Another week of crabbing back and forth in the markets. Complacency and ennui have set in. Things are happening, but the economy seems frozen in amber until the fed meeting in December, or if quantitative easing kicks in. Crypto likes when the money printer goes brrrrrrr. Historically, when Bitcoin has had a red November, it means December will be red as well, but are we stuck in the normal 4 year cycle? Institutional holdings seem to be both holding us back and possibly breaking the cycle. If this really is a bear, $BTC could retrace to around $55k, but are we really in a bear yet?
Everyone is simply bored and finding things to fight about on the timeline because nothing is happening with price. We’ve retraced a little bit, but nothing to get people engaged again. Hope of a rate cut may bring us back up some until mid December. Personally, I’m continuing my DCA approach I’ve had for the past 4 years. Each day, I wake up and buy a small amount of $BTC/$SOL/$ETH and I added in $ZEC a few months ago to that. If we do enter a bear, don’t go chasing every dip to get your avg cost lower. Just pick up your conviction tokens, whatever those are for you with your dry powder or swap dead tokens into 4-5 tokens you believe in. In my experience, when the vast majority of my holdings are tokens I have a long investment time horizon with, my stress levels on dips are much lower and bear markets are easier to weather. I’m not 100% convinced we are in a bear yet or heading for it, but I still rotated out of some dead tokens.
Price Movements on the Week
$BTC - Up 5.58% (-14.96% 30 days)
$SOL - Up 6.04% (-25.26% 30 days)
$ETH - Up 7.57% (-19.27% 30 days)
$ZEC - Down 22.4% (+35.32% 30 days)
$HYPE - Up 7.21% (-29.56% 30 days)
Total Crypto Market Cap - Up 4.98% (-16.1% 30 days)
Privacy has been a huge topic lately and if you don’t care about it, you should. It doesn’t mean you need to buy $ZEC, but it’s worth paying attention to how much the Solana community is diving into privacy. Zero-knowledge (ZK), in my opinion, will change everything for our industry going forward. Tons of teams on @Solana are working on projects. The big wallets will end up having to move in this direction. Here are 15 projects on Solana you should follow.
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@Arcium - C-SPL(confidential token standard) It utilizes @Arcium's <encrypted> MPC execution and within MPC generates ZKPs (zero-knowledge proofs)
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Ephemeral rollups from @magicblock will provide fast & private execution environments.
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@darklakefi is building an encrypted connective tissue of Solana. Infrastructure that allows applications, protocols, and users to verify, connect, and compute privately. They call it “Proof as Intelligence”
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@loyal_hq is building privacy infra with confidential conversations for traders, apps, and agents.
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@encifherio is developing private swaps on Jupiter, and private transfers
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@UmbraPrivacy is building a privacy-first wallet for users and an SDK for developers. It’s incognito mode for Solana. Powered by @Arcium
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@theprivacycash lets you transfer funds to a clean wallet without linking past addresses or transaction history.
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@hush_wallet is building auto-shielding, disposable addresses, private swaps, and a wallet with privacy-by-default.
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@ZeraLabs is making a wallet that brings privacy to everyday crypto: featuring shielded balances, private & offline P2P transfer and private swaps on Jupiter/Raydium that route directly to and from your shielded balance.
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@poseidoncash is an open-source privacy protocol bringing shielded transactions to Solana using Groth16 proofs and efficient Poseidon hashing.
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Dark Protocol (@privateLP) enables private trading.
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Radr Labs (@radrdotfun) - zero-knowledge payments, transfers, identity, and communication
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Vanish Trade (@vanish) enables instant private trading on @Solana
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@meleemarkets and @pythiamarkets are creating prediction markets with private orderflow
Continuing on the privacy front on Solana, WaveTek (@securethebagfun - terrible handle), is building an encrypted liquidity layer for Solana. A private, quantum-resistant DeFi stack connecting @Solana, @Zcash & @Starknet into one privacy-preserving network. ZK-verified transfers. Shielded assets flowing straight into encrypted Solana DeFi. I’m intrigued, but I need to see it in action. Their handle and 3 username changes on X feel like shifting more than long term alignment. I hope my apprehension is proven wrong.
In crappier news, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Upbit, suffered a major security breach on November 27, 2025, resulting in the theft of approximately 44.5 billion won ($30–$38 million) in Solana-based assets. The hacker started laundering the money, selling tons of Solana tokens and bridging to Eth with Railgun. The hack targeted Upbit’s Solana hot wallet (yes, a hot wallet) that had over $30 million of Solana tokens in it. Upbit has committed to covering all customer losses from its own assets. Approximately 2.3 billion won ($1.5 million) has already been frozen. This is the second major security breach at the platform in six years, following a $50 million hack in November 2019.
The @monad ICO happened and $MON initially started ripping up to an almost 2x to $0.049, but has retraced back down to $0.0279. As usual, farmers went all in on dumping. Over 60% of Monad airdrop recipients have already dumped all their $MON. Wintermute started shorting $MON, Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) did his usual thing of saying something is good trade, running it up and dumping all of it and now is out there saying Monad is pointless. “Just what this bull market needs is another low float , high FDV useless L1. But obvi I aped. It’s a bull market bitches!”....Two days later he sold it and said “send it to zero”. Their tokenomics are not the best. I picked some up via CB and decided to toss some stables in Morpho to check it out. As of now, Monad has some defi, staking and of course a meme launchpad. We all know how well memes do long term.
The Bitcoin quantum conversation continued this week and @nic_carter put up a great article.
He lays out 10 reasons why I think quantum timelines are accelerating:
1. Governments are planning for a post-quantum world
2. Qubit counts are scaling rapidly
3. Investment in quantum firms is inflecting
4. Several major quantum milestones have been achieved this year
5. Quantum firms project breaking ECC by 2028-2033
6. The number of qubits needed to break crypto systems is dropping
7. Bitcoin is itself a bug bounty for quantum supremacy
8. Quantum is a race with geopolitical stakes like AGI
9. AI could accelerate the pace of quantum development
10. Credible people have revised their quantum timelines
ZCash is talking about changing to a token holder based voting system for governance and it’s got everyone pitching in their ideas. My hope is that if it does go token based, that shielded stays as it is. Should community grants go away from a forum of people who decide to a token based voting system? Even @VitalikButerin chimed in, saying “I hope Zcash resists the dark hand of token voting. Token voting is bad in all kinds of ways.I think it's worse than Zcash's status quo. Privacy is exactly the sort of thing that will erode over time if left to the median token holder.
The token unlocks continue to add downward pressure. @AmirOrmu showed the list coming up in December from data on @DefiLlama. I’ll maybe look at picking up $SUI again if it pushes down below $1 personally, but not touching any of these right now.
Dec 1 - $EIGEN: $25.3M
Dec 1 - $SUI: $83.2M
Dec 10 - $ME: $118.1M
Dec 12 - $APT: $23.4M
Dec 14 - $IP: $126.6M
Dec 15 - $ARB: $19.9M
Dec 17 - $PENGU: $284.4M
Dec 19 - $ZRO: $31.7M
Dec 29 - $OP: $10.5M
And don’t forget $POL adding tokens like a continuous firehose. It’s no wonder it can’t go up. Added to supply: ~0.72M tokens daily/ 569M since inception. On average 20M monthly until the next repricing period in 2026. @sandeepnailwal posed the question: “Time and again, I keep hearing from folks in the Polygon trading community that MATIC was a far stronger and more familiar ticker — it had history, recognition, and stuck in people’s minds. So here’s an honest question: should we ask exchanges to revert just the ticker back to MATIC?” I personally wished they hadn’t changed from $matic. It had name recognition amongst retail buyers and I’d like them to pump my old $matic bags so I can sell instead of stake. I’m not even sure what $POL really does for value accrual. They just keep printing more and more. So it goes.
