The week has begun on an interesting note, with the U.S. dollar crashing to three-year lows alongside losses on Wall Street, yet bitcoin, which usually follows the sentiment on Wall Street, stands tall.

This could just be the beginning.

The shift away from the USD and toward seizure and censorship-resistant assets like BTC and stablecoins could accelerate if President Donald Trump follows through with his reported plans to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, which have pushed the DXY and U.S. stock markets lower today.

That’s the lesson from Turkey, which has seen its currency, the lira (TRY), collapse over the years mainly due to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s repeated interference in the central bank’s operations. The sliding lira has triggered a capital flight into BTC and stablecoins since at least 2020-21.

Trump’s issues with the Fed

Trump has feuded publicly with the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell, for years, criticizing Powell for being too late on rate cuts even during his first term when interest rates were way lower than today.

However, Trump’s criticism has recently reached a fever pitch with reports suggesting he is looking for ways to get rid of Powell, who recently warned of stagflation even as the President reiterated calls for lower borrowing costs while suggesting there is no inflation.

Powell’s patient approach follows a trade war-led spike in survey-based measures of inflation expectations, which could always become self-fulfilling.

Still, on Monday, Trump went further, calling Powell a «major loser» and warning that the economy could slow down unless interest rates are immediately lowered.

Lesson From Turkey

Erdogan began interfering in the central bank’s operations in 2019, and since then, the lira has collapsed sevenfold from 5.3 per dollar to 38 per dollar.

It all started with Turkey’s inflation rate reaching double digits in 2017. It remained elevated in the subsequent year, which prompted the country’s central bank to increase the one-week repo rate from 17.5% to 24% in September 2018.

The move likely didn’t go well with Erodgan, who issued the first decree dismissing Central Bank of Turkey (CBT) governor Murat Cetinkaya in July 2019. From then on until the end of 2021, Erdogan issued multiple decrees dismissing and hiring several CBT officials. Amid all this, inflation remained elevated, and the lira continued to depreciate at an alarming rate.

«We certainly don’t believe in high interest rates. We will pull down inflation and exchange rates with low-rate policy … High rates make the rich richer, the poor poorer. We won’t let that happen,» Erdogan said in 2021.

As of 2025, Turkey faces an inflation rate of nearly 40%, according to data source TradingEconomics.

This episode serves as a cautionary tale for Trump, highlighting that tampering with central bank independence — especially in the face of looming inflation — can erode investor confidence and send the domestic currency into a tailspin.

This does not necessarily mean that the USD will crash exactly like lira but may see significant devaluation.

Perhaps it could prove even more destabilizing for global markets, considering the dollar is a global reserve currency, and the U.S. Treasury market is the bedrock for international finance.

If better sense fails to prevail, U.S. investors may feel incentivized to move away from U.S. assets and into BTC and other alternative investments, just as Turks did.

Bitcoin (BTC) is taking a stand even as the broader stock market keeps sliding down to its tariff-related lows on Easter Monday.

The top cryptocurrency is up 2.3% in the last 24 hours and now trading for $86,800 for the first time since April 3—the day after the Trump administration unveiled its new tariff policy. Mainly buoyed by bitcoin, the broader market gauge CoinDesk 20 Index has risen 1.17% in the same period of time, with most tokens relatively unchanged.

Crypto-linked stocks have also remained stable, with Coinbase (COIN) and Strategy (MSTR) down 1.2% and 1.3% respectively, and major bitcoin miners such as MARA Holdings (MARA), Riot Platforms (RIOT), and Core Scientific (CORZ) slumping between 2% and 3%.

The crypto market’s resilience is noteworthy considering that the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Dow Jones have gone lower by 3.35%, 3.5% and 3.27% respectively, making their way back down to the tariff-related lows of two weeks ago.

Gold, meanwhile, is up 2.9% and is now trading for $3,400, while the DXY (an index that measures the strength of the dollar against a basket of other currencies) reached its lowest level in three years.

“Was today’s tandem rally in bitcoin and gold merely holiday-driven noise, or a meaningful shift towards bitcoin as a safe-haven asset? The latter would mark a material change in how traditional finance views bitcoin,» analysts at crypto trading firm QCP Capital wrote.

«With Europe still on holiday, market confirmation may take a few more sessions. The correlation between bitcoin, gold and equities is one to watch closely.»

Meanwhile, Lawrence McDonald, former head of U.S. Macro Strategy at French investment bank Société Générale, said that it may be time to sell gold in favor of bitcoin.

“Bitcoin has NEVER held up this well with a VIX near 30,” he posted on X, calling bitcoin’s resilience a game-changer. “This is a strong sign of a maturing bitcoin market (good news) and colossal encroaching fiat currency stress, USD.”

The weakness of stocks and the U.S. dollar, put into perspective with bitcoin and gold’s strength, may be due to investors’ concerns about Trump potentially looking to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Earlier on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump continued putting pressure on Powell, whom he called a “major loser” in a Truth Social post, sending an already shaky stock market even lower.

Trump demanded that Powell and his team lower interest rates “NOW,” arguing that there is currently “virtually no inflation” and that costs for many things are declining. Nevertheless, Trump said there’s a threat that the economy will slow down unless the Fed cuts rates.

Powell’s term, which started when he was appointed by Trump himself during his first four years in the Oval Office, is set to end in May 2026, but Trump has been trying to find a legal way to fire Powell beforehand.

The Fed Chair has previously argued that there is no possible way for the U.S. President to remove him under the law.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared a new proposal over the weekend that would radically overhaul the system that powers its smart contracts.

Buterin’s suggestion, which he posted on Ethereum’s primary developer forum, involves replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine, the software engine that powers programs on the network, with RISC-V, a popular open-source framework that offers built-in encryption and other benefits. .

The EVM is a key piece of Ethereum’s underlying design and has been seen as one of the main elements that helped the network succeed in a crowded field of other blockchains. Many non-Ethereum networks have used the EVM to build their own chains, as has a growing ecosystem of layer-2 networks built atop Ethereum, including Coinbase’s Base chain.

The EVM has long played an essential role in Ethereum’s development. Other chains that use it can seamlessly connect with apps on Ethereum, and developers on EVM-based networks can transition more smoothly to building applications directly within the Ethereum ecosystem.

Buterin argued that transitioning Ethereum to a RISC-V architecture will “greatly improve the efficiency of the Ethereum execution layer, resolving one of the primary scaling bottlenecks, and can also greatly improve the execution layer’s simplicity.” (The execution layer is the part of the network that reads smart contracts.)

The RISC-V architecture, which has seen limited adoption in other blockchain ecosystems, like Polkadot, could offer «efficiency gains over 100x» for certain kinds of applications, according to Buterin. These improvements could reduce the network’s costs — long seen as a major barrier to adoption.

Among the primary benefits of RISC-V is its native support for certain kinds of encryption. Transitioning to the new architecture could, in Buterin’s view, be a simpler alternative to the community’s current plan, which involves rebuilding the EVM around zero-knowledge cryptography.

Buterin’s proposal is something developers would tackle over the long term, comparable to projects like the Beam Chain, which is looking to revamp Ethereum’s consensus layer.

The RISC-V comes at a time of broader soul-searching for the Ethereum community. Recently, transaction volumes have declined, and Ethereum’s token has lagged behind the broader market.

Earlier this year, the Ethereum Foundation, the primary non-profit that supports the development of the broader Ethereum ecosystem, underwent a leadership transition in an attempt to remedy the impression among community members that the ecosystem lacked a clear roadmap and was losing its lead compared to competitors.

Read more: Top Ethereum Researcher’s Dramatic Proposal Draws Standing-Room-Only Crowd in Bangkok