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Bitcoin has limped into 2026, flailing in the wake of a gold price boom that’s catapulted it to an eye-watering $34 trillion market capitalization (triggering predictions of even more gains to come).
The bitcoin price, which plummeted under $100,000 per bitcoin in November, has struggled to regain its early 2025 momentum as Bank Of America’s chief executive issues a serious $6 trillion warning.
Now, with bitcoin and crypto primed for an imminent, “massive” shock, bitcoin-backing BlackRock fixed income chief Rick Rieder has become a surprise favorite to be named as U.S. president Donald Trump’s pick as Federal Reserve chair.

Le azioni statunitensi spingono al rialzo grazie a un sentiment di rischio migliorato - Nasdaq in aumento dello 0,9%

Le azioni statunitensi sono nuovamente aumentate nella sessione di ieri, poiché il sentiment di rischio ha continuato a migliorare attorno alla Groenlandia e alle preoccupazioni sui dazi europei. Il Dow Jones è salito dello 0,63% per chiudere a 49.384, mentre l'S&P 500 ha guadagnato lo 0,55% per chiudere a 6.913. Il Nasdaq ha sovraperformato, aumentando dello 0,91% per chiudere a 23.436. I rendimenti dei Treasury statunitensi sono aumentati, con il rendimento a 2 anni in aumento di 2,2 punti base al 3,607% e il benchmark a 10 anni che ha segnato un aumento di 0,2 punti base al 4,245%. Nonostante il movimento nei rendimenti, il dollaro statunitense è stato venduto pesantemente, con il DXY che è sceso dello 0,47% a 98,29. I mercati delle materie prime sono stati misti. I prezzi del petrolio sono diminuiti poiché il miglioramento del sentiment di rischio ha pesato sul greggio, con il Brent che è sceso dell'1,47% a $64,28 al barile e il WTI che è sceso dell'1,75% a $59,56. Al contrario, i metalli preziosi hanno continuato la loro potente corsa. L'oro ha sfidato il contesto di rischio più ampio, aumentando del 2,15% per stabilirsi a $4.936,02, mentre l'argento ha anche raggiunto nuovi massimi, rafforzando la forte domanda per beni durevoli.

Ether is the worst performer among the major cryptos, down more than 6% over the past 24 hours and tumbling below $3,000.
What to know:
Bitcoin added to earlier losses, falling below $90,000 in U.S. morning trade, while ether dropped below $3,000.
The declines occurred amid a global risk-off move as Japan's bond market collapsed on Tuesday and President Trump raised new trade threats against the European Union.
Altcoins are faring worse than bitcoin, with ether's 7% decline leading among the major cryptos.
Bitcoin
BTC
$90,055.69
dropped 3% to below $90,000 during U.S. morning trading on Tuesday after a meltdown in Japan’s government bond market combined with U.S. President Trump’s ongoing tariff threats against Europe to push risk assets sharply lower.
Ether
ETH
$3,028.95
fell more than 7% over the past 24 hours, sending the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network back below a crucial $3,000 mark for the first time since January 2.
Highlighting altcoin weakness, bitcoin's grip over the crypto market has been steadily climbing. The bitcoin dominance metric, which shows the largest crypto's market share of the overall digital asset market capitalization, rose to 59.8% on Tuesday, according to TradingView data.
"Volatility is back and so in keeping with risk assets, I expect bitcoin to trade lower in response and altcoins would likely be most impacted short-term here," Paul Howard at trading firm Wincent said in a note.
The Nasdaq is lower by nearly 2% on Tuesday. The Nikkei fell 2.5% overnight, while Germany's DAX declined 1%. Precious metals, though, continue to be the preferred safe haven, with gold soaring 3% and silver 7%, both hitting new record highs.
With today’s decline, bitcoin has given up much of its 2026 gains, now trading just 3% above its level at the start of the year.

According to Grok, XRP can rise to a new all-time high of $5 in the first three months of the year, whereas PI can reach a maximum of $0.50.
Pi Network’s PI and Ripple’s XRP are among the top-trending cryptocurrencies, driven by the large number of investors and frequent developments across both ecosystems.

We decided to check which asset could deliver stronger performance in the first quarter of the year and, for that purpose, asked four of the most popular AI-powered chatbots for their assistance.

Does XRP Have the Edge?
According to ChatGPT, XRP is better positioned for posting significant gains in the coming months due to its deep liquidity, solid reputation, and the removal of regulatory uncertainty (after the Ripple vs. SEC case was officially closed last year). It estimated that the maximum price the asset can reach throughout Q1 is $6, although it will require major catalysts.

PI, on the other hand, was described as “a longer-horizon, narrative-driven play.” ChatGPT suggested that without support from a leading exchange like Binance, the price may continue to decline in the near future. Recall that several hours ago, PI nosedived to approximately $0.18, which is quite close to the all-time low witnessed in October 2025.

Grok, the chatbot integrated within the social media platform X, shared a similar stance. It claimed that XRP has “the clearer path to meaningful upside in the short term, while PI remains trapped in a high-risk, low-momentum consolidation phase with limited near-term catalysts.”

Furthermore, Grok praised the cross-border token for its growing adoption and the advancement of the entire Ripple ecosystem, such as the progress of the stablecoin RLUSD. It predicted that XRP could explode above $5 during the first quarter of the year, whereas PI can reach a maximum of $0.50 if perfect conditions are met.

More in Favor of XRP
Perplexity and Google’s Gemini also leaned towards Ripple’s cryptocurrency. The former argued that XRP holds a stronger position to outperform PI in Q1, supported by institutional momentum, regulatory clarity, and ETF inflows.

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Ripple Streak Resumes: What Happened With the Spot XRP ETFs Last Week?
The interest in spot XRP exchange-traded funds is indeed impressive. The companies that have launched such products so far include Canary Capital, Bitwise, Grayscale, Franklin Templeton, and 21Shares, and the cumulative total net flow since day one (in mid-November) has reached almost $1.3 billion.

According to Gemini, XRP and PI have two very different market dynamics. It claimed that the former has the upper hand because it is a “mature asset,” whereas the latter has been in a “make or break” phase over the past several months.

“XRP has transitioned from a speculative asset to a regulated, institutional tool with clear demand from ETFs. In contrast, Pi Network is still in a “discovery phase,” where the high volume of circulating tokens from years of mobile mining acts as a heavy anchor on its price,” it concluded.

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La nuova settimana promette di essere intensa per gli appassionati di criptovalute, con notevoli fluttuazioni di mercato previste. Le recenti dichiarazioni dell'Unione Europea hanno significativamente aumentato i rischi per la settimana dal 19 al 25 gennaio. I trader di criptovalute dovrebbero prepararsi a giorni difficili quando si prevedono liquidazioni sostanziali in entrambe le direzioni. Sebbene i mercati siano pieni di sorprese, le prospettive per la settimana attuale non sembrano favorevoli.
Tensioni UE Corte Suprema e Tariffe
Tensioni UE

Meanwhile, the PI token continues to move sideways with little-to-no volatility.
With just over a week into the new year, the Core Team behind Pi Network has published its first new update, which will allow developers to integrate Pi payments into their apps in under ten minutes.
Despite this, the project’s native token has failed to make any major move over the past month, even though the broader crypto market has shown revival signs after January 2.
Pi Network’s New Update
The blog post from the team, published on Friday, indicated that they have released a new developer library to reduce the Pi payment integration process to under ten minutes. The library bundles the Pi SDK with backend APIs into a single, streamlined setup, the team said, which aims to ‘significantly’ reduce the amount of time needed to add payments to apps.
The post explained that simplifying the payment integration will allow developers to spend more time creating and improving products for users, which aligns with the project’s longer-term strategy to “strengthen and expand Pi’s utility-driven ecosystem where apps are practical, usable, and ready for real-world adoption.”
At first, the update will support commonly used stacks, which makes the library immediately usable for many existing apps. Developers will be able to use JavaScript or React on the frontend, while backend support includes Next.js and Ruby on Rails.
After an eventful 2025, the team reassured its community that it would continue to build in 2026 and encouraged developers to do the same to expand utilities for users across the entire Pi ecosystem.
PI Price Stagnation
The cryptocurrency market charted impressive gains in the first week of the new year, with many altcoins skyrocketing by double digits. However, Pi Network’s native token couldn’t follow suit. It was also in the green for a couple of days, but its move was capped at under $0.22. It now trades just under $0.21, which means there’s no actual movement on a daily, weekly, or even monthly scale.
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The number of tokens to be unlocked in the following 30 days has also flattened, with under 4.5 million coins reaching investors daily on average. There are a few spikes to around 5.5 million, which might intensify the immediate selling pressure at times.

Il trading degli ETF su Ethereum e Solana si è accelerato bruscamente all'inizio di gennaio, in un contesto di crescente interesse istituzionale per gli asset crittografici.
I fondi negoziati in borsa (ETF) su Ethereum e Solana hanno registrato volumi di scambio insolitamente elevati nelle ultime sessioni.
Un tale andamento indica un aumento dell'attività degli investitori poiché i mercati degli ETF per le principali criptovalute continuano a maturare.
Interesse crescente da parte degli istituti
Nell'analisi più recente, Santiment ha riferito che il volume di trading degli ETF su Ethereum ha raggiunto livelli record all'inizio di gennaio, con i giorni 2 e 5 che hanno registrato i volumi giornalieri più alti della storia, escluso un singolo anomalo evento avvenuto l'21 agosto. L'azienda di analisi ha affermato che l'aumento continuo del volume di trading degli ETF su Ethereum negli ultimi settimane si distingue dai picchi di breve durata, tipici delle reazioni di mercato a breve termine.

With the BOJ letting rates run to levels not seen in decades, the structural "term premium" is rising, a direct headwind for long-duration crypto exposure.
Tokyo bond traders have a new number burned into their screens this week, 3.5%.

For most of the past two decades, Japan’s long end was the place the world went to forget about interest rates. If you were a pension fund trying to match liabilities, a bank trying to park liquidity, or a global macro desk hunting cheap funding, Japanese government bonds were the quiet corner of the room.
That corner is getting loud.
Japan’s 30-year government bond yield has risen to roughly 3.5%, a level that would have sounded absurd in the years when “Japan” and “near zero” were essentially the same sentence. TradingEconomics shows the move as a fresh step higher in early January, after a year of steady pressure building in the long end.
If you only trade Bitcoin, you might be tempted to scroll past a Japanese bond chart and get back to the candles. The problem is that Japan isn’t just another country’s bond market. Japan has been a pillar holding up the whole global price of money.

When that pillar shifts, the vibrations travel, and Bitcoin is now wired into the same global risk system as everything else.

The Japan shift that matters for crypto
Japan is exiting an era that shaped a generation of markets, cheap funding, abundant central bank liquidity, and a sense that rates would stay pinned forever.
The Bank of Japan has moved its short-term policy rate up to 0.75%, with officials publicly signalling they can keep tightening if the economy and prices track their forecasts.
Reuters reported Governor Kazuo Ueda reiterated that path this week, and the BOJ itself lists its next meeting for January 22 to 23, a date that will matter far beyond Tokyo.

Ethereum e Solana potrebbero prepararsi per la loro prossima grande esplosione, ma una cosa potrebbe decidere tutto: la regolamentazione.
Secondo il Chief Investment Officer di Bitwise, Matt Hougan, entrambe le blockchain potrebbero raggiungere nuovi massimi storici se gli Stati Uniti approvassero il tanto discusso Clarity Act, una legge progettata per definire chiaramente come vengono regolati gli asset crypto.
Ethereum ha già mostrato forza quest'anno. Dopo essere sceso vicino a 1.500 dollari all'inizio del ciclo, ETH è rimbalzato bruscamente e ha quasi triplicato il suo valore al picco. Questa ripresa ha aiutato a ripristinare la fiducia degli investitori, specialmente tra le istituzioni che osservano dalla panchina.

La storia on-chain di XRP si è rafforzata anche se il suo prezzo è rimasto bloccato in una posizione neutra il 31 dicembre 2025 - scambiando intorno a $1.87 - suggerendo che l'adozione è avanzata silenziosamente sotto la superficie.
Cosa è cambiato sotto il cofano
- L'attività degli asset del mondo reale (RWA) di XRPL è aumentata di quasi il 18% rispetto ai 30 giorni precedenti, rendendolo la rete RWA in più rapida crescita (dietro Canton) e superando Ethereum, Solana e Avalanche in espansione relativa. Questo indica una crescente adozione della finanza tokenizzata e casi d'uso focalizzati sulla conformità.