A U.S. operation named Absolute Resolve began in the early hours of January 3 with more than 150 aircraft striking air defense systems, airfields and mobility nodes across northern Venezuela, and U.S. authorities reported that Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores were captured and flown out of the country. Satellite imagery and reports showed explosions around greater Caracas, damage to infrastructure and a legislative building, and outages and communications interruptions in southern Caracas. U.S. officials described the operation as intelligence-driven, said a small command cell authorized the action to reduce leak risk, and stated that charging documents against Maduro are being prepared while a senator said the secretary expects no further kinetic action and that Maduro will face a U.S. trial. Colombia confirmed involvement, deployed border forces and warned of refugee pressure; Russia and China issued condemnations; the U.N. called for restraint; and Venezuela requested a U.N. Security Council meeting. Crypto markets repriced geopolitical risk during low-liquidity hours as Bitcoin and major altcoins declined, perpetual funding turned negative, basis compressed, option skew favored puts, market makers widened spreads and reduced inventory, stablecoin order books saw heavy two-way flow, and Latin American P2P spreads widened. Venezuela’s broad retail adoption of USDT, USDC and P2P rails for remittances and commerce links local on-ramps and off-ramps to global liquidity, and power outages could affect mining operations, pool hash rates and mining throughput. Officials indicated that Treasury and State may update sanctions and guidance that would affect exchange routing, custody and compliance costs for exchanges, market makers and stablecoin issuers. Advisory guidance included prioritizing liquidity quality, maintaining contingency plans for custody and fiat ramps, and holding short-duration hedges and cash buffers; recommended indicators to monitor over the next 72 hours include official U.S. statements on operational scope and detainee status, cross-border incidents and refugee surges, oil price moves, exchange policy updates for Venezuelan users, stablecoin spreads across Latin American P2P channels, funding and basis metrics, open interest, deposit and withdrawal anomalies tied to Venezuelan IP clusters, and daily mining hash rate trends and reports of grid outages.
Source: https://web3businessnews.com/crypto/us-strikes-venezuela-crypto/