This week on Crypto News Rundown, we unpack one of the most revealing weeks of the cycle so far – a moment where brutal volatility, meme-coin fatigue, and security shocks collide with some of the strongest signals of long-term institutional conviction the crypto market has ever seen.

The episode opens with Bitcoin’s Thanksgiving “miss”: a rally to $91,000 that failed to break the 2024 high, triggering fresh retail fear and headlines about “lost momentum.” The hosts zoom out to show why this rare year-over-year holiday dip looks more like a structural reset than a collapse, digging into footprint charts, higher-low formations, RSI recovery, and a persistent bid below $90,000 that screams institutional accumulation rather than capitulation.

From there, the focus shifts to the flows that really matter. You’ll hear how BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) has clawed its way back into multi-billion-dollar profit, why it’s still the only spot Bitcoin ETF with net positive inflows in 2025, and what it means that NASDAQ is proposing “Mag 7–level” options limits for IBIT. The hosts tie this directly to macro tailwinds — falling yields, rising odds of a Fed rate cut — and to a historic milestone: Texas becoming the first U.S. state to buy Bitcoin via a spot ETF for its public treasury, potentially opening the door for other states and pension funds to follow.

On the corporate side, the episode contrasts two very different treasury strategies. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) showcases a deeply conservative, long-run playbook with a 71-year debt runway and a market premium on its BTC holdings, while Japan’s MetaPlanet sits on leveraged underwater bags and faces a December “do or die” vote that could trigger margin-call risk. SpaceX’s move to Coinbase Prime is framed as a case study in how large private firms are professionalizing Bitcoin custody without selling a sat.

Security takes center stage with the Upbit hack — a $36.9 million Solana-ecosystem hotwallet breach that lands just as its parent company announces a huge deal and U.S. IPO plans. The hosts walk through what likely went wrong, why the timing has people whispering about sophisticated repeat attackers, and why Upbit’s immediate promise to fully reimburse users marks a big cultural shift from the Mt. Gox / FTX era. At the same time, the incident shines an unforgiving spotlight on Solana token security across the industry.

Altcoin ETFs get their own “report card.” XRP stands out as the clear winner thanks to regulatory clarity and relentless ETF inflows, with shrinking exchange supply and a big regulatory win for Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin in Abu Dhabi. In sharp contrast, Grayscale’s Dogecoin ETF launch flops, exposing just how little appetite institutions have for pure meme exposure, while Solana funds see mixed fortunes as profit-taking in some products is offset by inflows into staking ETFs that offer real yield. Meme coins fare poorly overall, with on-chain data showing massive inflows back to exchanges and charts signaling bearish continuation rather than genuine reversals.

The episode then goes global, showing how stablecoins are quietly becoming the financial rails of both high finance and crisis economies. You’ll hear how Visa and major European market operators are integrating USDC and euro-pegged stablecoins into real settlement systems, even as S&P downgrades Tether’s USDT and spooks parts of China’s gray crypto market. At the same time, hyperinflation in Bolivia, Venezuela, Argentina and high inflation in Turkey are pushing citizens and businesses to treat stablecoins as de facto legal tender — or to chase risky altcoin gains just to outrun collapsing purchasing power.

Bitcoin just erased an entire year’s worth of gains—and took a chunk of the Trump family’s fortune with it. In this episode, recorded Monday, November 24th, 2025, we walk straight into one of the most violent phases of the current crypto cycle and unpack what real capitulation looks like when leverage, politics, and AI hype all collide.

We start with Bitcoin’s historic rout. After spending 2025 grinding higher on institutional optimism and spot ETF euphoria, BTC has crashed from an October peak near $126,000 to a terrifying low around $80,548. That breakdown doesn’t just sting; it retroactively wipes out the entire 2025 bull thesis and pushes year-to-date returns negative. We explain why the break of the “new floor” at $97,000 mattered so much, how the $80,000 support level became the final line of defense, and why a deeply oversold RSI reading of 26 is both a potential bounce signal and a warning that a structural bear market could still be ahead. You’ll hear how a failure to hold $80,000 could, in some of the more extreme technical models, open the door to 60% more downside toward the $32,000 zone.

From there, we lift the hood on the mechanics of the crash. This isn’t just “people selling”; it’s a leverage-driven cascade. We break down more than a billion dollars in liquidations, with over half a billion in Bitcoin alone, and explain in plain language how margin calls, forced selling, and derivatives positioning can create a self-feeding downward spiral. You’ll learn how negative funding rates, collapsing futures open interest, and a heavily skewed options market—with traders paying rich premiums for puts—signal an extreme risk-off environment. We also walk through how delta hedging by options dealers turns fear into actual spot selling, effectively turning protective puts into gasoline poured on the fire around the key $90,000 and $93,000 levels.

Then we follow the money into the ETF arena and institutional flows. The same U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs that powered the 2025 bull run are now bleeding. We look at sustained multi-billion-dollar outflows, including BlackRock’s transfers of thousands of BTC and tens of thousands of ETH to Coinbase Prime and roughly $2.5 billion in redemptions from their products alone. Combined with other issuers, spot ETFs have seen about $3.5 billion pulled in November, making it one of the worst months since launch. We frame this not as simple profit-taking but as institutional capitulation and mandated de-risking in a macro environment where the Federal Reserve may delay rate cuts and global liquidity is thinning.

That brutal macro meets a very specific story: the Trump family’s crypto-linked wealth. We outline how a highly concentrated ecosystem—Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), Trump-branded meme coins, World Liberty Financial, and mining stakes—has seen more than a billion dollars in paper wealth evaporate since early September. You’ll hear how DJT stock cratered from post-merger highs above $43 to around $10, erasing roughly $800 million from Donald Trump’s stake, and why a company with under a million dollars in quarterly revenue was ever valued in the billions. We look at the crashes in Trumpy and WLFI tokens, the drawdown in American Bitcoin Corporation, and how this all showcases the dangers of tying political brand, speculative tokens, and leveraged mining to a single “crypto always goes up” narrative—even as Eric Trump publicly insists this is a “great buying opportunity.”

If watching the crypto charts lately has given you motion sickness, this episode is your seatbelt and your barf bag in one. The hosts dig into a market that has shed more than a trillion dollars in value in just six weeks, with Bitcoin crashing from an early-October peak above $126,000 to briefly slipping under the psychologically crucial $90,000 line. They unpack why this correction was not only brutal in size, but frightening in speed—and how that compressed 42-day sell-off has magnified every ounce of fear in the system.

From there, the episode zooms in on the institutions. On one side, you have sovereign wealth conviction: Abu Dhabi’s funds quietly tripling their stake in BlackRock’s IBIT ETF and openly classifying Bitcoin as “digital gold,” a long-term reserve asset instead of a speculative toy. On the other side, you have fragile commitment: a billion-dollar Ethereum Digital Asset Trust, fully capitalized and ready to launch, abruptly canceled after a single sharp sell-off, and Sharplink Gaming staring down roughly half a billion dollars in unrealized ETH losses as it moves tens of millions to Galaxy Digital in what looks like a de-risking pivot.

The hosts then step back from price and examine the financial plumbing being built underneath the chaos. Kraken has confidentially filed for a blockbuster IPO after a funding round valuing the exchange at around $20 billion, backed not by crypto VCs but by Wall Street titans like Citadel Securities and Jane Street. Meanwhile Bullish, already public and newly profitable with surging revenues, is watching its stock trade below its IPO price even as it doubles down on real-world asset tokenization and seeks SEC approval to act as a transfer agent for U.S. securities. It is a paradoxical moment where the fundamentals are strengthening but the market refuses to reward them.

Altcoins get their own whirlwind tour. You’ll hear how the first XRP ETF launch turned into a textbook “buy the rumor, sell the news” event, why Dave Portnoy is calling XRP his 10x bet as he plows over $2 million back into the market, and how Zcash has stunned traders with a 1,000% rally powered by a roaring privacy narrative. In stark contrast, Shiba Inu is dissected as an object lesson in failed tokenomics, with burn mechanics that barely dent a supply still sitting in the hundreds of trillions and a price increasingly driven by inertia rather than genuine scarcity or utility.

Then the episode accelerates into the tech revolution that is marching forward as if price doesn’t matter. The hosts break down Bitrue’s bold experiment plugging a roster of cutting-edge AI models directly into copy trading, letting users hand a slice of their portfolios to automated machine decision-making. They explore the GNOT biometric hardware wallet that tries to kill the seed phrase once and for all with finger-vein scanning and zero-knowledge proofs, as well as Falcon Finance’s DeFi staking vaults that offer double-digit yields in a synthetic dollar with strict lockups designed to prevent DeFi-style bank runs.

Real-world utility takes center stage with Minipay, a Celo-based stablecoin wallet from Opera that now lets users in Latin America spend digital dollars directly through dominant local rails like PIX in Brazil and Mercado Pago in Argentina. Suddenly, stablecoins are not just speculative instruments; they are rent, groceries, and everyday commerce in two huge economies.

But every leap forward comes with a darker shadow. The episode highlights a stealthy cryptojacking campaign, Iron Urn 440, hijacking Ray clusters—the same distributed compute infrastructure that powers much of the AI boom—to mine coins in the background. Attackers use AI-generated payloads and carefully throttle CPU usage to avoid detection, turning high-end AI infrastructure into an invisible money-printing machine.