Federal Reserve Governor Jefferson: No Need to Hurry to Further Cut Interest Rates, Strong Economy Makes Caution Appropriate

January 19th – Per Caixin, a tech expert familiar with the central bank digital currency (CBDC) has revealed that the digital currency relies on account-based smart contracts. These contracts, like those on public blockchains, are essentially "condition-triggered auto-executing code," with the key difference being full Turing completeness. The CBDC’s account-based smart contracts are Turing-complete but restricted: programming is strictly limited to central bank-approved template scripts, supporting only preset simple conditional triggers. This design prioritizes security and risk control. While CBDC smart contract development supports multiple languages—including Ethereum’s Solidity and other Turing-complete languages—there are no technical hurdles. The core challenge, however, lies in designing standard access and audit mechanisms acceptable to the financial system.

January 19 — According to The Block, market fears of a potential U.S.-EU trade war are further weighing on an already fragile market sentiment, triggering a sell-off in crypto markets during early trading. Bitcoin, Ethereum and the broader crypto space tumbled, with Bitcoin briefly falling below $92,000 and marking a short-term drop of more than 3%. Total long positions liquidated over the past four hours exceeded $750 million. Analysts link the downturn to concerns over the prospect of a U.S.-EU tariff war. Presto Research analyst Min Jung noted: “Relative to other asset classes, the crypto market remains vulnerable. While U.S.-EU trade war fears have been the biggest drag on sentiment, other risk assets—including the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI)—have held steady or even gained. This signals a distinct inherent vulnerability in crypto markets, as investors are favoring other risk assets for allocations. Amid gains across most sectors, crypto assets continue to lag.”

January 19th — Per monitoring from HyperInsight, multiple traders on Hyperliquid were liquidated during today’s market flash crash. There were 38 liquidation events where losses exceeded $1 million each, spanning mainstream coins and altcoins. The largest single liquidation was a Bitcoin (BTC) long position, resulting in a loss of up to $25.8338 million.

On January 19, Holger Schmieding—chief economist at Berenberg Bank—said Donald Trump’s push to pressure Denmark into selling Greenland to the U.S. has dashed hopes this year’s trade war escalation will be milder than in 2025. Trump has threatened to impose a 10% tariff starting February 1 on eight countries backing Denmark (including the U.K. and France), with plans to hike the tariff to 25% in June. Schmieding noted the move could backfire, potentially pushing U.S. consumer prices up by 0.15%. He also said total U.S. imports from these targeted countries hit roughly $350 billion in 2024. If the U.S.-EU tariff deal is ultimately scrapped (though this is unlikely), losses for American consumers could be far more severe. While both sides could logically avoid economic losses in the end, “we first need to be ready to handle more turmoil.” (Kylie)

January 19 According to LookOnChain monitoring, trader beachboy4 has turned a cumulative loss of over $6.8 million into ~$395,000 in realized profit over the past two days. Over the period, he’s netted more than $10.5 million in gains across 5 predictive trades—fully recouping prior losses and posting positive returns. Notably, his single-trade size has spiked drastically: previously in the hundreds of thousands per trade, it now exceeds $3 million per bet.

On January 19, data from Coinglass indicates that over the past 24 hours, centralized exchanges (CEXs) have seen a cumulative net outflow of 44,000 Ethereum (ETH). The top three exchanges by ETH outflow are: - OKX: 21,900 ETH outflow; - Binance: 17,800 ETH outflow; - Gate: 3,870.73 ETH outflow. Additionally, Kraken recorded an inflow of 2,086.23 ETH, topping the inflow rankings.