Bearishness Persists, but It’s Not All Bad Folks — Week in Review

Bitcoin spent the week grinding down, and wicking twice below $60K. As of writing this Friday morning, BTC is sitting just above $60,000. Let’s see if that holds.

Stocks had their own ugly stretch, led by a rotation out of megacap AI/tech. The Nasdaq fell for four straight sessions through Thursday. The U.S. dollar index remains strong, now at 101.

There are rumors that the Saudi central bank is calling asset managers worldwide asking for its money back, with some reportedly scrambling for liquidity — emphasis on rumor, but the kind that, if true, explains a lot of unusual selling. South Korea halted trading after stocks plunged 10%, and the Nasdaq 100 erased all its gains and went negative after dropping more than 2% in half an hour.

One potential positive is that Bob Elliott thinks a wave of disinflation is coming while the market is still pricing the Fed to hike rates. Few are expecting cuts. Many could be caught bearishly offside if the Fed instead cuts rates in the next six to twelve months.

Speaking of the Fed, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan died Monday at 100. Whatever you think of his legacy, Mr. Greenspan was a towering figure in central banking.

With equities suffering due to on-again-off-again AI bubble fears, there was no way Bitcoin and crypto prices weren’t also going to suffer. That aside, crypto continues to have crypto-specific concerns. Buckle up for some bearishness.

Galaxy Research shows that distribution by five-plus-year Bitcoin holders has overwhelmed institutional absorption for four straight weeks. The oldest, strongest hands are handing coins to a market that no longer has the ETF and treasury-company bid to soak them up. Crypto ETF outflows have been brutal for a month and a half, with roughly $4 billion out over the trailing month, and the bleeding hasn’t stalled or “reached a steady state”.

This visualization of Bitcoin’s 261-day drawdown against past bear cycles puts the grind in perspective: this is a siege, not a flash crash. One of China’s best-known miners, Jiang Zhuoer, sees the bottom between October and December at $42,000–$44,000.

Chamath Palihapitiya came out against Bitcoin entirely, arguing it has a structural flaw: It lacks fungibility and privacy meaning it can never be a central-bank holding. Bloomberg quietly removed “Crypto” from its main navigation; you now have to dig under “More” to find it. Nothing says peak despair like getting dismissed on a tradfi website.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy is sitting on a roughly $14 billion unrealized loss on its Bitcoin, and Tom Lee’s BitMine is down around $10.5 billion on its ETH. The flywheel that minted the entire digital-asset-treasury genre spins both directions, and right now it’s spinning the wrong way. STRC is getting clobbered at all-time lows around $79, and MSTR is down about 36% year to date. Phong Le bought $1 million of STRC, saying he’ll hold until it reaches par and likely longer. This is the same Phong Le who made waves selling MSTR shares a few weeks ago.

DeFi did not help sentiment. Customers are alleging that on-chain private-credit protocol Goldfinch is effectively insolvent. Santiago Santons pointed out that tokenizing credit doesn’t make the credit good. You can put a bad loan on a blockchain and all you get is a transparent record of a bad loan.

MEV wizard Jaredfromsubway.eth says he was tricked into draining his own wallet and is now offering a 50% white-hat bounty for the return of 2,150 ETH within 48 hours, legal remedies otherwise.

An exploit hit a Cardano project for $20 million, with Charles Hoskinson calling it the “unfortunate reality of crypto“. Memecore (M) looks like it rugged, dropping 75% in minutes and shedding nearly $3 billion in market cap. ZachXBT did not mince words, saying the founder is a scammer and telling him “You are not welcome in the US go back to your home country.” The bad debt, drained wallets, exploits, and rugs indicate that crypto’s trust machinery keeps failing at the human layer, which is why ZachXBT says this stuff is radicalizing him toward publishing on-chain techniques to evade KYC entirely,

Over in crypto x AI, Algod appears to have exited Bittensor entirely ahead of the likely “Root Reborn” update, arguing the framework is trivially exploitable by validators and daring the team to let him whitehack it or admit the flaw.

It wasn’t all bad, folks.

Glassnode’s Altcoin Cycle Signal flipped back into “altcoin season”. Don’t hold your breath, though, they admit that this is an unusual print, with alts running out of sellers while BTC draws down aggressively rather than the usual alts-rip-while-BTC-holds setup. And on raw usage, the often maligned TRON hit 3.93 million active addresses in 24 hours, lapping every other chain.

ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, and OKX are launching a 50/50 joint venture called OKXICE focused on tokenized securities, reportedly co-chaired by former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Tradfi and crypto are integrating. DefiLlama now tracks equities: price, market cap, volume, earnings for 3,000-plus ticker. The institutional allocation drip continues: a Japanese corporate pension fund plans to put 1% of assets into crypto in FY2026. It amounts to only $1.3 million, but it’s a start.

The biggest crypto news of the week concerns Ethereum leadership. The Ethereum Foundation had a brutal, clarifying week. The EF announced it’s cutting 20% of staff and reorganizing around five “clusters” — protocol, access, user, community, and institutional layers. Then the double whammy: Vitalik flagged a 40% budget cut.

In the same week ETHLabs launched as a new non-profit R&D org whose mission is to take up the “ ETH the asset, ETH as the home of finance” mandate the EF has made clear it doesn’t want.

The reception was positive. One account noted this is where all the talent that left the EF has landed. Chris Perkins of Bits + Bips simply loves it. Haseeb Qureshi framed it as a second org with a simple mandate — accelerate Ethereum, increase adoption, protect DeFi. And Avichal of Electric Capital, an initial donor, made the crucial point that ETH-as-store-of-value is deliberate and important, not an accident to be apologized for.

Within crypto, prediction markets are holding attention, especially with the World Cup happening. Polymarket reportedly paid creators to post deceptive videos of themselves getting rich on the platform. On a more wholesome note, a former TV weatherman now bets on the weather instead of forecasting it, and is up $137,034 across 3,125 predictions on city temperatures.

Mark Zuckerberg has directed Meta to build a prediction-markets app, internally called “Arena,” reportedly independent of Facebook and Instagram and aimed squarely at the attention Polymarket and Kalshi currently own.

Finally, some hopium and a warning. Continuing with the theme of KOLs sniffing out a bottom from last week. Ansem declared that SOL has bottomed. The warning: even if a project is earning revenue and buying back tokens, apparently some are sneakily using buyback to stealth exit.

-David Sencil