BELIEVE_

Korean exchanges added local currency pairs for the privacy-focused layer-2 token, triggering a sharp move in a thinly traded market.

Aztec ($AZTEC ) surged about 82% in 24 hours to around $0.035 after South Korean exchanges Upbit and Bithumb both moved to list the token with local currency pairs, triggering a wave of KRW-denominated buying into a thinly traded market.
Korean listings still matter because they flip a token from being crypto-only to something a huge retail base can buy directly with local currency.
South Korea consistently ranks among the top three countries by crypto trading volume relative to population, and Upbit alone regularly matches or exceeds Coinbase in daily spot turnover during active sessions.
A KRW pair cuts out the extra hop through USDT, plugs into Korea's unusually active spot trading culture, and puts the token on the screens people in the region actually watch. And that kind of exposure can be transformative for smaller-cap tokens like AZTEC.
Traders often treat new Upbit and Bithumb listings as momentum events, rushing in before liquidity deepens and before the initial premium fades. The pattern has played out repeatedly — tokens like VIRTUAL have printed double-digit moves on Korean listing announcements alone, regardless of what the underlying project was doing at the time.
In thin books, that dynamic creates the kind of vertical candle AZTEC printed. Once prices gap higher locally, arbitrageurs step in, buying on global venues and selling into the Korean bid, which helps drag prices up across the board. The so-called "kimchi premium" — the persistent spread between Korean and international prices — tends to widen sharply during these episodes before narrowing as arb flow catches up.
Aztec itself is pitched as an Ethereum-based, privacy-focused layer 2 that uses zero-knowledge proofs to enable encrypted transactions on a public chain. That gives the token a narrative beyond the listing event.
The premium had narrowed slightly by the Asian evening session as arbitrage flow caught up and the surge showed signs of exhaustion.
$AZTEC #ETH

The average bitcoin ETF investor now sits on a 20% paper loss, leaving the market vulnerable to capitulation selling if prices slide further, a Wintermute trader said.

What to know:
Bitcoin stabilized around $67,000, avoiding a further breakdown for the moment, while altcoins lagged.Policy talks at the White House on the crypto market structure bill showed incremental progress, but strains in private credit markets and potential U.S. military action against Iran loom large over risky assetsCrypto derivatives traders are playing defense, buying downside protection against a potential drop, the head of OTC at Wintermute noted.
Bitcoin BTC$67,522.05 found its footing on Thursday, stabilizing above a key technical level after briefly slipping below $66,000 in early U.S. trading. The largest cryptocurrency recently changed hands at around $67,000, up roughly 1% over the past 24 hours.
The CoinDesk 20 Index lagged, with ether (ETH), XRP, BNB, DOGE$0.09852 and solana (SOL) flat to slightly lower during the same period, perhaps a signal of continued caution in altcoins amid shaky crypto markets.
Sorry, the video player failed to load.(Error Code: 100013)
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.
Crypto-related stocks climbed modestly higher across the board, with bitcoin miners CleanSpark (CLSK) and MARA (MARA) standing out with 6% gains. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 were 0.3% and 0.6% lower, respectively.
On the policy front, there were tentative signs of progress on the digital asset market structure bill. As CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton reported, White House-hosted talks between crypto industry representatives and bankers yielded incremental movement, though no compromise has yet emerged.
At the same time, cracks from the recent crypto downturn are still surfacing. Chicago-based crypto lender Blockfills, as CoinDesk reported, is exploring a sale after enduring a $75 million lending loss during the recent price crash and having temporarily suspended client deposits and withdrawals last week. With crypto prices tumbling sharply in recent months, investors have been bracing for potential blowups like those of Celsius and FTX in 2022. So far, however, the fallout appears contained — on the one hand, tempering worst-case fears, but on the other, avoiding the kind of complete washout that set the stage for the bottom of that brutal bear market and the beginning of the 2023-25 bull run.
Still, risks outside the crypto sphere continue to loom that leave investors hesitant to take risks.
Worries about mounting stress in credit markets flared up after private-equity company Blue Owl (OWL) permanently curbed redemptions in its $1.7 billion retail-focused private credit fund. OWL fell 6% on Thursday, while the shares of other major private credit managers, including Apollo Global (APO), Ares Capital (ARES) and Blackstone (BX) slid more than 5%.
Geopolitical tensions remain another overhang, with the prospect of U.S. military action against Iran still in play amid an ongoing regional buildup. Crude oil rallied another 2.8% over $66 per barrel, hitting its highest price since August.
Traders play defense
That caution is reflected in crypto derivatives markets, Jake Ostrovskis, head of OTC at trading firm Wintermute, pointed out. Many traders are buying downside protection while limiting upside participation, he noted, which means they are effectively paying for insurance against another drop while capping potential gains in a breakout to the upside.
The average U.S. bitcoin ETF cost basis now sits near $84,000, leaving a large share of ETF investors underwater — nursing a 20% paper loss on average — and potentially vulnerable to "capitulation selling" if prices slide further.
Still, total ETF holdings remain within about 5% of their peak in bitcoin terms, suggesting institutions are trimming exposure rather than rushing for the exits.
$BTC #StrategyBTCPurchase #BTC

Most platforms talk about users.
Some talk about developers.
Very few talk about the people who have to live inside the tooling every day.
If you’ve ever maintained a production system, you know this truth: bad tools don’t just slow you down. They change how you think. You start avoiding certain changes. You postpone cleanup. You build around friction instead of through it. Over time, the system doesn’t just get messy—it gets emotionally heavy.
What’s interesting about Vanar Chain’s direction is how much it seems to treat developer experience as operational infrastructure, not just a marketing layer.
In many ecosystems, tooling is reactive. The core ships first. Then, when enough people complain, someone builds dashboards, CLIs, or wrappers to make things bearable. The result is usually a patchwork: five tools that half-overlap, three ways to do the same task, and no clear sense of which path is “the right one.”
Vanar’s posture feels different. It looks less like “we’ll fix the tools later” and more like “the tools are part of the system’s contract.”
That matters because tools shape behavior.
When workflows are awkward, teams become cautious. They batch changes. They avoid touching fragile parts. They start treating the platform like a risky dependency instead of a reliable base. Innovation slows, not because ideas disappear, but because the cost of trying feels too high.
When workflows are clear, something subtle happens: people experiment more. Not recklessly, but confidently. They refactor earlier. They ship smaller changes. They clean things up because it’s not painful to do so.
That’s how systems stay healthy.
Another thing that often gets underestimated is how tooling affects knowledge transfer. In complex stacks, the real barrier isn’t missing documentation—it’s missing affordances. If the tools don’t guide you toward the right mental model, new engineers end up learning the system through folklore and Slack messages instead of structure.
Platforms that invest in coherent tooling end up with teams that share understanding by default, not by accident.
Vanar seems to be aiming for that kind of environment: one where the way you interact with the system teaches you how the system works, instead of hiding it behind clever abstractions.
There’s also a long-term maintenance angle here.
Every platform accumulates complexity. That’s unavoidable. The difference is whether that complexity becomes visible and manageable or hidden and brittle. Good tools surface complexity in places where humans can reason about it. Bad tools bury it until it shows up as a 2 a.m. incident.
When the interface to your infrastructure is honest, you don’t just debug faster—you design better. You start making decisions that respect the system’s real shape instead of its idealized diagram.
This is one of those things that rarely shows up in benchmarks, but always shows up in organizations.
Teams don’t leave platforms only because of performance. They leave because of friction fatigue. Because every change feels heavier than it should. Because the system demands more emotional energy than the problem they’re trying to solve.
Vanar’s approach feels like it’s trying to minimize that tax.
Not by oversimplifying, but by making complexity navigable. There’s a big difference between a simple system and a system that’s easy to work with. Real infrastructure is rarely simple. But it can still be humane.
That’s a design choice.
And it’s one that tends to pay off slowly, then all at once. The first teams adopt because it works. The next wave adopts because it’s pleasant to operate. The long-term users stay because leaving would mean going back to tools that fight them.
If Vanar keeps leaning into this direction, its advantage won’t just be technical. It will be cultural.
It will be the place where teams feel like the platform is working with them, not tolerating them.
And in the long run, that’s often what decides which infrastructure becomes standard—and which stays a clever experiment.
#vanar $VANRY @undefined

Most platforms are optimized for launch day.
You can see it in how they talk about themselves: features, throughput, roadmaps, integrations. The story is always about what’s coming next, rarely about what it will feel like to run this thing every day for three years.
That’s where a lot of infrastructure quietly breaks down.
Not because it can’t handle load.
But because it can’t handle routine.
What stands out about Vanar Chain’s direction is how much it seems to care about the operational life of a system, not just its technical potential. There’s a difference between something that demos well and something that teams are willing to put into their core workflows and forget about.
In real environments, most pain doesn’t come from edge-case failures. It comes from daily friction. Small inconsistencies. Slightly confusing behaviors. Processes that work, but only if the same two people are around to remember why.
Over time, that friction becomes institutional. New engineers learn the system through tribal knowledge. Old engineers become gatekeepers. Changes slow down, not because the system is fragile, but because nobody trusts their understanding of it anymore.
Vanar’s design posture feels like it’s trying to avoid that trap.
Instead of pushing complexity upward and asking teams to absorb it, the platform seems more focused on making the base predictable enough that higher layers don’t need to compensate. That’s not glamorous. But it’s exactly what makes systems survivable.
There’s a quiet discipline in building for operations.
It means caring about how things fail, not just how they perform. It means preferring clear behavior over clever shortcuts. It means designing so that when something goes wrong at 3 a.m., the path from symptom to cause doesn’t look like a maze.
Most teams don’t burn out because systems are slow.
They burn out because systems are mentally expensive.
Every time you have to second-guess what a component is supposed to do, you pay a cognitive tax. Every time behavior depends on history instead of rules, you pay it again. Over months and years, that tax adds up more than any performance issue ever could.
Vanar’s approach feels more like it’s trying to minimize that long-term cost.
Not by freezing the system or avoiding change, but by forcing change to stay legible. When evolution has to fit within a clear structure, you don’t just get safer upgrades—you get a platform that remains explainable to people who weren’t there at the beginning.
That matters a lot more than it sounds.
Most platforms lose their original clarity long before they lose users. The code still runs. The docs still exist. But nobody can quite tell you, end to end, how things are supposed to behave anymore. At that point, the system is alive, but it’s no longer healthy.
Vanar seems to be betting on a different outcome: a system that can grow without becoming narratively fragmented.
This also changes how teams plan.
When the base layer is predictable, you don’t need to overdesign every feature with escape hatches and fallback logic. You can build closer to your actual intent instead of building defensively. Products get simpler. Architectures get flatter. Decisions get easier to reverse because they’re easier to understand in the first place.
There’s also a strategic side to this.
Platforms that optimize for shipping speed often win early. Platforms that optimize for operational clarity often win later. They become the places where serious workloads settle, not because they’re the most exciting, but because they’re the least exhausting.
That’s how real infrastructure usually becomes central. Not through hype cycles, but through quiet accumulation of trust.
Vanar doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be the most talked-about system in the room. It feels like it’s trying to be the one people stop arguing about and start depending on.
And in practice, that’s a much harder thing to build.
Because it requires saying no to certain kinds of complexity.
It requires choosing coherence over cleverness.
And it requires designing not just for users, but for the people who will have to live inside the system for years.
If Vanar keeps leaning into that philosophy, its real advantage won’t be measured in headlines or benchmarks. It will show up in something quieter: teams that stop budgeting mental energy for the platform itself and start spending it on what they’re actually trying to build.
That’s usually the point where infrastructure stops being a tool and starts being a foundation.
 #vanar $VANRY @Vanar

For years, DeFi convinced itself that AMMs were the final form of on-chain trading.
They were simple.
They were composable.
They worked when blockchains couldn’t.
But look at the data in 2026.
Perpetual DEX volumes are climbing again. Orderbook-based designs are quietly returning. More serious capital is flowing on-chain — and serious capital does not think in bonding curves.
It thinks in price discovery.
That’s the shift most people are underestimating.
AMMs were a brilliant workaround for limited infrastructure. They solved liquidity bootstrapping when blockspace was slow and expensive. But they come with tradeoffs: slippage curves, inventory imbalance, reactive pricing instead of competitive pricing.
When volatility spikes, AMMs widen.
When demand clusters, depth thins.
When capital becomes aggressive, efficiency drops.
That’s not a flaw in AMMs.
It’s a design reality.
Now the infrastructure layer is changing.
Higher performance environments are making something else viable again: on-chain orderbooks with real matching logic.
And this is where Fogo becomes strategically interesting.
Because Fogo doesn’t read like a chain trying to out-AMM everyone else.
It reads like a chain architected for market-native structures.
There’s a difference.
On most general-purpose Layer 1s, orderbooks are just another application competing for blockspace. They coexist with NFT mints, governance calls, random token launches. That shared environment makes deep, reactive price discovery harder to sustain.
Markets hate interference.
Fogo’s positioning feels narrower and more deliberate. Instead of optimizing for maximum application diversity, it leans into the idea that trading itself is the primary use case worth structuring around.
That changes the incentives.
When the chain environment assumes adversarial, latency-sensitive activity as normal, not exceptional, design decisions become sharper. Matching logic, validator expectations, throughput discipline — all of it aligns toward one outcome: consistent market behavior.
Price discovery is not just about speed.
It’s about fairness of sequencing.
It’s about predictable execution windows.
It’s about minimizing structural advantages that distort competition.
In centralized markets, this is obsessively engineered. In decentralized markets, it’s often approximated.
Fogo’s architecture suggests it wants to close that gap.
And here’s the bigger macro layer.
In 2024, most on-chain volume was still retail-dominated. By 2026, institutional participation in crypto derivatives has expanded materially. That capital doesn’t care about narratives. It cares about microstructure efficiency.
If orderbook-native designs become viable on high-performance chains, liquidity could begin concentrating where price discovery feels cleanest.
That doesn’t require Fogo to beat every chain in ecosystem size.
It requires Fogo to win one specific battlefield: market quality.
And market quality compounds.
Tighter spreads attract flow.
More flow attracts market makers.
Market makers increase depth.
Depth stabilizes volatility.
That flywheel is stronger than broad but shallow ecosystem expansion.
There’s also a token-level implication here.
Trading-focused infrastructure generates fee dynamics tied to actual economic throughput, not just speculative staking loops. If Fogo successfully anchors real derivatives or orderbook activity, token demand could become functionally linked to transaction intensity rather than narrative cycles.
That’s a healthier alignment.
But this isn’t guaranteed.
The return of orderbooks on-chain depends on sustained performance integrity. If execution sequencing becomes inconsistent, or if latency variance creeps in, the whole thesis weakens. Orderbooks are less forgiving than AMMs. They require structural discipline.
Which makes Fogo’s ambition higher-risk — and higher-upside.
It’s easier to host AMMs.
It’s harder to engineer real-time competitive markets.
But if the next cycle favors deeper, more efficient on-chain price discovery, chains that prepared for that evolution won’t need to chase liquidity. Liquidity will move toward structural advantage.
That’s the transition we’re watching.
The conversation isn’t “which chain is fastest.”
It’s “where will serious price discovery settle?”
If decentralized finance matures, it won’t stay optimized for bonding curves forever. It will gravitate toward environments that resemble real market infrastructure.
Fogo appears to be building for that possibility.
Not louder.
Not broader.
Just structurally aligned with where trading may be headed.
And if price discovery becomes the new competitive frontier in crypto, the chains that treated it as infrastructure — not just an app — will be the ones that matter.
#fogo $FOGO @fogo

The Trump-affiliated token rose on news that a $3.5 trillion asset servicer will pilot USD1, while BTC and ETH continue to trade near multi-week lows.
What to know:
WLFI, the token linked to Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial, jumped about 10% after a $3.5 trillion asset servicer said it would pilot the firm's USD1 stablecoin as a settlement rail for tokenized funds.At a World Liberty Financial forum at Mar-a-Lago, Sen. Bernie Moreno and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong urged swift passage of a U.S. crypto market structure bill, arguing clear rules are essential for maintaining American leadership in financial innovation.World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman pitched USD1 as an institutional-grade stablecoin for real-world settlement, cross-border payments and future AI-driven commerce, with real-time on-chain proof of reserves and plans to expand beyond the U.S.-Mexico corridor to as many as 40 currencies.
WLFI, the token tied to Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial, rose roughly 10% after a $3.5 trillion asset servicer said it would test the firm’s USD1 stablecoin as a settlement rail for tokenized funds.
WLFI's uptick during the Asia morning hours was higher than bitcoin or ether, which were both down 0.5%, according to CoinDesk market data.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.
The rally comes as speakers at the World Liberty Financial forum at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday pitched stablecoins as central to U.S. financial leadership.
“The reality is the entire financial system is going to look very different in the next five years than it has looked in the last 50 years,” Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said during the event. “This will happen somewhere. We’re going to see a massive amount of innovation in financial services. The question is, will it happen in America or somewhere else?”
Sen. Moreno emphasized that lawmakers must “get this market structure bill across the finish line in the next 90 days,” arguing that clear rules for digital assets are critical if the U.S. wants to lead the next phase of financial innovation rather than cede it overseas.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also spoke about the importance of the market structure bill at the event and said banking trade groups – not individual banks themselves – are responsible for the stalled progress.
World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman framed USD1 as more than a retail stablecoin, describing it as “an institutional-grade dollar” designed for real-world settlement and cross-border use.
“This is what we did when we wanted to build an institutional-grade dollar,” Folkman said, adding that the token will feature “real-time proof of reserves, powered by Chainlink,” allowing users to verify backing on-chain.
Earlier in February at Consensus in Hong Kong, Folkman teased an upcoming World Liberty Forex platform.
On Wednesday, Folkman positioned USD1 as a bridge for global payments, saying the project would begin with the U.S.-Mexico corridor before expanding to support up to 40 currencies. “This is USD1 as a settlement bridge,” he said.
Looking ahead, Folkman tied the stablecoin’s use case to artificial intelligence-driven commerce.
“We’re entering a world where AI agents will need to transact autonomously,” he said. “AI agents can’t open bank accounts, they can’t sign checks, but they can hold stablecoins.”
“What we’re building is a complete financial system,” Folkman added.
$WLFI #WLFI #TrendingTopic

Bitcoin is now on track for its fifth consecutive weekly decline, and losing this level could open the floor for a fresh leg lower.

Bitcoin fell back to $66,000 on Wednesday afternoon, testing the lower end of its recent trading range.Crypto-related stocks reversed early gains, with Coinbase swinging from a 3% morning rise to a 2% loss and Strategy slipping about 3%.Surprisingly hawkish Fed minutes had the U.S.dollar strengthening, putting pressure on risk assets.
After chopping around early Wednesday, bitcoin BTC$66,943.64 rolled over during the U.S. afternoon and slid to session lows under $66,000, putting pressure back on the lower end of its recent range.
Having traded $68,500 overnight, BTC was down 2.5% over the past 24 hours and last trading at $66,200.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Don't miss another story.Subscribe to the Crypto Daybook Americas Newsletter today. See all newsletters
By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk products and you agree to our terms & conditions and privacy policy.
Crypto stocks, which started the day on a stronger foot, followed suit, paring back their gains or snapping into declines across the board. Most notable was Coinbase (COIN), which turned its 3% morning advance into a 2% decline by the afternoon. Strategy (MSTR), he largest corporate holder of bitcoin, was down roughly 3% as the underlying asset weakened.
After a fast start to the session, U.S. stocks had given back much of their gains shortly before the close of trading. Not helping were surprisingly hawkish minutes from the January meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). As expected, most at the central bank agreed with the decision to pause rate cuts, but — in a twist — several suggested the Fed favor "two-sided" guidance at which the bank might opt to hike rates if inflation continues to remain sticky.
Already higher for the day, the U.S. dollar gathered even more strength, with the dollar index (DXY) — which measures the greenback against a basket of major foreign currencies — climbing to its strongest level in nearly two weeks. A firmer dollar often weighs on risk assets, and Wednesday’s crypto fade appeared to fit that pattern.
With today's slide, bitcoin is now staring at a fifth straight week of losses, its worst streak since the long 2022 bear market.
It also faces a key test at current levels. The $66,000 area held as support last week and helped fuel a bounce above $70,000. If that floor gives way decisively, traders will likely start eyeing the early February lows at $60,000 or a fresh leg lower.
$BTC #BTC #StrategyBTCPurchase

Something went wrong with the Bitcoin price, says Galaxy Digital founder and CEO Mike Novogratz, as the search for the bottom grows more frantic, while another Michael – the Burry kind – sees a “death spiral” ahead for the BTC price.
Of course, Novogratz has skin in the game, so when he told Bloomberg TV yesterday that the bottom would form in the $70,000 to $100,000 range, it is understandable that some might want to view his reasoning with scepticism.
However, an equally quizzical line of attack might be applied to the musings of Michael Burry, who, after all, is the king of shorts – he’s always on the lookout for assets to sell.
If you can stay away from the panic button and have the risk tolerance that permits measured analysis and decision-making, then it’s worth pausing to listen to Novogratz:
On Monday, Bitcoin fell below $73,000, wiping out all of the Trump bounce. At these levels ($75k at the time of writing), they are minded to keep an eagle-eyed watch on Strategy as its net asset value flips from premium to discount.
If the Bitcoin price falls another 10% to around $65,000, then, according to Burry, Strategy will “find capital markets essentially closed.”
As Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) stocks tumble (194 public companies and 72 private companies are holding Bitcoin in treasury), bear in mind that some unrealized losses are more real than others. Fears of imminent bankruptcy are probably overdone.
Next up will be the miners, all adding to the death spiral’s velocity. For Burry, there is no bottom. There is no valuation model for Bitcoin because “there is no organic use case reason for Bitcoin to slow or stop its descent.”
And humming away in the background are the ETFs, whose emergence was heralded with great fanfare but, more than any other instrument, have made it easier for retail investors to speculate and have tightened the correlation with equity markets.
On that last point, though, the correlation might be described as selective. When the Nasdaq falls, so does Bitcoin, but when the Nasdaq bounces, Bitcoin goes AWOL.
Is Bitcoin the Ultimate ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ Money?
Which brings us to an interesting note in Noelle Acheson’s Crypto is Macro Now newsletter, essential reading for the crypto-savvy.
She relates the theory of Credit Suisse chief economist Zoltan Pozsar, in which he pointed to “the fundamental shift in global value away from finance and towards physical goods, specifically commodities”, Acheson recalls. Pozsar was developing his theory in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He dubbed the coming shift to a new global monetary order Bretton Woods III (for those who forget their economic history, Bretton Woods was set up in 1944 at the behest of the US and pegged all major globally traded currencies to the US dollar, which in turn was convertible at the rate of $35/ounce.
Then Bretton Woods II came along in 1971, when it became apparent that there was just not enough gold in the world to keep the gold-backed US dollar functioning as the premier reserve currency that oiled the wheels of booming commerce.
As a result, US President Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard.
Now we come to the interesting part, Bretton Woods III, and what it could mean for the future of Bitcoin.
As Pozsar would have it, we have now entered the era of ‘inside money’, which he defined as assets and debt created by the dollar system, versus ‘outside money’, which he described as commodities, notably gold and oil. He didn’t mention Bitcoin, but we will.
You may have spotted that on Monday, President Trump announced that the US would start stockpiling strategic commodities. Better late than never.
Still, it is an indication that when the world goes dark (the computers are turned off), some things, like gold, silver, copper, oil, palladium, and an assortment of rare earths, will remain.
But surely no computers means no Bitcoin, no crypto, right? Not so fast: although it’s a theoretical possibility, if the world did go dark, the entire value curve would collapse.
Bitcoin Sits Somewhere Between ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ Money
Let’s put this another way. Without computers, and increasingly, without artificial intelligence, getting stuff done (made, serviced) becomes problematic.
Or, at a step removed, depending on a debased dollar to underpin the working of the real economy and the actual circulation of physical things, is risky.
Perhaps we should think of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ money in a way similar to how plastic pollution is depicted in the Disney/BBC sci-fi mini-series The War Between the Land and the Sea (disclaimer: my brother Colin plays the character General Pierce).
In a famous scene, at least on TikTok, we see Homo Aqua returning human-created pollution to its point of origin through a rain of plastic upon the land.
The outside money is knocking some sense into the inside money by raining down gold and silver ingots on those inflated assets and burdensome debts.
Stay with me. Bitcoin is not pure inside money, although it has, of late, become much more integrated into the legacy financial system, and therein lies much of its current problems.
Neither is it pure outside money, in that, although it is so-called hard money because of its flow limit, it could, at least theoretically, collapse should the world go dark in a digital sense.
Yet in reality, Bitcoin is somewhere between the two money poles (inside-outside) of Bretton Wood III, as imagined by Pozsar.
Think about Iran, when the theocracy turned off the internet. Yes, you couldn’t buy tokenized gold or tokenized dollars, but your holding of those assets was still safe for another day, because eventually the theocracy has to enable trade in the modern world.
And when it comes to the other end of the spectrum, the hegemon of global finance, the US, the inside/outside dichotomy expresses itself differently, but in an equally supportive way for Bitcoin.
As the administration seeks to ease the pain of the supposedly ‘scam’ affordability crisis, it will seek to adopt an expansive economic policy.
It is one in which its One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 opens the spigots of tax cuts, on top of plans to cap credit card interest rates at 10% and, unconvincingly, to force Big Tech hyperscalers to bear more of the burden of soaring electricity costs resulting from data center load.
In this context, Bitcoin is outside money, whose value is secured by the world economy’s most valuable commodity – the crystallization of energy as a monetized data package with the property of universal equivalence, albeit still subject to the vagaries of speculative flows.
‘Speculative flows’ is a big caveat, but not when you consider the recent outsized movements in the precious metals markets, especially that 37% intraday crash in the silver price.
As investors rotate out of Big Tech, an Ii bubble imposition looms and ‘Sell America’ gathers pace against the backdrop of macro and geopolitical uncertainty pressing in and US governance norms shattering, Bitcoin is still the smart money, inside and out.
Now consider the following commentary from José Torres, Senior Economist at Interactive Brokers:
“The return of ‘Buy America’ sentiment is poised to continue weighing on precious metals’ performance on balance. Indeed, gold and silver are likely to decline further following a ferocious rally that was initially sparked by fundamentals but has since detached from the driving themes of ‘Sell America’ and a focus on relatively accommodative global central banks that enable excessive fiscal deficits and generate currency debasement.”
Those comments didn’t age well. Gold is trading above $5,000 again, and silver is up 7% today. The dollar has shown signs of life, but on a year-over-year view, it is still trending lower.
And the Nasdaq is off 0.71% at 23,089 after Tuesday’s 1.43% sell-off in what could be the start of the great rotation out of tech.
Cumulative Volume Delta Data Suggests Bitcoin Price Stabilization Around $70,000
Admittedly, Bitcoin is down 0.56% at $75,995, so there’s no definitive sign of a bottom yet, with each attempted lukewarm bounce met with renewed bailing.
What does this all mean for the Bitcoin in your digital wallet? Bitcoin’s safe-haven anti-debasement properties may be screened out by the rush of blood to the head represented by the opening up of the sluice gates to massively leveraged institutional money.
That unwinding will be damaging, but Bitcoin will live on. Indeed, there are tentative signs that the lower end of the Novogratz band could be the bottom.
Our friends at Glassnode pointed out a few days ago the pickup in the spot Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD), which measures the net difference between buying and selling by market takers. A positive bias (buying) in order flow may be emerging.

Source: Glassnode
Glassnode analysts concluded that, “If this buy-side dominance persists, it would support further price stabilisation and a potential push higher.” Since that end-of-January hint of stabilization, Bitcoin, as noted above, briefly fell below $73,000.
Nevertheless, a floor could be forming around current levels. Whether you buy the inside or outside theory, and our novel interpretation of it, the smart money might be starting to DCA in.
$BTC #BTC100kNext?