Bitcoin Roundup

Bitcoin Drops 15%, Briefly Breaking Below $61,000 As Sell-Off Intensifies

It has now been roughly four months since bitcoin hit its all-time high just north of $126,000, and based on the sentiment in the space you would think it happened a decade ago. Bitcoin briefly touched $60,062 last week, marking a drawdown of over 50% from the highs. Deutsche Bank is telling clients that "traditional investors are losing interest." CNBC is running segments about how bitcoin has failed to live up to its promise as digital gold. If you have been around this asset for more than one cycle, you have seen this movie before. The narrative flips from euphoria to obituary faster than any other asset class on the planet. Bitcoin is down nearly 40% over the past year while gold is up 61%. That divergence is painful in the short term, but it is also precisely the kind of setup that has preceded every major leg up in bitcoin's history. The best time to dollar cost average is when the headlines make you not want to.

Standard Chartered Cuts Bitcoin 2026 Target to $100,000, Warns of More Pain

Standard Chartered has now slashed its bitcoin price target twice in under three months, from $300,000 to $150,000, and now to $100,000, warning it could slide to $50,000 first. Wall Street price targets are a lagging indicator, not a leading one. These are the same desks that were falling over themselves to call for $200,000 and $300,000 when bitcoin was north of $100,000. Now they are cutting targets after a 50% drawdown. This is not analysis, it is extrapolation dressed up in a research note. The beauty of bitcoin is that it does not need Wall Street's permission to do what it does. $100,000 by year end from here would be a roughly 50% gain. That would be a great year for any asset. So even the bears are accidentally bullish.

Crypto's 'Age of Speculation' May Be Over, Says Galaxy CEO Mike Novogratz

Novogratz is making two points here, and one of them is right. He is correct that the October 2025 wipeout, where $19 billion in leveraged positions got liquidated in 24 hours, broke the speculative fever. The overleveraged retail crowd got carried out. That is what leverage does. It amplifies both directions, and most people learn that lesson the hard way. Where I part ways with Novogratz is the vision of crypto rails bringing "real world assets with much lower returns" to the masses. This is the tokenization narrative repackaged, and it fundamentally misunderstands what makes bitcoin valuable. Bitcoin's innovation is the removal of trusted third parties. Tokenizing stocks on a blockchain reintroduces every counterparty risk that bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Bitcoin is not crypto. The sooner the industry figures that out, the sooner we can stop having these conversations every cycle.

Bitcoin-Backed Bonds Facing Stress Test After Selloff: S&P

Jefferies structured a $188 million bond deal backed by bitcoin-collateralized loans from crypto lender Ledn. Then bitcoin dropped 27% and Ledn had to liquidate a quarter of the loan pool. What was originally $199 million in bitcoin-backed loans and $1 million in cash is now $150 million in loans and $50 million in cash. In other words, the product that was sold to investors as "bitcoin-backed bonds" is now substantially backed by cash. This is what happens when you try to financialize a volatile hard asset using traditional structured finance playbooks. The counterparty risk and liquidation cascades are features, not bugs, of these structures. Bitcoin in cold storage has no counterparty risk. Bitcoin wrapped in layers of Wall Street financial engineering has plenty of it. Don't get greedy.

Crypto Lender BlockFills Suspends Withdrawals Amid Faltering Bitcoin Price

A Chicago-based crypto lender with over 2,000 institutional clients and $61 billion in 2025 trading volume has halted deposits and withdrawals. BlockFills joins a long and inglorious list of crypto lending platforms that suspend withdrawals when markets turn south. The pattern is always the same: lend against volatile collateral, promise institutional-grade service, then lock the doors when the price drops 30%. The article notes that a major catalyst for the broader sell-off was Trump naming Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair, due to expectations he could shrink the Fed's balance sheet. Not your keys, not your coins. This lesson apparently needs to be relearned every single cycle.

Kevin Warsh Dismisses Bitcoin as Currency, Sees Store of Value Potential

The man who will presumably replace Jerome Powell in May sees bitcoin as a potential store of value but not a currency, and wants to prioritize a US digital dollar strategy. This is a fascinating position for an incoming Fed chair. On one hand, acknowledging bitcoin as a store of value is a meaningful concession from the central banking establishment. On the other hand, the push for a digital dollar is concerning. A central bank digital currency is the opposite of bitcoin. It is programmable money controlled by the state, with the ability to surveil and restrict every transaction. The value of assets all over the world continue to swing based on the comments and appointments of a handful of people in Washington. If that does not sound very "free market capitalism" to you, you are right. Bitcoin does not need a Fed chair's endorsement. It just needs to keep producing blocks.

Gold Prices Hit Record Highs as Wars and Trade Tensions Fuel Uncertainty

Gold has blown past $5,000 per ounce, up over 150% since 2022. Apollo's chief economist Torsten Slok points out that the decades-long inverse correlation between gold prices and real interest rates has completely broken down. Gold is rising despite high real rates, which historically should suppress it. Slok's explanation is that investors are "anxious about the level of returns they get in traditional assets." I would frame it differently. Gold is telling you the truth about inflation that the official CPI numbers are not. Since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, gold has compounded at roughly 9% annually, which is a far more honest measure of dollar debasement than anything the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes. Gold at $5,000 is not gold going up. It is the dollar going down. Bitcoin, for what it is worth, is telling you the same thing on a longer time horizon, even if the short-term price action does not feel like it.

The January CPI Inflation Report Is Due Out Friday Morning

The consensus expects January CPI at 2.5% year-over-year, which would be the lowest reading since May 2025. The Fed funds rate sits at 3.5-3.75%, and Fundstrat's Tom Lee says the Fed "has a lot of room to cut." Interesting framing. CPI has come in below consensus for three straight months, and the narrative is quietly shifting from "inflation is sticky" to "the Fed can cut." But ask anyone buying groceries, paying rent, or filling up their car whether inflation feels like 2.5%. The gap between reported inflation and lived inflation continues to be one of the great gaslighting exercises of modern economics. And this report does not yet fully capture the inflationary impact of the tariff escalation that has defined early 2026. We continue to treat the symptoms, not the disease.

The Facts on U.S.-Canada Tariffs Nearly One Year Into Trump's Plan

The U.S.-Canada trade relationship, worth roughly $700 billion annually, is being systematically dismantled by escalating tariffs on both sides. Steel tariffs have climbed to 50%, and the rhetoric between Trump and Prime Minister Carney has turned genuinely hostile. Analysts estimate a hypothetical 100% tariff on Canadian goods could raise U.S. inflation by 1.5-2% almost immediately. This is the part that the CPI report coming out today will not capture. Tariffs are a tax on consumers. Full stop. They may serve strategic purposes in negotiations, and the Trump administration clearly believes it is playing a longer game here, but in the near term, American consumers and businesses are footing the bill. Price fixing never works, and tariffs are just price fixing with extra steps. The free market will route around these distortions eventually. It always does.

Bitcoin Advances Toward Quantum Resistance With BIP 360

While everyone is focused on the price, bitcoin developers are quietly doing what they always do: building. BIP 360 introduces a new output type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) that lays the groundwork for quantum-resistant cryptography in bitcoin. This is not a panic response to an imminent threat. Quantum computers capable of breaking bitcoin's cryptography are likely years, possibly decades, away. But the fact that the developer community is proactively addressing this now, through the open BIP process, is exactly why bitcoin continues to be the only credible decentralized protocol. No CEO made this decision. No board voted on it. A group of developers identified a long-term risk and proposed a solution. This is how antifragile systems work. The price will do what the price does. The protocol keeps getting stronger.