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IS BITCOIN DUMPING BECAUSE DEFI JUST HAD ITS NEXT TERRA LUNA MOMENT?
Stream Finance, a “recursive looping” DeFi platform behind the xUSD stablecoin, just reported a $93M asset loss tied to an external fund manager.
Withdrawals are frozen as the company hires Perkins Coie LLP to lead a full investigation.
The fallout has been immediate. Their xUSD stablecoin plunged 76%, and total debt exposure across protocols like Euler, Silo, and Morpho now exceeds $285M, raising fears of a broader contagion.
Analysts say the collapse exposed a looping scheme where Stream’s xUSD and Elixir’s deUSD minted off each other, compounding leverage and masking real collateral, aka a “DeFi perpetual motion machine.”
The xUSD vault itself grew from $40M to nearly $400M in just months, while maintaining a flat 15% yield.
This is behavior analysts say is impossible on-chain without off-chain smoothing or leverage.
Just four days before the collapse, Stream touted its letters of engagement with auditing firms to verify over $400M in on-chain reserves and promised a transparency dashboard.
What they promised as a $400M institutional-grade yield strategy may instead be DeFi’s next systemic failure, echoing Terra’s collapse.
Once again, very little was learned in this space over the last four years. If you don’t know where the yield comes from, you are the yield.
Grok said:Bitcoin miner profitability has been under significant pressure in recent weeks, driven by a combination of declining hashprices, record-high network hashrates, low transaction fees, and a recent correction in Bitcoin's price. According to a November 4, 2025, analysis, hashprice—a key metric measuring daily revenue per petahash per second (PH/s)—has dropped to a multi-month low of $43.1 PH/s, squeezing miners' margins amid Bitcoin's price dip and subdued network activity. This represents a roughly 20% decline in profitability over the past month, with overall miner revenue per day falling 22% from $59.56 million to $46.37 million as of early November 2025.
Despite these challenges, some large-scale miners have reported strong quarterly results by diversifying operations and leveraging higher average Bitcoin prices year-over-year. For instance, Marathon Digital (MARA) announced a record Q3 2025 revenue of $252 million on November 4, 2025—up 92% from the previous year—swinging from a $124.8 million loss to a $123.1 million net profit. The company attributed this to an 88% rise in Bitcoin's average price, paired with new power deals and AI infrastructure integrations, though mining volume itself didn't drive the bulk of the gains. MARA's stock dipped 5.9% following the report, reflecting broader market concerns over sector-wide pressures.
Broader data points highlight the strain:
- Average Mining Costs: As of November 3, 2025, the estimated average cost to mine one Bitcoin stood at approximately $114,233, while Bitcoin's price hovered around $101,901 on November 5, 2025, resulting in a cost-to-price ratio of 1.07—indicating that many operations are operating at or below breakeven.
- Network Hashrate: Bitcoin's hashrate hit a record 1.13 zettahashes per second (ZH/s) in October 2025, increasing competition and energy demands, which further erodes profitability for less efficient miners.
- Fee Revenue Impact: Daily fee revenue has declined from about $576,000 earlier in 2025 to $410,000, making miners more reliant on the fixed 3.125 BTC block reward and tying earnings closely to spot prices. If Bitcoin falls below $100,000, widespread miner shutdowns could occur, potentially destabilizing the network short-term.
On X (formerly Twitter), recent discussions echo these trends, with users noting that institutional liquidity is shifting off-chain (e.g., via ETFs and exchanges), reducing on-chain activity and fees, which exacerbates profitability issues. Some highlight opportunities in efficient setups, like those using low-cost renewable energy (e.g., $0.035/kWh in Norway vs. the average $0.08–$0.12/kWh), or acquiring hashrate on-demand to bypass hardware ownership. Others warn of a "strange divergence" where Bitcoin's market cap grows institutionally, but on-chain metrics remain subdued.
For real-time tracking, resources like ASIC Miner Value and Hashrate Index provide ongoing profitability calculators and weekly updates across various ASIC models and coins. Overall, while select miners thrive through scale and diversification, the sector faces headwinds that could intensify without a sustained Bitcoin price recovery or fee resurgence.
New emails from the Epstein Estate, released this week by the House Oversight Committee, reveal that the financier and convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein assisted MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito in the funding of MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative, and that at least some of the funding was directed towards Bitcoin Core development.
While public reports have hinted that some of Epstein’s funding may have been directed to the Media Lab’s DCI, which at the time served as the main funding arm for the first digital currency’s reference implementation Bitcoin Core, MIT’s independent investigation of the scandal described mentions of Epstein in concurrence with the DCI as “cursory,” finding only a single instance in which Ito arranged for a meeting between Epstein and his “Bitcoin students.”
The emails now shed new insight into Epstein's connections and influence in the early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community.
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