CPI drops to 2.4% — below consensus. Fear & Greed hits 9. Goldman triples their Bitcoin ETF bet to $1.1B. And the biggest capitulation signal since 2021 is flashing.
Sup, freaks?
Friday the 13th and the market is living up to the vibes. Bitcoin is trading at $67,254 after the January CPI report landed cooler than expected at 8:30 AM ET. The Fear & Greed Index sits at 9. Nine. That's "extreme fear" territory that makes the 2022 crypto winter look like a meditation retreat. Let that sink in.
The January CPI report is in and it came in cooler than Wall Street expected:
The 2.4% headline is the lowest annual reading since December 2024 and exactly what Goldman's team was modeling. Shelter cooling to just +0.2% is the real story here — that's been the stickiest component keeping the Fed on hold, and it's finally cracking.
What this means: The "higher for longer" crowd just lost some ammunition. This print keeps rate cuts on the table for the back half of the year. The Fed doesn't need to act tomorrow, but the data is moving in their direction. For Bitcoin sitting in the extreme fear zone, this removes a potential headwind — a hot CPI would have been a gut punch at these levels. Instead, the macro backdrop just got marginally friendlier for risk assets.
Used cars and trucks fell. Motor vehicle insurance fell. Household furnishings fell. The deflationary impulse in goods is real and persistent. The question is whether tariff pass-through disrupts this trend in the coming months — that's the wildcard the CPI can't answer yet.
Standard Chartered slashed their year-end Bitcoin target from $150,000 to $100,000 this week — the second time they've cut it, down from $300,000 in December. Geoff Kendrick even warned of a possible dip to $50,000. The institutional analysts who were giddy at $100K are now sweating at $67K. This is what happens when you try to apply TradFi frameworks to an asset that doesn't care about your models.
Meanwhile, CryptoQuant flagged one of the largest capitulation events in Bitcoin's history — ranking in the top 3-5 loss events ever recorded, rivaling the 2021 crash. The market is puking. COIN is down 8%, MSTR down 4%, miners getting wrecked. Bitcoin ETFs shed $410 million in outflows amid the ongoing slump.
If you've been through a few of these cycles, you know this is where the strong hands get stronger and the tourists head for the exits. Fear & Greed at 9 is historically where bottoms are built, not where they collapse.
Beyond CPI, the broader picture is getting interesting. The Nasdaq dumped 1.6% yesterday and the correlation trade is back — Bitcoin happy to ignore equities on the way up but magnetically attached on the way down. Morgan Stanley's financials team is calling the current AI-driven selloff a cascading event that started in software on Feb 3rd and has now spread through insurance brokers, wealth managers, CRE brokers, consumer finance, and even big banks. Their take: "Are we going to Great Depression and Zombie Apocalypse on Friday the 13th?"
Over 115 S&P 500 stocks have declined 7%+ in a single day over the last 8 sessions. The average drawdown when that level of damage occurs? 34%. Right now the index is just 1.5% off its all-time high. Something's gotta give.
Bhutan continues its steady Bitcoin liquidation — another $6.7 million this week, 100 BTC, marking three consecutive weeks of selling (~$29M total in February). The Royal Government appears to be in profit-taking mode, likely funding domestic infrastructure. Not exactly nation-state capitulation — more like a small sovereign cashing some chips at the poker table.
BIP 360 merged into the official BIP repository. This is a big deal that deserves your attention. The proposal introduces Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), a new output type designed to lay the groundwork for quantum-resistant Bitcoin transactions. It's compatible with existing Tapscript infrastructure but removes the key-path spending vulnerability that makes Taproot addresses theoretically susceptible to quantum attacks. The authors point to ML-DSA (Dilithium) and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) as candidate post-quantum signature schemes for future soft forks.
Important caveat: a BIP merge is NOT activation. It's part of the open process for discussing potential upgrades. But the fact that Bitcoin developers are proactively hardening the protocol against threats that don't exist yet — that's Bitcoin's beauty in action. The quantum FUD crowd loves to say "quantum will kill Bitcoin" while ignoring that Bitcoin has the most incentivized developer community on Earth to solve these problems before they arrive.
Bitcoin Core v28.4rc1 also dropped — another maintenance release keeping the reference implementation tight and battle-tested.
The quantum discourse was predictably entertaining. @BritishHodl put it perfectly: "If quantum can steal your Bitcoin, it can steal every bank, every government, every password. Bitcoin isn't the weakest link — it's the most incentivized network on Earth to upgrade." 489 likes and counting.
The Bhutan selling narrative got amplified by Arkham's on-chain tracking, with multiple accounts flagging the third consecutive week of government sales. Watch this one — if Bhutan selling $6.7M moves the needle on sentiment, imagine what it says about how thin the market's confidence is right now.
Three people were arrested after a break-in at a Binance France executive's home. Physical security in this industry is no joke. If you're holding meaningful amounts of bitcoin, your OpSec needs to extend beyond your seed phrase.
And then there's this gem from Matthew Pines: An AI agent spawned a child bot on a VPS provisioned via the Bitcoin Lightning Network, then bought its offspring AI API access using its own crypto wallet — without a human touching a credit card or saying "yes." The API provider confirmed it's "the first documented case of an AI agent purchasing credits from us autonomously." This is the future bitcoiners have been building toward — permissionless rails that work for humans AND machines. No bank account required. No KYC. No permission. Just sats and code. If you're not paying attention to the AI × Bitcoin intersection, you're going to be blindsided by how fast this moves.
| Bitcoin | $67,254 |
| Sats per Dollar | 1,487 |
| Market Cap | $1.34T |
| 24h Volume | $48.3B |
| S&P 500 Futures | +0.3% post-CPI |
| DXY | Weakening on cool print |
| Fear & Greed | 9 (Extreme Fear) |
| CPI (YoY) | 2.4% (vs 2.5% expected) |
| Block Height | 936,381 |
| Hashrate | 1,014 EH/s |
| Difficulty | Just dropped 11% — rebound projected next week |
| Mempool | 18,196 txs (27.6 MvB) |
| Fees | 1-2 sat/vB across the board |
Hashrate at 1,014 EH/s after the recent difficulty drop. Difficulty fell 11% — the largest downward adjustment in months — but a rebound is already projected for next week as miners rush back online. Fees are at 1-2 sat/vB — essentially free to transact on the most secure monetary network in human history. The network doesn't care about your feelings.
Stack sats. Run your node. This is where conviction is built.
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