A gold token worth $3.1bn reported $35.3bn of trading on one venue

Good morning. Binance restarted bitcoin withdrawals this morning and bitcoin held $78,061, up 0.8%. Dollar tokens are shrinking: $4,114m left crypto in seven days, the worst week in 90. The day's strangest number: a gold token reported $35.3bn of volume on one exchange.

The tape

Bitcoin (BTC) $78,061, up 0.8% on the day, down 2.8% on the week and 9.5% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,271, up 1.2% and down 17.6% on the month. Solana (SOL) $95.47, flat and down 21.8%. XRP $1.25, up 0.9% and down 18.6%. Bitcoin holds 60.0% of all crypto value, now $2.61tn.

Gainers: Powerledger (POWR), an energy-trading token, +24.2% on $61m of volume against a $40m cap; Lighter (LIT), a perpetual-futures exchange that says it will seek a US licence, +21.5% on $113m; Morpho (MORPHO), the second-largest lender, +8.9%. Losers: UnifAI Network (UAI) -27.4%; Plasma (XPL), a chain built for stablecoin payments, -6.3%.

Where to look

Six things today, in order: Binance reopens withdrawals, dollars leaving crypto, retail long the alts, bitcoin's basis beats bills, Jupiter's trapped deposits, Zcash outgrows Solana.

1. 01

   Binance restarted bitcoin withdrawals on 1 November and its reserve report is due 2 November.

   Phase one covers 15 networks, bitcoin first; the exchange says 95% of affected assets are replenished, all of its ten largest, against $6,340m set aside. The other networks have no date.

   WatchThe proof-of-reserves report on 2 November, and whether the rest reopen alongside it.

2. 02

   Dollar tokens shrank $4,114m in seven days, the worst week in 90.

   Supply is $298.49bn against a $307.90bn peak on 7 October: $9.41bn gone in 25 days. Tether (USDT) lost $2,800m on the week and $4,233m on the month to $179.70bn; USD Coin (USDC) added $27m. Over 90 days the float is down $130m: this week is the whole move.

   WatchTether below $179bn.

3. 03

   Retail on OKX is at 30-day highs long the alts while the alts fall.

   Solana shows 3.40 long accounts per short, its highest in 30 days, on an asset down 21.8%; Dogecoin (DOGE) reads 4.90 and XRP 3.76. Bitcoin fell to 2.51 from 2.74 on 29 October: the leverage is rotating out of bitcoin into what is losing faster.

   WatchSolana under $90 with the ratio above 3.

4. 04

   Bitcoin's futures pay more than Treasury bills at every expiry; ether's pay less at every one inside December.

   Bitcoin's 27 November contract annualises at 5.57%, its December at 5.78% and its 26 March at 5.54%, against 4.16% on a three-month bill. Ether's 27 November pays 1.94% and its December 3.30%. Cash-and-carry funds bitcoin inventory, not ether's.

   WatchEther's December basis above 4.16%.

5. 05

   Jupiter Lend's dollar pool pays 6.98%, up 2.35 points in a week, on the $440m that could not be withdrawn on Friday.

   The Solana lender delayed withdrawals on 30 October: claims on 418.5m USDC against 3.35 USDC available, because deposits were lent out. That rate is the price of illiquidity, not credit: Maple's USDC pays 5.12% on $2.51bn, Sky's savings 3.80%.

   WatchThe rate back under 5%, when the queue has cleared.

6. 06

   Zcash carries $578m of open interest on Hyperliquid, more than solana's $551m.

   The privacy coin is $1,245, up 191.9% over 12 months against solana down 48.7%, and its perpetual pays longs 10.95% a year, like bitcoin's. A $21.18bn coin holds more leveraged exposure there than a $56.34bn one.

   WatchZcash funding above 11% with price under $1,200.

The deep dive

Tether Gold (XAUT), a token that represents one troy ounce of gold and is worth $3.13bn in total, reported $35.44bn of trading in 24 hours, and $35.31bn of it came from one pair on one exchange. We summed the reported volume of all 100 markets listed for the token.

Biconomy.com, a British Virgin Islands exchange founded in 2019, reports the XAUT-against-bitcoin pair at $35.31bn; every other market in the token traded $126m between them. That is 11.3 times the whole token: 808,995 ounces exist, and $35.44bn buys 9.15m of them. Yesterday was worse, $156.44bn, against a 90-day median day of $202m.

The price is not the anomaly. Biconomy's XAUT at 0.049615 bitcoin and its own bitcoin at $78,160 imply $3,878 an ounce against $3,872 elsewhere, on a 0.022% spread. The volume is, and it appears nowhere it must: $35.31bn bought with bitcoin needs about 452,000 coins to move, and Biconomy's own bitcoin-dollar pair traded $259m.

The objection is that gold moved hard and the flow is real: SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), the largest gold fund, fell 3.5% on 30 October. The control says otherwise. PAX Gold (PAXG), the other large gold token, turned over 0.03 of its $1.74bn market value against XAUT's 11.3. And Datavault AI (DVLT), a Nasdaq-listed company, said on 26 October that a June request to withdraw 1,309.04 bitcoin from Biconomy is still incomplete and four of its financial reports can no longer be relied on. Its shares fell from $0.13 to $0.07. What would prove this wrong: the pair clearing above $1bn a day once gold stops moving, with the bitcoin leg visible in Biconomy's own book.

The news

• The FBI named North Korea for the $6.3bn Binance theft and asked protocols to block the addresses. The confirmation landed on 1 November and $2.9bn can still move, because it sits in tokens with no admin key. A blocklist is the only tool left once the freezable share is frozen.
• Flashbots took $13.70m of Ethereum fees again on 30 October, a second day at 54 times normal. Its 90-day median day is $0.253m; 29 and 30 October printed $13.735m and $13.699m, 81% of its 30-day take of $33.86m. We said yesterday a second day above $1m in a quiet week would overturn the one-off reading. It came, on a day bitcoin moved 0.1%.
• Lido's advertised staking yield fell back to 3.23% from 15.07% in a day. The $22.03bn staked-ether pool pays 3.23%, and the 11.84-point drop confirms the 15% was a short annualisation window, not income. Any dashboard annualising one day of rewards will repeat the artifact.
• DTCC, the clearing house behind US stock settlement, put 34 securities on-chain, and Robinhood listed eight stock tokens over objections from 38 issuers. Robinhood's chain earned $26m of its $120m third-quarter crypto revenue and holds $1.09bn of deposits, ninth among all chains at five months old. The objections do not bite: these tokens carry no shareholder rights.

Token talk: Tether (USDT)

Tether (USDT) is the largest dollar token in crypto: holders send dollars, Tether issues tokens one for one and keeps the interest on the reserves. At a 4.16% bill rate a $179.70bn float earns about $7.5bn a year, none of it paid to holders.

It is here for three reasons. Its gold token is today's deep dive. Its dollar shrank $2,800m in the week of the Binance theft and $4,233m over 30 days, the largest fall of any dollar token. And it blacklisted the thief's receiving address 37 minutes after the first transfer, freezing more than 1,567m of its own tokens.

$179.70bn circulates, $92.39bn of it on Tron and $70.56bn on Ethereum, so two chains carry 90.7%. Fees of $16.86m on 30 October and $521.3m over 30 days make Tether the largest revenue line in crypto, two and a half times Circle's $208.3m. The token trades at $0.9994. Watch: whether the float stops falling once Binance's withdrawals are fully open.

Token Tape is written by an automated research desk built and supervised by Eric Manoukian. Figures are pulled live each morning and errors are possible. Nothing here is investment advice. The editor may hold positions in assets discussed.