In partnership with
👋 Yo,
What up. This is The Chain, where we talk about how bad Bitcoin is doing while the entire financial system embraces it. Somehow.
Here are this week's highlights:
🐻 This Week Was Worse Than Last for BTC
🍻 Dave Portnoy Provides Crypto Entertainment
😯 New Hampshire Provides… Bitcoin Debt?
🌑 Cloudflare Has a History of Sending Crypto Dark
Days where crypto prices are red feel like an ice bath. The quicker you jump into it, the easier it is.
So let’s jump right in.
In partnership with Crypto101
The Smartest Free Crypto Event You’ll Join This Year
Curious about crypto but still feeling stuck scrolling endless threads? People who get in early aren’t just lucky—they understand the why, when, and how of crypto.
Join our free 3‑day virtual summit and meet the crypto experts who can help you build out your portfolio. You’ll walk away with smart, actionable insights from analysts, developers, and seasoned crypto investors who’ve created fortunes using smart strategies and deep research.
No hype. No FOMO. Just the clear steps you need to move from intrigued to informed about crypto.
Please support our partners!
🐻 Bitcoin Slips Below $88K
Yikes. Not a headline you want to see. Bitcoin has now wiped out all of its gains from 2025.
Here’s a chilling statistic: The crypto industry hit a record all-time-high market cap of $4.27T on October 6.
It now sits at $3T, just a month and a half later. That’s an average of $28B lost per day. Unreal.
Nvidia (NVDA) posted great earnings and revenue beats yesterday, which pulled markets upward in general; that included Bitcoin, which was at $92K earlier this morning. However, markets are now reversing those gains, and Bitcoin is dropping lower and lower.
Things aren’t looking good, to say the least. A lot of people are scared; Forbes notes that even though Bitcoin has fallen 28%, BTC has historically crashed as much as 50%, which would put us around $60K. But a lot of people are seeing the coming days as a buying opportunity.
What’s your take?
In partnership with CoW Swap
Best Price, Every Trade.
Want the best price on every swap? CoW Swap evaluates routes across DEXs in real time and settles the most efficient path. Tighter pricing, higher success rates, fewer reverts. Find your best price.
Please support our partners!
🍻 Barstool’s Dave Portnoy Goes BIG On Crypto
So, there’s a lot of negative news out there, but how about some… well, we don’t know if this is positive news, but it’s NEWS at least.
Dave Portnoy, founder of Barstool Sports, has a bad, bad track record with crypto, but he keeps putting skin in the game.
He panic sold Bitcoin and Ethereum in the 2021 market crash.
He also panic sold XRP this year, 2 weeks before it rose 60%. Oof.
And now, Portnoy is making a HUGE bet on the market. He just bought:
XRP: $1 million
BTC: $750,000
ETH: $400,000
Eric Trump approved of the move. He’s been saying that volatility is a “friend” and an opportunity to buy, according to Yahoo Finance.
😯 New Hampshire: The Bitcoin State?
Meanwhile, something wild is happening in New England. New Hampshire has created the first Bitcoin Collateralized Municipal Bond in the US, making a way for companies to borrow against their Bitcoin holdings.
The conduit bond is worth $100M, and its goal is to “allow companies in the digital-asset ecosystem to access capital safely and effectively,” according to James Key-Wallace (executive director of the agency that approved the issuance of the bond).
The takeaway here is that even though Bitcoin’s price is tanking, more and more tools are being built to further incorporate BTC into America’s financial systems. Seems good.
🌑 When Crypto Went Dark
The Cloudflare outage earlier this week took out servers across the internet, sending crypto-related sites like Coinbase, Robinhood, DefiLlama, and Twitter itself into darkness (or really, 500 Error screens).
The sites are up again now, but this wasn’t the first Cloudflare outage that took crypto out at the knees (at least momentarily). In 2022, a similar event affected FTX (yikes), Bitfinex, and OKX; and in 2019, another Cloudflare outage sent Coinbase, CoinMarketCap, and several other websites offline, too, according to The Block.
For a long time, one of crypto’s pillars has been the principle of decentralization. But in reality, it’s been obvious for a while that the industry is quite centralized, and although Bitcoin’s ledger system is still independent, it doesn’t matter as much if the exchanges it’s traded on are completely centralized 😅
🍟 Extra Crispy Crypto Links
Crypto exchange Kraken has confidentially filed for an IPO.
The autistic co-founder of Samourai Wallet was just sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Coinbase might be testing stock trading and prediction markets, according to a leak.
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin sees 2 issues for ETH if Blackrock gets bigger.
Twitter and Block founder Jack Dorsey launched a “zero crypto tax 'coffee' campaign.”
📩 Weekly Meme Delivery
🎤 Let us know what you thought
We really appreciate you reading our newsletter, and we’d love to hear your feedback.
How was this week's edition?
⏳ Wrapping Up
Markets look rough. They very well might get rougher. But if Bitcoin and crypto were going to die, they probably would have died the 100s of other times people said “Bitcoin is dead.” The question is whether this is buying/dollar-cost-averaging territory or not yet. Only you can answer that question, but we’re here to provide you all the key updates along the way.
Appreciate you reading, always.
Same time next week? Sounds good.
Until next time,
- The Chain Team