I was going to lie down and wait for the 9:30 p.m. CPI release But Waller spoke first
The Fed governor spoke in London today He said that even if October CPI is a little better than September’s he’d still lean toward supporting a 25-basis-point hike in December If core CPI comes in around 0.3% month over month or higher we’d also have to consider going straight for 50 basis points
As soon as he said that Nasdaq 100 futures slipped about 0.3% to 0.5% in the short term Spot gold fell below 4,090 down about 1.2% on the day Silver was down about 2% The 2-year Treasury yield briefly climbed to around 4.599%
BTC is still hovering around 74,500 The market had already largely priced in a 25-basis-point hike in December Now there’s the option of 50 if needed
Tonight’s numbers aren’t out yet But let’s keep this comment in mind
Late-night scrolling turned up MARA’s quarterly report and shareholder letter This miner’s latest moves are pretty bold
Since quarter-end, it sold about 13,597 bitcoins Cashing in roughly $1.1 billion It used $750 million of that to fully repay its bitcoin-backed term loans And also unlocked and recovered about 17,477 bitcoins
The board also approved up to $500 million in stock buybacks As of September 30, it still held about 34,012 bitcoins
Mined 2,247 and sold 3,891 in Q3 Revenue was about $164 million, down more than 30% year over year Net income, though, topped $600 million, mainly thanks to changes in bitcoin’s fair value
Going forward, it also plans to sell bitcoin to fund AI infrastructure, repay convertible notes, and buy back shares Some data center leases may run through 2027
Mining, selling, unlocking collateral, and buying back shares all at once They’re keeping the books pretty busy We’ll see how it plays out
I came across this news about a major U.S. bank in the middle of the night 😮
PNC Bank, ticker PNC, is piloting USDC payments for corporate and institutional clients
Payments are made on Ethereum and automatically converted to U.S. dollars at a 1:1 rate then deposited directly into a designated PNC account
The service is powered by Coinbase’s payments product (ticker: COIN) and is initially available to eligible clients on a pilot basis The bank has around $410 billion in assets
The bank is integrating stablecoin payments into its treasury workflows to streamline cross-border and corporate settlements I’m keeping an eye on this one
Scrolling on my phone in the middle of the night and came across this 😮
Cosmos and the Interchain Foundation officially announced that they’re contributing the IBC cross-chain protocol to the Linux Foundation where it’ll be hosted under LF Decentralized Trust with neutral governance
IBC has been running in production since 2021 processing over $50 billion in transaction volume over five years across hundreds of networks and the code is still open source and free Initial maintainers are Cosmos Datachain and OpenZeppelin
Someone from Google Cloud was watching too The idea is to make it a more neutral, open interoperability standard to make it easier for banks and institutions to come on board
Institutions want neutral standards So the protocol is moving into a foundation Noted
Scrolling through the news about tokenization and the NYSE last night 😮
Ava Labs announced that Avalanche will provide core ledger technology to the clearing arm of a digital ATS affiliated with the NYSE
It’s still awaiting regulatory approval but it’s designed for 24/7 trading, clearing, and settlement
The platform can support stock tokens on multiple blockchains Avalanche handles the bookkeeping and settlement
Dennis Lee, head of digital issuance at the NYSE, said the right technology needs to be chosen for each use case The settlement ledger needs to be fast and reliable with controlled access and predictable costs
AVAX moved with the news rising about 8% over the past 24 hours
Wall Street’s tokenization race is already heating up Nasdaq and DTCC are also laying the groundwork This time, the NYSE side named Avalanche Let’s just note the facts for now
I came across Citi’s portfolio adjustment note last night 😅
Ticker C The strategists cut US equities from overweight to neutral Global tech was also cut to neutral European tech was likewise moved to neutral
On the other hand, European equities ex-UK were upgraded to overweight
The reasoning is pretty straightforward: AI sentiment is starting to fade after the midterms And positioning is crowded The Nasdaq (NDX) may have another roughly 5% to fall before positioning actually turns bearish
They’re still constructive on AI over the medium term They just want to wait for positioning to clear out first
Last Thursday, the Nasdaq briefly lost around $2.3 trillion in market cap Risk appetite for US stocks was already weak Crypto was subdued too
For now, I’ll just note the bank’s positioning changes No need to rush into calling the direction
I just came across some pretty significant regulatory news
The U.S. OCC has upgraded Coinbase’s trust charter from conditional approval in April to a full federal trust bank charter. $COIN
Basically, this means its custody and payments business can finally operate under the federal trust bank framework. It’s not a full-service bank that takes deposits and makes loans, though.
Since the GENIUS stablecoin bill passed, this kind of charter pathway has been accelerating. Ripple also just received a full trust charter last month.
The market is still hovering around 74k today, but the regulatory narrative just got a serious endorsement. Noted.
I checked my phone first thing this morning After the Democrats’ big midterm win, prediction markets got called out too 👀
This Politico piece pulls no punches It calls out Kalshi and Polymarket directly Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Maxine Waters are both criticizing the same thing: that sensitive events like elections, wars, and assassinations can also be turned into markets for betting And they’re preparing legislation
Trading volume for election-related contracts this cycle has already topped about $3 billion Kalshi alone accounts for roughly $2.5 billion or more
The markets were pretty accurate, though Kalshi priced the Democrats’ chances of winning the House at around 93% to 94.5% and their chances of winning the Senate at around 73.5% to 76% Both outcomes came through According to Kalshi’s own data, of the first 487 races with decided outcomes, the market favorite won 479
The Chinese-speaking crowd probably didn’t catch up until around 8 or 9 in the morning The markets may be accurate, but how regulators will step in is another matter For now, just keep the numbers in mind
The weekly candle just closed I took a closer look 😮
$BTC The fifth consecutive bearish weekly candle is officially in the books This week opened around 78354 Closed around 74851 Down about 4.5% for the week
Counting from the candle that closed at 86530 in early October That’s a pullback of roughly 13–14% over five weeks A run of consecutive down weeks like this is historically pretty rare
This morning’s low touched 73510 And made it into this weekly candle
The current price is around 74680 ETH is around 2120 Let’s get the weekly figures straight first No need to rush into calling what the sixth candle will bring
Scrolling on my phone on a weekend morning Nvidia's board issued a statement
They’re launching an independent investigation to determine whether founder and CEO Jensen Huang has become a target of a foreign intelligence operation
The investigation will be led by an independent committee of directors, with outside independent counsel brought in to help review the matter The statement was carefully worded: There is currently no reason to believe that U.S. national security or company secrets have been compromised, but all the information available will be reviewed
Huang emailed employees on Sunday, admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologizing He also said he would cooperate with the investigation A company spokesperson said he would continue serving as CEO without interruption
NVDA is already closely tied to the AI narrative these days For now, just read the statement carefully before the market opens on Monday
Scrolling X tonight I came across another orange-dot chart This time it was posted by Strive CEO Matt Cole with just one line: The hurdle rate is orange
The chart spells it out clearly Holdings: 43,124 BTC Current value: about $3.27 billion 41 purchases in total Ticker: $ASST
The last public disclosure still showed this number There was no new purchase announcement tonight Given their usual pattern maybe they'll report another purchase next week
I'll make a note of it No need to jump to conclusions ☕
Tonight I came across another long post by Vitalik He wasn’t calling for a bull or bear market He was explaining again how ETH should be understood
At 8:06 p.m. Beijing time He said ETH should be seen more as a store of value than as a token whose fees are burned
Three points, pretty straightforward First, the burn floor isn’t as solid as people imagine A lot of what was burned from 2021 to 2023 came from NFTs and DeFi projects within the crypto ecosystem When prices fall, people’s ability to pay falls too Second, if burns are meant to support a market cap of around $270 billion Ethereum would have to operate like a large corporation It would need to spend roughly 700,000 ETH a year on R&D Validator revenue could drop by two-thirds Third, the store-of-value narrative is what aligns with decentralization, censorship resistance, and resistance to capture
He explicitly said EIP-1559 should stay Don’t be discouraged if burns never reach even one-tenth of breakeven in the long run Value isn’t found on the burn dashboard
ETH is still hovering just above 2,230 for now I’ll keep this line of reasoning in mind But I won’t treat it as a trading signal 👀 $ETH
I was checking the charts this weekend when Saylor suddenly dropped “Connecting the dots” with a chart showing the orange-coin accumulation trend
Strategy (MSTR) still holds 849327 BTC with reserves worth about $64.44 billion at an average cost of around $75,446 Based on the chart, unrealized gains are roughly 0.21%, or about $133 million pretty much hovering around breakeven
The last time, on November 1, he said there was still room to load up on orange The next day, the company disclosed another purchase of 811 BTC at an average price of about $80,846
That old code phrase showed up again tonight Going by the usual pattern, a holdings update often follows How much they bought hasn’t been officially announced tonight
BTC is still grinding around $76,000 I’ll make a note of it for now—not jumping the gun 👀 $BTC
Checking on-chain activity over the weekend, I came across something a little alarming. A monitoring service flagged an address as the Drift attacker.
About 9 hours ago, this address withdrew 3,100 ETH from Tornado, swapped it for about 6.92 million USDC, and deposited it into Hyperliquid.
Then it went straight into 20x leveraged positions on both sides: long about 169 BTC, with a notional value of roughly 12.84 million, and short about 5,740 ETH, with a notional value of roughly 12.83 million. That’s over 25 million combined.
Later, someone spotted that the long position had grown to 263 BTC, and the short to nearly 9,000 ETH.
Money from an unknown source, opening such huge opposing positions over the weekend— those numbers have me a little baffled.
Just making a note of it for now. Not guessing what comes next.
Checking the positions dashboard in the early hours And the whales on Hyperliquid gave me another scare 😅
These big players’ BTC shorts have piled up to around $890–920 million while their longs are only around $450–480 million Shorts are nearly double the longs
Net short exposure is roughly $350–470 million the most bearish it’s been since October 2025
The largest single short is around $178.5 million with an entry price around $76,390 There are also shorts of $155 million and $101.8 million nearby Plus a bunch of positions over $60 million
Around October 27, they flipped to net short and have been adding to their positions ever since BTC perpetual open interest on the platform is around $3.13 billion Whales already make up a sizable chunk of that
Spot is still hovering around $75,700 and the largest short is sitting just above it
Being heavily short doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right but with positions lined up like this it at least shows big money is leaning toward a drop right now Let’s see what happens around $76,000
I came across the ZetaChain governance vote results last night They almost put me to sleep, then suddenly woke me up 😅
Proposal 2, also known as on-chain Proposal 70, passed About 313.6 million ZETA voted in favor Only around 400 votes against The approval rate was roughly 99.99%
Around December 9 The snapshot will be taken near block 20755000, and the network will shut down Once L1 stops, it won’t restart
ZETA will migrate 1:1 to native Solana SPL Same ticker Minting authority revoked No third-party bridge
ZetaHub will open claims that day Sign a message with your old wallet to link your Solana address No fees and no SOL required Don’t hand over your seed phrase You’ll need around 10 or more to claim
Staked and unbonding balances as of the snapshot will count Most exchange balances will be swapped automatically Coinbase (COIN) will also have a separate window to convert ZETACHAIN to ZETA
About 55 million in unissued emissions will be burned monthly through 2027 ZetaLabs’ private AI will also launch on Solana that same day
Mark the big migration on your calendar No need to keep shouting about it