After dipping just below the $59,000 level, Bitcoin printed a modest bounce above $63,000 in an attempt to reclaim its 200-week moving average. Ethereum and altcoins continued to bleed and are mostly well in the red as of Friday morning.
Tradfi markets looked similar, with all the major stock indices down on the week, while precious metals resumed corrective moves.
Aside from usual idiosyncratic bear market forces within crypto, there are exogenous factors weighing on digital assets. Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan said this week that she’s increasingly worried higher rates could be necessary later this year, and markets that were recently pricing cuts are now pricing the opposite. For risk assets, which live and die on liquidity, a hawkish pivot is far from ideal. Nor is the dollar still showing strength.
Then there’s oil and the crisis markets seemingly haven’t priced in because it hasn’t detonated yet. It feels like a boiling-the-frog situation. Amena Bakr warned that calling it a potential oil crisis is an understatement, and Bob Elliott put it more bluntly: inventories are drawing down at a pace that risks a serious squeeze within months, even as the market congratulates itself that supply looks slightly better than feared.
On Thursday morning the geopolitical fuse got shorter, with the president announcing the US would be hitting Iran hard and taking Kharg Island, along with plans to assume control of Iran’s oil and gas markets. All risk assets have the millstones of higher rates, a strengthening dollar, and an impending oil shock around their necks, but the one below is only fettering crypto’s.
The impending mega IPOs are probably the heaviest weight on crypto in the short term. With SpaceX pricing this week (Jim Bianco noted that any Friday pop could make Elon Musk history’s first trillionaire) this all-star IPO season is draining attention and liquidity. Bitcoin and crypto are the most liquidity and attention-sensitive assets in existence.
There’s also the debate whether the AI/space listings mark a top or a turn. The bear case: mega IPOs like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic historically mark cycle tops, and when the AI bubble pops, crypto goes from slow bleed to avalanche. The bull case: trapped bottom-shorters and a rush of liquidity rotating from profit-taking equity holders into BTC could mark the beginning of the recovery. Both can’t be right, and the resolution probably defines the next year.
Within crypto, sentiment and price action remain depressed. The on-chain picture is ugly. TXMC pointed out that long-term holder volume flowing to exchanges has dwarfed daily issuance since 2020. This has traditionally correlated with long-term holders taking profit, but since it has accelerated from the ETFs, it also could imply that the halving no longer matters for the market. Charles Edwards went further, noting we’re watching record institutional selling of Bitcoin, led by ETFs, absorbing over 460% of daily mined supply every day.
The cycle analysts are split on what comes next. Rekt Capital, who has called this bear market nearly beat for beat, says more macro downside is likely and any bounce will be weaker than the last relief rally. Benjamin Cowen observes that this bear market’s price path is so far basically identical to the last three. Cryptoquant put a number on it: a potential bottom near $53,600, bitcoin’s realized price.
The contrarians see green shoots in the carnage. Miners are capitulating, historically one of the most reliable accumulation signals there is. Real Vision’s James Easton sees bullish RSI divergence and a path to $180k by next year.
Michael Saylor kept the spotlight this week. He told an interviewer that Bitcoin sometimes feels like “risk cubed“ — volatility as a feature, not a bug. If Bitcoin is risk cubed, then leveraged beta to Bitcoin (say, MSTR) must be Bitcoin to the eighth power. Holders are living through that increased volatility right now: per Arkham, Strategy’s Bitcoin stack has lost roughly $13.5 billion in value since the company posted that celebratory post-earnings dancing video.
Then came Prague. On stage, Mr. Saylor explained the company’s recent sale of 32 BTC with a line for the ages: “I said to you to never sell your Bitcoin. I never said that the company wouldn’t sell its Bitcoin.” Cue videos of him promising to never sell Bitcoin. Austin Campbell has had enough of the whole genre, arguing that between this and the framing of STRC as a money-market equivalent, plaintiff’s attorneys must be thanking God for the gift. He also suggested retail should just buy a BTC ETF, because this ends badly for the bagholders.
Not every treasury company is retreating, though. Tom Lee’s Bitmine somehow keeps finding money, adding another 126,971 ETH worth roughly $213 million and bringing holdings to 5.54 million tokens, about 4.59% of all ETH. Eleven months in, he’s 92% of the way to his “Alchemy of 5%.”
With Bitcoin floundering, it’s no surprise ETH had a rough week too. Mr. Saylor lashed out at Ethereum et al, declaring on stage that confidence in Ethereum has collapsed, SUI collapsed after its “next Solana” hype, and the rest of crypto is fighting over utility. Tether’s Paolo Ardoino took his own victory lap as USDT surpassed ETH in market cap. The stablecoin built on Ethereum was briefly worth more than Ethereum itself.
Aave’s Stani Kulechov tried to reframe the flippening as bullish, predicting that large stablecoins and RWAs will flip ETH’s market cap and that this will be net positive for Ethereum. He declined to elaborate on how this is achievable.
Meanwhile, the builders kept building. Vitalik and several researchers published a genuinely interesting proposal for building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt, a way to create synthetic exposure to price indices without the liquidation cascades of debt-based designs. Vitalik noted that implementations are already happening, with a strong plea for formal verification before anything hits mainnet.
There were a number of news-worthy AI- crypto stories this week. Citadel published a report arguing that current AI model tokenomics are unrealistically expensive and a shift to cheaper models is inevitable, creating a bifurcation between frontier AI and everyday-usage AI. If correct, that has direct implications for every decentralized compute and inference token on the market. Relatedly, Milk Road ran a comparison of Venice ($VVV) at ~15x revenue versus closest comp OpenRouter, which just raised at 26x. And for a longer read, this candid year-in-review on agentic payments is worth your time if you believe (or want to believe) AI agents transacting autonomously is the next real use case.
AIxcrypto evangelist Algod spent the week trashing the quality of Bittensor subnets, and Bittensor founder const fired back by listing Algod’s own allegedly failed subnets: Kaito, Myshell, Efficient Frontier. Finally, Arthur Hayes unsurprisingly capitulated on WLD at all-time lows.
The rug-adjacent news was relentless. Humanity Protocol was exploited for more than $30 million, with the hacker dumping $H for ETH and the token down ~90%. The timing looked suspicious enough that “exploit” and “exit” were being used interchangeably within hours. On-chain sleuths also revived an old story: analysis suggesting Charles Hoskinson sold 1.5 billion ADA near the 2021 top, close to $3 billion at peak prices, if true.
Sam Bankman-Fried, from his federal prison cell, says he “absolutely” wants a presidential pardon from Trump. Kyle Samani was on the receiving end of an absolutely vicious roast that ricocheted around the timeline. And in the week’s strangest plot twist, on attention-starved CT (Crypto Twitter) Hunter Biden became crypto Twitter’s main character, thanking Beeple, putting his art on-chain, accepting Bitcoin as payment, and crediting Andreas Antonopoulos’s The Internet of Money for the orange pill.
A Biden capturing CT’s rapturous attention can only mean crypto is in the deep doldrums. It’ll be ok, though. Bitwise’s Hunter Horsley provided the best hopium of the week. 2026 will be remembered as a “changing of the guard”, pointing out that when Bitwise launched in 2017, the leading custodians were Xapo and Kingdom Trust, and the dominant exchanges were names like Poloniex, Bittrex, and BitMEX. Almost none of them lead today.
-David Sencil
