Market Overview
Gold is trading at $5,241. Let that sink in. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is stuck in the mud at $89,000. Usually, these two dance together as debasement hedges, but today? Complete decoupling. The crypto market cap is flat at $3.04T — literally a 0% change from yesterday. Why the paralysis? Everyone is terrified of the Fed. Powell is speaking soon, and nobody wants to be offside.
Bitcoin & Majors
BTC is hovering near $89k, testing support at $88k. Boring price action, sure, but look under the hood. Morgan Stanley is expanding crypto hiring and pushing ETFs to clients. That's the signal. The noise is the price action.
Ethereum? Still disappointing. Down 0.11%, losing ground to BTC again. The MegaETH mainnet launch is coming Feb 9, which might save it, but right now it feels heavy. Solana isn't doing much better (-0.07%), though Bybit's integration of MNT into the SOL ecosystem is a nice plumbing upgrade. BNB managed to crawl up 0.06%, but let's be honest — that's just noise.
Outliers
While the majors sleep, the weird stuff moves.
$XMR (+0.71%): Monero catching a bid. Privacy tech usually pumps when regulation fear ticks up. $CTA (+59%): "Cross The Ages" gaming token led the gainers on KuCoin. Retail chasing low-cap volatility because the majors are boring. $USDT: Not a price mover, obviously, but Tether now holds 140 tons of gold. They are basically a sovereign wealth fund at this point.
Sentiment
Neutral. Painfully neutral. The market is waiting for dad (Powell) to come home and tell us if we're in trouble. With $10.8B in Bitcoin options expiring this week and the FOMC looming, volatility is compressed. It’s like a coiled spring. The breakout will be violent, but trying to guess the direction before the Fed decision is gambling, not trading. Sit on your hands.
