Crypto
$1T

Painvember is real — the crypto market has lost more than $1 trillion in overall market cap since early October and now sits at $3.2 trillion, down from $4.3 trillion on October 6, when bitcoin hit its all-time high.

Bitcoin dipped below $90,000 for the first time since April late Monday night. The asset is roughly flat from one year ago, shortly after the US presidential election.

“The longer bitcoin stays under $100k, the more the sense of imminent doom intensifies. But amid all this panic, there are reasons to be optimistic. We’ve seen BTC ETF ownership jump from 20% to 28% this year, institutional demand remains high, and the biggest Bitcoin whale — Michael Saylor — has just scooped up more BTC,” Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood News.

  • The Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index is now at 11, reflecting “extreme fear.”

  • Bitcoin ETFs saw $254.51 million in outflows on Monday, bringing total outflows to $2.59 billion in November. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the most successful bitcoin ETF, saw a whopping $1.26 billion exit its fund so far this month.

  • Meanwhile, ethereum ETFs suffered $182.8 million in outflows — $1.42 billion so far this month, according to SoSoValue.

  • Crypto liquidations reached $801 million in the past 24 hours, Coinglass data shows. Bitcoin suffered $433 million in liquidations, with the bulk of them — $390.89 million — in long positions.

“Bitcoin and crypto are trading much more like classic risk assets right now. Everything is moving with broader risk sentiment and growing anxiety around credit,” Greg Magadini, director of derivatives at Amberdata, told Sherwood.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

$389M

US Attorney David Metcalf announced Thursday the arrests of Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, alleged senior members of AudiA6, a cryptocurrency money-laundering service believed to be responsible for laundering over $389 million.

The arrests coincided with a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure, involving the search of three properties, the seizure of servers and domains connected to the organization, as well as freezing cryptocurrency assets, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Tkachuk and Ledenev were “charged by criminal complaint with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering,” the DOJ said. If convicted, they face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.

Per the criminal complaint, AudiA6 offered services to conceal the origin of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity, charging fees of up to 5% of the amount laundered.

The two defendants are in custody of Republic of Georgia authorities, and the US Attorney’s Office aims to seek their extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

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