Today's top news highlights:
1. US President Trump: Kevin Warsh will become Chairman of the Federal Reserve
2. Gold suffered its biggest single-day drop in 40 years, while silver fell more than 36%, setting a record.
3. The U.S. federal government shuts down again due to budget failure.
4. Binance released a report on the "1011" market flash crash, acknowledging two technical glitches, but stating they were not the main cause of the decline.
5. OKX CEO accuses Binance of marketing campaign that triggered October's crypto market flash crash.
6. Tether's net profit is projected to exceed $10 billion in 2025, with gold reserves reaching $17.4 billion.
Macro
US President Trump: Kevin Warsh will become Chairman of the Federal Reserve
According to Jinshi News, US President Trump stated that Kevin Warsh will serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and that Warsh will certainly not disappoint.
Related reading: Kevin Warsh emerges as a surprise contender; why has this inflation hawk become a top candidate for Fed Chair?
A sudden sell-off occurred in the precious metals market, with spot gold prices falling by more than 12% at one point, hitting a low of $4,682 per ounce, marking the largest single-day drop since the early 1980s. At the close, spot gold was down 9.25% at $4,880 per ounce.
Spot silver once plummeted by more than 36%, marking its largest intraday drop in history, hitting a low of $74.28 per ounce. At the close, spot silver was down 26.42% at $85.259 per ounce.
According to CLS News Agency, the three major U.S. stock indexes closed lower. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.36%, but rose 1.73% in January; the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.94%, but rose 0.95% in January; and the S&P 500 fell 0.43%, but rose 1.37% in January.
Gold and silver stocks plummeted, with the world's largest silver ETF, iShares Silver Trust, falling 28%, Cordell Minerals falling over 16%, and Gold Fields falling over 14%.
Blockchain concept stocks generally fell, with COIN (Coinbase) down 2.23%; CRCL (Circle) down 5.36%; BMNR (Bitmine) down 5.99%; and MSTR (Strategy) up 4.55%.
The US federal government has shut down again due to budget failures affecting multiple departments.
According to CCTV News, in the early hours of January 31st local time, several departments of the US federal government ran out of operating funds. With a new budget yet to be passed, multiple US government departments have again fallen into a shutdown. This comes less than three months after the end of the longest government shutdown in US history last year, lasting 43 days. Even if the new budget currently being voted on in Congress is successfully passed, some departments will only receive funding for two weeks. In other words, the US government may face its third shutdown in the short term in just half a month.
Opinion
In an interview, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan stated that cryptocurrencies are in the late stages of a bear market bottom, paving a volatile but constructive path for stronger growth in 2026. Cryptocurrencies were in a bear market for most of 2025, with many altcoins falling by more than 60%. Bitcoin avoided even greater losses, largely thanks to continued buying from corporations and ETFs. He described the current situation as a "bottoming out," characterized by weak ETF liquidity and low retail participation.
Hougan predicts Bitcoin will trade sideways between $75,000 and $100,000 in the first half of this year. He reiterated his view that Bitcoin could reach approximately $6.5 million per coin within the next 20 years. Hougan stated that the core assumption is not accelerated adoption, but rather continued global debt growth, money supply expansion, and currency devaluation. He believes Bitcoin is an upgraded version of gold, and central banks are only just beginning to understand its role. "As long as the future doesn't change much from the past 15 years, we will achieve our goal. It's just a matter of time."
JPMorgan analysts say Bitcoin futures appear to be oversold, while gold and silver futures have entered overbought territory, as investors across both retail and institutional channels increasingly favor precious metals over Bitcoin.
Despite short-term risks for precious metals, analysts remain optimistic about gold's long-term prospects. They note that both private investors and central banks are consistently increasing their gold holdings. Analysts reiterate that assuming households continue to use gold as a hedge against equities instead of long-term bonds, private investor gold holdings could rise from the current slightly over 3% to approximately 4.6% in the coming years. In this scenario, analysts believe the theoretical price range for gold could reach $8,000 to $8,500 per ounce.
OKX CEO accuses Binance marketing campaign of triggering October's crypto market flash crash.
OKX CEO Star stated on the OKX platform that the October 10th flash crash in the crypto market was not accidental, but rather stemmed from irresponsible marketing activities by certain companies (such as Binance), which permanently altered the market's microstructure, causing damage exceeding that of the FTX crash. Star believes that Binance's temporary user acquisition campaign, offering USDe with a 12% APY (annualized yield) and allowing it as collateral, treating it the same as USDT/USDC with no limits, encouraged users to convert USDT/USDC to USDe for returns, but the risks were not adequately disclosed. From a user's perspective, USDe appears no different from traditional stablecoins, but its actual risks are higher.
Users created artificially high APYs of 24%, 36%, or even 70%+ by repeatedly converting USDe to USDT as collateral, and these yields were widely considered "low-risk" simply because they were offered by large platforms. Systemic risk accumulated rapidly in the global crypto market. At that time, even small market shocks were enough to trigger a collapse. As market volatility intensified, USDe quickly decoupled. A chain of liquidations followed, and deficiencies in the risk management of assets like WETH and BNSOL further exacerbated the crash. Some tokens plummeted to near-zero trading prices. The damage to global users and companies, including OKX clients, was severe, and recovery will take time.
Wintermute founder: It's irrational to blame a market crash on a single exchange.
Regarding Cathie Wood's previous statement that "the Bitcoin pullback was caused by the $28 billion deleveraging event triggered by the Binance software glitch on October 10th," Wintermute founder wishful cynic stated on the X platform, "I really hope public figures can be more careful with their words. 10/10 was clearly not a 'software glitch,' but rather a flash crash in a highly leveraged market on Friday night due to insufficient liquidity and macroeconomic news. Speaking of which, I understand nobody likes being in a bear market and watching all assets except cryptocurrencies rise. Finding a scapegoat is certainly satisfying, but shifting all the blame to one exchange is simply dishonest."
This morning, Binance released a report on the "1011" market flash crash, acknowledging two technical glitches, but stating they were not the main cause of the decline.
Project Updates
According to an official Aster announcement, Aster's sixth and largest airdrop will begin on February 2nd. This phase is named "Convergence." The sixth phase will last for eight weeks (February 2nd to March 29th, 2026), distributing 0.8% of the total supply (approximately 64 million ASTER), with an optional six-month vesting period.
Lido V3 launched on the Ethereum mainnet
According to the official announcement, Lido V3 has launched on the Ethereum mainnet, introducing the stVaults modular staking infrastructure powered by stETH, designed specifically for developers. This upgrade extends the Lido protocol, moving from a single pooled liquidity staking model (Lido Core) to supporting diverse staking models while retaining stETH's shared liquidity and DeFi composability. stVaults allows builders to customize staking settings without having to build infrastructure from scratch.
Tether, the issuer of the stablecoin USDT, announced on Friday that its net profit for 2025 will exceed $10 billion, primarily due to the steady growth of its flagship token USDT and its increasing investments in U.S. Treasury bonds and gold.
The fourth-quarter financial report, signed by the Italian accounting firm BDO, shows that Tether holds $6.3 billion in excess reserves, enough to offset its $186.5 billion in liabilities related to its issued tokens. The circulating supply of USDT increased by $50 billion in a year, exceeding $186 billion. The company continued to increase its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds, with direct holdings reaching $122 billion, and total holdings reaching $141 billion including overnight reverse repurchase agreements. This makes Tether one of the world's largest holders of U.S. Treasury bonds. Tether also maintained a significant allocation to gold and Bitcoin, with holdings of $17.4 billion and $8.4 billion, respectively.
Binance released a report reviewing the market flash crash on October 11, 2025. The report stated that the main drivers of the market turmoil on October 11, 2025, included macroeconomic shocks, market maker risk control mechanisms, and Ethereum network congestion. Individual platform issues were not the cause of the flash crash. The widely mentioned de-pegging of three tokens (USDe, BNSOL, and WBETH) occurred at 05:36 (UTC+8), later than the peak market volatility window of 05:10–05:20 (UTC+8), and approximately 75% of the liquidations that day had already occurred before these three tokens were de-pegged. The main driving factor for this event was the overall market-wide risk aversion and the chain reaction triggered by liquidations, rather than individual platform anomalies. Throughout the entire process, Binance's core matching engine, risk verification, and liquidation systems remained stable and uninterrupted.
In the report, Binance acknowledged two technical glitches that day: First, during the concentrated market sell-off from 05:18 to 05:5 (UTC+8), Binance's asset transfer subsystem experienced a performance degradation of approximately 33 minutes, affecting some users' fund transfers between spot, wealth management, and futures accounts. The matching, risk control, and clearing systems continued to operate normally. The fact that some users saw their balances displayed as "0" was due to a front-end rollback display issue and not an asset loss. Second, during the period from 05:36 to 06:15 (UTC+8), with declining market order book depth, on-chain congestion, and a slowdown in cross-platform rebalancing, the USDe, WBETH, and BNSOL indices showed abnormal deviations. The report stated that when liquidity was thin and cross-platform fund flows slowed, price fluctuations within the platform accounted for an excessively high proportion in the index calculation.
The Flow Foundation officially announced the progress of its security incident remediation efforts, confirming the permanent destruction of 87.4 billion counterfeit FLOW tokens. This marks the completion of the technical handling of the security incident on December 27, 2025. The destruction was executed on-chain by the community governance committee. All seized counterfeit assets have been completely removed from circulation, in accordance with the independent recovery plan disclosed in the previous technical review. Verifying nodes completed security patch deployment within 24 hours of the incident, and the network has continued to operate normally since then, with additional security measures introduced at the protocol level. Furthermore, network operation data shows that Flow has returned to a fully healthy state, processing over 3 million transactions in the past week. Core DeFi protocols are all functioning normally. With the security remediation complete, the focus will now be on ecosystem expansion and product development.
Previously, it was reported that Flow suffered a $3.9 million loss due to a hack, but user deposits were not affected. In mid-January, its community governance committee completed the final recovery of counterfeit FLOW tokens that had not been liquidated in centralized exchanges including Binance and HTX.
Jupiter launches permissionless P2P lending marketplace, Jupiter Offerbook
Jupiter has announced the launch of Jupiter Offerbook, a permissionless lending marketplace on Solana that allows trading of all assets. Jupiter Offerbook supports time-based peer-to-peer lending, eliminating the need for price-based liquidation. Users can lend and borrow using assets such as tokens, RWA, and NFTs.
Binance founder CZ unfollowed Solana co-founder Toly's X account.
Binance founder CZ has unfollowed Solana co-founder Toly's X account. This followed Toly's retweet of OKX Star's post accusing Binance of marketing activities that triggered the October crypto market crash, with a sarcastic comment that "it recovered in just 18 months." (SOL recovered to 2021 bull market levels 18 months after the FTX crash).
Toly then tweeted again: "If we're lucky, 10/10 will start an 18-month bear market, which will be a good time to build something."
Important data
BlackRock deposited $240 million worth of Bitcoin and Ethereum into Coinbase.
According to Onchain Lens, BlackRock deposited 2,288 bitcoins ($188.99 million) and 19,644 ETH ($53.72 million) into Coinbase.
According to Scam Sniffer, 10 hours ago, a victim lost 4,556 ETH (worth $12.25 million) after copying the wrong address from a corrupted transaction record.
Institutional holdings
Norway's sovereign wealth fund's indirect Bitcoin exposure surges 149% to 9,573 coins by 2025
According to Vetle Lunde, Head of Research at K33, Norway's sovereign wealth fund's indirect Bitcoin exposure grew by 149% to 9,573 coins in 2025, with its main investments including Strategy, MARA, Metaplanet, Coinbase, and Block. While the national fund does not directly purchase Bitcoin, many of these companies continue to hold it.
Ark Invest increased its holdings in Coinbase, Circle, ARKB, and Bullish shares yesterday.
Ark Invest yesterday purchased 7,565 shares of Coinbase, 23,420 shares of Circle, and 35,360 shares of ARK 21Shares Bitcoin (ticker symbol: ARKB) through its fund ARKF. It also acquired 64,211 shares of Bullish.
