Crypto

Ripple made a big announcement yesterday, while the XRP ETFs are actually in the green - so, what's up with the price move today?

The XRP price is plunging alongisde everything else in the cryptocurrency market. Let's have a look at where it may be headed to next.

ETH's price has lost roughly $1,000 in just over a week, what's next?

Bitcoin’s decline into a bear market has been faster than in the past cycle, according to analysts.  

Bitcoin ETFs may be sitting on their “biggest losses” since launching in January 2024, but there is a silver lining, according to an ETF analyst. US-based spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) holders are showing relatively firm conviction despite a four-month Bitcoin downtrend, according to ETF analyst James Seyffart. “The ETFs are still hanging in there pretty good,” Seyffart said in an X post on Wednesday. While Seyffart said that Bitcoin (BTC) ETF holders are facing their “biggest losses” since the US products launched in January 2024 — at a paper loss of around 42% with Bitcoin below $73,000 — he argues the recent outflows pale in comparison to the inflows during the market’s peak.  Read more

Bitcoin’s Coinbase Premium Gap has fallen to a yearly low, a move analysts say may reflect weaker relative demand on Coinbase-linked venues tied to institutional trading. The Coinbase Premium Gap, which tracks the price difference between Bitcoin on Coinbase and Binance, has fallen to its lowest level in over a year. An analyst said the move may point to weaker relative demand on Coinbase-linked venues, which are commonly associated with institutional trading. The Coinbase Premium is the price difference between Coinbase’s BTC/USD pair and Binance’s BTC/USDT pair. Read more

The dark web drug market used crypto for payments, but blockchain transaction tracing helped the FBI identify its creator, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The creator of Incognito Market, the online black market that used cryptocurrency as its primary payment rail, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after blockchain transaction analysis cited by US authorities linked him to the platform. The Justice Department said on Wednesday that a Manhattan court gave Rui-Siang Lin three decades behind bars for owning and operating Incognito, which sold $105 million worth of illicit narcotics between its launch in October 2020 and its closure in March 2024. Lin, who pleaded guilty to his role in December 2024, was sentenced for conspiring to distribute narcotics, money laundering, and conspiring to sell misbranded medication. Read more

Some crypto companies have proposed giving community banks a bigger stablecoin role as Senate negotiations stall over the contentious market structure bill. Crypto companies are reportedly floating concessions relating to stablecoin yields in an attempt to unfreeze the delayed crypto market structure bill.  The House has advanced crypto market-structure legislation, but negotiations have stalled in the Senate as negotiations continue over whether stablecoin issuers should be allowed to offer yields, with banks arguing that such offerings would compete with and take money away from traditional savings accounts. Anonymous sources told Bloomberg that crypto firms are now proposing measures, such as giving community banks a larger role in the stablecoin system, to help ease the bill through the Senate.  Read more

UNICEF has pressed governments to criminalize AI-generated child sexual abuse material, warning deepfakes are exposing children to serious harm beyond existing laws.

Buterin argued that many Layer 2s no longer meaningfully inherit Ethereum security.

Bhutan has slipped to the seventh-largest nation-state Bitcoin holder, with its stash falling from 13,295 BTC in October 2024 to 5,700 BTC. Bhutan has offloaded another $22 million in Bitcoin mined through its state-owned mining venture, with the sale coming amid crypto price declines and challenging mining conditions. Data from blockchain analytics platform Arkham shows that Bhutan moved 184 Bitcoin (BTC) worth $14 million from its national reserve on Wednesday, adding to another 100.8 Bitcoin transfer worth $8.3 million last Friday.  The $22.3 million worth of transfers were sent to crypto market maker QCP Capital, Arkham said. Transferring assets to market makers often signals a sale, as they help convert those assets into liquid markets. Read more

Payy says its new layer-2 network routes ERC-20 transfers through privacy pools by default without requiring new wallets or tokens. Crypto project Payy, which operates a privacy-focused wallet alongside a crypto banking card, has launched an Ethereum layer-2 network designed to support private ERC-20 transfers. In an announcement via X on Wednesday, Payy said users can add the network as a custom chain in MetaMask and that ERC-20 transfers made on it are routed through privacy pools by default with “no smart contract changes required.”  Payy said the two core user types on its network would be institutions and fintech firms seeking to bring financial flows onchain while limiting public transaction traceability and crypto natives seeking to use privacy tools without “juggling multiple wallets.” Read more

Social media sentiment has turned “extremely bearish” toward Bitcoin and Ethereum this week, according to analytics platform Santiment. XRP sentiment on social media has remained relatively robust despite a crypto market slump that has seen Bitcoin fall close to $70,000. Santiment said in an X post on Wednesday that “XRP is seeing a more optimistic outlook among traders” on social media as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have “turned extremely bearish” after a major downswing. Santiment’s Positive/Negative sentiment indicator, which measures the ratio of positive to negative social media mentions for a cryptoasset, shows XRP (XRP) has a score of 2.19, 103% higher than Ethereum’s 1.08 and 173% higher than Bitcoin’s 0.80. Read more

The filing follows approval of Starlink’s Gen2 expansion and Elon Musk’s push to move AI infrastructure into orbit.

The latest decline reflects a broader unwind in leverage, with investors reassessing Bitcoin’s short-term role as an inflation hedge.

CFTC Chair Mike Selig described the proposal as a “frolic into merit regulation” by the Biden administration. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has withdrawn a Biden administration-era proposal that would have banned sports and political prediction markets, some of the most popular event contracts today. The recently confirmed CFTC chair, Mike Selig, said on Wednesday that the agency has withdrawn a 2024 notice of proposed rulemaking that sought to ban event contracts for sports, politics and war, among other topics, classifying them as “contrary to the public interest.” Selig said the proposal “reflected the prior administration’s frolic into merit regulation with an outright prohibition on political contracts ahead of the 2024 presidential election,” adding that CFTC doesn’t plan to issue final rules on the proposal. Read more

Strium will begin with synthetic US and Japanese stocks and commodities before expanding to real tokenized shares and asset-backed products with identity verification. Startale Group and Japan’s financial conglomerate SBI Holdings have launched Strium, a layer-1 blockchain designed to support exchange-layer and settlement infrastructure for institutional trading of foreign exchange, tokenized equities and real-world assets (RWAs). The platform is designed as an exchange-layer network, according to an announcement shared with Cointelegraph. “Tokenization is an inevitable trend, and equities tokenization is clearly the next big market,” said Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group. He added that Strium aims to bridge the gap between traditional offchain finance and the onchain ecosystem by enabling compliant dividend and royalty payments. Read more

Solana became one of Samani’s favorite crypto projects at Multicoin in 2018 after he initially favored Ethereum but grew dissatisfied with how its developers addressed scaling. Multicoin Capital’s co-founder, Kyle Samani, said he is stepping down as managing partner of the crypto investment firm after 10 years in the industry.  Samani called it a “bittersweet moment” in a post on Wednesday, adding, “I am excited to take some time off and explore new areas of technology,” which he later revealed would include AI and robotics. He added that he is “more confident than ever that crypto is going to fundamentally rewire the circuitry of finance.” Read more

A selloff in professional-services stocks followed fresh concerns that AI agents could disrupt traditional software pricing.

Crypto price prediction today follows a shaky February start as Bitcoin trades near $75,000 and drags sentiment lower. XRP sits in a descending channel with RSI near 27 and $1.40 in view. Cardano is below 2024 lows, with $0.35 as the reclaim level. DOGE tests $0.10–$0.11, eyeing $0.13 on BTC bounce. The post Crypto Price Prediction Today 4 February – XRP, Cardano, Dogecoin appeared first on Cryptonews.