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- Crypto Saving Expert Newsletter - Issue 175
Crypto Saving Expert Newsletter - Issue 175
Gm! Price action has shifted, sentiment has tightened, and the market feels far less comfortable than it did just days ago. There’s hesitation again, patience on both sides, and a sense that participants are waiting rather than acting.
Full story in today’s newsletter. 👇
Table of Contents
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Bitcoin Plummets As Fears Increase
Bitcoin has dropped significantly over the past week, erasing all year-to-date gains and reverting to its previous range.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin has fallen back into its previous range after confirming a fakeout to the upside, which was all but a liquidity grab.
Now bitcoin is back within its range, the $85,000 to $94,000 region has become the levels to watch.
If Bitcoin returns to $85,000, it will be testing support and demand, while the task is yet again to overcome the $94,000 resistance for further upside.
CME Gap
Bitcoin filled its CME gap, which opened at the start of the year.
The gap was left open as bitcoin rallied fast and didn’t return to the 2026 open level until now.
Now it is filled, bitcoin may be free to return to the upside.
TOTAL2
TOTAL2 has a consistent channel in how it has moved over the past two years.
It is now within the downside of the channel, where it finds support and demand. In theory, it should head towards the upside over the next six months as long as it doesn’t break to the downside.
If the channel holds, TOTAL2 could set a new all-time high this year, approaching $2 trillion.
Gold
Gold continues to set record highs and is fast approaching $5,000, which would be a historic moment.
Since the start of the year, it is already up 12.5% and is moving strongly to the upside as fears and uncertainty arise.
While there is conflict between Trump and Europe, hard assets are taking full advantage, with Silver moving towards $100.
Will Facebook Melt Faces?
META
On my radar this week is a household name, we’re looking at META, better known as Facebook. The stock has faced a tough time as of late, with investor fears over AI capex and the monetisation that could bring. Fundamentally, the stock remains one of the cheapest in the MAG7, and is buoyed by strong ad revenues. This plays well into the hands of an AI storm and I think they are well placed.
From a chart perspective, it’s approaching a key bounce zone, where we have previously seen a reaction. The company is due to announce earnings next week and this could provide an impetus for a reaction. My area of interest is inside the sub $600 zone, with a key area at $589. Key upside targets are $650, with a break and hold above the local range high at $672 providing scope to attack $700 and fill in the FVG and complete the market structure retest at $750.
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Fear And Greed Index
The Fear and Greed Index has been thrown back into Extreme Fear, scoring 24.
Following bitcoin’s steep descent, the same fears that were around at the start of the year have begun creeping in as confidence is still lacking without a reclaim of $100,000.
Important Dates
Wednesday 21 January - Trump Speech
US President Donald Trump delivers a special address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Thursday 22 January, 13:30 UTC - Core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE)
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis releases the core PCE data, which measures the average amount of money consumers spend monthly in the economy.
PCE is released in two formats: month-over-month and year-on-year. The data also removes volatile products, such as energy and food.
The year-on-year data is not forecasted.
Friday 23 January, 14:45 UTC - S&P Global Manufacturing PMI
S&P Global releases the Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) data, which measures the manufacturing industry. The data is a crucial measurement of the US economy, as it is a significant portion of the revenue for large businesses.
The data is forecasted at 52.1.
Friday 23 January 14:45 UTC- S&P Global Services PMI
S&P Global also releases a second piece of data, the services PMI data, which measures the service industry. The data is another factor alluding to the economy’s strength, as it makes up much of the GDP alongside manufacturing.
The data is forecasted at 52.8.
Gainers
Losers
Should Prediction Markets Be Banned? The Case for Rules, Not Prohibition
Prediction markets are booming, but rising concerns over athlete harassment and youth exposure raise a hard question: regulate or ban?
TL;DR
🏟️ The NCAA wants college sports prediction markets paused over athlete harassment concerns
👶 Age gaps between gambling laws and prediction platforms are a real issue
📈 Prediction markets are exploding in volume despite regulatory pressure
⚖️ A blanket ban may miss the point; targeted regulation could work better
❓ The real debate isn’t “markets vs morals,” but rules vs chaos
Prediction markets are having a moment, and not a quiet one.
From political elections to sports outcomes, platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have surged in popularity, with daily trading volumes now regularly hitting record highs. But as participation grows, so do the ethical and regulatory questions, especially when college sports are involved.
This week, the National Collegiate Athletic Association stepped squarely into the debate.
🏀 Why the NCAA Is Sounding the Alarm
NCAA president Charlie Baker has asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to suspend college sports prediction markets until stronger safeguards are in place.
The concern isn’t abstract. Baker argues that the rapid and loosely governed growth of prediction markets has fueled a rise in harassment directed at student athletes by bettors, particularly after losses. Unlike professional players, college athletes are younger, unpaid, and far less insulated from public abuse.
There’s also an age mismatch problem. While most US states restrict sports gambling to those aged 21 and over, prediction markets often allow participation from age 18. That gap, Baker argues, could pull college and even high school students into financially and psychologically harmful behaviour.
The NCAA’s demands are clear:
🔞 Stronger age restrictions
📢 Limits on advertising
🛡️ Better integrity monitoring
🚫 Anti-harassment protections
🧠 Harm-reduction resources
📈 The Market Isn’t Slowing Down
Regulatory pressure hasn’t stopped growth; if anything, it has highlighted how fast this sector is expanding.
Prediction market trading volumes hit $701.7m in a single day this week, smashing previous records. Kalshi alone accounted for roughly two-thirds of that activity, underscoring just how central sports-linked contracts have become to market growth.
State regulators in New York, Nevada, New Jersey, Connecticut and elsewhere have already tried to block or restrict sports-related prediction markets. Yet participation keeps rising, suggesting that demand is deeply entrenched.
That reality raises an uncomfortable question: can bans actually work in a global, digital market?
⚖️ Ban Them or Fix Them?
This is where the debate gets murky.
On one hand, the NCAA’s concerns are legitimate. Harassment, underage participation and weak consumer protections are not theoretical risks; they’re happening now. Ignoring them in the name of “innovation” would be irresponsible.
On the other hand, banning prediction markets outright risks repeating a familiar mistake: driving activity underground or offshore, where there are zero safeguards instead of imperfect ones.
Prediction markets are not inherently predatory. At their best, they:
🗺️ Aggregate real-world information
📊 Improve price discovery
⚡️ Offer transparent, on-chain or regulated settlement
The problem isn’t the existence of the markets, it’s the absence of consistent rules.
🧩 Regulation Is the Harder, and Better, Answer
If prediction markets disappear tomorrow, the incentives won’t. Bettors will simply migrate to less transparent platforms or informal markets. Student athletes would still face pressure, just without oversight.
A regulated framework could realistically include:
👉 Age parity with sports betting laws
👉 Mandatory identity verification
👉 Automated abuse monitoring tied to market events
👉 Limits on individual exposure
👉 Clear jurisdictional boundaries between gambling and financial contracts
That approach is slower and messier than a ban, but it actually addresses the root problems.
🔍 Final Take
Prediction markets don’t need to be banned; they need to grow up.
The NCAA is right to push back against a system that exposes young athletes to harassment and risk. But prohibition would treat the symptom, not the disease. In a world where these markets are already massive and global, smart regulation beats moral panic.
The real danger isn’t that prediction markets exist, it’s that they’re expanding faster than the rules designed to protect the people caught in the middle.
And that’s a governance failure, not a market one.
Ethereum vs. Solana: Two Competing Visions of Blockchain Resilience
Ethereum and Solana are diverging on what “resilience” means, with Vitalik Buterin prioritising sovereignty and redundancy while Solana bets on speed and performance at scale.
⚡ TL;DR
🛡️Ethereum defines resilience as sovereignty, surviving censorship, outages and hostile states
⚡Solana defines resilience as performance, reliably running global, real-time markets
🧱 Ethereum favours redundancy, gradual scaling and architectural caution
🚀 Solana prioritises throughput, low latency and economic competitiveness
📈 Institutions are now signalling demand for both models, depending on use case
🛡️ Ethereum’s View: Resilience As Sovereignty
In a recent X post revisiting Ethereum’s Trustless Manifesto, co-founder Vitalik Buterin framed resilience as protection against worst-case scenarios.
For Buterin, a resilient blockchain must survive:
🧨 Political exclusion or censorship
🔌 Infrastructure collapse
👻 Developer disappearance
💸 Financial confiscation
Ethereum, he argued, was never designed to maximise efficiency or convenience, but to ensure users remain sovereign even under hostile conditions.
“Resilience is the game where anyone, anywhere in the world, will be able to access the network and be a first-class participant. Resilience is sovereignty.”
This philosophy explains Ethereum’s cautious roadmap: multiple independent clients, conservative scaling decisions and incremental throughput increases designed to avoid systemic failure.
⚡ Solana’s View: Resilience As Performance
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko responded by offering a sharply different definition.
For Yakovenko, resilience means the ability to synchronise massive volumes of information globally, at high speed and low latency, without trusted intermediaries.
“If the world can benefit from 1gbps and 10 concurrent 10ms batch auctions, then that’s the floor we must deliver reliably across the planet.”
In this framing, performance isn’t a luxury; it is reliability. A system that can’t keep up with real-time markets, payments and auctions is not resilient, regardless of philosophical purity.
🧱 Redundancy vs. 🚀 Throughput
The divide reflects two architectural strategies:
Ethereum
👉 Multiple execution and consensus clients
👉 Gradual scaling via blobs and data availability
👉 Emphasis on predictability and fault tolerance
Solana
👉 Aggressive optimisation for speed and capacity
👉 Single high-performance execution path
👉 Focus on real-time economic activity
Ethereum recently raised its blob limit again, choosing incremental capacity growth over aggressive execution scaling. At the same time, validator exit queues dropped near zero in early January, a sign of long-term confidence in the network’s security model.
Solana, meanwhile, has steadily reduced outages through protocol hardening and upgrades, betting that reliability can emerge from performance rather than restraint.
🏦 Institutional Signals And Trade-Offs
Institutional behaviour highlights why both visions persist.
🏛️ Ethereum remains the dominant settlement layer for stablecoins and tokenised treasuries, areas where predictability, neutrality and conservative risk profiles matter most.
📊 Solana is gaining traction in performance-sensitive use cases, including tokenised real-world assets, enterprise payments and markets where milliseconds matter.
Critics argue Ethereum’s future reliance on zkEVMs and proposer-builder separation could introduce new centralisation risks. Others counter that Solana’s tighter coordination model increases the blast radius of failures.
🔮 Two Futures, Not One Winner
The debate shows Ethereum and Solana aren’t just competing on scalability; they’re optimising for different failure modes.
🛡️ Ethereum prioritises survivability, even at the cost of speed
⚡ Solana prioritises economic viability under real-time demand
Rather than converging, the two networks appear to be diverging into complementary roles, each resilient, but against very different threats.
Bitcoin Holders Realise Losses for First Time Since 2023 as Gold Steals the Spotlight
Bitcoin holders have realised net losses for the first time since 2023 as ETF outflows rise, gold hits record highs, and geopolitical risk drives investors to be defensive.
TL;DR
📉 Bitcoin holders are realising net losses over a 30-day period for the first time since late 2023
🧾 Selling pressure is coming from holders who bought at higher prices
🏅 Gold has surged to record highs as geopolitical tensions rise
🔄 The Bitcoin-to-gold ratio has fallen more than 50% from its peak
💼 US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw nearly $395M in outflows
Bitcoin holders are once again selling at a loss, a rare development that hasn’t been seen since late 2023.
According to CryptoQuant, Bitcoin’s rolling 30-day realised profit and loss metric has slipped into negative territory, ending a long stretch dominated by realised profits.
Data shared by CryptoQuant head of research, Julio Moreno, shows that coins moved on-chain over the past month were, on average, sold below their acquisition cost.
“Bitcoin holders realising losses, for a 30-day period since late December, for the first time since October 2023,”Moreno wrote on X.
📊 What realised losses actually signal
A negative realised profit/loss reading doesn’t automatically mean Bitcoin’s price is collapsing. Instead, it suggests that who is selling has changed.
In this case:
📉 Sellers are increasingly underwater holders
🧠 Many bought closer to recent highs
🔥 Conviction is being tested amid macro pressure
Historically, these periods often coincide with late-stage capitulation rather than early-cycle weakness, a detail long-term investors tend to watch closely.
🏅 Gold surges as risk appetite fades
While Bitcoin has struggled, traditional safe havens are thriving.
Gold surged past $4,700 per ounce for the first time, with silver also trading near historic highs. The rally reflects mounting geopolitical anxiety following renewed trade threats from Donald Trump, including warnings aimed at European allies over Greenland and tariffs.
The flight to safety has dragged the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio down more than 50% from its peak, according to analysts at Bitfinex.
“Last time we were here, BTC went on to outperform gold,”Bitfinex analysts noted, suggesting the cross may again be worth watching as liquidity builds into 2026.
💼 ETFs flip back to outflows
The risk-off mood has also hit institutional flows.
US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $394.7m in net outflows on Monday, snapping a four-day inflow streak that had added more than $1.8bn to the products.
Valr co-founder and CEO Farzam Ehsani said Trump’s aggressive trade rhetoric has pushed markets back into de-risking mode.
“Tariff threats and retaliatory measures have historically created significant headwinds for digital and other risk assets,”he said.
🔍 Bottom line
Bitcoin’s return to realised losses doesn’t automatically signal the start of a prolonged bear market, but it does confirm a shift in market psychology.
As gold attracts defensive capital and ETFs see renewed outflows, Bitcoin is entering a phase where weaker hands are exiting, and patience is being tested. Historically, that environment has often laid the groundwork for the next structural move, rather than the end of one.
For now, the divergence between crypto and traditional safe havens is widening, and that tension may define the market’s next chapter.
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