U.S. Senator: If Powell Is Fired by Trump, It Will Trigger a Market Collapse

**Crypto Market Trades in Range Post-Weekend Recovery (Feb 16)** CoinGecko figures show the total cryptocurrency market cap now sits at $2.424 trillion, down 2% in the past 24 hours, as the market holds a range-bound trend after this weekend’s bounce. Bitcoin dipped this morning to touch $68,000 but is rebounding, trading at $68,849—up more than 5.7% from its last Thursday low of $65,118. Ethereum is currently at $1,969, while SOL has rebounded to break above $86.

On February 16th, OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced via a post that Peter Steinberger—founder of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot)—will join OpenAI to lead development of the next generation of personal intelligence systems. “He’s a genius with incredible ideas about how future intelligent systems can collaborate and deliver practical services to users,” Altman wrote. “We anticipate this will quickly become core to our product roadmap.” OpenClaw will remain an open-source project under the OpenAI umbrella, and OpenAI will continue supporting it. “The future will be a highly multi-agent era, and backing open source is a critical part of our path toward that vision,” the post added.

February 15th – GMGN market data (via https://gmgn.ai/sol/token/i_m4TE56o8_NV2RYH954cTJ3ckFUpvfqaQXU4ARqqDH3562nFSpump) shows Solana ecosystem meme coin Punch surged over 4x in a single day. It currently holds a market cap of $14.75 million, with 24-hour trading volume exceeding $16.1 million. Data further indicates the token’s top holder invested nearly $1,000 when the price was around $18,180, and now has an unrealized gain of $455,000 – a return of over 46x. Public info notes Punch is inspired by a viral monkey from Japan’s Ichikawa City Zoo. Moonshot has already listed the token tonight. BlockBeats reminds users that meme coin trading is extremely volatile, heavily reliant on market sentiment and hype, and lacks tangible value or use cases. Investors should be mindful of the associated risks.

On February 15, CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost noted that based on Bitcoin’s 4-year Simple Moving Average (SMA) indicator, BTC has re-entered the green zone—signaling undervaluation—and is approaching its 4-year moving average, currently around $57,500. Historically, this level typically marks the final stage of each bear market, with BTC prices tending to trade around it for several months.

February 15 — The Block’s Director of Projects Frank Chaparro reported that Wells Fargo posted a job opening for a Digital Asset Services Lead four days ago. Key responsibilities for the role include developing a three-to-five-year strategy covering tokenized deposits, on-chain collateral, intraday liquidity, and 24/7 programmable payments — with full integration into wire transfers, ACH, RTP, FedNow, and SWIFT. Separately, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley have recently hired senior leaders in the cryptocurrency space.

As of February 15, per Onchain Lens monitoring data, a whale has transferred 1,536 ETH—held for nearly four years—to Kraken, netting an estimated $1.95 million in profit.