MARA Holdings sold 13,597 Bitcoin (BTC) worth about $1.1 billion in six weeks and plans to keep selling, according to its third-quarter shareholder letter filed on November 9. Core Scientific announced that it will leave Bitcoin mining entirely by the end of 2026. In the market, a hotter-than-expected CPI pushed Bitcoin lower.
MARA sold 40% of its BTC to repay loans
The average sale price was about $81,039 per BTC. The amount equals 40% of the 34,012 BTC the company held at the end of September, and is six times more than it mined in the whole third quarter.
Of the proceeds, $750 million went to repaying Bitcoin-backed loans, which freed 17,477 pledged BTC. The share of holdings that was lent out or pledged fell below 5%, from 57% at the end of September. The loans were taken in August to fund the purchase of Long Ridge, a natural gas power business, which is expected to close in the coming weeks.
The company's policy has changed sharply. In 2024 it had committed to holding the Bitcoin it mined and buying more. In 2025 it allowed sales of new production, and in 2026 it extended them to accumulated reserves. Sales reached 26,984 BTC in the first nine months of 2026, and the full-year total now exceeds 40,000 BTC. "We intend to continue using Bitcoin to generate cash for purposes such as AI infrastructure opportunities," the company said.
Other costs are also coming. Some bondholders can ask for early repayment from next year, and the board approved a share buyback of up to $500 million. Quarterly revenue fell 35% to $164 million, while the company reported a profit of $632 million, which includes an accounting gain of $885 million from the rise in the Bitcoin price. Long Ridge has a 485-megawatt sale license. MARA also holds development rights at a site in Texas with potential capacity of up to 2 gigawatts, and it is targeting two new data center leases before the end of the year, although negotiations could run into 2027.
For us, the sale is mainly loan repayment and funding for the move into AI data centers, and MARA will not be the last mining company to do it.
Core Scientific leaves mining in the fourth quarter
Chief financial officer Jim Nygaard said on the quarterly earnings call that the company expects to complete the wind-down in the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a pure high-density colocation provider. In July it had already disclosed that hosted mining would end by December 31, while in December 2025 the Wall Street Journal had reported a target of 2028.
Bitcoin mining brought in $17.5 million, 7.5% of the quarter's revenue of $232.9 million, against $215.4 million from colocation. Self-mining revenue fell to $12.3 million from $57.4 million a year earlier, and the miners operating at the end of September were almost 50% fewer than at the end of 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 the company recorded impairments of $266.5 million on mining assets, citing lower Bitcoin prices and historically low hashprice. As we have been saying for months, miners see more profit in the AI market.
Hot CPI and $725 million in liquidations
October inflation rose 0.4% from September, against an estimate of 0.3%. Core CPI rose 0.3% against a forecast of 0.2%, the third month in a row above estimates. According to the CME FedWatch tool, traders have fully priced in a rate increase in December, with a probability of almost 11% for a half-point hike, up from 0% the previous day. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury has reached 5.0%.
We had warned about this in the previous report and episode: a core CPI above 0.2% locked in the December hike. Liquidations reached $725 million, of which $572 million were long positions, which explains why the price weakened.
Grayscale commits $1 million to Zcash as ZEC falls
Grayscale announced on November 10 that it will direct $1 million to nonprofits and ecosystem initiatives around Zcash. It has already given $100,000 each to the Zcash Foundation, the policy group Pretty Good Policy for Zcash, Switzerland's Shielded Labs and Project Tachyon, a scaling effort led by one of Zcash's co-founders.
The money comes from the fees of The Zcash ETF (ZCSH). Grayscale plans to reinvest all sponsor fees, for up to the product's first year, in development, marketing and education. The pledge is voluntary and can be changed or ended at any time, which to us makes it a promise without a guarantee. Grayscale also launched Zcash Invest and an advertising campaign, "Zcash: The Next Era of Crypto," which debuted with a Wall Street Journal cover.
ZEC fell 11.3% in 24 hours to $1,043 on November 10, after a brief dip below $1,000, according to CoinGecko. It is 19% lower over 30 days and below its October highs above $1,500, but about 75% higher than a year ago. A second Zcash ETF from the Winklevoss twins is in preparation, and Europe already has the first Zcash ETP.
XRP Ledger plans quantum-resistant accounts
A study from the XRP Ledger Foundation outlines a plan for holders to add a quantum-resistant signing key and disable the original one. Every signed transaction reveals a public key, and a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could recover the private key from it. That applies to every account that has sent a payment.
The new key uses ML-DSA-44, a scheme NIST approved in 2024. Key and signature together take up 3,732 bytes, against 105 bytes in a regular payment. The size gives a sense of how much harder the key is to break. The base fee stays the same, so users pay nothing extra, and as far as we understand they will not need to do anything themselves.
The work is not finished. Developers are fixing a mismatch in key generation from the same seed between the Python prototype and the server and JavaScript versions, and no tests with all validators have been published. The budget is $215,000 to $255,000 for review and auditing plus 640 hours of development. The migration study is expected in the first half of 2027 and deployment in late 2027 or 2028. It is a study plan with no upgrade date set, aiming for resilience by 2028.
Jupiter launches four products ahead of Solana Breakpoint
Jupiter, the largest trading platform on Solana, unveiled a new mission on November 10, "to make the world's assets universally accessible and useful," along with four products. COO Kash Dhanda said: "What Google did for information, Jupiter does for assets." The company reports total aggregator volume above $1.3 trillion and about $1.7 billion in TVL.
Baskets let users buy several tokens with a single deposit of SOL or USDC, with automatic rebalancing. Jupiter Vaults are a hub of yield strategies, from stablecoin lending to real-world assets, run by independent curators. They resemble the copy trading offered by exchanges. Vaults open on November 11 as a private beta for more than 19,000 people on the waitlist and holders of staked JUP, and all strategies carry a risk of losing capital.
We see the other two as convenience upgrades. Portfolio V3 allows quick actions across perpetuals, predictions and lending, with alerts for positions near liquidation. Pulse and the new token pages show data on tokenized stocks and ETFs and tokenomics for DeFi projects. Both roll out over the coming days, ahead of Solana Breakpoint, which starts on November 15.
The market
On November 11, Bitcoin is holding around $73,000. The hot October CPI and the $725 million in liquidations weighed on the price.