PDAX, a regulated cryptocurrency exchange in the Philippines, has partnered with Web3 payroll provider Toku to enable remote workers in the country to receive wages in stablecoins.
According to Tuesday’s press release, the new integration connects Toku’s token-based payroll system with PDAX’s regulated cash-out rails, enabling companies to send stablecoin wages through their usual payroll flows and allowing workers to convert earnings to pesos without incurring wire fees or delays.
Toku routes payments directly to PDAX wallets or external addresses for real-time, onchain settlement. Workers can then cash out to nearly any Philippine bank or e-wallet, including GCash and GrabPay, while employers have the option to fund payroll in either PHP or stablecoins such as (USDC), (USDG) or (RLUSD).
Toku is a global payroll platform that lets businesses pay employees and contractors in tokens or stablecoins using their existing payroll systems. According to the company’s website, it is used in over 100 countries.
PDAX is a Philippine crypto exchange that provides trading, cash-out services and tokenized asset products for local users and businesses.
The Philippines has become one of Asia’s more active crypto adopters, with government agencies and major banks launching blockchain pilots and stablecoin initiatives over the past two years.
In 2024, Tether partnered with Web3 platform Uquid to let people in the Philippines pay their Social Security System contributions using USDt on The Open Network. The SSS is the country’s state-run social security program, covering workers across both formal and informal sectors.
In January 2025, several Philippine banks began collaborating on the PHPX stablecoin, a Hedera-based project designed to facilitate real-time remittances using distributed ledger technology.
In July 2025, the Philippine government said it would begin notarizing official documents on the Polygon blockchain. Paul Soliman, CEO of Bayanichain, the company behind the effort, said the system will be used to track government budget records.
In August, the country’s Congress considered a bill that would direct the central bank to build a 10,000 Bitcoin strategic reserve. The “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act” would require the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to purchase 10,000 Bitcoin and hold it in a trust for a minimum of 20 years.
Bitwise’s Solana Staking ETF (BSOL) pulled in $56 million in volume on its launch day, while Canary Capital’s spot XRP ETF (XRPC) posted $58 million, the highest two volumes for any ETF launched in 2025.
Yet, SOL traded near $205 one day before the ETF launch and slumped to $165 within a week, a 20% drop during what K33’s Vetle Lunde called “a clear success” in terms of flows. As of press time, SOL traded around $140.
XRP slipped 7% within 48 hours surrounding its ETF debut, dropping from the region between $2.40 and $2.50 toward the low $2.20. Both coins are now at multi-month lows, while their ETF wrappers continue to log positive net creations.
The paradox isn’t actually paradoxical. These ETFs were launched exactly as designed into a particularly challenging part of the cycle, which consisted of heavy profit-taking, macro risk-off sentiment, and capital reshuffling within the crypto space, rather than fresh money arriving from outside.
Record ETF prints and red spot charts can coexist because they measure different things.
Volume doesn’t equal net buying
The “record volume” headlines for BSOL and XRPC describe the number of ETF shares that changed hands, not the amount of new capital that entered the underlying coins.
Those numbers capture secondary trading between early buyers, fast money, and market-makers. They include rebalancing out of other crypto exposures into the new wrapper.
They contain short-term arbitrage where traders buy the ETF and hedge by selling futures or spot SOL/XRP, which can actually pressure prices downward.
Net inflows, which involve the creation of new ETF shares that require actual coin purchases, were strong but relatively small compared to the market size.
CoinShares data indicate that Solana products generated approximately $421 million in one week, with further inflows exceeding $100 million in subsequent weeks.
Despite registering $245 million in inflows on its debut day, the Canary fund was part of the XRP funds group, which saw $15.5 million in outflows last week, suggesting a U-turn in inflows.
The bottom line is: against tokens with market caps in the tens of billions and heavy existing derivatives open interest, those flows don’t move the needle immediately.
The ETF plumbing explains the lag. Canary’s S-1 makes clear that the trust holds XRP directly and creates or redeems shares in 10,000-share “baskets.”
Authorized participants can deliver cash or XRP to create baskets, with the trust sourcing coins via approved venues.
Most launch-day excitement remains in the secondary market, as ETF shares can change hands throughout the day without triggering any creation or redemption at the trust level.
Where creations do occur, they’re often hedged. APs and market-makers routinely buy ETF shares and sell futures or spot to manage risk.
In a risk-off environment, that hedge leg contributes to downward pressure on the underlying coin even as the ETF itself grows.
Launching into a drawdown
These ETFs didn’t arrive in a vacuum. Since mid-October, Bitcoin has given back most of its 2025 gains, falling about 22% from its early-October peak near $126,000 to below $93,000.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs simultaneously flipped from record inflows to heavy redemptions.
Solana and XRP funds are the bright spots in that dataset. Solana especially has “bucked the trend” with back-to-back weeks of inflows, before registering $8.3 million in outflows last week.
These altcoin ETFs are swimming upstream against broad de-risking in everything from BTC ETFs to tech stocks.
Record launches in a structurally hostile macro window produce exactly this outcome: strong relative performance for the new products, weak absolute performance for the underlying assets.
The flows data reveal something else: capital going into altcoin ETFs is rotating from elsewhere in the crypto stack rather than arriving as fresh fiat.
Following the Oct. 10 liquidation event, digital asset ETPs experienced $513 million in total outflows. However, Solana and XRP funds still attracted $156 million and $73.9 million, respectively.
Altcoin ETFs are gaining market share within crypto ETPs, while the overall ETP market is shrinking. For spot prices, that redistributes existing risk across tickers rather than injecting new demand. The expectations tax
Both SOL and XRP experienced significant run-ups in the lead-up to their ETF listings. Trading data shows SOL climbing from local lows around $177 to approximately $203-205 in the week leading up to the Oct. 28 ETF debut, fueled by aggressive bullish positioning and headlines targeting upside scenarios of over $ 400.
Once BSOL actually launched, that pre-positioning flipped. Profit-taking, stretched valuations, and weakening risk appetite drove SOL’s 20% drop from $205 to $165 despite the ETF’s second-strongest-ever inflow week.
XRP showed the same pattern compressed into a tighter timeframe. The SEC’s generic listing rule in September flagged Solana and XRP as likely first beneficiaries.
XRP rallied on each incremental step toward listing, from Nasdaq’s certification to the final 8-A filing. By the time XRPC opened, Binance News described the intraday move as a “classic sell-the-news” reaction.
The ETF is structurally bullish, but much of that bullishness is already priced in ahead of time. Launch day is when early longs finally have a big, liquid venue to sell into. The product succeeds by its own metrics while the trade that anticipated it gets unwound.
Wrapper innovation doesn’t repeal the cycle
The day-one paradox resolves into a few clean threads. These are real products with real demand. BSOL and XRPC genuinely set 2025 records on first-day metrics and generated hundreds of millions in creations, even as the broader ETP universe bled capital.
They arrived late in the cycle, not early. The launches followed a year of aggressive price appreciation and optimism for ETFs.
By the time tickers went live, SOL and XRP were already crowded trades, with investors using the ETF window to de-risk and lock in gains.
The macro tide is flowing out. Bitcoin’s drawdown from $126,000 to sub-$100,000, the $2.3 billion outflows in ETFs, and rising rate-cut uncertainty mean even good micro stories can’t overpower the higher-beta nature of altcoins.
Mechanics mute the short-term effect. Day-one ETF “volume” is a noisy mix of seeding, intraday churn, and hedged arbitrage.
Net creations have been strong but too small, and too offset by selling elsewhere in crypto, to dictate price in the first few weeks.
The forward-looking question is whether this paradox resolves if ETF inflows continue to compound while Bitcoin and Ethereum stabilize.
Does sustained institutional wrapper demand eventually pull spot prices higher? Or does the market treat these as new vehicles for existing capital to rotate through?
The answer depends on whether fresh fiat arrives or whether crypto remains stuck in internal reshuffling mode.
The day-one paradox isn’t a failure of the ETF trade, but rather a reminder that wrapper innovation doesn’t repeal the cycle. It just gives the cycle a new set of tickers to express itself through.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands announced that it would allow citizens to access funds through a government-issued digital asset as part of the nation’s Universal Basic Income (UBI) program.
In a Wednesday announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the government of the island nation said it had launched a digital wallet called Lomalo, which will utilize the US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDM1 to enable citizens to access the UBI program. According to the government, the first disbursement of funds will occur in late November, allowing citizens to access them through their wallet, by physical check, or via direct deposit.
“By introducing a secure digital option alongside our traditional methods, we are strengthening our financial systems and ensuring that no community is left behind,” said David Paul, finance minister for the Marshall Islands.
Neighboring Pacific island nations have rolled out similar programs over the years, including Palau’s stablecoin on the XRP Ledger for government employees, and the central bank of the Solomon Islands’ Bokolo Cash for peer-to-peer transactions and retail payments in the nation’s capital, Honiara.
“Citizens will be able to transfer to other registered Lomalo users,” a spokesperson for the Marshall Islands’ finance minister told Cointelegraph. “Right now, only citizens registered for the UBI can set up a wallet.”
Warnings from the IMF on the Marshall Islands utilizing digital assets
The launch of the digital wallet as part of the islands’ UBI program followed warnings from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 2023, the group urged the government of the Marshall Islands to reconsider its central bank digital currency program, then known as SOV.
“Progress on rolling back past digital initiatives is welcome,” said the IMF in a Sept. 10 notice. “Current plans to issue a ‘digital sovereign bond’ carry significant risks relative to perceived returns, which cannot be effectively mitigated given lack of pre-requisite capacity. Thus, in the mission’s view, the authorities should not proceed with the global launch as planned.”
The IMF said that the expansion of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), which the Marshall Islands began recognizing as legal entities in 2022, and the launch of the UBI program using the “untested” USDM1 could have “adverse macro-fiscal and financial integrity implications.” The fund urged the government to scale back the UBI program to a “more targeted scheme to those who need it the most.”
For more than a decade, the DeFi sector has operated on a fractured promise. The theoretical pitch of a fairer, more accessible global financial system has consistently crashed against the rocks of practical reality.
In practice, DeFi has delivered a user experience defined by hostility of confusing interfaces, punitive gas fees, risky workflows, and the terrified clutching of seed phrases. It created a system where only the technically literate or those willing to take risks dared to tread, leaving the vast majority of the world’s savers on the sidelines.
But the launch of Aave’s new mobile savings application marks a distinct departure from this exclusionary history.
By radically re-engineering the user journey to mimic the seamlessness of modern fintech, Aave is making a strategic wager that the path to onboarding a billion users isn’t about teaching them to navigate the blockchain, but about making the blockchain entirely invisible.
The end of the “Tech Tax”
The most formidable barrier to DeFi adoption has never been the lack of yield; it has been the abundance of friction.
The “tech tax” of the ecosystem, requiring users to manage browser extensions like MetaMask, navigate complex signing pop-ups, and calculate gas fees in Ethereum, effectively capped the market size at power users.
The Aave App represents a fundamental break with this pattern. Leveraging advanced account abstraction, the application removes the vestiges of crypto’s technical burden.
There are no ledger devices to connect, no hexadecimal wallet addresses to copy and paste, and no manual bridging of assets between disparate chains. The interface simply asks the user to save.
This way, users can deposit euros, dollars, or connect debit cards, and the protocol handles the backend complexity of converting fiat into yield-bearing stablecoins.
By stripping away the “crypto” aesthetics and presenting itself as a clean, neo-banking interface, Aave is targeting the demographic that Revolut and Chime captured: digital natives who want utility without technical overhead.
A bank-like experience
The structural ambition of the app is to function as a bank in the front and a decentralized liquidity engine in the back.
This is not a trivial pivot. Aave currently manages over $50 billion in assets through smart contracts. If structured as a traditional financial institution, its balance sheet would rank it among the top 50 banks in the United States.
Total Value of Assets Locked on Aave (Source: DeFiLlama)
However, unlike traditional banks, where liquidity is often opaque, Aave’s ledger is transparent and auditable 24/7.
To operationalize this for the mass market, Aave Labs’ subsidiary recently secured authorization as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) under Europe’s comprehensive MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) framework.
This regulatory milestone is the linchpin of the strategy. It provides the app with a legally recognized gateway into the traditional SEPA banking system, enabling compliant and regulated fiat on-and-off ramps.
This moves Aave out of the “shadow banking” categorization and into a recognized tier of financial service providers, granting it the legitimacy required to court mainstream depositors who would otherwise never touch a DeFi protocol.
The $1 Million protection
If complexity is the first barrier to entry, trust is the second.
Numerous exploits, bridge hacks, and governance failures mark the history of DeFi. For the average saver, the fear of total loss outweighs the allure of high returns. No amount of yield is worth the risk of a drained wallet.
Aave is attempting to shatter this ceiling by introducing a balance protection mechanism of up to $1 million per user. This figure quadruples the standard $250,000 insurance limit for FDIC-insured accounts in the US.
While this protection is protocol-native rather than government-backed, the psychological impact is profound. It signals a shift in responsibility from the retail user to the protocol. In doing so, Aave is repositioning DeFi from a “buyer beware” frontier experiment into a product with institutional-grade safety rails.
For a middle-class saver in Europe or Asia, this reframes the proposition from “speculating on crypto” to “saving with better insurance than my local bank.”
The yield advantage
While protection solves the trust deficit, yield solves the incentive problem.
The macroeconomic timing of Aave’s rollout is fortuitous. As central banks globally, including the Federal Reserve and the ECB, begin to cut rates, traditional savings yields are projected to compress back toward the low single digits.
Aave’s yield engine, however, operates on a different fundamental driver.
According to analytics from SeaLaunch, Aave’s stablecoin APY (denominated in USD and EUR) has consistently outperformed risk-free instruments, such as US Treasury bills. This is because the yield is derived from on-chain borrowing demand rather than central bank policy.
This creates a persistent premium. As traditional rates fall, the spread between a bank savings account (offering perhaps 3%) and Aave (offering 5–9%) widens.
Aave Stablecoins vs US Treasury (Source: SeaLaunch)
For global users, particularly in developing economies with unstable banking sectors or high inflation, this access to dollar-denominated, high-yield savings is a necessary financial lifeline and not just a luxury.
The distribution engine
Ultimately, the most understated component of Aave’s strategy is distribution.
By launching on the Apple iOS App Store, Aave is attaching its decentralized rails to the world’s largest fintech distribution engine. In 2024, the App Store received 813 million weekly visitors across 175 markets, according to Apple.
Considering this, Sebastian Pulido, Aave’s Director of Institutional & DeFi Business, captured it perfectly by describing the new application as “DeFi’s iPhone moment” because the platform will “abstract away all complexity and friction around getting access to defi yields.”
Essentially, just as the browser made the internet accessible to non-coders, the App Store makes DeFi accessible to non-traders.
Aave is tapping into the same infrastructure that scaled PayPal, Cash App, and Nubank to global dominance.
So, for the first time, a user in Lagos, Mumbai, or Berlin can onboard into DeFi with the same simplicity as downloading a game. There are no barriers, no distinct “crypto” learning curve, and no friction.
Essentially, if DeFi is ever to reach a billion users, it will not happen through browser extensions or technical whitepapers. It will happen through an app that looks like a bank, protects like an insurer, and pays like a hedge fund.
BNB price hovers near $900 amid market volatility and Bitcoin’s decline.
Whales increase positions while retail investors show cautious selling.
Key support at $886 is crucial to prevent further downside toward $800.
Binance Coin (BNB) continues to navigate a turbulent market, with BNB price hovering near the psychologically important $900 mark.
After a steep decline from mid-October highs above $1,370, investors and traders are closely watching whether the cryptocurrency can hold key support levels while larger players make strategic moves.
Notably, the ongoing volatility in the broader crypto market, particularly Bitcoin price fluctuations, has further amplified uncertainty for BNB.
BNB price under pressure after breaking key support
BNB price has struggled to maintain momentum over the past weeks, dipping below $1,000 and failing to reclaim the critical resistance zone between $1,000 and $1,050.
A recent breakdown below $900 confirmed a bearish pattern, signalling technical weakness as short-term moving averages pointed downward alongside the Bitcoin price.
The 7-day RSI currently sits at extreme oversold levels, suggesting the possibility of a minor rebound, but MACD readings indicate continued downward pressure that may extend the decline.
Analysts have highlighted the $882.2 Fibonacci retracement as a critical defence level before the accumulation zones between $770 and $730 could come into play, emphasising the precarious position BNB finds itself in.
Market-wide deleveraging has compounded the pressure on Binance Coin (BNB), as liquidations surpassing $1 billion across the crypto space coincided with Bitcoin’s drop below $90,000.
Fear and Greed Index readings of 15 reflect extreme fear among investors, and stablecoin reserves on exchanges have fallen sharply, limiting buy-side liquidity just as selling pressure peaked.
This combination of technical breakdown and broad market turmoil has created an environment where both short-term traders and long-term holders must carefully weigh their positions.
Whales step in amid mixed signals
Despite bearish pressures, whale activity has been noticeable, particularly at lower levels around $900.
Large wallet investors have been increasing their exposure through futures contracts, with derivatives data showing a spike in average order sizes.
This is a potential signal of accumulation, suggesting that more sophisticated market participants see value at current levels.
Meanwhile, retail investors appear more cautious, with exchange inflows indicating some degree of selling, highlighting a contrast between institutional and individual behaviours.
The technical outlook remains mixed, with on-chain metrics and momentum indicators like the MACD and RSI suggesting BNB is technically oversold but not yet positioned for a strong reversal.
The presence of a double-bottom pattern around $900, combined with supportive long-term trendlines and BNB Chain upgrades, provides a framework for potential recovery if the cryptocurrency can weather short-term volatility.
The key levels to watch for the BNB price this week
Traders should pay close attention to the $886 support and the broader $880–$900 zone, as a failure here could trigger further downside toward $800.
Conversely, a successful hold of these levels, coupled with a rebound above the 50-period EMA near $951, may pave the way for the BNB price to approach the $1,000 psychological mark.
Particularly, Bitcoin price movements will continue to play a pivotal role, as BNB remains highly correlated with the flagship cryptocurrency.
Ultimately, the interplay between market sentiment, technical patterns, and whale activity will likely dictate the next significant move.
Ether’s 20% monthly decline has pushed it into a clear daily downtrend, retesting $3,000 for the first time since July.
The Mayer Multiple falling below 1 signals a historically strong accumulation zone, resembling past bottoming phases.
Leveraged liquidity has reset, but clusters at $2,900 and $2,760 warn of further volatility before a potential recovery.
Ethereum’s native token, Ether (ETH), has slipped nearly 20% in November, from $3,900 to retesting the $3,000 level on Nov. 17, a price last seen on July 15. The drawdown has pushed ETH into a well-defined daily downtrend, marked by consecutive lower highs and lower lows, placing the market in a technically fragile zone despite long-term accumulation signals starting to emerge.
Mayer Multiple drops below 1: What it means for ETH
One of those signals comes from Capriole Investments’ Mayer Multiple (MM), which measures the ratio between ETH’s current price and its 200-day moving average. A reading below 1 indicates Ether is trading at a discount to its long-term trend and has historically aligned with major accumulation zones.
ETH’s Mayer Multiple dropping below 1 for the first time since mid-June now places it back into the “buy zone,” a region that has previously preceded strong multimonth recoveries.
Throughout ETH’s history, sub-1 readings have typically indicated long-term bottoms, with the main exception being January 2022, when the metric remained suppressed due to the onset of a broader bear market.
At the moment, MM levels resemble early-cycle reset conditions rather than the structural breakdown seen in 2022, positioning the current market closer to historical buy opportunities than to distribution or selling zones (usually found when MM is greater than 2.4).
Despite the macro accumulation setup, short-term price action remains vulnerable. Data from Hyblock Capital shows that even after sweeping the key $3,000 psychological zone, ETH still sits above several dense long-liquidation clusters.
“We’ve swept quite a few large (bright) long liq clusters. The next two below on ETH are $2,904 to $2,916 and $2,760 to $2,772,” Hyblock wrote, implying the market may require a deeper liquidity flush before forming a durable base.
ETH long liquidity cluster under $3,000. Source: Hyblock Capital/X
Adding to this, analytics platform Altcoin Vector highlighted that Ether’s overall liquidity structure has “fully reset,” a condition historically present before every major bottom. According to the platform, liquidity collapses tend to precede multi-week bottoming phases rather than immediate structural breakdowns.
Altcoin Vector wrote that the correction window remains open as long as liquidity rebuilds: If replenishment occurs in the coming weeks, ETH could enter its next expansion phase. However, the longer liquidity takes to return, the more prolonged the grind becomes, and the more structurally exposed ETH becomes to more downside.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
AAVE is down 4% in the last 24 hours and is now trading at $171 per coin.
The bearish performance comes despite the launch of the Aave App on the App Store.
Aave launches the Aave App on App Store
Aave, the largest decentralized crypto lending platform, announced on Monday that it is launching its Aave App on Apple’s App Store. The team revealed that the app will allow users to earn up to 6.5% annualized yield, higher than money market funds, leveraging Aave’s infrastructure lending protocol.
Users can also deposit funds from bank accounts, debit cards, or stablecoins. The new app also offers “balance protection” on deposits up to $1 million.
However, this announcement didn’t stop AAVE from being affected by the bearish trend of the broader crypto market. AAVE has lost 4% of its value in the last 24 hours and risks declining further as the market selloff continues.
AAVE could retest the $150 psychological level
The AAVE/USD 4-hour chart is bearish and inefficient as the coin has lost 21% of its value in the last seven days. The technical indicators are also bearish, with the RSI of 38 indicating that AAVE could enter the oversold region if the selloff continues.
The MACD lines are still within the negative territory, suggesting that traders could reduce their risk in the market. If the bearish trend continues, AAVE could retest the $150 support level in the coming hours or days. An extended bearish trend could see AAVE drop below the October 10 low of $133.
However, if the market recovers, AAVE could rally towards the first major resistance level at $183. Overcoming the $200 psychological level would allow AAVE to target the recent $236 monthly high.
Bitcoin rebounded 4% from a key range under $90,000, outperforming US equities on Tuesday.
Tech stocks slid ahead of Nvidia’s pivotal Q3 earnings, which could determine the next phase of the AI trade.
The Coinbase premium gap plunged to negative $114, pointing to waning institutional demand, which may keep BTC range-bound in the short term.
Bitcoin (BTC) staged a sharp rebound on Nov. 18, rising 4% from an intraday low of $89,300 to trade as high as $93,700 as BTC rallied from a key order block between $91,500 and $88,400. The bounce came as risk assets wobbled, briefly putting BTC in the unusual position of outperforming US equities.
For a change, Bitcoin led the broader market. Stocks slid again on Tuesday, with investors pulling back from tech and AI-related stocks. The Dow fell as much as 1.2%, the S&P 500 dropped 1.1%, and the Nasdaq plunged 1.5%. Nvidia slipped another 2%, adding to its 10% decline this month ahead of closely watched Q3 earnings due Wednesday.
The volatility comes at a crucial moment for markets, with Nvidia’s results widely viewed as a potential breakout or bubble-check for the AI trade that has dominated the year. In October, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed that Nvidia had already secured $500 billion in chip orders for 2025–2026, signaling confidence that the AI boom still has room to run. Analysts took the comments as an indication of stronger-than-expected revenue potential for 2026.
But projections have cooled. Nvidia is now expected to post a 56% year-over-year revenue jump to $54.92 billion for the latest quarter, a strong figure, but well below the triple-digit growth rates it delivered earlier in the cycle.
Still, traders appear to be positioning for upside, with Bitcoin’s rebound suggesting a degree of speculative risk-taking returning ahead of what could be a pivotal earnings moment for AI and broader markets.
Key BTC metric suggests prolonged possible sideways action
While Bitcoin’s rebound could lift market sentiment, onchain data suggested the recovery may not be as strong as it appears. According to CryptoQuant, the Coinbase premium gap has plunged to -$114.5 on Nov. 17, one of its lowest readings since Feb. 25. The last time the premium fell this sharply was in February 2025, when it hit –$138, coinciding with a period of institutional pullback.
Bitcoin Coinbase Premium Gap. Source: CryptoQuant
The Coinbase premium gap tracks the price difference between Coinbase, favored by institutions and large players, and Binance, which is dominated by retail traders. In a bullish market, the premium typically turns positive as institutional demand accelerates.
However, a deep negative premium gap signaled the opposite, where the price action could be driven largely by Binance’s retail crowd, not institutions.
A persistently negative premium suggests the current market is influenced more by reactive traders who are quick to chase upside and faster to sell on dips.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
Bitcoin crossed a watershed moment in its monetary history on Nov. 17, surpassing 19.95 million mined coins and pushing the network past 95% of its immutable 21 million supply cap. This leaves the network with less than 1.05 million BTC to mine over the next 115 years.
On the surface, the milestone appears to be a victory lap for the digital asset as it represents a validation of the scarcity narrative that has driven its adoption by Wall Street giants and sovereign balance sheets alike.
Total Mined Bitcoin (Source: Bitcoin Magazine)
Yet, for the industrial operators responsible for securing the blockchain, the celebration is muted.
In reality, the crossing of the 95% threshold marks the beginning of Bitcoin’s most capital-intensive and operationally unforgiving phase: the “5% Era.”
Bitcoin’s mathematics of the long tail
Bitcoin’s issuance schedule is not a linear progression but a geometric decay, governed by the “halving” event. This is a hard-coded event that reduces block rewards by 50% every 210,000 blocks, or approximately every four years.
When the network launched in 2009, miners could extract 50 BTC every ten minutes. Today, following the April 2024 halving, that reward stands at just 3.125 BTC. This decay function means that while the network is nearing its supply ceiling in terms of quantity, it is only at the midpoint in terms of time.
The final 5% of supply will be stretched across a century-long timeline, with the very last partial bitcoin not expected to be mined until the year 2140.
For macro investors, this trajectory is the core investment thesis. Bitcoin is transitioning from a youthful, high-inflation asset into a mature commodity with an inflation rate destined to drop below that of gold and, eventually, near zero.
This programmatic scarcity is precisely what fueled the approval of spot ETFs and the entry of institutional capital.
However, for miners whose business models were built during an era of abundant subsidies, this transition represents a looming revenue cliff. The era of “easy money” mining is mathematically over.
The miner’s paradox
The economic strain of this transition is not a theoretical future problem; it is visible in today’s on-chain data. The “5% Era” is beginning under arguably the most difficult market conditions in the network’s history.
Hashprice, which is the industry standard metric for tracking miner revenue per unit of hashrate, plummeted to $38.82 per petahash per second (PH/s) per day last week.
This represents a 12-month low and a severe contraction from the $80-$100 levels seen during previous bull market cycles.
Bitcoin Hashprice (Source: Hashrate Index)
The collapse in revenue is driven by a “Miner’s Paradox”:
Price Weakness: With Bitcoin trading below $90,000, the fiat value of the 3.125 BTC block reward is insufficient to cover the operational expenditure (OpEx) of older fleets.
Record Difficulty: Despite falling revenue, the network hashrate has not capitulated. It remains elevated near 1.1 zettahash per second (ZH/s).
Typically, when revenue drops, inefficient miners unplug, difficulty adjusts downward, and margins recover for the survivors.
That mechanism appears broken in the short term. Miners, flush with capital raised during previous quarters or locked into long-term hosting contracts, are keeping machines running at a loss or breakeven.
On-chain data reveals the damage: the industry recently earned a weekly average of just over $37 million per day, a sharp decline from the $40 million-plus daily averages seen months prior.
As a result, the sector is currently caught in a vice where revenues are falling while the difficulty of extraction rises, a dynamic that invariably leads to consolidation.
The pivot to AI
Facing this structural margin compression, the mining industry is fracturing into two distinct camps: the “Pure Plays” who are doubling down on Bitcoin efficiency, and the “Hybrid Operators” who are fleeing the sector entirely for a more lucrative market in Artificial Intelligence.
The logic is strictly improved unit economics. The same power capacity and cooling infrastructure used to mine Bitcoin can, with hardware adjustments, be used to power High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI model training.
Currently, the arbitrage is massive because AI compute can yield exponentially higher revenue per megawatt-hour than Bitcoin mining.
In 2024, VanEck analysts quantified this opportunity, projecting that Bitcoin miners could unlock up to $38 billion in incremental annual revenue by diverting just 20% of their power capacity toward AI and HPC workloads.
Bitcoin Miners’ Earning Potential From AI as of 2024. (Source: VanEck)
The market is already witnessing this capital flight. Bitfarms, a name once synonymous with aggressive Bitcoin hashrate expansion, signaled a distinct shift with its recent announcement to wind down specific crypto operations in favor of AI compute.
Meanwhile, other operators across Texas and the Nordics, including Coreweave and Hive Digital, are also retrofitting facilities to capitalize on the AI boom.
This shift signals a broader transformation. The Bitcoin miners of the future may not be “miners” at all, but massive, hybrid energy-compute conglomerates where Bitcoin mining is merely a secondary revenue stream used to monetize excess power when AI demand dips.
This diversification may save the companies, but it raises questions about the long-term distribution of hashrate dedicated solely to securing the Bitcoin ledger.
The fee market
If the block subsidy is destined to vanish and miners are pivoting to AI, what will secure the Bitcoin network in 2030, 2040, or 2100?
Satoshi Nakamoto’s design posits that as the subsidy disappears, it will be replaced by transaction fees (the “service charge”). In this theory, demand for blockspace, driven by high-value settlements and financial applications, will become robust enough to compensate miners for maintaining the network.
However, the “5% Era” will test this thesis.
Currently, the fee market is volatile and unreliable. While the introduction of “Inscriptions” and “Runes” (protocols that allow data to be inscribed on satoshis) created brief spikes in fee revenue, the baseline demand for blockspace often remains too low to sustain the current hashrate without subsidies.
So, if Bitcoin’s price does not double every four years to offset the halving, transaction fees must rise to fill the void.
However, if they do not, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has argued that the network’s security budget, which is the total amount of money allocated to protect the chain from attacks, will shrink.
In that scenario, Drake said this could have a “systemic effect” on the emerging industry and “the fallout could take the entire crypto ecosystem with it.”
Miners face “Bitcoin’s most difficult phase”
Considering the above, the 95% supply milestone is less a finish line and more of a starting gun for Bitcoin’s most challenging phase.
The “free ride” of high inflation is over. For the first 16 years, miners were subsidized by the protocol to build out infrastructure.
Now, that subsidy is evaporating. The market structure is shifting from a gold rush, where anyone with a pickaxe could profit, to a brutal commodity market defined by economies of scale, energy arbitrage, and balance sheet efficiency.
Still, Bitcoin’s long-term vision remains intact. Its design ensures that scarcity compounds while monetary inflation trends toward zero.
However, the burden of enforcing that scarcity now falls heavily on the miners.
So, as the rewards for securing the network dwindle toward zero over the next 115 years, the mining industry will likely experience a washout of unprecedented scale.
Essentially, the operators who survive the “5% Era” will not only be miners, but also energy merchants and computing giants. Their struggle to extract the final million coins will shape not only the price of the asset but also the geopolitical reality of the network itself.
The Hyperliquid price is up 6.5% as a majority of major coins bleed.
The Hyperliquid price rally comes amid token buybacks and BLP rollout.
A risky pattern has, however, formed, hinting at a possible pullback.
Hyperliquid (HYPE) price has surged despite a broader market slump, drawing fresh attention to one of the strongest performers of the month.
While most major assets bleed through heavy selling pressure, HYPE has pushed higher on rising demand, aggressive buybacks, and growing activity across the Hyperliquid ecosystem.
But even as the altcoin’s market sentiment turns bullish, technical analysts warn that the rally may not be as secure as it appears.
Buybacks and BLP rollout drive momentum
The Hyperliquid (HYPE) price surge can be attributed first to the rapid progress of Hyperliquid’s Base Liquidity Pool testnet, commonly just referred to as BLP, which launched on Hypercore, the Layer 1 chain powering the exchange.
The BLP rollout signals a major shift in the protocol’s infrastructure as it introduces more efficient liquidity routing and additional yield mechanics.
The testnet has added new energy to the Hyperliquid ecosystem. It positions the platform not only as a fast on-chain exchange but also as a hub for tokenised equities such as Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX, which have attracted new users and boosted activity at a time when most platforms are seeing a pullback.
Another crucial force behind the recent HYPE price surge is the exchange’s aggressive buyback program.
Hyperliquid has already executed more than $1.3 billion worth of buybacks, removing over 28 million HYPE tokens from circulation.
The reduction in supply is creating steady upward pressure on the token, especially as long-term holders lock more HYPE into staking contracts.
Staking deposits have risen nearly 60% in a month, easing sell-side pressure and strengthening market confidence.
The tightening supply comes as Hyperliquid expands its role in the global derivatives market.
The exchange now accounts for more than 6% of perpetual futures market share, placing it alongside centralised giants such as Binance, OKX, and Bybit.
This expansion brings higher fees, more buybacks, and stronger fundamentals for HYPE.
Despite the strong fundamentals, technical signals are flashing warnings.
A head-and-shoulders pattern has been forming on the daily chart since June.
The neckline of the pattern sits near $35.5, a level that has repeatedly acted as a key support zone. If the price breaks below that area, HYPE could drop to the next support area just above $30.
