Markets faced a surprise January payrolls beat — roughly 130,000 jobs versus a ~70,000 forecast — that lifted near‑term Fed tightening odds, yet crypto did not suffer the kind of immediate, broad-based capitulation many had expected. Bitcoin held in the high‑$67,000s while the CoinDesk 20 benchmark registered modest net gains, a pattern market participants read as seller fatigue and tactical positioning rather than a fresh, conviction-driven risk-on impulse. Derivatives metrics stayed elevated: open interest hovered around $15.8 billion, three‑month basis sat near 2%, and funding trends showed a retreat from extreme bearishness. Options flow skewed toward downside protection — one‑week 25‑delta skew compressed into the high teens and puts made up a majority of daily volume — consistent with hedging against headline risk rather than aggressive shorting. Liquidations still occurred, with about $342 million wiped out across venues over 24 hours (bitcoin and ether the chief victims), highlighting how leverage points remain fragile even when spot prices hold. Complementary market signals pointed to guarded stability: short‑term implied volatility was around the middle of its recent range (implying roughly a 2% one‑day swing), and spot ETF flows were episodic — on the day flows were net negative — underscoring that product demand can be an inconsistent source of depth. Macro and geopolitical vectors — upcoming Fed communications, a U.S. funding deadline and legal or trade headlines — were cited as proximate tail risks that could rapidly flip conditional calm into volatility, while ecosystem operational adjustments and regulatory moves continued to shape platform-level liquidity. In a distinct structural development, BlackRock listed its $2.2 billion tokenized U.S. Treasury fund on Uniswap and took a strategic position in the protocol; the integration routes trades through an off‑chain quoting layer with on‑chain settlement and uses a compliance partner to gate investor access, effectively testing an institutional distribution channel on decentralized infrastructure. The BlackRock move produced a sharp intraday spike in UNI (peaking about 25%) and refocused conversation on how regulated, tokenized products might interface with DeFi order‑routing and market‑maker sourcing. Taken together, the picture is one of conditional resilience: retail and tactical flows can support short‑lived rallies, and institutional product experiments may broaden on‑chain utility, but durability of gains rests on whether macro narratives, ETF demand and institutional execution plumbing converge toward steadier, larger inflows.
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