Crypto's falling apart - here's what triggered it

Plus: OpenAI made research writing weirdly easy

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Crypto Market Cap: $2.81T -4.77% (24H)   Name   Price 24H 7D Bitcoin BTC $83,018.20 -2.51% -7.23% Ethereum ETH $2,729.26 -3.61% -7.32% BNB BNB $852.03 -1.45% -4.17% XRP XRP $1.77 -1.68% -7.28% Prices as of 11:00 AM EST. Click here to see live data.

If one of your New Year's resolutions was to be more positive in 2026... I'd suggest you don't look at the charts today 🥲

Yeah... everything's drowning in red.

👉 Bitcoin dropped to $81K (a level we haven't touched since April 2025);

👉 Ethereum decreased to $2.7K;

👉 Matter of fact, if you look at the top 50 cryptos, you'll see that nearly all of them are down 3% - 9% for the day;

👉 The total crypto market cap shed $180B;

👉 Bitcoin ETFs had $817.8M in outflows, Ethereum ETFs saw $155.7M head for the exit;

👉 Extreme Fear is back...

... Do you need a napkin to wipe them tears yet? 🙃

(I know I do.)

This was mainly because markets repriced around US monetary policy staying tighter for longer.

There's renewed focus on the upcoming transition at the Fed: President Trump formally nominated Kevin Warsh to replace Jerome Powell as Fed chair when Powell's term ends in mid-2026.

... And Warsh has a long reputation for being more hawkish on inflation and less comfortable with easy money than Powell.

That said, some analysts point out that Warsh's recent public statements have been closer to Trump's preferred narrative of eventual rate cuts and monetary "regime change," which suggests he may not be a straight-up traditional hawk in the current environment.

Translation: things are uncertain. And markets hate unclear paths.

Once uncertainty enters the room, the rest of the day basically writes itself.

When traders can't clearly price the future path of rates, they don't debate it - they reduce risk.

That's exactly what happened.

👉 Bonds sold off first, pushing Treasury yields higher, which is the market's way of saying "money just got more expensive in our models."

👉 As yields moved up, equities rolled over.

👉 And once stocks started wobbling, crypto - fully wired into the risk-on circuit - followed immediately.

Basically, today felt heavy not because something broke, but because the future got fuzzier.

So... now what?

👉 Watch whether $81K BTC holds;

👉 Keep an eye on ETF flows;

👉 And finally, watch the vibe. Are traders re-leveraging immediately, or staying cautious? Does volatility compress, or stay elevated? Markets usually tell you how scared they really are long before the news does.