What happened in crypto in the past week? I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. Ethereum is yet to be profitable, even after Fusaka upgrade. Solana got some moves, XRP ETFs are up and Dogecoin ETFs are ignored. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Strategy CEO talk about a Bitcoin dump scenario, telling that they are fully covered if BTC stays above $74K, while announcing the formation of a $1.44B USD reserve to ensure it has sufficient liquidity to pay out its dividends and interest on its debt. Retail wallets holding under 1 BTC picked up while large holders are stepping back. Whales selling while retail is buying, what is happening right now? I should be happy with this one. Bitcoin miners earned $41.400 per exahash in November, down 14% since the previous month. Yet Cleanspark mined 587 BTC in November, a 11% jump from October. American Bitcoin shares dropped 35% on Tuesday after a lockup period ended for early investors, from $3.60 to $2.33. Well, they did buy another 416 BTC, to a total of 4783 BTC. A new Bitcoin treasury company, Cantor Equity partners, hits NYSE next week. The Bitcoin exchange supply dropped to $1.8M BTC, the lowest in seven years. Over 400K BTC have moved off the exchanges since December 7. Could be that the BTC correction might be over? Dormant Silk Road wallets moved $3.14 million in Bitcoin, after one decade of inactivity, to one unknown address on Tuesday, and the other original Silk Road addresses still hold about $38.4M in BTC.
- Ethereum: Is ETH collapsing while competitors gain ground? We have nine valuation models with prices anywhere between $4600 and $9400. But Revenue Yield model, rated most reliable, calls Ethereum overvalued, with a real price of $1296. Yet the low stablecoin yield point to an ETH rally, as the stablecoin lending rates hover around 4%, suggesting that there is room fora $3200 ETH price. Addresses holding +1000 ETH dropped from 5628 to 5547 since September 25. Bitmine's Tom Lee bought 96.798 ETH last week and it is now controlling 3% of the ETH total supply, even if they reached nearly $4B in unrealized losses. Bitmine's ETH average buy price is $3639 right now. Ethereum's latest hard fork, Fusaka, went live, increasing data throughput for rollups, rolling out UX improvements and setting up the foundation for L1 scaling. Finalized just 15 minutes after activation, Fusaka upgrade also bundled 12 Ethereum Improvement Porposals aiming to reduce network congestion and improving developer tools. A memecoin called PIPPIN exploded 296%. Bonk lands ETP on the Switzerland's six exchange. The ETH stored on exchanges dropped to 8.7% of its total, the lowest since 2015. Compare this with BTC 14.7%! ETH's finality mechanism had a close call when a client bug nearly disrupted block confirmations, but Vitalik said that finality loss is not a problem. Blackrock filed for a staked ETH ETF on December 5.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: A big surprise, Bitcoin Cash climbed 40% to become the best performing Layer-1 of 2025. How? AI sector marketcap fel 7.3% (around $1.5B) as thin-liquidity AI tokens sold off. Privacy coins just lost their edge, with Zcash falling 8.5% in 24 hours, Monero followed with 5.4%, Dash 3.9% and the entire sector tumbled 15.4%. Chainling got its first ETF, Grayscale Chainlink ETF started trading on NYSE Arca. Dogecoin ETFs are getting ignored, with $142K in trading value Monday, lowest since launch. Franklin Templeton drops the first staking-enabled SOL ETF. Solana announced the SKR token, centered around its Seeker mobile phone. dYdX opens to the US traders. XRP is doing surprisingly well, with 11 days of consecutive inflows, pulling $756M since launch. 21Shares launched its own XRP ETF on CBOE this week too. Quite funny, as XRP staking launched with no rewards yet. Do you even call that staking? Monad went 31% up following its mainnet launch. Sony enters the stablecoin race with USDSC, a stablecoin built specifically for Soneium network. Polymarket returns to US market with sports betting app after regulatory overhaul. Kalshi partnered with CNN to integrate prediction markets into the newsroom. BNB Paribas joined a consortium of 10 EU banks forming Qivalis, a joint venture to launch a euro-backed stablecoin by late 2026. Coinbase and Chainlink launched a Base-Solana bridge for cross chain transfers.
- NFTs and blockchain games:The Trump Meme team announced the upcoming launch for the Trump Mobile Game, which will use TRUMP token for the in-game activities. Too little, too late! I have enjoyed playing Golem Overlord lately on Hive, and it is quite enjoyable, I would say, with some significant updates lately. On Splinterlands, we have had the Land NFT new update and improved tokenomics, and the new rewards cards from the Conclave collection are up and running. Heroes of Mavia surged 28% of a 317% volume spike.
- Good news: UK has passed a law officialy recognizing crypto and NFT as property, giving digital assets a defined legal status for the first time, letting crypto to be clearly owned, recovered in case of theft or fraud, and included in bankruptcy proceedings. Binance secures a global license, under the ADGM Framework, becoming the first ever crypto exchange to do so. Metamask introduced Transaction shield, protecting users for up to $10.000 on transactions that Metamask deems safe. Vanguard finally allows crypto ETFs on their platform. I use Freetrade to buy BlackRock in UK, works quite well, and they also have UK Treasury bills, so, quite happy to build a £10K portfolio here, to test how it is working. Meanwhile Bitcoin's weekly RSI is approaching the 30 level, with some predicting a rally toward $100k-$110K. The SEC will bypass Congress on crypto rules, releasing an innovation exemption for crypto projects in about a month. Taiwan will launch its own stablecoin in the second half of 2026. Malaysian royalty launched RMJDT, a ringit-pegged stablecoin for Asia-Pacific payments. Kraken acquired the tokenized stock issuer Backed Finance. Uniswap partnered with Revolut, enabling direct fiat on-ramp, to the Uniswap wallet and web app. Trust Wallet also partnered with Revolut integrating it for crypto purchases across Europe. State oil giant YPF, Argentina's state-controled energy company, is exploring crypto payments at its fuel stations. French banking giant BPCE is rolling out crypto trading to 2M customers starting Monday through its banking app with 2.99 Euro monthly and 1.5% fee per trade. Money grabbing! SEI is partnering with Xiaomim to integrate a new stablecoin payments app into the Chinese phone giant ecosystem. Klarna is building a crypto wallet with Privy, after the launch of its own stablecoin, KlarnaUSD. Japan is cutting crypto tax rate to 20%. OCC greenlights banks in the US to settle crypto trades as intermediaries without holding digital assets.
- Bad news: Coinshares withdrew its SEC filing for a staked Solana ETF on Friday, as the investors are chasing 5-7% staking rewards. The US SOL ETFs are dumping hard, with more than $41M outflows on Wednesday alone. Do Kwon was sentenced to 15 years in US federal prison for his role in the $40B collapse of TerraUSD and Luna, the event that kicked of the 2022 crypto crash.
- Joke of the week: Some interesting numbers here, as Coinbase fell 21% over 30 days, Circle 37% and RobinHood 12%, yet they build viable revenues outside main crypto, with 20% of it being generate by stablecoin, and token-launch platforms supporting coins like Monad being quite succesful. Fear dominates the Fear&Greed Index at 20 out of 100, up 66% since last week 12 out of 100 Index. Bank of America even told its clients to put 1% to 4% of their portfolios into crypto. Remember that public companies holds now nearly 1M BTC, and 90% of it sits in the US. SEC-registered Companies can now sell stock for stablecoins, directly, by issuing tokenized shares on ETH and SOL. New York Stock Exchange installed a Satoshi Nakamoto statue this week, the sixth of the 21 statues going up worldwide.
All the best,
George
Why not...
...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Upland - a real-life virtual land) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).
...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog, using the Presearch search engine to maximise your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter. I am also writing for crypto on Hive.
