Speaker 1: Hey, it's Alex with the Token Metrics Daily Pulse for
Speaker 1: February twentieth, twenty twenty six. We've got a weird one today.
Speaker 1: Miners are sprinting while the market limps. Let's get into it.
Speaker 1: So here's the headline that caught my eye this morning.
Speaker 1: Bitcoin ETF outflows just crossed four billion dollars over five weeks. Hey,
Speaker 1: quick pause, shout out to our sponsor. Okay, so here's
Speaker 1: what's happening. Four billion. That's not a hiccup, that's a trend.
Speaker 1: And yet bitcoin mining difficulty just spiked fifteen percent, the
Speaker 1: biggest jump since twenty twenty one. Hash rate bounced back
Speaker 1: to one zeta hash per second. So you've got Wall
Speaker 1: Street pulling money out and miners plugging machines back in
Speaker 1: faster than they have in five years. Bitcoins sitting around
Speaker 1: sixty eight thousand, kind of stuck in no man's land.
Speaker 1: The people trading paper are scared, the people running the
Speaker 1: actual infrastructure they're not. Now where does that leave the
Speaker 1: rest of the market? Honestly pretty quiet. Bitcoin's basically flat
Speaker 1: on the day, hovering near sixty eight k ethereums under
Speaker 1: two thousand, still underperforming, still struggling to find a bid.
Speaker 1: Solana's around eighty three bucks, up a couple percent, but
Speaker 1: nothing to write home about. Total market cap is about
Speaker 1: two point four trillion. Bitcoin dominance is at fifty six
Speaker 1: and a half percent, which tells you where the conviction is.
Speaker 1: It's in bitcoin and basically nowhere else. The narrative scoreboard
Speaker 1: is ugly too. AI tokens are down almost twenty percent
Speaker 1: on the week, dp pen down over twenty, Social Fi
Speaker 1: same story, the only green spots, prediction markets up a
Speaker 1: few percent, and meme coins barely positive. When memes are
Speaker 1: your best performing sector, that tells you something about the mood.
Speaker 1: All right, so what's actually driving all this? Let me
Speaker 1: walk through the big stories first. The ETF bleed. This
Speaker 1: is the one that matters most right now. Nearly four
Speaker 1: billion dollars has walked out of US spot bitcoin ETFs
Speaker 1: over five weeks. Another one hundred and sixty six million
Speaker 1: left yesterday alone, and according to Bloomberg Futures, exposure on
Speaker 1: the CME has dropped by about two thirds from its
Speaker 1: late twenty twenty four peak. Coinbase prices are consistently trading
Speaker 1: at a discount to binance. That's a clear signal of
Speaker 1: sustained American selling. Here's the thing most people miss about
Speaker 1: ETF outflows. It's not just about the money leaving, it's
Speaker 1: about the narrative leaving. The whole bull case for twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five was this wall of institutional money coming in
Speaker 1: through ETFs. When that wall starts crumbling, you don't just
Speaker 1: lose dollars, you lose the story that attracts the next
Speaker 1: round of dollars. Glassnode data shows Bitcoin has broken below
Speaker 1: the seventy nine K true market mean and is now
Speaker 1: stuck in a defense of range. The only major support
Speaker 1: they flag is around fifty five K at the realized price.
Speaker 1: That's a wide gap to be dangling over now. Blackrock
Speaker 1: did note that only zero point two percent of their
Speaker 1: Bitcoin ETF saw redemptions during the crash, which suggests the
Speaker 1: advisor and long term allocator money is sticky, but the
Speaker 1: hedge fund and tactical money that's what's bleeding out. The
Speaker 1: watch here is simple. If outflows slow to under fifty
Speaker 1: million a day for three straight sessions, the healthy reset
Speaker 1: thesis wins. If we get another five hundred million plus
Speaker 1: single day outflow, the structural weakness camp gets a lot
Speaker 1: louder okay. Second story, so, and this one is genuinely fascinating.
Speaker 1: That mining difficulty spike fifteen percent, the largest single increase
Speaker 1: since twenty twenty one, and it happened while bitcoin's price
Speaker 1: is limping around sixty eight k. Why would miners be
Speaker 1: plugging in machines at this pace when margins are compressed
Speaker 1: Because miners don't trade the next week, they trade the
Speaker 1: next cycle. Think of it like a restaurant hiring extra
Speaker 1: cooks on a slow Tuesday because they know Fridays coming.
Speaker 1: A big chunk of US hash rate went offline during
Speaker 1: the winter storm, and the snapback was violent, But the
Speaker 1: signal underneath is clear. The people closest to Bitcoin's infrastructure
Speaker 1: are not bearish. If hash rate holds above one zeta
Speaker 1: hash for the next two weeks despite these type margins,
Speaker 1: that's a deep conviction signal from the supply side. Third,
Speaker 1: and this is the one that's been nagging at me.
Speaker 1: The options market. Bitcoin bounced above sixty eight thousand, but
Speaker 1: the options traders didn't get the memo. Put Skew is
Speaker 1: still elevated. People are still paying up for downside protection,
Speaker 1: like someone who just survived a car crash and flinches
Speaker 1: at every yellow light. Price recovery sentiment didn't. That's the tell.
Speaker 1: And when hedging demand stays high during a rally, it
Speaker 1: usually means one of two things. Either the rally has
Speaker 1: legs and all that protection becomes fuel for a short squeeze,
Speaker 1: or the hedger's are right and we're just visiting higher
Speaker 1: prices before heading back down. Funding rates flipped positive, which
Speaker 1: means longs are paying again. Leverage is creeping back in
Speaker 1: on the upside. Leverage plus skepticism is a volatile cocktail.
Speaker 1: If put skew normalizes within five days while Bitcoin holds
Speaker 1: above sixty seven K, the panic was overdone. If skew
Speaker 1: stays elevated and price rolls below sixty six k, the
Speaker 1: options market was right to stay scared. Fourth regulation, This one,
Speaker 1: uh okay. This one is interesting because you've got two
Speaker 1: people who should agree on crypto regulation telling completely different stories.
Speaker 1: Ripple's Brad garling House says the Clarity Act has a
Speaker 1: ninety percent chance of passing by April. Custodia's Caitlin Long
Speaker 1: says Trump family crypto ties are complicating the whole thing
Speaker 1: and giving Senate fence sitters an excuse to slow walk it.
Speaker 1: The Clarity Act would finally draw a line between what's
Speaker 1: a security and what's a commodity. That's the single most
Speaker 1: important unanswered question in US crypto. But a ninety percent
Speaker 1: probability from a CEO whose company directly benefits from the
Speaker 1: bill passing. Take that with a salt mine, not a grain.
Speaker 1: The real signal is whether Senate Banking actually schedules a vote.
Speaker 1: Talk is cheap floor time isn't fifth Black Rock bought
Speaker 1: uniswap tokens, and look crypto Twitter lost its mind over this,
Speaker 1: but zoom out the bigger stories. The rotation happening underneath
Speaker 1: capital is leaving DeFi protocols and flowing into tokenized real
Speaker 1: world assets. That's not capitulation, that's maturation. When the world's
Speaker 1: largest asset manager buys governance tokens for a decentralized exchange,
Speaker 1: it's not because they want to vote on fee switches.
Speaker 1: It's because they see DeFi infrastructure as a distribution channel
Speaker 1: for tokenized everything. The RWA narrative is eating DEFIS lunch.
Speaker 1: That sector's market cap is over fifty billion even after
Speaker 1: a ten percent weekly pullback. Quick hits before I move
Speaker 1: on as Tech. The privacy focused Ethereum Layer two token
Speaker 1: surged over eighty percent after dual South Korean exchange listings.
Speaker 1: Thin liquidity plus Korean exchange premium equals fireworks. A Tennessee
Speaker 1: judge blocked state enforcement against Calshi prediction markets, which is
Speaker 1: a big win for prediction market legality. Parsek, the DeFi
Speaker 1: and NFT analytics platform shut down. Another casualty of dried
Speaker 1: up trading volumes. Bitdeer stock dropped seventeen percent after announcing
Speaker 1: a three hundred million dollar convertible note offering, raising debt
Speaker 1: at multi year low Hash prices. Is either desperate or
Speaker 1: contrarian genius, and the White House is floating the idea
Speaker 1: of letting banks offer yield on stable coins, which, if
Speaker 1: that becomes policy, it's the bridge between traditional finance deposits.
Speaker 1: All right, before we get into the risks, quick word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor. Okay, we're back. Let's talk about what
Speaker 1: to watch for and on chain dollars. So what should
Speaker 1: you actually be worried about right now? Three things on
Speaker 1: my radar. First, that options panic premium I mentioned it's
Speaker 1: not going away. What the people who pay the most
Speaker 1: for information options traders don't trust this rally. When hedging
Speaker 1: demand stays high in to a bounce, the next leg
Speaker 1: down tends to be sharper because everyone's already positioned for it. Second,
Speaker 1: and this is the structural one. We're about to enter
Speaker 1: week six of ETF outflows. Five weeks nearly four billion
Speaker 1: out the door. ETF flows were the demand engine for
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four to twenty twenty five rally. If
Speaker 1: that engine stalls for a sixth week, the market loses
Speaker 1: its marginal buyer. Bitcoin's stuck below the seventy nine k
Speaker 1: true market mean, and the only support below is around
Speaker 1: fifty five k. That's a wide, uncomfortable gap. Third, the
Speaker 1: wild card, Gold is ripping on geopolitical fear. Bitcoin is
Speaker 1: not US. Iran tensions are pushing gold higher, and crypto
Speaker 1: is just not sitting there. Every cycle, crypto bulls promise
Speaker 1: bitcoin will be the safe haven asset every geopolitical shock.
Speaker 1: Gold wins that argument. Prediction markets back this up. Only
Speaker 1: about twenty five percent of betters think bitcoin outperforms silver
Speaker 1: this month. The digital gold narrative is taking another credibility
Speaker 1: hit in real time, and looking ahead, i'm p's three
Speaker 1: things to watch over the next week. One, any movement
Speaker 1: on the Clarity Act from Senate Banking if they schedule
Speaker 1: a markup session this month. That's the most significant US
Speaker 1: crypto regulatory catalyst of twenty twenty six. Two. Whether bitcoin
Speaker 1: hash rate holds above one zeta hash. If it does
Speaker 1: despite compressed margins, miners are telling you something important about
Speaker 1: where they think price is going. And three ETF flows
Speaker 1: every single day. A single day of two hundred million
Speaker 1: plus in inflows would break the five week pattern and
Speaker 1: could trigger a short squeeze given all that elevated put
Speaker 1: positioning on the flip side. Week six of outflow would
Speaker 1: be the longest streak since these ETFs launched. That's the
Speaker 1: line in the sand. That's the picture for today. If
Speaker 1: you got something out of this, send it to a
Speaker 1: friend who's into crypto. That's the best way to support
Speaker 1: what we're doing here. This is educational content, not investment advice.
Speaker 1: Always do your own research. I'm Alex, See you next time.