Crypto Winter Meets Metals Mania: Bitcoin’s January Reset

Bitcoin Insights For Professionals

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Onramp MENA
February 06, 2026

Crypto Winter Meets Metals Mania: Bitcoin’s January Reset

📉 Bitcoin spent the first half of January teasing a breakout, briefly reclaiming levels above $97,000 after fresh inflation data, before the market’s tone abruptly flipped. By the end of January, BTC had slid below $80,000 amid thinning liquidity and a broad risk-off move. BTC plunged below $65,000 on Feb. 5, briefly dipped to ~ $60,000 on Feb. 6, then bounced back toward $65,000, still down about 26% year-to-date, with crypto markets shedding roughly $1 trillion in the last month alone.

At the same time, the “safe haven” trade moved somewhere else: precious metals. Gold, which had already been ripping for the past few months, surged through $5,000 and touched $5,500 in a matter of days, then experienced an old-school crash that looked eerily like crypto.

The takeaway of the month: Bitcoin didn’t “die.” It is repricing, against a macro backdrop where gold and silver traded like a meme coin and Bitcoin traded like a high-beta tech proxy.

This Month’s Big Story: When Gold Trades Like Crypto and Bitcoin Trades Like Tech

🟡 Gold went vertical. Spot gold surged to record highs above $5,500 in late January on safe-haven demand, still building on an extraordinary 2025 rally, at a pace that made bullion look more like a momentum asset than a steady store of value.

🌪️ Then came the “metals meltdown.” On Feb. 2, gold dropped as much as ~8% intraday, while silver saw violent swings, including a sharp plunge after weeks of record highs. In other words: the asset class famous for stability suddenly behaved like crypto.

🧨 Bitcoin did the opposite of the “digital gold” pitch. Into early February, BTC sank below $65,000 as leveraged positions unwound and investors rotated toward traditional defensives, a move reinforced by correlations with falling tech/AI equities.

Sovereign & Pension Funds Demand

🇸🇻 El Salvador doubled down on its Bitcoin strategy for 2026, revealing its national holdings now stand at 7,552 BTC. President Nayib Bukele’s government announced a national policy integrating Bitcoin and AI initiatives, leveraging the country’s surplus geothermal energy to power new data centers and “Bitcoin/AI special economic zones”.

📉 Spot ETF flows saw a surge of inflows in mid-January (including a ~$750M day, the strongest since October), suggesting institutional dip-buying was alive early in the year. But the tone worsened into February: Feb. 5 saw one of the sharpest ETF drawdowns in over a year, and IBIT recorded a ~$528M outflow day earlier in the week as risk appetite cracked.

⚖️ The transparency era begins (and it’s not optional). The UK and dozens of jurisdictions began implementing the OECD’s crypto tax reporting rules (CARF) on Jan. 1, requiring exchanges to collect and report customer transaction records and tax residency data; cross-border automatic exchange is slated to begin in 2027.  In the EU, DAC8 similarly enters into force in 2026, expanding automatic information exchange to crypto-asset transactions. 

Corporate & Institutional Moves

📦 Strategy Inc. (formerly MicroStrategy) now holds 713,502 BTC, after buying on multiple occasions in the past months, roughly 3.4% of total Bitcoin supply, making it the largest corporate holder. It has maintained its USD reserve to $2.25B USD, and held its Q4 Earnings Call on February 5th, reaffirming their commitment to continuing Bitcoin accumulation and strengthening capital structure.

🏦 Morgan Stanley has filed for both spot Bitcoin and Solana ETFs, signaling a deepening commitment to digital asset exposure among top-tier Wall Street firms. This move positions Morgan Stanley alongside peers like BlackRock and Fidelity in the competitive ETF race. If approved, these products could broaden access for traditional investors and further cement Bitcoin’s role as a foundational asset within diversified portfolios.

📉 Stock Market & Macro Backdrop: Broader markets set the tone for Bitcoin’s swings, through a global rout in tech stocks in late January, fueled by surging bond yields and a reset of frothy AI-driven valuations. Macro factors also played a role. The Federal Reserve signaled no imminent cuts upcoming.

Market Snapshot

Key Bitcoin Metrics as of February 6, 2025:

🔶 Price: $66,817 USD
🔶 Market Cap: $1.34 Trillion USD
🔶 All-Time High: $126,200 USD (Oct 5, 2025)
🔶 Dominance: 58.3%
🔶 Satoshis per $1: ~1,494 sats
📈 Onramp Terminal Metrics

Onramp Terminal

Closing Thought: The New Cycle Has No Map

The past two months have reminded us that Bitcoin sits at the crossroads of many narratives: digital gold, risk asset, geopolitical tool, and tech frontier.

A regime collapse in Venezuela sent BTC soaring, only for macro headwinds to drag it back into winter. Yet the network kept ticking, blocks every 10 minutes, regardless of everything else happening around it.

Bitcoin is now institutionalized yet idealistic, traded by Wall Street, pondered by nation-states. The deeper signal is structural: Bitcoin is colliding with the AI buildout in the real economy, power, data centers, and infrastructure, while regulators simultaneously turn on global reporting and oversight.  

This is what maturation looks like: less “cycle certainty,” more macro integration.

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