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A month to forget for crypto

It’s all eyes on Nvidia tonight, as attention turns to the Q3 results of the world’s most valuable company. Investors will be hoping that the chipmaker’s earnings will revive the AI trade, which went into reverse in November — dragging the wider stock market down with it and hurting speculative assets the hardest.

And while AI and crypto are only loosely linked, the alternative currency scene has suffered particularly during the carnage of the last few weeks, as investors have taken risk off the table in almost all forms.

Indeed, bitcoin slid below $90,000 earlier this week for the first time since April, extending a month-long rout that’s now erased all of its 2025 gains. As a result, the world's largest cryptocurrency is suffering its worst one-month stretch since the deep 2022 sell-off, and its worst Q4 since 2018, despite November typically being its strongest month. 

With fear gauges hitting “extreme” levels, and the asset now roughly flat from a year ago (shortly after the US presidential election), some traders are positioning for a further slide, potentially exacerbated by outflows in the increasingly popular bitcoin ETFs. Others, meanwhile, think the recent sell-off will be more temporary.

All told, the crypto market has lost more than $1 trillion in overall market cap since early October and now sits at $3.2 trillion.

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More Americans are job-hugging as switching employers doesn't pay like it used to

Long gone are the days of the Great Resignation. America’s labor market is increasingly in “hire less, fire more” mode — a subtle shift from the "hire less, fire less" pattern seen over the summer — and it’s weighing on those considering a job change.

The “fire more” part of that trend is showing up at some of America’s biggest employers, with Amazon, UPS, and Target all recently announcing staff cuts — as US layoffs hit their highest October level since 2003. In the same month, the hiring rate for unemployed workers fell to a 4-year low, per the Chicago Fed. 

Don’t quit your day job

As companies shrink their teams, job-hopping has given way to a lot more job-hugging, with workers resisting the pull of a new post. One sign is the quits rate, a proxy for workers’ willingness to leave jobs. Since peaking at 3% in early 2022, the rate has steadily dropped to 1.9% as of August — the lowest level since 2015, outside the pandemic shock.

And that stay-put mood seems likely to persist: employees are more likely than ever to stick with their current jobs over the next six months, according to Eagle Hill Consulting’s Employee Retention Index, which hit a record high in Q3. Several factors nudged the index higher — such as stronger confidence in leadership and dimmer views of the job market — but the biggest lift came from workers feeling more satisfied about their current pay and its growth potential.

That instinct is spot on: switching jobs isn’t as lucrative as it used to be.

Per Atlanta Fed data, people who have switched jobs have historically seen faster wage growth than those who stayed put — a premium that’s averaged roughly 1% over the last decade. Now, that gap has all but evaporated, with the premium shrinking to just 0.1% in August, the smallest since 2010.

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B2B payments are going on-chain

The volume of B2B transactions using stablecoins, like Ripple’s fast-growing RLUSD¹, has spiked in recent years. 

In early 2023, less than $150 million of monthly transactions were made with stablecoin every month. By August 2025, that figure was $6.4 billion – an increase of over 40x. And last year, stablecoin transfers outpaced the combined volume of Visa and Mastercard by over 7.6%. 

For anyone watching the growth of stablecoin and regulatory developments like the GENIUS Act, these figures might feel unsurprising. Digital Assets infrastructure such as Ripple Payments powered by RLUSD offer substantial improvements from legacy payment infrastructure, including speed, cost, transparency, availability, and increased inclusion.

For some, it might feel overwhelming to keep up with the pace of stablecoin adoption. That’s why Ripple also created the Block Stars podcast: a bite-sized analysis for busy commuters hosted by industry expert David Schwartz. 

40% of middle and high school students spend about half the school day on devices

In March 2020, when the pandemic had kicked off in earnest and schools shut around the world, educational institutions rushed to source e-learning devices to ensure kids could keep learning from home. Now, as we hurtle time-warpingly close to 6 years on from that point, students are back in class as normal, except they turn up in 2025 with the gadgets that helped them through the remote learning era.

Plugged in

Per an October survey from The New York Times published by The Upshot last week, 8 in 10 American teachers say that students at their schools now have devices assigned to them, up from around a third who said the same in 2019. While that might not be the most surprising news to anyone who has kids or knows even a little bit about modern classroom dynamics, the amount of time some students are spending on those screens each day may come as more of a shock.

As you might expect, tablets, laptops, and other school-issued tech are relied on less heavily in elementary schools, with a healthy majority of students spending less than 1 hour a day on devices in the classroom, according to their teachers. Older kids, however, spend more time with devices in school. Per the most recent Pew Research Center figures, the average school day is around 6 hours in the US, meaning that the 40% of middle and high school students who spend 3+ hours on devices see at least half of their time in school consumed by tech.

Teachers are already worried about screens in classrooms — a different part of the survey revealed that 70% of respondents said devices are distracting students at least “a little” from schoolwork. Still, despite how you may feel personally, all of this becomes pretty tricky when you remember that many of the so-called “good jobs” that parents and teachers may hope children get are, when stripped back, basically just 8 hours spent staring at a screen every day.

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Business (to blockchain) to business… B2B payments data shows a meteoric rise in stablecoin usage, suggesting businesses and financial institutions are fully embracing the benefits of digital assets. Stay up to date with the Block Stars podcast from Ripple.

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