November 7, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update. We are reporting to you from San Juan, Puerto Rico today. It is sunny and beautiful. No wonder a lot of people in the on-chain world live here. Also maybe the income tax situation. Let’s dive in.

What does Reid Hoffman envision for the future of crypto?

Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn, which is not a crypto company. It is a social networking service that has increasingly become the resume folder and job board for us all.

Reid Hoffman is active on Twitter and the technology investing world. So he thinks and says things about all sorts of technology topics. Of late, that has included a lot of artificial intelligence (AI) investing. He is also thinking about on-chain technologies:

"The intersection of AI and crypto is a natural thing for me to be thinking about, and I am thinking about that."

"At the moment, I’m thinking more at the app layer than the infrastructure layer…It’s coming with a heavy AI focus, and what does AI and crypto mean."

"It’s all in development. We haven’t gone “Ta-da!” yet."

You can listen to the whole interview here, or just take our word that this is the most interesting thing he said specifically about on-chain technologies.

Look, we aren’t here to say that it means anything if Reid Hoffman says he is thinking about on-chain technologies at the app layer. It probably doesn’t. Instead, it’s just a convenient way for us to introduce that phrase: “at the app layer.”

“At the app layer” is just a fancy way to say “something people can actually use.” Reid Hoffman is developing things using on-chain technologies that people can actually use. That’s all. And this is a broader theme in the on-chain world in 2025, including from our friends at Meridian Research. Something to keep an eye on.

Things looked good before they looked bad

To let you in on a secret, we usually write the entire Meridian Update around 9pm US Pacific Time, then hit the big publish button around 5 or 6am US Pacific Time after making sure nothing really changed. This morning was a little different.

We noticed that after a mostly pretty good Wednesday and Thursday for the major on-chain tokens, things took a bit of an overnight dip. We’re not talking Monday and Tuesday bad. Just a few percentage points in the wee hours of the day. That left BTC (Bitcoin) down a couple percent over 24 hours, ETH (Ether, Ethereum’s native token) down a little over 3%, and SOL (Solana’s native token) down a little over 3%.

Did anything particular cause these price declines? Who knows. It is extremely hard to tell, because you never know what is already priced in. For example, if the President of the United States says something like we’re going to make the United States the crypto capital of the world you might expect prices to go up a lot, maybe. But that is just not what happened, or what happens, these days. Everyone expected the President of the United States to say things like that, so they don’t care. What they would care about is if the President of the United States announced that the US government is simply going to buy Bitcoin, SOL, and ETH. That was not what happened yesterday. Prices are down a little.

That’s a wrap

Reid Hoffman talked crypto and prices dipped just before publishing. Have a great weekend. We’ll see you Monday.

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