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🐳 Daily Edition: Insane $90M Scam Story, Bitcoin Loses Steam Against Gold

🐳 Daily Edition: Insane $90M Scam Story, Bitcoin Loses Steam Against Gold

This weekend's price action has brought more of the red we've been a little too accustomed to recently as ZachXBT publishes some wild allegations

Beluga & Will McKinnon
January 26, 2026

As Gold rose to new highs and Silver sits up over 50% since January 1st, it seems every market is having fun except crypto: despite Michael Saylor backing up the truck once again, BTC dove to lows of $86k over the weekend. A major driver of the move were outflows from Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, which lost a combined total of about $1.9B last week (source: DeFiLlama), the largest loss since February 2025. Interestingly, the price action during that period was quite similar to what we’re seeing now (with similar reasons surrounding the Trump admin and macro risks); the following weeks cemented a local bottom in Bitcoin during the “Liberation Day” shenanigans, which then led to BTC’s next run from $80k to $125k.

So far the wildest story of the last couple days has nothing to do with price action. Over the weekend, well-known onchain sleuth ZachXBT exposed yet another scammer accused of stealing over $40M from the US Government’s crypto seizure wallets. Just like many other scammers Zach has helped catch, the scammer John Daghita, known as “Lick” online, couldn’t help himself from self-reporting by flexing his wallet holdings to other scammers. Stealing from the US Government is bold to begin with, but the story gets a lot stranger from here… John Daghita’s father owns a government-contracted IT firm which was hired by the US Marshals to assist in the management and custody of seized crypto assets. It’s unclear exactly how John gained access to the funds through his father, but the US Marshals Service is now investigating this new information. Whatever the outcome, this is a good reminder of the risks of centralized custody…