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

February 25 – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina announced that law enforcement has seized over $61 million in USDT, with the funds suspected of ties to a Ponzi scheme-style cryptocurrency investment fraud. Prosecutors said the funds were traced to multiple cryptocurrency wallet addresses and used to launder money stolen from victims via fake trading platforms. The investigation was led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Through on-chain tracking, law enforcement identified wallet accounts still holding large balances that met seizure criteria. Prosecutor Ellis Boyle noted the seizure “deprived criminals of their ill-gotten gains” and underscored law enforcement’s commitment to combating cryptocurrency fraud. Court documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) show fraud groups typically build trust by forming fake romantic relationships, luring victims into so-called high-yield cryptocurrency investments, and continuously “

Feb. 25 — Market data from Bitget shows the Nikkei 225 Index closed up 1262.03 points today, a 2.20% gain, at 58583.12 points, marking a new all-time high.

NEAR rolled out its Confidential Intents feature on February 25—a built-in cross-chain transaction privacy execution tool integrated into NEAR Intents, designed to address the longstanding transaction transparency challenge in DeFi. Confidential Intents creates a restricted-visibility execution environment via NEAR’s private shards, ensuring transaction details remain invisible to external parties during settlement. Users can seamlessly switch between their main account and a confidential account within apps, enabling privacy mode for actions like transfers, deposits, and withdrawals. A privacy feature for currency swaps is also slated to launch soon. Targeted at institutional capital, enterprise users, and advanced DeFi users, the feature adds a cross-chain position privacy protection layer.

February 25th — According to Coinbob Popular Address Monitoring, an address starting with 0x535 opened a 20x leveraged long position on the SILVER (Silver Mapping Contract) at 8 a.m. today, **ahead of a sharp intraday silver price rally**. The entry price was around $87. Via subsequent position rolls, the address boosted its position size to $4.08 million, making it the largest SILVER long position on the Hyperliquid platform as of now. Due to gradual rolling, the average entry price rose to $88, with current unrealized returns standing at 36%. Over the past week, the same address sustained consecutive losses on long positions in silver, HYPE, ZEC, and other assets, accumulating a weekly loss of $1.41 million. Today, it successfully capitalized on silver’s intraday rally for the first time, finally locking in a floating profit.

**February 25th** Citrini Research—author of the "Doomsday Report"—has been short Bitcoin since November 17 last year while long the Nasdaq. On February 1 this year, the firm’s Twitter account tweeted: "Regret closing the position too soon." Additionally, during last year’s Christmas period, Citrini Research predicted Bitcoin would fall to $69,000 in the first half of this year. In prior news, the firm released a report outlining the "global intellectual crisis" concept, warning AI could trigger a "race to the bottom" in knowledge-based jobs and disrupt industry/credit chains built around white-collar productivity. This report sent U.S. stocks tumbling Monday.

February 25th: Anchorage Digital Co-Founder & CEO Nathan McCauley disclosed via X that the firm holds Strategy’s perpetual preferred stock—STRC—on its balance sheet, and highlighted the strategic alliance between Anchorage and Strategy. ### Notes on alignment with American news style: 1. **Conciseness**: Replaced repeated "Anchorage Digital" with "the firm" to avoid redundancy (common in quick updates). 2. **Clarity**: Used em dashes to set off the stock ticker (STRC) for readability (standard in financial/tech briefs). 3. **Natural phrasing**: "Via X" (vs. "on X") feels more intuitive for platform disclosures; "disclosed" (vs. "revealed") is preferred in formal/industry contexts. 4. **Flow**: Merged two short sentences into one for tighter pacing (typical of breaking news snippets).