Swiss banking giant UBS, with assets under management (AuM) of up to $7 trillion, is set to launch Bitcoin trading for some of its clients. This comes amid predictions that regulatory clarity and broader adoption could send the BTC price to as high as $200,000. 

UBS To Offer Bitcoin Trading To Some Wealth Clients

Bloomberg reported that UBS is planning to launch crypto trading for some of its wealth clients, starting with its private bank clients in Switzerland. The bank will reportedly begin by offering these clients the opportunity to invest in Bitcoin and Ethereum. At the same time, the crypto offering could further expand to clients in the Pacific-Asia region and the U.S.

The banking giant is currently in discussions with potential partners, and there is no clear timeline for when it could launch Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for clients. This move is said to be partly due to increased demand from wealth clients for crypto exposure. UBS also faces increased competition as other Wall Street giants are working to offer crypto trading. 

Morgan Stanley, in partnership with Zerohash, announced plans to launch crypto trading in the first half of this year, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The banking giant may soon also be able to offer its crypto products, as it has filed with the SEC to launch spot BTC, ETH, and SOL ETFs. 

Furthermore, JPMorgan, another of UBS’ competitors, is considering offering crypto trading to institutional clients, although this plan is still in the early stages. The bank already accepts Bitcoin and Ethereum as collateral from its clients. Last year, it also filed to offer BTC structured notes that will track the performance of the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF.

Can Bank’s Entry Trigger A BTC Rally To $200,000  

Kevin O’Leary predicted that Bitcoin could rally to between $150,000 and $200,000 this year, driven by the passage of the CLARITY Act. His prediction came just as White House Crypto Czar David Sacks said banks would fully enter crypto once the bill passes. As such, there is a possibility that BTC could reach this $200,000 psychological level in anticipation of the amount of new capital that could flow into BTC from these banks once the bill passes. 

BitMine’s Chairman, Tom Lee, also predicted during a CNBC interview that Bitcoin could reach between $200,000 and $250,000 this year, partly due to growing institutional adoption by Wall Street giants. Meanwhile, Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said that a BTC rally to $200,000 is the “most obvious thing in the world” to him.

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is trading at around $89,600, up in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

Fundstrat’s head of research, Tom Lee, has told investors to prepare for a rough opening to 2026 before conditions improve later in the year. He warned that political friction and tariff talk could trigger meaningful setbacks for both stocks and Bitcoin, even as blockchain and AI remain long-term strengths.

Tom Lee’s Call And The Near-Term Picture

Lee said a more dovish stance from the US Federal Reserve and the end of quantitative tightening set the stage for gains later on.

He put a possible market correction in the mid-teens range, estimating a pullback of about 15% to 20% at one stage.

He pointed to geopolitics — including renewed tariff threats — and rising political divides as brakes on an immediate, broad rally. Reports note he still expects a late-year rebound if policy eases and liquidity returns.

Reports say the White House’s selective support for certain industries could tilt which sectors lead the recovery.

2026 is shaping up to be similar to 2025:

– good fundamentals – tariff escalations and White House picking “winners and losers” – political divisiveness – tailwinds from AI and blockchain BUT: dovish Fed now and QT over

And so a painful decline may lie ahead but we would… https://t.co/7Mp3rcOcP1

— Thomas (Tom) Lee (not drummer) FSInsight.com (@fundstrat) January 20, 2026

Deleveraging Still Hitting Crypto Liquidity

Lee argued that recent squeezes have left crypto markets fragile. Market makers have been weakened by repeated forced exits, and that has made price moves jumpier.

He also noted that a fresh Bitcoin all-time high would be an important signal that the market has worked through those stresses, though he didn’t repeat earlier extreme price targets in his latest remarks.

Reports stress the difference between a technical bounce and a move backed by wider adoption and deeper institutional flows.

Heavy Bitcoin Selloff

Despite warnings that a painful decline may still unfold, some investors are not backing away entirely. Reports say parts of the market continue to view sharp pullbacks as buying chances rather than exit signals.

Even with uncertainty around tariffs and global politics, Lee and his camp believes disciplined dip buying — spread out over time — offers better odds than trying to time a perfect bottom while fear dominates headlines.

“And so a painful decline may lie ahead but we would ‘buy the dip'”, Lee said in an X post.

Reports indicate that more than $1.8 billion was liquidated over a 48-hour stretch as bitcoin lost ground.

Bitcoin sank to roughly $88,500 during the slide, and Coinglass data showed the bulk of wiped positions were longs — a sign that traders had been positioned for higher prices.

The selloff erased gains made earlier in the year and pulled crypto capitalization sharply lower, in one of the biggest drops since mid-November.

Featured image from Allrecipes, chart from TradingView

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee reiterated his $250,000 Bitcoin target while cautioning that 2026 could be a “jagged” year for crypto adoption and a turbulent one for broader risk assets, framing any major pullback as a buying window rather than a signal to de-risk.

Speaking on The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost in an interview released Jan. 20, Lee said he expects 2026 to ultimately “look like a continuation of the bull market that started in 2022,” but argued markets must first digest several transitions that could deliver a drawdown large enough to “feel like a bear market.”

$250,000 Bitcoin Call Comes With A 2026 Warning

Lee pointed to what he described as a “new Fed” dynamic, arguing markets tend to “test” a new chair and that the sequencing of identification, confirmation, and reaction can catalyze a correction. He also warned that the White House could become “more deliberate in picking winners and losers,” expanding the set of sectors, industries, and even countries “in the bullseye,” which he said is already visible in gold’s strength.

A third friction point, in his telling, is AI positioning: the market is still calibrating “how much is priced into AI,” from energy needs to data-center capacity, and that uncertainty could linger until other narratives take the baton.

Pressed on magnitude, Lee said with regards to the S&P 500, the drawdown “could be 10%,” but also “could be 15% or 20%,” potentially producing a “round trip from the start of the year,” before finishing 2026 strong. He added that his institutional clients did not appear aggressively positioned yet, and flagged leverage as a tell: margin debt is at an all-time high, he said, but up 39% year-over-year—below the 60% pace he associates with local market peaks.

For crypto, Lee leaned on a market-structure explanation for why gold outperformed: he said crypto tracked gold until Oct. 10, when the market suffered what he called “the single largest deleveraging event in the history of crypto,” “bigger than what happened in November 2022 around FTX.”

After that, he said, Bitcoin fell more than 35% and Ethereum almost 50%, breaking the linkage. “Crypto has periodic deleveraging events,” Lee said. “It really impairs the market makers and the market makers are essentially the central bank of crypto. So many of the market makers I would say maybe half got wiped out on October 10th.”

That fragility, he argued, doesn’t negate the “digital gold” framing so much as it limits who treats it that way today. “Bitcoin is digital gold,” Lee said, but added that the set of investors who buy that thesis “is not the same universe that owns gold.”

Over time, Lee expects the ownership base to broaden, though not smoothly. “Crypto still has a, I think, future adoption curve that’s higher than gold because more people own gold than own crypto,” he said. “But the path to getting that adoption rate higher is going to be very jagged. And I think 2026 will be a really important test because if Bitcoin makes a new all-time high, we know that that deleveraging event is behind us.”

Within that framework, Lee reiterated his high-conviction upside call: “We think Bitcoin will make a new high this year,” he said, confirming a $250,000 target. He tied the thesis to rising “usefulness” of crypto, banks recognizing blockchain settlement and finality, and the emergence of natively crypto-scaled financial models.

Lee cited Tether as a proof point, claiming it is expected to generate nearly $20 billion in 2026 earnings with roughly 300 employees, and argued that the profit profile illustrates why blockchain-based finance can look structurally different from legacy banking.

Lee closed with advice that intentionally cuts against short-horizon reflexes. “Trying to time the market makes you an enemy of your future performance,” he said. “As much as I’m warning about 2026 and the possibility of a lot of turbulence, they should view the pullback as a chance to buy, not the pullback as a chance to sell.”

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $89,287.

As the Ethereum (ETH) price retests a crucial support zone, BitMine revealed it has added another $110 million worth of ETH to its treasury holdings over the past week, approaching an important milestone for the company’s investment strategy.

BitMine’s Ethereum Bet Continues

On Tuesday, BitMine, a Bitcoin and Ethereum Network Company with a focus on accumulating crypto for long-term investment, announced its holdings had reached 4.2 million ETH tokens after acquiring 35,268 ETH, worth roughly $110 million, in the past week.

As a result, the company, which is the largest Ethereum Treasury company in the world and the second-largest global treasury, has crypto and cash holdings totaling $14.5 billion at current prices.

According to the announcement, the company now owns 4,203,036 ETH at $3,211, 193 Bitcoin (BTC), a $22 million stake in Eightco Holdings as part of its “Moonshots” initiative, and unencumbered cash worth $979 million.

After the latest purchase, BitMine now holds 3.48% of ETH’s total supply, and nears its goal to control 5% of the leading altcoin’s 120.7 million supply. Notably, it has achieved nearly 70% if “Alchemy of 5%” target in just six months.

BitMine’s chairman, Thomas “Tom” Lee, stated that “Ethereum’s price ratio to Bitcoin, or ETHBTC, has been steadily climbing since mid-October. In our view, this reflects investors recognizing tokenization and other use cases being developed by Wall Street are being built on Ethereum.”

As of January 19, 2026, BitMine’s total staked ETH stands at 1,838,003, worth $5.9 billion at $3,211 per ETH, an increase of 581,920 ETH in the past week.

ETH Price At Crucial Support Zone

Despite BitMine’s constant bet on the cryptocurrency, Ethereum retraced nearly all its 2026 gains after falling below the $3,000 barrier. On Tuesday, ETH recorded a 6.8% decline in the daily timeframe, dropping from the $3,200 area to a three-week low of $2,980.

The King of altcoins has been trading between the $2,600-$3,350 area since the November pullbacks, reclaiming the upper zone of this range during the start of the year rally. Now, ETH is retesting an important multi-support area that could define the cryptocurrency’s short-term performance.

Analyst World of Charts affirmed that there are two “simple” possibilities for Ethereum. If the price loses the $3,000 area, which serves as the mid-zone of its local range and a key macro support and resistance level, then a retest of the $2,600 lows becomes likely.

On the contrary, if the altcoin holds this zone in the daily timeframe and momentum builds, it could retest the range’s upper boundary resistance again.

Amid the pullback, another pseudonym market observer also pointed out that ETH is currently retesting its 50-day Moving Average (MA), which was reclaimed at the start of the year and currently sits at the $3,089 level.

According to the post, if the 50-day MA holds, a move to the 200-day MA, located around the $3,650 area, could come next. “All eyes [are] on a close above the 50-day MA, which will point to a successful back test,” he added.

As of this writing, ETH is trading at $2,999, a 7% decline in the weekly timeframe.