Combining real estate with Bitcoin could redefine investment strategies and boost cash flow.

The post Grant Cardone: Combining real estate with Bitcoin creates an unmatched financial asset, why unit count is crucial for revenue, and how Bitcoin enhances cash flow | The Wolf Of All Streets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin's path to quantum safety may be smoother than expected, with proactive steps already underway.

The post Matt Corallo: Most crypto wallets are quantum-safe, Bitcoin’s soft fork could require proof of seed phrase ownership, and the Ethereum Foundation is leading in quantum threat response | Unchained appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI's rise could reshape money markets, leaving traditional players behind as crypto gains traction.

The post Jordi Visser: AI and crypto will disrupt existing market structures, stablecoins are processing more volume than Mastercard, and Bitcoin’s performance is closely tied to software ETFs | The Wolf Of All Streets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The tariff hike may strain international trade relations, potentially leading to retaliatory measures and impacting global economic stability.

The post Trump declares global tariff hike to 15% following court setback appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Trove's token sale raised $11.5 million, focusing on real-world assets like collectible cards. The ICO process for Trove was oversubscribed, leading to incomplete refunds for investors. The token sale process lacks the structure needed for success, highlighting a gap in support for token founders.

The post Luca Netz: Trove’s $11.5 million token sale highlights flaws in ICO structure, liquidity issues threaten NFT market, and the rise of echo groups over traditional VC | Unchained appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Crashes Below $65,000, Drops 5% in 2 Hours Amid Six-Week Slump

The bitcoin price fell more than 5% in the past 24 hours on Sunday evening, dropping below $65,000 as large holders moved coins onto exchanges and recent buyers sold at a loss, adding pressure to an already fragile market.

Most of the price drop occurred within just two hours on Sunday evening.

This marks Bitcoin’s first-ever stretch of six consecutive negative weekly closes, six straight closes below its 100-week moving average, and three consecutive closes beneath its 2021 high.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading near $64,500 at the time of writing, down roughly $3,500 on the day. The decline followed a weekend flush from the $67,000 range, breaking a relatively tight consolidation and accelerating lower into thin liquidity.

Trading activity picked up during the drop, signaling active distribution rather than a quiet drift, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data.

Meanwhile, exchange metrics from CryptoQuant reveal that whales are dominating inflows. CryptoQuant said large bitcoin holders are now driving most exchange deposits, with the exchange whale ratio rising to 0.64, the highest level since 2015, signaling that whales are leading selling activity.

The average bitcoin deposit size has climbed to 1.58 BTC, the highest since June 2022, reinforcing that larger players are moving coins onto exchanges.

While total inflows have fallen about 60% from the early February spike to roughly 23,000 BTC on a seven-day average, exchange flows remain elevated, leaving the market exposed to further volatility.

Bitcoin price analysis 

Prior to this bitcoin price dump, price action was semi-muted over the last week, with a bounce from a bitcoin price of $60,000 failing to break resistance at $71,800 and instead dipping to support near $65,650 before closing around $67,000 in the week prior. 

Bears remain in control as buyers have shown little follow-through. But some big institutions are continuing to buy into bitcoin price exposure. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company increased its stake in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) to 12.7 million shares worth about $630 million as of Dec. 31, up 46% from the prior quarter.

Al Warda Investments also raised its IBIT holdings to 8.22 million shares, continuing its move into regulated bitcoin ETF exposure. Together, the two Abu Dhabi funds held more than 20 million IBIT shares valued at over $1.1 billion at year-end 2025. 

Strategy bought another 2,486 BTC for $168.4 million last week, bringing its total holdings to 717,131 BTC accumulated.

Strategy executive Michael Saylor hinted on X that Strategy may make its 100th Bitcoin purchase this week, continuing a 13-week accumulation streak despite a $5.8B unrealized loss.

This post Bitcoin Price Crashes Below $65,000, Drops 5% in 2 Hours Amid Six-Week Slump first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Nakamoto Inc. ($NAKA) Completes Acquisition of BTC Inc. and UTXO Management

Nakamoto Inc. (NASDAQ: NAKA) announced today that it has completed its acquisitions of BTC Inc. and UTXO Management GP, LLC (“UTXO”), finalizing merger agreements previously announced earlier this month.

The transaction was structured entirely through the issuance of Nakamoto common stock. BTC Inc. and UTXO securityholders received 364,795,104 shares of Nakamoto stock, at a combined value of $81,632,852 based on Nakamoto’s closing price on February 19, 2026, of $0.248. In a form 8-K filing yesterday, Nakamoto disclosed that the two businesses reported a combined revenue of $80.5 million, $34.2 million in EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, and Amortization), and $40.1 million in net income for the 12-month period ending September 30, 2025.

The deal followed the terms of Nakamoto’s call option under its Marketing Services Agreement, which was previously approved by shareholders.

BTC Inc. is a global Bitcoin media company that produces Bitcoin Magazine, one of the longest-running publications covering the cryptocurrency industry. 

The company also organizes The Bitcoin Conference, a series of events held across the U.S., Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, which attracted over 67,000 attendees in 2025. BTC Inc. also operates Bitcoin for Corporations, a membership platform for companies using Bitcoin as a treasury asset.

UTXO Management serves as an adviser to a hedge fund focused on Bitcoin and related investments. Its team allocates capital across public and private markets in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The firm’s integration into Nakamoto expands the company’s investment and advisory capabilities.

Nakamoto: A portfolio of bitcoin adjacent companies 

David Bailey, Chairman and CEO of Nakamoto Inc., said earlier this week that the “acquisition aligns with our plan to operate a portfolio of companies across media, asset management, and advisory services. BTC Inc. and UTXO provide recurring earnings and institutional capabilities that support our growth strategy.”

Brandon Green, CEO of BTC Inc., added, “Joining Nakamoto allows us to scale our media and event platforms and extend our reach to a wider audience of companies and investors in Bitcoin.”

Tyler Evans, Chief Investment Officer of Nakamoto and UTXO, said the combination provides an opportunity to reinforce Bitcoin’s role in modern capital markets and to develop new investment strategies.

With the acquisition complete, Nakamoto now operates a diversified portfolio of Bitcoin-native enterprises spanning media, events, asset management, and advisory services. 

The company intends to use the combined platform for future strategic initiatives, including additional Bitcoin accumulation and potential acquisitions.

Bitcoin Magazine is published by BTC Inc, a subsidiary of Nakamoto Inc. (NASDAQ: NAKA)

This post Nakamoto Inc. ($NAKA) Completes Acquisition of BTC Inc. and UTXO Management first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nik and Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Core Issue: Cluster Mempool, Problems Are Easier In Chunks

Cluster Mempool¹ is a complete reworking of how the mempool handles organizing and sorting transactions, conceptualized and implemented by Suhas Daftuar and Pieter Wuille. The design aims to simplify the overall architecture, better align transaction sorting logic with miner incentives, and improve security for second layer protocols. It was merged into Bitcoin Core in PR #33629² on November 25, 2025. 

The mempool is a giant set of pending transactions that your node has to keep track of for a number of reasons: fee estimation, transaction replacement validation, and block construction if you’re a miner. 

This is a lot of different goals for a single function of your node to service. Bitcoin Core up to version 30.0 organizes the mempool in two different ways to help aid in these functions, both from the relative point of view of any given transaction: combined feerate looking forward of the transaction and its children (descendant feerate), and combined feerate looking backwards of the transaction and its parents (ancestor feerate). 

These are used to decide which transactions to evict from your mempool when it’s full, and which to include first when constructing a new block template. 

How Is My Mempool Managed?

When a miner is deciding whether to include a transaction in their block, their node looks at that transaction, and any ancestors that must be confirmed first for it to be valid in a block, and look at the average feerate per byte across all of them together considering the individual fees they paid as a whole. If that group of transactions fits within the blocksize limit while outcompeting others in fees, it is included in the next block. This is done for every transaction.

When your node is deciding which transactions to evict from its mempool when it is full, it looks at each transaction and any children it has, evicting the transaction and all its children if the mempool is already full with transactions (and their descendants) paying a higher feerate. 

Look at the above example graph of transactions, the feerates are shown as such in parentheses (ancestor feerate, descendant feerate). A miner looking at transaction E would likely include it in the next block, a small transaction paying a very high fee with a single small ancestor. However, if a node’s mempool was filling up, it would look at transaction A with two massive children paying a low relative fee, and likely evict it or not accept and keep it if it was just received. 

These two rankings, or orderings, are completely at odds with each other. The mempool should reliably propagate what miners will mine, and users should be confident that their local mempool accurately predicts what miners will mine. 

The mempool functioning in this way is important for:

• Mining decentralization: getting all miners the most profitable set of transactions
• User reliability: accurate and reliable fee estimation and transaction confirmation times
• Second layer security: reliable and accurate execution of second layer protocols’ on-chain enforcement transactions

The current behavior of the mempool does not fully align with the reality of mining incentives, which creates blind spots that can be problematic for second layer security by creating uncertainty as to whether a transaction will make it to a miner, as well as pressure for non-public broadcasting channels to miners, potentially worsening the first problem. 

This is especially problematic when it comes to replacing unconfirmed transactions, either simply to incentivize miners to include a replacement sooner, or as part of a second layer protocol being enforced on-chain. 

Replacement per the existing behavior becomes unpredictable depending on the shape and size of the web of transactions yours is caught in. In a simple fee-bumping situation this can fail to propagate and replace a transaction, even when mining the replacement would be better for a miner. 

In the context of second layer protocols, the current logic allows participants to potentially get necessary ancestor transactions evicted from the mempool, or make it not possible for another participant to submit a necessary child transaction to the mempool under the current rules because of child transactions the malicious participant created, or the eviction of necessary ancestor transactions. 

All of these problems are the result of these inconsistent inclusion and eviction rankings and the incentive misalignments they create. Having a single global ranking would fix these issues, but globally reordering the entire mempool for every new transaction is impractical. 

It’s All Just A Graph

Transactions that depend on each other are a graph, or a directed series of “paths.” When a transaction spends outputs created by another in the past, it is linked with that past transaction. When it additionally spends outputs created by a second past transaction, it links both of the historical transactions together. 

When unconfirmed, chains of transactions like this must have the earlier transactions confirmed first for the later ones to be valid. After all, you can’t spend outputs that haven’t been created yet. 

This is an important concept for understanding the mempool, it is explicitly ordered directionally. 

It’s all just a graph. 

Chunks Make Clusters Make Mempools

In cluster mempool, the concept of a cluster is a group of unconfirmed transactions that are directly related to each other, i.e. spending outputs created by others in the cluster or vice versa. This becomes a fundamental unit of the new mempool architecture. Analyzing and ordering the entire mempool is an impractical task, but analyzing and ordering clusters is a much more manageable one. 

Each cluster is broken down into chunks, small sets of transactions from the cluster, which are then sorted in order of highest feerate per byte to lowest, respecting the directional dependencies. So for instance, let’s say from highest to lowest feerate the chunks in cluster (A) are: [A,D], [B,E], [C,F], [G, J], and last [I, H]. 

This allows pre-sorting all of these chunks and clusters, and more efficient sorting of the whole mempool in the process. 

Miners can now simply grab the highest feerate chunks from every cluster and put them into their template, if there is still room they can go down to the next highest feerate chunks, continuing until the block is roughly full and just needs to figure out the last few transactions it can fit. This is roughly the optimal block template construction method assuming access to all available transactions. 

When nodes’ mempools get full, they can simply grab the lowest feerate chunks from every cluster, and start evicting those from their mempool until it is not over the configured limit. If that was not enough, it moves on to the next lowest feerate chunks, and so on, until it is within its mempool limits. Done this way it removes strange edge cases out of alignment with mining incentives. 

Replacement logic is also drastically simplified. Compare cluster (A) to cluster (B) where transaction K has replaced G, I, J, and H. The only criteria that needs to be met is the new chunk [K] must have a higher chunk feerate than [G, J] and [I, H], [K] must pay more in total fees than [G, J, I, H], and K cannot go over an upper limit of how many transactions it is replacing. 

In a cluster paradigm all of these different uses are in alignment with each other. 

The New Mempool

This new architecture allows us to simplify transaction group limits, removing previous limitations on how many unconfirmed ancestors a transaction in the mempool can have and replacing them with a global cluster limit of 64 transactions and 101 kvB per cluster. 

This limit is necessary in order to keep the computational cost of pre-sorting the clusters and their chunks low enough to be practical for nodes to perform on a constant basis. 

This is the real key insight of cluster mempool. By keeping the chunks and clusters relatively small, you simultaneously make the construction of an optimal block template cheap, simplify transaction replacement logic (fee-bumping) and therefore improve second layer security, and fix eviction logic, all at once. 

No more expensive and slow on the fly computation for template building, or unpredictable behavior in fee-bumping. By fixing the misalignment of incentives in how the mempool was managing transaction organization in different situations, the mempool functions better for everyone. 

Cluster mempool is a project that has been years-long in the making, and will make a material impact on ensuring profitable block templates are open to all miners, that second layer protocols have sound and predictable mempool behaviors to build on, and that Bitcoin can continue functioning as a decentralized monetary system. 

For those interesting in diving deeper into the nitty gritty of how cluster mempool is implemented and works under the hood, here are two Delving Bitcoin threads you can read:

High Level Implementation Overview (With Design Rationale): https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/an-overview-of-the-cluster-mempool-proposal/393 

How Cluster Mempool Feerate Diagrams Work: https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/mempool-incentive-compatibility/553 

Don’t miss your chance to own The Core Issue — featuring articles written by many Core Developers explaining the projects they work on themselves!

This piece is the Letter from the Editor featured in the latest Print edition of Bitcoin Magazine, The Core Issue. We’re sharing it here as an early look at the ideas explored throughout the full issue.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/27677 

[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/33629 

This post The Core Issue: Cluster Mempool, Problems Are Easier In Chunks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Shinobi.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Pops After Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs

The Supreme Court of the United States on Friday struck down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariff regime, ruling 6-3 that he exceeded his authority by imposing broad import duties under a national emergency law.

The decision invalidates tariffs Trump levied in early 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a statute enacted in 1977 and historically used to sanction foreign adversaries during crises. Trump cited persistent trade deficits and national security concerns, including fentanyl trafficking, to justify duties ranging from 10% to 50% on imports from nearly every major trading partner.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Constitution leaves little ambiguity about who controls the taxing power.

“The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Roberts wrote, adding that no previous president had used the statute to impose tariffs “of this magnitude and scope.”

The ruling marks the first major test of Trump’s second-term economic agenda before the high court, which includes three justices he appointed during his first term. Lower courts had already found that the administration overstepped, emphasizing that Article I of the Constitution assigns tariff authority to Congress.

President Trump said he has a backup plan to pursue tariffs following the court ruling, according to various sources.

Bitcoin jumps on the news 

In financial markets, the reaction was swift and unsettled. Bitcoin rose about 2% within minutes of the decision, briefly climbing above $68,000 before retreating toward $67,500. The move reflected a familiar pattern in digital asset markets, where headline-driven rallies have struggled to hold.

The mixed response underscored the ambiguity surrounding the ruling’s economic impact. For some investors, the invalidation of tariffs removes a source of policy uncertainty that has weighed on global trade. 

For others, it introduces new questions about fiscal gaps, refund obligations and next steps from the White House.

Reuters has reported that more than $133 billion in tariff revenue collected under the emergency authority could be subject to refunds. Trump has said his broader tariff program generated roughly $600 billion, though that figure has been disputed. If significant sums must be repaid, Treasury financing needs could shift at a delicate moment for bond markets.

Earlier Friday, economic data painted a complicated picture. The Commerce Department reported that the U.S. economy grew at a 1.4% annualized rate in the final quarter of 2025. 

Core personal consumption expenditures, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, rose 3% year over year, above expectations. 

Annual growth for 2025 slowed to 2.2%, the weakest pace since 2020.

Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, described the data as sending a “messy message” of firmer inflation alongside cooling growth, according to CoinDesk. That backdrop has reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve will proceed with caution on rate cuts.

Is this ruling good for bitcoin?

For Bitcoin traders, the tariff case has been less about trade flows than about liquidity and risk appetite. During prior episodes of trade escalation, digital assets tended to move in tandem with equities as investors reassessed growth and inflation risks. 

A court decision that removes tariffs could ease cost pressures over time, yet the near-term effect hinges on how Washington fills any fiscal hole.

Stephen Coltman, head of macro at 21Shares, said before the ruling that a negative outcome for the administration could pressure the dollar and Treasuries while favoring stocks and bitcoin. 

Others, including VanEck’s Matthew Sigel, have argued that reduced tariff revenue could widen deficits, increasing the appeal of assets like bitcoin viewed as hedges against currency debasement.

Online prediction markets had assigned high odds to the court striking down the tariffs, suggesting traders were prepared for the headline. 

For now, the court’s decision narrows presidential authority over tariffs and returns leverage to Congress. Whether lawmakers move to codify elements of Trump’s trade agenda or chart a different course remains unclear.

Bitcoin is trading near $67,600.

This post Bitcoin Pops After Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin’s 50% Slide: Quantum Scare or Capital Rotation?

Bitcoin’s 46% decline from its October peak near $126,100 to roughly $67,000 has triggered debate over what is driving the pullback. Some market participants have pointed to quantum computing as a looming threat to the network’s cryptographic security. Others argue the explanation lies elsewhere, in shifting capital flows, tightening liquidity and changing miner economics.

On a recent episode of the Unchained podcast hosted by Laura Shin, Bitcoin developer Matt Corallo rejected the idea that quantum fears are behind the downturn. If investors were pricing in imminent quantum risk to Bitcoin’s cryptography, he said, Ether would likely be outperforming rather than falling in tandem.

Bitcoin is down roughly 46% from its all-time high, while Ether has fallen roughly 58% since an early-October market break. Corallo argued that this parallel weakness undercuts the claim that quantum computing is uniquely weighing on Bitcoin. He added that some holders may be looking for a scapegoat to explain weak price action.

The quantum debate has gained visibility as researchers explore post-quantum cryptography and as asset managers update disclosures. Last year, BlackRock amended the registration statement for its iShares Bitcoin ETF to flag quantum computing as a potential risk to the network’s integrity.

Corallo countered that market pricing does not signal urgency. He framed the current environment as one in which Bitcoin is competing for capital against other sectors, especially artificial intelligence. 

Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure 

AI infrastructure requires large data centers, specialized chips and significant energy capacity. That capital intensity, he suggested, has drawn investor attention and funding that might otherwise have flowed into digital assets.

Mining data reflects these crosscurrents. Bitcoin mining difficulty recently climbed to 144.4 trillion, a 15% increase and the largest percentage jump since 2021, when China’s mining ban disrupted the network before operations stabilized. 

Difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, to keep block production near a 10-minute average regardless of hashrate changes.

The latest increase follows a 12% decline in difficulty after a drop in total computational power. In October, when bitcoin traded near $126,500, hashrate peaked around 1.1 zettahash per second. As prices slid toward $60,000 in February, hashrate fell to 826 exahash per second. It has since recovered to about 1 zettahash per second as bitcoin rebounded to the high-$60,000 range.

Even with that recovery, miner economics remain tight. Hashprice, a measure of daily revenue per unit of hashrate, sits near multi-year lows around $23.9 per petahash per second. Lower revenues have pressured margins, particularly for operators with higher energy costs. Large-scale miners with access to inexpensive power have continued to expand. The United Arab Emirates, for example, is estimated to hold roughly $344 million in unrealized profit from mining operations.

At the same time, several publicly listed mining firms are reallocating energy and computing resources toward AI and high-performance computing data centers. Bitfarms recently rebranded to remove explicit bitcoin references as it increases its focus on AI infrastructure. 

Activist investor Starboard Value has urged Riot Platforms to expand further into AI data center operations. The shift underscores Corallo’s point that bitcoin now competes directly with other capital-intensive technologies.

Bitcoin is consolidating in ‘extreme fear’

Onchain data suggests the market remains in a compression phase. Analytics firm Glassnode reports that BTC has broken below its “True Market Mean,” a model that tracks the aggregate cost basis of active supply and currently sits near $79,000. 

The firm identifies the Realized Price, around $54,900, as a lower structural boundary. Bitcoin has traded between roughly $60,000 and $70,000 in recent sessions, within that corridor.

Sentiment remains fragile. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has registered “extreme fear” for weeks. Yet some analysts see valuation support. 

Bitwise’s head of European research, André Dragosch, said bitcoin appears undervalued relative to global money supply growth, gold and exchange-traded product flows. He expects consolidation rather than a rapid recovery, noting that sharp capitulations rarely produce immediate V-shaped rebounds outside crisis events.

Macro data may shape the next move. Traders are watching U.S. core PCE inflation figures for signals on Federal Reserve policy. Higher inflation could support scarce assets in theory, but a hawkish response could strengthen the dollar and pressure risk markets.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading near $67,000. 

This post Bitcoin’s 50% Slide: Quantum Scare or Capital Rotation? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs gave the market a clean, daily scoreboard: a green print meant fresh cash crossing the boundary from traditional brokerage accounts into Bitcoin exposure, and a red print meant the opposite.

For much of the first year of spot ETFs in the US, that scoreboard tracked sentiment and set the market’s tempo. Traders learned to treat flows as the simplest proxy for a real bid, because the buyer was observable, usually price-insensitive, and large enough to matter.

But that habit is now getting seriously stress-tested.

The risk in this phase now comes from flat days, because the cushion disappears without a reset.

By mid-February 2026, mainstream coverage started framing the same idea: Bitcoin has struggled to break through nearby levels while ETF demand cools, and caution returns as the ETF honeymoon fades. While the details differ across outlets, the shared premise is easy to recognize on any flow tracker. Sessions flip between small greens, zeros, and reds, with fewer of the relentless up-only intake days that trained everyone to anchor on the tape.

What we have now is ETF fatigue, and it happens when the scoreboard stops acting like a metronome for the rest of the market. Flows still matter, sometimes a lot, but they've stopped behaving like a daily engine. They've turned into confirmation, or a missing ingredient, rather than the whole recipe.

The price is now listening harder to other inputs: derivatives, macro rates, and liquidity.

Over time, the market adapts. Allocations settle into rebalancing rhythms, hedging gets more efficient, and the surprise factor in the daily print fades. The flow still counts, but it seems to have stopped setting direction by itself.

When the 7-day average drifts toward zero for a full week, the price starts taking cues from positioning and liquidity rather than the print.

Early February tape: big inflows still show up, yet the rhythm changes

One reason ETF fatigue can fool people is that large inflow days still show up.

In early February, spot Bitcoin ETFs posted a roughly $562 million net inflow day that ended a long outflow streak. The inflow looked like the old world, where a big green day set the stage for a relief rally.

But, in a fatigue regime, a big green print can matter and still fail to restore the earlier rhythm where persistent inflows did the heavy lifting day after day. The market absorbs the good print, then immediately asks whether it can repeat. When repetition fails, price action starts behaving accordingly.

The same week offered the other half of the picture. We saw back-to-back inflows for the first time in about a month, including a roughly $471.1 million day and a roughly $144.9 million day. Those are meaningful numbers, and their existence makes a useful point: the post-flow regime doesn't mean there's no inflows, just that inflows stop arriving with the consistency that made them an easy trading framework.

Why flat flows can be worse than outflows

Outflows can create a kind of mechanical clarity. Red days force conversations about positioning, risk limits, and capitulation. They can push marginal leverage out of the system and leave a cleaner base for price discovery. None of this is guaranteed, and every selloff has its own structure, but the market at least receives information: someone is exiting, and the exit has size.

Flat flows give less information while removing a cushion.

When ETF net flows hover around zero, the wrapper still trades, arbitrage still functions, and headlines still print, but the marginal buyer that used to soak up supply becomes intermittent. Meanwhile, leverage in the rest of the system often remains. Perpetual swaps still carry exposure, options desks still run books, and systematic strategies still react to volatility.

In that environment, price can drift inside a range with thin depth and sharp wicks, because fewer natural buyers step in during micro-stress. The market can look calm on the surface, then slip on small sells because fewer passive bids sit close to the price.

This is how air pockets form. There's no dramatic catalyst forcing a full flush, so positioning can stay stubborn. At the same time, the steady source of incremental demand that used to blunt sell pressure stops showing up reliably. The result can be a market that feels stable but is actually standing on a very shaky foundation.

Impact per dollar: the same flow, a different market

The best way to see the regime shift is to compare the impact per dollar across tape regimes.

• Inflow regime: money arrives repeatedly, rallies hold, pullbacks look orderly.
• Fatigue regime: money arrives episodically, rallies fade, wicks get sharper.

The $562 million day works as a contrast example. It mattered as it snapped a streak, and it also placed a spotlight on how quickly everyone demanded a second act.

Flat flows also change behavior around levels. When Bitcoin approaches a well-watched price area, traders look for confirmation. In 2024, confirmation often meant a flow print that matched the move.

In 2026, confirmation can fail simply because the flow print arrives flat. That failure can matter more than a modest outflow day, because it interrupts momentum without clearing the board.
Replacement engines, ranked by time horizon

When flows lose their role as the daily engine, the market rotates toward replacement engines. Think short horizon first, then medium, then background conditions. These forces decide whether a quiet flow week produces a calm range or a violent wick.

Short horizon: derivatives positioning. Funding, basis, and open interest determine how fragile the price becomes during small moves. When positioning builds in one direction, small spot moves can trigger liquidations, forced hedging, or dealer flows. That accelerant effect becomes louder when ETF flows stop acting as a stabilizer. The combination of ETF outflows and crowded positioning is a setup that can leave the market primed for volatility.

Medium horizon: macro sensitivity. A market anchored by ETFs and institutional wrappers tends to respond more to rates, real yields, and broad risk appetite, because the marginal allocator sits inside the same portfolio framework as equities and credit. To use this, you only need to track whether BTC behaves like a rates-sensitive risk asset during a week when ETF flows go quiet.

Background conditions: liquidity. Depth, spreads, and stablecoin flows determine how easily the market absorbs demand. When natural spot demand is intermittent, liquidity becomes the difference between a normal pullback and a sudden vacuum. ETF flows are useful precisely because they sit alongside derivatives and market-wide dashboards, which makes it easier to connect them to broader positioning and liquidity context.

Overrides: narrative shocks. Regulation headlines, sovereign actions, security events, and major corporate decisions can override any flow regime for a week. In a fatigue phase, these shocks can carry more weight because the baseline bid feels less dependable. The market starts asking a harsher question: if flows stay flat, what else can justify a breakout?

A three-scenario playbook for a post-flow week

There's a very practical way to understand and stay on top of ETF fatigue. There are a few different ways for it to play out, so when it does, it's useful to think of them as scenarios and then look for confirmation in the other engines.

Scenario A: Flows re-accelerate

• What flows look like: multiple strong green prints, with the 7-day average turning decisively higher.
• What price tends to do: upside grind with calmer pullbacks as the market trusts repetition.
• What to watch: whether derivatives froth stays contained as price trends.

Scenario B: Flows stay flat

• What flows look like: net flows hover around zero across several sessions.
• What price tends to do: range trade with air pockets, especially during off-hours liquidity.
• What to watch: derivatives as the warning system. Funding flipping positive while price fails to break higher can point to a crowded long. Funding turning negative while price holds can point to bearish positioning that lacks follow-through.

Scenario C: Flows turn persistently negative

• What flows look like: repeated red prints with a clearly negative weekly total.
• What price tends to do: higher volatility and faster drawdowns when weak spot demand meets one-sided leverage.
• What to watch: outflow streak framing and reflexive selling risk during liquidity thin spots.

Each scenario can coexist with the same daily headlines. The main difference lies in persistence and in whether the other engines confirm what the flows are showing.

What to watch next week

Start with the 7-day average of ETF flows rather than single prints and pair it with derivatives positioning. See whether funding stays one-sided, whether open interest expands into a range, and whether basis grows in a way that reflects leverage rather than hedging.

Then check liquidity behavior: whether spreads widen during stress and whether wicks become more frequent around key levels, a common symptom when the natural bid weakens and liquidity thins.

ETF fatigue doesn't mean that ETFs are failing; it's a natural consequence of the market growing up around them. The wrapper flows taught traders to read a simple scoreboard. The next phase asks for a deeper reading: flows as confirmation, positioning as accelerant, macro as gravity, and liquidity as the difference between a routine pullback and a sudden vacuum.

In this phase, flows confirm, positioning accelerates, and liquidity decides how far it goes.

The post Bitcoin’s calm price action is a trap: The steady ETF bid that supported it has already disappeared appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A Trump-linked crypto firm is bringing the former president's brand into the structured credit market.

World Liberty Financial plans to tokenize loan-revenue interests tied to the Trump International Hotel and Resort Maldives, offering investors exposure to projected interest payments connected to the project's financing rather than ownership of the property itself.

With the completion date set for 2030, the deal converts future debt service into a digital security and places the current President's name at the center of a regulated financial product.

Put simply, investors will be buying a slice of a resort loan's interest payments rather than buying any part of the resort.

Why this matters now

Tokenization has long ago stopped being a crypto-native concept. For the better part of the last two years, it's been turning into a regulated packaging and distribution strategy for private-market products, especially private credit.

This deal arrives as Trump-linked crypto activity keeps expanding into more finance-forward structures, and as oversight and questions about foreign investments are already circulating in the media.

With a political and technical background like this, WLFI's latest deal will be a timely test of how far regulated tokenization can scale when the distribution engine is a politically charged brand.

What buyers actually own: a cashflow claim

Buried deep in PR speak and vague political language are the practical details of the offering. Its structure is closer to a structured credit product than to the usual real-estate-on-a-blockchain pitch that's all the rage in tokenization.

The token is tied to cashflows that come from loans, and those cashflows only arrive if the project actually gets built, financed on workable terms, and serviced through a full cycle of travel demand, rates, and risk appetite.

What makes this only slightly different than structured credit is that the tokens sit on a blockchain, which handles issuance, ownership records, and distribution under accredited-investor rules. The underlying risk looks familiar to anyone who's ever had to read a repayment waterfall, meaning who gets paid first if the underlying borrower runs into stress.

World Liberty Financial said this is a product that offers accredited investors exposure to interest repayments tied to the resort's loans, which puts underwriting questions at the center of the pitch.

In practice, that means investors are buying a claim that behaves like private credit. The key variables here are seniority, covenants, reserves, payment priority, and what happens in a downturn. The eventual popularity of the resort and the standing of its brand matter only indirectly, through the influence they'll have on the company's ability to service debt.

So, framing this as tokenized real estate is about as far from real estate you can get, but giving it a footing in something real and tangible (like a resort) makes the instrument feel concrete. In reality, however, the instrument is as abstract as it can be, but abstraction travels easily and lands farther when the name on it carries its own gravity.

How the issuer gets paid: the wrapper economics

The process of “tokenization” here adds a second layer that traditional credit investors tend to underestimate.

The token wrapper, meaning the digital security packaging, can generate its own revenue at issuance, separate from the yield investors hope to collect later. DT Marks DEFI, a Trump family-owned entity, is set to receive 75% of the revenue from $WLFI token sales after costs. That revenue will come from just selling the product, not from the Maldives resort successfully throwing off interest payments years from now.

Given the gravity the Trump name carries, just having the name on a product like this will make distribution quicker and easier. A Trump-backed anything pulls attention, reduces the cost of acquiring buyers, and in this case, turns a relatively technical product into something that can spread outside the usual private-credit circles.

The token can offer yield, and the issuance itself can still throw off cash to the issuer ecosystem.

Why the compliance wrapper is central

Having Securitize handle the tokenization process puts the product inside a regulated digital securities infrastructure, rather than open-ended token issuance. With over $4 billion in AUM and clients like BlackRock, BNY, KKR, and VanEck, it gives quite a bit of weight to the rather vague product.

WLFI wants to position these tokens as an offering for accredited investors, distributed through familiar and compliant infrastructure. That usually means transfer restrictions, eligibility checks, and tightly controlled secondary trading venues, which will certainly make this token feel more like a private placement with a modern cap table than a coin traded freely across exchanges.

This is also the direction tokenization has been taking in mainstream finance coverage. Blockchain is now showing up as issuance and settlement plumbing for private-market instruments, with compliance embedded into product design. The tech can make distribution and record-keeping cleaner, while the legal and economic substance stays rooted in securities law and credit contracts.

Trump's crypto arc: from collectibles to cashflow engineering

The Maldives deal is part of a much larger Trump and Trump-linked crypto portfolio that began with what can only be described as fandom products and then grew to include capital market products.

Earlier efforts from Trump leaned hard on culture and memorabilia, including the Trump and Melania memecoins, alongside a broader constellation of Trump-branded token activity.

However, projects under World Liberty Financial sat closer to financial infrastructure than merch, which is why they managed to generate an insane amount of profit for the Trumps.

According to the Wall Street Journal, World Liberty earned the Trump family at least $1.2 billion in cash over 16 months, plus $2.25 billion in paper gains from crypto holdings. Company disclosuresshow that 75% of all WLFI token sales go directly to a Trump entity, which makes the venture's business model look like a toll road built on distribution and branding.

However, a controversial deal with an Abu Dhabi Sheikh that purchased 49% of WLFI for $500 million put the company and its dealings under an uncomfortable spotlight. The deal gained significant political and media attention, which culminated in Senate Democrats requesting a CFIUS probe, making it a matter of national security.

That hasn't stopped the Trump family from pursuing their crypto agenda. World Liberty Financial held a massive crypto summit in Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence this week, gathering some of the country's most powerful CEOs and regulators under the same roof.

Various media reports marked it as a huge success, noting that it set forth a path that merges influence, distribution, and legitimacy.

All of that context changes how the Maldives tokenization should be understood. It's packaging future cashflows into a product that can be sold through regulated channels while the presidential brand supplies a built-in audience.

The timeline risk: why 2030 changes everything

A 2030 completion target makes this a patience trade with construction, financing, and macro risks layered on top of each other. A lot can happen between an announcement and a finished resort, and the token's structure doesn't remove any of those risks.

Investors will need to focus on a set of tried and true questions that apply to any structured credit product: who pays whom, in what order, under what conditions, with what protections, and with what exit options?

The new layer of questions that come from this being a tokenized product focus on the distribution and attention, because a presidential brand can create demand in a way that no normal credit product can.

What happens next

This kind of structure could do three things at once.

It could normalize tokenized private credit marketed through high-profile brands.

It could invite tighter scrutiny of token issuance economics, especially where brand-linked entities capture meaningful revenue from sales.

It could also accelerate the broader shift toward regulated tokenization platforms as packaging and distribution rails for private securities, even when the underlying risk is no different from standard credit risk.

If tokenization has a cultural endpoint, it may look like familiar cashflows packaged in an unfamiliar form, sold through compliant infrastructure, and amplified by a name or narrative that travels faster than the term sheet.

The post Trump’s crypto firm made $1.2 billion in 16 months because it found a way to sell resort debt as tokens appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bank of America's latest market call reads less like a typical bear forecast and more like a structural warning about what happens when markets stop paying premium multiples, even if profits keep growing.

The firm argues that the S&P 500 remains “statistically expensive” on 18 of 20 valuation metrics, with four near-record highs, and expects P/E compression despite forecasting robust 14% earnings growth.

That setup of strong fundamentals meeting falling multiples creates a textbook risk-off problem for Bitcoin, which has increasingly traded as a high-volatility equity beta rather than the diversifier narrative that dominated crypto's early institutional pitch.

The mechanics matter because BofA isn't predicting an earnings collapse.

The firm's year-end S&P 500 target of 7,100 implies significant multiple compression even with profits on the high end of consensus, driven by five specific pressure points: earnings downgrades following price drops, a surge in IPO supply expanding the equity base, rising asset intensity and leverage in corporate balance sheets, and what BofA calls “index risk from private hiccups.”

Software stands out as the stress epicenter, down roughly 20% year-to-date, with valuations near decade lows amid AI concerns, a sector BofA explicitly flags as unlikely to snap back quickly.

For Bitcoin, that matters because crypto's relationship with traditional equities has fundamentally shifted since 2020.

CME research documents correlations between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq reaching 0.35 to 0.6 during 2025 and early 2026, with crypto consistently amplifying equity moves on down days.

The “digital gold” diversification thesis has given way to a reality where Bitcoin functions as liquid beta in multi-asset portfolios, a high-volatility extension of US tech exposure that gets sold first when risk appetite contracts.

Duration math meets cashflow-free assets

When markets demand higher risk premiums or real yields rise, long-duration assets reprice lower.

Bitcoin has no earnings stream, no dividends, and no terminal value calculation. Yet, it behaves empirically like an asset with extreme duration sensitivity.

The mechanism runs through discount rates: if equities with actual cash flows see multiples compress because investors pay less for future growth, an asset with purely speculative cash flows tends to get hit harder.

The tell will show up in real yields and equity volatility rising together.

If the March FOMC signals a slower pace of rate cuts, particularly after the February CPI print on Mar. 11, Bitcoin's implied “duration” gets repriced alongside growth stocks.

BlackRock explicitly framed 2026's crypto trajectory as being driven “in large part” by liquidity conditions and the pace of cuts, positioning monetary policy as a first-order driver rather than a secondary consideration.

Cross-asset deleveraging and the liquidity problem

Feb. 5 delivered a stress test of how quickly crypto can get caught in broader portfolio deleveraging.
Bitcoin liquidations exceeded $1 billion that day, coinciding with a tech selloff and deteriorating risk sentiment linked to institutional crypto ETF outflows.

The episode wasn't an idiosyncratic crypto event, it was a reflection of Bitcoin's position in the liquidity hierarchy.

When multi-asset portfolios reduce gross exposure during drawdowns, managers sell what's liquid and what moves. Bitcoin qualifies on both counts.

IMF research has documented increasing spillovers and interdependence between crypto and traditional financial assets, particularly during turbulence.

The structural setup means Bitcoin doesn't decouple during stress. It amplifies the initial risk-off impulse because it's easier to exit than locked-up private positions or illiquid alternatives.

Reuters highlighted AI-driven borrowing sprees lifting corporate leverage and pressuring coverage ratios, exactly the kind of macro feedback loop that worsens risk-off cascades.

More leverage in the system means more fragility, and Bitcoin sits at the intersection of maximum liquidity and maximum volatility when those cascades trigger.

ETF mechanics turn sentiment into daily tape signals

The introduction of spot Bitcoin ETFs changed how risk-off translates into price action.

What used to show up as generalized “sentiment” now appears mechanically as slower inflows or outright redemptions, turning institutional positioning into a daily observable signal.

CoinShares reported $1.7 billion in weekly outflows as of early February, with Bitcoin alone accounting for $1.32 billion, a sharp reversal that flipped year-to-date flows into net negative territory.

The ETF structure creates a tight feedback loop: equity weakness triggers outflows, which pressure Bitcoin prices, which can trigger stop-losses and forced selling in leveraged positions, which in turn feed back into more outflows.

That's fundamentally different from the pre-ETF era, when institutional exposure was harder to track and slower to adjust. Now the plumbing exists for equity-market stress to be transmitted to crypto markets within the same trading session.

Failed rallies become easier to diagnose. If Bitcoin bounces on lighter volume but ETF flows remain negative or neutral, the rally lacks institutional conviction.

Multi-day redemption patterns coinciding with range-bound or declining prices suggest the bid won't return until either equity conditions stabilize or macro catalysts shift.

AI narrative contagion and the beta-selling reflex

BofA's specific call-out of software as 2026's worst-performing sector carries weight beyond traditional equity analysis.

Software's roughly 20% year-to-date decline, with valuations at decade lows, reflects growing skepticism about AI capex returns and the sustainability of winner-takes-all narratives.

If the market shifts from “AI transforms everything” to “AI capex may be mispriced,” the instinct isn't to carefully separate winners from losers, but to sell broad beta exposures.

Bitcoin gets bucketed into that beta pile despite having no direct AI exposure.

The mechanism runs through narrative contagion: when high-growth, high-multiple sectors crack, risk managers reduce exposure to anything perceived as speculative or momentum-driven.

Reports tied the software selloff directly to Bitcoin and Ethereum weakness on Feb. 5, noting the software index decline “accelerated the slide” in crypto markets.

Nvidia's earnings call on Feb. 25 functions as the immediate test.

If guidance disappoints or raises questions about capex ROI sustainability, the software weakness is likely to deepen, and Bitcoin faces renewed selling pressure as managers exit what they perceive as correlated risk.

If Nvidia calms concerns and stabilizes the AI tape, Bitcoin gets a reprieve, but only if flows turn positive and macro conditions cooperate.

Three scenarios, one catalyst window

The base case assumes orderly de-rating: mixed earnings, acceptable CPI data, and a cautious Fed in March.

Equities grind sideways or lower as valuations compress gradually. Bitcoin trades choppy with a downside bias, rallies fade when ETF flows stay weak, and correlation with equity risk-on/risk-off remains positive but manageable.

Volatility compresses, liquidations stay contained, and the market waits for the next macro catalyst.

The tail risk centers on an AI air pocket: Nvidia's guidance spooks the capex narrative, software follow-through accelerates lower, and equity volatility spikes.

Bitcoin suffers a drawdown larger than that of equities because it's the most liquid, high-beta asset available. ETF outflows accelerate, liquidations surge, credit spreads widen, and forced selling dominates.

The tell would be unmistakable: sharp, correlated moves across risk assets with crypto leading the decline.

The upside scenario requires macro relief: CPI cools, the Fed signals cuts sooner, and Nvidia reassures markets on AI fundamentals. Equities bounce, and Bitcoin can outperform on reflexive risk-on flows plus improving ETF demand.

Correlations rise as inflows return and volatility falls. That outcome depends on multiple conditions aligning, which is possible, but not the path of least resistance, given the current positioning.

The immediate test arrives within weeks

Feb. 25 brings Nvidia's earnings call. Mar. 11 delivers the February CPI print. March 17-18 frames the next FOMC decision.

Those three events determine whether BofA's P/E compression thesis plays out quickly or gets delayed by better-than-feared data.

For Bitcoin, the stakes are straightforward: if equities reprice from “priced for perfection” to “pay less for risk,” crypto gets sold as liquid beta through deleveraging, tighter liquidity, and ETF mechanics before any serious decoupling debate begins.

BofA maintains its 7,100 year-end S&P 500 target and warns a quick rebound looks unlikely.

If that view proves accurate, Bitcoin faces a structural headwind that has little to do with crypto-specific fundamentals and everything to do with its position as a high-volatility equity beta in an environment where markets stop paying premium multiples.

The catalyst window is immediate, the transmission channels are well established, and the ETF infrastructure ensures feedback loops run faster than in previous cycles.

The post Bitcoin bulls could walk into a $1 billion liquidation trap as Bank of America warns multiples are about to compress appeared first on CryptoSlate.

CME's Cardano futures went live on Feb. 9, and that date may matter more for ETFs than for trading.

Under the SEC's new generic listing standards for commodity-based trust shares, one of the clearest fast lanes for a spot crypto ETP is having regulated futures on a CFTC-supervised venue for at least six months.

That turns Feb. 9 into a starting gun: if CME's ADA futures remain listed and active, the earliest six-month threshold falls around Aug. 9, potentially shortening the path to launch compared with the old process, Reuters says, which could take up to 240 days.

None of this guarantees approval. Issuers still need registration documents and operational plumbing, and ADA's classification remains a live risk factor. But the mechanics are now in motion: roughly 170 days from Feb. 20 until the six-month futures threshold.

The rule change that built the fast lane

In September 2025, the SEC approved generic listing standards allowing NYSE Arca, Nasdaq, and Cboe to list qualifying commodity-based trust shares without filing a bespoke 19b-4 rule change for each product.

Reuters says the new process can cut maximum filing-to-launch time to roughly 75 days from 240 days.

That's not automatic approval: it removes the longest exchange-rule-change gate, but issuers still need S-1 effectiveness, custody arrangements, and market maker commitments.

The key eligibility gate runs through futures. The SEC's order requires the commodity to underlie a futures contract on a CFTC-regulated designated contract market for at least six months, with the listing exchange having a comprehensive surveillance-sharing agreement with that DCM.

CME's Feb. 9 launch date starts this clock.

CME structured Micro ADA futures at 10,000 ADA per contract, with larger standard contracts also available.

CME is a CFTC-designated contract market, so the surveillance spine is in place from day one. The six-month threshold ensures the futures market develops sufficient depth to support cross-market surveillance that can detect and deter manipulation.

Three phases of the countdown trade

Phase one runs now through April or May. CME volume and open interest trends signal whether this becomes a live hedging venue or stays a low-liquidity niche product.

Basis behavior versus spot, tighter spreads, and consistent participation matter because the SEC's surveillance logic depends on deep, actively traded derivatives markets, not just a listed contract's existence.

Phase two covers May through Aug. 9. The real tell is issuer positioning. If spot ADA ETF applications start appearing in S-1 filings during this window, it signals that issuers are lining up to launch soon after the threshold.

Reuters notes that marketing plans, legal filings, and service-provider arrangements still need work, even with the new roadmap.

Phase three begins after Aug. 9. The story becomes who files first and whether the SEC treats ADA as a clean commodity-based trust underlying.

The classification risk nobody wants to discuss

The SEC previously alleged in 2023-era litigation that Cardano was a security.

The SEC later dismissed its Coinbase case in February 2025 and its Binance case in May 2025, showing a changed enforcement posture, but that's not a formal “ADA equals commodity” determination.

An ADA ETF S-1 filing includes explicit risk language: if a court upholds a finding that ADA is a security, the trust may need to liquidate.

That risk factor reveals the tension between generic listing standards and unresolved classification questions. The SEC's standards create a procedural pathway assuming the underlying asset is a commodity.

If classification remains contested, the pathway exists, but the destination is uncertain.

The futures-exist logic has limits. The SEC's surveillance rationale depends on futures markets with meaningful liquidity. A six-month listed contract with minimal volume may satisfy the literal regulatory condition, but won't satisfy the surveillance substance.

CME's track record with Bitcoin and Ethereum futures has attracted real institutional participation before spot ETFs launched, but ADA starts from a smaller base with greater classification uncertainty.

What liquidity needs to look like

CME Bitcoin futures averaged daily volume in the hundreds of thousands of contracts by the time spot Bitcoin ETFs launched.

Cardano starts with a smaller addressable market and less institutional penetration, making the volume and open interest trajectory over the next six months critical.

The basis behavior between CME futures and spot ADA exchanges indicates whether the futures market is integrating with spot pricing or operating as a disconnected derivative.

A tight basis and active arbitrage suggest that surveillance-sharing agreements can work, as markets are linked through participant activity.

Open interest growth provides another tell. Rising open interest indicates institutional hedgers are using the contracts for risk management, strengthening the case that futures serve a real economic function beyond satisfying an ETF eligibility checklist.

Flat or declining open interest weakens the surveillance coverage argument.

What Aug. 9 actually opens

Cardano ETP exposure already exists in Europe, with 21Shares and WisdomTree listing physically backed products. The US story is about building the regulatory and surveillance spine that Europe didn't require.

The European precedent provides operational proof that custody, liquidity provision, and market-making for spot Cardano products can operate at an institutional scale, though the SEC's surveillance requirements remain distinct.

The six-month mark doesn't trigger automatic approvals. It opens a window where exchanges can list spot ADA trusts under generic standards without filing separate 19b-4 rule changes.

Issuers still need effective S-1 registrations, meaning SEC review of disclosure documents, risk factors, and fee structures. The 75-day maximum timeline assumes the exchange-side process moves quickly, but issuer-side registration can still face delays.

A realistic scenario for a late third- or fourth-quarter 2026 launch requires issuers to have registration work substantially complete before Aug. 9.

Waiting until the threshold to start filing adds months. Issuers with serious intent will show their hand through S-1 filings during the May-to-August window.

The competitive dynamic matters.

First-mover advantage in crypto ETFs has proven significant, as Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETF launches saw concentrated early inflows to leading issuers. The first spot ADA ETF to launch can establish liquidity and AUM advantages that later entrants struggle to overcome.

The real test starts now

The countdown clock is running, but the outcome depends on variables that won't resolve until late summer.

CME futures need to prove they're more than regulatory box-checking by building volume, open interest, and basis integration.

Issuers need to pre-file and demonstrate readiness to launch immediately after the six-month threshold. The SEC needs to signal whether its changed enforcement posture extends to treating ADA as a commodity for ETF purposes.

Feb. 9 didn't approve an ETF, but it started the clock on the SEC's fastest eligibility pathway.

Aug. 9 marks the earliest moment that the pathway opens. What happens in the 170 days between those dates determines whether Cardano becomes the next crypto to cross from futures eligibility to spot ETF reality.

The post The SEC just gave Cardano a 75-day shortcut to a spot ETF that took Bitcoin 240 days appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin trades sideways as Trump cites Trade Act for 15% tariffs after Supreme Court limits IEEPA authority, and the market starts watching the 150-day clock

It is one of those rare weekend sessions where the chart barely moves… yet it still feels like something is about to snap.

Bitcoin is hovering around $68,000, chopping inside a tight band, while Washington hands markets a story that is both legal and macro at once.

The U.S. Supreme Court just narrowed the emergency-powers tariff pathway Trump relied on, and the White House is now pointing to a different statute to keep a 15% duty alive, at least for a limited window.

Sideways trading can be a form of suspense. The headline sets the stage, and the second-order effects keep arguing with each other.

Related Reading

Bitcoin eyes $175B in refund liquidity as Supreme Court nukes Trump tariffs

The refund fight moves to trade court, but markets are already pricing a potential cash transfer that could reshape liquidity fast.

Feb 22, 2026 · Gino Matos

Traders trade what the ruling does to growth, inflation, interest rates, and liquidity, the variables that have repeatedly mattered most for crypto pricing in the post-2020 cycle.

The legal fight matters because it shapes how durable the policy shock looks, and durability forces businesses and investors to reprice the future.

On Feb. 20, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 does not authorize the president to impose broad tariffs. In plain terms, the Court tightened the lane, and tariffs of this scale now point back toward clearer permission from Congress.

Then came the pivot. Within a day, Trump cited Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a narrower authority that can allow a tariff of up to 15% for up to 150 days under certain balance-of-payments conditions.

The tariff tax impact on Bitcoin

The dispute sits inside statutes and process, and it opens a fresh round of questions about whether Section 122’s conditions are met and how far the authority can be stretched beyond its historical use.

Tariffs are a tax at the border. They can lift import prices quickly, pressure margins, and rearrange supply chains.

Those forces can push inflation in one direction and growth in another, and when those signals conflict, markets often hesitate before they commit.

That hesitation is visible in Bitcoin right now. If tariffs add inflation pressure and keep real yields elevated, financial conditions tighten and high-volatility assets can trade heavy.

If tariffs translate into a growth scare and the market starts pricing easier policy later, liquidity expectations can turn supportive and Bitcoin can find oxygen. With both paths plausible at the same time, the tape often turns into chop, a market arguing with itself in real time.

There is also a confidence layer. Policy that looks reversible can trade like noise, and policy that looks durable can force a full re-forecast.

This episode carries both features at once, tariffs that exist today, and a legal structure that keeps the next step in question.

Related Reading

Bitcoin ignored Trump’s latest 25% tariff threat, but the $19B liquidation ghost from October is quietly resetting in the shadows

Leverage is lower, funding is calmer, hedges are pricier, and ETF inflows quietly absorbed the sell pressure.

Jan 14, 2026 · Gino Matos

From courtroom ruling to balance-sheet reality

The Supreme Court decision also leaves a practical question sitting on the table, what happens to tariff funds already collected under the now-limited framework?

The ruling did not address what will happen to the more than $133 billion already collected, funds that importers are seeking to recover and businesses are demanding clarity on.

This is where policy becomes operational. Someone imported inventory, paid the tariff, set prices, and built a plan around that cost.

Refunds that arrive late, arrive in pieces, or arrive through litigation keep uncertainty alive outside the courtroom, and that uncertainty can show up in payrolls, purchasing decisions, and capital spending.

Capital spending is one of the transmission channels markets care about when they are trying to predict what the Fed does next.

The macro path runs through the usual wiring, inflation and growth feed into Fed expectations, Fed expectations feed into yields and the dollar, and yields and the dollar feed into global liquidity conditions.

Related Reading

The only thing worse than buying Bitcoin so far this year is selling at this time of the week

Bitcoin’s January weekend death spiral is erasing every single weekday gain and leaving portfolios in the absolute dust.

Jan 27, 2026 · Liam 'Akiba' Wright

Why Bitcoin looks calm, and why that calm feels tense

Bitcoin’s range-bound action fits a market trying to map which macro path dominates.

A 15% levy can hit price levels quickly. Any slowdown in demand can take longer to show up in hard data, and that lag can keep rate expectations stuck between stories. Rate expectations have been one of the most reliable short-term drivers of crypto sentiment when macro uncertainty rises.

The sequence also matters.

• First comes the price shock and the headlines.
• Then come inflation prints, surveys, and corporate guidance.
• Then comes the market’s updated view of the Fed reaction function.
• Then comes positioning, often abruptly, once the argument resolves.

Until the argument resolves, Bitcoin can trade like a standoff between narratives, inflation risk versus growth risk, tighter liquidity versus eventual easing, risk-off correlations now versus liquidity-led rallies later.

Section 122 matters for its built-in timer, up to 150 days. A timer changes behavior.

Permanent policy encourages broad repricing, and temporary policy encourages positioning.

A 150-day window can invite pull-forward effects, rush imports before rules change, lobbying surges, and a steady drumbeat of implementation and litigation headlines.

It compresses uncertainty into months rather than years, and compressed uncertainty is often where markets react most violently.

This is also where the trade-policy toolbox matters. If the administration leans on longer-lived authorities beyond Section 122, including other trade statutes that extend uncertainty further into the year, the market’s “temporary shock” framing can give way to a different kind of positioning.

What crypto traders will watch next

The watch list stays simple, because Bitcoin’s macro wiring has stayed consistent in episodes like this:

• U.S. Treasury yields, especially the 10-year and real yields
• The dollar, trade-weighted measures, and DXY-style strength
• Equities and credit spreads, risk appetit,e and stress gauges

Yields rising alongside a stronger dollar often tightens financial conditions, and Bitcoin often struggles in that setup.

Yields falling on recession fear can shift the market toward easier money expectations, and Bitcoin often finds air. Equities and credit can set the first-wave tone, and crypto can drop with everything else during stress before any divergence shows up later.

International reactions add another layer. The Guardian reported blowback and warnings from European leaders about economic harm and instability. The FT described strain for partners like the UK as expectations shifted around tariff levels.

Those reactions feed into global growth expectations, and global growth expectations feed into every risk chart on the screen.

Bitcoin is trading as if the legal story matters, and the macro fallout remains the decision point.

The Supreme Court’s IEEPA ruling and the Section 122 pivot have set a countdown for the next round of tariff policy. The chart will move when the macro variables stop arguing with each other.

Until then, sideways trading is the market’s way of saying it is listening.

The post Bitcoin enters a 150-day danger zone as Trump pivots to a 1974 trade law the Supreme Court hasn’t touched yet appeared first on CryptoSlate.

In the global landscape of digital assets, energy is the ultimate currency. While most miners worldwide struggle with rising energy costs and hardware depreciation, Iran remains a global anomaly. As of early 2026, the cost to mine 1 $Bitcoin in Iran stands at a staggering $1,320, while the market price of $BTC holds steady around $68,000. This massive disparity has created a unique, high-stakes environment where geopolitical strategy and underground economics collide.

Can you Make Money Mining Bitcoin in Iran?

In short: Yes, but with significant risks. The 50x return on investment is driven by Iran's heavily subsidized electricity, which allows miners to produce Bitcoin at a fraction of the global average. However, this profitability is split between state-sanctioned operations that must sell to the central bank and illegal miners who risk raids to pocket the full profit.

Subsidized Mining Economics

Bitcoin mining is the process of using specialized hardware (ASICs) to solve complex mathematical puzzles, securing the network in exchange for block rewards. In most regions, electricity represents 80-90% of operational costs. In Iran, the government provides industrial electricity for as low as $0.005/kWh.

To produce one Bitcoin, an average setup requires roughly 2,000 to 3,000 MWh. At Iranian rates, this equates to roughly $1,320. In contrast, mining the same Bitcoin in Europe or the US can cost upwards of $40,000 to $100,000 depending on the local grid.

The Dual Economy: Legal vs. Illegal Operations

The Iranian government legalized mining in 2019 to generate foreign currency and bypass international sanctions. Yet, the sector is deeply divided:

1. Licensed Miners: These operations receive legal protection and cheap power but are mandated to sell their entire Bitcoin yield to the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) to fund national imports.
2. The Underground (90%): An estimated 90% of Iranian mining occurs illegally. These miners use stolen or subsidized household power to maximize ROI, often hiding rigs in schools, mosques, or rural farms.

Why the Government Allows It

For Iran, Bitcoin is more than a financial asset; it is a tool for sanction evasion. By converting local natural gas into Bitcoin, the state can pay for global goods without relying on the restricted SWIFT banking system. However, this has led to severe domestic issues, including frequent power grid failures and blackouts in major cities.

Comparing Global Mining Costs (2026)

To understand the scale of Iran's advantage, compare it to other popular mining hubs using the latest exchange comparison data:

Risk Management and Hardware

Miners in Iran often face equipment seizures during government "raids" aimed at stabilizing the power grid. To protect their assets, professional miners utilize high-end hardware wallets and sophisticated cooling systems to hide the thermal signature of their rigs.

Conclusion

The 50x ROI in Iran is a byproduct of unique geopolitical and economic pressures. While the entry cost is low, the operational risks—including jail time and asset forfeiture—remain high. As the global Bitcoin price continues to fluctuate, Iran’s role as a low-cost mining haven will likely persist as long as its energy subsidies remain intact.

The cryptocurrency market has always been defined by its relentless volatility, characterized by a rhythmic cycle of parabolic bull runs followed by grueling bear markets. For long-term investors, these swings are the price of admission for potential triple-digit gains. However, when a prominent asset like $XRP experiences a prolonged drawdown while the rest of the market evolves, whispers of a "death spiral" inevitably begin to surface.

Currently, the XRP price finds itself at a critical crossroads. After reaching an all-time high (ATH) of approximately $3.84 in early 2018, the token has struggled to reclaim those glory days. While it saw a massive resurgence in 2025 following major legal victories, the price has recently cooled significantly, drifting from those local highs to the current level of around $1.43. This 60%+ decline from the ATH has led some skeptics to ask the ultimate "black swan" question: Will XRP price crash to $0?

What is Ripple and What is XRP?

To understand the price action, one must first distinguish between the company and the asset. Ripple is a private technology company based in San Francisco that specializes in providing financial institutions with a global payment network. Its primary goal is to replace the aging SWIFT system with a faster, cheaper alternative.

XRP, on the other hand, is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger (XRPL). While Ripple uses XRP in its liquidity products—specifically On-Demand Liquidity (ODL)—the ledger is decentralized and open-source. XRP acts as a "bridge currency," allowing banks to move money across borders in seconds without the need for pre-funded Nostro/Vostro accounts.

The SEC Lawsuit: A Battle for the Ages

For nearly five years, the primary weight around XRP's neck was the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The lawsuit, which began in December 2020, alleged that Ripple's sale of XRP constituted an unregistered securities offering.

The legal saga reached a historic turning point in 2025. Following years of appeals and courtroom drama, a final settlement was reached under a shifting regulatory climate in Washington. The court reaffirmed that XRP itself is not a security when sold on public exchanges to retail investors. Ripple ultimately paid a significantly reduced penalty of $50 million—a fraction of the SEC’s original $2 billion demand—and the permanent injunction on its operations was largely dissolved. This provided the "regulatory clarity" that the market had craved for years.

XRP News Today: XRP in February 2026

As of February 22, 2026, the narrative around XRP has shifted from legal survival to institutional adoption. Despite the recent price correction to $1.43, the ecosystem is expanding:

• ETF Inflows: Following the approval of spot XRP ETFs in late 2025, institutional products have seen over $1.2 billion in cumulative inflows.
• RLUSD Stablecoin: Ripple’s USD-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, has surpassed a $1.3 billion market cap, driving more utility to the XRP Ledger.
• The CLARITY Act: Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse recently expressed 90% confidence that the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act will pass by April 2026, which would provide a permanent statutory framework for tokens like XRP.

Will XRP Crash to $0? The Hard Truth

The idea of XRP crashing to $0 is a sensationalist "zero-sum" theory that ignores the fundamental utility of the network. For an asset to hit zero, it must lose all liquidity, all utility, and all demand simultaneously.

• Network Utility: Unlike "meme coins" that rely on social media hype, XRP is integrated into the backend infrastructure of hundreds of financial institutions globally. Even if the price drops, the ledger continues to process transactions.
• Institutional Backing: With the launch of ETFs and the entry of major asset managers, XRP is now a "regulated" asset class in the eyes of many institutional desks.
• Market Cycles: A drop to $1.43 is a standard correction in the world of crypto. In previous cycles, assets like $Bitcoin and $Ethereum have crashed 80-90% before reaching new highs.

While a "crash to zero" is highly improbable given the current ecosystem, XRP still faces risks. Macroeconomic downturns, a potential failure in the passage of the CLARITY Act, or a lack of retail interest could keep the price suppressed. However, the "truth" is that XRP has more structural support today than it did when it was trading at $3.00.

Weekly Market Roundup: A Climate of "Extreme Fear"

The third week of February 2026 has been characterized by a palpable tension across the digital asset landscape. While the total market capitalization remains robust at $2.41 trillion, the sentiment has plunged into a state of "Extreme Fear," with the Fear & Greed Index hitting a low of 14.

Despite Bitcoin ($BTC) stabilizing around the $68,000 mark, institutional confidence appears to be wavering. Recent data confirms that crypto investment products have faced four consecutive weeks of outflows, totaling roughly $3.8 billion. This defensive posture is largely driven by a combination of macroeconomic uncertainty and specific "existential" concerns, including renewed debates over quantum computing's long-term impact on Bitcoin's scarcity.

What Impacted the Crypto Market?

Investors are currently navigating a "wait-and-see" period. The primary drivers of this week's volatility included:

• Massive ETF Outflows: US spot Bitcoin ETFs alone saw nearly $400 million in exits, signaling a shift in institutional appetite.
• Regulatory Friction: The White House roundtable on stablecoin yields ended without a clear agreement between banks and the crypto industry, delaying the progress of the CLARITY Act.
• Geopolitical Safe Havens: In contrast to global outflows, Bitcoin adoption surged in regions like Lebanon and Iran as a hedge against local fiat collapses.

Top Crypto Gainers and Losers: February 15 – 21

Top Gainers

Top Losers

Regulatory Watch: The "Heavyweight Rumble" of 2026

The fight for regulatory clarity has entered a "Round 2" phase. In Washington, the push for the CLARITY Act remains the focal point. According to reports from Reuters and other major financial outlets, the Trump administration has requested a compromise proposal on stablecoin yields by the end of this month.

Banks remain concerned that interest-bearing stablecoins will siphon off traditional deposits. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) continues to set the global gold standard, with the European Central Bank (ECB) preparing to launch pilot activities for the digital euro.

"The bell has rung for the real fight for regulatory clarity. Lawmakers are no longer asking if crypto belongs, but how to integrate it safely into global infrastructure." — Industry Analysis, February 2026.

Upcoming High-Impact Events: February 23 – March 1

The final week of February is packed with events that could dictate the market's direction heading into March.

• ETHDenver 2026 (Feb 23 - Feb 28): The world's largest Ethereum builder festival. Expect major announcements regarding Layer-2 scaling and the future of DeFi.
• USD.AI ICO (Feb 22 - Feb 23): A high-profile launch on CoinList featuring a synthetic dollar backed by real-world assets (RWA).
• Grass (GRASS) Token Unlock (Feb 28): A significant unlock of 13.15% of the supply, which may lead to increased short-term volatility.
• Crypto Expo Europe (Starts March 1): A major gathering in Bucharest focusing on European adoption and MiCAR compliance.

As the market approaches these milestones, ensuring your assets are secure is paramount. Check out our latest Hardware Wallet Comparison to find the best protection for your portfolio.

Recent rumors circulating in the crypto space suggested a massive $8.2 million single-day dump by $Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. However, verified on-chain data and reports from reputable sources like Lookonchain, Phemex, and Blockchain News tell a different, more nuanced story.

On February 22, 2026, Vitalik Buterin executed a sale of 428.57 ETH, valued at approximately $850,000. While this contributes to a larger trend of selling seen throughout February, it falls significantly short of the sensationalist figures reported by some outlets.

Fact Check: Did Vitalik Sell $8.2M Today?

The short answer is no. There is no confirmed single transaction or aggregate movement totaling $8.2 million from Buterin’s known wallets (such as vitalik.eth) on February 22.

The Real Numbers

According to OnchainLens and Lookonchain, the specific activity for Sunday involved:

• Amount Sold: 428.57 ETH
• Asset Received: 850,178 GHO (Aave’s stablecoin)
• Estimated Value: ~$850,000

This transaction is part of a broader, transparent liquidation strategy that Buterin has been open about since late January.

Vitalik’s February Sales History

Since February 2, 2026, Buterin has been consistently offloading portions of his holdings. These moves are often tracked via Ethereum price charts (adjusted for $ETH) as they can impact short-term sentiment.

These sales are conducted through the CoW Protocol, a decentralized exchange aggregator that uses batch auctions to minimize price impact and protect against MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) bots. This method confirms that Buterin is not "dumping" in a way intended to crash the crypto market.

Why is Vitalik Selling Ethereum?

Contrary to "FUD" (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) suggesting a loss of confidence, these sales are tied to a publicly announced development funding and philanthropy roadmap.

1. Ethereum Foundation Austerity: Buterin recently noted that the Ethereum Foundation is entering a period of "mild austerity." To compensate, he is personally funding "special projects" that were previously under the Foundation's umbrella.
    
2. Cypherpunk Roadmap: On January 16, 2026, Vitalik outlined a vision to reclaim "lost ground" in self-sovereignty. The funds are earmarked for:

• Open-source security software
• Privacy-preserving technologies (ZK-proofs)
• Biotech research (via his Kanro initiative)
• Secure hardware development

Investors looking to understand how these sales compare to broader exchange activity can visit our exchange comparison page to see where liquidity is highest.

The $XRP Ledger (XRPL) has secured a major institutional victory as Société Générale, the 6th largest bank in Europe with $1.8 trillion in assets, officially deployed its euro stablecoin, EUR CoinVertible (EURCV), on the network. This move marks the third major blockchain for the MiCA-compliant token, following its earlier launches on Ethereum and Solana.

Quick Facts: The Institutional Surge on XRPL

• Société Générale: Launched EURCV on XRPL via its digital arm, SG-FORGE, on February 18, 2026.
• Multi-Chain Strategy: XRPL now hosts EURCV alongside Ethereum (2023) and Solana (2025).
• Network Growth: XRPL reached #2 in 30-day Real-World Asset (RWA) growth at 15.37%, trailing only Arbitrum.
• Institutional Backing: Deutsche Bank and Aviva Investors also announced XRPL-based integrations this month.

Why Société Générale Chose the XRP Ledger

The deployment of EURCV on the XRP Ledger is not a simple experiment. As a systemically important financial institution, Société Générale requires high throughput and low-cost settlement. SG-FORGE cited the scalability and speed of the XRP Ledger as primary reasons for the integration.

Furthermore, the launch is supported by Ripple’s custody solution (formerly Metaco), which provides the bank with the security infrastructure needed to manage reserves and on-chain issuance. This partnership allows EURCV to potentially be utilized as trading collateral within Ripple’s payment products, bridging the gap between traditional finance (TradFi) and digital assets.

Deutsche Bank and Aviva Join the XRPL Ecosystem

The XRP news today follows a series of high-profile institutional announcements in February 2026.

• Deutsche Bank: Revealed plans to integrate Ripple’s technology stack to modernize its cross-border payment rails and FX workflows.
• Aviva Investors: Partnered with Ripple to tokenize traditional fund structures directly on the XRPL, marking Ripple’s first major deal with a UK-based asset manager.

These developments have pushed the total value of tokenized assets on the XRP Ledger to approximately $1.5 billion. While the XRP price has faced headwinds in February—trading near the $1.40 support level amid a broader market correction—the fundamental utility of the network is at an all-time high.

XRP Price Prediction and Market Reaction

Despite the bullish institutional news, the XRP price has remained under pressure, down roughly 30% for the month. Analysts at Standard Chartered suggest that while short-term retail demand has cooled, the long-term structural demand remains intact due to these RWA integrations.

Ethereum builders at ETH Denver said that the crypto infrastructure has been laid—but not products people actually want to use.

Ethereum developers scheduled a controversial upgrade for later this year. Buterin said it reinforces the network’s cypherpunk principles.

Researchers built AdGazer, a machine learning tool that predicts whether you'll actually look at a digital ad—before it's ever shown to you.

At ETH Denver, developers warned that advances in quantum computing could threaten Bitcoin’s digital signatures as the industry continues to debate how to prepare.

Bitcoin is down 46% from its October peak—and the largest holders keep depositing to exchanges, presumably to sell, says CryptoQuant.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has called for a full-blown restructuring of blockchain security.

Bitcoin has plummeted below the critical $65,000 support level, triggering a violent $464 million liquidation event as fresh tariff uncertainty roils global markets.

The market could be bottoming, at least that is what's happening with assets like XRP, Bitcoin and Shiba Inu.

Michael Saylor, Strategy's executive chairman, has teasted yet another massive Bitcoin purchase.

John Deaton rejects Sam Bankman-Fried's $78B solvency claims, citing a "two-tiered justice system." The pro-Ripple lawyer opposes an SBF pardon as FTX recovery data surfaces.

TLDR:

• Dogecoin has tested a descending trendline across six consecutive daily candles without breaking below support.

• Analyst Trader Tardigrade warns that current momentum is weak and a volume spike is needed to confirm a breakout.

• Dogecoin’s Number of Days Spent at a Profit has surpassed 1,100 days, marking a first-ever reading for the asset.

• The 1,100-day metric shows most historical holders are at a loss, a level that often precedes long-term accumulation phases.

Dogecoin is drawing attention from analysts as two distinct market signals emerge simultaneously. The asset is holding a key trendline on the daily chart while posting a historic reading on a long-term cycle indicator.

Together, these developments are painting a complex picture for traders watching the market closely. The situation reflects both caution and structural interest in Dogecoin at its current price level.

Trendline Support Remains Intact but Momentum Raises Questions

Dogecoin has tested a descending trendline across six consecutive daily candles. Each test has so far resulted in the price holding above support.

Crypto analyst Trader Tardigrade noted that structure remains technically bullish under these conditions. However, the analyst also pointed out that the current price action appears to be running low on energy.

According to Trader Tardigrade, the move lacks the buyer conviction needed to confirm a genuine breakout. The analyst specifically called for a volume spike and strong conviction candles as confirmation signals.

Without those, the setup is considered more hopeful than reliable. The brakes, as the analyst described, are lightly tapped on any upward momentum.

Volume remains a critical factor in determining whether this trendline holds or breaks. Thin volume during a trendline test often leads to false signals in either direction.

Traders are advised to watch price behavior closely before committing to a directional position. A high-volume candle closing above resistance would carry more weight than multiple low-volume closes.

Until clear confirmation arrives, Dogecoin remains in a wait-and-see zone technically. The trendline holding is a positive sign, but it does not guarantee continuation.

The market requires participation from genuine buyers to shift the current dynamic. That participation has not yet shown up in a measurable way on the chart.

Historical Metric Hits Unprecedented Level for Dogecoin

On the on-chain side, Dogecoin has reached a notable milestone in a long-term cycle metric. Analyst Joao Wedson reported that Dogecoin has now accumulated more than 1,100 historical days where price traded higher than today’s level.

This is the first time the asset has reached this reading. The metric is called the Number of Days Spent at a Profit.

This indicator measures how many past trading days recorded prices above the current level. A higher reading reflects a longer history of trading at elevated prices compared to now.

It captures the aggregated positioning and memory of holders over time. This is a structural metric, not a short-term signal.

Wedson described the reading as a cycle-level development rather than a day-trading data point. It speaks to where Dogecoin sits relative to its entire price history.

More than 1,100 days of higher historical prices means a large portion of past holders are currently at a loss. That kind of data often precedes a longer-term accumulation phase in similar assets.

The combination of trendline support and this historical metric gives analysts two separate angles to monitor Dogecoin going forward.

The post Dogecoin Hold Key Trendline for Sixth Day as Historical Profit Metric Hits All-Time High appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• A 300bps rate drop could erase nearly $234B in annual MMF income.
• Even 5% MMF rotation may release $390B into higher-yield alternatives.
• STRC’s 11.25% yield positions it for institutional inflows during easing.
• New STRC issuance could translate into large-scale Bitcoin purchases.

Yield Tsunami Bitcoin is gaining attention after investor Adam Livingston projected a sharp capital rotation toward Bitcoin-linked yield vehicles.

In a detailed post on X, Livingston argued that ongoing Federal Reserve rate cuts could erase hundreds of billions in annual income from U.S. money market funds.

He contends that falling short-term yields may push pensions, insurers, and endowments toward higher-yielding listed structures tied to Bitcoin exposure.

Rate Cuts and the Projected $234 Billion Income Compression

Livingston stated that U.S. money market funds hold roughly $7.79 trillion as of mid-February 2026. He noted that current yields near 4.5% to 5% reflect the prior hiking cycle.

However, he argued that an additional 75 to 100 basis points of cuts could reduce front-end rates toward 3% or lower.

According to his calculations, a 300-basis-point decline across $7.79 trillion equates to about $233.7 billion in lost annual income. He described this as a large-scale compression event for conservative capital pools. As yields fall, institutions dependent on fixed income cash flows may reallocate capital.

In his tweet, Livingston called this shift a “trillion-dollar yield tsunami” moving toward Bitcoin-aligned assets. He referenced historical data from the post-2008 and 2020 easing cycles. During those periods, alternative credit and private structures experienced accelerated asset growth.

He further cited estimates suggesting that even a 5% rotation from money market funds could release nearly $390 billion. A portion of that capital, he argued, may seek liquid high-yield instruments offering double-digit returns.

STRC Structure and the Bitcoin Treasury Feedback Loop

Livingston identified Strategy’s Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock, trading under STRC, as a potential beneficiary.

The security reportedly pays 11.25% annualized, distributed monthly. It trades near $100 par value and includes a rules-based monthly reset feature.

He reported that STRC has a notional value of about $3.46 billion with average daily trading volume near $128 million.

According to the post, dividend coverage is supported by cash reserves and the strategy’s Bitcoin treasury. The company currently holds more than 717,000 BTC.

Livingston estimated that a 0.5% capture of projected alternative inflows could generate $2 to $4 billion in new STRC issuance.

At Bitcoin prices near $68,000, he calculated that each $1 billion raised could acquire roughly 14,700 BTC. Larger inflows would increase that figure proportionally.

He also modeled broader scenarios. A 5% rotation from money market funds with a 10% STRC capture rate could imply $39 billion in inflows.

That level, based on his figures, would represent hundreds of thousands of additional BTC purchases. Yield Tsunami Bitcoin remains central to his thesis that rate compression may indirectly expand institutional Bitcoin exposure through listed yield vehicles.

The post Yield Tsunami Bitcoin: Fed Rate Cuts Could Trigger Massive Capital Rotation Into STRC appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• • A single $618,000 BTC-to-USDC swap on THORChain exposed every transaction detail to the public in real time.
    
  • GemWallet’s 50 basis point fee was written directly into the transaction memo, visible on-chain to anyone worldwide.
    
  • THORChain allows users to swap assets without creating an account, submitting an ID, or seeking any permission.
  • Every swap ever executed on THORChain remains permanently traceable, dating all the way back to its first transaction.

THORChain recently showcased blockchain transparency through a live transaction on its network. A user swapped 8.99 BTC, worth roughly $67,393, for 611,637 USDC in under 17 minutes.

The swap totaled approximately $618,000 moving across chains. Every detail of this trade remained publicly visible to anyone with an internet connection.

What the Transaction Revealed About On-Chain Visibility

THORChain shared the transaction publicly, noting that every detail was traceable without any permission required.

The sending wallet address, destination address, exact amounts, fees, and processing time were all recorded permanently on a public blockchain. No compliance department or regulatory body controls access to this data.

The transaction memo also showed that GemWallet processed the swap and charged 50 basis points as a service fee.

That fee was written directly into the transaction instructions, not buried in a terms of service document. Anyone on earth could verify this at the moment it happened.

THORChain posted about the event, stating: “There is no compliance department to call, no freedom of information request to file, no company deciding what data you are allowed to see.”

This reflects a core design principle of public blockchain infrastructure. The data exists on-chain and remains accessible indefinitely.

This level of auditability extends beyond a single transaction. Every swap ever executed on THORChain traces back to the network’s first transaction, all publicly accessible without creating an account or submitting identification documents.

How THORChain Contrasts With Traditional Financial Systems

THORChain draws a direct comparison between its model and traditional finance. In conventional systems, users cannot meaningfully audit the infrastructure they trust with their money.

Access also requires clearing increasingly complex identity verification processes before any transaction can occur.

According to THORChain, opacity and gatekeeping come bundled together in traditional finance. Users are told this is simply how financial infrastructure must function. The protocol presents itself as evidence that this assumption does not hold.

The protocol operates under a model where full transparency and permissionless access coexist by default. A user can make a swap without asking anyone for permission, without creating an account, and without submitting any identification. Both features run simultaneously within the same system.

THORChain noted: “Full transparency and no gatekeepers are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist, and on a public blockchain they do by default.”

This positions the network as a functional alternative to systems where financial data remains controlled and access remains conditional. The transaction itself serves as a working example rather than a theoretical argument.

The post THORChain’s $618,000 Live Swap Puts Blockchain Transparency to the Test appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• USDT 60-day market cap change has fallen below -$3B for only the second time in crypto market history.

• The first instance occurred in late 2022, aligning precisely with Bitcoin’s cycle bottom near the $16,000 level.

• Three single-day USDT outflows exceeding -$1B have each coincided with local bottoms or sharp Bitcoin volatility.

• Historical data shows Bitcoin entered strong recovery phases once USDT outflows stabilized after peak liquidity stress.

USDT is flashing a rare on-chain signal that has only appeared twice in crypto market history. The stablecoin’s 60-day market cap change has dropped below -$3 billion.

This level was last reached in late 2022, when Bitcoin bottomed near $16,000. That period marked one of the most severe liquidity contractions in the digital asset market.

Now, this same metric is triggering again in early 2026, with Bitcoin trading between $65,000 and $70,000.

USDT Outflows Mirror Patterns From the 2022 Cycle Bottom

The 60-day USDT market cap contraction has only breached -$3 billion on two occasions. The first came during the late 2022 market collapse, a period of forced selling and maximum fear.

The second is occurring now, in early 2026, after Bitcoin’s recent all-time high run.

On a daily basis, USDT has recorded three separate instances of single-day outflows exceeding -$1 billion. Each of those episodes lined up with either local market bottoms or sharp Bitcoin volatility clusters. That pattern is difficult to ignore given the current market conditions.

Analyst CrptosRus qouting MorenoDV_ flagged this development on X, noting the historical weight of the signal. “The 60-day Market Cap Change has dropped below -$3B, on only two occasions,” the post read. “The first occurred in late 2022, precisely as Bitcoin was carving its cycle bottom near $16K.”

Large-scale USDT redemptions at this rate typically reflect institutional or major holder exits from the broader crypto ecosystem.

Historically, these exits tend to cluster near exhaustion points rather than at the start of prolonged downtrends.

Liquidity Conditions Now Determine Bitcoin’s Next Move

Stablecoins function as the dry powder of the crypto market. When USDT supply grows, it points to fresh capital entering the ecosystem. When it contracts sharply, it reflects risk-off behavior, liquidity withdrawal, or forced redemptions.

For Bitcoin, a liquidity-sensitive asset, USDT supply trends carry measurable weight. The current 60-day contraction points to sustained capital outflows and structural tightening in crypto-native liquidity. That creates a fragile environment for price stability.

However, past cycles offer some useful context here. Once forced deleveraging completed and USDT flows stabilized, Bitcoin moved into strong medium-term recovery phases. The normalization of liquidity conditions preceded meaningful upside in prior cycles.

The current setup presents a conditional risk-reward scenario. If USDT contraction continues, downside pressure may extend further.

If flows flatten or reverse, the asymmetry shifts rapidly toward upside potential. Extreme liquidity stress has historically marked opportunity, but only once selling exhaustion is confirmed by stabilizing on-chain flows.

The post USDT Rare -$3B Signal Returns: Is Bitcoin Approaching Another Cycle Bottom? appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ethereum’s RWA market surpassed $15B in 2025, marking more than 3x growth within a single calendar year.

• Tether Gold and Paxos Gold combined to add over $4B in new tokenized gold value on-chain this year.

• BlackRock BUIDL, Ondo USDY, and WisdomTree posted triple to four-digit growth in Treasury-backed products.

• Syrup USDC and USDT scaled to $2.3B combined, proving strong demand for yield on idle stablecoins.

RWAs on Ethereum have crossed the $15 billion mark, reflecting more than triple growth within a single year. The surge is largely driven by tokenized funds, gold products, and yield-bearing stablecoins.

Institutions are no longer testing the waters — they are committing real capital. This shift marks a turning point for on-chain finance, as real-world asset tokenization moves from concept to active deployment across major financial players.

Tokenized Gold and Treasury Products Lead the Charge

Tokenized gold has scaled at an aggressive pace over the past year. Tether Gold grew from roughly $500 million to $2.7 billion during this period.

Paxos Gold also climbed to around $2.3 billion in total value. Together, gold products alone added over $4 billion in new on-chain value.

Treasury-backed products followed a similar trajectory. Ondo USDY, BlackRock BUIDL, Janus Henderson, Superstate, and WisdomTree all posted triple- to four-digit growth rates.

These are not small or speculative positions—institutions are directing meaningful capital toward these products. The numbers reflect a structural shift, not a temporary trend.

Crypto analyst Ted, posting under the handle @TedPillows, noted the pace of this growth. He wrote that RWAs on Ethereum “just crossed $15B” and described it as “more than 3x growth in a single year.”

His observation pointed to tokenized funds and short-duration U.S. Treasuries as the primary catalysts behind the move.

The appeal of Treasury products lies in their familiarity and yield. These instruments offer stable returns while settling on-chain with full transparency.

As a result, they attract both traditional finance firms and crypto-native protocols seeking low-risk allocations.

Yield Products and DeFi Integration Expand the RWA Market

New yield products have also contributed to the RWA market’s expansion. Syrup USDC and USDT scaled to approximately $2.3 billion combined within a short period. The speed of that growth points to strong existing demand for yield on idle stablecoins.

These products work because they plug directly into decentralized finance as collateral. Stablecoins parked in RWA-backed instruments can earn returns that were previously unavailable on-chain. This creates a practical use case that goes beyond speculation.

Ethereum continues to hold around 60% of the RWA market share. Stablecoins on Ethereum alone exceed $160 billion, which means RWAs at $15 billion still represent a relatively small portion of the broader base. There is room for continued expansion as more assets come on-chain.

Ted framed it plainly: “This is no longer pilots or experiments.” Settlement is transparent, programmable, and increasingly efficient.

The infrastructure supporting RWAs on Ethereum is maturing, and capital flows are following that maturity in real time.

The post Ethereum RWAs Hit $15B as Tokenized Gold and Treasury Products Fuel Institutional Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

Toobit is a very well-known and award-winning cryptocurrency exchange, which has recently announced its successful registration with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, a.k.a AUSTRAC, as a Digital Currency Exchange. This is in full compliance with the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act of 2006.

What This Means for Australian Traders

The news is important for the growing community of the exchange in Australia. It confirms that Toobit delivers additional immediate practical benefits as well as enhanced reliability of its services, which include but are not limited to:

• Reliable banking connectivity and on-ramps for AUD: As an AUSTRAC-registered exchange, Toobit provides a well-recognized on-ramp for local financial institutions, reducing the likelihood of bank-side transaction delays or blocks on transfers involving AUD.
• Better fraud prevention: To meet the strict requirements of the AML/CFTC Act,  Toobit maintains very high-standard KYC and transaction monitoring protocols.
• Travel Rule compliance: Toobit’s registered status also allows traders to move assets between different wallets and other global exchanges without having to worry about compliance freezes which are oftentimes associated with unregistered entities.

Speaking on the matter was Mike Williams, Chief Communication Officer at Toobit, who said:

“Securing our AUSTRAC registration is a pivotal step in our mission to provide a transparent and professional trading environment for Australians. […] Meeting these rigorous standards allows us to build a foundation of trust so our traders can navigate global markets with uncompromising security and greater transparency.”

Building on Existing Best Practices

This latest registration with the AUSTRAC is simply building upon Toobit’s successful Polish VASP license acquisition, which was obtained in anticipation of the EU’s Market in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework. The cryptocurrency exchange ensures a regulated experience, which is defined by comprehensive security protocols and a complete alignment with the nation’s evolving regulatory landscape by applying these very high-level European standards to its operations in Australia.

The digital asset sector in the country enters 2026 with unprecedented momentum. Industry forecasts project the local market revenue to reach AUD 1.2 billion this year, driven by a nearly 20% annual growth rate.

With global crypto adoption now exceeding 21% of internet-connected adults, 2026 marks a shift toward regulated entities. Australian traders are increasingly prioritizing registered providers that offer verified fraud protection and adhere to the latest national Travel Rule standards.

For more information about Toobit, visit: Website | X | Telegram | LinkedIn | Discord | Instagram

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company or project mentioned and to do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

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The post Toobit Announces AUSTRAC Registration, Bolstering Security and Service for Australian Crypto Traders appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It almost felt inevitable after the latest developments on Trump’s tariff front that bitcoin’s price would eventually head south after a relatively calm weekend.

Recall that the US Supreme Court ruled that many of the POTUS’s tariffs imposed in the past year were illegal, determining that he should have been unable to use the IEEPA (a 1977 emergency law) to levy taxes on imports from almost all countries.

Aside from calling the Court’s decision a “disgrace,” President Trump announced a 10% temporary global tariff under Section 122 – a law that was never used before. A day later, he ramped up this taxation to 15%.

As it happened several weeks ago during the most intense verbal battle for Greenland, the impact on bitcoin wasn’t immediate. At the time, the tariff threats between the US and the EU took place mostly during the weekend, and BTC stood still.

However, once the legacy futures markets opened on Sunday afternoon, bitcoin slumped by several grand within an hour or so. This scenario repeated on February 22/23 when the cryptocurrency plunged from $67,800 to a 17-day low of $64,350 (on Bitstamp). It found some support there and now sits close to $66,000.

If there’s another substantial leg down, BTC’s next key support levels could be at $58,500, $54,440, and $41,500, according to Ali Martinez, who cited the BTC holder cost basis.

Bitcoin $BTC holder cost basis highlights three key support levels:

• $58,467
• $54,439
• $41,488 pic.twitter.com/fievX4HpdA

— Ali Charts (@alicharts) February 22, 2026

The altcoins followed suit, with many dropping by over 5% within the same timeframe. The total value of liquidated positions has jumped to almost $500 million on CoinGlass. Longs are responsible for rouhgly 90% of that amount.

Santiment also weighed in on BTC’s latest crash, indicating that the open interest has dropped to just $19.5 billion after the latest liquidation cascade, which is “under half of the 2026 peak of $38.3 billion back on January 14.”

The analytics company added that the social media FUD among retail investors has “quickly gone into FUD mode, which can historically help propel a quick rebound.”

The post BTC Flash Dump: Why Bitcoin Fell $4K in Hours and What Comes Next appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Crypto markets have tanked again, with Bitcoin dropping more than $3,000 in an hour or so, wiping out all weekend gains.

Donald Trump has been on the tariff warpath again, imposing a 15% global tariff after the Supreme Court found on Friday that his sweeping tariffs exceeded his authority.

“Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions remain elevated between the US and Iran, with oil markets on edge,” commented the Kobeissi Letter.

Economic Events Feb. 23 to 27

Markets are already digesting the latest round of tariffs in addition to the increased geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, with crypto markets tanking 4% on Monday morning.

Tuesday will see the release of February’s Consumer Confidence data, which sheds light on consumer sentiment and potential spending patterns. Sentiment fell to its lowest level since 2014 in January as people were mostly concerned about employment conditions during the first month of the new year.

Thursday will see initial jobless claims, which paint a clear picture of pressures on the labor market, one of the Federal Reserve’s two mandates for monetary policy. Friday will see the release of the January Producer Price Index (PPI), which is a measure of wholesale Inflation, the Fed’s other mandate. However, it is unlikely to move the Fed off its wait-and-see approach.

Key Events This Week:

1. Markets React to Trump’s 15% Global Tariff – Monday

2. February Consumer Confidence data – Tuesday

3. Nvidia, $NVDA, Reports Earnings – Wednesday

4. Initial Jobless Claims data – Thursday

5. January PPI Inflation data – Friday

6. Total of 11 Fed…

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) February 22, 2026

Wednesday’s Nvidia earnings report could also rattle the AI sector if demand for the firm’s chips appears to be waning, though this is unlikely.

Crypto Markets Tank Again

A red Monday morning has seen total capitalization erase weekend gains with a 4% decline to $2.31 trillion. Bitcoin tanked from $67,600 to just below $65,000 in a couple of hours and remains around the $65,000 level at the time of writing.

The asset is now down more than 5% on the week and at support at the bottom of its range-bound channel. Ether prices saw similar losses, tanking to $1,860, its lowest level since February 6. Meanwhile, altcoins continue to bleed out with larger losses for Solana, Cardano, Hyperliquid, and Chainlink.

The post 4 Things That May Move Crypto Markets Further This Week appeared first on CryptoPotato.

South Korea’s financial authorities are facing criticism after failing to spot major flaws in Bithumb’s systems that led to an unprecedented Bitcoin error.

Despite repeated inspections by the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), a vulnerability remained that allowed a single employee to trigger massive coin transfers without detection.

Bithumb Crypto Mishap

According to Rep. Kang Min-guk of the People Power Party, the FSC reviewed Bithumb once in 2022 and twice in 2025, while the FSS carried out three inspections during the same period. Despite this, none identified discrepancies between actual holdings and accounting records.

On February 6, a promotional event went wrong when users were mistakenly credited with 2,000 BTC each instead of coins worth 2,000 won (worth approximately $1.38). This error caused the system to register a total of 620,000 bitcoins being “distributed” to users, which is far more than the exchange’s actual holdings of about 42,800 BTC.

As reported by The Korea Times, the country’s lawmakers said the mistake exposes deeper weaknesses in internal controls, ledger management, and regulatory supervision. Rep. Han Chang-min of the Social Democratic Party questioned whether regulators’ inspections were largely procedural and noted attempts to place responsibility on Bithumb.

The FSS has extended its probe through February and is investigating potential violations involving investor protection, anti-money laundering (AML), and system flaws.

Bithumb CEO Lee Jae-won acknowledged two smaller prior errors that were recovered, which the FSS will also review.

Meanwhile, an emergency team from the authorities and the Digital Asset eXchange Alliance (DAXA) is reviewing asset verification and internal controls at some of the country’s other prominent exchanges, such as Upbit, Coinone, Korbit, and GOPAX. Results are expected to influence both DAXA’s self-regulatory rules and future crypto legislation.

Lost and Found

The latest setback comes a month after the Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office reported that Bitcoin seized in a criminal case had gone missing, but authorities have now recovered all 40 billion won worth of the lost cryptocurrency. Prosecutors said the 320.8 bitcoins were returned from the hacker’s electronic wallet to the office’s wallet on February 17, apparently voluntarily, after the hacker was unable to cash them out.

The coins had originally been confiscated from the daughter of a couple arrested for operating an illegal overseas gambling site worth 390 billion won between 2018 and 2021, who had converted their criminal proceeds into Bitcoin. Officials said the BTC were lost last August when prosecutors accidentally accessed a phishing site while checking the wallet, which exposed the funds.

Authorities have been tracking the hacker and monitoring domestic and international exchanges to prevent further losses.

The post Bithumb Bitcoin Blunder: $1.3B Error Sparks Probe Into Weak Financial Oversight appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Nearly 3 million Bitcoin (BTC), worth approximately $200 billion and representing 15% of the circulating supply, currently sits on centralized exchange platforms.

The concentration of assets on trading venues reveals that, despite the shock of the FTX collapse in 2022 and years of industry messaging around self-custody, about one out of every six BTC in existence remains stored with third-party intermediaries.

Binance Dominates

Data shared by crypto analyst Darkfost shows that centralized exchange reserves have climbed alongside the expansion of trading services.

Platforms now offer yield generation, collateralized derivative products, and lending solutions, all of which require maintaining significant Bitcoin reserves to meet user liquidity needs. The result is that approximately 3 million BTC now sits on exchanges, with the distribution heavily skewed toward market leaders.

According to the on-chain observer, Binance holds the largest share, controlling around 30% of all Bitcoin stored on centralized platforms. Bitfinex follows with almost 20% of reserves, while Robinhood and South Korea’s Upbit each account for about 8.2%. Kraken, OKX, and Gemini round out the top tier with holdings between 5% and 7%, respectively.

The concentration becomes even more pronounced when examining absolute figures. Per data from CoinGlass, Coinbase Pro currently holds approximately 792,000 BTC, making it the single largest exchange holder despite its smaller percentage of the CEX-specific ranking. Binance follows with nearly 662,000 BTC, while Bitfinex holds roughly 430,000 BTC.

“The liquidity depth, fast order execution, and access to additional services such as lending and staking contribute to maintaining a significant share of Bitcoin’s circulating supply within these centralized infrastructures,” Darkfost noted in their analysis.

This observation matches up with trading volume data showing continued activity concentration, with a CryptoQuant report from earlier in the year showing that Binance captured over 40% of spot and Bitcoin perpetual volumes across major global exchanges in 2025. The platform also processed $25.4 trillion in Bitcoin perpetual futures alone.

Market Structure Shifts Despite Persistent Exchange Holdings

The $200 billion held on exchanges represents a complex market dynamic because, while total exchange reserves are substantial, the past month has seen mixed movements across platforms.

CoinGlass data shows overall exchange balances increased by some 16,990 BTC over the past 30 days, but individual platform trends diverged significantly. For example, Binance added more than 22,000 BTC during that period, while OKX and Bithumb recorded outflows exceeding 2,700 BTC and 3,600 BTC, respectively. Gemini saw the largest 30-day decline, with balances dropping by almost 13,900 BTC.

These movements are happening against a backdrop of evolving exchange business models and regulatory positioning. Kraken confidentially filed for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in November 2025, following an $800 million funding round that valued the exchange at $20 billion.

Meanwhile, Robinhood, which holds approximately 8.2% of exchange BTC reserves, recently launched the public testnet for Robinhood Chain in February 2026, an Ethereum Layer 2 network built on Arbitrum designed to accelerate development of tokenized assets.

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