Variant, Coinbase Ventures, Gemini and More Invest $5M in Solana Staking ‘Transformer’ Pye Finance

Founder of SkyBridge Capital Anthony Scaramucci gave Michael Saylor's latest move a rare shout-out, calling it "really smart stuff" after Strategy announced the biggest Bitcoin purchase in months and fresh details about how its balance sheet keeps absorbing more supply.

Build a dollar cushion, raise equity, rotate proceeds into BTC and let the balance sheet harden while the market watches the largest corporate holder keep adding size — that is what is smart for Scaramucci in the Bitcoin strategy of Michael Saylor & Co.

The praise came after Strategy confirmed the acquisition of 10,624 BTC for about $962.7 million at an average price of $90,615. That brings the company's total holdings to 660,624 BTC, worth almost $60 billion at current pricing, while the average cost sits near $74,702. The unrealized gain is now just over 20%. 

According to Scaramucci, this setup — dollar backstop first, equity sales second, accumulation third — is a capital structure that keeps working because it increases BTC exposure without weakening the corporate base.

Equity loop 

The equity angle is important because Strategy's share issuance has become a regular thing in the Bitcoin macro market. Even "barely" accretive sales, as Scaramucci said, still add to the balance sheet and expand the firm's BTC-per-share metric, which equity markets are watching closely.

Right now, the market is valued at anywhere from $52 to $58 billion, with an enterprise value of about $67 billion, and mNAV readings have climbed back to near parity.

Saylor's approach has not changed: treat BTC as the main reserve asset, execute when liquidity allows and communicate purchases with precision. Scaramucci's endorsement shows how Wall Street pros now see the model not as just an experiment but as a corporate BTC pipe that keeps proving it can scale.

A wave of newly launched spot altcoin ETFs are making headlines, even after the U.S. government’s longest shutdown pushed the crypto market into a sharp correction. While spot Bitcoin ETFs saw heavy outflows, several newer altcoin ETFs recorded zero days of net outflows, raising questions about whether certain altcoins may outperform once the market recovers.

Below is a detailed breakdown of the five cryptocurrencies that recently received U.S. spot ETFs and why they may be positioned for a strong bounce.

XRP: Strong ETF Launches Despite Market Drop

XRP was designed to speed up and lower the cost of global payments. Unlike traditional banking systems that rely on slow messaging networks like SWIFT, XRP transactions settle in seconds at extremely low fees.

Because of this real-world use case, institutional interest has grown quickly since spot XRP ETFs went live.

ETF Impact

• First ETF launched on Nov. 13 with $58M in day-one volume
• Attracted $250M in inflows, the largest ETF debut of 2025
• Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, and Grayscale followed with additional ETFs
• Combined day-one inflows exceeded $160M

Although XRP’s price fell 23% during the market-wide downturn, these ETF inflows show strong institutional demand that could lift XRP once sentiment improves.

Solana : ETF Momentum Supports a Local Bottom

Solana continues to be one of the fastest-growing ecosystems thanks to its speed, low fees, and explosive memecoin activity. It also aims to become a “decentralized Nasdaq,” powering tokenized assets at scale.

ETF Impact

• Over $370M in inflows across Solana ETFs in November
• Fidelity and VanEck ETFs added fresh demand
• Some ETFs include built-in staking, giving investors yield
• SOL’s price appears to have formed a local bottom after listings

As the market positions for a possible final leg up, analysts expect spot Solana ETFs to play a major role in SOL’s recovery.

Dogecoin : ETF Interest Rekindles Memecoin Hype

Dogecoin, the original memecoin, now has its own spot ETF, giving investors exposure without needing to hold DOGE directly.

Why It Matters

• DOGE has potential real-world catalysts, especially speculation around Elon Musk integrating Dogecoin payments on X
• Grayscale’s Dogecoin ETF launched on Nov. 24
• Although day-one volume was small ($1.4M), earlier hype was absorbed by a non-spot DOGE ETF

ETF interest confirms that traditional investors are increasingly open to memecoins, which could support future DOGE rallies.

Litecoin : Weak ETF Demand But More Approvals Coming

Litecoin is often called “digital silver,” making it a potential diversification tool for investors already holding Bitcoin.

ETF Impact

• Only one spot Litecoin ETF approved so far
• Very low launch interest — less than $1M in first-day trading
• Total trading since launch is just $30M
• Several days passed with zero inflows

For now, the ETF has had almost no impact on Litecoin’s price. However, multiple additional LTC ETFs are pending approval, which could trigger renewed momentum.

Hedera (HBAR): Strong Inflows for a Non-Blockchain Alternative

Hedera stands out because it does not use a blockchain. Instead, it uses a hashgraph, a fast and energy-efficient distributed ledger that processes transactions nearly instantly.

ETF Impact

• Canary Capital launched the first HBAR spot ETF on Oct. 28
• $8M first-day volume
• More than $70M in inflows to date
• Multiple additional Hedera ETFs expected soon

Despite strong ETF interest, HBAR’s price hasn’t reacted yet — but analysts see rising inflows as a positive sign for future moves.

The derivatives market for XRP just delivered one of those statistical outliers that forces you to pause and check if the number is real. As revealed by CoinGlass's liquidations heatmap, a liquidation imbalance of 29,668,367% appeared on the four-hour map as long liquidations reached $175,000, while shorts generated only $588. 

The spread is so one-sided that it basically confirms the main thing the chart keeps signaling: bears are not putting real weight on XRP right now.CoinGlass">

The price action of XRP softening earlier in the session did not change that. XRP dipped from its intraday range, spiraling through a couple of levels, and still failed to attract any serious downside flows. No wave of fresh shorts, no pressure buildup, no attempt to force a cleaner breakdown. 

The market only flushed longs and moved on.

Why is no one shorting XRP?

The max pain table repeats the same message, with the short max pain price sitting 9.71% above spot; this cluster is worth $12 million in exposure right now, and that alone is enough to keep short sellers from getting aggressive, as taking early positions for bears risks walking straight into their own loss zone, so they are staying light and picking their moments.

All of this leaves XRP in a strange setup: the price is going down, but the downside is not being driven by bears. It is being driven by the lack of leverage support on the long side.

Until short interest actually steps in, XRP’s price pullbacks will look more like routine resets than controlled trend moves, because a market without pressure can fall — but it cannot fall with intent.

Decentralized finance protocol Yearn Finance has published a detailed post-mortem on last week’s yETH exploit, laying out how a numerical bug in its legacy stableswap pool allowed an attacker to mint a near-infinite amount of LP tokens and drain roughly $9 million in assets.

The yield farming platform also confirmed that it has recovered a portion of the stolen funds.

In the incident breakdown, Yearn said the yETH weighted stableswap pool on Ethereum was exploited at block 23,914,086 on Nov. 30, 2025, following “a complex sequence of operations” that first pushed the pool’s internal solver into a divergent state and eventually triggered an arithmetic underflow.

Yearn emphasized that its v2 and v3 vaults and other products “were not affected,” with the impact isolated to yETH and its direct integrations.

The exploit targeted a custom stableswap pool that aggregates multiple liquid staking tokens (LSTs) — including apxETH, sfrxETH, wstETH, cbETH, rETH, ETHx, mETH, and wOETH — plus a yETH/WETH Curve pool.

Pre-exploit, those pools held a combined basket of LSTs and 298.35 WETH, according to Yearn’s asset snapshot.

Three-phase exploit and 'infinite mint' path

Yearn’s post-mortem breaks the attack into three phases.

First, the attacker used extremely imbalanced “add_liquidity deposits” to force the pool’s fixed-point solver into a regime it “was not designed to handle.”

That caused an internal product term, denoted Π, to collapse to zero, breaking the weighted-stableswap invariant and allowing the protocol to significantly over-mint yETH LP tokens for the attacker relative to the value of their deposits.

With over-minted LP tokens in hand, the attacker then repeatedly called “remove_liquidity” and related functions, draining nearly all LST liquidity while offloading the cost of the over-mint onto protocol-owned liquidity (POL) held in the staking contract. Yearn said this process drove the pool’s internal supply to zero while ERC-20 balances still existed.

In the final phase, the attacker re-entered a “bootstrap” initialization path intended only for the pool’s first launch. By depositing a crafted “dust” configuration that violated a key domain condition, they triggered an “unsafe_sub operation” in the solver that underflowed, minting a gigantic amount of yETH LP tokens.

Yearn’s post-mortem described this as an “infinite-mint” scale, which was then used to drain the yETH/ETH Curve pool.

Recovery and governance stance

The disclosure confirms that 857.49 pxETH has been recovered so far, in coordination with the Plume and Dinero teams, and notes that a recovery transaction was executed on Dec. 1.

Those funds will be distributed pro rata to yETH depositors based on balances immediately before the exploit, with additional recoveries — whether from the attacker or further tracing — also earmarked for depositors.

Yearn’s timeline shows that a war room was convened about 20 minutes after the exploit, SEAL 911 was engaged shortly after, and 1,000 ETH of the stolen funds were sent to Tornado Cash the same evening, with the remainder of the attacker’s funds also routed through Tornado on Dec. 5.

Earlier reporting from The Block highlighted that roughly $3 million worth of ETH moved through the mixer in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The post-mortem reiterates that yETH is self-governed by its depositors under YIP-72 and explicitly cites the product’s “Use at Own Risk” clause, stating that Yearn contributors and YFI governance are “not liable for reimbursement.” Any recovered assets, it says, will be redistributed to affected users.

On Dec. 1, The Block reported that Yearn had already recovered about $2.4 million in stolen assets tied to the bug, a figure corresponding to the recovered pxETH.

Remediation plan

To address the issues, Yearn detailed a remediation plan that includes enforcing explicit domain checks on the solver and treating Π = 0 as a fatal condition, replacing unsafe arithmetic with checked math in critical sections, and gating or disabling bootstrap logic once a pool is live.

The team also plans to introduce hard caps that tie LP issuance to the value of user deposits and expand its testing approach with more aggressive invariant-focused fuzzing, adversarial numerical test cases, and differential testing against offchain models.

Yearn credits ChainSecurity for supporting root-cause analysis and SEAL 911 for assisting with incident response and asset recovery, and says technical analysis, recovery efforts and monitoring of attacker-linked flows remain ongoing.

Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

© 2025 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

XRP continues to draw attention this week as the broader crypto market posts steady gains. Many large-cap tokens recorded double-digit increases over the last seven days, even with Bitcoin dominance still holding high. XRP also moved higher, rising about 3% in the past few hours to trade near $2.10.

XRP ETF Inflows Continue to Outshine Rivals

New ETF data shows a clear split in market behavior. Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs recorded outflows last week, with BTC losing $87.7 million and ETH seeing $65.5 million exit. But XRP and Solana moved in the opposite direction.

Solana attracted $20.3 million in inflows, while XRP pulled in $230.7 million, more than ten times Solana’s figure. On a daily average, that works out to roughly $46 million going into XRP ETFs each day.

Even more important: XRP has not recorded a single day of ETF outflows since launch. Every session has shown net inflows, a trend which is seen as a sign of steady institutional interest.

Much of this activity does not show up in market prices. ETF providers buy XRP through OTC desks, not public exchanges. These transactions do not move the open market price, but they increase the chance of a future supply squeeze if OTC liquidity starts to thin.

Expert View: Traders Likely to Dominate Early ETF Demand

Avinash Shekhar, Co-Founder and CEO of Pi42, spoke to Coinpedia about what may drive XRP ETF demand. He said early flows will likely come from speculators and traders, not long-term institutions.

Newly launched ETFs usually attract short-term traders first because they are seeking quick liquidity and volatility. Over time, the profile shifts. Institutions look at deeper factors: payment rails, settlement speed, liquidity strength, and enterprise adoption.

Shekhar says that as XRP’s real-world usage grows, long-term institutional buyers may form a larger share of total ETF demand. That transition depends on growth in payment volume and broader corporate integrations.

“If those fundamentals scale, institutional demand for an XRP ETF could become a significant and stable component of overall flows,” he said.

What Comes Next for XRP?

XRP continues to lead ETF inflows by a wide margin. The lack of outflows since launch signals durable interest, even as price movement remains slow due to OTC purchasing. If OTC supply tightens, analysts say a supply shock could force price action to catch up.

According to CoinGlass data, Shiba Inu has surged 2,394.51% in spot volumes on major U.S. crypto exchange Kraken in the past week, revealing traders betting on the altcoin as the market awaits fresh catalysts.

The Federal Reserve policy decision is anticipated on Dec. 10. Markets are expecting that the Fed will cut its key interest rate at its final meeting of the year, with traders pricing in around an 87% chance of a 25-basis-point cut when the central bank concludes its two-day meeting, according to the CME FedWatch tool.

After a few days of consolidation between $0.0000081 and $0.0000086, Shiba Inu began a move early Monday as the broader market turned green.

According to Maartunn, an on-chain analyst at CryptoQuant, spot buyers are stepping aggressively into the market. The Bid/Ask Ratio (0–20% Spot) has flipped to +0.31, which marks the highest since April 2025. Maartunn noted that this level of bid-side imbalance often marks local bottoms or signals trend reversals.

Volumes indicator flashes bullish for altcoins

At press time, SHIB was up 2.23% in the last 24 hours and up 7% weekly to $0.000008513.

In a recent analysis on the altcoin market, which includes Shiba Inu, CryptoQuant noted this particular cycle has been tough for traders as many coins did not perform as expected.

CryptoQuant noted that the altcoin market has now entered an interesting period, taking a look at overall altcoin trading volumes. The aggregated 30-day altcoin trading volume for stablecoin quote pairs to its annual average reveals something noteworthy.

The 30-day volume fell below the yearly average, which might suggest a buying zone for altcoins. CryptoQuant added that this phase could last for weeks or even months, giving enough time to optimize a DCA strategy with well-targeted entry points.

However, caution is required given the current uncertainty on the market. Despite the recent rise in the market, sentiment remains cautious, with the potential for further declines without fresh catalysts and liquidity.