分类： Bitcoin

Imagine the world’s internet backbone collapsing in a day.

Whether it’s due to human error, a catastrophic software bug, a rogue computer virus, or outright kinetic warfare, what happens to Bitcoin if the physical internet exchange hubs that connect the world suddenly go dark?

If Frankfurt, London, Virginia, Singapore, and Marseille were to go offline simultaneously, Bitcoin splits into three partitions.

Traffic across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the main trans-Pacific routes would stall, leaving the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and Oceania to view history separately until links are restored.

Block production continues inside each partition according to the hashrate that remains reachable.

With a 10-minute global target, a region that holds 45 percent of the hashrate produces roughly 2.7 blocks per hour, 35 percent produces about 2.1 blocks, and 20 percent produces about 1.2 blocks. Because nodes cannot exchange headers or transactions across partitions, each region advances a valid chain unaware of the others.

The result is a natural fork depth that grows with time and with the distribution of hashrate.

The partitioned cadence makes the divergence mechanical. Let’s assign rough hashrate averages to each region. For our modeling, we will use 45%, 35%, and 20% as our baseline distribution for the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and Europe and Africa, respectively.

An Americas cohort would add about six blocks every two hours, while Asia and Oceania would roughly add four to five blocks per hour, and Europe and Africa would add around two to three blocks per hour.

After one hour, the ledgers would already differ by double-digit blocks.

After half a day, gaps expand into the low hundreds.

After a full day, the chains differ by hundreds of blocks, which is beyond the range of routine reorganizations and forces services to treat regional confirmations as provisional only.

Local mempools split immediately. A transaction broadcast in New York would not reach Singapore, so receivers outside the sender’s partition would see nothing until routes recover.

Within each partition, fee markets turn local. Users compete for limited blockspace against the regional hashrate, so fees rise fastest where hashrate is smallest and demand remains high.

Exchanges, payment processors, and custodial wallets typically pause withdrawals and on-chain settlement when confirmations lose global finality, and Lightning counterparties face uncertainty around commitment transactions that confirm on minority partitions.

When routes are returned, nodes initiate an automatic reconciliation.

Each node compares chains and reorganizes to the valid chain with the most cumulative work.

The practical costs fall into three buckets:

1. The depth of reorganizations that invalidate minority-partition blocks.
2. The work of rebroadcasting and reprioritizing transactions that were previously “confirmed” only on a losing branch.
3. The operational checks that exchanges and custodians perform before reopening.

In a 24-hour fracture, dozens to hundreds of minority-partition blocks can be orphaned upon recovery, and services require additional hours to rebuild mempools, recalculate balances, and re-enable withdrawals.

Full economic normalization often lags protocol convergence because fiat rails, compliance checks, and channel management require human review.

The dynamics are easier to reason about by modeling isolation as a percentage of reachable hashrate rather than by counting hubs.

With 30 percent of the hashrate isolated, the minority side would add roughly 1.8 blocks per hour. This means that a standard six-confirmation payment within that partition becomes at risk after approximately three hours and twenty minutes, as those six blocks can be orphaned if the other 70 percent of the network builds a longer chain.

In a near 50/50 split, both partitions accumulate similar work, so even short splits create competing “confirmed” histories on both sides, and the outcome on reconnection becomes stochastic.

In an 80/20 split, the majority partition almost certainly wins; the smaller partition’s blocks, roughly 29 after a day, would be orphaned on merge, reversing many confirmed transactions in that region.

Resilience tools do exist, and they shape the real-world impact.

Satellite downlinks, high-frequency radio relays, delay-tolerant networking, mesh networks, and alternative transports, such as Tor bridges, can carry headers or minimal transaction flows across damaged routes.

These paths are narrow and high-latency, but even intermittent cross-partition propagation reduces fork depth by allowing some fraction of blocks and transactions to leak across.

Miner peering diversity, multi-homed exchange infrastructure, and the geographic spread of pools increase the likelihood that at least some work propagates globally through side channels, thereby limiting the depth and duration of reorganizations when the backbone returns.

The operational guidance for market participants during a network fracture is straightforward.

• Halt cross-partition settlement, treat all confirmations as provisional, and harden fee estimation against local spikes.
• Exchanges can switch to proof-of-reserve attestation without active withdrawals, extend confirmation thresholds to account for minority-partition risk, and publish deterministic policies that map isolation duration to the required number of confirmations.
• Wallets can surface clear warnings about regional finality, disable automatic channel rebalancing, and queue time-sensitive payments for rebroadcast on recovery.
• Miners should maintain diverse upstream connectivity and avoid manual overrides that deviate from standard longest-chain selection rules during the reconciliation process.

The protocol survives by design because nodes, once reconnected, converge on the chain with the most accumulated work.

The user experience does not fare as well during the split, since economic finality depends on consistent global propagation.

The most credible worst-case scenario under a day-long multi-hub outage is a temporary collapse in cross-border usability, a sharp and uneven fee shock, and deep reorganizations that invalidate regional confirmations.

When links are restored, software resolves the ledger deterministically, and services restore full functionality after operational checks.

The last step is reopening withdrawals and channels once balances and histories are coherent on the winning chain.

That’s the recoverable case, but what if the fracture never heals?

What would happen to Bitcoin during World War 3?

Now then, what if those backbone hubs I mentioned at the start never come back?

Well, in that dystopian scenario, Bitcoin, as we know it, does not reemerge.

You get permanent geographic partitions that behave like separate Bitcoin networks, sharing the same rules but no communication between them.

Each partition continues to mine, adjusts its difficulty on its own schedule, and develops its own economy, order books, and fee market. There is no mechanism to reconcile histories without restoring connectivity or coordinating a manual choice of a single chain.

Here is what that steady state looks like.

Consensus and difficulty

• Until each partition reaches the next 2016-block retarget, block times run slow or fast according to the reachable hashrate. After the retarget, each partition re-centers around 10 minutes locally.
• Using our approximated shares, the expected time to the first retarget is:

Partition	Hashrate share	Blocks/hour	Blocks/day	Days to 2016 blocks (first retarget)
Americas	~45%	~2.7	~64.8	~31 days
Asia/Oceania	~35%	~2.1	~50.4	~40 days
Europe/Africa/Middle East	~20%	~1.2	~28.8	~70 days

After that first retarget, each partition produces blocks at roughly 10 minutes, then continues halving and adjusting independently.

Halving dates diverge by wall-clock time because each region reaches halving heights at different speeds before its first retarget.

Supply and “what is BTC:” Fees, mempools, and payments

Inside each partition, the 21 million cap still applies per chain. Globally, the total number of coins across all partitions exceeds 21 million, as each chain continues to issue subsidies independently. Economically, this creates three incompatible BTC assets that share addresses and keys but have different UTXO sets.

Keys control coins on every partition simultaneously. If a user spends the same UTXO in two regions, both spends are valid on their respective local chains, resulting in permanent “split coins” with the same pre-split history and divergent post-split histories.

• Mempools are local forever. Cross-partition payments do not propagate. Any attempt to pay someone in another partition never reaches them.
• Fee markets settle into local equilibria. The smaller-hashrate partition tends to have tighter capacity during the long pre-retarget period, then normalizes after difficulty adjusts.
• Lightning channels that span users across different partitions cannot be routed. HTLCs time out, peers publish commitments, and closures confirm only in the local partition. Cross-partition liquidity becomes stranded.

Security, markets, and infrastructure

Each partition’s security budget equals its local hashrate and fees. A region with 20 percent of pre-split hashrate has a lower absolute cost of attack than the global network did. Over time, miners may migrate toward the partitions with higher coin price and cheaper energy, changing the security profile again.

Without a path for headers between partitions, an attacker in one partition cannot overwrite the history in another; therefore, attacks are contained within a specific region.

• Exchanges become regional. Tickers diverge. You effectively get BTC-A, BTC-E, and BTC-X prices, even if all refer to themselves as BTC locally.
• Fiat on-ramps, custody, derivatives, and settlement rails specialize in regional chains. Index providers and data vendors have to choose one chain per venue or publish multiple composites.
• Bridged assets and oracles that depended on global data feeds break or fork into regional versions.

Protocol rules remain the same unless a partition coordinates a change in the rule. Any upgrade adopted in one partition does not activate elsewhere, creating rule-set drift over time.

Pool software, explorers, and wallets run per-partition infrastructure. Multi-homed services cannot reconcile balances across chains without a manual policy.

Can the partitions ever reconcile without those hubs?

If no communication path is ever restored, protocol convergence is impossible. The only way back to a single ledger is through social and operational means, for example, a coordinated selection of one partition’s chain as canonical and the abandonment or replay of the others.

Given deep divergence after weeks, automatic reorg to a single history is not feasible.

Operational takeaway

We would have to treat a permanent fracture exactly like a hard fork with shared pre-split history. Manage keys so you can spend split coins safely, avoid accidental replay across partitions by using outputs that only exist in one region, and maintain separate accounting, pricing, and risk controls per partition.

Miners, exchanges, and custodians should select a home partition, publish chain identifiers, and document policies for deposits and withdrawals specific to each chain.

In short, if those hubs never return and no alternative paths bridge the gap, Bitcoin does not die; it becomes several independent Bitcoins that never rejoin.

The corporate Bitcoin (BTC) treasury trade that validated itself through the second quarter hit a wall in the fall.

Public companies added 159,107 BTC in the second quarter, pushing total corporate holdings to roughly 847,000 BTC, approximately 4% of the capped supply, and proving that “Bitcoin on balance sheet” worked as a capital-markets play.

Then the easy money stopped. NYDIG-tracked flows into digital asset treasury names fell to their lowest daily clip since mid-June through September and October.

Premiums to net asset value (mNAV) compressed across the cohort, pushing several treasuries toward or below parity. When a stock trades at or below its book value, issuing equity to buy more Bitcoin dilutes the existing holders.

Metaplanet faced that constraint in late October when its mNAV ratio dipped below 1. On October 31, the Tokyo firm drew $100 million from a Bitcoin-backed credit agreement and allocated the proceeds toward acquiring more BTC, its options-premium “Bitcoin income” business, and share repurchases.

Three days earlier, it had announced a $500 million BTC-collateralized credit facility to fund a one-year buyback of up to 150 million shares, about 13% of float, and further Bitcoin purchases as needed.

As of October 31, Metaplanet held approximately 30,823 BTC and remains committed to achieving a 210,000-BTC goal by 2027.

Date	Company	Move	Size / Value	BTC After	Source
Nov 3	Strategy (ex-MicroStrategy)	Additional purchase	397 BTC for ~$45.6M	641,205 BTC	Strategy Form 8-K / press page.
Oct 31	Metaplanet	Drew a BTC-backed loan to fund buys/buybacks	$100M credit draw	30,823 BTC	Yahoo Finance; TradingView/Cointelegraph recap.
Oct 27	Bitplanet (KOSDAQ)	Began rules-based treasury program	First buy: 93 BTC	173 BTC	Yahoo Finance; CMC Academy explainer.
Sept 30	Hut 8	Expanded strategic BTC reserve	13,696 BTC added to the reserve	13,696 BTC	Company Q3 release/PR.
Sept 22	Strive–Semler	All-stock deal; plan to add BTC	Strive said it will buy 5,816 BTC for ~$675M with the merger	>10,900 BTC combined (planned)	Reuters deal report.

Credit substitutes for equity when markets won’t pay a premium

Metaplanet’s move tests whether BTC-backed credit can substitute for equity premium financing when valuations compress.

The playbook that worked in the second quarter of issuing a stock at a premium to mNAV, using proceeds to buy Bitcoin, and accreting BTC per share, depends on investors paying more than book value for exposure.

When that premium is no longer available, equity issuance becomes dilutive. Securing credit against existing BTC holdings offers a way to continue accumulating without selling the coin or issuing dilutive stock.

The trade-offs are visible. Borrowing against BTC introduces collateral risk: a deeper drawdown increases the loan-to-value ratio and could force deleveraging or asset sales at the worst moment.

Floating-rate exposure adds a second vector: if dollar benchmarks reprice higher, the cost of carry turns negative.

But if BTC stabilizes and equity discounts close, the combination of buybacks and secured credit accretes BTC per share without tapping common equity. Metaplanet is betting it can use the credit line as bridge financing while it waits for equity premiums to rebuild.

The prepayment flexibility matters: if BTC rallies and the stock rerates, the firm can refinance or retire the loan and revert to equity issuance.

How the broader treasury cohort responds

Strategy disclosed additional BTC purchases in July and highlighted its Bitcoin balance sheet again in the third-quarter reporting. Still, the firm built its treasury over a multi-year period when equity premiums were more stable.

Newer entrants that ramped up holdings during the second quarter surge now confront the same valuation pressure Metaplanet faced, which consists of compressed premiums, mNAV discounts that have opened, and the equity issuance lever having stopped working.

The question for the rest of the cohort is whether Metaplanet’s approach becomes a template or a cautionary tale. If the loan is successful, as measured by buybacks closing the mNAV discount and BTC stabilizing, other treasuries facing similar valuation gaps will likely follow.

Infrastructure and potential repercussions

BTC-collateralized credit isn’t new, but its application to corporate treasury strategy is relatively new. Custodians and prime brokers built the infrastructure to lend against Bitcoin over the past several years, initially serving hedge funds and proprietary trading desks.

The mechanics are straightforward: post BTC as collateral, draw cash at a loan-to-value ratio that leaves margin for volatility, pay floating interest tied to a dollar-denominated benchmark.

What changed is the borrower profile. Corporate treasuries bring different incentives than trading desks. They’re optimizing for BTC per share rather than absolute profit and loss, and they’re borrowing not to trade but to accumulate or buy back stock.

That shift turns collateralized credit into a capital structure tool rather than a margin facility.

If Metaplanet’s approach is successful and other treasuries adopt BTC-backed credit to defend per-share metrics, the supply of unencumbered corporate BTC will shrink.

That tightens float and could amplify volatility if multiple treasuries face simultaneous margin calls during a drawdown.

For allocators, the implication is that treasury premiums become less about pure Bitcoin exposure and more about leverage and capital structure. A company trading at 1.2x mNAV with no debt is a different bet than one trading at one mNAV with $500 million in BTC-collateralized loans.

If credit serves as a substitute for equity issuance, treasuries can continue to accumulate during periods when their stock trades below book value. That removes one brake on the accumulation cycle, which consists of equity dilution, and replaces it with a more rigid constraint: collateral coverage.

Constraints that could derail it

The structural risk is reflexivity. If enough treasuries borrow against BTC to continue buying, they create demand that increases collateral values, allowing them to borrow more. That model works until it doesn’t.

A macro shock that drives BTC down 30% or 40% could trigger cascading margin calls across leveraged treasuries, forcing asset sales that accelerate the decline.

Floating-rate exposure introduces a second constraint. If the Fed holds rates higher for longer, the cost of servicing BTC-collateralized debt rises.

At some threshold, interest expense exceeds the appreciation needed to justify the loan, and the treasury either prepays or bleeds cash.

The stakes are whether BTC-backed credit can restart corporate accumulation when equity markets won’t cooperate, or whether it amplifies the downside for treasuries that took on too much leverage at the wrong moment.

Metaplanet’s $100 million draw tests the thesis in real time. If the firm closes its mNAV discount, continues to accumulate, and refinances before collateral or rate risks materialize, the playbook becomes replicable for other treasuries facing similar valuation pressures.

If BTC corrects hard enough to force deleveraging, the lesson is that credit substitutes for equity only when collateral values cooperate.

The answer will arrive over the next six to twelve months, as BTC either stabilizes and allows Metaplanet to compound its way out of leverage, or falls far enough to prove that borrowing against a volatile asset to buy more of it accelerates losses as much as gains.

Bitcoin’s sustained price above $100,000 was supposed to signal its arrival as a mature institutional asset. Instead, its sudden reversal below that threshold has unsettled traders and revived fears of another crypto winter.

On Nov. 4, Bitcoin briefly dipped to its lowest level since May at $99,075, before recovering to approximately $102,437 as of press time. Despite the price recovery, BTC is still down roughly 3% from the day’s peak of $104,777, according to CryptoSlate data.

This price performance resulted in Bitcoin lagging US Treasuries for the first time this year, erasing one of 2025’s most popular macro trades.

Yet analysts say the move reflects a structural reset rather than a systemic collapse.

Why is Bitcoin price falling?

Long-term holders have played a significant role in driving the flagship digital asset’s downward trend by realizing profits at record rates.

Bitcoin analyst James Van Straten noted that this cohort has sold more than 362,000 BTC, equivalent to approximately 3,100 BTC per day, since July. According to him, that pace has quickened over the past three weeks to nearly 9,000 BTC daily.

Another analyst, Johan Bergman, suggested the total could be even higher. He calculated that the LTH cohort’s cumulative realized profits increased from $600 billion in June to $754 billion as of today.

According to him:

“Assuming they sold at an average price of $110,000, that’s about $72,000 in profit per coin. So, $154B / $72K ≈ 2.1 million coins sold.”

Data from James Check at CheckOnChain further reveals that Bitcoin currently faces $34 billion in monthly sell-side pressure as older coins return to exchanges.

That inflow has largely offset weakening demand from ETFs and corporate treasuries, some of which have shifted focus to share buybacks instead of new crypto allocations..

At the same time, speculative activity is also fading in the market.

Data from Glassnode shows that the funding rates for perpetual futures have decreased by 62% since August, from approximately $338 million to $127 million per month, reflecting lower leverage.

The firm stated:

“This underscores a clear macro downtrend in speculative appetite, as traders grow reluctant to pay interest to maintain long exposure.”

Meanwhile, the fading enthusiasm comes amid tightening global liquidity.

The prolonged US government shutdown, the joint-longest on record, has immobilized roughly $150 billion in the Treasury General Account, removing liquidity that circulates typically through risk assets.

BitMEX cofounder Arthur Hayes noted that since the debt ceiling increase in July, dollar liquidity has declined by approximately 8%, while Bitcoin has decreased by 5%, reinforcing the correlation between the two.

$95K becomes the market’s stress point

Due to this wave of selling activity, Check estimates that 57% of all dollars invested in Bitcoin are now in loss. His cost-basis model, which values each coin at its last on-chain transaction, reflects what he calls the market’s recency bias.

He wrote:

“We price every coin when it last transacted onchain, and this helps us interpret sentiment based on our recency bias We don’t think about our coins from prior cycles as much as the ones we bought 3-days ago.”

Considering this, he pointed out that roughly 63% of capital invested carries a cost basis above $95,000, making that level the key psychological and structural support.

He also noted that unrealized losses total nearly $20 billion, or about 3% of market capitalization. Historically, bear markets have begun once unrealized losses exceed 10%.

Therefore, if prices drop below $95,000, he anticipates a deterioration in sentiment. Prior corrections in 2024 and early 2025 stabilized when losses reached 7–8% of market cap. Anything deeper could signal that a new bear phase is underway.

Check noted:

“Obviously nobody wants to make that call AFTER the price has already fallen, which is why $95k is a critical line in the sand to hold, as it deteriorates below.”

Is this the start of a bear market?

Industry analysts remain divided on whether Bitcoin’s recent pullback marks the beginning of a new downtrend or simply a mid-cycle reset.

Check said:

“There has been a tremendous rotation of coins in 2025, and a lions share of it has occurred above $95k. We don’t want to see the price fall below $95k, but I also expect the bulls to mount one hell of a fight to defend it. Prepare for a bear but dont believe the doomers.”

However, in a recent note called “Hallelujah,” Hayes frames the decline as a function of temporary dollar scarcity rather than structural failure.

According to him, the heavy issuance of Treasury securities has siphoned liquidity from the money markets. However, he believes this dynamic will reverse once policymakers reopen the government and resume balance-sheet expansion.

He wrote:

“If the current money market conditions persist, the treasury debt pile grows exponentially, the SRF balance must grow as the lender of last resort. As SRF balances grow, the amount of fiat dollars in the world expands as well. This phenomenon will reignite the Bitcoin bull market.”

Meanwhile, Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, shares Hayes’s long-term optimism but frames it within Bitcoin’s evolving maturity.

On CNBC, he described the recent downturn as “a tale of two markets,” where retail traders capitulate amid leverage washouts while institutions quietly increase exposure.

Considering this, Hougan stressed that BTC’s risk-adjusted outlook remains unmatched, but the days of 100x yearly returns are gone. He added:

“We’re unlikely to see 100x returns in a single year. But there is still massive upside once the distribution phase is complete…[However, we still] believe bitcoin will reach $1.3 million by 2035, and I personally think we’re being conservative.”

At the same time, he believes BTC’s era of 1% allocation is over as its lower volatility makes it more attractive to hold.

Hougan concluded:

“As an allocator, my response to this dynamic would not be to sell the asset—after all, we forecast bitcoin to be the best-performing large asset in the world over the next decade—but rather, to buy more of it. Put differently, lower volatility means it’s safer to own more of something.”

Bitcoin’s four-year cycle used to offer a simple script: halving rewards meant scarcity, and scarcity meant higher prices.

This pattern held for over a decade. Every four years, the network’s reward to miners was halved, thereby tightening the supply, followed by a speculative frenzy that resulted in a new all-time high.

However, as Bitcoin hovers just above $100,000 this week, down about 20% from its October peak of over $126,000, that old narrative is wearing thin.

Wintermute, one of the largest market makers in digital assets, has now said the quiet part aloud. “The halving-driven four-year cycle is no longer relevant,” it argued in a recent note. “What drives performance now is liquidity.” The statement may sound heretical to long-time Bitcoin believers, but the data leaves little room for debate.

The market is now dominated by ETFs, stablecoins, and institutional liquidity flows, with miner issuance appearing to be a rounding error.

Liquidity rewrites the four-year cycle rules

Bitcoin’s latest rally and retreat map neatly onto one metric: ETF inflows. In the week ending October 4, global crypto ETFs raised a record $5.95 billion, with U.S. funds accounting for the majority of the funds. Just two days later, daily net inflows hit $1.2 billion, the highest on record.

That flood of capital coincided almost perfectly with Bitcoin’s climb to its new all-time high near $126,000. When the inflows slowed later in the month, so did the market. By early November, with mixed ETF prints and light outflows, Bitcoin had slipped back toward the $100,000 line.

The parallel is striking but not coincidental. For years, the halving was the cleanest model investors had for Bitcoin’s supply and demand mechanics: every 210,000 blocks, the number of new coins awarded to miners halves.

Since April’s event, that figure sits at 3.125 BTC per block, or roughly 450 new coins per day, equivalent to around $45 million at current prices. That may sound like a large daily injection of supply, but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of institutional capital now coursing through ETFs and other financial products.

When just a handful of ETFs can absorb $1.2 billion of Bitcoin in one day, that inflow is twenty-five times the amount of new supply entering the market each day. Even routine weekly net flows often match or exceed the entire week’s worth of newly minted coins.

The halving didn’t stop mattering entirely, as it still wields an outsized influence on miner economics. But, in terms of market pricing, the math has changed significantly. The limiting factor isn’t how many new coins are produced, but how much capital is flowing through regulated channels.

Stablecoins add another layer to this new liquidity economy. The total supply of dollar-pegged tokens now hovers between $280 billion and $308 billion, depending on the data source, effectively functioning as base money for crypto markets.

A growing stablecoin float has historically tracked higher asset prices, providing fresh collateral for leveraged positions and instant liquidity for traders. If the halving constraints the faucet where new Bitcoins flow, stablecoins open the floodgates for demand.

A market ruled by flows

Kaiko Research’s October report captured the transformation in real time. Mid-month, a sudden wave of deleveraging erased more than $500 billion from the total market capitalization of crypto, as order-book depth evaporated and open interest reset to lower levels. The episode had all the hallmarks of a liquidity shock rather than a supply squeeze.

Bitcoin’s price didn’t fall because miners were dumping coins or because a new halving cycle was due. It fell because buyers disappeared, derivatives positions unwound, and the thinness of the order books amplified every sell order.

This is the world Wintermute describes: one governed by capital flows, not block rewards. The arrival of spot ETFs in the US and the broader expansion of institutional access have rewired Bitcoin’s price discovery. Flows from major funds now dictate trading sessions.

Price rallies now typically begin in US hours, when ETF activity is at its highest: a structural pattern that Kaiko has tracked since the products were launched. Liquidity in Europe and Asia still matters, but it now acts as a bridge between American sessions rather than a separate center of gravity.

This shift also explains the change in market volatility. During the earlier halving epochs, rallies tended to follow long, grinding accumulation phases, with retail enthusiasm layering on top of shrinking supply.

Now, the price can lurch several thousand dollars in a day, depending on whether ETF inflows or outflows dominate. The liquidity is institutional, but it’s also fickle, turning what used to be a predictable four-year rhythm into a market of short, sharp liquidity cycles.

That volatility is likely to persist. Futures funding and open interest data from CoinGlass indicate that leverage remains a significant swing factor, amplifying moves in both directions. When funding rates remain high for extended periods, it signals that traders are paying heavily to stay long, leaving the market vulnerable to a sharp reversal if the flows pause.

The October drawdown, which followed a surge in funding costs and a wave of ETF redemptions, offered a preview of how fragile the structure can be when liquidity dries up.

Yet even as those flows cooled, structural liquidity in the system continues to grow. Stablecoin issuance remains elevated. The FCA’s recent move to allow retail investors in the UK to access crypto exchange-traded notes has sparked a fee war among issuers, leading to increased turnover on the London Stock Exchange.

Each of these channels represents another conduit through which capital can reach Bitcoin, thereby tightening its correlation to global liquidity cycles and distancing it further from its self-contained halving cycles.

The Bitcoin market now behaves like any other large asset class, where monetary conditions drive performance. The halving calendar once dictated the tempo of investor psychology. Today, it is the Federal Reserve, ETF creation desks, and stablecoin issuers who set the beat.

In the next few months, Bitcoin’s trajectory will depend on liquidity variables. A base case sees Bitcoin oscillating between roughly $95,000 and $130,000 as ETF flows remain modestly positive and stablecoin supply continues its slow expansion.

A more bullish setup, with another record inflow week for ETFs or a regulatory green light for new listings, could send prices back toward $140,000 and above.

Conversely, a liquidity air pocket marked by multi-day ETF outflows and contracting stablecoin supply could pull Bitcoin back to the $90,000 zone as leverage resets again.

None of these outcomes depend on miner issuance or the distance from the halving. Instead, they depend on the rate at which capital enters or exits through the pipes that have replaced the halving as Bitcoin’s key throttle.

The implications reach beyond price. Kaiko’s data suggests ETFs have also changed the microstructure of the spot market itself, tightening spreads and deepening liquidity during US trading hours, but leaving off-hours thinner than before.

That shift means the health of Bitcoin’s market can now be gauged as much by ETF creation and redemption activity as by on-chain supply metrics. When miners’ daily output is absorbed by ETFs within minutes, it’s clear where the balance of power lies.

Bitcoin’s evolution into a liquidity-sensitive asset may disappoint those who once viewed the halving as a kind of cosmic event, a preordained countdown to riches. Yet, for an asset now held by institutions, benchmarked in ETFs, and traded against stablecoins that function as a private money supply, it’s simply a sign of maturity.

So perhaps the halving cycle isn’t dead, just demoted.

The block reward still decreases by half every four years, and some traders will always use it as a guide. But the true map now lies elsewhere. If the past decade taught investors to watch the halving clock, the next one will teach them to watch the flow tape.

The new calendar of Bitcoin isn’t four years long. It’s measured in billions of dollars moving in and out of ETFs, of stablecoins minted or redeemed, of capital searching for liquidity in a market that has outgrown its own mythology. The miners still keep time, but the tempo now belongs to the money.

A new quantum countdown website projects a two– to three-year window for quantum computers to break widely used public key cryptography, placing Bitcoin within its scope.

Sites like The Quantum Doom Clock, operated by Postquant Labs and Hadamard Gate Inc., package aggressive assumptions about qubit scaling and error rates into a timeline that spans the late 2020s to early 2030s for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.

This framing doubles as product marketing for post-quantum tooling, but you need to read the fine print to notice that disclosure.

According to the Quantum Doom Clock, recent resource estimates that compress logical-qubit counts, combined with optimistic hardware error trends, suggest that the required physical-qubit class for breaking ECC falls into the few-million range under favorable models.

The clock’s presets rely on exponential hardware growth and improving fidelity with scale, while runtime and error-correction overheads are treated as surmountable on a short fuse.

Government standards bodies are not treating a 2027 to 2031 break as a base case.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s CNSA 2.0 guidance recommends that National Security Systems should complete their transition to post-quantum algorithms by 2035, with staged milestones before then, a cadence echoed by the UK National Cyber Security Centre.

This requires identifying quantum-sensitive services by 2028, prioritizing high-priority migrations by 2031, and completing them by 2035.

The policy horizon serves as a practical risk compass for institutions that must plan capital budgets, vendor dependencies, and compliance programs, implying a multi-year migration arc rather than a two-year cliff.

Laboratory progress is real and relevant, yet it does not exhibit the combination of scale, coherence, logical gate quality, and T-gate factory throughput that Shor’s algorithm would require at Bitcoin-breaking parameters.

According to Caltech, a neutral-atom array with 6,100 qubits has reached 12.6-second coherence with high-fidelity transport, an engineering step toward fault tolerance rather than a demonstration of low-error logical gates at proper code distances.

Google’s Willow chip work highlights algorithmic and hardware advances on 105 qubits, claiming exponential error suppression with scale on specific tasks. Meanwhile, IBM has demonstrated a real-time error-correction control loop running on commodity AMD hardware, which is a step toward systems plumbing fault tolerance.

None of these set pieces removes the dominant overheads that prior resource studies identified for classical targets like RSA and ECC under surface code assumptions.

A widely cited 2021 analysis by Gidney and Ekerå estimated that factoring RSA-2048 in about eight hours would need roughly 20 million noisy physical qubits at around 10⁻³ physical error rates, underscoring how distillation factories and code distance drive totals more than raw device counts.

For Bitcoin, the earliest material vector is key exposure on-chain rather than harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks against SHA-256. According to Bitcoin Optech, outputs that already reveal public keys, such as legacy P2PK, reused P2PKH after spend, and some Taproot paths, would become targets once a cryptographically relevant machine exists.

At the same time, typical P2PKH remains protected by hashing until it is spent. Core contributors and researchers track multiple containment and upgrade paths, including Lamport or Winternitz one-time signatures, P2QRH address formats, and proposals to quarantine or force rotation of insecure UTXOs.

Proponents behind BIP-360 claim that more than 6 million BTC are held in quantum-exposed outputs across P2PK, reused SegWit, and Taproot, which is best understood as an upper bound from advocates rather than a consensus metric.

The economics of migration matter as much as the physics.

With NIST now finalizing FIPS-203 for key encapsulation and FIPS-204 for signatures, wallets and exchanges can implement the chosen family today.

According to NIST FIPS-204, ML-DSA-44 has a 1,312-byte public key and a 2,420-byte signature, which are orders of magnitude larger than those of secp256k1.

Under current block constraints, replacing a typical P2WPKH input witness with a post-quantum signature and public key would increase the per-input size from tens of virtual bytes to multiple kilobytes. This would compress throughput and push fees higher unless paired with aggregation, batch-verification-friendly constructs, or commit-reveal patterns that move bulk data off hot paths.

Institutions with many exposed-pubkey UTXOs have an economic incentive to de-expose and rotate methodically before a scramble concentrates demand into a single fee spike window.

The divergences between a marketing-aggressive clock and institutional roadmaps can be summarized as a set of input assumptions.

Recent papers that reduce logical-qubit counts for factoring and discrete log problems can make a few-million physical qubit target appear closer, but only under assumed physical error rates and code distances that remain beyond what labs demonstrate at scale.

The mainstream lab view reflects stepwise device scaling where adding qubits can erode quality, with a path toward 10⁻⁴ to 10⁻⁵ error rates as code distance grows.

A conservative read places material limits, control complexity, and T-factory throughput as rate limiters that extend timelines into the 2040s and beyond, absent breakthroughs.

The policy drumbeat to complete migrations by 2035 aligns more with the stepwise and conservative cases than with exponential hardware trajectories.

Case	Hardware and error path	Physical qubits for ECC-256*	Earliest window	Primary sources
Marketing-aggressive	Exponential qubit growth, ≤10⁻³ errors improving with scale	Few million	Late-2020s to early-2030s	Quantum Doom Clock
Mainstream lab	Stepwise scaling, error reduction with code distance	Many millions	Mid-2030s to 2040s	CNSA 2.0, UK NCSC
Conservative	Logistic growth, slower fidelity gains, factory bottlenecks	Tens of millions+	2040s to 2050s+	Quantum Doom Clock

*Totals depend on surface code distance, logical gate error targets, and T-gate distillation throughput. See Gidney and Ekerå (2021).

Forward-looking markers to watch are concrete.

1. Peer-reviewed demonstrations of long-lived logical gates, not only memory, at code distance around 25 with sub-10⁻⁶ logical error rates.
2. Practical T-gate distillation factories that deliver throughput for algorithms with 10⁶-plus logical qubits.
3. Bitcoin Improvement Proposals that advance post-quantum signature pathways from prototype to deployable standard, including formats that keep bulk artifacts off the hot path.
4. Public commitments by major exchanges and custodians to rotate exposed outputs, which would distribute fee pressure across time.

The Doom Clock’s utility is narrative, compressing uncertainty into urgency that funnels to a vendor solution.

The risk compass that matters for engineering and capital planning is anchored by NIST standards now finalized, government migration deadlines around 2035, and the lab milestones that would mark real inflection points for fault tolerance.

According to NIST’s FIPS-203 and FIPS-204, the tooling path is available today, which means wallets and services can start de-exposing keys and testing larger signatures without accepting a two-year doomsday premise.

Bitcoin’s hash-then-reveal design choices already delay exposure until spending time on common paths, and the network’s playbook includes multiple rotation and containment options when credible signals, not vendor clocks, indicate it’s time to proceed.

It is, however, worth remembering that when quantum computers make Bitcoin’s cryptography vulnerable, other legacy systems are also exposed. Banks, social media, finance apps, and much more will have backdoors left wide open.

Societal collapse is a bigger risk than losing some crypto if legacy systems are not updated.

For those who argue that Bitcoin upgrades will be slower than those of banks, etc., remember this, some ATMs and other banking infrastructure around the world still run on Windows XP.

Moon Inc. said its shares are now available to U.S. investors on the OTCQX Best Market as of Nov. 5, following an upgrade from the OTC Pink tier and a bell ringing at OTC Markets Group in New York.

The move opens a direct channel for U.S. retail and institutional investors to access the Hong Kong-listed issuer, which trades on the HKEX under code 1723 and has been pivoting from its roots in prepaid connectivity toward Bitcoin-focused consumer products.

The company framed the OTCQX graduation as part of a broader capital strategy that aligns with a Bitcoin standard and tighter U.S. market engagement.

Chief executive John Riggins said the higher disclosure bar and visibility are intended to create a cleaner pathway for U.S. investors to participate in Hong Kong’s regulated digital asset ecosystem and Moon’s expansion across Asia.

Moon Inc’s Bitcoin strategy

The company completed a legal name change from HK Asia Holdings to Moon Inc. earlier this year, a step that formalized the strategic pivot and preserved the 1723 stock code on HKEX, according to HKEXnews.

The U.S. trading venue upgrade follows Moon’s October financing of approximately HK$65.5 million, or roughly US$8.8 million, through a combination of new shares and convertible notes to fund a Bitcoin-enabled prepaid card and a Pan-Asian rollout, starting in Thailand and South Korea.

The raise was supported by a group that included Bitcoin miners. The product plan aims to integrate Bitcoin-native rails into the company’s legacy prepaid distribution network, positioning Moon to distribute BTC loads through the same cash-in channels used for SIMs and mobile top-ups, an approach examined in detail in our coverage of retail cash rails.

A yearlong restructuring set the stage for today’s U.S. access milestone.

UTXO Management and Sora Ventures took control of the former HK Asia Holdings in early 2025, and leadership positions were filled by figures associated with Bitcoin Magazine’s parent, moves that helped steer the rebrand and the company’s treasury and product direction.

Shares reacted positively during the spring as Moon launched a MicroStrategy 2.0” approach that blended measured balance-sheet Bitcoin exposure with product integration.

For U.S. investors, OTCQX access reduces friction in trading a Hong Kong issuer pursuing Bitcoin consumer rails. At the same time, the company continues to execute in Asia, where cash usage remains high across retail top-up ecosystems.

The model Moon is pursuing treats BTC like phone credit, a distribution angle that differs from exchange apps and targets segments that fund digitally through physical agents rather than banked channels.

The execution hinges on licensing, issuer partnerships, and agent activation in each market.

Regulators in Singapore enforced a June 30, 2025, deadline, prompting some overseas-facing operators to reassess their footprints. This development has concentrated attention on Hong Kong and Dubai for digital asset activity.

Hong Kong’s stance, including the listing of spot BTC and ETH ETFs, has broadened mainstream engagement with digital assets.

If Moon can convert a portion of its prepaid distribution into BTC loading points, the near-term revenue lens will be driven by active loaders, average ticket sizes, and blended take-rate across spreads, fees, and interchange.

The financing amount indicates a pilot phase involving country-by-country partners, with the first announced corridors being Thailand and South Korea.

While operating costs, compliance, and issuer fees will determine net economics, gross revenue sensitivity can be framed for 2026 exit rates using directional ranges tied to the company’s plan.

Scenario (2026 exit, monthly)	Active loaders	Avg load (US$)	Blended take-rate	Gross revenue / month	Gross revenue / year
Bear	75,000	40	1.0%	$30,000	$0.36 million
Base	250,000	70	1.5%	$262,500	$3.15 million
Bull	600,000	120	2.2%	$1.584 million	$19.0 million

These ranges depend on agent density, repeat load frequency, issuer and processor partnerships in each country, treasury policy, and volatility management. Wider BTC volatility can expand spreads but can also constrain conversion, and program-level costs for KYC, KYT, and customer support can pressure unit economics.

A listed vehicle’s disclosure cadence, including treasury sizing and card economics, will provide more clarity on run rates as the program scales. The company’s legacy as a prepaid operator is relevant to cash-in mechanics, which often drive micro-loads and small-ticket behavior in the early months of deployment.

Today’s step into OTCQX aims to broaden the shareholder base that can follow that deployment.

For U.S. market participants, the move enhances quotation quality and corporate disclosure access compared to Pink, while preserving the primary listing in Hong Kong and the short name. The company described the upgrade as part of an international growth strategy that includes regional product launches funded by the October capital raise and a focus on governance and transparency. The legal rebrand in June laid the groundwork for these actions.

Key milestones to watch include issuer and licensing announcements in Thailand and South Korea, activation counts across top-up agents, disclosure of monthly active loaders and average load sizes, and updates on balance-sheet Bitcoin policy and risk controls.

The U.S. over-the-counter venue shift is now in place, providing investors with a clearer view into a Hong Kong-based company pursuing Bitcoin rails through prepaid distribution.

Disclosure: Sora Ventures is an investor in CryptoSlate.

After years of relentless buying, Strategy Inc., the digital-asset treasury firm led by Michael Saylor, has quietly eased its pace of Bitcoin accumulation.

In recent weeks, company filings have shown that its BTC purchases have fallen to only a few hundred coins, representing a sharp slowdown for the largest corporate holder of the flagship cryptocurrency.

During the third-quarter earnings call, Saylor explained that the slowdown was due to the firm being at an “inflection point.”

According to him:

“Our multiple-to-net asset value, MNAV, has been trending down and has been trending down over time as the Bitcoin asset class matures, as the volatility decreases.”

However, that lull may prove temporary, as the firm’s new financing channels are now in motion.

This includes a 10% euro-denominated perpetual preferred stock listed in Luxembourg and a variable-rate US issue that has just regained its $100 par value.

Together, the products could reopen the flow of capital into Strategy’s Bitcoin reserves and test whether yield-hungry investors will again fund Saylor’s $70 billion wager on digital scarcity.

Strategy goes international with STRE

Strategy’s latest quarter underscored both the pause and the potential. The firm reported $2.8 billion in net income, mainly from unrealized gains on its Bitcoin holdings, but added only a modest number of coins.

Industry analysts attributed the slowdown to lighter demand for the company’s common stock and its four listed preferred share offerings, which have long been its primary sources of funding.

Bitcoin analyst James Check said:

“The company is struggling to keep them above face value, and daily trade volume is so light, nobody can put any size on. The demand is tepid.”

However, that may be changing as the firm expands internationally.

On Nov. 3, Strategy introduced the Series A Perpetual Stream Preferred (STRE), a euro-denominated security that carries a 10% annual dividend, paid quarterly in cash.

The dividend is cumulative and increases by 100 basis points per missed period, up to a maximum of 18%. It added that the proceeds from this fundraising will be used for “general corporate purposes, including Bitcoin acquisition.”

Notably, the economic backdrop favors experimentation.

According to BNY Mellon, euro-denominated corporate bond spreads remain tight by historical standards even after the European Central Bank’s tightening cycle. The region has seen the second-highest investment-grade inflows in six years, pushing total market size beyond €3.2 trillion across more than 3,700 issuers.

With BBB yields near 3.5% and single-Bs around 6.5% (FTSE Russell), STRE’s 10% coupon stands out. Bitcoin analyst Adam Livingston said:

“Even before tax, STRE doubles high-yield and triples investment-grade coupons. After US tax-equivalent conversion the yield explodes to 15.9 percent thanks to its ROC treatment!”

STRC hits par to reopen the US tap

Meanwhile, the European listing follows movement at home that could also reignite an additional source of funding for the firm.

During Strategy’s third-quarter earnings call, the firm announced that it would raise the coupon on its US-listed Variable-Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred (STRC) by 25 basis points to 10.5% in November.

The adjustment is meant to stabilize market pricing and keep the preferred near its $100 target.

Following the announcement, STRC reached the $100 par for the first time since its launch in July.

Strategy’s investor Mark Harvey pointed out that this development would allow the company to sell new shares and funnel that liquidity into BTC.

He said:

“The TAM for $STRC is $33 trillion. That’s $33 trillion of yield-chasing capital, which is attracted to STRC like a magnet because it offers a higher yield (10.5%). Since Strategy aims to maintain the $100 target for STRC, it will follow its guidance and begin issuing new shares through the ATM to buy Bitcoin. Put simply, STRC above $100 means it will start funneling that $33T into BTC; a powerful catalyst for Bitcoin.”

Financial analyst Rajat Soni echoed the enthusiasm, saying:

“$100 STRC means Strategy can start ATMing shares to buy Bitcoin… Brand new source of funding unlocked.”

Indeed, Saylor had explained that “as the credit investors start to understand the appeal of digital credit, they’re going to want to buy more, and we’re going to sell more and issue more credit.”

He added:

“As the equity investors start to appreciate the uniqueness of the Bitcoin treasury model, and especially the uniqueness of our company and our ability to issue digital credit worldwide at scale, we think that that’s going to drive an appreciation of the equity.”

What does this mean for Bitcoin?

At its peak, Strategy Inc. was the most aggressive corporate buyer of Bitcoin.

Data from Bitwise shows the firm added more than 40,000 BTC in the third quarter, far surpassing every other public holder. Those purchases, analysts say, have repeatedly supported market sentiment and, at times, the asset’s spot price.

According to CryptoQuant analyst JA Maarturn, Strategy’s stock remains “highly correlated with Bitcoin’s price,” reflecting how the company’s trading often mirrors that of the cryptocurrency itself.

That linkage could strengthen again because the revival of STRC and the debut of STRE create a two-continent funding loop capable of reigniting corporate Bitcoin accumulation.

Beyond Strategy’s balance sheet, the twin preferreds deepen Bitcoin’s financial integration with the traditional ecosystem. Each share sold channels conventional yield-seeking capital into exposure to Bitcoin’s balance-sheet value, effectively transforming investor appetite for income into indirect demand for the asset.

Peter Duan, a Bitcoin analyst, also pointed out that the products would introduce a significant “liquidity” factor to the market.

According to him:

“One HIGHLY under-appreciated part of MSTR’s preferreds is the fact that they have tremendous liquidity that is backed by the most pristine asset in the world – Bitcoin. For reference, the average USD listed preferreds only has $1.1M in daily liquidity while the average Euro listed preferreds only has $1.0M in daily liquidity. Said another way, Strategy’s preferreds range from 12X-70X more liquid.”

That depth matters because a greater turnover reduces funding friction and accelerates the flow of capital between investor demand and Bitcoin acquisition.

So, if  STRC holds its par value and STRE gains traction in Europe, each new tranche could act as a direct liquidity conduit from traditional markets into the crypto economy.

Moreover, Saylor’s model also reframes Bitcoin’s macro role as not merely a speculative reserve but a collateral base for yield engineering.

This provides a clear feedback loop, showing that healthy preferred markets enable new issuance, which finances Bitcoin purchases; these purchases, in turn, reinforce balance-sheet value and market perception of scarcity.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a sharp $566.4 million outflow on Tuesday, Nov. 4, extending its five-day drain to roughly $1.9 billion and decisively flipping the week’s tone into risk-off.

Fidelity’s FBTC accounted for the majority of the exits at -$356.6 million, with ARKB at -$128.1 million and Grayscale’s GBTC at -$48.9 million. No fund posted an inflow.

This is the largest single-day outflow since Aug. 1, a fresh new high for redemptions in the second half of the year. The rolling five-day tally is now near $1.9 billion.

Bitcoin’s price action offered little cushioning to the ETF market. Bitcoin briefly dipped below the coveted $100,000 level on major US exchanges on Tuesday before stabilizing just above $100,000 into Wednesday morning. Aggregated data puts Bitcoin’s average price on Nov. 4 at $101,475, with the early hours of Nov. 5 bringing little upside to the price.

Yesterday’s outflow was concentrated at Fidelity’s FBTC, while ARKB and GBTC added notable, but significantly smaller redemptions. It’s a noteworthy change from Monday outflows, where BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for almost all of the outflows.

The setup that leads into the second half of the week is now pretty straightforward. With Bitcoin struggling to find stability at $100,000 and realized volatility increasing, the next ETF print will have a significant impact on near-term sentiment. Another significant redemption in the next two to three days would reinforce the idea that de-risking is now being expressed through the largest and most liquid wrappers. It will take more than a single day of net creations to reverse this risk-off sentiment.

When analyzing the macro context behind ETF flows, it’s important to focus on the classic feedback loop: flows influence AP’s hedging and inventory, which then influences spot liquidity, which then influences derivatives positioning and funding. That loop can easily loosen or tighten within a couple of trading days.

Given the scale and concentration of Tuesday’s outflows, we’ll be carefully watching FBTC’s next print, the persistence of GBTC’s outflows, and whether ARKB’s redemptions continue in size. If the streak breaks, and we see a large fund like IBIT posting inflows again, there’s a good chance Bitcoin’s price will be able to find support above $100,000. If these outflows extend, the market will have to absorb a new wave of selling pressure at a time when both liquidity and confidence are already in short supply.