U.S. CPI: +2.9% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +2.9%); U.S. CORE CPI: +3.2% YEAR-OVER-YEAR (EST. +3.3%)

On January 15, Bitcoin topped $97,000, per HTX market data, posting a 2.2% gain over the past 24 hours.

On January 15th, per monitoring from HyperInsight (https://t.me/HyperInsight), controversy flared in the crypto community after a tweet from Solana’s official account. The post noted Starknet’s public chain had just 8 daily active users (DAUs) and 10 daily transactions—yet held a $1 billion market capitalization. Against this backdrop, two whales took action: one identified as the “Shanzhai Air Force Leader” and another address starting with 0x023 opened STRK short positions with roughly 5x leverage. In the past few hours, both have closed a portion of their shorts to lock in profits. Their average entry price was ~$0.0897, with an overall return of ~15%.

On Jan 15, on-chain analyst Ai Auntie (@ai_9684xtpa) reported the BNB Chain Foundation resumed purchasing ecosystem tokens after a four-day pause. It bought $100k worth of "Binance Life"—marking its second such acquisition, following an initial $95k purchase of the token "I F***ing Made It."

On Jan. 15, Cointelegraph reported that Argentine crypto exchange Lemon has launched a Bitcoin-backed Visa credit card. The card lets users lock up Bitcoin as collateral to secure a peso credit line—no need to sell their crypto holdings.

January 15 – Per HyperInsight monitoring, trader James Wynn (0x507), once on the brink of “bankruptcy,” liquidated all his PEPE and ETH long positions on Hyperliquid today and withdrew most of his funds from the platform—roughly $41,000. The PEPE long position yielded ~$110,000 in profits, while the ETH long position posted a $160,000 loss. The address initially opened PEPE long positions with ~$20,000, and account funds once peaked at $900,000. However, on January 8, his positions faced 12 consecutive liquidations, with the account size halved multiple times. He exited all positions amid today’s market rally, locking in a final profit of ~$20,000. Notably, on January 1 of this year, James Wynn publicly predicted PEPE’s market cap would exceed $69 billion by 2026, vowing to deactivate his social media accounts if it fails to materialize. PEPE’s current market cap stands at ~$25.4 billion.