This Week in Crypto: Trump Tariffs OUT! What This Means For Cryptocurrency

All right, thanks for tuning in everybody. Um, on this pre-recorded This Week in Crypto video, we're going to be going over the week that has passed as well as what looks like will be coming up for the final week of February as we get into uh March and beyond. Obviously, there's been a lot of talk of uh consecutive months in the red. Um, we've seen right now as it stands, five consecutive months of uh bleeding in the crypto markets going back to the very beginning of October. And even though we had the all-time high in October, it actually ended up being the first of the past five red months. So, we are in quite a slump now. And as we've talked about on previous videos, there's a difference between a giant retrace all at once versus a giant retrace that's spread out over the span of multiple months very gradually. kind of like what we've been seeing where, you know, every month we see on average like a 10 to$15,000 um market value drop in Bitcoin's price ever since the 126k all-time high back on October 5th, 2025. So this has been kind of a slow painful bleeding process for a lot of traders and are and investors who are uh based on sentiment showing to be pretty fed up and pretty impatient and frustrated. Um not fearful, right? Because fearful and um the panic selling type of vibes tend to come when there's a very sudden drop in the markets and we haven't been seeing that so much. It's been just like a, you know, wake me up when crypto stops bleeding kind of situation for a lot of people. Um, and what we look at now is the one day changes, which actually are pretty promising. We saw this last Friday, too, when I updated um in a pre-recorded video. And, uh, Bitcoin is once again moving up along with stock and gold prices. Uh, they're not significant jumps. Yes, it's a lot of green here, but you know, the axis is only up to 6% at most with Cardono and Litecoin appearing to lead the way. Squeeze right up there, too. All just below plus 6% on the day, but um you know, the 7-day changes you can see down here, slumping for Bitcoin and Ethereum and most of crypto. I know these are a lot of stable coins, but you get the idea. It's just um seemingly a lot of people who are slowly getting out of altcoins. It's weird because at the beginning of the week after there was some optimism from last Friday, we saw a bunch of alt season spamming and that quickly dried up as altcoins started to take a dip. So, yes, it's been a week of kind of moving sideways with today, Friday, being a little more uh encouraging, just like kind of what we saw last week, but it wasn't as much of a slump this week as it was all of last week. Uh, looking at the price comparisons of Bitcoin versus the S&P 500 versus gold, we can see that Bitcoin has been moving um sideways as expected, while gold has rebounded pretty well. And even the S&P has moved pretty well back upwards just in the past 3 days. If I hold down shift here, you can see Bitcoin's up 0. 6%, the S&P 500's up 0. 9% and gold's up just about 4%. So, um I would still argue in a weird way there's a heavy correlation between stocks and Bitcoin. It's a little tough to see because of the big separation that happened at the turn of the month about three weeks ago. But if we go back a full year and we kind of zoom out when in doubt, so to speak, you'll see a little more gradual movement here, especially if we kind of take out this part. There were two waves where Bitcoin kind of fell way below the S&P 500 here in uh late October to mid November and then again from mid January down to early February. But if I just scoot this over a little bit, you'll see a lot more correlation there before the second break in correlation happens. And now it appears that they're kind of working tightly in unison again. So this is concerning because it kind of is implying that a lot of big capital has gradually been dropping out. So whenever there's a minor slump in the S&P, Bitcoin has a bigger slump and doesn't recover as well. Um, so I'll come back to MVRVS in a moment, but this is the main thing that I'm looking at here. It does appear, oops, yeah, it does appear that the retail traders, the supply held by those with under 0. 01

BTC, they're just continuing to buy any little dips they can find. They think that prices are way too low. Um, and you know, especially if we see like a 2% 3% drop in a day, you see retails buy fingers just continuing to um press like crazy to try to get any dips. But, uh, historically, we don't want to see retail continuing to buy with confidence. We want to see them being fearful. And so far we haven't seen a lot of reasons for that uh for this trend to change because retail is just I would assume kind of going back to every other big dip that's happened in the past three to five years especially the most recent one which was back in 2022 uh where Bitcoin lost over half its market cap. You know people have kind of learned their lesson then and said you know no matter how low Bitcoin goes it's eventually going to pop back up. And I just Based on what I've been reading on my timeline and what's been showing on social trends, it's just a lot of denial that this dip can last much longer, which as we know can increase the likelihood of the dip lasting longer, especially when institutional money uh those holding 10 to 10k BTC in key stakeholder wallets, they are not uh moving in the right direction either. Yeah, they had just a minor bump up in the past 24 hours, but you can see here, I mean, just since mid January up until now, five weeks ago, yeah, they've dropped almost half a percentage of the entire supply of Bitcoin, which is a ton in the grand scheme of things, especially just in the course of five weeks. Going back to MVRV here. Um, so this is one of the short-term promising signs. When we look at Bitcoin, the 30-day MVRV is a little bit below -6%. Ethereum is 15%. Cardano's at -2. XRP is at4 and a half. Chain links at about 72. All of these are under 0% and that implies that we are uh at least showing opportunity zones uh because of the fact that the average trading returns on these top cap assets are well underwater still. The more below 0% a coin is, the more likely we do see some sort of relief rally to at least get them back to that 0% in what is a zero sum game for every single asset no matter what time frame of MVRV you look at. So the short term in my opinion still looks pretty promising here. I wouldn't be shocked if Bitcoin makes a move to 70K in the next couple of days or you know maybe it goes sideways during the weekend because that's how weekends have been in recent memory. But you know the rest of Friday, some of Monday, we may say see a little bit of a relief rally and then the question is are institutionals going to start buying back in as a result of that getting a little bit encouraged themselves or is retail just going to go crazy and start FOMOing them in themselves? Uh the former would be a good sign. The latter would be uh concerning. I also wanted to point out on the sentiment side, this is a uh grouping of all the calls of Bitcoin going to between 50K to 100K, which it's been in for a while now, and then 150K all the way to 200K. Um, what we really are looking for are less and less of these calls. We've obviously never seen 150K to 200K Bitcoin. The highest we got was 126K back on October 5th. But if we're seeing less, that means the FOMO and the visions of the Lambos and all of the memes out there that kind of indicate that there's a lot of optimism means that's all kind of drying up and we're finally getting to a point where people don't really see long-term growth for Bitcoin. You know, obviously at a crypto company, uh, we do we think that crypto is going to go up substantially in the long run, but it takes a lot of these kind of short-term hurdles, uh, needing to be leapt over in order for us to kind of get there. And right now, retail still shows a little bit of optimism, especially at the turn of the month, which is interesting, but then it's dropped off a little. So, it's not a bad sign that I see this. Um, the 50K to 100K is kind of going down. Also, this is more or less kind of just showing that the amount of commenters on crypto in general is moving down due to

retail becoming less interested and um, you know, staking and kind of more passive income being enticing to people right now, which is normal when we see an extended slump like this. People don't want to make the wrong moves. they don't want to trade as much in general, which we'll look at in a moment with the onchain metrics. Um, but inevitably we're going to get some people piling back in from one of two ways. is either Bitcoin continues to crash and suddenly people are salivating over, you know, sub 40k Bitcoin or something or we rebound back toward 90 to 100K and suddenly all those people who dropped out over these past few weeks are coming back in and um offering their opinions. They're buying. Um typically, you know, people react in a lagging fashion compared to what price does. So, if we see a rebound, you're going to see a lot of people FOMOing, not, you know, selling on the rise like many of the more smart key stakeholders do. Um, I'm going to also show you the alpha narratives that just updated today. They update every Friday. Uh, shout out to our wonderful developers who have put this great chart together and keep it updating. the uh Lunar New Year um is seeing a huge spike because of the timing of the Lunar New Year going on. Um but we'll also see plenty of crypto topics like whales. And you'll see here on the left side of my screen, social posts highlight intense whale activity, huge onchain transfers and exchange deposits of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Um analysts are warning about exchange inflows and they're often preceding selling pressure while other metrics uh other metrics Bitfinex long exposure a three-year high spot buys versus retail futures leverage point to squeeze risk and mixed bullish conviction. Market intelligence providers are actively tracking and monetizing these signals. So whales are a big topic as they should be. I'm happy to see that the crypto community is putting such a priority on uh monitoring whale activity right now because they really are always going to be what drive markets up and down. Um, and I do think there's a little more I more of a collective eye on them due to uh people awaiting a big buy to signal that they come back in. But I still like looking at it in like a group fashion where we look at all the 10 to 10k wallets together which hold a little over twothirds of all of the supply and when they move up together that's the big thing not just one or two um you know whale buys all of a sudden even if it's a 10 million or hundred million dollar isolated buy that's not always enough to get excited but I digress. um vibe coding uh AIdriven multi- aent apps. Um you've probably noticed an increased talk about claude and various bots and stuff. They're actually pretty impressive and um we have a company out there that is using our API actually and connecting it to a uh cloudbot right now that is doing some pretty wonderful things. So we'll be keeping you guys posted in the upcoming weeks about that. Um, other minor bumps I see here, uh, the US war with Iran, um, and the rising tensions there. We've got Valentine's Day, which happened last week, um, real world assets, things like that. And then this big one here at the top is AI, um, which saw a big spike at the beginning of this week. But in short, I definitely recommend you check out this because it really is a great way to correlate when a subject spikes, you know, like memecoins and how that impacts crypto at the time it happens in isolation compared to everything else. And it's not just looking at all the social volume and dominance at the same time. like we're seeing isolated incidents where, you know, a certain subject gets talked about because it's in the news all of a sudden or a huge Telegram group suddenly is interested in memecoins and that can drastically shift the direction of markets. So, it's definitely really awesome to be able to have access to this kind of data. Uh moving on to a little bit of objective sentiment uh analysis. What we can see based on the ratio of positive versus negative sentiment for Bitcoin. I'm going to make this just daily to zoom out a little bit. We do see a rise and that's coinciding with excuse me. I want to make sure we're up to date here. That's better. Yeah, we're still seeing that rise, but it's kind of stayed in neutral territory as we've gone back and forth here. This is just today's

rise which is pretty mild. Uh but sentiment has at least recovered back to the middle ground when it was very bearish understandably so at the turn of the month here and when we bottomed out nearly going below 60k on February 4th and 5th. If we switch to Ethereum, you'll notice it's actually quite a bit higher, which is interesting because Ethereum has been um struggling to get any sort of momentum really going all the way back to the uh final week of January. So, sentiment looks to be a little more positive on average than Bitcoin. Maybe uh the retail community thinks that it's the better buy due to the u the more regressed and suppressed price action that we've seen from them. And if we look at XRP also sitting kind of in the middle at the moment, um we'll look at BNB as well. Yeah, it's been pretty low as of late. Obviously, Binance had that big fallout in reputation, which I think has kind of been swept a little under the rug by now, but um one to two weeks ago, there was a pretty big fallout about the October 10th liquidations that uh caused a lot of people to lose a pretty impactful amount of money. But BNB itself appears to be fine. Its price is sitting way back down at 618 after, you know, just one month ago, five weeks ago to be exact, it was well uh above 900 around 950. It's dropped 35% in five weeks, which is more than most. Um, one other one I wanted to look at was Sana. And Sana is a little under average with its sentiment. That's a decent sign. Um, I put out an article about Salana yesterday, which you guys can check out to see what's been going on there. Um, I also talked about the Binance incident incident, by the way, about a week ago. So, feel free to check both of those out. If you'd like more context, just head to our insights page and you'll see everything you need to see. Here's the deep dive on Salana. And the Binance one, I can find it. There we go. Is Binance just a scapegoat for pissed-off traders or is the hot seat deserved? Um, and it's got a lot of jam-packed information about there for you for everyone to read. Okay. Onchain. Um, yeah, let's do that first and then I'll look at the historical trends to finish things off. Looking at Bitcoin's network activity, what are we seeing right now? Well, transaction volume is continuing to dry up. It's moving down over time. The active addresses are um also very concerningly moving down network growth as well. So um yeah, pretty much all of the indicators that show utility are indicative of a declining network that is being used less and less. This isn't necessarily a bearish sign. It just means that we are in a spot where people are kind of sitting on their hands. They don't want to panic sell. um FOMO buy just because prices are so far below where they were four months ago. But um it does look like the amount of you know active trades per day is continuing to fall off significantly along with the amount of new wallets being created. Uh we went over MVRV. In addition to the 30-day MVRV being pretty low for Bitcoin, the 365 day is still sitting below negative 30%. So when both of these combined are well below zero, that's a very good sign that we can recover. Funding ratewise, um yeah, it's we were seeing a lot of shorts when we were talking about things last week. Those shorts have dissipated a bit. We're still seeing a pretty healthy mix. So I'm not I don't think it's a strong enough signal to really rely on until we see one extreme or the other. I won't be shocked if we start seeing another big uh dose of shorts coming in. If we fall back down to 65k or below soon, whale transactions have been declining just like with active addresses and circulation, you know, not a major surprise there. Just less action overall on the network. The network continues to be dormant as mean dollar invested age moves up. Uh we saw a very mild uptick in network realized profit loss here. That's a good sign because it's happening on the rise. I can make this a little more granular. So you can see here this network realized profit is happening as the trend is mostly upward.

That can often indicate that we are going to continue to climb a little bit further. Um I also want to point out that there was a big exchange in flow spike. So, you know, you may be a little excited about this as a uh a sign that we can build off of this momentum, but this is a sign that a bunch of coins have just moved to uh exchanges in a very short amount of time. These are just 15minute intervals, and there were nearly 5,000 BTC moved to exchanges, which often precludes a sell-off. Um, so be a little weary of that. social volume and dominance, nothing too special there. Total amount of holders is continuing to climb slightly over time. So, yeah, as far as onchain metrics go, it's um not painting the best picture. The one signal that I like a lot is MVRV. I think just from a regression to the mean standpoint, like there will be some mild relief rally. It might come very slow um and it may be there may be a little more pain before it happens but we are in negative territory which objectively means that we're underwater uh the average traders are underwater and there is less risk right now compared to the average moment if you were to at least open a position buy in doesn't mean we're immediately going to you're going to be rewarded right away for that but it means that the downside is a lot more limited than the upside. Uh and then finally, as promised, the historical crypto trends are showing that it's mostly decline. You see the big tariff news. I probably should have opened with this story, but um it looks like by a vote of six to three, the uh many of the tariffs that Trump has instated are um now going to be dialed back. And there's discussion of potential um repayments to companies and countries that were affected by tariffs over these past 10ish months or so since he implemented them last April. Um I won't get too into the politics of it and I think there are plenty of uh content uh outlets out there that are covering this more substantially. We may do a deep dive, but I I'd rather do it in written form. So, I have all of the proper research on what this means. It sounds like it's still very early as people figure out what the result of this is going to be. But, as you remember, tariffs have mostly been um a bit of an anchor for crypto. And with the news that tariffs will be a lot harder to integrate, at least without a lot more hoops and, you know, further um discussions in the Senate and House. I think this is objectively some good long-term news. Um we're not really seeing much of a shortterm reaction to it. I think this mild uptick we're seeing on Friday is mostly just because crypto is staying locked in with what the S&P 500's mild gains are doing today. But objectively, this is very good news for um crypto assuming things are as good as they sound and we aren't going to be dealing so much with the tariff what you know will he won't he situation with Trump's actions. Um besides that, you know, Trump in general, you see the uptick here. That's obviously going to be associated with the tariff news. Um inflation discussions are moving down. ETF discussions are moving down, alt season discussions are moving down. Um meme coins pretty much across the board. Maybe a mild uptick in AI agents, but that's a pretty niche subject. Um, I did have ETF data preloaded. Let me see if I can find it Here it is. In my sea of different tabs here. All right, we got to get dark mode on because I'm way too used to that now. So, white screens just blind me. I'm sure some of you can relate to that. Um, ETF volume overall for Bitcoin, yeah, it's stayed pretty far down lately. We did have that big spike when we crashed and almost went below 60K, but that's recovered. As far as Ethereum's total volume, yep, it's kind of the same boat. It's really fallen back down hard going back to Yeah, it's at its lowest point of 2026 right now. We also have Solana's ETF volume staying pretty dormant at the moment. By the way, you have access to all of this, too. This is a free dashboard that you're more than welcome to check out and start using. Bitcoin's overall inflows and outflows

show more outflows over the past week, which is a good sign. We've kind of come to the conclusion that this is a bit of a counter indicator these days with a lot more retailers using it than um when it when they first came out. So, good to see some mild outflows coming in. Kind of a sign of crowd FUD. Uh, if we can get to Ethereum's flow, pretty similar, up and down, more down than up. And then finally, Solana's ETF flows have been up a little. Um, because it's so new, you rarely see more outflows because it's still most people that are first discovering it and bringing in money rather than taking it out. But if altcoins get really scary in the next couple months, you might start to see more big outflows. But that's about it, guys. Would love to hear your thoughts about how you're seeing the markets yourself. Um, if you're stumbling upon this video, please make sure you subscribe to our channel. It's incredibly helpful as Santiment continues to grow um and uh reach more eyeballs out there. Um, I'm Brian and on behalf of the Santiment team, thank you so much and we will talk to you next week.