US home-equity loans are now crypto's ninth-largest asset, at $26.9bn

Good morning. Democrats took both chambers overnight and crypto rose with the result: bitcoin $78,426, up 1.9%. The companies that sell crypto did not: Coinbase is down 9.7% over five sessions against bitcoin's 3.6%. And the ninth-largest asset in crypto is a pool of American home loans, which grew $2.63bn in October.

The tape

Bitcoin (BTC) $78,426, +1.9% on the day, -3.8% on the week, -9.2% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,323.16, +2.5% and -14.7% on the month. BNB, the largest exchange's own token, $702.01, +0.7% and -11.1%. Solana (SOL) $93.28, +1.1% and -23.2%. XRP $1.28, +2.3% and -15.4%. Bitcoin holds 60.0% of crypto's $2.62tn.

Gainers: Bubblemaps (BMT), which maps token ownership, +25.6% on $119.9m of volume against a $22.9m market value, 5.23 times its own size in a day; Zcash (ZEC), the privacy coin, +13.6% to $1,308.80 and now crypto's tenth-largest asset at $22.28bn. Losers: UnifAI Network (UAI), an AI agent network, -45.9%; Janction (JCT), which rents graphics processors, -12.9%.

Where to look

1. 01

   Coinbase fell 9.71% over five sessions while bitcoin fell 3.60%.

   Robinhood (HOOD) lost 9.39% and Circle (CRCL) 7.80%, against 3.61% for BlackRock's IBIT, the largest spot bitcoin fund: the fund tracked the coin, the businesses lost 2.7 times as much. Coinbase's 29 October accounts say why: trading revenue down 44% in a year to $590m, operating profit $62m against $481m. The market is repricing crypto's revenue, not crypto.

   

   WatchFourth-quarter trading revenue holding the $165m pace reported through 25 October, which puts Coinbase's two halves level for the first time.

2. 02

   Single-stock perpetual futures can trade in America because a review clock ran out.

   A perpetual future tracks a share price and never expires. Coinbase Derivatives, Bitnomial and KalshiEX, the regulated prediction-market exchange, were deemed approved when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's 45-day window closed without a rejection; a group of established exchanges and market makers including Cboe and Citadel Securities has asked a court to void them. Polymarket, the largest prediction market, prices the Clarity Act, the US market-structure bill, at 3.05% to pass this year. Expired clocks and lawsuits are writing crypto's rules, not Congress.

   WatchA restraining order before the first contract lists, which stops equity perpetuals before they start.

3. 03

   Spot bitcoin funds sold for a third straight session, $1,157.5m in all, and one fund was 63.4% of it.

   The twelve funds lost $115.6m on 3 November after $398.6m and $643.3m; BlackRock's IBIT is $734.0m of those three days and $500.3m of November's $514.2m. Fund assets are $99.16bn, 10.5% under the $110.84bn peak of 22 September. The buyer that absorbed October is now the only seller that matters.

   WatchIBIT taking money in on any session this week, which would mean October's buyer is back.

4. 04

   The midterms paid prediction markets $4.32m of fees in a day, 6.5% of everything crypto earned.

   Polymarket US took $2.73m and Polymarket International $1.59m in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning, against $66.29m across all protocols. That is 1.31 times Polymarket US's $2.08m median day of the last 90: an American election is worth a third of an extra day to the largest prediction market. Over 30 days the international venue's fees are up 51.8% and the US venue's down 36.1%, so the growth is offshore, not at home.

   WatchPolymarket US above $4.29m, its 24 October level, which would mean the vote brought users who stayed.

The deep dive

The ninth-largest asset in crypto is $26.85bn of American home-equity loans, and it doubled in twelve months while its price moved 0.31%. Figure Heloc (FIGR_HELOC) is issued by Figure Technology Solutions, a Nasdaq-listed lender, onto Provenance, the blockchain Figure built. Each token is one dollar of principal from a home-equity line of credit, a loan secured against the value a borrower owns in their house.

We divided market value by price on each of the last 365 days to get tokens outstanding. They went from 13,441,660,770 on 5 November 2025 to 26,063,337,182 yesterday, up 93.9%, while the price went $1.03338 to $1.03015. Of the $5.42bn of value added in 89 days, $5.17bn was new tokens and $249m price: 95.4% of the growth is lending. October set the record, $2,625,456,043, 2.82 times the $932m average of the ten months before.

The objection: this is an issuance instrument, so thin secondary trading does not matter. It fails on the data: over 84 days the correlation between daily volume and the daily change in supply is 0.02. On the twenty quietest days supply grew $31.6m a day while volume stayed under $5m, and on 2 November the token traded $50,666 against $26.85bn outstanding. Figure Markets, the company's own venue, carries 100% of the volume.

This is a loan book with a ticker, not an asset with a market. What would prove it wrong: a week in which the price moves more than 1% while supply is flat, or a second venue quoting it.

The news

• Binance traced the $6.34bn theft to a fake job interview. A recruiter approached an engineer in September, and a second interviewer had him install a coding assignment that replaced a development tool. The permission that emptied the wallet took three hours and 46 minutes to revoke, and the $2.85bn now called frozen is below the $3bn claimed on 30 October.
• Kraken restricted accounts over a suspected European theft above $133m. Chainalysis put the 2 November loss at Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil's largest exchange, at $49m across 17 chains. Strip the Binance incident out and 115 exploits over 90 days come to $1.16bn, so this one November theft is 11.5% of everything else.
• Securities and Exchange Commission staff called Canton Coin a digital commodity. Canton is a blockchain for regulated finance, and the relief rests on the issuer's representations, not a ruling. On the same chain Societe Generale took $10m of tokenised Treasury bills as loan collateral. Amazon, Tesla and SpaceX joined objectors to tokenised versions of their shares, now 56.
• Ethereum targets December 2028 for its post-quantum switch. Justin Drake named the date at Devcon 8, a year ahead of the Foundation's 2029 goal. A quantum computer large enough could derive private keys from public ones. Ether is down 14.7% in 30 days, so none of it is priced.

Token talk: Pyth Network (PYTH)

Pyth Network (PYTH) publishes price data onto blockchains so that lending and derivatives contracts know what things cost. It earns two ways: fees from the on-chain feeds, and Pyth Pro, a subscription selling the same data to institutions off-chain.

It is here because Pyth Pro booked $1,035,331 of fees on 3 November, its largest bill and 24.4% of the $4,244,899 it has recorded since launch. It bills in lumps, not daily: five dates in 180 carry every dollar, nothing was booked between 8 September and 3 November, and each bill beats the one before. Kalshi's tradable midterms index settles to values Pyth publishes, the same product sold twice.

The token has not followed the business. PYTH is $0.06564, up 5.0% on the day but down 17.9% over 30 days and 94.5% below the $1.20 high it set in March 2024. Market value is $517.08m against $656.61m fully diluted, 7.87bn of 10bn tokens circulate, 78.7%, and 5.19% of that value turns over in a day. November's bill is 1.43 times September's and 4.29 times June's. What would change the view: a December bill above $1.04m, which makes the subscription a trend rather than five points.

Token Tape is written by an automated research desk built and supervised by Eric Manoukian. Figures are pulled live each morning and errors are possible. Nothing here is investment advice. The editor may hold positions in assets discussed.