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Strategy founder Michael Saylor (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

TD Cowen lowers Strategy price target while bitcoin continues to rise

The analysts also set a base case assumption of bitcoin hitting $177,000 by December 26, with an upside scenario of $225,000 and a much bleaker downside scenario of $60,000.

TD Cowen analysts lowered their price target on Strategy to $440 from $500, citing its “audacious” bitcoin buying and noting that “greater equity in the mix reduces BTC yield.”

Lance Vitanza, managing director and senior analyst at TD Cowen, wrote in a January 14 note that the company “has not only survived the latest period of price compression; it has leaned into it.”

In the past week, Strategy raised $1.25 billion through the issuance of common stock and its variable-rate Stretch preferred stock, using “all but $0.5 million” to buy 13,627 bitcoin.

Vitanza added that the company remains attractive “for those looking to create bitcoin exposure,” and expects Strategy to now buy 155,000 bitcoin, versus the previous expectation of 90,000. TD Cowen maintained its “buy” rating.

Vitanza said long-term investors (four or more years) who are big believers in bitcoin should focus on the common shares, as “to the extent bitcoin outperforms most other asset classes, MSTR will outperform bitcoin handsomely, in our opinion.”

For risk-averse investors seeking exposure to bitcoin, Vitanza said they should focus on the senior preferred STRF shares.

“These shares are covered 6.4x by the value of the company’s bitcoin holdings, which means bitcoin would have to fall to $14k for the shares to even potentially become impaired,” Vitanza told Sherwood News.

TD Cowen analysts also set a base case assumption of bitcoin hitting $177,000 by December 26, with an upside scenario of $225,000 and a much bleaker downside scenario of $60,000.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin Treasuries released its 2025 Audience Survey, which found that 90% of respondents expect Strategy’s bitcoin holdings to increase, and nearly half believe the company will hold 1 million bitcoin in 2026, up from the current 687,410.

Another 12% expect Strategy to reach 1.5 million BTC, and 6% expect it to hold between 2 and 3 million BTC.

Investors also expect bitcoin digital asset treasuries to double by the end of 2026, with 32.4% expecting total corporate holdings to reach about 1.7 million bitcoin, “close to twice today’s levels.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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