevents a single FOMO purchase at the worst possible moment from determining the result. We have worked through the difference between a savings plan and a lump-sum investment in a separate calculation.

Limit orders and stop-losses fix prices in advance

A limit order is a buy order that is executed only up to a set maximum price. It thus protects against the typical FOMO mistake of buying at any price during a fast move. A stop-loss order sells automatically as soon as the price falls below a set level. It limits losses, but in very volatile phases it can also lead to sales just before a recovery. Both tools only work if you set the levels calmly and do not move them on impulse.

A position size you can live with

The simplest rule against panic is a position whose swings do not keep you awake at night. If you only invest money you would not need even after a 50 percent decline, you do not have to sell on FUD. Leveraged products, by contrast, amplify every emotion, because liquidations loom even with small moves. Long-term investors therefore often rely on holding for years, known in the scene as HODL.

A checklist before every purchase

A short written check before every order has proven its worth: why am I buying, and would I give the same reason without the current price move? At what price do I sell at a profit, and at what price at a loss? What share of my wealth will be in crypto afterwards? If you cannot answer these questions, you are probably acting out of FOMO.

The panic-selling tax trap in Germany: the one-year holding period under Section 23 EStG

In Germany, FUD has a tax dimension that is often overlooked. Crypto assets held privately count as “other assets” within the meaning of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG). If you sell them within one year of buying, any gain is taxed as a private sale transaction at your personal income tax rate. Once the one-year holding period has passed, the gain is tax-free.

For emotional decisions this means two things. If you sell in a panic with a gain shortly before the period expires after a FOMO purchase, you may give away the tax exemption. Gains from such transactions remain tax-free only as long as their total stays below the exemption threshold of €1,000 per calendar year; once it is exceeded, the entire amount is taxable. Conversely, losses from a panic sale within the holding period can only be offset against gains from private sale transactions, not against salary or stock gains. A sale driven by fear can therefore be doubly expensive.

FOMO and FUD: a plan made before you buy beats any mood

At the start of November the index sits in the fear zone, and it is precisely in such phases that spontaneous decisions are most expensive. Three steps help you stay on course:

1. Choose how you buy: pick an exchange with an EU licence, low fees and limit orders. The crypto exchange comparison offers an overview.
2. Instalments instead of gut feeling: set a fixed amount and a schedule, and automate it. Providers with recurring purchases are listed in the comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.
3. Automate your rules: if you trade actively, you can have entries and exits executed according to rules set in advance. Which tools are suitable and where their limits lie is shown in the comparison of crypto trading bots.

(As of November 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Cory Fields wants future quantum attackers to post Bitcoin as collateral before touching vulnerable wallets, giving prepared owners a chance to recover their coins and collect a potentially costly penalty.

Apple and Meta’s objections mean all seven of the biggest U.S. tech companies have now asked to keep their shares off the planned OKX-ICE venue.

A Friday rebound offered relief after a historic selloff. The question now is whether politics and mounting debt could turn an AI correction into something much worse.

Experts say a disc-free PlayStation will price out low-income players, while in much of Africa, digital-only gaming means breaking Sony’s rules.

FinCEN’s order, part of Operation Economic Outcast, bars U.S. institutions from any transfers to or from MEXC, which Treasury says facilitated $16 billion in illicit finance tied to Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Flare CEO Hugo Philion has pushed back against renewed XRP FUD, urging holders to stop relying on Ripple to drive the cryptocurrency's value and instead focus on turning XRP into usable capital.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rejects the commercialization of ETH, declaring the asset a pure Store of Value.

Dogecoin cofounder makes Shiba Inu-related observation that gets attention.

Promising “big plans for 2027,” Ripple engineers have begun overhauling the XRPL core to handle smart contracts and commercial bank payments.

XRP Ledger eyes bigger scaling opportunity with key feature beneficial in this regard.

TLDR:

• The Keplr wallet hack affected Google and Apple sign-in accounts, while Keplr says recovery-phrase and hardware-wallet accounts remain outside the incident scope.
• Web3Auth paused its embedded-wallet service, Keplr froze social login, and users with affected accounts were told not to deposit additional assets.
• Bitquery initially tracked about $6.01 million across eight destinations, but the figure needs review after Web3Auth labeled those addresses as recovery wallets.
• The companies have not released a final loss total, technical root-cause report, return process, or accounting of assets moved in whitehat recoveries.

Keplr wallet hack reports have put Google and Apple login users on alert. Keplr paused both social-login options after unauthorized transactions affected some accounts. The wallet says recovery-phrase and hardware-wallet accounts are not affected. Web3Auth, which provides embedded login technology, paused its service during a security response. Initial blockchain tracking placed more than $6 million at several on-chain addresses. 

Yet Web3Auth later said flagged destinations belong to its recovery operation. That clarification changes how the on-chain flows should be read. It does not erase unauthorized activity or establish a final loss total. Users must distinguish protective transfers from attacker-controlled withdrawals.

Keplr Wallet Hack Triggers Google and Apple Login Pause

Keplr’s social-login feature lets users open an account through Google or Apple instead of recording a recovery phrase. The flow relied on Web3Auth infrastructure to generate and access wallet keys. Web3Auth first placed its embedded-wallet service on pause November 6. It also moved the Login Service into maintenance while investigators reviewed a security incident.

Keplr disclosed the next day that some social-login accounts had transactions their owners did not authorize. The company disabled Google and Apple login while it examined the incident with Web3Auth. The Keplr wallet hack affects the social-login route, not every Keplr account. Its guidance is direct: do not send new assets to an affected account. Users should move any remaining liquid tokens to a separate recovery-phrase or hardware wallet.

A private-key breach can expose Cosmos balances at once. Cosmos chains use one key across related addresses, even though their prefixes differ. That design can turn a single compromised key into an ecosystem-wide problem. It also explains why early tracking found activity on Cosmos Hub, Osmosis, Celestia, Akash, Noble, Injective, dYdX, and Babylon.

Bitquery traced at least $6.01 million to eight destinations. It recorded 44,041 drained wallets on seven linked chains and estimated total victims near 44,700. The research did not include unpriced tokens in its dollar total. For the Keplr wallet hack, it logged a largest individual loss near $325,000.

The original figure is not a confirmed, final theft total. It reflects the value held by named addresses at the investigation cutoff. Verified Web3Auth recovery wallets help analysts clearly separate stolen balances from assets transferred during the whitehat response. That assessment may change as the companies reconcile individual transactions with users.

Keplr Wallet Hack Raises Recovery Wallet Questions

Web3Auth later reported that it began whitehat recoveries before an attacker could reach some vulnerable wallets. The company used the same access path to secure affected assets. As a result, a balance moving from a social-login wallet does not automatically prove theft.

On November 8, Web3Auth published verified destinations for its recovery effort. Keplr relayed the same list and said the named addresses were not malicious or exploit addresses. The list included destinations across eight Cosmos chains, three additional Cosmos networks, and an EVM address covering eight chains.

Those Web3Auth recovery wallets overlap with addresses Bitquery had previously associated with the drain. That overlap complicates the headline loss estimate. Web3Auth has not disclosed the value it secured, and neither company has provided a final loss reconciliation. There is no return process or technical postmortem yet.

Some accounts may look empty because assets were moved during mitigation, Keplr said. Staked and locked assets require more time to secure. Users should not trust direct messages, give up recovery phrases, or send funds to a claimed rescue address.

The Keplr wallet hack remains a confirmed security incident with an unsettled financial tally. The key distinction is narrow but important: Web3Auth calls some transfer destinations protective wallets, while unauthorized activity affected social-login accounts.

The post Keplr Wallet Hack Hits Google and Apple Users as Recovery Begins appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ripple and Privy are bringing embedded XRP Ledger wallets to payment apps, supporting XRP and RLUSD transfers.
• Privy integration supports automated transactions and x402 payments for app developers building on XRP Ledger.
• Ali Martinez reported that XRP whales accumulated 16.46 million tokens over five days, despite falling prices.
• XRP trades near $1.16, while some analysts watch $0.99 support and a possible $1.60 breakout resistance level.

Ripple has partnered with Stripe-owned Privy to bring embedded wallets to the XRP Ledger (XRPL), expanding support for digital payments. The development comes as XRP whale accumulation increases despite continued selling pressure across the cryptocurrency market.

The integration, announced on October 13, lets developers create wallets that support XRP, RLUSD, and other digital assets. Meanwhile, XRP traded near $1.16 on November 8, raising questions about whether the token can recover toward $2.

Recent on-chain activity shows growing interest among large holders, though XRP has struggled to sustain upward momentum. Market analyst Ali Martinez reported that whales accumulated more than 16.46 million XRP over five days.

Ripple and Privy Expand XRP Ledger Payment Infrastructure

Ripple’s partnership with Privy introduces programmable wallet services designed for developers building financial applications on the XRP Ledger. The infrastructure allows businesses to create wallets, manage digital assets, and sign transactions without developing separate wallet systems.

According to Privy’s official announcement, the integration supports XRP, RLUSD, and other XRPL-based assets. Users can access these services without manually managing private keys, while retaining the option to export their credentials.

The partnership also supports automated payments through the x402 standard, allowing AI agents to transact using server-side wallets. These tools can support payments for digital services, including data access and computing resources.

Markus Infanger, RippleX’s senior vice president, said Privy’s infrastructure would help developers build payment applications using XRPL. The network has recorded more than eight million funded accounts and over $1 trillion in cumulative value transferred.

The integration follows other network developments, including a recent XRP Ledger security update addressing token permissions. Privy plans to expand its services with transaction policy controls and network fee sponsorship. However, the companies have not disclosed expected transaction volumes or projected XRP demand from the partnership.

Can XRP Price Reclaim $2 as Whales Accumulate?

XRP traded around $1.16 on November 8 after retreating from approximately $1.34 during the preceding week. Despite the decline, large wallet holders continued accumulating tokens, according to Santiment data shared by Martinez.

In a November 7 post, Martinez reported that whales purchased more than 16.46 million XRP over five days. However, buying activity has not reversed the broader downward trend. Previous XRP price analysis identified $1.60 as an important resistance level.

Martinez has also identified a potential inverse head-and-shoulders formation, although the pattern remains unconfirmed. A sustained recovery above $1.60 would bring higher resistance levels into focus, including the psychological $2 mark. From $1.16, XRP would need to gain approximately 72.4% to reach that target.

XRP/USD 3-day chart (Source: X)

Meanwhile, recent XRP market analysis identified support between $1.04 and $1.16. The same report recorded approximately $529,500 in net XRP ETF outflows between November 2 and 6. Weak ETF demand adds another challenge for buyers attempting to reverse the decline.

However, whale accumulation suggests some large holders have continued increasing their positions at lower prices. Institutional investment products remain part of the wider XRP market picture, with GraniteShares delaying its leveraged XRP ETFs until November 30.

Martinez has separately identified $0.99 as the next potential support area following XRP’s breakdown below its trading channel midpoint. A further decline toward that boundary would place additional pressure on buyers attempting to defend the $1 level.

The post Ripple Partners With Stripe-Owned Privy: Can XRP Price Reclaim $2? appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Trump linked the November 5 stock market sell-off to Democrats’ victories in the USA midterm election results.
• U.S. stocks suffered steep losses on November 5, with the Nasdaq falling 5.52% amid a broader AI stock sell-off.
• Trump described the election result as a giant step back in history after the U.S. stock market’s sharp decline.
• Technology shares led Wall Street’s losses as investors questioned AI spending and the data center expansion plans.

U.S. President Donald Trump blamed the midterm election results for a $3 trillion U.S. stock market loss on November 5. His latest comments followed a sharp sell-off in U.S. stocks and cryptocurrencies, which erased the previous session’s gains.

In a November 8 post shared by The Kobeissi Letter, Trump described the election outcome as a “giant step back in history.” The president linked the market decline to Democratic victories, although concerns over artificial intelligence investments contributed to the selling.

The S&P 500 lost approximately $3 trillion in market value during Thursday’s session, while major technology companies recorded heavy losses. The Nasdaq Composite entered correction territory, and investors reassessed the outlook for AI infrastructure spending.

Trump Blames Democrats for $3 Trillion Stock Market Loss

Trump’s latest remarks followed his November 5 Truth Social statement, where he criticized the market’s reaction to the elections. He argued that Democratic victories had reversed progress made during his administration and affected Americans’ retirement savings.

“The Stock Market suffered one of the Worst Days in History based on the results of the Election,” Trump wrote. He also blamed Democrats for the decline, while maintaining that the market could recover.

However, the sell-off followed a rally on November 4, when investors initially welcomed the election results. The S&P 500 gained 1.58%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced approximately 3% during that session.

The reversal came as investors assessed how the new congressional balance could affect corporate spending and technology regulations. Democrats secured control of Congress, while several gubernatorial victories raised questions about future data center approvals.

Some newly elected governors have proposed restrictions on large AI projects, particularly those requiring substantial electricity supplies. The proposals have raised concerns over planned data center expansion across several states.

However, proposed restrictions have not automatically become law, and governors face different approval requirements across states. Markets have also reacted to company valuations, technology spending, and expectations for future earnings.

Nasdaq Drops 5.52% as AI Stocks Lead Wall Street Decline

The Nasdaq Composite dropped 5.52% on November 5, closing at 24,315 after its steepest daily decline in 19 months. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 fell 4.36% to 7,353.73, while the Dow declined 3.44% to 51,523.06.

Technology companies recorded some of the largest losses, with Nvidia shares falling approximately 9.3% during Thursday’s trading. Advanced Micro Devices and Micron Technology each dropped around 17%, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index declined approximately 12%.

The decline reflected renewed concerns about AI infrastructure spending and the financial returns expected from major technology investments. Investors also examined the funding required to construct data centers and secure electricity supplies.

The technology stock sell-off reached companies involved in chips, cloud computing, and data center development. However, several semiconductor stocks recovered during Friday’s trading as buyers returned after the previous session’s declines.

The broader market downturn extended into other sectors, with all 11 S&P 500 sectors closing lower on Thursday. The losses followed growing concern about future regulation and the pace of corporate investment.

Meanwhile, the incoming Democratic majority is preparing greater congressional oversight of Trump’s business interests and technology companies. The election results have prompted plans for investigations into Trump-linked crypto businesses, although the new Congress will not convene until January.

The post Donald Trump Blames Midterm Results for $3 Trillion Wall Street Loss appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• A potential Strategy Bitcoin buy remains unconfirmed because Saylor’s chart post disclosed neither a purchase size nor a new holdings total.
• Strategy last acquired 811 BTC for $65.5 million, lifting its reported Bitcoin holdings to 849,327 coins as of November 1.
• Bitcoin near $75,900 traded below Strategy’s latest $80,846 purchase price, yet remained just above its $75,451 aggregate basis.
• The November 2 acquisition used MSTR stock-sale proceeds, while cash funded a separate $208.2 million repurchase of STRC shares.

Michael Saylor revived attention around a possible Strategy Bitcoin buy after sharing the company’s familiar accumulation chart on X Sunday. He captioned the post, “Connecting the dots,” but gave no purchase amount. He provided no updated holdings. Bitcoin traded near $75,900 as it struggled to regain $76,000. 

That level sat slightly above Strategy’s overall average cost of $75,451 per coin. The message followed the company’s latest disclosed BTC purchase and a separate STRC repurchase. Investors will watch the next official filing.

Saylor has repeatedly posted the chart before weekly disclosures. Still, the latest message does not confirm that Strategy bought Bitcoin during the past week. It renewed attention on its acquisition pattern. A purchase report would normally identify the coin amount, average price, funding source, and reporting period.

Strategy Bitcoin Buy Signal Follows Familiar Saylor Pattern

The Strategy Bitcoin buy idea gained attention because Saylor’s tracker often precedes company updates. Strategy typically releases its treasury activity through a Form 8-K. Those reports give investors a formal record of purchases and financing decisions. They also separate confirmed transactions from signals shared on social media.

The company’s last confirmed acquisition covered October 26 through November 1. Strategy bought 811 BTC for $65.5 million. It paid an average of $80,846 per Bitcoin, including fees and expenses. The purchase lifted its reported holdings to 849,327 BTC. Strategy reported an aggregate purchase price of $64.08 billion for the entire position.

For now, a fresh acquisition remains an expectation, not a confirmed event. Sunday’s post did not state whether any coins changed hands. It also did not say whether the company raised new capital. That distinction matters while the Bitcoin price remains below the latest purchase price. Market participants need an official disclosure before treating the chart as evidence of a completed acquisition.

Michael Saylor has built a public narrative around steady Bitcoin accumulation. The tracker shows prior additions across market cycles. Yet the format alone offers limited detail about timing and size. A new filing would clarify whether Strategy extended its treasury during the latest reporting week.

Funding Behind the Last Strategy Bitcoin Buy and STRC Deal

The November 2 filing showed how Strategy financed its latest confirmed purchase. The company sold 1,178,552 MSTR common shares through its at-the-market program. Those sales generated $164 million in net proceeds after commissions. Strategy allocated $65.5 million to Bitcoin and added $98.5 million to its USD Cash balance.

The financing structure matters because it separates the BTC acquisition from the STRC transaction. Strategy did not sell preferred shares during that reporting period. Instead, it used existing USD Cash to repurchase 2,092,035 STRC shares. The repurchases totaled $208.2 million. STRC closed Friday at $99.84, just below its $100 stated amount.

The last Strategy Bitcoin buy arrived at a higher level than the current Bitcoin price. BTC traded near $75,900 on Sunday, while the company paid $80,846 per coin in its most recent purchase. However, the spot price remained roughly $449 above Strategy’s blended acquisition cost. That comparison remains important for investors assessing its treasury exposure.

Strategy held about $4.79 billion in its designated dollar reserve on November 1. It also reported $132.7 million in separate cash holdings. Those balances, along with future common-stock sales, could shape its purchasing capacity. Any new Strategy Bitcoin buy would also show whether management changed its financing mix after the STRC repurchase.

The company’s future disclosure may reveal another BTC addition, no purchase, or a different capital move. Michael Saylor’s post did not resolve those possibilities. It only placed the next reporting window under scrutiny as Bitcoin traded near Strategy’s average cost.

The post Strategy Bitcoin Buy Watch Builds as Saylor Hints at Purchase appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Vitalik Buterin says ETH’s store-of-value case rests on decentralization, security, and long-term stability.
• Buterin backs retaining EIP-1559 even if ETH fee burns remain under 10% of the break-even level indefinitely.
• He says 2021–2023 fee burns were driven largely by crypto speculation, making them a weak ETH valuation floor.
• Buterin warns a fee-focused model could demand 700,000 ETH yearly for R&D and interventionist governance.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has argued that ETH should be valued primarily as a store of value rather than through the amount of transaction fees the network destroys. In a November 8 series of posts on X, Buterin outlined three reasons for shifting the focus.

He questioned whether fee burns reliably support ETH’s valuation, warned that maximizing fee revenue could undermine decentralization, and said Ethereum’s security offers a stronger foundation for long-term holders.

However, Buterin stressed that Ethereum should retain EIP-1559, which burns the base fee paid on transactions. He added that holders should not be concerned even if burns remain below 10% of the break-even level indefinitely.

Buterin Questions Whether Ethereum Fee Burns Support ETH Value

Buterin challenged the assumption that annual fee burns establish a dependable valuation floor. Under a simplified discounted-cash-flow approach, burned fees can represent economic value accruing to holders, but that calculation depends on sustainable demand.

He argued that exceptionally high burns during 2021–2023 largely came from activity within crypto, including speculative trading and digital collectibles. If ETH lost 90% of its value, he reasoned, much of the spending power behind those fees could decline alongside it.

Consequently, the apparent valuation floor would weaken during market downturns, precisely when investors would want protection. Although tokenized real-world assets could generate demand from outside crypto, Buterin said mature businesses were unlikely to recreate speculative peaks that once produced roughly $180 million in burns in a single day.

Higher Ethereum Fees Could Threaten Decentralization

Buterin also examined what optimizing Ethereum for fee-based valuation would require. Supporting a hypothetical market capitalization of roughly $270 billion through such a model, he argued, could push Ethereum toward the operating structure of a large corporation.

He estimated that a revenue-driven strategy might require approximately 700,000 ETH annually in protocol-funded research and development. Maintaining that system could also require more interventionist governance over spending and development priorities, creating tensions with Ethereum’s decentralization and resistance to capture.

Higher gas fees would make Ethereum more expensive to use. Buterin warned that this could exclude people who most need private, secure, and censorship-resistant transactions. Ethereum’s EIP-1559 specification confirms that the network burns transaction base fees, while validators receive priority fees. The mechanism reduces circulating supply but does not guarantee that ETH becomes deflationary.

ETH Store-of-Value Case Centers on Security and CROPS

Instead, Buterin connected ETH’s store-of-value potential to Ethereum’s CROPS principles: censorship and capture resistance, open-source development, privacy, and security. The Ethereum Foundation formally established censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security as central priorities in its March 2026 mandate.

For holders, Buterin said the priority is preserving assets reliably over time. That requires conservative security decisions, greater stability in the core protocol, reduced political intervention, and secure private transfers with limited dependence on intermediaries.

He added that holding ETH becomes more useful when assets remain directly on Ethereum’s base layer and can be exchanged without trusted middlemen or used as collateral.

Buterin also connected the argument to potential disruption from artificial intelligence. As technologies and institutions change, he suggested, dependable decentralized infrastructure could become increasingly valuable to people seeking long-term asset protection.

The post Vitalik Buterin Backs ETH as a Store of Value Over Fee Burning in the AI Era appeared first on Blockonomi.

Hypercall said on Friday that it will open options tied to Anthropic’s pre-IPO price on Monday, November 9, as the AI company prepares for its Nasdaq listing.

The contracts go live at 8 a.m. EST and trade around the clock, weekends included. Traders can buy calls and puts or combine them into spreads. Those options are synthetic and settle in cash.

Hypercall, a Synapse product, is an options exchange built on Hyperliquid. The platform reported $536 million in options notional volume in September. Its existing markets cover SpaceX, the S&P 500, large US stocks, Bitcoin (BTC), and Ethereum (ETH).

Options Settle on Perp Prices

Hypercall pointed to Anthropic’s pre-IPO perpetual futures on Hyperliquid, where traders already bet on the company’s valuation. Those markets run on HIP-3, a Hyperliquid feature that lets developers deploy their own perpetual futures. Hyperliquid’s market data listed four Anthropic perps on Friday. Those four come from Trade[XYZ], Ventuals, Paragon, and EntropyIO.

Moreover, Hypercall’s documentation says its options are European-style, so they pay out only at expiry. Each contract settles in USDC against a 30-minute average of the oracle price on the underlying Hyperliquid perp.

For stocks and indices, that perp sits on Trade[XYZ]’s venue. Its list of underlyings, last updated on November 3, does not yet include an Anthropic perp.

Ventuals’ SpaceX pre-IPO perp fell about 45% in May after bad oracle data from an outside provider and liquidated more than $1.5 million in long positions. Hypercall said buyers of fully paid options can lose no more than their premium and face no liquidation before expiry.

Likewise, market makers that sell those options can hedge on the Anthropic perps, which keep trading after US exchanges close.

Roadshow Timing Draws Doubts

Anthropic made its IPO filing public on October 26 and plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Its amended prospectus, filed on November 2, still leaves the price range blank.

Bloomberg had reported the roadshow could start the week of November 9, with a debut before Thanksgiving on November 26. On Friday, Reuters reported potential investors doubt that the roadshow can go ahead next week.

Four people familiar with the talks told the agency investors are pushing for a lower valuation because they see the recently discussed $1.5 trillion valuation as the high end of expectations.

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During the first full week after the major Binance hack, which coincided with the US midterm elections, the spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest net outflows since late June.

Meanwhile, their Ethereum counterparts continue to see red-only, as their negative weekly streak has been extended to six in a row.

BTC ETFs Bleed $1.28B

As CryptoPotato reported last weekend, the last trading day of October turned the entire month around. With over $640 million being withdrawn from the Bitcoin ETFs at the time, a major outflow that followed the aforementioned Binance hack, the funds closed the month with $515 million in the red. This was the first such instance since June, when the financial products bled out $4.51 billion.

As the actual impact of the hack unraveled, investors pulled out another $400 million on November 2 (Monday), and $115.56 million on Tuesday (midterm election day). The bulls returned on Wednesday, pouring $74.57 million into the funds, which helped drive the underlying asset’s major surge at the time to $81,000.

However, that rally was short-lived, and so were the net inflows. Investors changed their tune on Thursday and Friday, withdrawing another $430 million and $412 million, respectively. Expectedly, BTC’s price tumbled hard in line with these outflows, dumping to a seven-week low of under $75,000 on Friday.

Ultimately, the week ended with net outflows of $1.28 billion, the highest since the last full week of June, when the number was close to $1.8 billion.

6 In a Row

The leading altcoin plunged by double digits in October, and the ETF outflows were among the major reasons. As reported last weekend, October’s withdrawals hit an all-time high, with $1.61 billion leaving the funds. There were only three green days throughout the entire month, each with less than $25 million.

This negative streak for the Ethereum ETFs has extended. Aside from November 4, which saw net inflows of $53 million, the other four trading days were deep in the red — each saw more net outflows than the Wednesday inflows. $139.80 million left the funds on Monday, followed by $85.35 million on Tuesday, $100 million on Thursday, and another $93.19 million on Friday.

The week ended with just over $365 million in net outflows, which makes it the sixth consecutive week in the red. The cumulative total net inflows have declined from $13.94 billion at the end of September to $11.92 billion as of November 6. Meanwhile, ETH’s price has tanked hard to under $2,250, posting a 10% monthly drop.

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XRP’s rebound has given way to another sharp selloff, with the price falling toward $1.16 after losing a key support zone. Sellers retain control across both timeframes, while the next major demand area is approaching below.

Ripple Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

The daily chart shows a clear continuation of XRP’s bearish structure. The recent recovery into the $1.30–$1.34 supply zone was aggressively rejected, triggering a breakdown beneath the $1.24–$1.28 support area. Several consecutive bearish candles have since carried the price toward $1.16, with little sustained buying response.

The next significant demand zone sits around $1.09–$1.14, corresponding to the base of August’s strong advance. This area could attract buyers and produce a relief bounce, but a reversal would require stronger follow-through than the recent candles have shown. A sustained breakdown below $1.09 would expose the broader $0.99–$1.03 support zone around the August lows.

On the upside, the broken $1.24–$1.28 region is now an important potential resistance area. Recovering it would ease immediate downside pressure, although the $1.30–$1.34 supply zone remains the more significant barrier to a broader structural improvement. Until these levels are reclaimed, rebounds remain vulnerable to renewed selling.

XRP/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The four-hour chart highlights a failed breakout above the descending channel’s upper boundary. Ripple briefly advanced into the $1.30–$1.34 supply zone before reversing sharply, falling back inside the channel and breaking through the consolidation base near $1.25.

The subsequent sequence of lower highs and lower lows confirms strong bearish momentum. Price is now consolidating narrowly around $1.16, but this pause has yet to produce a meaningful bullish structure shift. The nearby $1.15 low is the immediate downside reference, followed by the $1.09–$1.14 demand zone. The descending channel’s lower boundary currently passes through approximately $1.12, adding technical confluence within that area.

For a recovery to gain traction, Ripple first needs to overcome the recent lower highs around $1.18–$1.20. Sustained acceptance above this region could support a rebound toward $1.24–$1.28, where former support overlaps with the descending channel’s upper boundary. Until then, the limited response near the lows keeps another move toward the lower demand zone in focus.

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Bitcoin’s recovery toward $81K has been sharply rejected, sending the price back to the lower edge of its daily demand zone. With Bitcoin consolidating near $75.9K, buyers face another important test while futures activity shows signs of heating up.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

The daily chart shows Bitcoin remaining below the ascending channel’s midpoint after an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim it. The latest rebound toward $81K ended with a strong bearish candle, reinforcing the sequence of lower highs that has developed since the September and October peaks.

The asset is now hovering near the bottom of the $75K–$78K demand zone. Although this area has attracted buyers on several occasions, the latest reaction has been limited, with small candles forming following the aggressive selloff. This indicates temporary stabilization, but there is little evidence of a convincing reversal so far.

A sustained daily close below $75K would weaken this demand zone and could extend the correction toward the ascending channel’s lower boundary, currently around $72K–$73K. Alternatively, buyers need to recover $78K to improve the immediate outlook. A subsequent reclaim of the $80K–$81K region and the broken channel midpoint would provide stronger evidence that the correction is losing momentum.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

On the four-hour timeframe, Bitcoin is trading within a descending channel. The recent rally reached the channel’s upper boundary inside the $79.8K–$82K supply zone before reversing sharply. This rejection confirms that sellers continue to defend both horizontal supply and descending trendline resistance.

The subsequent decline carried BTC into the $74.9K–$76.3K demand zone, where it is now consolidating near the channel’s lower boundary. This confluence could support a temporary rebound, but the narrow consolidation and lack of strong bullish follow-through leave the short-term structure fragile.

A sustained recovery above $76.3K would be the first sign of relief, potentially allowing a move toward the recent consolidation area around $77K–$78.5K. However, a broader reversal would require Bitcoin to overcome the descending channel’s upper boundary and reclaim the $79.8K–$82K supply zone.

Conversely, acceptance below $74.9K would signal that buyers have failed to defend the September demand area. A simultaneous breakdown beneath the descending channel could accelerate the decline toward the lower daily support region.

Sentiment Analysis

The Futures Volume Bubble Map classifies futures volume conditions into cooling, neutral, heating, and overheating regimes. The latest observations show heating conditions around $75.8K–$76K, following another heating reading near the failed recovery around $80.5K.

The appearance of heating signals during the latest decline suggests increased futures participation as Bitcoin approaches support. However, volume alone does not establish whether this activity represents fresh short positions, defensive hedging, or buyers attempting to absorb the selloff. The latest bubbles also remain in the heating category rather than overheating.

Combined with the bearish price structure, this activity makes the current demand zone particularly important. Rising participation alongside a confirmed support breakdown could accompany further downside volatility. If buyers instead reclaim $76.3K and build sustained upward momentum, the same increase in activity could mark a contested support defense. For now, the bubble map highlights an active decision area without confirming capitulation or a bottom.

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Alongside the rest of the market, shares of JPMorgan Chase tanked at the end of the previous week, but there’s more to the story. JPM’s decline also came after reports emerged that Senate Democrats are preparing a fresh investigation into the banking behemoth’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Although there’s no real connection with Bitcoin, we decided to still cover this and highlight the awkwardness, as JPM’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, has spent years bashing the crypto industry.

JPMorgan Faces New Epstein Scrutiny

CNBC reported after the Blue-nami in the US midterms that Democratic staff on the Senate Finance Committee plan to examine how senior JPM executives handled Epstein as they take control of Congress early next year. Mary Erdoes, CEO of the bank’s Asset & Wealth Management Division, is expected to be among the high-profile names in the investigations.

“The US government had damning information ​about Epstein’s crimes that it failed to share ​with us or other banks. We regret any association we had with ‌him, ⁠but we did not help him commit his crimes,” commented a spokesperson from the bank.

The market reaction was immediate as JPM shares tanked by over 4% to under $340 on Thursday. The sell-off essentially erased the stock’s post-midterm rally.

Although the bank continues to deny any wrongdoing, it previously agreed to pay $365 million in settlements related to Epstein.

The Irony

We admit there’s no official confirmation that JPM has done anything wrong, and we don’t expect it to come to light if it did, because it’s one of the world’s largest banks. And we know how banks are treated in almost any situation (recall the 2008 banking crisis and the subsequent lack of any real consequences). Nevertheless, the irony is still worth pointing out.

JPM’s long-serving CEO, Jamie Dimon, has been bashing BTC for years. He has called it a “fraud,” “worthless,” a “pet rock,” and a “decentralized Ponzi scheme.” All bad and, in some cases, illegal names. He also advised investors to stay away from crypto and told lawmakers that if he were running the US government, he would “close it down.”

The hypocrisy is glaring when we look at what the bank has done lately. It now lets institutional clients use BTC and ETH as collateral; it supports crypto-related services; it participated in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF infrastructure; and it recently projected that bitcoin could outperform US large-cap stocks and gold over the next 10-15 years.

But there’s another contrast. Bitcoin has no CEO, board of directors, wealth-management division, or customer relationship with Jeffrey Epstein – or anyone else, for that matter. The protocol itself cannot make a questionable client decision, hide internal correspondence, or become subject to congressional scrutiny over corporate conduct.

People or companies using BTC can still appear in investigations and criminal records, but reputational and governance risks belong to institutions and individuals, not the decentralized Bitcoin network itself.

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