Happy Black Friday. Hopefully my American readers had a lovely Thanksgiving. I think we can all agree it is our best holiday, right? Both thematically and in practice. Gratefulness? LFG.

Now that the season of abject consumerism has begun, chime into the comments if you bought a TV with more inches than your own body today. A friend of mine got one of those. I helped him unpack it. As we turned it on, I felt like I was a resident of Tokyo, standing in the street as Godzilla walked in from the sea. Fear. Awe. Disgust.

Stick around till the end and I’ll tell you my favorite Black Friday memory. Yes, it is relevant to the subjects of this newsletter.

11 years ago today, bitcoin was priced at $376
The 11th largest coin was namecoin
The 111th was dogeblackcoin

Folks. No one has any idea what’s going on with the crypto charts. That’s my take.

You’ll hear folks say the “fundamentals“ are better than ever but day traders are skittish and no one will believe good ole Jerome is making cuts until he does it.

Bitcoin hit $90K on Wednesday and then slunk back like a high school trombone player giving up on his move to ask a cheerleader to Homecoming. Then back over again. By the time this goes out it will probably be under again.

And, listen, to anyone who wants to talk about fundamentals, explain this to me: Bitcoin is down about 2% over the last year. Ethereum is just a little worse. So for all the opening in regulatory friction in the last year, the only two chains with any kind of product market fit are crab walking.

But, XRP is up 50% over the last year. This is a coin that has never had a point other than to fatten Ripple’s bags as it tosses acquisition cash like a whirling dervish, as if it can finally find a place in the market by pure chance.

Is the future here, but it’s a clown show?

Well, if it is, then William Gibson was right: it’s not evenly distributed. Because XRP’s peer clown show, Cardano, is down just about the same amount for the same year. Someone help me understand how rationally XRP is up and Cardano is down.

Because they are the same thing: nothing. Make it make sense!

By the way, exhibit #1,487 in the case against Cardano came in this week. A script kiddie with a ChatGPT account busted the chain badly enough that Charles Hoskinson called the cops, so badly that one of its devs quit because, he admitted, the team should have known better.

Look, the best move with the Cardano team is to not join it. Cardano’s whole schtick is making a giant show of technical seriousness to the point of being clearly defensive about its larger non-starter status. It’s the top-20-coin equivalent of the kid at camp who says he has a girlfriend in North Dakota.

For heaven’s sake: there are only $40M worth of stablecoins on the whole chain. Freaking Fantom has almost 10X more.

So Cardano is down, which is right and good. But somehow XRP is up? How/why/what?

I promise, the clown show is not the future. Crypto and blockchain are going to work out. This really is generative technology. But it feels weird now.

As it happens, Tron’s TRX is up over the year too, but you know what? People use Tron to move USDT around cheap. I might not like it, but at least I get it. Yet XRP still has more gains than TRX.

The XRP thing is unsettling.

If you bought XRP, I’m happy for you. The price is up enough that you can now trade it for bitcoin and really stack some sats. Nice play, anon. That is why y’all are buying, XRP, right?

Confession.

I missed the obvious on DATs.

So when DATs first started to become this giant trend earlier this year, I asked the question: How could this go wrong?

Basically, I wanted to know if there was a way all these companies could be forced to sell off their token hoards. After reporting it out, I concluded that they couldn’t really be forced to sell until their convertible notes came due.

Convertible notes are the form of debt these companies were using to buy crypto. It was debt that wouldn’t come due usually for at least four years.

I thought, well, the market is safe for now because four years is a long time. And, as we know, over a long timeline, bitcoin (at least) tends to do well. Looks good?

Dear reader: I did not understand the equity markets.

The equity market does not like when a company’s stock is worth less than its stuff. In this case, its crypto hoard. These companies became, by and large, nothing more than holding companies for giant piles of bitcoin or shitcoins.

At first, investors were weirdly willing to pay more than the value of the underlying cryptocurrencies to buy these stocks. Why? The companies were making hand-wavey promises that were basically the investor equivalent of the kind of hand-wavey things I tell dates about why I’d make a good boyfriend. (We’re all just trying to make our case going into an unknown future, you know? It’s tough out there.)

Well it’s not exactly a shock that people who could have just bought bitcoin (or whatever) had second thoughts about overpaying just so their web3 bet could sit neatly in their Schwab portal. Not a shock they hit “sell.”

So what are the DATs doing? They are selling their cryptocurrency to attempt to get their net asset value back in line with their market cap. So what I have learned here is that there was another mechanism that could force these companies to sell: irritated shareholders.

Let’s all keep watching while these companies try to strategically reverse their core “never sell” strategy back into the market’s good graces.

To me, a DAT is like a relationship. You either only buy or you sell everything. You can’t cheat a little.

Even the final boss of DATs, MicroStrategy, is underwater. Word on the street is that market moods will never break Saylor, though. I’m imagining a shareholder meeting that opens with a giant hologram of Saylor on stage laughing maniacally while a wall of also-holographic flame burns behind him. As the investors fall into a stunned silence, the hologram giant bends over so it looks like it’s three inches from their faces, and Saylor’s mega-avatar bellows:

THIS. IS. FINE.

Curtains.

End meeting.

The State of Texas actually bought some bitcoin! Five mega-large worth.

Okay, okay, it bought it via BlackRock’s IBIT ETF. Whatever. That’s a nice slab of corn off the market.

While the state works on how to take its own approach to self-custody, I put in a proposal. Dragons. We’ll get that one from the old Dungeons and Dragons TV show, Tiamat. That thing had like five heads and a terrible attitude. Put that thing in front of Texas’ bitcoin. How about that?

Let’s say that North Korea does hack it? Good news, bad news, Kim. Yes, you have the bitcoin, but Tiamat is flying your way. How do you like that?

Anyway, waiting to see if that gets picked up. It’s a long tail proposal.

Last week, I called the moves by U.S. states around bitcoin largely theater, and pointed out that no state had bought any yet. According to the CoinDesk report, I might have been wrong then, the world just didn’t know it yet. Texas made its buy last week. ::bandolero-shooting-air-emoji::

I’m picturing Bitcoin sitting on a mountain out there somewhere, intoning: “I shall come, but I shall come in my own time, mortals.”

Seven years ago, Warren Buffett, the sage of Omaha, called Bitcoin “rat poison, squared.” Time has proved him wrong.

That said, JPMorgan is embracing bitcoin finally — in a bizarre way, and, well, if anyone famous wants to come out and call what they are doing rat poison squared, I would not hate them for it.

The firm has filed to list a derivative that will win BIGLY if bitcoin tanks next year but pops in 2028 (the year of the next probable halving).

JPMorgan is a big company, but it has been giving mixed signals like a first-time movie director in a room full of starlets. While JPM proposes this very interesting instrument with one hand, with the other hand it is kicking crypto entrepreneurs out of its banking services.

Jack Mallers, the man who brought bitcoin to El Salvador, got kicked off the bank recently. There’s a lot of things you can say about Mallers, I suppose, but at this point the idea that his money might not be good seems very unlikely. Mallers is doing fine.

Of course, Chase wouldn’t explain their decision, but then news came out that they also booted a guy at ShapeShift.

Strike and ShapeShift sit at the more rebellious end of the crypto industry. Not that they are non-compliant, but these are companies for people with ideological convictions. Flippening enjoyooooooors.

It still irritates me that the prevailing narrative amongst slingers of The Conventional Wisdom was that debanking wasn’t real. If you had your ear even a little to the ground among crypto types, debanking of the industry was definitely real (all three prudential regulators put out a joint memo in 2023 for goodness sake).

The bad news is it seems like it’s also not quite over, even if there’s apparently no longer an order on high now. The latest calls seem to be coming from inside the house, instead, but the effect is the same.

It’s like, you think you’ve gotten your diet in order and you can finally quit that Proactiv subscription. You have a couple nice months taking it easy and: boom, three big old zits pop up on your chin.

Yes, I’m saying that JPM has zits. Go back on the treatments, JPM. This looks bad.

The other boss monster DAT is Metaplanet. When I covered New Hampshire’s bitcoin bond last week I said that bitcoin whales would use the credit facility to post bitcoin in order to get cash to buy more bitcoin. Tried and true trade. I now present you with Metaplanet, the Japanese MicroStrategy. Doggone double down degen. Dang. DAT’s how you do dis.

2025 one clear lesson has been don’t advertise the fact that you have phat bags. Wrench attacks have been going crazy (see: Lopp’s log). The good news is that physical attackers seem to be getting dumber. Is that good news?

Polymarket wins its bet, as the CFTC has said it’s okay to run its prediction market here. Kind of hard to justify keeping them out with Kalshi going strong, right? Now the real game is on: for your hearts and minds.

And Bitwise has succeeded in putting a dogecoin ETF on the market with the best possible name: BWOW. My take:

What I should do today probably is unpack Japan’s proposed new crypto trading and taxation rules. They sound important!

Japan wrote rules around crypto exchange custody that held up amid 2023’s darkest days. But digging into regs is hard. And it’s Black Friday. And I don’t speak Japanese. And I’m sick of policy!

So, instead, let’s have a look at some fresh weird in the top 50 cryptocurrencies.

Here’s a standard I hold myself to as a crypto reporter. If a digital asset is in the top 50 by market cap, I should not look at it and say: What the shenanigans is that? If you point out any cryptocurrency in the top 50 (hell, the top 100), I should be able to tell you with some degree of confidence what it is. What I say might be a bit out of date, sure, but I can at least show that I’ve had a look at some point.

So when something I don’t recognize pops up in the upper echelons of CoinGecko, it’s like when the Trouble Alert fired up in that 80s cartoon, The Super Friends. My own Colonel Wilcox pops up inside my head, complete with dress greens, and says, “Brady! Find out what that is!”

So, today, my friends, I present you with WhiteBIT (WBT).

This coin is somehow the 13th largest crypto asset in the world right now. News to me.

WhiteBIT’s chart goes back to 2022. It is, apparently, an exchange token, much like Binance’s BNB.

Also, much like BNB, it also works on its own chain, the WhiteChain, which, based on its whitepaper, is a highly centralized system. This is the first time I have ever heard of this chain, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the last. In fact, if I had to bet why it might come across my transom again it would be because the highly centralized blockchain got hacked horribly after a successful spearfishing attempt.

CoinGecko ranks it as the 32nd largest exchange with a 24-hour volume, as of this writing, of $1.2 billion.

Back in the 90s a record store guy told me that when labels have a real huge act, like, say, The Black Crowes, they will go out and find another similar act and sign them. They do this, they explained, just to sort of keep that sound going in people’s minds until their stars finish their coke and press another album.

Feels truthy.

The best argument I can find for WhiteBIT’s success this year is a partnership with a soccer team.

Sometimes I feel like the whole continent of Europe watched the movie: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as a documentary.

Housekeeping:

Next week will be my first week doing this newsletter as a fully formed endeavor. Tell your enemies. My first standalone, one-topic newsletter will come out Tuesday afternoon. It’s going to be something of a broadside, a manifesto, a jeremiad.

It will also be a listicle.

It’s for me. It’s for you. It’s for us.

We will see if I manage to drop the first episode of the Diamond Rhino podcast next week, my explainer show. I will drop it, but it could slip to the following week. The plan for that first ep: I’m going to steelman XRP. I’ve never been a believer, but one must test their convictions. Tune in — one of these days.

And Backstage Pass will be back once again on Friday, to enter the maelstrom of Friday news roundups and ]whistle ‘Dixie’ as it strolls deeper and deeper into your heart.

Finally, I promised you my favorite Black Friday story.

It was 2019.

Crypto Twitter was already making noises about the coming pandemic. I stayed in Brooklyn that year. I was still working at CoinDesk then.

I wasn’t an editor, but every now and then I would serve as editor-for-a-day when there weren’t going to be lots of staff around. Usually I’d get two comp days for that — nice deal.

So Black Friday 2019, me and the estimable crypto reporter David Pan were the whole desk for the day. He was the reporter, I was the editor.

I told David on Slack: Listen man, let’s keep this low key. We will get out two or three simple posts. No big swings. Just keep the site alive.

He was like, “Cool, cool.”

It was not to be. Poor idealistic, innocent Virgil Griffith, a long-time developer in the Ethereum world, landed back in the U.S. on Thanksgiving and got a tap on the shoulder by law enforcement. They took him into custody for going to North Korea and talking officials there through how Ethereum works.

It was not a chill day for me and David! Curse you, News Gods! But I’ve enjoyed the memory since. It was better than scrumming it up at Best Buy.

Anyway, Griffith has been out of prison and under house arrest since April.

Griffith wants a pardon, of course, but, unbelievably, I can’t seem to find a prediction market for whether or not he will get one. What’s even the point of making Polymarket legal if I can’t have this? I thought degens didn’t leave money on the table! Do better, y’all!

I hope Thanksgiving reminded you that it’s a wonderful world out there (but encrypt your files).

Stay shiny! See you next Friday.