This isn’t what decentralized coin enthusiasts expected in the first 100 days of the new crypto-friendly administration: After President Donald Trump reaffirmed his tariff plans Thursday, Bitcoin traded below $80,000 yesterday for the first time since November, stoking fears that a crypto winter could be coming amid a broader pullback in risky investments.

BTC reached 28% below its high of ~$109k from Inauguration Day yesterday before recovering from a ~7% dive by the afternoon.

• Still, Bitcoin shed more than 20% in February, marking its worst month since June 2022.
• Spooked crypto traders offloaded their BTC at a realized loss of ~$1 billion/day for three consecutive days this week, the biggest wipeout since August, CoinDesk reported.
• Spot Bitcoin ETFs have also lost more than $3 billion since Feb. 18. Traders pulled out $1 billion on Tuesday alone—the biggest single-day outflow since Bitcoin ETFs hit Wall Street.

In total…the crypto market has lost $1 trillion since peaking at $3.72 trillion in mid-December.

What’s driving the rout

Tariff certainty and inflation uncertainty are making investors feel more cautious about turbulent assets, especially crypto.

• Trade tensions triggered yesterday’s Bitcoin selloff and broader market declines—tariffs of 25% on Canada and Mexico plus another 10% on China will take effect next week, Trump affirmed Thursday.
• Inflation has also stayed higher than the Federal Reserve would like, so hopes for more interest rate cuts in the near future have largely fizzled, causing traders to pull back.

Undercutting crypto trust, digital currency exchange Bybit lost $1.5 billion ethereum to hackers in the biggest crypto theft ever last week, which contributed to the Bitcoin sell-off.

But in good news for crypto…the SEC delivered on Trump’s campaign promises and decided to drop investigations into crypto exchanges Robinhood and Coinbase over the past week. The agency then declared memecoins like $DOGE—the sixth-largest cryptocurrency—to be collectibles and not securities, putting them outside its regulatory purview.—ML

Trump cuts Zelensky’s White House visit short after tense Oval Office exchange. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky left the White House yesterday without signing an agreement giving the US access to his country’s mineral resources after an unusually heated public spat between Zelensky, Trump, and Vice President JD Vance over the US’s negotiations with Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Trump and Vance aggressively chastized Zelensky in front of reporters in the Oval Office, saying he wasn’t thankful enough for US aid. “You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country,” Trump said. The open tension calls into question whether the Trump administration will continue to provide military support to Ukraine as it tries to repel Russia’s invasion.

Trump makes English the official language of the US. The president signed an executive order yesterday that designated English as the official language of the US—something the country has never had before. The order permits government agencies and organizations receiving federal funding to decide whether to offer their services in other languages going forward, which they had previously been required to do under an order signed by former President Bill Clinton. Though there’s never been an official language at the federal level, 30+ states already have legislation making English the official language there.

Federal worker firings hit staffers who forecast the weather. The latest federal government employees targeted in the Trump administration’s cost-cutting drive were ~800 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides weather watches and warnings as well as climate research. The agency, which includes the National Weather Service that’s relied on by many for forecasting, had about 13,000 employees before the termination notices went out to probationary staff on Thursday, so the cuts could impact what it can do going forward.—AR

After four decades on the DEA’s most wanted fugitive list, alleged Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero was transferred to US custody from Mexico this week along with 28 other drug cartel suspects. The transfer comes as President Trump has ratcheted up threats of tariffs and military action against Mexico to force a crackdown on border security and drug trafficking.

US officials called the deportation unprecedented, especially concerning the notorious 72-year-old Caro Quintero who is believed to be behind the 1985 torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. The murder escalated the US’ involvement in the drug war and was dramatized in Netflix’s 2018 series Narcos: Mexico.

• Caro Quintero was arraigned in New York yesterday and pleaded not guilty to drug charges along with alleged former Juarez Cartel leader Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.
• In January, Trump signed an executive order labeling six Mexican cartels “foreign terrorist organizations,” which means prosecutors could seek terrorism charges and the death penalty against the men.

Big picture: Mexico-US relations remain tense after Trump’s announcement on Thursday that a 25% tariff on Mexican imports would take effect on March 4.—MM

Pour one out for a service that showed us that you don’t need to buy a plane ticket to chat face-to-face with loved ones oceans away. Microsoft announced yesterday that it will sunset Skype in May, urging users to switch to Teams instead.

Founded in Estonia in 2003, Skype was one of the first services to offer free long distance voice and video calls, which made it the go-to option for years. The bulging blue icon eventually became a popular corporate communication tool and Oprah’s app of choice for video interviews on her popular afternoon talk show.

Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011—its biggest acquisition at the time—and integrated it across its other products. But it eventually turned into another Internet Explorer moment for the tech giant:

• Skype’s clunky glitchiness left it ceding ground to Apple’s FaceTime and the Facebook-owned WhatsApp.
• Microsoft began phasing out Skype for Business in 2017, and went all in on souping up Teams during the pandemic. Teams now has 320 million users and is the preferred way to fire people over video call for work along with Google Meet, Zoom, and Slack.
• Skype’s monthly daily user base was 36 million in 2023, according to the company, compared to 300 million monthly users in 2016.

For anyone still using Skype…your contacts and login info will automatically migrate to Teams.—SK

Turns out there is a work mix-up more embarrassing than that time Tim from accounts accidentally called a client “Dad.” Citigroup meant to credit a client’s account with $280 last April, but accidentally transferred $81 trillion, the Financial Times reported this week. The bank caught the problem with the internal transfer within 90 minutes and reversed the payment hours later—but it managed to slip past two layers of checks before a third employee caught the error—even though those numbers look nothing like each other, per FT.

That seems like a pretty extreme mistake for a bank to (almost) make…until you remember that time Citi actually did erroneously send out $900 million to creditors fighting over money owed the cosmetics company Revlon owed them. In the five years since, Citi has gotten a new CEO, paid fines, and supposedly put measures in place to prevent something like that from happening again.

Things do seem to be improving at Citi, at least a little: An internal report seen by FT showed the bank had 10 near misses (that’s when the bank processes the wrong amount but recovers the cash) involving $1+ billion last year, down from 13 the year before. But experts told the newspaper that number is still high for the US banking industry.—AR