BlackRock Boosted its Stake in BitMine

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Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Daily Updates:

• After falling from $70K at the start of the week, BTC continues to trade rangebound at $65-68K, a region which marks a near 50% drawdown from the October all-time high. 
• Implied volatility levels in options markets have settled around 50% and 65% respectively for BTC and ETH — far lower than the peaks of 103% and 121% only a week ago. 
• The term structure of implied vol is currently flat for both, while out-the-money put options continue to trade with significant 8-9 vol point premiums over calls. 

• Spot Bitcoin ETFs show little interest in taking advantage of sub-$70K prices however, with the funds experiencing $410.2M of outflows yesterday. 
• That brings the 20-day rolling sum of flows to -$3.8B — a pace of outflows last seen in late November 2025. 
• Altcoins are also continuing to chop sideways – ETH is still below $2,000, while SOL has fallen below $80. 
• SOL ETFs saw $2.70M of inflows yesterday, while ETH ETFs recorded outflows of $113.10M.

• Sentiment in crypto assets has also been impacted by continued jitters in US equities. The S&P 500 fell 1.57% yesterday, while the Nasdaq-100 declined more than 2%.
• The most recent leg down in US equities began after AI-startup Anthropic launched a new set of tools designed to automate various work tasks across different industries. That sparked fears that software companies were lagging behind big tech and that incumbent businesses would see a drop in earnings.
• The selloff that began in software firms then spread to the rest of the market.

• According to the US Department of Labor, initial jobless claims this week decreased by 5,000 to 227,000, though the figure still exceeded market expectations of 222,000 and remained near an eight-week high following an upward revision to the prior week’s reading.
• The increase is largely attributed to business disruptions caused by severe winter storms across several regions, which prompted more households to file for unemployment benefits.
• The data follows a far stronger-than-expected nonfarm payrolls report figure for January released earlier this week, which showed US employers added 130,000 jobs in January (more than double what was estimated by Bloomberg’s survey of economists)
• Later today, markets expect the BLS’s CPI inflation release. 

• The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced the full membership of its new Innovation Advisory Committee, including representatives from major exchanges and market infrastructure firms like CME Group, Nasdaq, ICE, LSEG, Cboe, and DTCC, alongside crypto and fintech companies such as Coinbase, Uniswap Labs, Ripple, Kraken, and Chainlink Labs. 
• The committee is intended to advise the CFTC on how emerging innovations—especially AI and blockchain—are reshaping derivatives and commodity markets, helping the agency modernize regulation and keep oversight aligned with real-world market developments.

• The Trump administration has reached a trade agreement with Taiwan under which Taipei will remove or reduce 99% of its tariff barriers, while most Taiwanese exports to the US will face a 15% tariff rate, bringing Taiwan in line with other Asia-Pacific trading partners.
• The deal is closely tied to semiconductors and the US-Taiwan trade imbalance, and is paired with a separate commitment for Taiwan to invest $250B into US industries such as chips, AI and energy. 

• According to BlackRock’s latest 13F filing, the asset manager has significantly boosted its stake in BitMine Immersion Technologies, lifting holdings to 9,049,912 shares.
• That represents a 165.6% quarter-on-quarter increase versus its prior disclosed position, with the stake reported at approximately $245.7M in the filing.

• Citi Trade and Working Capital Solutions has completed an internal proof-of-concept with PwC and Solana to tokenize a bill of exchange on the Solana blockchain. 
• The test ran end-to-end in a private, simulated setup, covering issuance, financing, distribution, and settlement using synthetic data. The aim is to explore how tokenized bills could make trade finance easier to fund, transfer, and settle automatically at maturity.

• Aave, a major DeFi lending protocol, has proposed the “Aave Will Win” framework to align the ecosystem around a token-first model that routes 100% of Aave-branded product revenue into the Aave DAO treasury (the community-controlled pool of funds).
• The proposal positions Aave V4 as the DAO’s official long-term upgrade, adding new built-in monetization features to help the protocol capture more revenue at the protocol level. It also asks the DAO to fund Aave Labs (the core development team) and sets out plans for a future foundation to manage governance and protect the Aave brand such as trademarks and standards.

• At Injective, a new programme has been launched to buy back and burn INJ tokens.
• The INJ Community BuyBack is gaining traction, combining accelerated token burns with a revenue-share mechanism for eligible participants.
• Users commit INJ onchain, receive a pro-rata share of ecosystem revenue, and the committed tokens are permanently burned.
• More than 6.9M INJ has been burned to date, with the initiative designed to further increase burn.
• Injective’s own Community Buyback documentation adds that the “earnings” are the ecosystem revenue collected that month, made up of multiple different tokens, which are distributed pro rata to participants after they commit INJ (which is then burned).
• Whitelist eligibility is currently based on active staking and meaningful onchain participation, with randomised selection aimed at limiting bot activity and gas wars, where users and bots bid up gas fees to get transactions included first during oversubscribed launches. 

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