The post-Thanksgiving sprint into year-end’s Christmas holidays often means limited time but high event density. It’s the perfect time to optimize for immediate actions with lasting consequences. The same news can simultaneously be both short-term noise and long-term signal.

Key Takeaways

• The risk isn’t the December cut, but the path forward—a deliberate USD weakening.
• In a globalized, high-trade, cross-collateralized world, forced USD devaluation represents a volatility catalyst that may disrupt ongoing U.S. mega-cap flows.
• Complacency around sustained money printing regimes might catch markets off-guard—USD down, U.S. equities vulnerable, foreign buyers retreat, and the Mag-7 regime reverts.
• Spot over leverage: prioritize majors over alts until solid confirmation. Fade crowded leverage and capitalize on forced dips.
• Bottoming is a process—confirmation is volume on green candles.
• ETH/BTC—respect the multi-year support.
• SOL—Breakpoint (Dec 11–13) + recaptured momentum = more upside.
• Oversupply and unlocks crush weak narratives. Validate entries with rising spot and falling perps OI.
• Read‑through is USD path, majors confirmation, and unlock discipline. Keep cash optionality; act on volume, not vibes.

Macro: The USD Trapdoor

The Fed’s tone has changed after the shutdown created a weird data blackout. Right now the market is all-in on a small December cut. The danger is complacency, or overconfidence miscalibrating downside risks. It’s no longer about a single decision itself, but about the path forward.

Classic value frameworks (Buffett-era heuristics) were born in a low-trade, low-liquidity period. Globalization, however, is the opposite. In a high-trade environment, global trade expands liquidity, cross-collateralizes countries and currencies, and establishes a direct link between asset prices and flow dynamics.

The bigger picture is one characterized by USD devaluation. More specifically, deliberate USD devaluation driven by tariffs and a more dovish Fed. This is what flips the standard playbook (if there is such a thing). A plausible path could see USD and equities falling, with foreign investors losing faith in stocks and FX. The outcome would expose the system’s cross-border fragility.

For years already, flows have been concentrated in U.S. mega-caps, but a policy-driven USD drop could trigger the foreign investors that funded those U.S. assets in USD to start pulling their money out. They would de-risk, sell U.S. assets, and set off the cascade where AI leaders underperform.

The sleeper risk—an intentionally weaker dollar—becomes the main source of market volatility. This is an engineered volatility catalyst, not a broad stimulus or performance aid. If/when markets misread a forced USD slide, that causes heightened risk rather than easing it. No longer can you assume that easing lifts equities by default. The shock is external. Short-term easing is noise if the long-term signal is dollar erosion.

Crypto: Spot Bids Or Bust

When momentum is weak, relative strength is absolute truth. We have seen how efficient crypto is for asset creation—an infinite token factory essentially. Creation precedes accumulation. Oversupply first, surface true demand later. It’s necessary to flood the market with tokens, issue en masse, and finally let markets separate wheat from chaff.

Currently, persistent bids are confined to majors and stables. As you move further down the market cap ranks, it gets harder to justify reasons for spot accumulation. Leverage often does the heavy lifting for alts, especially during recoveries and short-lived rallies. However, that often ends up in “escalator up, elevator down” situations. One nudge and forced exits snowball into cascades of liquidations.

It’s becoming increasingly evident to the average market participant that most alts are supply machines without marginal buyers. Inflation and unlocks tend to ruin the party. With thin liquidity depth and real cash sidelined, price is increasingly a function of leverage. Value accrual is almost never the reason justifying a leg up. That’s why alt cycles look like borrowed conviction: reflexive grind up driven by perps, then air-pocket down when sentiment flips. The structural tell of this cycle is exactly that—everyone has become aware of how easy it is to issue and manufacture float (mint tokens out of thin air) while realizing that organic demand and spot bids cannot be faked.

For the market as a whole, bottoming is a process. Confirmation is found by looking at majors. You want to see high volume on the way up as buyers start stepping in, validating the belief that the worst is over. Additionally, funding rates play a crucial lever in market sentiment, hence monitoring long periods where it is stretched to either side is crucial.

The market just told you what matters: leverage drives the move, cash validates it. December is short—a packed calendar with rushed and abundant headlines, but not all of them matter. Year-end is a trap. Everyone stares at the Fed decision, the chairman nominees, tax-loss harvesting, etc while the real trades slide under most feet.

Alea Long-Short Portfolio

We stay bullish but not brave. Crypto remains in a non-euphoric hangover stage with frequent drawdowns on lower timeframes. For spot allocations, we look at structural winners that can see meaningful flows. BTC has bled ~30% off the $126k peak. That’s a positioning flush. BTC still sits at the core of institutional portfolios. It hasn’t offered a clear retest of $75k yet. We are in a sharp mean reversion window and period of apathy where alts are getting hit worse than majors. With BTC, you are looking to take chips from forced de-riskers as institutions continue to publish upside cases on their 2026 outlooks. JPMorgan is openly modeling $170k.

Signals Radar

BTC — IBIT options and OI are now another tracking rail. Down roughly 33% from October highs, leverage got rinsed, and the ETF puke is behind us. The trend was damaged, but the bull case for BTC is not dead. November removed the excess, but the structural bids are still in place. This week Vanguard announced that it will allow its customers to get exposure through ETFs and mutual funds.

ETH — Trading at ~0.0329, we’re near the lower third of the range, with the ~0.031–0.032 level on Nov 24 acting as multi‑year support. ETH/BTC also tends to bottom around December in prior cycles (2015, 2018, 2020).

The Fusaka Upgrade, technical in nature, barely had an impact on ETH’s price action, or any of the L2s. Fusaka centered on PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling with erasure coding) to allow validators to sample and reconstruct blobs without heavy storage requirements. Along with a higher L1 gas limit (moved to 60M) and a minimum cost for blob fees, it removes the “free lunch” for L2s while pushing fees down through more blockspace (blocks can now hold more computation, fitting more transactions, or more complex ones. Fusaka also shipped a passkey curve precompile that will allow for native biometric signing (FaceID), reducing friction for users and improving wallet UX.

SOL — Breakpoint will be taking place December 11–13, 2025. Out of majors, this is the one with more room to run. Even though DATs are underwater, regret starts building up as price recovers and starts approaching previous highs.

HYPE — Devs finally got their tokens on hand. Well deserved. Nobody panicked. It’s 1.75M tokens allocated to builders, not VCs that got in early with a favorable discount. For perspective, the airdrop was ~270M tokens—the largest in crypto’s history and currently estimated to be ~$10B worth. This speaks to the power of bootstrapping a business, underscoring how far a product-first, founder-led project can go. Scrappy execution beats capital intensity in the early game.

Paradigm’s HYPE DAT was approved to go live. Hyperliquid Strategies is expected to hold about 12.6M HYPE (valued around $583M at signing) and at least $305M in cash committed largely to buying more HYPE, implying an ~$888M combined value. They also staked 12M HYPE ($420M, which is 1.2% of the total supply or 3.54% of the circulating supply.

ZEC — Grayscale filing the conversion of its trust into a spot ETF coincided with 30% drawdown to begin the week. Everyone is already caught up with the fundamentals, so the technicals start playing a greater role, especially as key support levels are broken. The NU6.1 upgrade, however, is fundamentally bullish, allocating 8% of block rewards to a community grants pool and 12% to a ZEC‑holder‑controlled fund.

AAVE — Price has been disappointing despite market leadership and catalysts. The $50M/year buyback program has been made permanent, with v4 and GHO/RWA growth strategies lining up. Over the next week this is a dip‑buy candidate vs ETH if BTC calms down.

AAVE has generated more revenue in 2025 than in the past 3 years combined, buying back just under 1% of the supply at an average price of $230.

SKY — Even though price is moving along with the rest of the market, it’s not sunshine and rainbows for the project. It’s been on the receiving end of bad news as Aave’s governance voted to no longer accept USDS as collateral. Most importantly, reputation is on the line. The “Endgame” rebrand was already controversial. Things haven’t improved much since then. Most still doubt the SubDAO model and the value accrual of their governance tokens. Aave explicitly states “USDS generates negligible revenue for Aave while introducing asymmetric risks tied to Sky’s evolving issuance model.” This issuance model refers to low or zero-cost credit lines and yield strategies venturing further down the risk curve.

ENA — There was a shift in tone towards negativity that intensified as Terminal scrapped its launch stating Converge’s launch would fail to materialize. Currently busy building, this may be the calm before the storm. Silence from a seasoned, competent team usually signals heads‑down execution before releases. Buyers here may be early; December is typically slow and teams stay focused. Still, don’t mistake radio silence with inactivity.

Expect news to drop unexpectedly when nobody’s looking. At the moment, one issue—the October 10th liquidations—led to another and a minor setback (which was outside of Ethena’s control) became the story, crowding out balanced views. One negative data point inflects others and eventually the signal becomes eclipsed by overly pessimistic views.

PENDLE — With HIP-3 live and volume ramping up, Boros remains relatively under the radar. This is a primitive with strong differentiation relative to what’s on the market. The opportunity looks attractive for bidding spot, especially considering the moat. Interest rate derivatives and equity perps combined present one of the most appealing bets for TradFi folks dipping their toes into crypto. 24/7 round-the-clock weekend hedging is a narrative Wall Street can rally behind. Whether it’s through Pendle or not, the first-mover intention is already there.

ZRO — Good example of the type of token where you want to be seeking rising volume and ever-improving relative strength before accumulating. Letting majors lead, then adding ZRO on higher-volume upswings and relative strength breakouts can be a sound strategy to capture solid returns beyond short-term trades. If you are confident that the bottom is in, and you believe that ZRO’s fee switch will be turned on during the next vote in ~2 weeks (Dec 20), the window of opportunity to start scaling up is now.

The 1-year cliff may be an unfortunate circumstance when it comes to timing, delaying potential sell pressure from unlocks. December will result in a 25.7M ZRO unlock. Even if sell pressure is a function of probabilities, it’s a good sign to see growing buybacks beginning to offset them. As time passes, if BTC behaves, the risk of net sell-flow decreases just as the protocol increases its buyback allocation.

For catalysts, you want to get before the event-driven move. LayerZero’s immutable onchain referendum occurs every six months. The next key date is December 20, 2025. The odds are staked in ZRO’s favor this time after the Foundation and team started buying back after the Stargate acquisition. Previous votes failed because the quorum wasn’t met (98% of voters were in favor of turning on the fee switch). For the first six months post-acquisition, 50% of revenue funds buybacks, moving to 100% thereafter. From Sep–Nov 2025, $2.4M revenue drove $1.2M in buybacks, while Stargate expands beyond bridging (OFTs, Fast Swaps) toward a $100M ARR target in 2026 (Alea’s ZRO thesis).

ETHFI — At near‑unanimous support with a $50M buyback program that offers some relief. Incentive programs like “Cashmas” help to drive more adoption for Cash during the Christmas holidays. This improves fundamentals and increases confidence, reinforcing a constructive view that’s likely to support a strong re-rating when conditions improve for the overall market. Investors vesting ends in ~4 months just as the team buybacks ~$1M per week at current prices.

JUP — Close to cycle lows, down ~80% YoY—they have weathered a lot. Heavy rains, and they’ve come through. 135M JUP (~4% of circulating supply) was burned from the Litterbox (Jupiter Strategic Reserve) on Nov 25 and 2026’s “Jupuary” 700M airdrop has been broken down into staggered unlocks (200M in Feb 2026, 200M in Jan 2027, 300M reserved for JupNet) instead of a single cliff.

What’s in front is a high‑revenue “superapp” with a simpler, less aggressive supply story. Jupiter has done the hard, unsexy work: cut 30% of supply (Catstanbul), set a recurring buyback pipe, burned 4% of float, shortened staking locks, and shrank the 2026 airdrop. The next leg up or down in JUP is now mostly about one thing: trust in value accrual and confidence on whether fee growth can outrun the remaining unlocks.

DRIFT — Held its Town Hall last Tuesday. Buybacks with 100% of revenue + the release of v3 remain the central theme. The upgrade unlocks 10x faster order fills, gasless trading by default, and 400ms oracle updates. Drift’s current fee split (10% Insurance Fund / 10% DLP / 80% Protocol-owned Holdings) has built a sizable treasury (~$42M) with strong fee capture (~$57M annualized) but as the holdings scale the marginal utility declines. The bull case: DIP‑9 passes and v3 sends tens of millions/year into programmatic buybacks. What’s to be determined is what happens postbuybacks—locking, burn, LP, etc.

RAY — Lower risk-taking means less trading volume and, therefore, less ammo for buybacks from protocol revenue. Programmatic buybacks come with the tradeoff that the protocol’s balance sheet can go underwater over time, and that’s where active management comes into play, sensibly buying dips without burning runway.

Q3 showed a structurally healthier business: average TVL up with legacy pools retaining depth while the newer CLMM/CPMM pools and LaunchLab accounted for most of the volume and fees. In Q3, volume rose to $112.92B (+8%), fees to $158.89M (+49%), and revenue to $25.06M (+102%), with LaunchLab contributing nearly half of revenue. This is indicative of a durable margin that is increasingly less tied to speculative cycles

KMNO — Season 5, launched Nov 7, distributes 100M KMNO over three months including 4M KMNO/week for SOL‑backed USDC borrows and new vault incentives, on top of Season 4’s 90M KMNO vesting. The “Aave” of SOL stands out for continually expanding its product suite, making it one of the most solid and versatile bets for ecosystem exposure as it starts leaning into RWAs. Nonetheless, holders’ revenue is not active yet. Revenue amounts to the reserve factor or spread between what borrowers pay and what lenders earn plus management fees on vault profits. For Q3, that’s almost $30M in fees with ~$5M in revenue going to the treasury. Turning on the fee switch would help them stay competitive and follow the playbook of other ecosystem players like JUP, DRIFT, PUMP, or RAY.

FLUID — Positive-sum ideal, zero-sum reality. The industry wants cooperative games, but the players are in a ruthless war for market share. This week Fluid went straight at Kamino with unforgiving shots.

In the ring we have “innovation and openness” (Fluid’s stance) against “protecting market position” (Kamino’s perceived motive). The flashpoint is Kamino blocking users from refinancing or migrating their loans to Fluid/Jupiter Lend. Fluid entered the Solana lending space in late November. Coming directly from Ethereum, it entered a battle against SOL-based, VC-backed, well-established projects like Kamino.

On one side, Fluid amplified the drama listing Kamino’s alleged sins: inflated APRs boosted by vested KMNO rewards, high borrowing fees of up to 2-3x industry average on Solana, and pressuring smaller projects to route liquidity away from Jupiter’s Meteora and toward their partner Orca. On the other side, Kamino’s defensive stance is all about “protecting users from “unproven” Fluid smart contracts and preserving protocol stability” arguing most users stick with them anyway. Kyle from Multicoin (also Chairman of SOL’s DAT Forward Strategies) backed this, suggesting Kamino devs aren’t obligated to subsidize rivals’ code risk. The drama finally unfolded: fierce competition is healthy, but gatekeeping isn’t.

L1s — MON started recovering rapidly as the landscape got brighter for BTC. SUI, for which unlocks remain the major concern (~$86.9M unlocked on Dec 1, ~0.56% of the circulating supply), started outperforming as well. KAS resumed the uptrend. APT is a prime candidate for being shorted into its cliff (~11.3M APT, ~1.1% supply, ~$22M) and could see some short-squeezes pushing price higher as OI builds up.

TON — Founder and single full owner of Telegram Pavel Durov announced the release of Cocoon. Live now, this is TON’s first confidential compute network. Similar to other DePIN projects that crowdsource access to GPU renting, Cocoon lets users share and earn from their compute power. This is the purest overlap of the current two hottest narratives—privacy and AI—yet the response in price action was quite muted. Narrative perfection, price action indifference—that’s the type of market we are in.

GPU owners rent out hardware, get paid in TON, and Telegram is the first big customer. With no new official Cocoon token, this is net bullish for TON. GPU operators can’t see or decrypt data (confidential inference) and the DePIN component allows for TON payments for AI requests that run inside hardware TEEs. Developers pay for compute in TON, GPU workers are rewarded in TON, and the protocol takes its fees in TON. If you want economic exposure to Cocoon itself, the native lever is TON.

RAIL — Railgun has been busy on all fronts—tech and narrative. Cumulative shielded volume now >$4B, with $1.6B in 2025 alone. Vitalik continues to route funds through it, but so do the attackers of recent exploits like Yearn’s yETH hack last week. It’s still up ~200% over 60 days but down ~50% from highs and trading below short‑term moving averages. Now that it’s cemented its role as the ETH privacy layer, it will be worth tracking spot volume to measure strength when momentum resumes.

CFG — They see a massive opportunity ahead. They want to be the market leaders in RWAs across asset classes, from tokenized bonds to equities and private credit. The market isn’t pricing in their value proposition just yet. To counteract, they are being more aggressive in their communications: “Most so-called onchain equities still rely on Excel cap tables and PDFs behind the scenes. If the true legal record lives in a siloed database, you didn’t put equity onchain, you just put a token wrapper on top. Real onchain equity = the transfer agent lives onchain. That’s what we’re building at Centrifuge.”

ASTER — After buying back 155M ASTER from S3, they burnt 77M tokens and locked another 77M on Friday. S4 is now ongoing.

META — Primed for major Breakpoint headlines, although no CEX listings and thin liquidity can get in the way of explosive price action. Narrative fuel can come from the prediction markets angle while it continues to solidify its role as a leading launchpad on SOL. The most recent ICOs like Umbra, Avici, Solomon have been massively oversubscribed and runway is no longer a concern after recent investments. More on our latest META Memo.

AI — Centralized AI is booming post-release of GPT5.1, Gemini3, and Opus 4.5, yet this is not translating into upside for deAI (Decentralized AI). This is telling us that the winners that are likely to emerge won’t necessarily belong to the current cohort of “AI coins,” but instead be adjacent to fields related to compute, data, payment, and verification. Many players are still early and haven’t launched a token yet, like Nous Research or Prime Intellect.

Conclusion

Macro isn’t child’s play. Bullish views on QE fail when USD is intentionally weakened. These days, treating anything as a binary switch is playing with fire. Leverage-driven volatility has become the norm. Flushes come without warning. A thesis on an altcoin bet can be directionally right yet never pay off.

The market keeps grinding through leverage flushes that reset positioning. Consensus then forms around the same datapoints. Another cascade of liquidations hits. Conviction erodes. By the time the original idea should win, fear has taken over, erasing all spot buyers.

Markets punish leverage fantasies and reward survival. Lean into BTC structural buyers while it holds above $75k, use ETH/BTC near cycle support and SOL momentum as the main relative‑value levers, and keep alt exposure mostly to names where fundamentals force buy pressure.

See the risk in every opportunity. Treat moves as noise unless/until spot confirms it’s real. To survive, follow the path of least regret: keep dry powder, scale into strength, and let time stops clear anything that doesn’t move in the expected direction.