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Crypto Daybook Americas: Bitcoin Bull Postings Lift Spirits
By Omkar Godbole (All times ET unless indicated otherwise)
The past 24 hours have been marked by bullish postings on social media, with notable figures voicing positive outlooks on the cryptocurrency market that have worked their way into prices.
Bitcoin has bounced to over $98,000 from $96,900, with President Donald Trump’s son Eric encouraging family-linked World Liberty Financial to invest in the largest cryptocurrency.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson was among those painting an optimistic picture. «To give you a sense of how big the upcoming bull market is for crypto, we just absorbed a downturn that was larger than the collapse of Luna or FTX and have already nearly recovered: 710 billion in losses and 740,000 traders liquidated in 24 hours. 2025 is Crypto’s year,» Hoskinson posted.
Cardano’s ADA token rose 4% and other major altcoins including XRP, SOL and ETH posted similar gains, CoinDesk data show.
As for ether, while the analyst community remains bearish, institutions seem to be buying it up. Data tracked by on-chain sleuth Lookonchain shows in the past two days a trading firm withdrew 62,381 coins from centralized exchanges, moving them to Coinbase Prime. Market maker Wintermute noted strong over-the-counter demand for ether early this week.
In other news, Conor Grogan, a director of Coinbase, speculated that crypto exchange Kraken may know Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s real identity. Nakamoto may own 1.096 million BTC, with a paper wealth exceeding Bill Gates, Grogan said. A bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate to regulate stablecoins, which could boost demand for U.S. Treasuries and «spur financial innovation,» FxPro’s chief market analyst, Alex Kuptsikevich, said.
On the macro front, China-sensitive currencies like the Australian and New Zealand dollars are again weak against the U.S. dollar, but remain in recent ranges, indicating that markets do not expect a long, drawn-out U.S.-China trade war. Trump, however, is in no hurry to call President Xi Jinping and that could cap gains in risk assets for now.
The U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that the Trump administration wants to lower the U.S. Treasury yield, which could bode well for risk assets. Even so, the 10-year rate may spike higher if Thursday’s weekly U.S. jobless claims and fourth-quarter Unit Labor Costs paint a positive picture of the economy. That could arrest BTC’s upswing. Stay alert!
What to Watch
Crypto:
Feb. 6: Berachain (BERA) mainnet launch, as well as initial creation and distribution of its native token. 15.75% of BERA tokens will be airdropped to community members, applications and liquidity providers.
Feb. 6, 8:00 a.m.: Shentu Chain network upgrade (v2.14.0).
Feb. 13: Start of Kraken’s gradual delisting of the USDT, PYUSD, EURT, TUSD, UST stablecoins for EEA clients. The process ends March. 31.
Feb. 18, 10:00 a.m.: FTX Digital Markets, the Bahamas-based subsidiary of FTX, will start reimbursing creditors.
Macro
Feb. 6, 7:00 a.m.: Bank of England (BoE) releases Monetary Policy Summary and Minutes of the Monetary Policy Committee Meeting as well as the February Monetary Policy Report. The press conference is live-streamed 30 minutes later.
Interest Rate Decision Est. 4.5% vs. Prev. 4.75%
Feb. 6, 8:30 a.m.: U.S. Department of Labor releases Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims report for week ended Feb. 1.
Initial Jobless Claims Est. 213K vs. Prev. 207K
Nonfarm Productivity QoQ (Preliminary) Est.1.4% vs. Prev. 2.2%
Continuing Jobless Claims (January) Est. 1870K vs. Prev. 1858K
Jobless Claims 4-Week Average Prev. 212.5K.
Feb. 6, 2:00 p.m.: U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing about “Operation Choke Point 2.0«: Two of the witnesses are Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, and MARA Holdings CEO Fred Thiel. Livestream Link.
Feb. 6, 2:30 p.m.: Fed Governor Christopher J. Waller is giving a speech on Payments at the Atlantic Council in Washington. Livestream link.
Feb. 7, 8:30 a.m.: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases January’s Employment Situation report.
Non Farm Payrolls Est. 170K vs. Prev. 256K
Unemployment Rate Est. 4.1% vs. Prev. 4.1%
Feb. 8, 8:30 p.m.: China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) releases January’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) report.
Inflation Rate MoM Prev. 0%
Inflation Rate YoY Prev. 0.1%
PPI YoY Prev. -2.3%
Earnings
Feb. 6: CleanSpark (CLSK), post-market, $-0.06
Feb. 10: Canaan (CAN), pre-market, $-0.08
Feb. 11: HIVE Digital Technologies (HIVE), post-market, $-0.11
Feb. 11: Exodus Movement (EXOD), post-market, $0.14 (2 ests.)
Feb. 12: Hut 8 (HUT), pre-market, $0.04
Feb. 12: IREN (IREN), post-market, $-0.01
Feb. 12 (TBA): Metaplanet (TYO:3350)
Feb. 12: Reddit (RDDT), post-market, $0.25
Feb. 12: Robinhood Markets (HOOD), post-market, $0.41
Feb. 13: Coinbase Global (COIN), post-market, $1.61
Token Events
Governance votes & calls
OsmosisDAO is discussing a change to the use of taker fees collected in OSMO to burn 50% of collected fees.
Threshold DAO is discussing the creation of a bond program to address its stablecoin’s liquidity challenges.
Bonk DAO is voting on burning 2.025 trillion BONK “celebrating the end of the BONKDragon campaign and the 2025 Lunar New Year.”
Feb. 6: 11 a.m.: Livepeer (LPT) to host a Core Dev Call on Discord.
Feb. 6, 2 p.m.: Arbitrum to hold an open call about using AI to empower decentralized finance applications.
Feb. 6, 12 pm.: Moonwell to hold a governance call.
Feb. 6: Bittensor (TAO) to vote on launching a dynamic Tao, which introduces a more decentralized approach to governance.
Feb. 7, 1 p.m.: Sweat Economy (SWEAT) to hold a token holders briefing discussing tokenomics, product roadmap and partnerships.
Feb. 8, 1:08 p.m.: A dYdX Foundation vote on granting the dYdX Operations subDAO signer market authority over the market map and eliminate revenue sharing for that function is on track to pass.
Unlocks
Feb. 9: Movement (MOVE) to unlock 2.17% of circulating supply worth $31.41 million.
Feb. 10: Aptos (APT) to unlock 1.97% of circulating supply worth $68.99 million.
Token Launches
Feb. 6: Berachain (BERA) to be listed on Bybit, Bithumb, Bitget, BingX, MEXC, SwissBorg, Kraken, OKX, LBank, Gate.io, BitMart, Binance and KuCoin.
Conferences:
Day 2 of 2: The 14th Global Blockchain Congress (Dubai)
Feb. 6: Ondo Summit 2025 (New York).
Feb. 7: Solana APEX (Mexico City)
Feb. 13-14: The 4th Edition of NFT Paris.
Feb. 18-20: Consensus Hong Kong
Feb. 19: Sui Connect: Hong Kong
Feb. 23 to March 2: ETHDenver 2025 (Denver, Colorado)
Feb. 25: HederaCon 2025 (Denver)
Token Talk
By Shaurya Malwa
The Floki DAO community voted with a 99.71% approval rate to invest $125,000 from its treasury into upcoming BNB Chain-based AI Agent Bad AI.
The investment will diversify Floki’s treasury and deepen its involvement in the blockchain and AI sectors.
Bad AI plans to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop a decentralized AI ecosystem for various uses, such as online bots and AI-based applications. Over 45% of its token supply is dedicated to Floki, including airdrops to FLOKI and TokenFi users.
Similar AI agents on other chains have valuations between $720 million and $2.8 billion.
Derivatives Positioning
BTC and ETH perpetual funding rates have flipped positive in a sign of renewed bias for bullish bets, according to Velo Data.
Funding rates for SUI, XLM, HBAR, TON, SHIB and ONDO remain negative.
XMR has recorded the highest positive open interest-adjusted cumulative volume delta among majors in the past 24 hours, indicating net buying activity.
Bullish sentiment has been in restored in the front-end BTC options on Deribit, but that’s not the case in ETH options.
Block flows featured BTC calendar spreads, outright longs in $130K December expiry call and a bull call spread, betting on a rally to $5K in ETH.
Market Movements:
BTC is up 1.7 % from 4 p.m. ET Wednesday to $98,0682.38 (24hrs: +0.76%)
ETH is up 4.15% at $2,812.62 (24hrs: +0.37%)
CoinDesk 20 is up 1.54% to 3,281.41 (24hrs: -0.60%)
CESR Composite Staking Rate is down 9 bps to 3.09%
BTC funding rate is at 0.0041% (4.52% annualized) on Binance
DXY is up 0.36% at 107.96
Gold is unchanged at $2,865.30/oz
Silver is down 0.97% to $31.99/oz
Nikkei 225 closed +0.61% at 39,066.53
Hang Seng closed +1.43% at 20,891.62
FTSE is up 1.18% at 8,724.97
Euro Stoxx 50 is up 0.70% at 5,307.80
DJIA closed +0.71% to 44,873.28
S&P 500 closed +0.39% at 6,061.48
Nasdaq closed +0.19% at 19,692.33
S&P/TSX Composite Index closed +1.15% at 25,569.84
S&P 40 Latin America closed -0.39% at 2,392.39
U.S. 10-year Treasury is down 4 bps at 4.42%
E-mini S&P 500 futures are unchanged at 6,090.25
E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures are unchanged at 21,749.00
E-mini Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures are unchanged at 45,007.00
Bitcoin Stats:
BTC Dominance: 61.45 (0.15%)
Ethereum to bitcoin ratio: 0.02867 (-0.69%)
Hashrate (seven-day moving average): 808 EH/s
Hashprice (spot): $59.7
Total Fees: 5.12 BTC / $515,226
CME Futures Open Interest: 163,495 BTC
BTC priced in gold: 34.0 oz
BTC vs gold market cap: 9.65%
Technical Analysis
The BTC/JPY pair has penetrated the bullish trendline connecting higher lows registered in October and November.
The breakdown may embolden bears, although the pair remain locked in a sideways range.
Crypto Equities
MicroStrategy (MSTR): closed on Wednesday at $336.70 (-3.33%), up 1.10% at $340.40 in pre-market.
Coinbase Global (COIN): closed at $275.14 (-1.87%), up 1.89% at $280.34 in pre-market.
Galaxy Digital Holdings (GLXY): closed at C$27.66 (-0.04%)
MARA Holdings (MARA): closed at $17.03 (-3.51%), up 1.53% at $17.29 in pre-market.
Riot Platforms (RIOT): closed at $11.74 (-4.48%), up 1.36% at $11.90 in pre-market.
Core Scientific (CORZ): closed at $12.71 (+4.10%), up 1.18% at $12.86 in pre-market.
CleanSpark (CLSK): closed at $10.31 (-4.89%), up 2.33% at 10.65% in pre-market.
CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI): closed at $22.46 (-0.49%), up 1.16% at $22.72 in pre-market.
Semler Scientific (SMLR): closed at $51.79 (+1.07%), up 2.24% at $52.95 in pre-market.
Exodus Movement (EXOD): closed at $51.36 (-9.53%), up 2.61% in pre-market.
ETF Flows
Spot BTC ETFs:
Daily net flow: $66.4 million
Cumulative net flows: $40.67 billion
Total BTC holdings ~ 1.176 million.
Spot ETH ETFs
Daily net flow: $18.1 million
Cumulative net flows: $3.17 billion
Total ETH holdings ~ 3.785 million.
Source: Farside Investors
Overnight Flows
Chart of the Day
The chart shows inflows into gold-backed tokens has surged alongside a rise in the spot price of gold.
The yellow metal rose to a record high of $2,882 Wednesday.
While You Were Sleeping
Trump’s Aim to Lower the 10-Year Yield Could Bode Well for Bitcoin (CoinDesk): U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration aims to lower the 10-year Treasury yield by controlling inflation and reducing the budget deficit, which could help risk assets, including bitcoin.
Berachain’s BERA Trades at $8 Ahead of 79M Token Airdrop and Mainnet Launch (CoinDesk): Layer-1 blockchain Berachain’s mainnet starts up later today. Of the total 500 million BERA tokens to be created, nearly 80 million will be airdropped to eligible users.
Tiger21 Founder Michael Sonnenfeldt Says Ultra-Rich are Bullish on BTC (CoinDesk): Michael Sonnenfeld, founder of TIGER 21, a peer advisory group for ultra-high-net-worth investors, said BTC now serves as both a store of value and a substitute for gold.
Bitcoin Musings Draw Scrutiny Over Czech Central Bank Governor (Bloomberg): Czech central bank governor Aleš Michl’s proposal to invest up to 5% of reserves in bitcoin may face a months-long review and be reduced to under 1%, insiders report.
Trump’s Trade War Adds to ‘Clear Decoupling’ on Central Bank Rate Cuts (Financial Times): As the Fed holds interest rates steady amid inflation worries, Trump’s new tariffs intensify risks, prompting central banks in economies reliant on U.S. exports to cut rates to shield against slower growth.
Surging Dollar Spurs Jump in Corporate FX Hedging (Reuters): U.S. companies earning abroad are boosting hedging to safeguard repatriated profits as confidence grows that Trump’s tariffs will keep the dollar high, threatening to erode converted earnings.
In the Ether
Traditional U.S. assets are going haywire as U.S.-China trade tensions continue to rattle global markets, now coupled with fresh data of tumbling sentiment towards the U.S. economy and mounting inflation concerns.
The most recent University of Michigan survey, published on Friday, found that consumer sentiment fell to 50.8 from 57.0, nearing the most depressed level in three years and far below that seen during the 2020 Covid shutdowns. Year-ahead inflation expectations surged to 6.7%, up from 5% in the prior month and the highest read since 1981.
On the back of the data, investors resumed selling long-term U.S. government bonds and the greenbacks, two assets traditionally considered as safe havens. The 10-year Treasury yield soared above 4.55% during U.S. morning hours, up more than 50 basis points in just a week. Meanwhile the dollar index (DXY) sank below 100 to a three-year low. Gold, meanwhile, hit a fresh record of $3,240 per ounce.
After a wildly volatile past few sessions, U.S. stocks were trading in a far tighter range on both sides of unchanged on Friday. At press time, the Nasdaq was higher by 0.6%
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency markets were moving higher, with bitcoin (BTC) holding just above $82,000, gaining 4% over the past 24 hours. The broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index was up 3%, with altcoin majors Solana’s SOL, Avalanche’s AVAX leading with 6% gains.
Signal or noise?
While some macroeconomic analysts are fearful that the recent surge in government bond yields is threatening the future outlook of the U.S. economy, others believe investors are reading too much into short-term market swings.
«U.S. dollars and U.S. government debt, two of the market’s most liquid safe haven categories, are going haywire,» Noelle Achison, analyst and author of the Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, said in a Friday note. «This is not the case for other safe havens, however, just those directly tied to the U.S.»
“I believe that it is much more likely that recent sharp moves in these asset classes is due to highly leveraged market participants being forced out of positions than due to fundamentals,” said billionaire investor Bill Ackmann in a post on X.
“Technical factors are driving the dramatic market moves,» Ackman continued. «As a result, markets have become increasingly unreliable as short-term indicators of the impact of policy changes.»
When the U.S. government sanctioned the Ethereum-based crypto mixing service Tornado Cash in 2022, it ignited a debate within the crypto community that continues three years later.
Tornado enabled users to transfer crypto anonymously. The government contended that the service facilitated money laundering, prompting some of Ethereum’s validators and block builders to take steps to avoid engaging with Tornado-linked transactions, which made the service slower and costlier to use.
Advocates argued that complying with the sanctions amounted to censorship — undermining a fundamental cypherpunk principle. President Donald Trump supported the cypherpunks and lifted the sanctions on Tornado Cash in March of this year, but for some Ethereum developers, the situation highlighted a flaw within the network that still exists today: Why should users depend on third-party apps to transact privately on the network?
«Publicly accessible transaction graphs allow anyone to trace the flow of funds between accounts, and balances are visible to all participants in the network, undermining financial privacy,» crypto security researcher Pascal Caversaccio explained in a blog post on Wednesday. «While the Ethereum network’s transparency fosters trustlessness, it also opens the door to potential surveillance, targeting, and exploitation.»
Perhaps emboldened by the recent Tornado Cash developments, Ethereum developers and researchers have once again begun discussing ideas for making the Ethereum network private at its core.
«Privacy must not be an optional feature that users must consciously enable — it must be the default state of the network,» said Caversaccio, whose post outlined his vision for a privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap. «Ethereum’s architecture must be designed to ensure that users are private by default, not by exception.»
Caversaccio’s post identified several potential interventions — some new, some old — that could, according to him, would make Ethereum more private for end-users. One idea is to encrypt Ethereum’s public mempool — where transactions are sent before they’re recorded permanently. Another involves making Ethereum transactions confidential through zero-knowledge cryptography, new transaction formats, and other methods.
«Today, Ethereum operates in a partial, opt-in privacy model, where users must take deliberate steps to conceal their financial activities — often at the cost of usability, accessibility, and even effectiveness,» wrote Caversaccio. «This paradigm must shift. Privacy-preserving technologies should be deeply integrated at the protocol level, allowing transactions, smart contracts, and network interactions to be inherently confidential.»
In response to Caversaccio’s post, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin left a comment on the network’s main developer forum with his own much shorter privacy-oriented Ethereum roadmap.
Buterin suggested focusing on privacy for on-chain payments, anonymizing on-chain activity within applications, making communication on the network anonymous, and privatizing on-chain reads.
To achieve all of this, Buterin listed various steps like integrating certain third-party privacy features into the core network.
One of the more substantial interventions suggested by Buterin involves moving the network towards a “one address per application” model — a departure from today’s system, where a single application may employ dozens of wallets for different features. “This is a major step, and it entails significant convenience sacrifices, but IMO this is a bullet that we should bite, because this is the most practical way to remove public links between all of your activity across different applications,” Buterin wrote.
According to Buterin, if all of his suggestions are implemented, private transactions could be the default on Ethereum.
The privacy discussion comes a few weeks before Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Pectra, which doesn’t have a major focus on privacy. Ethereum developers are also currently planning the network’s following upgrade to Fusaka. The changes to be included in that hard fork are not yet set in stone.
Read more: Vitalik Buterin Disappointed With Embrace of Blockchain “Casinos”
The complex pipes that keep derivatives trades moving are about to get a major efficiency boost in DeFi, according to Crypto Valley Exchange.
Crypto Valley Exchange’s «smart clearing» protocol will lower the capital requirements for derivatives traders by setting collateral levels in light of the traded assets’ correlations in price. In doing so, it could make DeFi more competitive with the mainstream financial markets crypto trying to replace, according to CEO James Davies.
The service is a new take on an age-old problem in DeFi: how to sufficiently mitigate counterparty risk in a trustless environment.
Traditional financial markets like CME and NYMEX rely on clearinghouses to be a trusted counterparty for every buyer and seller. They demand some collateral, but hardly 100%. DeFi markets, meanwhile, definitely lack a trusted middleman, and so can’t afford to require anything less than full collateral.
This system works, but hardly well. More collateral requirements means traders have less capital to deploy elsewhere. Davies claims this severely limits the market’s growth.
«This is the one place where all of crypto is much more conservative than TradFi,» Davies said. «We’re really, really undersized in this space, and that’s because clearing is needed to create this efficiency.»
He pointed to the seeming lunacy of requiring full margin for trades involving highly correlated assets, like forms of oil.
«If I was to go to, say [commodities exchange] NYMEX as an oil company and want to buy oil and sell jet fuel, and you asked me to put down full margin on both parts, I’d laugh at you, because those things are 90% correlated,» Davies said.
He believes the same logic should apply in DeFi. «Ethereum isn’t going to 10,000 on the day Solana goes to zero,» he said. Because of the correlation, a trader betting that ETH will rise relative to SOL shouldn’t need to post full collateral.
In his telling, clearing is the missing piece in DeFi’s effort to gobble up traditional finance. If protocols gain an ability to better manage the risk, and also do so transparently, on a blockchain, so that everyone can see what’s happening and how, then they’ll become competitive with the financial rails they’re trying to replace.
«You can’t just build a perps DeFi platform for, say, treasuries or commodities, go up against NYMEX or go up against CME, and expect to win when you have to lock up so much more collateral than you would do to trade on those platforms.» Davies said.
If crypto’s real-world asset (RWA) subsector delivers on its promise of bringing tokenized versions of everything on-chain then, according to Davies, DeFi will need a solution to the clearing efficiency problem such as this. Institutional investors won’t put up with requirements for triple the collateral capital they’re used to – especially on correlated trades, he said.
The first user is Crypto Valley Exchange itself. Already, the Arbitrum-based futures and options DEX is running dated futures orders through its smart clearing. More capabilities are coming later this year to support commodities markets beyond crypto, and Davies hopes for other protocols to plug into smart clearing, too.
U.S. Consumer Sentiment Craters in First Post-Tariff Read, but Crypto Is Holding Up
Can Ethereum Be Truly Private? Developers Push for Encrypted Mempool, Default Privacy
Crypto Valley Exchange Bets ‘Smart Clearing’ Is DeFi Derivatives’ Missing Link
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