thecryptoworkshop

The decision
I've been weeks avoiding making this entry. Every time I close a grid cycle with profit, I post the number and I feel good. What I don't post is the comparison that really matters: what would have happened if that same capital had simply stayed put in spot—no grids, no adjustments, no fleet.
In the workshop we talk all the time about margins, grids, and stop protocols. But we rarely present the uncomfortable question: is the active infrastructure really making money, or is it just generating the feeling of doing something?

When we open a trading application, the first thing we see is the price of Bitcoin. If it is going up, we think the market is doing well. If it is falling, we assume everything is going wrong. The problem is that the price only tells part of the story.
In the workshop we usually look at more than just the price. A move can look very strong, but if it comes with low volume, it may not have enough strength to hold. The opposite can also happen: the price barely moves while other indicators start to show that the market is changing beneath the surface.

Today Square’s feed is, once again, full of candlestick charts and screenshots of liquidations. Bitcoin goes up, Bitcoin goes down, someone leveraged badly, someone else got rich overnight. It’s the same conversation. But there’s a story that’s being built in parallel—much less noisy—and that probably affects more real people in the region than any Bitcoin price move will ever affect.
A few weeks ago, Brazil’s central bank published a piece of data that, personally, made me pause for a moment: during the first quarter of 2026, Brazilians bought $6.9 billion in cryptocurrencies for transactions abroad, and 98% of that amount—$6.8 billion—was in stablecoins. Not in Bitcoin. Not in the currency of the week. In digital dollars. That’s more than twice what moved in the same period of 2025, and it’s freelancers getting paid by clients abroad, businesses paying suppliers, people hedging against a real that’s losing value—all of them using stablecoins the way someone uses a pocket-sized bank account in dollars.

In mid-August, Bitcoin did something that caught the attention of the entire market: it went from around $64,000 to nearly $79,500 in less than a week. If you only saw the headline, you probably thought some huge piece of news had appeared—something that would change Bitcoin’s real value overnight. But the explanation is less magical and much more interesting to understand, because it has to do with how the market works from the inside—not with what Bitcoin is worth as a technology.
It all started with two fairly positive pieces of news: the U.S. Treasury announced that it would inject more liquidity by buying bonds, and a few days later President Trump met with regulators and exchange executives to push for a law providing regulatory clarity for crypto. Good news, yes—but not enough to justify a 30% jump on its own. What really lit the fuse was something that happens behind the scenes in the futures market: a lot of people were betting that the price would fall.