Crypto Rallies 1% as INJ Leads Gains

Crypto markets traded higher on February 22, 2026, with direction up and a 1.0% average change across tracked assets. Breadth was slightly positive with 91 assets up and 82 down, while the day’s news flow leaned constructive with 8 positive items versus 4 negative, suggesting risk appetite improved even as macro headlines stayed noisy.

The most market-relevant macro development was the U.S. administration’s tariff push, with reporting pointing to a 15% global tariff rate being raised and separate coverage referencing a newly signed 10% global tariff despite legal setbacks. The immediate significance for crypto was the lack of a broad risk-off response, with Bitcoin cited around $68.0K and the broader tape holding gains, implying traders treated the tariff headlines as either already priced into cross-asset volatility or not directly transmissible into near-term crypto liquidity conditions. The muted reaction matters because tariffs typically pressure growth expectations and can tighten financial conditions; today’s price action instead signaled that crypto beta remained resilient.

The second key story was the governance and contributor risk surfacing at Aave, where coverage said a core technical contributor plans to cease involvement with the Aave DAO, with additional reporting framing it as a governance crisis and pointing to an April exit timeline. Despite that negative narrative, AAVE rose 5.5%, indicating dip-buying or positioning that separated token price from near-term governance uncertainty, potentially because markets expect continuity through other contributors or view the risk as manageable relative to protocol cash flows. The divergence also fit a broader pattern of investors rotating into liquid large-cap DeFi on up days even when project-specific headlines are mixed.

A third theme was institutional and infrastructure signaling around payments and governance, led by a report that SBI issued bonds with payouts in XRP and a separate piece on Vitalik Buterin proposing AI “stewards” to improve DAO governance. XRP-linked bond payouts, if accurately characterized, reinforce the narrative that token rails can be used for settlement-like functions in structured products, which can support medium-term demand assumptions even if it does not translate into immediate spot flows. Meanwhile, the Ethereum governance discussion matters less as a near-term price catalyst and more as a reminder that protocol communities are actively seeking scalable decision-making frameworks, which can influence how markets price governance risk after episodes like Aave’s.

Price leadership skewed toward high-beta infrastructure and smart-contract adjacent names rather than defensive corners. Injective outperformed sharply with multiple prints on the board, including +15.3%, +10.6%, and +8.2%, while The Graph gained +8.9% and +8.0% and Filecoin rose 8.5%, a cluster consistent with a risk-on bid in application infrastructure and data/compute narratives. Ethereum Classic advanced 15.2% and another 7.5% mention tied to the weekend market wrap, while NEAR added 7.9% and Arbitrum rose 7.0%, pointing to broad strength across L1/L2 exposure; in DeFi, Uniswap gained 5.8% and Aave 5.5%, and in gaming Axie Infinity rose 5.4%, suggesting a generalized rebound rather than a single-sector squeeze.

Several of the day’s biggest movers advanced without clear catalyst, including INJ, GRT, FIL, THETA, NEAR, ARB, DOT (+6.1%), UNI, and AXS, which makes the session look more like positioning and flows than headline-driven repricing. The only explicit linkage between news and a major move was the weekend note that paired BTC near $68.0K with ETC’s surge, but even there the story read more like a description of price action than a discrete trigger. Conversely, some prominent headlines did not map cleanly onto immediate price response, including the SBI-XRP bond payout item and the Cardano smart contract release ahead of a hard fork, underscoring that incremental fundamental updates are being discounted unless they coincide with liquidity events, clear revenue impacts, or regulatory step-changes.

The clean takeaway is that the market absorbed tariff-related uncertainty while bidding up higher-beta alts, but the Aave contributor story shows governance risk can re-enter pricing quickly once the broader tape cools. For tomorrow, watch whether BTC can hold the $68.0K area referenced in coverage and whether alt breadth remains positive; a fade in breadth with BTC flat would signal the move was flow-driven and vulnerable to reversal. Traders should also monitor whether DeFi tokens continue to rally in spite of governance headlines, because sustained strength there would indicate that market participants are prioritizing macro liquidity and sector beta over project-specific operational risk in the near term.