Home Blog Page 1318

Bitcoin price up after Fed chair vows to fight new Trump attack – DL News

0

  • Powell vows to hold firm as Trump launches new attack on Fed.
  • Bitcoin’s price briefly jumped 2% before returning to just above $90,000.

Bitcoin’s price jumped 2% on Sunday after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell vowed to hold firm against a new attack from US President Donald Trump.

In Trump’s latest salvo, the Justice Department served the Fed with grand jury subpoenas and is threatening a criminal indictment. That means the DOJ is legally forcing the Fed to hand over evidence relating to Powell’s testimony on office renovations to the Senate Banking Committee in June 2025 to decide if a crime was committed.

“This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure,” Powell said.

The move by the White House is a serious escalation in the long-running feud between Trump and Powell. No American president has ever launched a similar attack against a sitting Fed chair.

The central bank has traditionally been free of pressure from the Oval Office, and operates on a mandate of ensuring stable prices and maximum employment.

Trump has aggressively insisted on more and deeper rate cuts to support the US economy. Powell has taken a more cautious approach. Yet, Trump’s aggressive rhetoric towards the Fed has spooked some investors who fear the central bank’s independence is under threat.

“This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings,” Powell said. “Those are pretexts.”

“The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president,” he said.

In December, the US central bank slashed interest rates to their lowest level in three years.

“When chair Powell addresses the public directly on a Sunday afternoon, it is either a financial crisis or something equally important,” Peter Tillmann, economics professor at Justus-Liebig University Giessen, said on LinkedIn.

Crypto impact

Riskier assets like Bitcoin or tech stocks are highly dependent on Fed policy. Lower interest rates tend to push up the prices of these assets by disincentivising investors to hold bonds.

But despite the strong tailwinds that have pushed stocks and gold to new record highs, crypto has lagged behind. The overall crypto market is down $1 trillion from its all-time high set in October.

The CME FedWatch tool shows that the Fed is likely to hold interest rates at their current level during the next Open Market Committee meeting on January 28.

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email atlance@dlnews.com.

‘We Are in an Ethereum Market’ — Crypto Market Analyst

0

The Ether–Bitcoin (ETH/BTC) ratio bottomed in April 2025 and has since followed a trajectory similar to the 2019 market cycle, according to crypto market analyst Michaël van de Poppe.

A surge in stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), which are traditional or physical assets represented as tokens on a blockchain, and developer activity on the Ethereum network are reasons to be bullish on Ethereum’s price, van de Poppe said.

“The stablecoin supply on Ethereum has seen an increase of more than 65% in 2025. It’s doubled since the peak in 2021,” he wrote in a Sunday X post.

The stablecoin market cap on Ethereum. Source: DefiLlama

The total stablecoin market capitalization on Ethereum is over $163.9 billion, with about 52% of the market cap dominated by stablecoin issuer Tether’s USDt (USDT) dollar-pegged stablecoin, according to DefiLlama.

Ethereum processed about $8 trillion in stablecoin transfer volume in Q4 2024 alone, according to Token Terminal.

The contrarian analysis of investor sentiment that Ether (ETH) is dead or dying followed ETH briefly, tapping $3,300 and breaking above its 365-day moving average, before falling back to about $3,100, the price at the time of publication.

Ethereum, Ethereum Price
ETH popped up above the 365-day EMA before falling back to the $3,100 level. Source: TradingView

Related: ETH price to $5K next? Ether rallied 120% the last time this happened

ETH-BTC ratio mirrors 2019 cycle

“ETH is called dead, as it has been trending downwards for four years against Bitcoin (BTC). However, since April 2025, it has bottomed out, and we’re already in an Ethereum market,” van de Poppe said.

He shared a chart of the Ethereum-Bitcoin (ETH-BTC) ratio, a metric that tracks the price and strength of ETH against BTC, which bottomed in April, around 0.017, before rallying to a local high of 0.043 in August 2025.

Ethereum, Ethereum Price
The ETH-BTC ratio bottomed out in April 2025 and rallied. Source: Michael Van de Poppe

The ratio climbed back down to 0.034, the level at the time of this writing, following a market-wide crash in October that disrupted the upward price trend in crypto markets.

Current investor sentiment about Ethereum is similar to investor sentiment patterns that preceded previous price rallies, according to crypto market analysis company Santiment.

Magazine: Ethereum’s Fusaka fork explained for dummies: What the hell is PeerDAS?