What happened in crypto in the past week? The bear market sets in, Bitcoin is down to $91k right now. Whales buy while retail investors panic sell. Do not be like them. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
- Bitcoin: Strategy bought another 487 BTC worth $50M, largest buy in the last six weeks and they are raising another 620M Euro through its first euro-denominated stock offering. And then they bought another 8178 BTC for $835.6M. And then we had BTC going down below $104K, hiting the crypto mining stocks and we could see them dropping in value from 8% up to double digits. Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $524M Tuesday, while most people were worring about its future. Only 14.447 BTC were bought ny institutional investors in October, as opposed to September 38.000. The irony, BTC broke below six figures again, takin the entire crypto market down with it. We had $1.3B in liquidations on derivatives market. Harvard knows its math, as they boughts more BlackRock Bitcoin ETF, trippled down up to $443M worth. Binance also takes BlackRock Treasuries as collateral now. Fun fact, when everyone agrees that BTC hits its bottom, they are usually wrong and we have Bitcoin dropping even more. Moral of the story: buy or sell, but do not try to guess the bottom. Adam Beck said that quantum computers won't threaten Bitcoin for at least 20 to 40 years. Shadow Bitcoin ATMs appeared in Nairobi's upscale shopping malls even if no crypto provider has received proper licensing yet. Malaysia's national utility provider identified more than 13K locations that stole electricity for crypto mining between 2022 and Augist 2025 with the total damage reaching over $1B in stolen power. Czech central bank buys BTC IN $1m test pilot, a first among global central banks.
- Ethereum: Bitmine just bought almost half a billion dollars worth of ETH (110K), holding now 3.5M ETH, almost 2.9 of the total supply. Many institutional investors restarted their ETH accumulation. ETH dominates with $201B in tokenized assets, nearly two thirds of the entire $314B global market. Tokenized fund AUM on Ethereum exploded by 2000% since January 2024. The Ethereum Foundation unveiled their decentralized AI (dAI) team's 2026 roadmap, addresing the adoption of the recent developments, in ERC-8004 and x402. Well, all these happened while ETH investors move and spend three times faster that their BTC counterparts.
- Altcoins and stablecoins: The first XRP ETF could launch this week, as we have 21Shares, Proshares, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton and few others applying for it. XRP holders can also earn yield though a new tokenized product on BNB Chain called mXRP. Trump-related tokens pump as the president teases tariff dividents. Winklevoss backs Zcash treasury as Leap Therapeutics rebranded as Cypherpunk Tech and boughts $50M worth of Zcash in a funding round led by Winklewoss Capital. Zcash jumped 11.3% after this $50M buy and overtook Monero as top privacy coin. BNB stays up and Pancake TVL is growing, Fermi hardfork is hiting testnet too. dYdX is ready to vote on distribution of protocol revenues. Lido Finance proposes an automated buyback for the LDO token. Sui inveiled USDsui, a native stablecoin issued by Bridge, a company under Stripe. VanEck selected Sol Strategies to stake the Solana holdings in its upcoming ETF. Solana ETFs hit enchanges all at once, within a three-day window, but SOL still dropped 16% to $138. AI marketcap dropped by -18.7% to $24.2B, with only 13% of the top AI tokens being green.
- NFTs and blockchain games: 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.
- Good news: Mastercard turns wallet addresses into simple usernambes. UK has lifted its ban on crypto exchange-traded notes, allowing retail investors to gain exposure to BTC and ETH in pensions and ISAs. BlackRock launches its iShares Bitcoin ETP on the London Stock Exchange. Citigroup is preparing to launch a crypto custody service in 2026. 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. Even Nigel Farage called on the UK to introduce crypto regulations urgently as we fall behind as a financial center. Coinbase launched a new ICO platform, and Monad will be the first to use it. JPMorgan and DBS Bank are creating a blockchain framework for instant bank-to-bank transfers, as a stablecoin alternative. Solana treasury firm Upexy approved a $50M buyback for its own shares. Singapore Exchange launched crypto perpetual futures. Amina Bank became the first international bank to win Hong Kong's type 1 license for institutional crypto services. Ondo just unlocked access to tokenized US stocks for 500M European investors. Visa pilots stablecoin payouts for gig workers and creators worldwide. Circle's USDC growth fuels bullish outlook after strong third quarter results.
- Bad news: A Cloudflare outage shut down most of the major exchanges: Coinbase, Kraken, Aave, Etherscan, were all hit with the same '500 Internal server error' message. Institutions are loading on the last quarter of 2025, planning to exit crypto in 2026, some reports pointed out. CleanCore did a disastruos bet on Dogecoin, and now their stock is at its lowest point all year. Coinbase m oved incorporation to Texas, dissatisfied with Delaware's legal environment.
- Joke of the week: Bank are losing to crypto yield products, as yield bearing stablecoins exploded 300% year over year. Treasuries are tokenized going from single digits in 2022 to over $36B in 2025. Close second place, we had China accusing US of seizing $13B in BTC linked to a 202 crypto hack targeting a large Chinese crypto mining pool, with CHina implying that the hack was executed by a state-level hacking organization. It is not like the NK hakers work and stay in China, isn't it? US said that hte money are linked to Chen Zhi, a Chinese-Cambodgian bussinessman now facing US charges for crypto fraud.
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.
!BBH