Bitcoin Holds $65K as Kimi K3 Revives Chip-Ban Fears, Dominance Hits 69.7%
BTC funding stays positive and dominance climbs to 69.7% as a Chinese open-weight AI model reignites Washington export-ban talk and rattles chip-linked risk assets.
Bitcoin traded near $65,252, up 0.76% on the day, with 24-hour volume of $18.39 billion and a session range between $63,100 and $65,799, according to COINOTAG DATA. Funding stayed mildly positive at +0.0031%, with longs paying shorts, while the futures book skewed 57.5% long against 42.5% short. Bitcoin dominance sat at 69.7% and total crypto market capitalization held near $1.87 trillion, even as the Fear and Greed Index printed 29 — firmly in “fear” territory.
The price stability came against a backdrop of renewed geopolitical noise around artificial intelligence. A single Chinese open-weight model, Kimi K3 from startup Moonshot AI, surged up coding benchmarks last week, shaking U.S. chip stocks and spilling into sentiment across AI-linked crypto tokens and trading infrastructure.
A 23x investment gap that may not tell the whole story
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report puts 2025 U.S. private AI investment at $285.9 billion against just $12.4 billion recorded in China — a roughly 23-fold headline gap. The same report cautions that the comparison is misleading, and a source close to the matter said the U.S. Commerce Department is not currently moving toward a new export ban.
The report also notes that Chinese state-directed guidance funds channeled an estimated $184 billion into domestic AI firms between 2000 and 2023 — capital that never shows up in private investment tallies. On the U.S. side, funding is similarly concentrated: mega-rounds above $1 billion nearly doubled to 28 in 2025, led by OpenAI’s $40 billion raise. For traders pricing geopolitical risk into AI-adjacent tokens, that concentration on both sides means headline totals can overstate who is actually ahead.
Shelved policy tools are back on the table
Officials last year weighed placing Chinese AI labs on the Entity List, the same trade blacklist that restricted Huawei in 2019. The NSA reportedly considered a public warning on Chinese AI systems, and the White House explored making U.S. companies legally liable if a hosted Chinese model were compromised. Innovation-focused officials shelved those proposals at the time — but Kimi K3’s benchmark jump has handed security hawks fresh ammunition, and the renewed debate is feeding into how altcoin desks price geopolitical and supply-chain risk.
Not everyone inside the policy tent favors a crackdown. David Sacks, an outside AI adviser to the White House, framed the moment as a critical inflection point, arguing that leading closed labs — which already control a revenue duopoly — are pressuring the government to sideline open-source rivals. The split echoes a familiar tension in crypto between open protocols and closed platforms, and it will help determine whether next-generation AI infrastructure stays permissionless or consolidates around a handful of incumbents.
Demand outran supply at Moonshot
Moonshot AI paused new subscriptions within 48 hours of Kimi K3’s launch as demand spiked, and the company is now preparing for a Hong Kong IPO. A viral open-weight release landing alongside an imminent listing suggests China’s AI push is as commercial as it is strategic — a combination that has historically lifted adjacent narratives, including compute- and inference-linked tokens, some of which have touched fresh all-time highs whenever AI headlines dominate the cycle.
For now, Bitcoin’s positive funding and 69.7% dominance point to capital consolidating in BTC rather than rotating into risk-on alt positions, even as the Fear and Greed reading near 29 signals traders are still hedged against policy-driven volatility spilling from chip stocks into digital assets.
Read more: BTC Funding Stays Positive at $64.8K as KOSPI Crashes 25% From Peak