Crypto Market Fear Subsides Significantly, Today's Fear and Greed Index at 45

On January 14, Daniel Hynes—Senior Commodity Strategist at ANZ Bank—stated that gold and silver’s outlook remains bullish for 2026 following a strong 2025 performance. Renewed geopolitical tensions, concerns over the Federal Reserve’s independence, and a lack of U.S. fiscal discipline are expected to keep driving fund flows into gold. For silver, worsening physical supply tightness is amplifying price volatility. Hynes noted that confirmation of U.S. import tariff exemptions would ease supply pressure, but supply-demand imbalances and robust industrial demand will still provide solid price support. ANZ Bank forecasts gold will break above $5,000 per ounce in the second half of the year. (Source: FX678)

January 14th — The Bitcoin Policy Institute and several other Bitcoin advocacy groups recently sent a joint letter to top U.S. tax officials, calling for an expansion of the de minimis exemption to include Bitcoin and major network tokens (not just stablecoins). The coalition proposed two key measures: 1. Classifying stablecoins meeting the GENIUS standard as cash-equivalent; 2. Setting a $250 billion market cap threshold for eligible network tokens, alongside a $600 per-transaction limit and a $20,000 annual cap.

January 14 — While ETH prices remain in a consolidation phase, new Ethereum wallet creations hit an all-time high last week, with network adoption rebounding strongly. Over the past seven days, an average of 327,000 new Ethereum wallets were created daily, topping out at over 393,000 on Sunday — a new single-day record. Total non-zero Ethereum wallets (addresses holding any ETH) reached a new high of 172.9 million. Scheduled to go live on Ethereum in early December 2025, the Fusaka upgrade optimizes on-chain data processing, sharply cutting costs for Layer 2 networks to submit data to the mainnet. This makes Ethereum cheaper and easier to use, especially for interacting with rollups and decentralized applications (dApps). Meanwhile, Ethereum stablecoin activity surged: total stablecoin transfer volume hit a record $80+ trillion in Q4 2025, indicating the network is being used for real-world payments and settlements rather than just speculation. Analytics firm Santiment noted: “This r

On January 14, per HyperInsight monitoring (via its Telegram channel @HyperInsight), the "On-chain Part-time Stock Trader" short whale has reduced its 20x leveraged short positions across ETH, BTC, and SOL over the past hour. The combined position size of the three assets has dropped by ~$3.5 million, with position closures still ongoing as of press time. Compared to last week, the trio’s combined position has fallen from $45.6 million to $14.5 million—BTC shorts have been fully closed. Concurrently, the address continues to add to its 5x leveraged short positions in on-chain gold (PAXG) and XRP. It now holds the largest PAXG short position. Key current positions include: - PAXG Short: ~$13.2M position size, avg price $4,525, ~$320k unrealized loss; - XRP Short: ~$11M position size, avg price $2.088, ~$330k unrealized loss; - ETH Short: ~$7.82M position size, avg price $3,182, ~$350k unrealized loss; Beyond crypto, the address recently opened 18 stock short positions on

January 14: Per monitoring from HyperInsight, a market-bearish whale opened a short position worth ~$5.2 million (54.77 BTC) with 10x leverage at 13:24, averaging an entry price of $94,986. The position is currently slightly profitable.

January 14 – A Forbes report notes that by 2025, cryptocurrency scams have grown into a massive criminal industry with an annual volume of at least $14 billion. This surge is largely driven by widespread AI tool adoption, which lets scammers create fake identities more efficiently, produce more convincing deepfake scam content, and significantly boost average earnings per scam. Stats show AI-equipped scam gangs defraud victims of an average $3.2 million per successful scam, while non-AI gangs net just $719,000 per scam—4.5 times less than their AI-powered counterparts. In 2025’s prevalent piggyback scams, criminal groups first build emotional connections with victims or pose as investment advisors on social platforms. They then lure victims to fake crypto trading platforms before absconding with their funds. AI has made these scams more scalable and personalized, sharply increasing both success rates and the total sums involved.