The Breakdown - The Week Crypto Moved Forward While Prices Fell Behind

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Extreme fear grips the market and Bitcoin dips into the mid-$90Ks, but the real story is everything happening underneath the sell-off. This Friday 5 breaks down the heavy wallet distribution, the liquidation wave, and why short-term price pain contrasts so sharply with long-term structural progress — from new SEC/CFTC clarity efforts to bipartisan draft legislation, from Coinbase’s launchpad experiment to JPMorgan’s deposit token push. A clear look at the week when crypto quietly advanced despite the charts. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, November 14th, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, back after last. week off with another Friday 5. It's kind of a gloomy one, but I think it's just a very short-term

gloominess, as you will hear. Still lots and lots of tailwinds being built for the future, so without any further ado, let's dive in. Good morning, bear market enthusiasts, and welcome to the dystopian future hell that is crypto. You're going to welcome NLW. Bear market things, you know? It's a baby bear. Bitcoin, 95,500. $100. Clearly, it's all over. I haven't even looked. Let's see where crypto fear and greed has got to be low. Let's pull that up. 16. Extreme fear. Yesterday, extreme fear. I don't know, man. Seems like there's a lot of depression and maybe a bottom is approaching.

Yeah. I mean, who knows? I think that there's a lot that you can point to in all directions. I'm sure, which we will unpack throughout this episode. Yes, we will. I still think that this image is living Renfrey and a lot of people. heads when it comes to the cycle theory and where we're at this 2023 Reddit post that said the pattern would put the cycles all time high on the 6th of October 2025 exactly when we hit 126,000 people looking for reasons for this renewed sell-off of course as well though you had Michael Saylor saying Hoddle apparently the Titanic's going down oh my god what are we doing here I don't know man I don't think that picture says what he thinks that picture says no I'm wondering if he's and Rose is hanging off the back there somewhere and he's going to just dwindle down into the abyss.

Yeah, I think that he thinks that the Titanic is the global financial system, but everyone who sees this thinks that it's Bitcoin. Yeah, maybe. And meanwhile, at the exact same time, the Fudd strikes hard. Arkham, Sailor's strategy cuts Bitcoin holdings by 47K. So a series of tweet saying that Michael Saylor is selling, right as his hoddle image comes up. up with the Titanic sinking, of course, this is probably just wallets moving. Yeah, listen. You visit selling. Michael, Michael Saylor selling would be a very damaging psychological signal for many.

That would be the thing, right? And I'm like, yeah, bear market. I think everybody would agree. You just said Michael Sell a seller, by the way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no. That's a lot. There was impeccable.

Yeah. There you go. So I actually do think, though, like if you were looking for something that can be a catalyst for a much lower price. If that actually happened and was proving, that that could be it. Certainly from this, if you view Bitcoin as the people who are inside the industry and the sort of, you know, the rest of the financial world that's now incorporating it, I don't know that there's anything that could more hurt the psychology of the folks who are inside than a sailor sell. Man, the non-sailer whales have been selling their butts off, though. It's pretty clear when you look

at any of the data that this has just been sustained and relentless selling. by these old wallets. And it's pretty impressive how much Bitcoin these guys have. And they're willing to sell it at these prices. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's when the dust settles and have the benefit of some emotional space from all of this.

That will be a key point of analysis of this entire cycle. Is that sort of basically relentless pressure? So something else that never ceases to amaze me is how much money people can put into leverage positions and C liquidated. Crypto market liquidations top 1.1 billion. That was in less than 24 hours, by the way, and not even counting when we dropped all the way down and have had, you know, hundreds of millions on every single day, basically. But analysts compare stress to FTX collapse. I would say that maybe was comparable because of the mass liquidation event on finance, but steady liquidations, that seems wildly overstated. Yeah, that seems like an analyst

who wasn't here, like when that happened. It's like normal parts, even if unfortunate and unfun parts of a market cycle, versus like the culmination of multi-tier, multi-end year fraud exploding into an event that could do more to damage the reputation of this industry in the U.S. than anything before it, like not comparable, which is good news, right? It's good when we're getting that sort of hyperbolic. It's that human need to compare any bad situation to a worse situation. Yeah.

Well, you know, I think in this case, it does us good because, boy, it's not even close. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about some of the actual tailwinds, though. As everybody on planet Earth, I would imagine, knows the United States government reopening this week after the longest shut down in history. Obviously, we saw a pause on a lot of things that we were looking for. for and excited about in the crypto market when it came to the government regulation and legislation. We came out of the gates swinging, though, right? Got an XRP launch of an XRP which was the best of 25. I think it outpaced the B-souled by about a million bucks.

But that was obviously a success, even in the down market, but more importantly, the regulators and legislators are chirping again. I think that this is one of the bigger stories. SEC Chair Paul Atkins unveils plan for token taxonomy to redefine cryptocurrency, to redefine regulation, utility tokens, payment tokens, securities, commodities, or the four buckets that I saw from looking at this. But actually found digging into his words really interesting. I mean, maybe you can unpack this first, but this is something we've been needing or looking for for a long time. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these ideas harken back to stuff Hester Purst has been talking about for years. They're trying to, they're basically taking up some amount of the work of this

key question of whether a thing is a security or not and can it cease to be a security? You know, one of the key things that Atkins said is that basically the security nature of a thing can expire over time because the promises that were made to investors initially, which gave it security like properties, ceased to have a relevance to the sort of the nature of the ecosystem and community. And I think that that's very coherent for those of us who live in this space, who can see that there's a difference between, you know, a token that launches and needs to raise capital to sort of build itself out and uses a token sale as part of that and what that looks like from a security perspective, as opposed to five years down the line when it's mature,

when you have a totally different set of actors than the people who launched it, who are maintaining it. And we're finally actually sort of getting or we're lurching towards systems that can handle that sort of complexity. It's also interesting to me that Atkins is taking on some of this. I think that he made it very clear that he's not trying to duplicate the work of Congress, but I do think that they are, he is at least a little bit preparing for some of those security designation questions to be punted on because they're clearly kind of second tier in terms of the debates from a political perspective that are getting had. So it's a lot of positioning to actually be in the place that we need to be once this legislation is signed and in the books.

Yeah, what I find interesting. I actually had a conversation with Matt Hogan about this yesterday afternoon, but it will come out on Sunday. It was not live. But we both sort of agreed that it's not necessarily that the SEC is pro crypto right now. It's almost like they're just swinging the pendulum back to reasonable. And when you dig into what is happening, they're actually saying maybe most of this isn't even our jurisdiction or our business. So I mean, maybe we should just touch on the next story as we talk about that. Senators unveil draft crypto bill giving CFDC oversight power. This is a bipartisan bill that's being proposed that really would put most of the onus of regulating this industry on the CFDC.

And when you see Atkins talking about those buckets, three of those buckets are probably CFDC. And most things he does not view as securities. And when you listen to him talking about it, he said, yes, we're still going to use the Howie test because it's what we have. But most of these things started that way, but no longer are. He even went into a pretty great explanation about Howie and the Orange, that it was based on in the fact that those are no longer orange groves now. They're roads and, you know, streets and there's trees and there's parks. And none of those things are the same security as when they started. So I think they're really kind of pushing this off the SEC's plate.

Yeah. And I think that this is so that the draft bill that was presented was presented through the ag committee. So it's focused on that side of things. But this has been a, you know, I think a pretty common theme in a lot of the way the crypto industry was hoping to be regulated over the last few years is a bigger role for the CFTC. We're now at the point where we're actually getting into some of the logistical questions. The CFTC is about a quarter of the size of the SEC. And so there are questions of whether it can handle this from a jurisdiction perspective. But to your point about Atkins and pro-crypto or not, I think that one of the best ways to be pro-crypto is to know when you don't have any jurisdiction over parts of crypto, you know?

It's funny. I interviewed PERS years ago, and I started it thinking that I was being endearing by saying, yeah, we love to call you crypto mom. You're the only pro-crypto SEC chair or SEC commissioner. And she was very quick to say, I'm not pro-crypto. I'm pro-common sense. This has nothing to do with my opinion of the asset class. I'm just trying to do the right thing. Yeah. And I think that that's whether that actually reflects their opinions or whether that's just this sort of like the stance that they're taking, I think it's the better one from a longevity standpoint of these policies. Quickly, Saller just tweeted, there's no truth to this rumor underneath Walter Bloomberg. So I think we can put the Sailer's selling thing to bed because if he lies, he goes to jail.

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But Coinbase offer new crypto tokens to traders ahead of listing, basically a pre-sale launchpad here from Coinbase with Monad being the first. We've seen a lot of unsuccessful structures for launching tokens. Will this finally be the right way to do this? That I don't know, but I'm glad that they're doing it. I think the ICO movement gets rightly maligned for the amount of it that was sort of co-opted by, you know, scams and just, you know, absurdity and overzealousness. But part of why it found such a ready market is that people have been kept out of early stage investments, you know, systematically for decades as they've watched sort of, you know, the accredited class get rich. And that is a big part of the discontent that was driving interest in

ICOs in the first place. There's broader political conversations about this right now, about finding ways to get more people invested into the success of American companies so that there's not a sort of a rejection pattern a priority because they're not benefiting from these gains. And so I think that any experiments that are in the realm of legally feasible that allow people to have earlier access to these projects, especially in crypto where they get to be a part of those projects in more meaningful ways than, for example, just buying early open AI stock as, you know, as secondaries or something like that, I think is a net positive thing. I also think that Coinbase doesn't do things that are like overly risky, you know, I think that if they're doing

they have a sense of where it's going to fit with the new regulatory regime. They're not doing some crazy version of it. I think they were very loud about the non-listing fees, no listing fees for part of this. So there's clearly an attempt to take the good parts of token launches and turn them into a thing that people can participate at. Yeah, I've said this a few times on the show, but I think that there's kind of two parallel issues with the ICO structure. One obviously is tokenomics, and I think that's going to come down to the project and not something Coinbase can necessarily control. But the other side is the disclosures and, you know, breaking through the opacity that comes with these launches. And the fact that they already have shown who the market

makers are, how many tokens they're getting, how long they'll be market making for, obviously shows that we're on the path to more transparency. Now you can debate all day whether they should be releasing more than 7.5% of Monad in this sale, right? Those are the things that go back. the old days of ICO where people feel like there's a privilege class that's getting the benefit. But at least everybody knows the vesting structure. Everybody knows where the tokens are going. And then you can make your choice accordingly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the coin waterfall was one of the key problems with ICOs, where like, literally you would have five different classes of people who were led in early that each had,

you know, different tiers of discounts. And it on, you know, there was no lockup, right? is just the day one liquidity, you know, dumping on retail's heads. It was a very, very weird moment. Yeah, I mean, and if we're talking about Coinbase, I think we definitely have to give an honorable mention to the fact that they delisted EOS this week, since we're talking about ICOs. I mean, that was the most successful ICO of all time, raised over $4 billion and never built a thing.

But the block one, you know, who was behind that still has, you know, 120, 160, I don't remember the number 160,000 Bitcoin. They own bullish. A lot of failures. I mean, if you want to look back at the best example of the gratuitous grift of the ICO craze, raising $4 billion, not giving any of that back to retail, but accumulating a sh** on a Bitcoin and businesses, maybe the best clary example we have. Yeah, I mean, listen, Treasury Management was the most successful crypto strategy for a good

number of years. Yeah, well, hasn't been going too well for our new Treasury Management companies that have been launching, but that's a topic for another day. And just quickly note, Coinbase moves in corporation to Texas from Delaware following musks lead. I didn't see this as such big news, but people seem to. Yeah, I don't know. It's broader stuff that's not just crypto-related that has to do with sort of shifting tides of how business is organized, but I think it's kind of insider baseball. China accuses U.S. of orchestrating 13 billion Bitcoin hack. I haven't gotten so deeply into

this story, but I've definitely seen some bad takes because a lot of people are thinking that this was a hack that just happened. I believe this is from 2020. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, China is saying, it's state-level actor, most likely the United States, that directly, effectively stole $13 billion in Bitcoin from China. Isn't this the same pile of money that was, like, involved in the pig-buttering scam that we just talked about like a month ago? Like, basically there's this-22, Bitcoin. Yeah, there's this big chunk of $127,000 Bitcoin that a lot of people seem to have different

interpretations around. I think what's interesting about this is the Chinese government wading into the conversation around this, basically this particular person who's been accused of all these things in the U.S. You know, I don't know what it says, but it's a, it's sort of a geopolitical intrigue, I guess, around, around this. I don't think that this plays out into anything. And frankly, I think that the idea that this is going to even sort of merit a mention in bilateral trade negotiations that are happening, I think is pretty far-fetched. But, you know, whatever. Maybe it's one more bully-codial for, you know, various sides to use against each other.

And speaks to the technique that we're going to see governments using to build those strategic Bitcoin reserves. Right. I mean, Kazakhstan literally, it was either this week or last. I remember we talked about said, hey, we're going to do a billion, but it's going to be from Cs to Bitcoin. Like, we're not buying that stuff. And by the way, I think Checks bought Bitcoin yesterday, only a million bucks worth,

but that was the first time an actual central bank had added Bitcoin and crypto as a strategic reserve asset. Interesting. Yeah. Well, and you also have some pretty fun conversations. Christian Carlo and Chris Perkins from Coin Fund have been advocating basically for the return of privateering for the U.S. government to go out and basically license hackers to go get, you know, get it.

North Korean Lazarus, you know, crypto back, which is a pretty, there's probably a whole show to be done there. There is because no matter how much of it we take back, it's not actually ours. Well, the finders keepers. Yeah. I like the finders keepers mentality for a strategic Bitcoin Reserve building. I love it. So the next story we have here, and these are kind of honorable mentions, but I still think worth mentioning JPMorgan rolls out deposit token, JPM coin, and digital asset push.

So to my knowledge, J.P. Morgan coin somewhat existed privately. So that part of it maybe is not the biggest news. I think what is the biggest news is it's on a public blockchain and that they chose base, right? JP Morgan and base I didn't really necessarily have on my bingo card. It would be like a J.P. Morgan on Ethereum or something like BlackRock. Yeah, again, we're coming up to the sort of end of the year. And so you're starting to, like, I don't know about you, but you know, you start to kind categorize like top stories from the year, top themes, things we got right, things we got

wrong. And I think that, you know, it was very clear that institutionalization was going to be a major theme, if not the major theme for this year, right? Checkmark. Everyone got that one right. What was interesting about some of the ways that the competition has played out, I think, is different than people thought. People kind of felt like it was an absolute race for circle to get public because there

was going to be basically every big financial traditional Tradfye firm was going to do their own thing and build their own infrastructure and launch their own coins. And there's certainly some amount of that. But there's also a lot more of just, you know, the big players in crypto, the big crypto-native institutions are reaping the benefits as lots of these companies decide that moving faster with them as partners is better than just re-rolling the whole thing. And this is kind of another example of that. Yeah. Maybe I haven't been bullish enough on base. I think that was my takeaway. It is Coinbase, and we know that Coinbase is eating the world and knows what they're doing, as I said. So maybe I should be more bullish there. We had a final kind of honorable mention story.

Maybe we should have mentioned earlier in the CFTC conversation, but Carolyn Pham confirms push to launch leverage spot crypto trading on U.S. exchanges. And we also could have mentioned this in the $1.1 billion liquidations part, just what we need, you know. We need perp spots for every American. Yeah, I think the maybe if we try to kind of sum up why there's all this sort of good, you know, tailwindy news, but the price is still in the crapper. None of these news items, none of this, none of these tailwinds are about the short term, right? They're all long term, like build out like the safe sort of place, the infrastructure for this industry. They're not the type of things. They no longer have the power to drive short term sentiment because they are sort of expected.

They're part of the trend and the trajectory right now. But I think in the in the long term, we still, it's very easy to underestimate the significance of these things when it comes to the environment that it creates for the long term, you know, but the government shutdown, let's put it this way, the government shutdown when it comes to crypto prices is sort of more significant for crypto and the fact that we might actually get this clarity bill before midterms now because the shutdown's over. But in the short term, the biggest implications for price are probably that, you know, Treasury is going to spend a bunch of billions of dollars now that adds more liquidity to the markets, which could have a benefit for risk assets in general.

maybe some of that flows into crypto, right? This is just very different things. So if you are feeling bad about here, just kind of, you know, zoom out as far as you can. Look, my prediction, sadly, is that I think that we've hit, it feels to me that we've hit a bit of a shift in sentiment in risk assets broadly, where everyone's kind of like, you know what, year was good. I'm done. See in January. Yeah, I get something off the table. The problem is that the year wasn't good for us. Yeah. I brought up the coin market cap first week of January prices. Spoiler, Bitcoin was 98. Last I checked, we're at 95 here in November of the same year, given, like, first week of January is arbitrary. I don't know that you care like what it was, but if we're talking about 2025 and Ethereum was like 36, Solana was like 220. It's at 139. So this was not a bull market if you look at, you know, those dates that we really participated in. Yeah. No, I mean, that that is the challenge. But this also comes back to the fact that, you know, another part I think of the story that will be written about this cycle to the extent that we are,

you know, still in cycles is retail never came back. It was just us DGens that diamond handed it through the FTX explosion, everything else, plus a bunch of new institutions. That was this market. And there was never a new group of energy, excitement, capital. And then there was only so far you could go with it. And assuming that's true, October 10th was a really big deal. when 19 billion was liquidated because maybe that wasn't us over here in the States, but I think as Rand Newner put it, that was 1.1 million individuals had their accounts liquidated. That's a lot of soldiers if there's no new, if there's no new backups coming in. Absolutely.

Yeah, I think that that is still going to also be looked at as one of those events that we'll be unpacking for quite a long time if we do indeed continue to go down. Yeah. Look, I also think that there are more short-term tailwinds that we're maybe imagining. And it could very easily be that next week we're comfortably back up above 100. We feel a little bit better. We feel okay going into Turkey Day once again. Yeah, man, I mean, I still default mentally all the lines and whatever to every bull market.

We go down 25% like seven times and it's never a thing. Yeah, either this is the top for years or we're going to be back, you know, at 150 at the end of the year and giggling Tom Lee style. We'll find out. man that guy though like this week i think he literally said it could be 10 or 12 grand by the end of the year you gotta love them got a love pure bullishness just go for it all right guys give n lb a follow check out the breakdown both newsletter and show and we will be back next Friday for another Friday five thank you man later