Crypto Mark ⚡️

🚨 The Litecoin Foundation just posted “Mainnet incoming..” 👀 LitVM is getting closer, bringing EVM smart contracts to Litecoin and potentially opening up a whole new ecosystem of DeFi, RWA and more. Interesting timing with $LTC still beaten down alongside the wider market. I’m increasingly interested in what Litecoin could become over the next couple of years. The market might not be paying much attention yet, but that could change. Worth keeping an eye on 👀

🚨 BREAKING: MSCI is removing Strategy ($MSTR) from its indexes from 1st December. And this could have bigger implications for Bitcoin than many people realise. Why? MSCI believes companies whose primary activity is holding investments, rather than running an operating business, shouldn’t qualify for its indexes. At first glance, this might look like a problem for MSTR shareholders. But there’s a bigger issue here… Strategy has been one of the biggest sources of additional Bitcoin buying pressure, repeatedly raising capital to accumulate more $BTC. If its shares take a hit and raising new capital becomes harder, that could slow its Bitcoin purchases. And what if other index providers follow MSCI? What if the same treatment spreads to companies like Metaplanet and other crypto treasury businesses? We could see an entire source of institutional buying pressure start to dry up. To be clear, nobody is forcing Strategy to sell its Bitcoin. But the knock-on effects could be significant. Bitcoin doesn’t need Strategy to survive, but the market has certainly benefited from its buying. I really hope this doesn’t become a wider trend. Is this just a headache for Strategy, or are we potentially watching the beginning of a much bigger problem for the crypto market? 👀

$XRP holders are divided right now. • David Schwartz says he’s sold most of his crypto. • Holders are questioning Ripple executives and their XRP sales. • Meanwhile, huge XRP accounts are telling retail to stop complaining because “Ripple owes you nothing.” The problem is that many of these influencers built their entire brand and income on endless XRP hype. How objective can you really be when your engagement depends on keeping the hopium alive? You should be able to hold $XRP and still hold Ripple accountable. Why is that suddenly a controversial take?

Nobody on CT talks about Litecoin’s privacy layer, and the numbers are wild. • 563,923 $LTC reached MWEB at its September peak (21x higher than late 2023). • 10x growth in MWEB transaction volume from mid-2024 to late 2025. Everyone writes $LTC off as just a legacy payments coin, yet its optional privacy layer is seeing genuine usage. Hard to call a chain dead when its privacy adoption is growing like that.

$LTC is starting to look seriously undervalued. While the rest of the market struggles, StoneX found Litecoin was the only major crypto still in the green over the last 10 weeks (+6.78%). Meanwhile, Nasdaq-listed Lite Strategy ($LITS) just reported $16M in quarterly net income and now holds 751,798 LTC. Add @LitecoinVM bringing smart contracts to Litecoin and there’s way more happening here than CT gives it credit for. At what point does the “dino coin” narrative finally die? ⚡

$TAO is quietly landing tier 1 AI partnerships while the rest of the market bleeds 👀 Tencent Cloud just chose Bittensor subnet @chutes_ai (SN64) as a launch partner for its flagship 770B-parameter Hy4 model and Chutes is serving it cheaper than Tencent’s own published API rates. A decentralised miner network is now helping deliver a flagship AI model for one of China’s biggest tech giants. Most AI coins are still selling whitepapers. Bittensor is actually shipping infrastructure. How long before the market reprices $TAO? ⚡ cc: @opentensor

$LTC is quietly winning the real-world payments race. ⚡ • SAHARA Las Vegas accepts BTC, ETH and LTC for gaming deposits. • CoinGate payment share rises from 13.1% to 18%, making LTC its #3 most used crypto. • Canton is exploring tokenised Litecoin for institutional markets. The market keeps calling Litecoin outdated, yet it continues to prove its worth as a fast, cheap and battle tested payment network. What happens when the market finally realises what it’s been overlooking?

I own $XRP and believe in Ripple’s global vision. But I think the community needs to have an honest conversation about tokenomics. Ripple has made significant progress with institutional adoption. The next hurdle? Turning that success into sustained demand for the token itself. Let’s look at the supply numbers: • 1B XRP released from escrow monthly. • ~700M typically re-escrowed. • ~300M net leaves escrow. That’s 3.6 BILLION XRP over 12 months. It isn’t all being sold, but it does create a significant potential supply overhang. So what could Ripple do? - Provide greater transparency around XRP distributions and sales. - Consider permanently burning a portion of unused escrow releases. - Accelerate genuine XRP utility through lending, collateral and institutional liquidity. We all want Ripple to succeed. But that success needs to translate into stronger demand for XRP holders. Is it time for Ripple to focus just as much on growing demand for the token as it does on expanding its enterprise business? 👇

$XRP has a massive institutional adoption story. But who’s actually buying the token? Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that around 84% of XRP ETF assets are held by investors outside disclosed institutional 13F positions. Even more eye-opening: Goldman Sachs accounted for roughly 74% of the disclosed institutional holdings at the end of 2025. At the same time, look at the supply. Every month, Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow. Around 700M typically goes straight back into a new lockup. That’s still 300M XRP leaving escrow every month. 3.6 billion a year at that rate. And here’s the problem. Banks can use XRP to move money without needing to hold billions of dollars of it on their balance sheets. Ripple’s business can grow enormously without creating equivalent long-term demand for the XRP token. Are investors confusing Ripple’s corporate success with actual investment demand for $XRP?

$TAO is finally tackling its biggest criticism: the lack of real-world demand. Bittensor’s new Gamma system lets subnets sell services via dollar-priced credits. The best part? When customers fund those credits with TAO, the network buys the subnet’s Alpha token and burns it. More adoption = potential buying pressure for TAO + shrinking Alpha supply. Bittensor is moving beyond miners competing for emissions. It’s building a real marketplace for AI services. Don’t sleep on Gamma.

AI is making it easier than ever to create a cryptocurrency. But it’s also making it easier to attack one. That could change what investors value in crypto. We’ve spent years chasing new chains, new narratives and increasingly complicated ecosystems. But what happens when launching a new project becomes almost effortless, while building a secure, sustainable network becomes increasingly difficult? Perhaps longevity and genuine decentralisation will become more valuable again. Look at $LTC, $ZEC, $DASH, $BCH, $XNO, $DCR and $DGB. These networks have something many newer projects don’t: years of independent operation and established communities. And there’s another important distinction. Many of these networks don’t need a company to pay for their blockchain to keep running. Independent miners, node operators and stakeholders provide the infrastructure, supported by incentives built into the protocols themselves. They aren’t dependent on a company constantly funding a separate blockchain to keep it alive. That doesn’t make them immune to attacks or guarantee their future success. But you can’t simply create 10–15 years of network history, independent infrastructure and established trust overnight with AI. I wonder whether the market is underestimating the value of crypto networks that have already stood the test of time. Could the next rotation favour the original decentralised cryptocurrencies rather than the latest AI or blockchain narrative? Are there any older, genuinely decentralised projects you’re watching or accumulating that you think the market is overlooking? I’d be interested to hear your suggestions.

The real story with $CPOOL isn’t the token migration. It’s the institutional lending opportunity Clearpool is positioning itself for. A few developments worth watching: • XLS-66 Lending Protocol has reached 21/35 validator votes in favour. • XLS-65 Single Asset Vaults has reached 23/35. Both need 29 votes and then two weeks of sustained support before activation. • Clearpool says nearly all exchanges will handle the CPOOL → CLEAR conversion automatically. For holders in their own wallets, the 1:1 migration opens on 17 November. But here’s the part I find more interesting. Clearpool has already originated over $965m in institutional loans across its existing markets. It’s now working with Ripple and Cicada Partners to bring institutional lending to XRPL, using RLUSD, native lending infrastructure and permissioned credit markets. Cicada handles borrower sourcing and credit underwriting, Ripple participates as an investor, and Clearpool builds the lending infrastructure. This isn’t simply another DeFi yield farm. The ambition is to connect real businesses needing working capital with institutional capital willing to provide it. If XLS-65 and XLS-66 pass, Clearpool could be positioned at the centre of a new institutional credit market on XRPL. The migration is one step. Building a much bigger lending business is the real opportunity. I’m watching this one closely.

I’ve been following what’s happening across the $TAO subnet ecosystem quite closely recently, and I’m starting to notice a pattern. Some of these projects are moving beyond development and beginning to win real customers. A few examples: • Yanez (SN54) has secured its largest customer yet, a major social media company. • OpenRoboto (SN80) has signed its first commercial robotics data pilot with a major Hungarian manufacturing complex. • Reliquary (SN81) has released a 9B model trained through collaboration across multiple Bittensor subnets, reporting 43.6% on SWE-bench Verified. Meanwhile, US lawmakers are calling for stronger AI safety testing, independent audits and oversight of advanced AI models. I find this particularly relevant. As AI becomes more powerful, questions around control, transparency and concentration of power are becoming harder to ignore. Could decentralised AI offer a meaningful alternative? Bittensor is attempting something quite different: independent teams competing to build useful AI products across a shared network. Robotics, identity verification, AI models and compute are just some of the markets being targeted. We’re still early, and plenty needs to be proven commercially. But I’m beginning to think the diversity of what’s being built across Bittensor is being underestimated.

$TAO subnets are starting to do something investors have been waiting to see… Win real customers. Generate revenue. Build actual businesses. Yanez (Subnet 54) has just announced its largest customer yet — a household name in social media. The name is under NDA, but think about the potential. Identity verification and detecting fake accounts are becoming increasingly important as AI makes it easier to create convincing bots and fake identities. This is exactly the sort of real-world problem Bittensor subnets should be solving. Forget the hype for a moment. Commercial adoption is what I want to see more of across Bittensor. And it looks like it’s starting to happen.

Are we starting to see the end of the standalone Layer 1 era? Something is happening across crypto that I think deserves more attention. $ZEN moved to Base. $CELO migrated to an Ethereum L2. $LSK has shut down its own chain. And now $ZIL is abandoning its standalone L1 to become an Ethereum L2 focused on regulated institutions. What’s driving this? Zilliqa has openly admitted that usage, funding and liquidity weren’t sufficient to sustain its own chain. Security was another major challenge. I think there’s a bigger lesson here. Why spend millions maintaining your own blockchain when you can build on established infrastructure with existing liquidity, developers and users? Perhaps the next winners won’t be the projects with their own chains, but those building the most useful products on top of existing networks. Is owning a Layer 1 becoming a competitive disadvantage rather than an advantage?

Everyone talks about the trillions of dollars that could eventually move on-chain. But look at what Aviva is actually doing with $XRP. Its £22bn Sterling Liquidity Fund now has a tokenised share class on the XRP Ledger, initially backed by a £50m investment. Across two tokenised funds, Aviva now has over £86m invested. That’s still a tiny fraction of the traditional fund market. But perhaps that’s the point. Institutional adoption doesn’t happen overnight. It starts with smaller allocations, testing the infrastructure before scaling. If those allocations grow into billions, the opportunity for tokenisation could be enormous. Are we looking too much at today’s numbers and not enough at where this market could be in five years?

$LTC is making another move into institutional finance. The Litecoin Foundation has endorsed a project to bring a reserve-backed version of Litecoin, called cLTC, onto the Canton Network. Why does this matter? It could allow Litecoin to be used in institutional trading, lending and as collateral within financial markets. The LTC backing it will also be publicly verifiable, with independent checks planned. Litecoin has been around since 2011. Its institutional ambitions could be entering a new chapter. Is the market overlooking what could be developing around $LTC?

$TAO is starting to demonstrate something that could become very important for the future of decentralised AI. Macrocosmos, operating Bittensor’s Subnet 9, has just released IOTA Decide 4B, its first public open-weights AI model. But it’s how they built it that caught my attention. The 4B parameter model was trained across 16 globally distributed GPUs using Macrocosmos’s IOTA SDK. It scored 78.6 on the JevBench composite, reportedly placing it among the top 10 of more than 300 systems. And it’s released under an Apache 2.0 licence, opening the door for developers and businesses to use it. Why does this matter? Because Bittensor subnets aren’t just competing for emissions. They’re increasingly trying to build useful AI products that can compete in the real world. If those products attract users, developers and paying customers, we’re looking at something much bigger than a crypto incentive network. We’re looking at the foundations of a decentralised AI economy. One model doesn’t prove the thesis, but this is exactly the kind of progress I want to see across Bittensor. Could this be an early glimpse of what the TAO ecosystem becomes over the next few years?

$QNT could be heading for a major opportunity in institutional finance. But could its biggest success actually create a problem for token holders? It’s a question that should sound familiar to $XRP investors. Ripple has built a substantial financial technology business, but its commercial success doesn’t automatically translate into demand for XRP. Now Quant faces a similar question. Its selection by The Clearing House to provide interoperability infrastructure for a US tokenised deposit network is a significant development. But here’s what investors need to consider… Could banks use Quant’s technology, generate millions in revenue for the company, and never actually need to buy QNT? There may be a commercial reason for this. Banks want predictable costs, regulatory clarity and minimal exposure to volatile crypto assets. Paying a technology provider in dollars is much simpler than being required to acquire and hold a cryptocurrency. Perhaps keeping the token optional makes it easier for companies like Quant and Ripple to win institutional business. But it creates a dilemma for investors. If banks don’t need the token, how much of that institutional success actually flows through to its holders? I’m genuinely interested in what Quant is building. But I want to see evidence that growing adoption creates measurable demand for QNT. Could Quant become a major player in institutional finance while QNT struggles to capture the value? That’s the question I think the market needs to start asking.

$TAO’s most important development might not be another AI breakthrough. It could be the emergence of a real commercial economy underneath the network. SubConnect’s latest Bittensor Revenue Index estimates annualised revenue across revenue-generating subnets has climbed: $35M → $50M → $70M. That’s a 100% increase in just two months. Barry Silbert has also highlighted the growth, describing the Bittensor ecosystem as being on fire. But there’s another number I think investors should be watching… Annual TAO emissions are estimated to be worth more than $300M. So despite the impressive revenue growth, there’s still a significant gap between what the ecosystem earns from customers and what the network distributes in emissions. That’s the next challenge. If subnets can keep growing customer revenue, improve margins and increasingly fund their own token demand through commercial activity, Bittensor’s economics could look very different. I think the market should be paying close attention to this transition. The question is no longer just whether Bittensor can attract developers and miners. It’s whether it can build an ecosystem of profitable businesses. That’s what could make $TAO particularly interesting over the longer term.