Black Friday is supposed to be the easiest day of the year. This one starts with the plumbing failing.

A cooling issue at a CyrusOne data center forced CME to halt futures and options trading across stock indices, currencies and other contracts for several hours. 

Treasuries and metals came back first. Equity futures are only reopening right before the cash market in what is already a shortened session.

On the equity side the story is still simple.

• Four straight up days into Thanksgiving.
• Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all tracking their best Thanksgiving week performance since the early 2010s.
• November itself is still negative, with tech pulling back and AI profitability doubts hanging over the tape, but the week has traders talking again about a year end rally.

Crypto’s story is more complicated.

A week ago, bitcoin nearly tagged $80,000 on some venues after giving back roughly a third from its October highs. 

This morning it sits just above $91,000, an 8 to 11 percent bounce helped by renewed belief in a December Fed cut, BlackRock’s income fund adding to its BTC holdings, and Tom Lee publicly talking about a path back to fresh record highs before year end.

Volatility gauges in both BTC and U.S. stocks have cooled from last week’s spike. 

BTC and ETH options markets are showing less appetite for put protection. On the surface, the reset looks constructive.

Breadth says otherwise. A clear majority of the top 100 tokens by market value still trade below both their 50 day and 200 day moving averages. 

By comparison, Nasdaq breadth looks healthier, with a smaller share of its top names stuck under key trend lines.

Equities are enjoying a broadening Thanksgiving rally. Crypto is running a leader-only bounce inside a still fragile structure.

Investor Signal

Treat bitcoin’s rebound as a positioning reset, not a clean all clear. Until breadth improves and more of the market reclaims its longer term trend lines, this looks more like a strong rally inside a corrective phase than the start of a new leg higher.

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Flows today split into three distinct channels.

Bitcoin and majors

• BTC has stabilized just above $91K after last Friday’s scare.
• The move off the lows has triggered larger percentage bounces in majors like ETH, XRP and SOL.
• With volatility gauges easing and fewer traders paying up for downside puts, the near term tone is more constructive than it was a week ago.

Digital Asset Treasuries

The cleanest stress signal is not in the coins. It is in the equities that hoard them.

Fifteen listed “digital asset treasury” companies that stockpile coins on their balance sheets are trading below the net asset value of the BTC, ETH or SOL they hold. 

Shares of Michael Saylor’s flagship bitcoin hoarding vehicle are down almost 36 percent in November alone.

The sector now holds roughly 4 percent of all bitcoin, just over 3 percent of all ether and almost 1 percent of all solana. 

That concentration means drawdowns and discounts in these stocks matter for the asset class. The pattern so far is simple.

• DATs rallied hard into the year on the back of token gains and a friendly White House narrative.
• The latest bout of volatility has left many of them trading at discounts to the assets they own.
• The market is signaling doubts about governance, risk management and capital allocation, not just about crypto prices.

IBIT and the options plumbing

Nasdaq’s International Securities Exchange has quietly asked the SEC to raise the position limit on options tied to BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust from 250,000 contracts to one million.

On paper this looks technical. In practice it is a line in the sand.

• At one million contracts, a fully exercised position would still represent only a single digit percentage of IBIT’s float and a fraction of a percent of total BTC supply.
• Market makers would be able to hedge larger institutional flows using listed IBIT options rather than bespoke swaps.
• Private banks and structured product desks would finally have room to build full size notes and yield products for clients who want BTC volatility without holding the coin.

The friction is no longer pure market structure. It is balance sheet and regulation. 

Accounting rules like SAB 121 still make it hard for large banks to treat BTC as seamless collateral, even as IBIT’s options market is upgraded to big league limits.

Investor Signal

The spot chart tells you BTC has recovered. DAT discounts and IBIT’s push for higher options limits tell you where institutional exposure is actually evolving. 

The cleaner edges right now are in mispriced wrappers and changing risk capacity, not in chasing another five percent in spot.

The same AI story that props up megacap valuations and leaks into the crypto narrative is getting more crowded and more regional.

Two pieces coming into the morning matter.

In China, Baidu’s Kunlun AI chip unit is emerging as a leading domestic alternative for high performance AI workloads. Management just laid out a five year roadmap with new generations slated for 2026 and 2027. 

Analysts now see Kunlun chip sales multiplying over the next couple of years and value the unit in the tens of billions of dollars. 

Chinese hyperscalers are increasingly sourcing from local vendors as U.S. export controls and domestic policy both push them away from a steady diet of Nvidia parts.

In the U.S., Google’s TPU story is finally back at the center of the AI trade. 

Gemini 3’s strong debut has highlighted the fact that Alphabet is already on its seventh generation of in house AI chips. Those TPUs power Google’s own products and now support outside workloads from companies like Apple and Anthropic. The sales pitch is straightforward.

• TPUs are specialized for deep learning and matrix math.
• Under the right workloads they can offer a better cost structure than general purpose Nvidia GPUs.
• They give large customers a way to diversify away from dependence on a single vendor.

Nvidia still sits at the middle of the AI universe, with data center revenue that has exploded since 2021 and gross margins in the seventies. 

Its real moat is the software stack developers have learned to live in over the last decade.

Where this intersects crypto:

• Mining fleets and compute aligned tokens are implicitly long a world where GPU based capacity is scarce and mostly Nvidia shaped.
• As TPUs, domestic Chinese chips and other in house designs take share, that assumption starts to weaken at the margin.
• The more AI hardware turns into a multi polar market, the less clean it is to think of “AI demand” as a single linear driver of GPU prices and miner economics.

Investor Signal

The story has moved from “Nvidia or nothing” toward a more fragmented hardware map, even if the market has not fully priced that yet. 

If your crypto exposure is anchored on a single vendor AI boom, revisit it. Hardware diversification tends to show up in cost structures before it ever shows up in megacap multiples.

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Policy headlines this morning are blunt and partisan, but they go straight to core crypto risks.

A new report from House Judiciary Committee Democrats accuses President Trump and his family of turning the White House into “the world’s most corrupt crypto startup operation,” 

claiming roughly $800 million of token sales in the first half of the year and tying World Liberty Financial and Trump linked meme coins to foreign money, rollbacks of investigations and high profile pardons.

The report argues that:

• Token ownership has become a channel for buying access and influence.
• Enforcement teams have been dismantled or repurposed.
• Key rules put in place by the prior administration have been quietly reversed.

The authors are now asking Treasury for suspicious activity reports tied to Trump related crypto ventures and are calling for a ban on elected officials trading or issuing tokens.

This is not just rhetoric. It sets the frame through which future rules around political tokens, corporate treasuries and DAT structures are going to be written. 

The more the debate is about corruption and pay to play, the harder it will be for treasuries and token issuers to argue they are just another asset on the balance sheet.

At the same time, the Upbit hack in South Korea is a reminder that operational risk is still real even at the largest regulated venues.

After a roughly 30 million dollar theft tied to Solana ecosystem tokens, Upbit’s emergency audit uncovered a wallet implementation flaw that could have allowed attackers to reconstruct private keys by analyzing on chain signature data. 

The exchange has patched the issue, moved assets to cold storage and pledged to cover customer losses. Regulators are probing potential involvement by North Korea’s Lazarus Group.

The immediate market impact was a set of sharp, localized premiums as Solana based tokens ripped higher on Upbit once arbitrage bots and cross market flows were disrupted. 

Korean retail buy pressure briefly created a separate price universe while deposits and withdrawals were suspended.

Investor Signal

Policy risk is pulling in three directions at once.

• Partisan scrutiny of Trump era token wealth raises the odds of stricter rules on political coins and corporate treasuries.
• Large exchanges are reminding everyone that wallet implementation details can still fail in surprising ways.
• Regional dependence on single venues, as in Korea, can turn a hack into a temporary parallel market with its own pricing.

None of that is in the BTC chart. All of it matters for how capital allocators think about venue and issuer risk.

Into the shortened Black Friday session, microstructure is defined by a glitch and a coil.

On the TradFi side, CME’s data center outage temporarily erased the usual futures based pre market signaling. 

Globex, FX, and other contracts went dark before gradually coming back online. Stock index futures are reopening right into the cash open, and in a day that is already light on volume, price discovery will be shallow at best.

On the crypto side:

• BTC has stalled just above $91K after its rebound from last week’s lows.
• Options markets show less demand for crash protection than they did at the peak of the panic, but not enough call buying to signal a full sentiment flip.
• Open interest is recovering from the washout, yet remains moderate. There is no sign of an all in chase.
• Altcoin liquidity is patchy, with many names still trading below key moving averages and order books thinned out by the recent volatility.

Breadth remains the tell. Equities are putting up strong weekly gains even as November closes in the red. 

Santiago Crypto is creating the opposite pattern, a solid bounce in the leader while most of the field quietly trades below trend.

Investor Signal

Think of BTC here as sitting in a compression corridor. The important information will not be whether it finishes this quiet session a few hundred dollars higher or lower. 

It will be how breadth, open interest and DAT discounts behave once full liquidity returns next week.

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If you only watched the index tape, you would see a familiar story.

• A strong Thanksgiving week.
• AI still central to megacap narratives.
• A glitchy but ultimately manageable futures outage.
• A crypto leader that bounced hard from last week’s scare.

Crypto is already trading something else.

It is trading:

• Breadth that has not confirmed the BTC move.
• Public companies whose crypto hoarding trades below the value of their coins.
• A partisan fight over Trump era token wealth that will shape how treasuries, political coins and DAT structures get regulated.
• Exchanges that can still lose tens of millions and uncover previously unknown wallet flaws.
• An options market around IBIT that is being rewired so Wall Street can finally size BTC risk with the same tools it uses for SPY and QQQ.

Thanksgiving week can still close green. Bitcoin can still make a run at six figures into year end. None of that erases the fact that the rails underneath the market are shifting.

The traders who will own the next leg are not the ones who chase today’s holiday bounce. They are the ones who stay focused on where structure is changing faster than price.

Stay early.
Stay structural.
Stay where the signal lives.

CryptoHiiv sees it first.