Will Bitcoin Hit $100K? 🚀
Plus, 💰 In the money, 📈 COINing it, 🐳 Whales weigh in.
Another day, another bitcoin all-time high! I’m Juan Aranovich, managing editor of Unchained.
In today’s edition:
📈 Bitcoin bulls stampede
🔥 Crypto market cap: Bulking up
🪙 Coinbase: Along for the ride
🤔 Misleading metrics?
🚨 Yacht, apartments, and cash
💸 Will Saylor ever stop?
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What’s Poppin’?
Bitcoin Hits an All-Time High — Again
Bitcoin surged to a new all-time high of $89,956 on Tuesday, marking a 10% daily gain as bullish momentum swept the market.
The rally was driven by optimism about increased regulatory clarity under the incoming administration of president-elect Donald Trump, alongside cascading liquidations totaling $581 million, according to CoinGlass data.
Spot bitcoin ETFs recorded $1.1 billion of inflows, led by BlackRock’s IBIT, with crypto-focused stocks such as Coinbase and MicroStrategy — dubbed “The Bitcoin Industrial Complex” — seeing a combined trading volume of $38 billion.
Bitcoin is now worth 10% of gold’s $17 trillion market capitalization.
Bets on the original cryptocurrency hitting $100,000 by year-end surged, with Polymarket participants assigning a 55% probability to the milestone.
Crypto Market Cap Reaches $3.15T
The total crypto market cap soared to a historic $3.15 trillion on Tuesday.
Bitcoin leads, with a market cap of $1.77 trillion, followed by Ethereum at $410 billion and Solana at $105 billion.
Ethereum climbed 9% to a high of $3,437, spurred by record-breaking inflows of $295.5 million into U.S. spot ether ETFs — more than doubling their previous daily high.
Interestingly, bitcoin and ether ETFs showed a strong inflow ratio of roughly 4:1, reflecting their relative market caps.
Will Trump’s Victory Spark a Wave of Crypto IPOs?
The election of Donald Trump has set the stage for a potentially more crypto-friendly regulatory environment, raising hopes for a wave of crypto companies going public.
Firms like Circle, the issuer of $37 billion market cap stablecoin USDC, are strong IPO contenders, with CEO Jeremy Allaire reaffirming their commitment to going public.
Similarly, Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics company less tied to crypto price volatility, is often floated as a solid IPO candidate.
That said, experts caution that IPOs aren’t for every crypto company. Volatility and the burden of regulatory filings make the process challenging.
Companies like Anchorage Digital and NYDIG, which focus on crypto market infrastructure and analytics, may have a better shot due to their relative stability.
While a pro-crypto SEC could reduce regulatory risk, as Baker & McKenzie’s Karl Egbert notes, firms will still need to address issues like profitability and product-level risks to truly seize the IPO moment.
Coinbase Stock Surges on Post-Election Bullishness
And it’s not just crypto tokens!
Shares of Coinbase, often seen as a proxy for the U.S. crypto market, soared more than 75% in the past week, closing Monday at $324.24 — their highest level since November 2021.
Investors are betting on a friendlier regulatory landscape under Trump, who has vowed to fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler. The political shift has propelled COIN into the top five most traded stocks, alongside giants such as Tesla and Nvidia.
The question now is whether that momentum can be sustained. Coinbase’s fortunes are highly correlated with broader crypto adoption and regulatory clarity, and the market is watching closely to see if the current rally signifies a lasting shift or whether it’s just a temporary spike.
Are Daily Active Addresses Misleading?
Blockchain activity metrics might not tell the full story. According to Coinbase data posted by Haseeb Qureshi, a managing partner at crypto fund Dragonfly, a small percentage of users dominate blockchain economics.
On Solana, for instance, 0.13% of accounts paid 90% of fees in Q3, among 125 million active accounts. Similar patterns exist on Base and Arbitrum, where 0.02%-0.6% of accounts generate the majority of fees.
This stark concentration, with “whales” driving up to 95% of activity, challenges the reliance on daily active addresses as a metric. Instead, fee distribution reveals a network’s true economic drivers and dependence on high-value users.
Former Alameda CEO Sam Trabucco to Forfeit $70M
Former Alameda Research CEO John Samuel Trabucco has agreed to forfeit significant assets to creditors of FTX as part of a settlement related to the defunct exchange’s bankruptcy proceedings.
The forfeitures include a 53-foot yacht purchased for $2.51 million and two San Francisco apartments valued at $8.7 million. Additionally, he relinquished claims totalling approximately $70 million against FTX, according to a Nov. 10 filing.
Trabucco is an American businessman known for his role as co-CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm affiliated with FTX. He was part of Sam Bankman-Fried's inner circle before both companies collapsed in 2022.
Trabucco resigned from his position as co-CEO of Alameda Research on Aug. 24, 2022, shortly before the company’s financial troubles were made public.
MicroStrategy Buys Another $2B of Bitcoin
MicroStrategy has made another massive bitcoin purchase funded by the issuance and sale of its stock.
The Michael Saylor-headed tech firm announced on Monday that it had acquired 27,200 BTC between Oct. 31 and Nov. 10.
The latest purchase takes MicroStrategy’s total bitcoin holdings to 279,420 BTC, worth around $23 billion at the time of writing.
Based on the average purchase price of $42,692 per bitcoin, MicroStrategy’s profits from bitcoin currently stand at around $11 billion.
The company, which began its bitcoin acquisition strategy in 2020, describes itself as the largest corporate holder of bitcoin and the world’s first bitcoin treasury company.
The firm reported a year-to-date BTC yield of 26.4% on Monday.
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Daily Bits… ✍️✍️✍
🎯 Fairshake-backed Democrat Ruben Gallego secured Arizona's Senate seat, adding to the crypto PAC's success in influencing key elections, even as Republicans gained Senate control and remain close to taking the House majority.
⚙️ Justin Drake unveiled the 'Beam Chain' proposal at Ethereum's Devcon, aiming to consolidate major upgrades like faster finality, improved staking, and native zero-knowledge proof support into a single overhaul of Ethereum's consensus layer.
🛠 Ethereum developers proposed EIP-7809 to enable native-like token properties, introducing opcodes such as mint, burn, and balance-checking for easier token management and expanded layer 2 application innovation.
🌐 Decentralized social media platform Lens unveiled its version 3, introducing customizable tools such as verifiable feeds and curated content groups to address centralized platforms' limitations, aiming to scale its 550,000-strong user base and combat algorithmic biases.
What Do You Meme?
📈 Your Market Update 📉
BTC is up 4.7%, trading at $86,152
ETH is up 1.9%, trading at $3,234
BTC dominance: 56.52%
Crypto market cap: $3.03T
*All data as of today, 08:00 am ET. Source: CoinGecko
Recommended Reads
A market update by Capriole Investments
Black or White? by Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX
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