GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #1008 bringin‘ the news… 🥜

We're the crypto newsletter that's more optimistic than a football coach from Kansas taping a handwritten sign above a Premier League locker room door… ⚽📝

What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: U.S. Democratic sweep could be the final nail in the ‘Clarity Act’s coffin’

Crypto's super PACs spent more than $170 million on the midterms, Republicans lost both houses of Congress on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday afternoon Bitcoin was trading over $80,000.

It had slid to around $75,600 overnight as the results came in, then climbed more than 6% off that low as US stocks rallied too, with the Dow up 2.5%.

Ether gained about 6% on the day.

The only big losers were the Trump tokens, with the president's TRUMP memecoin down 17% and his family's World Liberty token down more than 7%, the two worst performers in the top 100.

That's because the bill crypto wanted most from Congress died in September, two months before the election.

The CLARITY Act (the market-structure bill meant to give crypto its first full federal rulebook) failed its Senate test vote 49 to 50, with Republicans running the chamber and Democrats objecting to the president's crypto businesses.

Analysts told Decrypt the sweep was mostly priced in by election night, and investment bank TD Cowen says the bill is unlikely to move for two years.

Sherrod Brown, the former Senate Banking chair that crypto super PAC Fairshake spent $56 million trying to beat, won Ohio by nearly five points and could take his seat as early as December 15.

TD Cowen expects Democrats to investigate the president's crypto ventures, World Liberty included.

Since that vote, the SEC and CFTC have been writing crypto's rules themselves, from September's tokenized-stock exemption to Tuesday's approval of stock perps, and from January those agencies answer to a Democratic Congress.

To be fair, the industry still has friends on both sides…

Stand With Crypto counts 226 pro-crypto members elected to the House and 19 to the Senate, and more than 70 House Democrats voted for CLARITY when it passed the chamber last year.

An agency rule can be rewritten by the next agency head without a vote in Congress.

For the next two years, that's the kind of rulebook crypto will be living on. 🚀

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Michael Saylor read Tuesday's midterm results and came away with a different headline from the one most of crypto is writing.

He's the Executive Chairman of Strategy, now the largest institutional holder of Bitcoin on earth.

Here's what he posted:

While most of the industry spent Wednesday tallying what the Democratic sweep of Congress costs crypto in Washington, Saylor pointed at two winners from opposite parties.

In Florida, Republican Byron Donalds won the governor's race, and back in Congress he filed a bill to write Trump's Bitcoin reserve into law (his version sets no buying target).

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate seat, and as a state representative he voted to create the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in 2025.

That's a separate fight from the rulebook, since a reserve decides whether a government holds Bitcoin, and it gets built in a state capitol rather than in Congress.

Of course, Strategy owns more Bitcoin than any other company, so he was always going to find the bullish read here…

And neither win buys a single coin by itself, since Talarico's new job is federal and Texas's reserve is already law.

The rulebook may be stuck for two years, but the people who want governments holding Bitcoin won on both tickets Tuesday. 🗳️

Today we'll be checking in on the amount of Ethereum available for sale on exchanges.

Here's how to interpret this metric:

14.36 million ETH on exchanges.

We've moved this chart to a new data source that should be more reliable, so this number doesn't line up with our older readings.

That means no comparison with two weeks ago this time, and today's figure becomes the new baseline.

It works out to almost 12% of all ether in existence.

At today's price that's about $33 billion of ether sitting on exchanges.

From here, every fortnight gets measured against 14.36 million. 💧

Jack Dorsey's Block faces $764 million DOJ settlement as bitcoin profit plunges 50%. The proposed deal would defer an anti-money-laundering charge for three years, while lower fees cut Block's bitcoin gross profit to $52 million.

Coinbase Says 99% of Customer Crypto Is Offline and Out of Hackers’ Reach. Its platform held $377 billion in assets at Sept. 30, and no single employee has standing access to its hot-wallet signing service.

Circle reports $865 million in Q3 revenue and reserve income, discloses 5% workforce reduction. Reserve income fell 8% to $658 million as rates on its reserves dropped, while the ARC token presale added $182 million.

Ethereum dev targets 2028 for quantum resistance, a year early. Justin Drake told Devcon 8 he hopes to finish the transition by December 2028, against the foundation's official December 2029 deadline.

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Select your answer below and you’ll be redirected to the results page. (answer explanation can be found after “Meme Corner”)

Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: Resend the same payment with a higher fee so miners pick it up 🥳

RBF lets you swap an unconfirmed transaction for a new version that pays a bigger fee, and miners take the better-paying one. It only works while the original is still waiting in the mempool.

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