US President Donald Trump has agreed to hold off imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for 30 days, following negotiations with Mexico's President Sheinbaum and Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau. Both leaders have committed to dispatching large numbers of police forces to their US borders to address drug trafficking and irregular migration. However, a US tariff of 10% on Chinese imports has come into effect after the deadline of 00:01 EST (06:01 CET) on Tuesday passed.
In response to the US President's implementation of 10% tariffs on Chinese products, Beijing announced it was imposing retaliatory tariffs on various US imports, setting 15% duties on American coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments, and 10% tariffs on US crude oil exports and farm equipment.
The cryptocurrency market made a sharp recovery overnight, with BTC rebounding to the $100,000 level and ETH rebounding to the $2,900 levels. Both have now stabilized lower, with BTC currently trading around $98,500 and ETH around $2,700.
Both assets saw their 24h volume decrease over the past day, highlighting slowing trading activity compared to the previous market panic.
The crypto market cap went as high as $3.36tn, and is currently at $3.2tn, a 3.22% increase over the last day. The total crypto market 24h volume is $237.55bn, a 25.27% decrease over the last day.
US President Trump has signed an executive order directing the Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund. Treasury Secretary Bessent expects the fund's establishment within 12 months. Bitcoin advocates took the news as a signal that the US is taking active steps towards investing directly in the world’s top cryptocurrency through this fund.
On Feb 3, US BTC Spot ETFs recorded $234.4m of net outflows, while ETH ETFs recorded $78.4m of inflows.
Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou posted on X that the real figure of liquidations for Feb 2-3 may have been five times larger than the $2.25 bn recorded on Coinglass.
“I am afraid that today’s real total liquidation is a lot more than $2 billion, by my estimation it should be at least around $8-10 billion. FYI, Bybit’s 24hr liquidation alone was $2.1 billion,” he said. He also added that this was likely due to API limits whereas a maximum amount of data can be sent through the system in a given second, and that moving forward, Bybit will start to push all liquidation data, by actively sending the data as it becomes available.
While many altcoins remained sluggish, Real World Assets (RWA) linked tokens have posted some of the strongest gains, signaling renewed investor interest in tokenized real-world assets. Total RWA onchain led the market recovery with the total RWA onchain returning close to their all-time high (around $17.2bn) in terms of value tokenized onchain, which was seen in early Jan 2025. The sector’s total value locked (TVL) is up 95% year-over-year.
Thailand's SEC plans to digitize its capital markets through a new distributed ledger technology based trading platform, spurred by growing interest in token investments. The system could streamline bond trading processes, reducing the current two-week wait time for primary market trades. The platform will support both digital and tokenized traditional securities, with firms able to use their own blockchain infrastructure or the SEC's public chain. According to Deputy Secretary-General Kongsakul, multiple trading chains will be connected through a shared ledger system.
Blockchain investigators ZachXBT and tanuki42 have documented approximately $65 million in losses from Coinbase users due to social engineering attacks between December 2024 and January 2025. The researchers suggest the actual losses could be significantly higher, as their analysis only covers cases reported directly through social media. The cryptocurrency exchange is facing criticism for its inability to prevent widespread scams while simultaneously implementing aggressive user account restrictions.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment against a Canadian man on February 3, charging him with wire fraud, computer hacking, attempted extortion, and money laundering. The charges stem from his alleged theft of approximately $65 million in cryptocurrency through exploiting vulnerabilities in two DeFi protocols - KyberSwap and Indexed Finance.
