Weekly Top Stories - 11/28/25
In this week’s newsletter, Alex Thorn recounts Bitcoiners' historical Thanksgiving experiences; Will Owens outlines a postmortem on the launch of the Monad blockchain; and Lucas Tcheyan recaps the Solana inflation proposal.
Bitcoiners Justify Investment on Thanksgiving Yet Again
Bitcoin and crypto investors braced themselves for questions at Thanksgiving from skeptical family following market correction. It’s that time of year again: the turkey’s in the oven, the wine is flowing, and that uncle who “just doesn’t get it” is sharpening his knives for another round of cross-examination. Bitcoin’s down again, but of course from another higher high. Somewhere between the mashed potatoes and the “so, how’s that investment of yours going?”, investors across America faced a fresh wave of family FUD.
Depending on the year (and the family), bitcoin and crypto investors have faced familial reactions ranging from derision and skepticism to confusion and regret to anticipation and euphoria. Indeed, Thanksgiving (celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November each year) has rarely been a quiet time for the BTC/USD trading pair, often falling during historic bull runs or crushing bear markets.
Looking back, Thanksgiving has seen Bitcoiners placed on a spectrum ranging from criminals to geniuses over the last few years.
2017: Bitcoin traded at $8,000 for the first time after a historic 2017 run, leading many to learn about the cryptocurrency and others for the very first time. At this point, “bitcoin is for criminals” is a pervasive mainstream narrative. Bitcoiners were outlaws!
2018: Following the 2017 blow-off top, by Thanksgiving 2018 bitcoin has dropped more than 78% from its all-time high. Skeptical family members who were surprised by Bitcoin’s 2017 rally the year before felt vindicated by its failure. Bitcoiners were idiots!
2019: Bitcoin was up 72% YoY but still more than 50% below its 2017 all-time high. No respite for the believers from those familial skeptics. Bitcoiners were still wrong!
2020: Finally, three years later, Bitcoin was knocking on the door of its prior all-time high. Some vindication was in the works for the believers. Bitcoiners were resilient!
2021: By Thanksgiving, the cycle top of ~$69k was already in, but the market had mostly not realized it yet. Family members who listened the year before were sitting on a 3x gain. Bitcoiners were geniuses!
2022: Just two weeks after the collapse of FTX, Bitcoin had dropped below its 2020 Thanksgiving value, well below its prior all-time high. The crash of 2022, culminating in FTX’s Nov. 11, 2022, bankruptcy, validated skeptics once again. Crypto fraud and crime appeared to be back on the menu. Bitcoiners were criminals again!
2023: A sustained rally in 2023 off a low bottom to start the year and fueled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (and others), BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF filing, and Grayscale’s victory at the D.C. Court of Appeals led to an ETF-anticipatory rally that pushed bitcoin back towards its prior all-time high. Bitcoiners were resilient again!
2024: President Trump’s victory, only the second non-contiguous term won by a president in history, fueled a monster rally to new all-time highs on anticipation of relaxed crypto regulatory policy and increased government support for innovation. Bitcoin neared $100k on Thanksgiving 2024. Bitcoiners were geniuses again!
In 2025, expectations for the year ahead include a K-shaped range of outcomes, with many predicting further downside while others anticipate a rebound.
OUR TAKE:
Bitcoin remains a volatile, cyclical asset that reliably gravitates toward the price of maximum pain—for bulls and bears alike. Thanksgiving has long served as a ritualized trial for Bitcoin believers, forced to justify their convictions to skeptical relatives. This year’s “crash to $85k”—a phrase unthinkable just a few years ago—fits the pattern. While bitcoin could certainly fall further, long-term holders remain vindicated even through the correction.
Analysts are split on what comes next: some see a retest of the 200-week moving average near $55k, others expect a rebound to new highs fueled by risk-on drivers (Fed easing, fiscal expansion, AI growth) or risk-off ones (geopolitical hedging, dollar debasement, and sovereign adoption). In October, we noted $95k as a key pivot – below which most onchain cost bases slip underwater (as I discussed in a recent interview with James Check). With BTC now hovering around 90k, bears still feel firmly in control and will likely remain so absent a rise to $95-100k. But bears should also be cautious – bitcoiners have a very long-term view.
Claims that bitcoin’s purpose has vanished now that governments tolerate it are shortsighted. Even if Ethereum took ICOs, stablecoins took payments, and gold outperformed this year, bitcoin’s perfect digital scarcity remains unmatched. In an era of endless fiscal deficits and monetary excess, scarce assets will shine, and bitcoin is the only one both finite and programmable. Gold may have outpaced BTC in 2025, but it’s playing catch-up to bitcoin’s 7x run from 2023 to 2025. Bitcoin’s correction looks more like a reversion than a collapse. And “bitcoin collapses to $85k” just sounds silly when you say it out loud, given the 16-year run we’ve been on.
It’s fair to say that Bitcoin’s story is not early, but it’s also not late. The future of BTC is likely to be characterized by lower volatility, more passive flows, and a more mature market structure, all of which are conducive to its adoption as digital gold, something the world will continue to demand in greater amounts as we progress into a more fractured, digital landscape. – Alex Thorn
Monad’s Mainnet Ignites
Monad, the high-performance EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain, officially went live on its public mainnet Monday, Nov. 24 at 9 a.m. ET. This has been the most anticipated L1 debut of 2025. After years of development and over $244 million in private funding from crypto VC heavyweights including Paradigm and Dragonfly, the network hit the ground running with a full ecosystem of applications already live. You can view them here. Users were able to move funds from other blockchains to Monad using the Monad Native Bridge.
Metrics exploded immediately. As of Wednesday, Nov. 26, the network had processed over $260 million in decentralized exchange (DEX) volume and more than 18.5 million total transactions. Remember, this blockchain was specifically built to target 10,000 transactions per second (TPS), on par with leading high-performance chains like Solana, with a long-term goal of 400,000 TPS.
The MON token has a 100 billion total supply and effectively 10.8 billion (10.8%) unlocked at circulation. This figure counts the 7.5 billion (7.5%) distributed through the Coinbase Token Platform and 3.3 billion (3.3%) distributed via airdrop. Airdrop recipients were free to immediately sell their tokens.
But the real star of the show was the public token sale hosted by Coinbase. This was the exchange’s inaugural ICO-style offering on its new token sales platform. The sale ran from Nov. 17-22 and offered 7.5 billion MON at a fixed $0.025 per token, targeting $187.5 million at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $2.5 billion. Notably, this sale price came in below Monad’s last private round valuation of $3 billion. The sale wrapped up oversubscribed by 1.43x, pulling in $269 million from over 85,800 participants. The “fill-from-bottom" mechanism prioritized smaller buyers to ensure most got near-full allocations while whales faced less complete allocations.
On Polymarket, bettors wagered on everything from airdrop timing to Coinbase sale commitments exceeding certain thresholds.
OUR TAKE:
Whether you’re bullish on Monad’s tech or bearish on yet another high-performance L1, the marketing execution here was elite.
The team cooked up viral Monad Cards and gamified mystery box airdrops. The sheer mindshare capture across Crypto Twitter is very impressive. Just as I’m writing this, $CHOG, the official Monad Mascot memecoin, has launched and is trading at around a $10 million market cap.
MONUSD Coinbase 1h
As of Wednesday morning, MON was trading at $0.045. This means that all Coinbase sale participants are sitting on roughly +80% gains within a few days for clicking a couple buttons. Many individuals who insta-sold their airdrop right away for "quick free money" at $0.025 are surely regretting their decision.
Now comes the real question: Can Monad turn this launch hype into sustained user activity? Early metrics are decent, but long-term stickiness obviously remains unproven. I’ll be watching closely.
Until then, gmonad. — Will Owens
Solana’s SIMD-0411 Proposal Rekindles Inflation Debate
A week ago, Mert Mumtaz, the CEO of Helius Labs (a leading Solana infrastructure provider) submitted Solana Improvement Document-0411 (SIMD-0411), proposing to double the blockchain’s disinflation rate from 15% per annum to 30%. This adjustment would halve the time required to reach the 1.5% terminal inflation rate (from ~6.2 years to ~3.1 years).
The proposal would also reduce SOL emissions over the next six years by 22.3 million, 3.2% lower than the current expected inflation amount. At current SOL prices ($130), this equates to roughly $2.9 billion of currently expected supply that wouldn’t be added to the market. SIMD-0411 would maintain Solana’s initial terminal inflation target of 1.5% and make no other changes to Solana’s inflation mechanism.
Nominal staking yields for validators and delegators would gradually decline as the accelerated disinflation rate reduced token emissions over time. Assuming a consistent percentage of SOL remains staked, nominal staking yields would move from roughly 6.4% today to about 5.0% in the first year, then to 3.5% and 2.4% over the following two years as inflation converges toward the 1.5% terminal rate.
While this modest reduction would improve SOL’s long-term supply dynamics, it would slightly compress validator margins, particularly for smaller operators that rely heavily on inflationary rewards. The proposal estimates that around 47 of Solana’s 870 active validators (roughly 5% of the network) would become unprofitable over the next three years, with the majority of the validator set expected to remain in the black.
There is no official timeline for voting on the proposal. It is in the community review phase, with active discussion on GitHub, forums, and X. The proposal mentions a 6-month lag period before any change is implemented to account for activation of the Alpenglow upgrade (expected Q1 2026) and the governance process. If approved, the proposal would likely be activated in mid-2026.
Based on recent precedents (SIMD-0228), the process could take 1-3 months before a conclusive vote is held. Voting will be conducted through a stake-weighted onchain vote that is expected to last 2–3 epochs (~4–7 days total), requiring simple majority approval among participating validators. Validator voting power is proportional to delegated stake.
OUR TAKE:
A consistent theme in the Solana ecosystem over the past year has been the aggressive push by teams across the protocol and application layers to improve every aspect of the network. This is something we have covered extensively at Galaxy Research. SIMD-0411 fits squarely within that broader effort and reinforces Solana’s long-term commitment to keep developing at a healthy clip and avoid ossification.
The proposal arrives at a time when Solana face challenges in maintaining its status as one of few leading high-performance blockchains. Network activity has softened in recent months, with declines in overall users and decentralized exchange (DEX) volumes following a period of record activity earlier in the year (although there have also been significant strides in diversifying activity away from memecoins). Within the ecosystem there is also intensifying competition for market share and competing ideas over the best path forward for implementation of technical upgrades like Application Controlled Execution. Meanwhile, Solana faces intensifying competition from established ecosystems like Binance Smart Chain and emerging ones including Base and Hyperliquid.
While SOL inflation may not be a primary concern for the ecosystem, when it does come up it is a highly contentious issue. In March, Solana validators vetoed another proposal, SIMD-0228, that called for a dynamic inflation rate based on the amount of total SOL staked on the network. This followed months of debate between leading voices from across the ecosystem, including the Solana Foundation, validators, infrastructure providers, application developers, and large allocators including venture capital firms.
Those in favor of adjusting the inflation schedule argue it would support SOL’s value by reducing sell pressure, especially from large institutional validators that must sell a portion of their emissions to satisfy tax obligations, and by encouraging DeFi activity on the network. SOL’s high staking rate introduces a large opportunity cost of not staking SOL, and despite leading in categories like DEX volumes, network and application fees, and stablecoin velocity, Solana’s DeFi vertical continues to lag in adoption relative to competitors like Ethereum.
Those opposed to adjusting the inflation schedule primarily argue it would make SOL less attractive to large institutional allocators and retail investors that like the high staking yields, which partially offset the risk of holding a volatile asset. Additional objections include the impact on smaller validator profitability and potential reductions in the number of Solana validators, which could undermine network decentralization and security.
The new proposal seeks to find a middle ground, and in my opinion, does an excellent job, by offering a more subtle and predictable adjustment than SIMD-0228. While it would accelerate the reduction in SOL inflation, it would do so in a more gradual manner than prior proposals and would not change the terminal SOL inflation rate. By not introducing a dynamic rate, it also provides validators with a consistent and predictable inflation rate so they can plan for the adjustment. Additionally, adjustments to SOL inflation may help SOL performance by reducing sell pressure and attracting investors that previously viewed its high inflation as a turnoff.
Critically, the proposal highlights shifting dynamics in the crypto ecosystem where protocols and applications must focus on generating sustainable economic activity as the primary incentive mechanism for validator activity rather than depending on token emissions. SOL inflation has been successful in providing an initial bootstrapping mechanism for the ecosystem, but Solana has evolved into a more mature blockchain with some of crypto’s highest revenue-generating applications and one of its largest user bases. Validators on the network will be best incentivized to participate as long-term honest stakeholders if their primary source of revenue comes from demand for block space – such as base fees, priority fees, and (hopefully) benign forms of maximum extractable value, or MEV – or from running profitable businesses on the chain itself.
Just like SIMD-0228, SIMD-0411 will face a highly contentious vote, and it is too early to determine whether it will pass. No matter the outcome, however, the proposal shows the Solana ecosystem’s continued push for sustainable economics. Whether these adjustments translate into durable competitive advantage will depend on the network’s capacity to sustain developer activity and user demand in an increasingly competitive market. For more on this topic, read my research alert. – Lucas Tcheyan
Charts of the Week
$MON spot trading volume on Solana cleared $125 million in the four trading days following Monad's airdrop on Monday November 24. This comes as the effort and mindshare in the Solana community has moved toward making the chain the home of spot trading by "listing" any and all assets on the chain. This movement started with the rise of Zcash (ZEC) in early October when Solana integrated ZEC, lowering the barrier to trading the asset. The pivot to emphasizing spot trading comes at a time when onchain perps are all the rage, with Hyperliquid being the clear segment winner. Time will tell whether the new narrative is an admission of defeat on the perps front or if it signals Solana is trying to win a different game altogether.
Other News
🐻Berachain Gave Brevan Howard VC Fund a Sweet Deal, Documents Show
👑Tether, Top Private Gold Holder️; USDT Stability Rating Cut to ‘Weak’ by S&P
🏦JPMorgan Pitches Derivative Tied to BTC ETF, Debanks Bitcoiner Jack Mallers
‼️Saylor’s Strategy Skips Weekly Bitcoin Buy; Metaplanet Doubles Down
🇰🇷Naver (Korean Payments) to Buy Parent of Upbit Crypto Exchange for $10.3b
🤝Wallet Firm Exodus Buys Baanx and Monavate for $175m
🔐Paxos Acquires Wallet and Custody Provider Fordefi for More Than $100m
📱‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Lender Klarna Launch Stablecoin; U.S. Bancorp Tests One
🧠Anchorage Devises GENIUS-Compliant Way to Pay Rewards on Stables
🤠Texas Buys $5m of BlackRock’s IBIT Bitcoin ETF (Not Spot – Yet)
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