GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #995 bringin‘ the news… 🥜

We're the crypto newsletter that's more level-headed than a police chief who sees the size of the shark, backs away from the chum and quietly flags a problem with the boat… 🦈🚤

What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: MSCI adopts index exclusion rules that could oust Strategy

Friday we asked which worry hangs over Bitcoin most for the rest of 2026, and 35% of you picked inflation and more Fed hikes.

Oil and the Middle East war ran a close second on 30%, ahead of AI debt on 18%, and 16% of you worry about none of them.

The oil camp got a fresh reason on Saturday, when Iran's Revolutionary Guards said two tankers hit mines in the Strait of Hormuz and caught fire.

Bitcoin's biggest corporate holder spent the week on a worry nobody voted for, though…

MSCI said on Thursday it will drop "non-operating companies" from its global stock indexes.

(Index funds copy MSCI's indexes, so a company it drops gets sold by those funds automatically.)

Firms without real operating assets face five financial tests, and failing four or more rules them out.

A trial run on May's numbers flagged three: Strategy, Japan's Metaplanet and Yellow Cake, a British uranium investment company.

The final list lands November 11, with removals after trading closes on November 30.

Strategy's stock dropped 9.6% on Friday to $136.83, about 75% below its November 2024 record.

JPMorgan estimated an exit could push about $2.8 billion of Strategy stock onto the market, a figure worked out for an earlier draft of the rules.

So any damage to Bitcoin runs through Strategy's fundraising, as it pays for its coins mostly by selling new shares, and a cheaper share buys fewer of them.

Its preferred stock, STRC, slid to $97.72 on Friday too, further below the $100 it spent $192 million defending the week before.

Strategy argued in August that the hit is small, with index funds holding about 13 million of its shares, 3.1% of the total and less than a day's normal trading.

Current members only drop out after failing in two straight annual filings, so the November list could still change.

If Strategy does go, its stock loses a steady buyer, and that's the stock it sells to buy Bitcoin.

For anyone holding Bitcoin, that means a smaller bid from the largest company buying it… 🚀

Robots are moving into factories, warehouses and hospitals faster than most people realize. When a new industry takes off like this, the instinct is to buy a basket of names and hope one of them hits.

The trouble is that baskets dilute your winners. In a lot of booms, a single company ends up taking the lion's share, while everyone holding the other six watches from the sidelines.

Our report names the one robot company we think comes out on top, and explains why. It normally sells for $19.99, but today it's free. Opt in and we'll also text you alerts on the stock, so you don't miss a move.

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Will Clemente reckons Bitcoin spent last week behaving the way its fans always said it would, and he's pointing at the bond market for the reason.

Clemente is one of the most respected on-chain analysts in crypto and co-founder of Reflexivity Research.

Here's what he posted:

The number he's watching is the real rate (a bond's yield minus expected inflation, so what a lender actually keeps).

Bitcoin and gold pay nothing, so when real rates fall, the income you give up by holding them shrinks.

His read is that worries about AI spending slowing the economy are dragging long-term yields lower, while oil and the Middle East keep inflation sticky.

Treasury's own figures back him up… the 10-year real yield fell from 2.95% on October 5, its high for the year, to 2.74% on Friday.

Over the same stretch, the inflation priced into 10-year bonds barely moved.

It showed up in last week's trading, where by our count QQQ (the big Nasdaq-100 fund) lost 5.5% in the week to Friday's close while BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT, gave up just 0.9%.

Measured against QQQ, IBIT is up about 33% since mid-August.

To be fair, he says Bitcoin won't be immune to a proper risk-off shock, when traders dump everything at once.

And real yields are still well above the 1.94% they started the year at, so what we've had so far is a turn in direction, and money's still a long way from cheap.

But for most of the year the worry has been that Bitcoin trades like a leveraged tech stock and follows the AI trade wherever it goes.

If Clemente's right, a cooling AI boom ends up as a tailwind for Bitcoin. 🧭

Let's kick off the week with a look at the Bitcoin HODL Waves, one of the clearest snapshots of market conviction.

Each coloured band represents the percentage of Bitcoin that last moved within a specific time frame.

The warmer the colour, the younger the coins, with red showing Bitcoin that has been held for less than one day.

Today we're focusing on short-term holders (STHs), defined as coins held for less than six months.

Here's how the supply breakdown looks today compared to two weeks ago:

TL;DR: 20.18% of all Bitcoin is in the hands of short-term holders. 💎

Up from 19.59% two weeks ago, a 0.59% rise that adds roughly 118,000 Bitcoin to the short-term float.

This time the growth came from coins moved one to four weeks ago, while the newest coins cooled off.

Coins moved in the past week slipped from 2.95% to 2.75% of supply, so the last seven days were a little quieter on-chain.

The big mover was the 1 week to 1 month band, up 1.08% to 4.58%, which now holds the coins that changed hands when Bitcoin slid under $81,000 earlier this month.

The 1-3 month band shrank 0.60% to 6.97% as part of it aged into the 3-6 month band, which grew 0.31% to 5.88%.

Over the past month the short-term share has climbed from 19.01% to 20.18%, so about 233,000 more Bitcoin sit in short-term hands than in late September.

For the second fortnight running more coins woke up than aged out, and one in five Bitcoin now sits with short-term holders. 💎

CoreWeave, Broadcom, Verizon among nine companies objecting to tokenized trading of their shares on OKXICE. Eight of the nine were among the 63 stocks the OKX and ICE venture named for tokenized trading on Oct. 4.

Scammer Lost $4.8M in Bitcoin to Tampered Ledger Wallets: Chainalysis. The scammer moved task-scam proceeds into three Ledger addresses in September, and thieves emptied all three on Oct. 9.

Deutsche Bank prepares German crypto custody launch, eyes Asia: Report. The bank will hold BTC, ETH, USDC and EURC for clients at launch, with Asian financial centers to follow in 2027.

Stablecoin supply stalls, but payments jump 45% as Visa, Mastercard and Stripe connect crypto to cash. Allium counts $482 billion in stablecoin payments over nine months, while supply rose just 0.4% this year to about $305 billion.

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

Trivia Answer: El Salvador 🥳

El Salvador's Bitcoin Law took effect in September 2021. In January 2025 lawmakers amended it to make accepting Bitcoin voluntary, as part of a $1.4 billion IMF loan deal.

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DISCLAIMER: The content of this newsletter is not financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice. Please be careful and do your own research.