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Normally that’s a tailwind for $BTC… but here’s the twist: lately Bitcoin’s been moving with the dollar, not against it.

If that correlation sticks, a USD drop could actually pressure BTC short term.

Macro playbook is changing. In this choppy tape, stay flexible > stay stubborn.

The chart keeps circling the same number.

Bitcoin slid nearly 3% on Wednesday, drifting back toward $66,500 after another failed attempt to hold ground near $70,000. The move wasn’t violent. It didn’t need to be. Traders are watching $69,000, and so far, the market keeps backing away from it.

Keith Alan of Material Indicators said the current range carries more history than most realize. In 2024, price churned around this zone for months, building what technicians call structure. Go back further and the 2021 cycle top sits in the same neighborhood. Markets remember levels like that.

That memory cuts both ways.

The thinking goes that if a legitimate catalyst appears and drives the price up, it’s even further confirmation to this breakout. But if it doesn’t, it’s essentially like a ceiling because of this same exact logic. The prevailing thought in Alan’s mind right now looks like this: there’s just not enough momentum. The buyers are there, but not enough are coming into the stock. Not enough with conviction.

Over shorter time scales, some traders may be looking to identify signs that a local floor is being established. The pseudonymous analyst known as Killa has noted that Bitcoin often establishes its monthly high or low price within the first week of a new candle. February is still young, which means that this phenomenon is relevant again.

Yet another quirk-in-the-making: Since Bitcoin rolled over from its last 2025 high, Mondays have been highly biased towards short sellers in the market. The trader Killa was telling his fans how shorting on every Monday for the past four months would have given them 18 out of 19 winning trades. Yeah, that’s the kind of number we love to deploy when markets get worst-case bearish.

The broader backdrop isn’t helping. Talk of a deeper slide toward $50,000 hasn’t disappeared, even if it hasn’t materialized. At the same time, February is shaping up to be one of the rougher months in recent memory. Data from CoinGlass shows Bitcoin down more than 14% so far this month, close to last year’s February performance. Historically, the month hasn’t been consistently weak, but that offers little comfort in the middle of a drawdown.

The emails that were found looked plain and procedural. There are no sales pitches, no buzzwords, instead just wire details, company names, and dates. When all that is put together, it suggests Jeffrey Epstein had exposure to Coinbase even years before crypto entered the mainstream.

Messages released this week indicate that in late 2014, an entity tied to Epstein picked up nearly 196,000 Series C shares in the exchange for roughly $3.25 million. At the time, Coinbase was still a relatively small startup, valued around $400 million, operating far from the glare it would later attract.

The correspondence shows the investment was routed through intermediaries, with care taken to obscure the ultimate owner. In one December 2014 email, Bradford Stephens discussed renaming the investing LLC before funds were sent, writing to Epstein associate Darren Indyke about logistics and wire details. There is no indication in the records that Coinbase executives were aware of who stood behind the capital.

The same document release paints a broader picture of Epstein’s exposure to early crypto ventures. Entities linked to him also appeared in the seed round of Blockstream, the Bitcoin infrastructure company, with investments split across several similarly named LLCs. The structure was consistent. The approach was quiet.

By 2018, the tone of the emails changed. Coinbase was no longer an experiment. It had raised new money at valuations far above its earlier rounds. In January of that year, Stephens reached out again, this time offering to buy half of Epstein’s Coinbase position. The proposal valued the company at about $2 billion and put $15 million on the table for roughly half of an investment that originally cost closer to $3 million.

A month later, another email added color. Brock Pierce wrote that the wire for $15 million had already been sent, leaving Epstein with cash returned and a remaining equity stake still worth millions on paper.

How much of that position was ultimately retained is unclear. The emails don’t say. What they do show is that Epstein’s involvement in crypto venture investing ran through established industry figures rather than direct ties to startups themselves.

It started quietly, the way these things often do. A few large transfers. Then a steady stream. By Monday, wallets linked to Trend Research had shed roughly 73,000 Ether, most of it funneled to exchanges to unwind DeFi loans before they became unmanageable.

Trend Research isn’t a household name, but onchain watchers have known it well since late last year. The firm surfaced in November and spent weeks accumulating Ether at a pace that stood out even in a market used to oversized bets. At its January peak, blockchain data tracked more than 650,000 ETH tied to the operation.

The build was aggressive and leveraged. Ether bought on centralized venues was pushed into lending protocols, borrowed against, and recycled back into more ETH. For a while, the loop held. Then prices slid. When ETH slipped under $2,200, the strategy lost its margin for patience.

According to Arkham, Trend Research’s balance fell to about 578,000 ETH by Monday morning as sales hit Binance and loans on Aave were repaid. Founder Yi Lihua didn’t try to soften the message. In a public post, he acknowledged the timing was wrong, saying the firm misread ETH’s relative strength while Bitcoin held near six figures.

The sell-off landed during a week of regulatory disappointment elsewhere in Asia. In India, the annual Union Budget came and went without a single concession for crypto traders. The 30% tax on gains remains intact, as does the 1% levy deducted on every transaction. Industry groups had pushed hard for relief, arguing the rules have hollowed out domestic liquidity. Instead, the government doubled down on compliance, proposing new penalties for inaccurate filings.

South Korea is heading in the opposite direction, but not toward leniency. The Financial Supervisory Service said it has expanded its use of artificial intelligence to detect crypto market manipulation in real time. The upgraded system now watches trades almost moment by moment, catching sudden price jumps and coordinated moves that used to take investigators days to piece together.

In Hong Kong, progress is slow but visible. Regulators are edging closer to handing out the city’s first stablecoin licenses, with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority signaling that approvals could land as early as March. Chief executive Eddie Yue cautioned lawmakers that only a handful of applicants are likely to pass the initial round.