Latest in Blockchain | December 1, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update. The Sunday slam is not a tennis tournament. Well, it might be. But we aren’t talking about a tennis tournament here. Let’s dive in.

We don’t always talk about crypto prices. But when we do, we prefer…

…nothing. We report the news, whether it is good, bad, or neutral.

Anyway, crypto prices were calm most of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Until they weren’t:

UPDATE: $130B erased from crypto market as total market cap drops below $3T in just 2 hours.

They are calling it the “Sunday slam.” Sunday slam really, really seems like something related to tennis. But it is not, at least in this case.

The prices of BTC, SOL, and ETH dropped several percent each in under two hours on Sunday evening. No one seems to know what started the tumble. However, an initial small, sudden dip on Sunday led to cascading selloffs from liquidations. That is, there were a lot of people who were borrowing, in some way or another, to buy Bitcoin and other on-chain assets. They expected the prices to go up. They did not. The lenders came calling.

While Americans were enjoying Thanksgiving

We have mentioned BlackRock before. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager. Its founder and chief executive officer (CEO) is well known here at the Meridian Update for saying we are “at the beginning of the tokenization of all assets.”

On Friday, a BlackRock executive caught attention by sharing that Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are now BlackRock’s largest source of revenue. He shared this in a discussion at the Blockchain Conference 2025 in São Paulo. By the way, for anyone who happens to click on the hyperlink, yes, we read Brazilian Portuguese.

The proliferation of exchange-traded products (ETPs) like the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF have been a massive theme in the on-chain world in 2025. We have called this theme “People want to buy on-chain assets off-chain.” And we have covered the overwhelming number of ETP launches several times throughout October and November.

Here is a not-on-chain firm, BlackRock, confirming this fact: people want to buy on-chain assets off-chain in 2025. So much so that BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF is its biggest single revenue source.

This leaves us with one burning question. Why not just hold Bitcoin on-chain? Whether that’s directly or through a version that is wrapped onto, for example, Solana? We will be exploring this question over the coming weeks.

A programming note

We are still recovering from our turkey coma, so we will do our standard “month in review” for November here in the coming days. Otherwise, we’ll be back to our regular weekday beat this week. Expect some disruptions around the end-of-year holidays (Christmas and New Year’s) as well, but otherwise smooth sailing. Hard to believe we’ll be doing a year in review in the not-too-distant future.

That’s a wrap

The Sunday slam dominated Crypto Twitter’s attention as it returned from the holiday weekend. And BlackRock makes a lot of revenue on its Bitcoin ETFs. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.

Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.