New Year, but no Fireworks for Crypto

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Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

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Daily Updates:

• BTC has not left the narrow range within which it has traded since early December, changing hands at $87K on a new years day that has seen a disappointing lack of fireworks.
• It’s a similar story across majors and large-cap altcoins, with ETH unchanged at $2.9K and change, stubbornly sitting below the psychological $3K level, and SOL, which is similarly sat just below $125.
• While BTC ended 2025 5% lower than the $93K at which it traded at the beginning of the year, the S&P 500 finished more than 16% up – despite BTC at one point trading at $124K and the turmoil felt by US equities in the midst of the Tariff war in April 2025.

• With most markets closed for New Year’s day, and no US market open to disturb the peace, the low volatility expectations that prevailed over the holiday period have continued.
• As a result, options market traders are pricing any New Year’s fireworks for crypto to be delayed, especially in the near-term.
• ETH options markets trade with an incredibly steep term structure of at-the-money volatility, with 1-week ATM options implying a volatility of just 47%, while 6-month tenor options imply a volatility of 63.8% – closer, if not quite as high, as the level we’ve come to expect from ETH.
• As a result, one-week tenor ETH options trade with their lowest implied volatility since Trump’s election in November 2024 – even lower than the last time we stated that fact last Saturday, on Dec 27, 2025.

• Also delayed are Trump’s tariffs on wooden products and “their derivative products”, such as upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets.
• Initially set to come into effect on Thursday morning, a late-night declaration on Wednesday (which no doubt kick-started Trump’s Mar-a-Lago New Year’s eve party) postponed the increase in levy from 25% to 30% to January 1, 2027.
• The declaration also noted that the US “continues to engage in productive negotiations with trade partners” – a sign that the administration may be able (or indeed forced to) reckon with the issue of high consumer prices felt by many voters in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

• In a bid to boost adoption, China is due to begin paying interest on holdings of its digital yuan. The interest will be paid to end-consumers via the commercial banks that operate digital yuan wallets, but  the digital yuan has thus far failed to gain significant traction, and has not yet been launched in all regions in China.

• Uniswap’s governance has now passed a resolution (by 125 million votes for to just 742 against) that will follow Hyperliquid’s example in using fees generated by trading in its AMM pools to buy-back UNI tokens that will be burned.
• Previously, fees were collected by LP depositors only, with UNI token holders seeing none of the upside to the adoption of Uniswap’s leading spot-DEX.
• After a short time-lock, the protocol is set to burn 100M of the 630M circulating supply of UNI tokens, after the protocol earned more than $1.05B in fees in 2025.
• As yet there has been no explosive rally in UNI spot price in reaction, with the token trading flat at $5.7.

This Week’s Calendar:

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Charts of the Day: