Avgusto

The market has woken up in a red mood, but with very loud volumes 👀⬇️

📊 Total capitalization:
$2.65 T | 🔻 –4.79%

💸 Trading volume:
$188.54 B | 🔺 +42.12%
(panic + active hands — just as we "love")

🪙 Prices:
• 💵 BTC — $78,741
• 💵 ETH — $2,420
• 💵 BNB — $778

📌 BTC dominance: 59.16%
📉 Altcoin season index: 29 / 100
(alts are still under pressure)

😱 Fear and greed index: 🔴 18 — extreme fear
Classic: when it's scary — a base is formed.

🔄 Market cycle indicators:
🟢 0 / 30 — 100% HOLD

🪙🐻 BTC is pulling towards $80,000 — and this is no longer just a theory

Binance announced that within the next 30 days it will convert about $1 billion of the SAFU fund's stablecoins into Bitcoin. And here’s an important detail 👇➡️ if the BTC price drops below $80,000, the reserve will be replenished back to $1 billion.

📌 In essence, the market has received an officially stated price target.

🧲 Why is $80,000 becoming a "magnet" for the price?

💰 A specific volume of purchases is declared📍 A specific level is named🏦 The source — the world's largest exchange

Such levels are loved by the market to test. Not because "it has to be," but because it makes sense:

to pull liquidity

to check if the purchases are real

to squeeze out weak longs

📊 Spot volumes are decreasing — a classic sign of the distribution phase
📉 Open interest is holding — the market is overloaded with expectations
😱 The fear index is in the fear zone — the perfect environment for accumulating liquidity
🟡 BTC still maintains high dominance — altcoins are under pressure

⸻

🔎 It is important to understand
SAFU is not a "gift to the market," but an infrastructural reserve.

🔒 Opaque blockchain: privacy becomes the main trend of 2026

What was once considered a niche for enthusiasts is going mainstream in 2026 🚀
Privacy in cryptocurrencies is no longer an 'optional extra' and is becoming the basic standard of blockchain infrastructure.

📌 What is happening in the market?

🏦 Institutions are in the game
Large funds and companies are increasingly entering crypto — and it is critically important for them to hide business logic, volumes, and counterparties. Confidentiality is becoming a condition for entry.

📈 Growth of anonymous coins
Monero, Zcash, Dash, and other private solutions are showing steady growth, confirming real demand rather than hype.

🧩 Privacy-as-a-Service and Secrets-as-a-Service
Experts predict a boom in services that will allow companies to 'plug in privacy' as a service — without complex cryptography and taking regulatory requirements into account.

⚖️ Regulators are not sleeping
Control is intensifying, so the market is looking for a balance between:
➡️ user confidentiality
➡️ compliance and transparency for regulators

📌 Changpeng Zhao (Binance) and Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) have repeatedly emphasized:
🔑 privacy and decentralization are the foundation of the future of blockchain

😔Market without emotions: morning snapshot on crypto

The market woke up in cautious mode — without panic, but also without euphoria. Let's break down the numbers 👇

📊 Market capitalization:
💰 $2.79 trillion | 🔻 –0.28%

📉 Trading volume:
💵 $133.49 billion | 🔻 –28.45%
➡️ activity has noticeably declined — participants are waiting

🔑 Rates:
- 🟡 BTC: $83,035
- 🔷 ETH: $2,643
- ⚡ SOL: $837

📈 BTC dominance: 59.22%
🧭 Altcoin season index: 28 / 100
➡️ altcoins are still under pressure, the season has not yet started

😱 Fear and greed index: 🟠 26 — fear
➡️ the market is tense, emotions are at low levels

🔄 Market cycle indicators:
🟢 0 / 30 — 100% HOLD
➡️ the signal is simple: don't panic and keep calm

📌Weak volumes + fear = the market in wait-and-see mode. Usually, it's in such moments that the foundation for the next movement is laid.

🇺🇸 Trump named a candidate for the head of the Fed — and the market tensed up

Donald Trump officially nominated Kevin Warsh to be the chairman of the United States Federal Reserve.

💼 Who is Warsh?
— Former member of the Board of Governors of the Fed (2006–2011)
— Represented the Fed at G20 summits 🌍
— Worked with financial systems in Asia
— According to Trump — "young, talented, and a future legend of the Fed"

📈 Pros
— In 2018, Warsh called Bitcoin "digital gold"
— In 2025, he said that BTC does not threaten the dollar, but only highlights the mistakes of monetary policy
— Could bring more predictability and systematization to the markets

📉 Cons
— Considered a "hawk": tough stance on inflation and the budget 🦅
— Strict monetary discipline = less liquidity
— Risks for all risk-on assets, including cryptocurrencies

If Warsh goes down the path of a strong dollar — the crypto market will find it difficult.
If, however, the bet is on stability without extremes — the market may exhale 😮‍💨

🟠 Binance strengthens SAFU with Bitcoin amid market uncertainty

Binance announced: reserves of stablecoins are being converted to BTC 🧠
This concerns a sum of $1 billion, and the exchange is planned to be completed within 30 days.

The funds will go to the SAFU fund — the very "insurance shield" of Binance,
which is used for compensations to users in case of emergencies
(hacks, failures, force majeure, and all that).

🔄 There is also auto-insurance
If the value of SAFU falls below $800 million,
Binance promises rebalancing and a return to the target of $1 billion 📊

💬 The company emphasizes:
BTC is a key asset,
it is this that, in their logic, ensures the long-term value of the ecosystem 🟠

📉 And all this — against the backdrop of a market decline
On the morning of January 30, Bitcoin updated its minimum since November 2025,
touching the area of $82,000
In one day — −7%, and the market, as usual, followed downwards 🧊

🔥 Context is also important
Binance's decision came amid criticism for:
— insufficient transparency
— the events of October 2025,
when the market linked the crash to technical failures and
liquidations in the billions of dollars 💣

📉 The crypto market is shaking again

In a day, Bitcoin has fallen by almost 7%, breaking $83,000 and dipping into the $81–82 thousand range during the night of January 30.
Overall, the market has hit a new low since November — total capitalization has dropped to $2.8 trillion 🧊

🔻 Top-10 in the red zone
• BTC and ETH: −6–7%
• Ethereum fell below $2,700 during the night
• Tron (TRX) — a rare "safe haven": only about −1% 😐

🟢 There are exceptions, but they are few:
In the top-100, local growth was shown by Canton (CC), DoubleZero (2Z), and LayerZero (ZRO) — drops of green in a sea of red 🌱

💣 Liquidations — the market's pain
According to Coinglass, $1.7 billion was wiped from the market in a day
The main blow was to those who bet on growth 📉📉📉

😱 The fear and greed index is back in the zone
👉 Extreme fear: ~16/100
The crowd is panicking, sales are intensifying — a classic scenario.

⚠️ Volatility remains high, the market is nervous,
and February is in great question:
everyone is watching liquidity, the Fed, and regulators 👀

While everything is falling down, the infrastructure is just being built… Ripple is bubbling with optimism🫣

Ripple is confident that 2026 will be the point of no return for crypto. Digital assets will finally stop being an "alternative" and will become the foundational layer of the global financial system.

Here’s what everything will rely on 👇

🪙 1. Stablecoins
Regulated stablecoins are the new digital dollar.
In the USA, the GENIUS Act has already been adopted, and Ripple promotes RLUSD as the standard for:
— 24/7 global payments
— market assurance
— B2B settlements

🧩 2. Tokenization of assets
Stocks, bonds, T-bills, treasuries — everything is going on-chain.
Ripple expects that by 2026:
— 5–10% of settlements in capital markets will move to blockchain
— real mobility of collateral will emerge

🏛 3. Financial institutions + AI
Banks are no longer "just watching" — they are getting serious.
— 200+ public companies are already using BTC in treasuries

📌 The year 2026 will go down in history as the moment when
crypto stopped being a market — and became infrastructure.

🌙 Dollar night shook crypto again

The market reacted to the Fed's decision without surprises, but with nerves 😬
The rate is left in the range of 3.5–3.75%, and Bitcoin immediately went into the red.

📉 BTC -2%
By the morning of January 29 — around $88.3k, after yesterday's surge above $90.5k.

While crypto is stalling, gold and silver are making new historical highs 🔥

✨ Gold — above $5,600 per ounce
✨ Silver — around $120

Against the backdrop of expectations for cryptocurrency regulation in the USA, metals look significantly stronger than BTC, which is still declining from the local peak.
📊 The market in general:

🔻 Cryptocurrency market capitalization: ~$2.98 trillion (−2%)
🔻 Most of the top 50 — in the red up to −13%

Worse than the market:
• 🟥 RIVER
• 🟥 DASH
• 🟥 XTZ

Better than the market:
• 🟢 STABLE +25%
• 🟢 WLD +10%

And, of course, the gold tokens did not disappoint 👀
• 🟡 XAUT +6%
• 🟡 PAXG +6%

🤖📈 Grok 4.20 — the most successful AI trader of the year

Grok 4.20 took first place in Alpha Arena Season 1.5 — a live trading tournament for stocks and crypto.

• starting capital: $10,000
• result: $11,060
• yield: ≈ 10–12%
• 🟢 the only participant in the tournament that closed in profit

🔥 Interesting fact:
Immediately 4 versions of Grok 4.20 made it to the top-6 leaderboard. For AI — a rare case of stable profitability in the real market.

🧠 How it earned:
xAI used different operational modes of the model:
• Situational Awareness
• New Baseline
• Max Leverage
• Monk Mode 🧘‍♂️

📊 What kind of tournament is this?
Alpha Arena — an independent benchmark for autonomous trading:
• real money
• real markets
• without manual intervention
• open order history

Previously, models had already traded crypto on Hyperliquid, earning about $10k each.

💬 xAI emphasized:

Grok 4.20 "does not just pass tests well — it earns real money in live markets".

😂 Elon Musk's reaction:

"It seems I've found a way to pay for all these GPUs".

🤯 And that's not all:
• Musk estimates the chance of achieving AGI with Grok 5 at about 10%
• Grok is planned to be integrated into the infrastructure of the U.S. Department of Defense
• AI will operate alongside Google products in Pentagon networks 🪖

🧠 Vitalik Buterin and crypto betting: how to earn from someone else's madness

The co-founder of Ethereum admitted that in 2025 he earned about $70,000 on the Polymarket prediction market 📊
The starting bank was approximately $440,000.

According to Vitalik, his strategy is simple and… cold:
• he enters the markets in what is called "crazy mode" 🤯
• and bets AGAINST irrational FOMO, expecting that the "wildness" simply won't happen.

🎯 Examples of such bets:
• 🏆 Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump
• 💵 sharp decline of the dollar
• and other loud but unlikely scenarios

📉 Criticism of Polymarket
Buterin notes that the platform is overloaded:
• with short-term
• trendy
• and, in his opinion, socially useless predictions

At the same time — an important nuance 👀
💰 In 2024, Vitalik invested in Polymarket, participating in a round of $45 million led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

🧠💥 The new dopamine is here — traders are massively shifting to predictions🙄

The cryptocurrency market is changing.
After the October peaks of 2025, capital gradually flowed out — and by the current moment, the market has lost almost a third of its capitalization 📉
But the money and attention have not disappeared. They have relocated 🚚

🎯 Prediction markets — a new magnet for speculation

Trading volumes on platforms for betting on real events have increased more than 15 times over six months 🔥
Data from Dune + Bloomberg analytics confirm this.

👑 Top players:
• Kalshi
• Polymarket
• Opinion

➡️ Together they control 95% of the market turnover.

💰 The figures are impressive:
• Weekly liquidity — $6.1 billion
• For comparison:
▪️ August — < $400 million
▪️ October — ~ $2 billion

Against the backdrop of declining activity on cryptocurrency exchanges — this is already a separate segment of the crypto economy 🧩

⚠️ But there is a nuance:
📊 about 70% of wallets are in the red
There is no easy money here, despite the gamification

📌 Prediction markets are the new dopamine, quick outcomes, and binary bets 🎲
But the risks haven't gone anywhere. Volatility remains, and losses may affect many.

💰 For those who are looking for a place to invest their free cash:
here there's about 20% profitability 📈

It's not a panacea and not a "money button" ❌
but as an idea — the option deserves attention 👀

🧠⚛️ Why is Ethereum already spending millions on protection against quantum threats?

The Ethereum Foundation has officially included quantum security in the list of key strategic priorities for the network. And this is not just talk 👇

💰 The Foundation has created two $1 million prizes — Poseidon and Proximity — to accelerate the development of protection against future quantum attacks.
Research has been ongoing since 2019, but now the topic has become part of Ethereum's roadmap.

❗️Why is this important?
If powerful quantum computers become a reality, the current cryptography of blockchains could be compromised. At risk are wallets, smart contracts, and billions of dollars in crypto assets.

📅 The quantum threat has been discussed for a long time, but it is the year 2025 that has become a turning point:
investment funds and large corporations have begun to seriously consider quantum risks.

🤔 When exactly the real threat will emerge is still debated.
But Ethereum operates on the principle:
it's better to prepare in advance than to save the ecosystem in a panic.

❄️ Frosts in the USA have impacted bitcoin mining

Extreme cold has forced mining farms to urgently reduce energy consumption — priority is given to power grids and residential areas.

⚙️ What is happening with the BTC network?

🔋 The hash rate of the FoundryUSA pool has collapsed by almost 200 EH/s
📉 This is about −60% since Friday (January 23)
⏳ Due to the drop in capacity, the block time has stretched to ~12 minutes instead of the usual 10

⸻

▪️ miners are shutting down en masse → the network is temporarily slowing down
▪️ fees may rise
▪️ difficulty has not yet had time to adapt
▪️ stress test for the entire BTC infrastructure

⸻

While the price is under pressure and the market is in fear 😱
even the fundamentals feel the strain — nature reminds us,
that bitcoin is still tied to the real world and energy ⚡️

⸻

📌 Such events are usually short-term,
but they clearly show where the vulnerabilities of the system lie
and why the decentralization of mining is not just a pretty word 😉

📉 Bitcoin updated the year's minimum

On the morning of January 26, BTC fell to ~$86,000 — for the first time since mid-December.
In a day −1%, in a week −5%. We are currently hovering around $87.8k.

Reminder:
📈 just 3.5 months ago there was a historical high of $126,000
📉 and now the market is searching for a bottom in the range of $80.6k – $86k

⸻

🌍 What about the market as a whole?

💰 The total cryptocurrency market capitalization has fallen below $3 trillion → $2.97 trillion
🔹 ETH went to $2.78k and bounced back to $2.89k
▪️ in a day −1%
▪️ in a week nearly −10%

The tops are also under pressure:
🔻 SOL −3%
🔻 XMR / DASH −5%
🔻 WLFI −6%

⸻

🔥 Pain of traders

In 24 hours:
⚡️ ~200,000 traders liquidated
💥 totaling $678 million
📉 of which $601 million — longs

Fear and Greed Index:
😱 20/100 — “extreme fear”
The market is emotional, panic is at a maximum.

⸻

📊 ETFs are also not pleasing

🏦 Bitcoin ETF:
➖ −$1.33 billion for the week (the second worst result in history)

🏦 ETH ETF:
➖ −$611 million

🌍 Historian Rutger Bregman after Davos: the world needs populists again

That same Bregman, who in 2019 at Davos publicly reprimanded billionaires for not paying taxes, is again saying uncomfortable things

🧠 The main idea is simple and harsh:
ideals and values are worthless without power.

📉 What he believes is happening to the world:

🇺🇸 USA — a mix of immorality and unseriousness in power.
🇪🇺 Europe — weak and irrelevant: well-regulated, but creates and protects almost nothing.
🤖 AI is already changing the world, but most people don't even understand what awaits them in the next 3–5 years.

⚠️ History, Bregman says, is ruthless:
every technological revolution initially makes life worse for the majority, while enriching a minority.
If this also happens with AI — we are facing a new digital feudalism.

Meanwhile, wealthy people could really address poverty, disease, and inequality — but they do not.

⚔️ The key phrase of the entire article:

"Politics is power. And ideals without power are worth very little."

Even the abolition of slavery worked not because of beautiful words, but because real power stood behind them.

🎯 The world is entering a dangerous period.
AI, weak elites, crisis of democracy.

🚨 Vitalik Buterin: the time of digital sovereignty

The co-founder of Ethereum publicly called to move away from Google, Telegram, and large social networks in favor of private and decentralized solutions.

In a series of posts on X, Vitalik shared what stack he uses himself — and this is not just words, but a fully functional alternative to familiar services 👀

🔐 The main idea — privacy, autonomy, and open-source.
Without tracking, without centralization, and without speculative "social" tokens, which he directly calls a bubble, not an innovation 💥

📍 What Vitalik uses:

🗺 Maps and navigation
Google Maps → OpenStreetMap + Organic Maps
Works offline and does not track the user.

📧 Email and documents
Proton Mail with encryption + Fileverse for decentralized file work.

💬 Messengers
Abandoning Telegram → Signal
Sometimes — Session and SimpleX Chat (by the way, he donated $800 000 to these projects 💸).

🌐 Social networks
Instead of X (Twitter): Farcaster, Bluesky, and Lens
Posts via Firefly — a single interface for all feeds.

🤖 Artificial intelligence
Local LLMs through Ollama and ComfyUI, to avoid sending data to the cloud and third-party services.

🇷🇺❌ The Russian Federation recognized the cryptocurrency exchange WhiteBIT as an "undesirable organization"

The General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation has officially included the cryptocurrency exchange WhiteBIT in the list of "undesirable" organizations. The decision affects not only the platform itself but also all affiliated structures within the W Group.

📌 What was the reason?
The agency stated that the exchange is allegedly used for:
— "gray" schemes for withdrawing funds from Russia
— transactions through cryptocurrency exchanges
— other "illegal activities"

But the key point is support for Ukraine 🇺🇦

💙💛 According to the Russian prosecutor's office:
— since 2022, WhiteBIT has transferred about $11 million
— $900,000 was allocated for the purchase of UAVs for the Armed Forces of Ukraine
— the exchange collaborates with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine

🔎 In practice, WhiteBIT is indeed actively helping Ukraine:
— participates in fundraising
— supports crypto donations
— provides infrastructure to assist the army and humanitarian initiatives

⚠️ What does this mean for users from the Russian Federation?
— risks of blocking
— possible access restrictions
— increased attention from regulators

🪂 Retro Drops: the most underrated way to earn in crypto

Retro drops remain one of the most interesting ways to earn in crypto for those who enter projects early and actually use them 👀

🔍 How it works
The project team at a certain moment fixes a list of addresses that:
• traded 💱
• added liquidity 💧
• staked 🧱
• participated in the testnet 🧪
• voted 🗳

After the token launch, part of the emission is distributed among these addresses.
👉 The main difference from an airdrop is the reward for actions already taken, rather than for future tasks.

🎯 Why this matters to projects
Retro drops:
• enhance decentralization 🌐
• form a loyal community 🤝
• reward early users 🧠
• help attract liquidity

In simpler terms — the project thanks those who believed in it before the hype.

The basic strategy is simple:
• use protocols 🛠
• add liquidity
• stake
• test early versions
• follow announcements in official channels

❗ Do not abuse multi-accounts
❗ Consider fees and gas
❗ Remember about taxes in your jurisdiction