• Strategy bought no BTC last week, freezing its holdings at 845,050 BTC.

• Strategy's last major purchase was 4,603 BTC for roughly $369.7 million in late August.

• Core CPI rose 0.3% month-over-month, beating the 0.2% forecast and lifting September hike odds near 90%.

One-Engine Rally Warning

Bitcoin (BTC) is holding near $77,300 on Sept. 12, but the demand structure behind its recovery has thinned out, market analyst Ecoinometrics argued in a Sept. 12 assessment posted on X. In the analyst's reading, the uptrend currently runs on a single engine — spot Bitcoin ETF demand — while corporate treasuries, the second great buyer of recent cycles, have plateaued. Ecoinometrics' chart shows aggregate public-company BTC reserves flattening after accelerating from late 2024, leaving the market reliant on a narrower buyer base than in prior rallies. The most telling signal comes from Strategy, the largest corporate whale. Having returned to the market in late August with 4,603 BTC bought for roughly $369.7 million, the company made no purchase last week and froze its stack at 845,050 BTC — the largest corporate strategic Bitcoin reserve in existence. Instead of accumulating, it repurchased $176.3 million of its STRC preferred shares, capital that in earlier phases would have gone straight into BTC — a departure from the pure HODL playbook. The analyst stops short of calling a top: ETF demand alone can still carry price higher, but a rally supported by fewer buyer groups is structurally more fragile, with no second engine to absorb the slack if ETF flows wobble.

Hot Core CPI, Firm $77K

The macro backdrop should, on paper, have punished risk assets. August core CPI — inflation excluding food and energy — rose 0.3% month-over-month, above the 0.2% consensus and the largest monthly increase since April, while headline CPI rose 0.4% and held at 3.4% year-over-year. CME FedWatch data showed the implied probability of a 25-basis-point hike at the September meeting surging to nearly 90%, up from roughly 72% the day before, and the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.9915%, a near three-year high, before easing back toward 4.96%. Yet the Bitcoin price held between roughly $77,200 and $77,300, marginally positive over 24 hours, after dipping to about $76,568 on Sept. 10 and briefly approaching $79,000 in the initial post-CPI tape — echoing our earlier coverage of the golden cross fade near $79,837. The muted reaction is partly mechanical: the hotter PPI print the prior day had already driven hawkish repricing and pushed BTC below $77,000, so the report offered little genuinely new information. Spot ETF flows remain the counterweight — U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs shed about $450 million over three sessions, including $282.7 million on Sept. 10 alone, with ARKB accounting for $164.3 million of that day's redemptions — meaning the floor near $77,000 is holding despite persistent institutional selling. Options desk QCP Capital still characterizes the range as fragile, noting BTC surrendered an advance that had reached roughly $82,000 before sliding to about $76,500.

Altcoins Outrun the Flagship

While Bitcoin consolidated, the altcoin market did the heavy lifting. Coin Liveness Metric data — a composite of on-chain activity, social signals and trading momentum — shows the week's top-10 portfolio returning an average of 13.47%, up 10.51 percentage points week-over-week and 12.14 percentage points ahead of Bitcoin's own 1.34% gain over the analysis window. Privacy-linked assets dominated the matrix: Venice Token (VVV) surged 58.7% as demand for confidential AI computation spiked after a controversy over sensitive Navier-Stokes equation data being leaked into an LLM, though its RSI near 76 flags short-term overheating. Polkadot (DOT) jumped 43.1% and topped the liveness ranking, processing over 180 million tokens daily on its privacy-inference platform, while Canton (CC) slipped 5.5% but held the center of the matrix on institutional demand for application-level privacy controls. Majors also defended the top tier without overheating: Ethereum gained 2.8% with a liveness score of 1.75 and Solana rose 3.4% at 1.72, ranking second and third overall, while XRP added 4.9% at 1.12 — all with RSI readings in the neutral 40-50 band. The rotation underlines the week's split personality: a flagship in wait-and-see mode ahead of the CPI release, and capital with no intention of sitting still.

FOMC Sept. 15-16 in Focus

COINOTAG's aggregate data frames the tension: our tracked-universe market cap sits near $2.29 trillion with Bitcoin at a 67.8% share, and the Fear & Greed Index reads 63 (Greed) — positioning that assumes the ETF bid holds. With a near-certain hike largely priced in, Chair Kevin Warsh's forward guidance at the Sept. 15-16 FOMC is the real variable.