TLDR Crypto 2025-11-06

Humanity Protocol partners with Mastercard to onboard users without invasive KYC (Sponsor)

Crypto was meant to be about privacy. If users need to upload pay stubs or bank statements before making transactions, many simply won't onboard.

A new update to Humanity Protocol layer aims to solves this. By integrating Mastercard's open finance technology into Human ID, their palm-scan identity verification system, Humanity Protocol now enables users to prove financial claims to lenders and apps without sharing actual data.

Building in crypto? Use this integration to give users access to both DeFi and traditional financial services (credit, loans) without forcing them through invasive KYC every time. The credentials are owned by users, not stored by companies.

Learn more about Human ID >

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Markets & Business

Government Shutdown Continues Risk of Derailing Crypto Bill (6 minute read)

The US government shutdown reached a record 36 days on Wednesday, potentially delaying budget dealmaking and further pushing out crypto market structure legislation. Policy experts predict that a markup by Thanksgiving remains possible, but passage by the end of 2025 is unlikely, with legislation more likely moving through both houses by the end of 2026, as furloughed government experts leave fewer people capable of crafting legislative language. Patrick Witt, White House executive director of the President's Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, maintains optimism that Trump still wants the bill by end of 2025 and argued the shutdown paradoxically helped by allowing more time to engage lawmakers on substance "in a way that we might not have otherwise been able to, had there been a bunch of other competing priorities."

RLUSD to Power Mastercard Settlements on XRP Ledger (5 minute read)

Ripple partnered with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to pilot RLUSD stablecoin settlement for credit card transactions on the XRP Ledger, potentially marking the first time a regulated US bank settles fiat card payments via stablecoin on a public blockchain. RLUSD launched in December 2024 under a New York Trust Charter with full cash backing and surpassed $1 billion in circulation, aiming to replace traditional 1-3 day settlement rails with near-instant blockchain settlement while maintaining compliance. WebBank, issuer of the Gemini Credit Card, will explore settling Mastercard transactions using RLUSD, with onboarding beginning in the coming months, pending regulatory approvals.

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Innovation & Launches

Monad Sets Nov. 24 for Mainnet Launch and MON Airdrop (4 minute read)

Monad will officially launch its Layer 1 blockchain and native MON token on November 24 at 9 AM ET, marking one of the most anticipated network debuts of the year. The launch includes a massive airdrop designed to reward thousands of early community members and ~225,000 verified users across major crypto protocols, including Aave, Uniswap, Hyperliquid, Morpho, Pump.fun, and Virtuals, as well as long-term NFT holders and DAO participants.

Ethereum Ecosystem Hits 19,000 TPS as ZK Rollups Go Live (2 minute read)

Ethereum's ecosystem just reached a record 19,083 transactions per second (TPS), driven primarily by high-performance ZK rollups like Lighter, which alone contributed 4,782 TPS. Other major contributors include Base (139.8 TPS), Arbitrum (75 TPS), and Unichain (35.7 TPS), bringing total live throughput to over 5,100 TPS at press time. What was once dismissed as "ETH maxi fantasy" - scalable, secure ZK rollups - is now a reality in production, marking the arrival of Ethereum's high-throughput era.

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Guides & Tutorials

MiCA, Travel Rule, GENIUS Act, CLARITY Act… what comes next for crypto KYC? (Sponsor)

Crypto is finally getting the legitimacy it deserves, but regulations are fragmenting, not converging. That means one-off KYC flows don't cut it anymore. This guide by Persona is for people who got into crypto to change the financial system — and want compliance to accelerate rather than slow down that vision. Download the eBook.

Asymmetry in Crypto (6 minute read)

Asymmetric outcomes in crypto are disappearing due to four structural problems - 90%+ of assets are speculative with no compounding, October 10's $40 billion in OI liquidations exposed market structure risks deterring institutions, daily token launches fragment liquidity, and high launch valuations price perfection - leaving minimal upside for public market investors. The optimal strategy is no longer narrative chasing, but instead new asymmetric plays: farming, acquiring equity stakes in blockchain-enabled businesses, buying exchange tokens as the "only investable assets" positioned for power-law returns, and gem hunting for dirt-cheap assets with genuine value accrual mechanisms. Everyone knows the current meta is broken, but they continue repeating failed strategies. True asymmetry now requires completely different positioning than the crowd.

Emergence: Let a Billion APIs Compose (6 minute read)

Agentic emergence requires the long tail of APIs with x402 that enable LLMs to compose thousands to billions of addressable, payable building blocks. Current bottlenecks include human-gated API keys and billing that force platforms like OpenAI to curate a few integrations while ignoring the long tail, but x402's protocol for attaching stablecoin payments to any web request removes this constraint by letting intelligence do the composition instead of developers writing glue code. Merit Systems is building three components to foster emergence: The Terminal (turns open-source TODOs into funded work), Echo (model router with user-pays metering), and x402/x402scan (standard for addressing/paying web resources plus discovery index), with ecosystem support from Coinbase, Cloudflare, Vercel, Visa, and Stripe.

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Miscellaneous

OpenFX Hits $34B TPV as Cross-Border Payments Surge (2 minute read)

OpenFX has reached an annualized $34B in total payments volume (TPV) after adding $14B in October alone, more than its previous five months combined. The firm's rapid growth is fueled by its Latin American expansion, including corridors in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, where 86% of transactions now settle in under 10 minutes despite volatile FX and regulatory conditions. OpenFX distinguishes its platform from "instant settlement" competitors by proving real institutional-scale settlements in minutes, not hours. Next, the company is expanding into Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Philippines) in Q1 2026, applying its deep liquidity, local rail integrations, and automated treasury model.

Solana's Validator Count Falls Sharply as Ethereum Expands (3 minute read)

Solana's validator count has dropped over 60%, falling from roughly 2,500 in early 2023 to under 900 today, raising fresh concerns about the network's decentralization and security. The decline, down 33% year-to-date, reflects rising hardware costs, high bandwidth demands, and limited economic incentives for smaller validators. In contrast, Ethereum continues to grow its validator base, now nearing 1 million active validators, securing billions in real economic activity and attracting new entrants daily. While some chains scale by compromising decentralization, Ethereum's modular architecture allows it to scale through L2s without sacrificing security, reinforcing its position as the world's trusted settlement layer.

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Quick Links

Ethereum Dominates Blockchain Liquidity (2 minute read)

Ethereum leads all blockchains by a massive margin, with $599 billion in total app capital, over 7x more than Tron ($84B) and 11x more than Solana ($53B).

Lighter Pushes Ethereum Toward 350K TPS Settlement Capacity (2 minute read)

Ethereum's leading high-performance ZK rollup consumes just 1.46 bytes of blobspace per transaction, meaning it could theoretically settle 45,000 TPS on Ethereum today.

Aave, Ethena, and Pendle Forge DeFi's Most Powerful Yield Alliance (6 minute read)

Aave, Ethena, and Pendle have formed DeFi's most synergistic alliance, combining floating, fixed, and leveraged yields into a self-sustaining flywheel that's driving billions in TVL and record capital efficiency.

Balancer releases preliminary post-mortem report (4 minute read)

The $116 Balancer DEX hack was an expert job done by hackers who had planned for months.

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Thanks for reading,
Esham Macauley & Lincoln Murr

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