November was a difficult month for digital assets and this was reflected in both managed funds. Digital Fund declined 17.15% as the broader crypto market sold off sharply, while Alpha Prime Trust finished essentially flat at -0.02%, with material losses in the arbitrage book offset by modest positive returns from market neutral, DeFi and momentum foreign exchange strategies.
An extended US government shutdown carried into early November and became one of the longest in modern history, disrupting data releases, delaying some policy processes and heightening concerns about growth and fiscal governance, all of which weighed on risk sentiment. At the same time, investors were focused on the Federal Reserve path into the December meeting, with uncertainty over the timing and scale of future rate cuts coinciding with heavy outflows from spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs and contributing to a broad derisking across digital assets.
This macro and policy uncertainty translated into a wide based sell off across crypto subsectors. Composite managed futures and multi asset indices recorded a near 20% decline for crypto in November, making it one of the weakest months since the last bear phase, with Bitcoin and Ethereum down sharply from their October highs as forced deleveraging, margin liquidations and profit taking amplified the move lower.
At the regulatory level, the G20 Financial Stability Board released a thematic review highlighting significant gaps and inconsistencies in global crypto and stablecoin regulation, and the United States advanced a new federal stablecoin framework with broader market structure legislation expected in 2026, reinforcing policy risk as an important driver for institutional positioning.
Alpha Prime Trust
Alpha Prime Trust generated a marginal negative return of 0.02% in November. Within the portfolio, the market neutral book delivered a 0.80% gain, the DeFi strategy added 0.68% and the momentum foreign exchange strategy contributed 0.84% at the strategy level, while the arbitrage sleeve recorded a 5.37% loss. The net result was a month where diversifying strategies largely did what they were designed to do, but the magnitude and speed of the arbitrage drawdown absorbed most of that protection.
The best performing sleeve for the month was the momentum foreign exchange strategy, which benefited from persistent trends in major currency pairs linked to shifting interest rate expectations. Early in November, the Australian dollar weakened against the following the Reserve Bank of Australia decision, with AUD USD falling roughly 2% from late October highs, while broader markets priced a more patient Fed and pockets of global growth concern.
The arbitrage book was the main detractor, with a 5.37% strategy level loss in a month where the structure of crypto markets temporarily shifted against traditional basis and relative value trades. November saw roughly 2.5 to 3.5 billion US dollars in net outflows from spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, with research indicating that a large share of these flows reflected hedge funds unwinding basis trades and other arbitrage structures rather than long-term investors capitulating. As these trades were closed, spreads between spot, futures and ETF wrappers compressed, funding rates swung sharply and intraday liquidity became patchier, particularly around US data releases and Fed related headlines. In that environment, some of the higher conviction arbitrage positions faced slippage and gap risk as exits had to be executed into stressed order books, and several relative value relationships that had been stable through much of 2025 briefly broke down before normalising.
Digital Fund
The Digital Fund declined 17.15 % in November, in line with a broad reset across major crypto assets after strong gains earlier in the year. Bitcoin fell about 17 % over the month to finish near US$91,452.57 , while Ethereum declined 21.55 % to close around US$3,028.58, both pressured by heavy outflows from spot ETFs, profit taking after October’s all time highs and growing uncertainty around the Fed policy path. The modest appreciation of the Australian Dollar over the month(with USD AUD edging higher from roughly 1.53 to 1.54), provided a small positive translation effect when converting USD denominated crypto back into Australian dollars and slightly cushioned the local currency impact of the underlying drawdown.
Monero and Uniswap were the primary positive contributors. Monero gained 25.02 % to end November at about US$409.50, supported by its status as the dominant privacy coin, continued demand for transactional privacy and renewed attention following the Fluorine Fermi upgrade in October, which strengthened protection against surveillance nodes and improved network security. Despite a multi year trend of exchange delistings across privacy assets, Monero continues to command the vast majority of global privacy coin trading volume and is increasingly framed as a focused bet on censorship resistant payments rather than a broad speculative altcoin, which helped its relative performance in a risk off month. Uniswap delivered a 6.98% gain to finish at about US$6.13, with returns driven by governance proposals such as the “UNIfication” and related fee switch initiatives that seek to activate protocol fees, direct a share of revenue to UNI holders and implement a significant token burn, including a proposed retroactive burn of 100 million UNI tokens from the treasury. These changes strengthen the link between protocol usage and token economics, which supported UNI relative to the broader DeFi complex despite the weaker market backdrop.
The key detractors were Sui and Cardano, both of which underperformed the already weak market. Sui fell 35.02 % to close at about US$1.54. November price action reflected an overhang from sizeable token unlocks and broader risk aversion toward newer layer one ecosystems, with commentary highlighting that recent drawdowns were driven more by supply dynamics and position reduction than by any specific fundamental failure of the network. Although the Sui ecosystem continues to ship new products, including work on native stablecoin infrastructure and DeFi primitives, these positives were overshadowed by the combination of market wide deleveraging and an expanding circulating supply. Cardano declined 30.97 % to end the month around US$0.4229. External analysis notes that ADA has traded below US$0.50 for much of 2025, with November bringing an additional monthly drop of more than 25 % as it broke below a key support zone, against a backdrop of slower than hoped progress in DeFi adoption, intense competition from other smart contract platforms and lingering concerns about development speed and ecosystem traction.