This Week in Bitcoin: Trump Tariffs and DeepSeek Fuel Plunges, But Tether Is Coming

It was another action-packed week for Bitcoin, and the price of the coin is sitting comfortably above $100,000 again—despite substantial swings fueled by the news cycle.

CoinGecko shows that the biggest digital asset is currently sitting at $101,880 after a turbulent week. That’s a drop of nearly 3% over the past week.

Things started off rocky, with the crypto market taking a hit after Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released a new open-source large language model late the previous week.

This powerful and much more cost-efficient model led tech investors to rapidly sell their stakes in American AI-related companies and crypto positions. At one point, Bitcoin was priced as low as $98,380 on Monday.

But it recovered fast, and the asset leapt back above the $100,000 mark after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted that another interest rate cut was possible if inflation continued to cool. His comments on banks being able to handle crypto services also fueled optimism.

But then on Friday, word that President Donald Trump’s tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China will begin Saturday helped push Bitcoin and other assets down again. After nearly touching $106,000 on Friday morning, BTC plunged below the $102,000 mark that afternoon—and remains there as of this writing.

ETF flows

Last week was a big week for Bitcoin, with money flowing hard and fast into the new Bitcoin exchange-traded funds—largely thanks to crypto-friendly President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Nearly $1.6 billion worth of assets entered Bitcoin ETFs last week.

Things slowed down this week, with investors on Monday pulling out nearly $458 million out of the funds, data from Farside Investors shows.

By Thursday, over half a billion had entered the vehicles—but that’s pretty slow going compared to last week, when investors pumped over $800 million into the ETFs on Tuesday alone.

Tether on Bitcoin

Perhaps the biggest news of the week was stablecoin giant Tether announcing digital dollars on the Bitcoin network. On Thursday, the company behind said its native USDT token would soon be available across both Bitcoin’s base layer and the Lightning Network.

USDT is the world’s top stablecoin, and Bitcoin is the world’s biggest crypto network. Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs, the company building the integration, said that “millions of people will now be able to use the most open, secure blockchain to send dollars globally.”

Ripple vs. the Bitcoin reserve?

Hardcore Bitcoiners are going after fintech Ripple, as the company—whose founders made XRP—get chummy with President Trump.

Last week, the President signed an executive order on crypto, but it didn’t specifically mention Bitcoin—despite his campaign promise to stockpile the orange coin.

Now, Bitcoiners are alleging that Ripple is pushing to have XRP, the third-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, in the new administration’s “digital asset stockpile.”

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse responded to the allegations on X in a Monday post, writing that “if a [government] digital asset reserve is created… it should be representative of the industry, not just one token.”

Trump’s new fintech eyes Bitcoin

Meanwhile, the President’s Trump Media and Technology Group said it would launch a financial services and fintech arm called Truth.Fi. According to the company’s announcement, Truth.Fi may buy “Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies or crypto-related securities.”

But the wording was vague, and the $250 million cash that the fintech wanted to allocate to crypto will be in the hands of Charles Schwab—who would invest it via ETFs.

While some of Trump’s recent moves come in his official capacity as president and others are from his personal companies or licensees, they may be causing mixed messages for Bitcoiners who supported him during the campaign.

Edited by Andrew Hayward