Institutional adoption often moves slowly, then all at once. This week, we witnessed the latter. In a span of six days, JPMorgan — the world’s largest bank by market cap — executed two landmark transactions on public blockchains, effectively ending the “private chain only” era for Wall Street. Simultaneously, the hunger for regulated crypto exposure remains voracious, with XRP ETFs shattering inflow records despite a lackluster price environment.

Bitcoin fees fell while Ethereum fees and activity rose. BTC saw heavy exchange outflows, ETH strong inflows. BlackRock launched a staked ETH ETF, boosting yield options. The Fed cut rates again, but markets expect a pause in January, tempering short-term momentum.

In this week's newsletter, we dive into the renewed ETF flows and the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade

The last week has been an important one for crypto infrastructure and regulation in 2025. Monad's Mainnet launch on November 24 has moved parallel EVM execution from whitepaper to reality, challenging the Solana dominance thesis. Simultaneously, the prediction market sector has shed its "gray market" status, with Robinhood and Polymarket both securing the regulatory moats needed to onboard the massive US retail capital base. High-performance tech has arrived, and the regulatory floodgates keep opening.

This week, we analyze the largest DeFi TVL contraction since 2023, driven by a rare convergence of institutional outflows through ETFs, BTC sustained weakness below $100,000, and a DeFi protocol-level contagion event centered on Elixir and Stream Finance stablecoins. The data reveals a market undergoing risk-off positioning across all major venues, while the these stablecoin collapses expose hidden structural fragilities in synthetic stablecoin architectures and risk curation models.

It was a volatile week for DeFi: multiple high-risk events hit in quick succession, and a risk-off macro tone compounded the damage, sending crypto lower. Let’s dig in.

In this week's newsletter, we explore Hong Kong's approval of the first Solana ETF and Aave's onboarding of Maple's institutional yield assets

This week we dive into the two key events shaping the DeFi landscape: the October 10 “Black Friday” market crash, which triggered over $19 billion in liquidations (the biggest liquidation event in crypto history) and exposed vulnerabilities in centralized trading infrastructure, and Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 launch, a permissionless upgrade enabling builders to deploy custom perpetuals markets with potential to expand on-chain derivatives volumes by 10–20x.