Crypto Markets See Mixed Signals as Bitcoin Hovers Near $90,000 and Gold Surges

The cryptocurrency market has been sending mixed signals, with Bitcoin's price hovering near $90,000 as the dollar drops and gold continues to surge. According to a report by Bloomberg, Swiss bank UBS, which manages over $4 trillion in assets, is planning to offer crypto investments to some of its private banking clients, which may have contributed to the short-lived rebound in crypto markets. However, Bitcoin's price has been volatile, trading near $88,000 at press time, down about 0.5% over the past 24 hours and down 5% on the weekly timeframe. Ethereum has also weakened, dropping as low as $2,787 on Sunday evening and trading flat over the past 24 hours around $2,936. ETH is down nearly 9% on the week and has been trading below $3,000 levels since Jan. 22. Despite the volatility, regulators are increasingly applying traditional market rules to decentralized finance (DeFi). According to a report by PwC, regulators are no longer treating crypto as a special case, but are instead applying the same kinds of rules used in traditional markets. This includes monitoring for bad behavior, requiring more transparency, and making sure users understand what they are buying. "This is no longer a question of if regulation will arrive, but how quickly firms can now adapt to operating in parallel regimes," said Elise Soucie Watts, executive director of Global Digital Finance. Meanwhile, tokenized gold has surpassed $4 billion in market value as spot gold reached a new all-time high this week, reflecting growing interest in on-chain commodities amid global market uncertainty. Tether Gold (XAUT) has about $2.5 billion in total assets, while Paxos Gold (PAXG) stands near $1.99 billion, according to DeFiLlama data. Both tokens are designed to track the price of an ounce of physical gold. The growth of tokenized commodities is not limited to gold, with the overall tokenized commodities market at roughly $4.88 billion, up more than 22% over the past 30 days, with monthly transfer volume above $7 billion. Notably, Tether Gold and Paxos Gold together hold roughly 86% of the market share. In other news, Ethereum's mainnet activity has seen an unusual spike, with the network reaching 1.2 million active daily addresses, according to Token Terminal data. However, researchers caution that the headline numbers around active addresses and transaction count are being distorted by dust attacks and so-called "address-poisoning" campaigns rather than organic activity on the network. The number of transactions on the network also reached an all-time high of about 2.8 million transactions, per BitInfoCharts data. In the past 24 hours, the network has seen about 2.5 million transactions. However, the surge in mainnet activity overshadows previous concerns about the network's scalability, with Ethereum's Layer 1 chain "outranking all leading L2s in terms of daily active addresses," according to Token Terminal. Overall, the cryptocurrency market is sending mixed signals, with Bitcoin's price volatile and regulators increasingly applying traditional market rules to DeFi. However, the growth of tokenized commodities and the surge in Ethereum's mainnet activity suggest that there is still interest and innovation in the space.