What happened today: 08 Jan 26'
The market review
This is the 2026 daily market review. Where I wrote with curiosity to curious people. I try to give exercise thoughts on what happened during the day. And what can impact the future.
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Today was the day for another fight between non-profit and profit-driven organizations. This time was not the time for AAVE, but the time for ZCash. I woke up to the information that the ZCash core team (the Electric Coin Company, ECC) resigned to form a new company; in the announcement, they flagged a “constructive discharge” from the Foundation. The market reacted pretty aggressively: ZEC was down over 20% on the announcement, and XMR was up on the rotation game. As the day passed, multiple opinions followed. Zooko, the leader of Shielded Labs and former ECC CEO, highlighted the relevancy to the ZCash network: it is open source, permissionless, secure, and private, so in this conflict, nothing happens to the protocol. The ZCash product still works, and works well. Later in the day, I read positive feedback about the announcement: Mert was in favor of the ECC resignation, Jack (a core contributor) aligned with it, and even Haseeb and Balaji wrote in favor of ZCash.
Later today, the ZCash Foundation announced that everything is running as predicted; ZCash is a decentralized, open-source model. No contributor, team, or organization controls ZCash. So, this is just a change in management; it means nothing to the protocol.
By surprise, the Electric Coin CEO announced that, in fact, they are now building a competitor to the current wallet landscape—not getting out of business. They are building a new wallet for ZCash that scales ZCash, and they are going all-in on ZCash. When the market thought that ECC would step away from ZCash, in fact, they are trying to scale even more by building a profit-driven wallet called CashZ.
What a day for privacy enthusiasts and crypto traders. You have ZEC pricing and XMR pricing reacting pretty aggressively to the news, where ZEC is still -10% in the last 24h.
Not to end up only on privacy conversations, I read DAC8, which threatens crypto privacy in Europe by enforcing automatic reporting, total visibility, and mandatory compliance at a global reach. This means companies that are not based in Europe must still comply with this DAC8 enforcement. This is mass surveillance, and it is relevant for all crypto users. There is no rule that threatens worse than DAC8 for European users.
In terms of prices, we have basically flat pricing for BTC and a worse performance for other major l1’s and other tokens. The unique winner is XMR due to this flow of capital originated by the ZEC FUD.
Oil prices went up; even when Goldman Sachs traders are near their most bearish on oil in a 10-year period, prices are still moving up today.
Trump went crazy; he went all-in. Republicans are now fighting for the mid-term elections, and prediction markets are not in their favor. They must do everything they can to win the mid-terms, and that includes pushing oil prices down by unlocking Venezuela oil to be imported to the US, and probably ending up with the Iran conflict that has been escalating lately, to protect against inflation that the population really cares about. It has been critical to protect the housing market for their population, with the announcement of blocking institutional buyers of single-family homes yesterday. Today they unlocked a new $200b mortgage bond purchase, pushing mortgage rates down and monthly payments down, making the cost of owning a home more affordable. These are all politics and formats of trying to win the mid-terms.
But this represents a new, Trump-style format of doing innovative QE. QE means Bitcoin goes up. As Arthur Hayes said in a tweet, “Run it fucking hot! If you ain’t long you is wrong. BTC to 1 million.” This ballistic approach ignites the fire, and Trump will use multiple reasons to justify printing more money.
Defense is critical to the administration; they justify with any possible reason the need to print or use money to increase defense spending. Trump calls for a $1.5T military budget in 2027, up from the $901b approved by Congress for 2026. Defense stocks are killers here, and they will be killers for 2026 and beyond. The increase in defense spending will not stop anytime soon.
Besides defense being critical, energy is even more critical. With AI and data centers, electricity consumption is set to more than double by 2028. Data center energy consumption is already up to a record 5% of total US power demand.
Electricity is not only related to the cost of AI products; it is also related to the direct cost for households, especially during the winter. Probably the 2026 winter will be tough for all Americans.
In a world where electricity is key, Germany leftists sabotaged high-voltage power lines that supplied the southwestern districts of Berlin, putting more than 45 thousand households, 100 thousand people, and 2 thousand businesses in the dark—no electricity, no heating. It is cold in Berlin, and the population there stayed 5 days like this. It shows the vulnerability of our electricity system. Nothing like this has happened since WW2.
Energy, AI, and data centers are extremely important, but without rare earths, nothing is possible. Venezuela doesn’t have rare earth minerals; they have critical minerals located in places like the Katanga region (in the Congo), a protected area far from the conflict. The big problem is that these mining facilities are controlled by the State or by armed militias, making it hard for international companies to do business in those regions. This makes Greenland critical, not only because they have critical minerals as well, but they also have rare earth minerals. This market is dominated by China and is critical for chips and robotics, making it critical for the administration to get a deal with Greenland.
We are filled with positive updates. Without knowing who the user is, Morpho has 44% MAU market share, running 2.2x Aave MAU over this 12-month window. Fireblocks acquired TRES Finance, making them a giant firm. Morgan Stanley plans to launch a proprietary digital wallet for tokenized assets later this year, and JPM launched on Canton.
Another day where information doesn’t match the market performance. Yesterday’s flows were a disaster, reflecting the price of yesterday. Today, it was a confrontation of the ZCash problem plus the combination of QE alignments that makes our Bitcoin thesis completely aligned and very positive about the future outcome. 125 thousand per Bitcoin sounds ambitious but possible in the near future if these trends continue.