Strategy buys more bitcoin, and Coinbase gets final federal trust charter

Michael Saylor is back. Strategy purchased 1,036 Bitcoin taking them over 850,000 Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Coinbase just officially became a nationally chartered bank. We've got a lot to talk about here on the Daily Wolf. Let's go.

What is up everybody? Welcome to The Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host, Scott Melker, also known as The Wolf of All Streets. A lot has been happening in markets over the past few days. Of course, of course Bitcoin dropped pretty massively over the weekend alongside the tech sell-off that we saw, the Democrat Blue wave, the Binance hack.

But, I don't check it on an hourly basis. It seemed to have bounced very nicely to a very key level around $74,000, around the 50 weekly MA, which we've talked about many times. I actually take the silver lining view that Bitcoin has performed exceptionally well considering all the bad news. Remember, it wasn't very long ago that Bitcoin was trading under $60,000. So, up still 25% off the lows, while all other markets seem to be rattled.

Now, it never hurts when Michael Saylor steps back in the game. and here you go from Strategy. Strategy has acquired 1,036 Bitcoin and repurchased 188 million of MSTRC. As of 11/8/26, we hold 850,000, first time over that number, 364 Bitcoin and 4.9 billion of USD assets.

You know that in the old days of this show, we used to have a meme that I showed where we talked about space balls and Michael Saylor was Mega Maid and he's gone back from blow to suck. Sucking up all the Bitcoins, not blowing them out, not selling at the bottom. Bought more Bitcoin now, uh, than he's buying necessarily of STRc. It's really, really, really, really good news.

So, actually, as you know, I need to correct myself. It's more in the number, but there was $81 million worth of Bitcoin and still $188 million worth of MSTRc. I got a little bit ahead of myself. Now, of course, I see this story as great news, but the story being reported across media for some reason is actually this one. You can see it, Bitcoin slips below Strategy's 75,451 cost basis.

And I keep seeing stories again that now Saylor's underwater and it's apparently a big problem. This guy has spent, I feel like the majority of his time buying Bitcoin underwater, right? The fact that he had just got back above cost basis and skyrocket and slightly below, it's not a story. It's not a story. It doesn't matter what Saylor's cost basis is. He's never getting liquidated, he's never getting margin calls unless Bitcoin goes down to $10, $15,000 and stays there for a few years. So I just, uh, highly recommend, uh, ignoring those kind of headlines.

Now, to fund all this, Strategy sold approximately 2.05 million MSTR shares for $283.8 million. So like I said, 81.9 million to fund Bitcoin, 188.3 million funded STRc, which is trading right near par on a daily basis, once again. And a little bit of that went to the USD reserve to give them some more optionality into the future. So listen, if if Saylor's finding new ways to buy 1,000 Bitcoin, still small for him, a week, I think, uh, we can start to have a little more renewed comfort, confidence that we will have, uh, some base buyers back in the market.

It can only be good news in my mind.

Speaking of things that can only be good news, mentioned this at the top. Coinbase gets full US trust charter from federal banking regulator, the Office of the Controller of the Currency, that's the OCC. Elevated the biggest US exchange's trust status from conditional to a full-fledged charter, the company said. Jamie Dimon must be just having nightmares. JP Morgan, he he absolutely hates, Jamie Diamond hates Brian Armstrong, he hates everything that Coinbase is being doing.

And now Coinbase is officially a bank. So listen, this doesn't change much, right? Because becoming a national trust company is not the same as becoming a full bank that takes customer deposits and earns yield and does lending and all those things. We've talked about this a lot. But it does take Coinbase out from under the New York chartered custody business that they had before. New York's a very difficult state to be nationally, uh, federally chartered, which is great news. And they're joining others.

Anchorage is there and we know Ripple got this approval in the past. This allows them uh, more flexibility in how they custody assets, custody other people's assets, what they can do for backing stable coins, all of those things.

But, once again, to be fair, Coinbase is already the custodian for the majority of the Bitcoin spot ETFs. And that was one of those interesting nuances that happened when all of those were sort of surprisingly approved was that because of rules that the SEC had that were strict about crypto custody for actual banks, which Coinbase was not at the time, that the banks, uh, or the traditional custodians like State Street and BNY Mellon and all those were actually not able to custody

the ETFs and Coinbase got all of that. So they were already able to custody institutional assets. This is just changing how they're regulated and giving them a hell of a lot more clarity and stability moving into the future. Great news for Coinbase. I would say great news for the industry. Great news to see that the bank regulators are still moving forward regardless of what happens uh, in the political worlds. Coinbase is entering the federal banking framework. Treasury is moving to exclude another exchange from US financial connections. Here you go.

Treasury cuts off MEXC Global over alleged $16 billion in transactions linked to Iran, North Korea, and Russia. So fifth FinCEN uh issued an order against MEXC on November 6th, just three days ago. This order prohibits covered US financial institutions from transmitting funds to or from MEXC, which takes 30 days in effect after the federal register publication.

So, what they're claiming here, Treasury is saying that MEXC facilitated at least $16 billion in illicit transactions between May 2021 and May 2026. They attribute nearly 1.5 billion of those flows to Russian sanctions evasion. Now, Treasury says transactions with Garantex and its successor Grinex, which were Russian exchanges continued as recently as June 2026. Those are sanctioned entities since April 2022. So the order uses section 9714 of the combating Russian money laundering Act.

Now, I said, there have been a lot of allegations from individual traders about losing balances or strange trades happening on MEXC. So this is not a surprise, but one thing that you should never be surprised about is that the United States government is going to take action when they think that a crypto exchange or anyone else is interacting with a sanctioned entity. I mean, MEXC here got a quote from Scott Besant himself. Financial institutions cannot have it both ways.

Either you support the Iranian regime or you have access to the US financial system. Pretty uh, pretty clear messaging there from him. Treasury will continue to sever the Iranian regime's economic lifelines and thwart its desperate attempts to circumvent US sanctions using digital assets. So like I told you, this was a 16 billion total, 1.6, 1.5 billion specifically were Russian. That leaves about 14.5 billion for the rest of the axis of evil. Right? So Iran, uh, North Korea, obviously. So listen, like MEXC is a, uh, exchange to my knowledge that didn't have very thorough KYC AML.

Nothing about this is surprising to me. Uh, but once again, a cautionary tale that you need to be exceptionally careful where you keep your coins and where you decide to trade. Right? The biggest exchange in the world has actually two related stories today, which is Binance. Here's the first. Binance users in some European countries told to pull crypto before fees kick in with accounts closing by year end. Affected accounts are reportedly set to close on December 31st. That's New Year's.

Users in Spain, France and Poland say they've received similar notices. So, listen, this is a followup on a story we already knew existed, right? Binance lacks MiCA authorization. They thought that they were going to get in under the deadline with uh licensing in Greece. And if you get licensing in one country, then you have licensing across the entire European uh area. That did not happen. We know that Christine Lagarde herself, the head of the European Central Bank stepped in and basically told the Greeks to block that.

Interesting. But there's this strange, awkward transition period where Binance still has obviously probably millions of customers in Europe, I don't I don't know the exact amount, who all need to slowly get their coins off of exchange and make other decisions, while Binance still tries to become compliant so that they theoretically wouldn't have to. But as of right now, Binance still lacks that MiCA authorization. So, basically there's going to be a very small monthly fee for people who still keep their coins on. You cannot deposit at all, but they're telling you that you absolutely have to withdraw all of these coins.

If you are European and you are still using Binance, do not passively just let this happen. Go ahead, take your coins off. If Binance gets their licensing, you can put those coins back on. But for now, seems pretty clear what you need to do.

And the second half of this Binance story is this one. Circle says it froze 1.1 billion in USDC link to Binance hack investigation. They said that they acted in coordinate in coordination with law enforcement and that a freeze does not determine ownership or mean the funds have been returned. They're just frozen while they sort it out. So we know that Binance was hacked, feels like 100 years ago, I think it was a week and a half ago. for just over $6 billion, roughly $6.4 billion.

1.1 billion of that has been frozen, which means in theory that the bad actors will not be able to access that capital. So, interesting world out there uh in the world of crypto exchanges, as you can see, have MEXC uh getting basically blocked for sanctions evasion, Europe uh blocking Binance and customers there having to deal with this, and then of course, stable coin issuers being forced to freeze coins on everybody's behalf.

That's not the only stable coin story that we have today. Actually, this one's a bit of a surprise. Stable coin growth has stalled. The payments boom hasn't. So that's an interesting nuance there. Now, this is being reported by D5 llama that dollar peg stable coin market value measured approximately 3.13 billion on October 29th. So it went down to 292.96 today.

So, we have seen capital flight of roughly, you know, almost 7 billion uh stable coins from the entire market cap, which means that those were redeemed and taken out of circulation. This peaked in May around 317 billion, so it's only still about 7% off that high. But it's an interesting nuance because for stable coins to be created, somebody who has an account with USDT or USDC has to put a ton of money in and redeem it. Then the money is held and the coins are put into circulation, then they can trade obviously those stable coins back in for their cash.

So we're seeing the market cap not continue to increase as it always sort of did parabolically. But that does not mean that the payments boom using stable coin has not. Just as the same dollar bill can circulate thousands and thousands and thousands of times, the same stable coin can do that and they are. So we've seen a massive explosion. I don't have the exact numbers month to month or quarter to quarter in actual usage and transactions using stable coins. So nothing has changed there.

Still interesting to note that they have topped as far as market cap for now, and that we've seen a major drawdown over the last week and a half. I would imagine a lot of that has to do with all these hacks and exploits and all the news and that that will soon reverse. But important to note when you read those headlines that that does not mean bad news necessarily uh for stable coin payments and transactions. Those are still massively growing.

Now going back to our favorites sanctioned uh axis of evil member, we got Russia. Bank of Russia sets, remember the axis of evil? Bank of Russia sets November 17th, uh, which also happens to be my 50th birthday. Thanks Russia. start for crypto trading rules with 300,000 ruble cap.

Bank of Russia crypto trading rules take effect November 17th capping retail purchases of 300,000 rubles per intermediary and requiring investor testing. So they've approved, the Bank of Russia has approved Bitcoin, ether and USDT for non-accredited investors. There's a test that you can take, or if you are a creditor investor, you have a larger cap. So we've got three approved tokens, but a homework assignment before you can buy any of them.

300,000 rubles is only about $3,600, folks. So this is a very, very, very limited cap, but investors who pass the test can do that. But if you're a qualified investor, which I assume is the equivalent of an accredited investor in the United States, you can access these crypto assets without those purchase restrictions.

So this is interesting because this is, you know, basically the Bank of Russia, a Central bank that is approving the trading officially of crypto assets that Russians have been schizophrenic, much like the Chinese or other countries. You seem to get a headline every day. It's like crypto banned, crypto being used to evade sanctions, crypto adopted, but only for accredited, crypto banned for accredited. Like the never-ending flip-flopping news. And I would imagine a lot of that is because we don't really get clear news uh, out of Russia as to what's happening.

But this definitely is and this is at the highest level. So even though the caps are small and you have to take a test, I think this is probably uh very good news for crypto enthusiasts in Russia and we have one last story. Kepler Wallet hack hits Google and Apple login users. There's another hot wallet that uh, we have an exploit with the web, Web 3 auth where you sign in with Google or Apple and you lose your coins.

My God, where are your crypto assets safe right now? Really gross. It seems about 5.6 million uh, in the 12 published recovery addresses as of Sunday was hacked. We seem to have a story like this every single day. And man, is it annoying.

All right, well, listen, we're going to see what the Bitcoin market does here. We've had a week basically, almost to absorb what happened in the elections. Uh, we're going to see what happens with Chinese spies and Nvidia. talk about that tomorrow. It's all I got today. Peace.