2025, Jan 29 - Jan 31

“I’ve had no contact with the President,” said FED Chair Powell, this week. The Federal Reserve reportedly kept the current interest rates at around the 4.25 - 4.5% mark. According to the CME FEDWatch Tool, the prediction rate for no cuts is around 12% and the prediction rate for one cut is 31% and expects no cuts until mid-June. The US stock market starts to recover after a sudden fear of China’s new AI startup DeepSeek, as skepticism rises after the $5.6 million price statement. “The $5M number is bogus. It is pushed by a Chinese hedge fund to slow investment in American AI startups, service their own shorts against American titans like Nvidia, and hide sanction evasion.” commented by X. Despite the assumptions, American tech giants are “respectful” of their new rival, according to Barron’s. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg states during earning calls “I think there’s a number of novel things that [DeepSeek] did that I think we’re still digesting. And there are a number of things that they have advances that we will hope to implement in our systems.” [META went up by 1.61%]. Microsoft also implements Deepseek R1 on Azure AI Foundry, and earnings soar [MSFT went down 6.52%]. 

Circle just released $USDC, one of the top stablecoins by market cap, listing on Aptos Layer-1, expanding to Web3 access. A personal hobby of mine is to watch used car prices and all sorts of car reviews on social media. Today, I was very surprised to see my all time favorite car YouTuber, Doug DeMuro, partnered with Coinbase to list a fairly well preserved 1986 Toyota Pickup XtraCab 4x4, on his enthusiast car auction website. The vehicle, as Coinbase claimed, could be now bought with a stable coin, $USDC. This not only means that “[p]aying for cars in 2025 [is] much easier,” but Coinbase partnering with social media influencers can tell us exactly how much confidence they have in this industry, and are trying to go further with transforming blockchain into a mainstream payment method. In the Cars & Bids information section, it explains that this truck can only be bought through Coinbase $USDC and promotes its redeemable 1:1  for US Dollars.  

Bitcoin’s price jumped back up to $105,000, a pretty surprising markup shortly after a slip from today’s official tariff release. A few months ago, the then president-elect was claiming he would increase Canadian and Mexican tariffs by 25% and the Chinese by 10%. We will see how this goes on from this road starting from tomorrow, to see how President Trump will continue international relations, or even expanding U.S. territories like he was promising, and how crypto reacts.  

Happy New Month.