Plus: The Fed might not be your Valentine this year
GM. Roses are red, violets are blue, crypto is wild… but we got you 😏 Consider this your heart-shaped box of market chocolates – minus the weird fillings.
👀 Brian Armstrong says crypto is going mainstream by 2030.
🏹 Cupid’s quick shots: Coinbase’s Q4 earnings report, Elon Musk’s statement about the upcoming Grok 3 + more
💌 Market confessions today
The market still feels like an awkward first date: not bad enough to bail, but sparks aren’t flying either 🫤
On Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) – which measures how much more expensive life got – came in hotter than expected (more on that here).
Then yesterday, we got the Producer Price Index (PPI) report, which basically shows how much businesses are paying to make stuff.
(If it costs them more, they usually pass those costs onto us, meaning higher prices down the line.)
The Fed’s Jerome Powell was waiting for this one, because he wanted to see if it confirmed the disappointing CPI data. And, well… it did:
This means that inflation isn’t cooling down as fast as people were expecting, and if this keeps up, the Fed won’t be in a rush to cut interest rates.
And fewer rate cuts = money stays expensive = people lean toward safer investments instead of crypto.
As if that wasn’t enough, Donald Trump signed an executive order for “reciprocal tariffs,” which basically means if other countries hit the US with taxes (like VAT), the US might return the favor with matching import taxes.
He has already slapped tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada, and it’s making the market sweat over a potential trade war.
Trade war = economic uncertainty, meaning investors might ditch riskier assets (like crypto) and run to safer choices (like US government bonds).
Despite all this drama, Bitcoin has managed to stay above $95K.
Trader Jelle’s take: if BTC doesn’t reclaim $100K, expect price swings that make you feel like you’re in a toxic relationship.
A big chunk of selling pressure rn is coming from US spot Bitcoin ETFs, which logged $650.8M in outflows this week.
Oddly enough, Jelle sees these steady outflows as a good thing because they’ve often meant the market is close to a bottom.
Not everyone’s bailing, tho’.
Canada’s Bank of Montreal, the country’s third-largest bank (with more than $1T in assets), revealed that they invested $150M into BTC ETFs. So, slowly but surely, big institutions are starting to understand.
Yeah, the short-term might be full of ups and downs, but the long-term love story of Bitcoin? Still looking strong 💖
💘 Love at first pump
Forget love letters – these memecoins sent out “u up?” texts to every FOMO buyer.
Btw, remember how Binance co-founder CZ was teasing a dog reveal yesterday? He actually went through with it, and here are the results:
Data as of 08:00 AM EST.
Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.
And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is fluent.
He’s calling this the “dawn of a new era” for crypto – basically, he thinks we’re at the same stage the internet was in the early 2000s. Back then, companies that ignored the internet got left in the dust, and Armstrong says the same thing will happen to businesses that don’t embrace crypto.
“On-chain is the new online,” he said. Poetically.
And he made a huge prediction:
By 2030, up to 10% of the entire global economy could be running on crypto.
For perspective, the world’s GDP is over $100T right now – so if he’s right, that’s $10T+ in value getting tokenized or moving on-chain.
Armstrong also thinks the US will be the one to lead the charge. Why?
Trump’s trying to make America the crypto capital of the planet;
The US now has the most pro-crypto Congress in history;
Lawmakers are moving fast on stablecoin regulations and market structure laws.
And the rest of the world likely won’t want to get left behind = mass adoption could come faster than expected.
TL;DR: the chemistry is there – now we just have to wait for crypto and the global economy to make it official 💍
Now you’re in the know. But think about your friends – they probably have no idea. I wonder who could fix that… 😃🫵
Spread the word and be the hero you know you are!
🏹 Cupid’s quick shots
🤖 Elon Musk says Grok 3 is just weeks away and claims it has already outperformed every other AI model in testing. Funny timing: earlier this week, an xAI engineer said it’s worse than ChatGPT’s o1-pro, o1, and o3-mini (and was forced to resign afterward).
⛏ Two Estonian dudes pleaded guilty to running a $577M crypto scam. Their company, HashFlare, sold mining contracts, but instead of mining, they just faked data and kept the profits.
💰 Coinbase dropped its best earnings report in over a year. In Q4, they had $2.3B in revenue (up 88% from last quarter) and $1.3B in net income – way above what analysts expected.
✈️ Alexander Vinnik, the guy who ran the now-collapsed BTC-e exchange, got sent back to Russia in a prisoner swap. In return, the US got Marc Fogel, a teacher who’s been stuck in Russia since 2021 for bringing weed to an airport.
💝 Is Ledger Flex the soulmate your crypto deserves, or just another situationship? We laid it all out in this review – no red flags hidden.
