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Bitcoin briefly returned above 70,000 USD, bouncing back after a sharp correction at the beginning of the month. The impetus came from macro data from the USA: the January CPI reading was 2.4% year-on-year compared to expectations of 2.5%. The market began to re-evaluate the greater likelihood of earlier interest rate cuts.
Prediction platforms suggest a move in expectations: on Kalshi, the probability of a 25 basis point rate cut in April increased to 26%, and on Polymarket to 20%.
This theoretically favors risky assets — but the sentiment in crypto still looks bad. The Fear and Greed Index remains in the extreme fear zone, at levels associated with panic during the FTX collapse in November 2022.

Democratic Party Senators Elizabeth Warren and Andy Kim have asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen to investigate reports regarding foreign investment in World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — a cryptocurrency venture linked to the Trump family.
In the letter, they requested to determine whether the matter should be handled by CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States), which is the committee analyzing foreign investments that may be associated with access to sensitive technologies or data of U.S. citizens.

The bitcoin derivatives market has clearly revived: the base of three-month futures contracts on major exchanges (including Binance, OKX, Deribit) has increased, and contracts have started trading above the spot market. This setup often suggests that market participants are betting on further rebounds — but it can also signal increasing speculation and leverage.
Nick Ruck from LVRG Research pointed out that the increase in retail activity and rising leverage often precede sharp price movements:

Bitcoin developers have taken another step towards preparing for potential threats from quantum computers: BIP 360 has been integrated into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository on GitHub, marking the transition to the formal review stage.
BIP 360 proposes a new type of output called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR). The solution aims to enable key-path spending techniques in a way that may facilitate the implementation of post-quantum signature schemes in future soft forks.

The founder of the Praetorian Group International (PGI), Ramil Ventura Palafox, was sentenced by a federal court in Virginia to 20 years in prison for running a cryptocurrency-based Ponzi scheme. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), from 2019 to 2021, he collected over 201 million USD from clients, promising even 3% daily profit from alleged bitcoin trading. Instead of investing the funds, he was said to finance personal expenses and maintain a payout system for earlier participants at the expense of new deposits.

Bitcoin is under pressure: since the beginning of the year it has fallen by over 24% and is trading around 65,900 USD (in the text you have two values: 65,907 and 65,997 — it is worth standardizing). More and more data suggests that the market may be in the early stages of a bear market.
Capital is not flowing in — this is the first red alert
CryptoQuant shows that inflows of new investors have turned negative. This means that the sell-off is not being balanced by fresh capital. The analyst from 'IT Tech' notes that in a bull market, declines attract buyers, whereas at the beginning of a bear market, the opposite happens: capital flows out, and liquidity shrinks.

The DeFi market received a strong impulse: following the announcement of the integration of the BUIDL fund (BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) with the UniswapX infrastructure, the price of the UNI token jumped locally by about 40%.
Behind the announcement is Securitize, which stated that it enables trading of BUIDL 'on-chain' via UniswapX. BUIDL — a tokenized fund based on U.S. Treasury bonds — is set to manage assets of around 2.2 billion USD and launched in 2024.
After the announcement, UNI jumped from about 3.2 USD to about 4.52 USD, then retraced to around 3.4 USD, giving back part of the euphoria.

Paxful — P2P platform — was ordered to pay a fine of 4 million USD after admitting to knowingly profiting from servicing clients linked to crime. The prosecution claims that the exchange advertised itself as a place without KYC, and the AML policy was practically 'on paper', with no real implementation and enforcement.
According to the DOJ, funds linked to fraud and the illegal sex services market were said to flow through the platform. Andrew Tysen Duva, Deputy Attorney General in the Criminal Division, stated outright that Paxful was attracting criminals by signaling a lack of AML controls.

Sam Bankman-Fried filed a motion for a new trial in federal court, citing Rule 33 of the federal criminal procedure. This is a mechanism that allows for a request for reconsideration of a case when new circumstances arise or when, in the court's opinion, the interests of justice require it.
The defense claims that the original proceedings were burdened with procedural errors and that the jury did not see the full picture of FTX's financial condition.
SBF maintains that the exchange was not 'unequivocally insolvent' in the way presented by the prosecution, and that some data was interpreted to reinforce the narrative of misappropriation of client funds.

Michael Saylor claims that Strategy is prepared even for a very deep bearish scenario on bitcoin — and that the company's credit risk remains under control.
If bitcoin falls by 90% over the next four years, we will refinance the debt. We will simply extend it
— said Saylor, suggesting that the company has room to roll over obligations even in the case of an extreme drop in the value of BTC.
Strategy has over $8 billion in debt today, largely in the form of convertible bonds, while simultaneously controlling 714,644 BTC worth approximately $49 billion (at current prices). Saylor emphasizes that the company wants to buy bitcoin quarterly and has no plans to sell.

Ether fell below 2000 USD, but simultaneously something is happening that usually doesn't fit the narrative of pure panic: investors are mass withdrawing ETH from exchanges. CryptoQuant data indicates that this is the largest outflow since October, which may suggest that the market is transitioning into accumulation mode.
In recent days, over 220,000 ETH has left exchanges net. Binance stood out particularly: on February 5, the platform recorded approximately 158,000 ETH in net outflows — the highest daily payout level from this exchange since August of last year.

Strategy bought another 1,142 BTC for about 90 million USD (an average of 78,815 USD per BTC) during the period from February 2 to 8, according to the 8-K report submitted to the SEC. The purchase was financed by selling Class A shares (MSTR) under the ATM program.
Last week, the company sold 616,715 shares, raising about 89.5 million USD. As of February 8, the issuance limit in the ATM program was still 7.97 billion USD.
This is another purchase in a short time: previously, Strategy bought 855 BTC for about 75 million USD (an average of 87,974 USD). In total, the company now has 714,644 BTC.

Block Inc., Jack Dorsey's fintech (Cash App, Square, and bitcoin projects), is preparing for a workforce reduction of up to 10% of the team. With employment below 11,000 people, this potentially means around 1,000 positions.
Decisions are to be made as part of the annual performance reviews, lasting until the end of February. This would be the third wave of cuts in about two years: in January 2024, the company laid off about 1,000 people, and in March 2025, it eliminated another 931 positions.
In the background, a broad trend is visible: companies on the border of fintech and crypto are cutting costs, as pressure on margins and a decline in market activity force a defensive mode. Block additionally focuses on automation and AI tools (including the Goose assistant) and reallocates resources towards projects with higher potential, including those related to bitcoin.

There has been a lot of noise around Robert Kiyosaki again – this time due to discrepancies in his public statements about bitcoin purchases. The author of 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' suggested that he stopped buying BTC at around 6,000 USD, but the community quickly reminded him of earlier posts where he bought... much higher.
A Community Note appeared on Na because in 2025 Kiyosaki was said to express the desire to buy BTC at levels above 100,000 USD, and later also repeated that he buys 'every day' during the consolidation around 90,000 USD.

Searches for the term "cryptocurrencies" on Google remain close to the annual minimum. This is a signal that retail interest has clearly weakened - and historically, such moments often occurred during periods when the market was on the defensive.
The global Google Trends index for the phrase "cryptocurrencies" is around 30/100 (where 100 is the peak popularity, last reached in August 2025). The lowest reading in the last 12 months is 24. In the USA, the picture is similar: after a peak of 100 in July, it was around 37 in January, and the annual minimum is 32 (during the April crash of 2025).

When gold hits record highs and bitcoin experiences one of its weakest periods in years, the narrative of 'digital gold' is once again taking a hit. Bradley Duke, managing director of Bitwise Europe, believes that the market is confusing concepts: gold and BTC serve different roles and rather complement each other in a portfolio than push each other out.

During the Digital Assets Forum in London, Duke argued that in market stress, gold usually acts as a 'safety cushion' because investors have a historical 'muscle memory' for it. Bitcoin, on the other hand – in his opinion – offers greater potential in rebound phases when capital flows back to riskier assets.

The difficulty of mining in the Bitcoin network has decreased by about 11.16% over the last 24 hours – the strongest such movement since the Chinese crackdown on mining in 2021. The effect: BTC mining has temporarily become noticeably easier, although miners' profitability still looks weak.

According to CoinWarz, the difficulty is currently 125.86 T (since block 935 429), and the average block time is about 9.47 min. The next difficulty adjustment (scheduled for February 20) is expected to bring an increase of about 5.63% to 132.96 T.

What caused such a strong drop? One possible catalyst was the winter storm in the USA, which hit the energy infrastructure and led to temporary power consumption restrictions for some mines. At one point, Foundry USA – the largest BTC pool – had briefly lost about 60% of its power, dropping from nearly 400 EH/s to about 198 EH/s.

Bitcoin briefly dropped to 60,000 USD, recording its lowest levels since September 2024. Over the course of a day, positions worth 2.67 billion USD disappeared from the market, of which 2.31 billion USD were leveraged long positions.
The CMC Fear and Greed Index dropped to 5 points, the lowest in the history of the indicator, signaling extreme risk aversion. The index is currently oscillating around 9.
According to analyst Rachael Lucas (BTC Markets), traders have stopped 'catching falling knives' and are focusing on capital preservation. This is also confirmed by outflows from American spot ETFs on BTC, which exceeded 800 million USD in two days.

Strategy's CEO, Phong Le, reassures investors in the face of bitcoin declines. During the earnings conference, he stated that only maintaining the price of BTC at $8,000 for 5-6 years would pose a real threat to the company's debt servicing.
In an extreme scenario of a 90% discount to $8,000, BTC reserves would equal net debt. At that point, the company would consider restructuring, issuing shares, or new debt.
Strategy reported a net loss of $12.6 billion for the quarter, primarily due to unrealized losses on BTC. CFO Andrew Kang emphasized, however, that this is an accounting effect resulting from market valuation.

Bitcoin lost nearly 30% over the week, dropping to around 60,000 USD. Among many hypotheses, a less obvious theory regarding the ETF market emerged.
Parker White (DeFi Development Corp.) drew attention to the record activity surrounding BlackRock's IBIT ETF. The fund recorded:
10.7 billion USD daily volume (the highest in history),
~900 million USD in options premium trading.
White speculates that one of the large funds may have been using leveraged options strategies on IBIT, funded by cheap capital in JPY. After previous losses and rising financing costs, the fund may have been forced to sharply reduce risk — which translated into a sell-off of BTC and other assets.