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South Korea’s Upbit recorded 1.15 trillion won, roughly $830 million, in trading volume within a single hour on Saturday, with XRP and TRUMP dominating the surge.
The spike extends a rebound that began the previous day, when Upbit’s daily volume already jumped 273%.
Upbit’s trading volume distribution over the past 24 hours was led by XRP at 32.20%. Source: Upbit Datalab What Drove Upbit’s Record Hourly Volume
XRP led the charge by a wide margin. The token accounted for 32.20% of Upbit’s 24-hour trading volume, ranking first among all traded assets, according to Upbit Datalab.
TRUMP ranked second on the exchange, contributing 10.93% of total volume. USDT followed in third place with 8.39%, while Ethereum and Bitcoin rounded out the top five at 5.44% and 5.40%, respectively.
Upbit’s total 24-hour trading volume reached approximately $3.81 billion, while rival exchanges Bithumb and Coinone recorded $1.954 billion and $172 million, respectively.
Saturday’s spike was not an isolated event. On August 21, Upbit’s daily volume had already jumped 273% to roughly $1.84 billion, marking the exchange’s highest daily volume since mid-March.
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The South Koreans are back, Upbit volume up 273% and Bithumb up 133%"Remember, I told you the South Koreans weren't trading anymore. Crypto volumes were down massively, they'd gone to SK Hynix and Samsung and were using leveraged ETFs. Well, in the words of Poltergeist, they're… https://t.co/uxkrA2cy5x pic.twitter.com/pzvvUU8Gv3
— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) August 21, 2026
XRP topped that session too, contributing $418.9 million and ranking ahead of Bitcoin, USDT, and ETH. Bithumb recorded a similar increase that day, with volume climbing 132.9% to about $934.9 million.
Why the Rebound Follows Months of Weaker Activity
That earlier rebound followed months of weaker trading, as South Korean investors favored domestic equities while the KOSPI climbed to record highs on AI-driven semiconductor demand. Upbit and Bithumb both reported declines in operating revenue of nearly 50% during the first half of 2026.
XRP traded near $1.44 at the time of writing, according to BeInCrypto data, up 2.1% over the past 24 hours despite an intraday flash crash and up nearly 50% over the past week. The token’s rally followed Ripple’s backing of a major XRP Ledger amendment, alongside strong ETF inflows.
That gain remains positive despite a brutal 37% flash crash earlier in the day, which briefly pushed XRP as low as $1.36 before it recovered, liquidating hundreds of millions in leveraged positions along the way.
TRUMP held its gains more cleanly. The token traded near $2.34, up 26% in 24 hours and more than 66% over the past week. Its all-time low of $1.37 came just nine days ago, on August 13.
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Speculation around a Robinhood Chain launch has fueled renewed interest in the token, alongside a broader recovery across Solana-based meme assets. Whether this two-day streak marks a lasting rotation back into crypto or another short-lived wave, as seen repeatedly this year, remains an open question for South Korean traders.

US-listed Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) exchange-traded funds each recorded their largest week since October 2025, drawing a combined $2.6 billion in the seven days ended August 21.
Bitcoin products captured $1.92 billion of that sum. Ethereum funds added $697.18 million, reversing a $391.96 million combined outflow the previous week.
Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs Hit Biggest Weekly Inflow in 10 Months
According to SoSoValue, Bitcoin funds recorded five consecutive days of net inflows from August 17 to August 21. The run included a $606 million single-day haul on August 20.
Trading activity climbed alongside the money. Weekly volume in BTC funds reached $22.15 billion, roughly triple the prior week’s total.
The week interrupts a long retreat. Cumulative net inflows into Bitcoin ETFs peaked at $62.77 billion in October 2025 and have since fallen to $53.71 billion.
Ethereum funds followed a similar path. Their largest daily intake since October landed on August 20 at $220.77 million. Total assets, however, remain 53% below the August 2025 high.
The annual picture stays negative for both. BTC funds have shed $2.91 billion in 2026 and ETH products $177.93 million, leaving each on track for its first losing year since launch.
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Assets Grew 9 Times More Than New Money
The flow figures understate what actually moved. Combined assets across both products rose by about $23 billion last week, compared with $2.6 billion in creations.
Stripping out flows, the implied gain in the underlying holdings reached 22.9% for Bitcoin and 29.2% for Ethereum. Three sessions from August 19 to August 21 produced most of it.
Revaluation, therefore, did the heavy lifting. Bitcoin traded near $77,125 at press time, while Ethereum changed hands at $2,423.
Altcoin Funds Extend the Run
Other major US altcoin spot ETFs also posted net inflows over the same week. XRP (XRP) ETFs led with $39.78 million and set a record for weekly trading volume at $271.74 million.
Crypto ETF Performance in August. Source: BeInCrypto/SoSoValue
Solana (SOL) products followed with $28.34 million, marking an eighth consecutive week of inflows. Chainlink (LINK) funds drew $13.35 million, their second-largest week since launching in December. Assets closed at a record $171.59 million.
Hyperliquid (HYPE) products added $3.89 million and also finished at record assets of $360.39 million. Dogecoin (DOGE) funds trailed the group with $654,416.
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BounceBit will permanently shut down its Layer 1 blockchain after an attacker moved 286.5 million BB out of nine mainnet accounts. The project will reissue the token as a BEP-20 asset on BNB Chain.
The team said the attacker compromised no private keys, wallets, or hardware devices. The unauthorized transfers came from a protocol-level authorization vulnerability.
Why BounceBit Will Not Restart Its Chain
BounceBit Chain ran on the Evmos stack, which lets smart contracts call protocol-native modules directly. One of those modules handles vesting and lockup accounts.
A funder account should be debited only after it authorizes the transfer. Along the smart-contract path, that binding was bypassed, and a second permission check ran against the wrong account. The attacker could therefore designate any account as the funding source without the holder’s consent.
The attacker ran 14 transactions over 4 hours and 52 minutes on 19 and 20 August, using two accounts and 15 single-use contracts. Block production stopped at height 20,702,857, roughly 42 minutes after the final transfer.
Meanwhile, Evmos itself has been discontinued. BounceBit said moving its fork to a successor codebase would demand a full rebuild, re-audit, and revalidation rather than a routine upgrade.
“Importantly, BounceBit CeDeFi Strategy, Promo Vaults, Prime, and RWA products are not affected,” the post read.
The exploit follows a security incident at MANTRA, which froze its network this week due to a vulnerability in an upstream dependency.
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What the Snapshot Means for BB Holders
The team will set the balances from block 20,697,260. None of the BB tokens that moved during the incident exist on the reissued token.
BB transfers made during the 5-hour-34-minute window will be reversed. Buyers will have those purchases undone, while sellers will receive the BB they sent back. Staked and unbonding balances count toward the snapshot.
BounceBit plans to credit reissued altcoins automatically to matching BNB Chain addresses. There is no claim site.
“We know this is disruptive, nothing is expiring and nothing is being rushed,” the team said.
BB Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
BB traded near $0.0111 on Saturday, up 16% over 24 hours, per BeInCrypto Markets data. The token hit a record low of $0.0079 on August 20, about 31% below its level before the attack.
That leaves BB roughly where it started the week. The stolen supply amounts to about 13.6% of the 2.1 billion maximum, worth nearly $3.2 million at current prices.
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Bitcoin traded near $77,260 on Saturday, according to market data, after reaching an intraday high close to $79,500 before a sudden flash crash rattled the market.
The asset climbed more than 22% over the past week, but a technical signal is starting to raise caution among traders.
bitcoin:native highest 4h RSI in 7+ yearsbtw absurdly high rsi is good for long term, not for short term pic.twitter.com/0I6HO6gs7s
— Krown (@KrownCryptoCave) August 22, 2026
What the RSI Shows and Why It Matters
The relative strength index (RSI) measures price momentum on a scale of 0 to 100 and is considered overbought above 70. On the 4-hour chart, the indicator now sits at its highest level in more than seven years.
Analyst Krown noted early Saturday that this RSI extreme is good for the long term, but not for the short term. Readings above 80-90 reflect temporary exhaustion of demand.
Historically, those levels tend to precede short-term corrections or consolidations, though they do not necessarily mark the end of an uptrend.
Crypto Market Performance. Source: X/@KobeissiLetter
The market already saw an initial shock in the early hours of Saturday. Bitcoin retreated sharply from around $79,500 down to a low near $76,300, in what traders described as a flash crash.
“$BTC is holding above its weekly bull market support band. A weekly close above this zone is needed for more upside in Bitcoin,” crypto analyst Ted said on X.
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Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
The move liquidated more than $500 million in long positions within minutes. It formed part of total liquidations exceeding $1.35 billion over the past 24 hours, according to market data.
Analysts Split on What Comes Next for Bitcoin Price
Views among widely followed analysts remain split. Shardi B warned that the daily RSI sits at one of its highest levels in history and recommended caution.
Others note the indicator stood at 84, close to resistance zones that have historically punished late buyers. Several point to the possibility of a local top or a significant pullback that would test the current price structure.
“Low timeframe wave count has been pretty tricky on bitcoin since the start of our expansion because of the extended 5th subwave to the upside, but I think it might be time for a pullback/local top if the initial move is finally complete,” analyst CredibleCrypto noted.
#BTC Another thing worth considering is this:Are April/May 2026 weakening as a point of rejection or strengthening?The previous two rejections imply slight strengtheningAny upcoming rejection from here will be tellingIf the pullback is visibly shallower than -24% then… https://t.co/mwp2oSYgLD pic.twitter.com/lLEpflnZgN
— Rekt Capital (@rektcapital) August 22, 2026
On the more constructive side, some argue that when RSI reaches these extremes, it is never the end of the move, and that momentum typically continues higher before correcting. A target of $83,000 to $85,000 is being floated for the coming weeks, allowing only for minor pullbacks.
From current levels, the short-term scenarios traders are weighing fall into two camps. An extension toward the $83,000 to $88,000 zone, if the $75,000 to $76,000 support holds.
The majority of the move on #Bitcoin is in, I think.We should easily consolidate here and have another impulse towards $81,000-83,000 and stall from there for the coming months.Result?#Altcoins to be picking up the pace as they've been falling behind. pic.twitter.com/PMYCxKy6kw
— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) August 22, 2026
Or a deeper correction toward $70,000 to $72,000, should momentum fade following the overbought extreme and the recent flash crash.
The market, therefore, sits at a decision point. The question is whether the extreme RSI reading signals only a healthy pause or the start of a more significant adjustment after the strong weekly rally.
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Anthropic will name negative sentiment towards artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers as a risk factor in its IPO prospectus, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
The document is expected within weeks. Anthropic filed confidentially in June and has since held preliminary meetings with bankers and investors in San Francisco.
Anthropic Fields Investor Questions Before Public Debut
Companies disclose risk factors to warn investors and to shield themselves legally. Anthropic will point to a public mood that has hardened against new data center projects.
Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao is fielding questions on competition and margin pressure from open-source models, the sources said. Investors are also asking what happens if data center construction slows.
This question matters because compute capacity tracks directly with revenue at AI labs. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion in July, roughly $25 billion above OpenAI’s level.
The company is valued at nearly $1 trillion in private markets. Investors expect a public float of around $2 trillion. BeInCrypto reported that Anthropic expects its IPO to match or beat SpaceX’s record stock market debut.
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Surveys Show US Opposition to Data Centers Hardening
Polling supports the disclosure. A Gallup survey conducted in March found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose a local AI data center, with 48% strongly opposed.
Opposition has since deepened. A Heatmap Pro poll of 2,045 registered voters, conducted August 8 to 13 by Embold Research, put opposition at 75%, up from 42% a year earlier.
American Opposition Towards Data Centers. Source: Heatmap Pro
Job anxiety runs alongside it. Pew Research found that 71% of adults expect AI to cut US jobs over the next two decades, up from 64% in 2024.
Politicians have responded. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order imposing strict standards on data center development. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has also ordered a pause on permits for large new data centers.
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XRP price suffered a brutal 37% flash crash on Saturday, August 22, as roughly $500 million in leveraged long positions were liquidated across the crypto market within minutes.
The move came just days after XRP had rallied more than 60% over the past week, leaving traders dangerously overexposed.
🩸 MASSIVE CRYPTO FLASH CRASH$500 million worth of late long positions were liquidated as the market plunged:Bitcoin: -$1,935 (-2.5%)Ethereum: -$130 (-5%)Solana: -$11.50 (-11.5%)XRP: -$0.60 (-37%)All of this happened within MINUTES. pic.twitter.com/QsQ24TyGQh
— Crypto Rover (@cryptorover) August 22, 2026
What Triggered the $500 Million Liquidation Wave
A liquidation occurs when an exchange forcibly closes a leveraged position because a trader can no longer cover potential losses, often triggering rapid, cascading price moves. That mechanism drove Saturday’s collapse.
XRP plunged 37%, a drop of roughly $0.60, while Bitcoin fell 2.5%, Ethereum dropped 5%, and Solana slid 11.5% during the same window. Roughly $500 million in long positions were liquidated within minutes as the market plunged.
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Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP & Solana Price Performance. Source: CoinGecko
A wider timeframe helps illustrate the scale of the event. According to Coinglass data, $1.35 billion was liquidated from the crypto market over the past 24 hours, with the bulk of the activity concentrated on Binance.
“Due to the current decline, a large amount of $XRP long positions have been liquidated. There has been no increase in short positions during this downturn; in fact, short positions are decreasing. It is simply that high-leverage long positions held by retail investors have been liquidated. Even during a bull market, a decline of this scale is inevitable,” crypto analyst CW said on X.
Crypto Market Liquidations – 24 Hours. Source: Coinglass Analysts Call it Manipulation, Others Call It Deleveraging
The crash followed days of euphoria. XRP had surged over 60% in the prior week, briefly topping $1.69, fueled by institutional inflows, regulatory optimism, and a broad market short squeeze.
That rally left the market saturated with leveraged long positions, amplifying any correction that followed. Analysts agree that no clear macro catalyst triggered the drop, no Fed announcement, no major hack.
The most common explanation is structural: high leverage, thin weekend liquidity, and excessively bullish positioning. Some traders describe it as manipulation, while others call it simple, necessary deleveraging that the market needed.
You’re telling me EVERY SINGLE CRYPTO decides to crash at the same exact time?That isn't a organic selling, it’s pure manipulation. We all know who's behind this but no one wants to say it out loud…
— Bark (@barkmeta) August 22, 2026
XRP quickly recovered part of the lost ground, climbing back to around $1.50 in the hours following the crash, according to BeInCrypto data.
Still, the episode reinforced a familiar lesson. In heavily leveraged crypto markets, a move lasting only minutes can wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars and knock thousands of traders out of the game entirely.
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Zcash (ZEC) climbed to an 8-year high on Saturday, after Grayscale filed a fifth amended registration with the SEC.
The amendment advances Grayscale’s proposed Zcash ETF but does not amount to SEC approval. If approved, the fund would be the first US ETF to directly track Zcash.
Grayscale Fills the Blanks on Fee and Name
Tuesday’s fourth amendment left both the sponsor’s fee and the name blank. Friday’s amendment sets that figure at an annual rate 2.5% of the NAV Fee Basis Amount of the Trust, accruing daily.
Furthermore, Grayscale will rename the trust The Zcash ETF. Shares would list on NYSE Arca under ZCSH.
“While an investment in the Shares is not a direct investment in ZEC, the Shares are designed to provide investors with a cost-effective and convenient way to gain investment exposure to ZEC,” the amendment reads.
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NEW: @Grayscale just filed amendment #5 for their Zcash Trust.. Looks like they're getting closer and closer to converting this thing into an ETF. $ZCSH zcash:native pic.twitter.com/QeGPHfP9EI
— James Seyffart (@JSeyff) August 21, 2026
Grayscale pledged to direct 100% of the fee toward marketing and development for up to 12 months. This commitment is voluntary.
Coinbase Custody Trust Company would hold the trust’s tokens. Bank of New York Mellon serves as transfer agent and administrator.
Zcash Becomes Top Crypto Gainer
The filing arrives as the broader crypto market rallies. ZEC is up 34% over the past 24 hours, the largest gain among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies.
Zcash (ZEC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Today, the token crossed $800 for the first time since January 2018. It touched an intraday high of $857 before easing to about $784.
That 2018 peak near $800 had capped Zcash for more than eight years. ZEC still trades well below its October 2016 record of $3,191.
The rally comes after a June setback, when a security researcher disclosed a flaw in one of the network’s shielded pools. ZEC lost roughly half its value before an emergency upgrade fixed it.
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Criminal adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has climbed 40% year-on-year in 2026, according to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. Scams drove most of that growth.
TRM’s new AI-in-Crime Adoption Index scores overall adoption at 54 out of 100, up from about 28 in 2024. Scams are the only category rated Mature.
AI Now Runs the Whole Scam, From Target List to Victim Chat
The index rates four crime types on how common AI use is, how many stages of an operation it touches, and how advanced it is.
Scams top the ranking. TRM says AI now generates target lists and lures, powers deepfakes, and runs the victim conversations themselves.
AI Adoption in Crypto Scams. Source: TRM Labs
The share of scam reports in which AI was part of the attack has grown by roughly 13 times since 2022. Among crypto scams with live domains, 17% advertise AI products.
Reported deepfake scam losses in 2026 already exceed the 2025 total by 263%. Narcotics sit at the opposite end. Darknet buyers warn each other away from markets they suspect were AI-generated.
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Hacks and Ransomware Climb the Attack Chain
Hacking and state-sponsored theft ranked one tier lower, at Emerging. The volume, however, tells a harsher story.
TRM logged 201 hacks in the first half of 2026, against 83 a year earlier. However, 4% of incidents produced 75% of the stolen value.
North Korea accounted for roughly $600 million, or 61% of the half-year total. Two April operations dominate that figure: the $285 million Drift Protocol breach and the $292 million KelpDAO exploit. Both started with social engineering rather than novel code.
Ransomware sits one step further along.No-code ransomware kits now change hands for $400 to $1,200, TRM noted.
In July, Sysdig documented JadePuffer, which it calls the first fully agentic ransomware. An AI agent handled reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and encryption without human direction.
TRM’s broader finding is that AI touches every stage of the crime lifecycle. It lowers the barrier to entry, raises the scale and sophistication of attacks, and hands investigators both a harder problem and better tools.
The last part decides the trajectory. TRM says holding the current parity between offense and defense depends on enforcement and compliance tooling scaling at the same pace.
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The Sandbox said it has contained a vulnerability in the SAND cross-chain bridge on Base and BNB Smart Chain after an attacker minted unbacked tokens on both networks.
The project put the impact at under 0.01% of the total SAND supply. It said that tokens on Ethereum (ETH) and Polygon (POL) are unaffected and that no user wallets were compromised.
Sandbox Becomes Latest Project Reportedly Hit by an Exploit
Blockaid flagged the incident on Saturday. The firm said attackers hijacked LayerZero delegate permissions through the approveAndCall function.
“~$49B face-value SAND minted so far across ~400+ txs,” Blockaid said.
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#PeckShieldAlert Seems like The @TheSandboxGame ($SAND) got exploited. 14.9B $SAND minted across 2 addresses: 0xAbE0…4D22 & 0x638C…F296 pic.twitter.com/a5Jgym87gR
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) August 22, 2026
The team said that it has disabled bridging to and from Base and BSC, cutting off any route to move or redeem the minted supply. It said the SAND locked on Ethereum, which backs all bridged tokens, remains intact.
“An attacker was able to mint unbacked SAND on Base and BSC. We have disabled bridging to and from both networks, so SAND on Base and BSC is currently isolated and cannot be moved or redeemed,” the post read.
The project told holders not to buy, sell, or trade SAND on either network, warning that liquidity there is compromised. It is taking a pre-incident snapshot and preparing compensation for qualifying liquidity providers, with a full post-mortem promised.
Korean Exchanges Halt SAND Transfers
Meanwhile, Bithumb suspended SAND deposits and withdrawals at 11:11 a.m. KST, and Upbit followed one minute later. Both cited suspected security incidents under South Korea’s Virtual Asset User Protection Act.
Upbit imposed a halt on the Ethereum version of SAND, which the project has since said was never at risk.
The incident fits a wider pattern. DefiLlama has logged 17 separate exploits so far this month, most of them small, with bridges again the recurring weak point.
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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says crypto spot trading is close to its next bull market, citing prior bear cycles that each ran roughly 370 to 380 days.
He spoke on CNBC after President Donald Trump hosted crypto executives and regulators at the White House. Bitcoin (BTC) has since climbed above $78,000.
Trading Activity Had Been Sliding for Months
Armstrong’s call follows a long stretch of thinning volumes and volatile prices. Spot turnover across 14 major exchanges dropped 21.7% in July to $429.0 billion from $547.9 billion in June, according to Wu Blockchain.
Every one of the 14 venues posted a monthly decline. Binance led with $196.5 billion, or 45.8% of the total. Coinbase recorded a 26.4% drop, the second steepest after Bitfinex at 59.7%.
Derivatives cooled too, falling 11.1% to $3.03 trillion. However, the futures-to-spot ratio climbed to 7.06x from 6.21x, showing traders leaned harder into leverage.
Sentiment also stayed depressed well into August, with the Fear and Greed Index sitting at 29 on August 13.
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A Bond Market Move Started the Turn
The mood shifted sharply on August 19. The Treasury doubled its bond buyback operations to at least $4 billion each and raised them from two to four per quarter, a plan that starts September 9.
Yields dropped on the news. The 10-year note closed 5.7 basis points lower at 4.647%, while the 30-year fell 9 basis points to 5.196%, according to CNBC.
Furthermore, President Donald Trump suggested that a sizable government purchase of Bitcoin has been discussed. Bitcoin has gained roughly 22% since that day and traded near $78,700 on Saturday.
Bitcoin (BTC) Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto Markets
Sentiment has flipped with it, and the Fear and Greed Index reached 71 at press time.
Armstrong Builds His Bull Case Around the Clock and the Calendar
Armstrong’s argument for a bull market with the cycle length. He said spot crypto trading has been in a bear market for about a year, and that each prior bear phase lasted roughly 370 to 380 days.
“We’re basically coming right up against that where people, you know, they’re going to say, well, this one’s about over. It’s time for the next bull run in crypto,” he stated.
Two catalysts sit on top of that. Armstrong pointed to the September 15 Senate vote for the CLARITY Act and to October through December, months he described as traditionally strong for Bitcoin under halving cycles.
“So I think there’s a good chance we’re on the cusp of the next bull market for spot trading in crypto,” he said.
Nonetheless, analyst Benjamin Cowen still puts a “decent chance” of one final selloff if prior midterm years repeat.
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A 2021 clip of Elon Musk making his case for Bitcoin (BTC) is circulating again. His main argument was not scarcity. It was that Bitcoin has no throat to choke.
He meant there is nobody to threaten. No single party can be forced to empty the system. Five years on, filings show what his own companies did with that idea.
Why Elon Musk Framed Bitcoin as an Information System
Musk spoke in July 2021 at The B Word, a one-day conference he joined alongside Jack Dorsey and Cathie Wood.
He opened by redefining money itself. He called it an information system for allocating labor.
Then he went after the plumbing. Bank settlement still takes one to five business days. He called the ACH network ancient and insecure. Paying by card, he said, is like handing a stranger your password.
Bitcoin’s edge, in his telling, was not speed. It was that nobody can be leaned on.
“Bitcoin per se is mostly solving for … having no throat to choke, decentralized, so there’s no one who can be coerced in any way to empty their bitcoin account,” Elon Musk, at The B Word conference, July 2021.
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In plain terms, there is no head office to raid. There is no chief executive to lean on.
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What Tesla and SpaceX Actually Did
Musk named the flaws in the same breath.
“Transaction volume is low, transaction cost is high and usability for the average person is not yet very good, but it has a lot of potential.”
He had already wavered once. Two months before the panel, he stopped Tesla accepting bitcoin for cars, blaming mining emissions.
The harder test came 11 months later. Tesla had bought $1.50 billion of bitcoin in early 2021. By mid-2022 it had converted roughly 75% of that into cash, a filing shows. The sales raised $936 million.
SpaceX did the opposite. Its Bitcoin has not moved in any period it has ever disclosed.
Every SpaceX filing since 2024 lists the same 18,712 BTC at the same $661 million cost. Only the value changes. It was $1.75 billion at the end of 2024 and $1.10 billion in June.
That grip held through pressure. In July, an $88 test transfer triggered sale rumors. Weeks later its debut earnings report booked a $539 million paper loss for the half and kept every coin.
Tesla’s leftover 11,509 BTC cost $386 million and has sat still since 2022. Its second quarter results logged a further $334 million decline over the half. Together the two hold 30,221 BTC for about $1.05 billion.
Top 100 Public Bitcoin Treasury Companies. Source: Bitcoin Treasuries
At a current price near $78,570, that is worth roughly $2.37 billion.
So the answer is plain. Nobody can force either company to sell. Tesla did anyway, once, by choice. That is the part no ledger protects against.

Moderna, the American pharma company that became popular for its COVID vaccine, has spent three days trading like a meme stock. Shares exploded 177% on Wednesday after its personalized mRNA cancer vaccine with Merck succeeded in a Phase 3 melanoma trial, adding roughly $30 billion in market value in a single session.
Heavy short covering helped turn a major clinical breakthrough into an extraordinary market move. Then came the whiplash. Moderna fell 23.6% on Thursday, before buyers rushed back on Friday.
Even after the violent pullback and another volatile session, Moderna was still up more than 140% for the week. BeInCrypto analysts now looked at three other US stocks that could potentially have a similar setup.
Is $MRNA's massive rally just getting started? 📈The Phase 3 oncology trial didn't just break the shorts, it Moderna just delivered the ultimate biotech turnaround. While the Merck cancer vaccine readout rewrites its post-COVID future, the explosive $30B market move was… pic.twitter.com/1hFOq8pC5X
— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) August 20, 2026
Intel (INTC) Fits the Mold, Minus the Squeeze
Moderna’s day began with a collapse and a recovery, and Intel has both, sinking to $21.81 before quadrupling to $92.80 in a year, even as chip leaders wobbled.
Its Q2 revenue grew 25.4%, the best in 15 years, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan just put $10 million into the stock at $95 per share.
INTEL CEO BUYS $10M OF $INTCIntel CEO Lip-Bu Tan purchased 105,263 shares at $95 each, worth roughly $10M, according to a new SEC filing. The purchase lifts his total beneficial ownership to about 1.33M shares. pic.twitter.com/C7qaPvBV9y
— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) August 14, 2026
The doubt matches too. Intel is rated Hold, with only 5 of 29 analysts rating it a Buy, though the $116.84 average forecast implies 26% upside.
Intel Quadrupled, and Doubt Stayed: BeInCrypto
The missing box is the squeeze, since Intel carries only 2.87% of its shares short and its put-to-call open interest, the standing money in options, sits dead even at 1.00.
Intel Put-Call Ratio: Barchart
The price chart is the other open box. An inverse head and shoulders has formed since mid-July, low at $81.88 and trigger near $107, while selling volume has faded since August 12, even as bond yields hammered chips.
Intel Price Analysis: TradingView
A daily close above $106.91 projects 30% toward $139.60, and the 14A design kit reaching Apple this fall is its readout. Below $81.88, the ‘stocks like Moderna’ thesis fails.
Target (TGT) Is the Closest Match
Retail giant Target mirrors the template on a smaller scale. Its collapse was 67%, from above $250 in 2021 to an $83 low last November, and a Q2 beat lifted it just 4.28% to $159.
Target’s Collapse Came First Too: BeInCrypto
The doubt is the sharpest match in the piece. The $152.71 average forecast is 3.95% below the price, while 11 of 22 analysts rate it Hold, and the latest calls lean Hold or Sell.
Wall Street is grading a stock at fresh highs as if it were still broken, the defining trait of stocks like Moderna.
Bears are positioned too, with put-heavy options at 1.03 and 3.70% of shares short, because the rally has run on fading volume.
Target Put-Call Ratio: Barchart
The price action stands on its own. Target has been climbing in an ascending channel since May 20, and a daily close above $161.96 reopens the channel’s upper line, where a breakout projects roughly 30%.
Target Price Analysis: TradingView
Supports wait at $151.41 and $144.89. However, the weakening volume and a drop below $134.35 can weaken the thesis.
Macy’s (M) Ticks Every Box, Some Only Halfway
Department store chain Macy’s (M) meets all five of Moderna’s conditions, with two only partially. It never suffered Moderna-style collapse, and its chart is the weakest here. Yet, it wears the two clearest markers: analyst disbelief and bearish positioning.
Macy’s Ticks Every Box, Some Only Halfway: BeInCrypto
The $22.43 average forecast is 4.15% below the $23.40 price, with just 1 Buy rating among 8 analysts. JP Morgan’s $27 call sits among the Holds. Finally, it has the heaviest put lean of the three at 1.11, the nearest echo of Moderna’s loaded shorts.
Macy’s Put-Call Ratio: Barchart
The chart is the weakest of the three, but it just gave a reason for hope. Macy’s has held a rising channel since May 15, nearly lost it on August 16, and buyers defended the floor with the strongest buying volume since August 4.
Macy’s Price Analysis: TradingView
Moderna’s own support at the $61.91 line held the same way before its readout, so a defended floor can spring a surprise.
Moderna Support: TradingView
Resistance for M sits at $23.93. Yet the bigger gate sits at $25.33, up about 8%. Only above $29.01 does the tone turn bullish. Below $23.06, the channel fails. Earnings land on September 10, so this catalyst is still ahead.
Stocks Like Moderna: BeInCrypto
Analyst’s View: Target matches Moderna’s setup best, but its big news was the Q2 beat that landed this week, and the stock has already moved a bit. Intel and Macy’s still have their news ahead, a $107 close for one and the September 10 report for the other.
And that is where the remaining upside lies, because a stock can only jump on a surprise that has not yet happened. If Intel loses $81.88 or Macy’s loses $23.06 before then, the idea is off.

Nvidia stock’s losing streak hit a sixth day on Friday. That is its longest run of declines in four years. The earnings report that could end it lands Wednesday.
So is Nvidia stock a buy after the slide? Every analyst covering it says yes. The reason for the selling, though, has not gone away.
BREAKING 🚨: Nvidia$NVDA has traded red for 6 straight days, its longest losing streak in 4 years 📉 📉 pic.twitter.com/QbXNcZnJEK
— Barchart (@Barchart) August 21, 2026
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Why the Nvidia Stock Losing Streak Kept Going
The slide is small. It is also stubborn. Nvidia last closed higher on August 13, at $225.30. By Friday it sat at $214.75. That is 4.7% gone in six sessions.
Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
The shape matters more than the size. Four of those six days lost less than 1%. A single session, August 18, did half the damage with a 2.34% drop. This is a slow leak, not a crash.
The 2022 comparison flatters it. Nvidia fell seven days straight into September 6, 2022, shedding 24% and closing at its lowest level since March 2021, data from the period shows. That slide was five times deeper than this one. The record here is the length, not the pain.
No single event set it off. The pressure dates to August 10. That day, Nvidia announced financing platforms with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR.
The plan is to raise more than $500 billion from outside investors. That money helps customers buy Nvidia computing power. The stock fell 2.9% on the news.
Here is the worry in plain terms. Nvidia helps its customers find money. Those customers spend that money on Nvidia chips. Critics call it circular financing.
It is not a one-off. Last week, a securities filing revealed Nvidia had guaranteed up to $105 billion in lease obligations tied to an OpenAI campus in Ohio.
Is Nvidia Stock a Buy Before Wednesday’s Earnings?
Nvidia reports on August 26, after the closing bell. The quarter runs through July 2026.
Nvidia Q2 Earnings Date. Source: Nasdaq
Analysts expect earnings of $2.01 per share. That would be 103% above the $0.99 posted a year earlier. Revenue guidance points to roughly $91 billion, up from $81.6 billion last quarter. Nvidia has beaten estimates four quarters running.
Price targets stay bullish. All 26 analysts tracked by TipRanks rate the stock a buy, with none at hold or sell. Their average target of $301.82 sits about 40% above Friday’s close. Bank of America’s Vivek Arya has held a $350 price target into the print.
Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Forecast & Price Target. Source: TipRanks
One number complicates that picture. Nvidia gained 19.7% over the past year. Its technology sector rose 37.1% in the same stretch. The company at the center of the AI trade has lagged the AI trade.
The recent record is stranger still. Nvidia has beaten estimates four quarters running. It has also fallen the day after every one of them.
Those four reports cost the stock 2.79% on average the next day and 5.31% across two days, by Motley Fool analyst Sean Williams’ count of the post-earnings moves. Beating Wall Street has not been enough to lift the shares.
Nvidia Keeps Buying Power, Not Just Chips
On Friday, Nvidia disclosed a minority investment in Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Terms were not disclosed.
Cloverleaf makes no chips and runs no servers. Founded in 2024, it buys land, secures grid power, and sells sites that are ready to build on.
The company has sold more than 7 gigawatts of powered projects, including Wisconsin sites tied to Oracle and OpenAI, according to trade reporting. Its pipeline runs past 10 gigawatts.
Nico Caprez, vice president of global AI infrastructure growth at Nvidia, explained the thinking.
“AI factories are the infrastructure of the intelligence age, and land, power and shell are their foundation,” he said.
Electricity, not silicon, is now the hard limit on AI growth. So Nvidia is paying for the power years before the chips arrive.
So will earnings end the losing streak? On recent form, the report is at least as likely to extend it. The numbers have not been Nvidia’s problem. The assumptions built on top of them have.
Until Wednesday, the circular financing debate is what traders are trading. After it, the question becomes whether even a record quarter is enough.

Ray Dalio says the Japan debt story is about to repeat in America, and Japanese bondholders lost most of their money the first time. He wants investors out of government bonds and into gold and Bitcoin.
The Bridgewater Associates founder made the case on Friday. He puts a US debt crisis three years away, give or take two, unless Washington changes course.
Ray Dalio Japan Debt Losses Are the Real Warning
Most coverage led with his three-year clock. However, the harder evidence sits in Japan, where this process already ran its full course.
Start with 2013. That March, the Bank of Japan owned 11.6% of all Japanese government bonds. By March 2023, it owned 53.3%.
The central bank printed money and bought that debt because private buyers would not. That is the exact step Dalio warns about.
In turn, bondholders paid for it. By his math, Japanese government bonds lost 51% against dollar debt after 2013. Against gold, they lost 76%.
What Japanese Bond Holders Lost after 2013
Meanwhile, the bill is still arriving. Japan’s four biggest life insurers now sit on roughly $96 billion in paper losses on government bonds.
America’s Debt Bill Is Twice Its Income
Dalio treats the US government like a business. That makes the arithmetic easy to follow.
Washington will collect about $5.5 trillion this year. It owes roughly $1 trillion in interest. It must also refinance another $10 trillion of maturing debt.
Together those payments reach about $11 trillion. That is double what the government takes in.
Separately, independent numbers support the strain. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency that scores federal spending, puts this year’s deficit at $1.9 trillion.
That equals 5.8% of gross domestic product (GDP). CBO also pegs net interest at $1.039 trillion. Debt held by the public sits at 101% of GDP, and reaches 120% by 2036.
“I am confident that the government’s financial condition is at an inflection point. If this is not dealt with now, the debts will build up to levels where they can’t be managed without great trauma,” Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, in a LinkedIn post.
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In response, his fix cuts the deficit to 3% of GDP. He points to one American precedent that worked.
The government ran a deficit worth 4.6% of the economy in 1991. By 1998, it ran a surplus instead. Historically, though, that swing needed spending limits, tax rises, and falling rates together.
Gold and Bitcoin Take the Bond Market’s Pain
Markets moved his way this week. The 30-year Treasury yield closed at 5.23% on Thursday, after touching 5.31% on August 17.
Meanwhile, total federal debt crossed $40 trillion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent answered by doubling long-dated debt buybacks to at least $4 billion per operation, running from September 9 to November 4.
Dalio therefore reads that response as a symptom rather than a cure.
Hard assets caught the money leaving bonds. Gold traded at $4,604 an ounce on Friday, its best level since May. The metal capped a near 5% week at a three-month high. Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $77,502, up 6.4% in a day. Its market value stands at $1.55 trillion.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Gold (XAU) Price Performance. Source: TradingView
“I expect non-government-produced monies like gold and Bitcoin to do relatively well.”
Ray Dalio wrote that in the same post. His allocation advice stays specific. Underweight bonds, hold 10% to 15% of a portfolio in gold, and add a small bitcoin position.
One caution sits inside the trade. Long-run research on the best currency to save shows gold and bitcoin doing different jobs, not the same one.
The next test comes on September 9, when the larger buybacks begin.

Zcash has rallied nearly 40% over the past week, pushing its price to around $675. ZEC gained roughly 19% in the latest 24-hour period, while trading volume climbed above $1 billion.
The rally has brought ZEC close to the $680–$700 resistance zone. This area previously stopped the price from moving higher, making it the biggest immediate test for buyers.
What Triggered the Zcash Rally?
The rally accelerated after ZEC broke through several resistance levels, including $520 and $590. These breakouts attracted momentum traders and forced some traders betting against ZEC to close their positions.
Interest in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies also helped. Meanwhile, renewed institutional attention and wider strength across the crypto market gave buyers more confidence.
Grayscale files 4th amendment for its Zcash ETFGrayscale is moving to convert its Zcash Trust into an ETF listed on NYSE Arca under the ticker $ZCSH.The filing also reveals that a DCG subsidiary is in nonbinding talks to acquire ~200,000 $ZEC (approx. $110M) through the fund. pic.twitter.com/reSqdp0DAy
— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) August 19, 2026
However, derivatives trading played a large role. ZEC futures volume reached roughly $4.55 billion, compared with about $553 million in spot volume. Open interest stood near $1.35 billion.
That imbalance shows that leveraged traders are heavily involved. Leverage can push prices higher quickly, but it can also make a pullback sharper if momentum changes.
Zcash Weekly Price Chart. Source: CoinGecko ZEC’s Larger Trend Remains Bullish
On the two-hour chart, ZEC trades well above all four major exponential moving averages. The 20-period average sits near $609, followed by the 50-period average at $567. The longer-term averages remain lower at approximately $539 and $519.
In simple terms, recent prices are rising much faster than their longer-term averages. That confirms a strong upward trend.
The two-hour MACD also remains positive. This indicator measures momentum, and its current reading suggests buyers still control the larger move.
Zcash Charts Show Buyers Are Still in Control. Source: TradingView Short-Term Momentum Is Starting to Cool
The main warning comes from the Relative Strength Index. The two-hour RSI has reached almost 86, well above the level commonly considered overbought.
On the 30-minute chart, the RSI remains above 73. The MACD has also produced a small bearish crossover, meaning the speed of the rally has started to slow. It does not confirm a reversal, but it often appears before a pause or pullback.
Meanwhile, the five-minute chart remains positive. Buyers are still defending dips, suggesting that the rally has not broken down yet.
Zcash Remains Overbought at Current Levels. Source: TradingView Zcash Price Forecast: $750 or a Drop Below $600?
The most likely near-term scenario is consolidation or a pullback toward $620–$650, followed by another attempt at $690–$700.
A strong close above $700, supported by high volume, could open the way toward $733 and eventually $750.
Based on the current structure, ZEC has an estimated 50%–55% chance of reaching $700–$733 within a week. The probability of reaching $750 is closer to 40%.
However, a sustained close below 590–600 would weaken the breakout and expose support near $567 and $539.
These projections reflect technical probabilities and do not constitute investment advice.

Tom Lee ranked 17 large-cap crypto stocks by how closely they track Bitcoin and Ethereum. The oddest result sits at the bottom. Bitcoin miners barely move with BTC price at all.
Core Scientific tracked the asset at 16%. MicroStrategy tracked it at 78%. Yet MicroStrategy mines no Bitcoin, it only holds a pile of it.
What Tom Lee’s Crypto Stock Rankings Show
The Fundstrat co-founder measured 90-day correlations against BlackRock’s two crypto funds. He covered every crypto-linked stock worth more than $2 billion. Fundstrat and Factset supplied the numbers.
Correlation simply asks whether two prices move together. A score near 100% means they move in step. A score near zero means they ignore each other.
BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) led on Ethereum (ETH) at 80%. Coinbase (COIN) came second at 74%.
Strategy (MSTR) led on Bitcoin (BTC) at 78%. Lee also expects ether to outrun bitcoin this cycle. He chairs BitMine, the stock at the top of his own Ethereum column.
Large Cap Equities that Track Crypto Prices. Source Lee on X Why Bitcoin Miners Stopped Tracking Bitcoin
Now look at the miners. Core Scientific (CORZ) scored 16%. Cipher Mining (CIFR) hit 17%, TeraWulf (WULF) 18%, and Hut 8 (HUT) 19%.
Riot Platforms (RIOT) reached 31% and IREN 33%. Every one of them trailed Trump Media (DJT), which scored 40% and mines nothing.
The answer sits in their accounts. These firms now sell computing power to artificial intelligence companies, and that business has taken over.
The reason is practical. Mining margins thinned as costs rose, while miners already owned the two things AI firms compete for hardest.
They hold cheap power contracts and warehouses wired to carry it. Renting that out to AI companies pays better, and it pays every month rather than with each block.
Core Scientific booked $164.2 million in revenue for the quarter ending in June. Colocation, its data centre business, brought in $136.7 million. Self-mining brought in $21.5 million.
So AI work supplied 83% of the money. Bitcoin supplied 13%.
TeraWulf showed the same shape in May. It earned $21.0 million leasing high performance computing capacity against $13.0 million from mining, or 62% from AI.
IREN sits further behind. Its quarter ending in March brought $33.6 million from AI cloud services. Mining still brought $111.2 million, leaving AI at 23%.
Line those three up against Lee’s table and a pattern appears. The more a miner earns from AI, the less its shares follow bitcoin.
Core Scientific is the most AI-driven and the least correlated. IREN is the least AI-driven and the most correlated. TeraWulf sits between them on both measures.
“We expect the business to be increasingly driven by recurring, contracted revenue, reducing exposure to the volatility historically associated with bitcoin mining,” Patrick Fleury, TeraWulf chief financial officer, in the company’s quarterly results.
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History makes the switch sharper. Core Scientific filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2022, after a Bitcoin crash and heavy debts. It emerged in January 2024.
The miner that Bitcoin nearly destroyed is now the miner least exposed to it.
What This Changes for Crypto Equity Exposure
The practical read is blunt. Anyone who bought a miner for Bitcoin exposure now owns a power and computing landlord. Its fortunes rest on demand from AI firms.
That works both ways. Miners have climbed while Bitcoin fell, which is exactly what a weak correlation predicts. The pivot is sector wide, and it has been costly. MARA and CleanSpark posted $851 million in combined losses while chasing it.
Treasury companies track Bitcoin more tightly. They have not paid better. MicroStrategy traded near $118.86 on Friday against a 52-week high of $365.21.
MicroStrategy Stock (MSTR) Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
Correlation describes direction, not profit. A stock can shadow Bitcoin faithfully on the way down.
One caution covers the whole table. These are 90-day trailing figures. They tighten and loosen with each market phase rather than holding forever.
Bitcoin traded near $77,151 at the time of writing, up 6.3% on the day. Ether changed hands around $2,412 after a 3.5% gain.
The next earnings season will test how far the split runs. Miners that book more AI revenue should drift further from Bitcoin, not closer.
Lee built his table to help equity investors buy crypto exposure. Read closely, it shows how much of that exposure the mining sector has already sold off.

Venezuela is moving closer to formal dollarization, with economist Steve Hanke drafting a bill to abolish the bolivar. According to reports, the National Assembly appointed him as a special adviser this month.
The Johns Hopkins economist drafted a full dollarization law that would abolish the bolivar and the central bank. He puts the odds of passage at 50% to 80%.
Since 2017, I have maintained that dollarization is Venezuela’s best defense against hyperinflation.I am grateful to Professor @steve_hanke for mentioning our work in Fortune and, especially, for agreeing to serve as an advisor to the Lápiz National Parliamentary Delegation on…
— Antonio Ecarri A. (@aecarri) August 20, 2026
What Hanke’s Dollarization Plan Actually Proposes
According to Fortune, Hanke is working on the project alongside Assembly member Antonio Ecarri, founder of the centrist “Lápiz” party.
This marks Hanke’s second attempt at this cure in Venezuela. In 1995 and 1996, he designed a currency board as chief economic adviser to President Rafael Caldera, a plan that failed to win a majority in the National Assembly.
The economist argues that conditions look different this time. He told Fortune that surveys show most Venezuelans already want to dump the bolivar, and many already shop in dollars even though they get paid in local currency.
His plan would shut down the central bank entirely, ending the government’s ability to print money. Inflation currently runs near 400% annually, still the highest rate in the world.
“Venezuela would be the most competitive economy in the world. The bolivar has lost 78% of its value to the U.S. dollar in the past year,” the economist said.
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#VNZWatch🇻🇪: Today, I measure Venezuela's inflation at a CRUSHING 350.1%/yr.TO CRUSH INFLATION, VENEZUELA MUST DITCH THE BOLIVAR AND DOLLARIZE. pic.twitter.com/lnLejXIhMS
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) August 20, 2026
Venezuelans already live in a heavily dollarized economy in practice. Physical dollars circulate widely, though a digital alternative has quietly become even more central to daily transactions across the country.
“Taming inflation is the key to restoring stability in Venezuela, and all the other progress flows from that… Stability isn’t everything, but without stability, which means stable prices, you have nothing,” Hanke told Fortune.
Inflation has eased from the 700% rate recorded before Maduro’s capture, but it remains six times higher than Iran’s. That translates into an 8% weekly increase in the prices of eggs, beef, and rent, according to Hanke’s calculations.
Why Oil Sits at the Center of the Plan
Oil sits at the center of the diagnosis. Venezuela produces just 1.1 million barrels per day, roughly 1.3% of global output and only one-third of the 3.4 million barrels it pumped before Hugo Chávez took power in 1998.
That figure is barely 7% higher than production levels before Maduro’s ouster, despite the US Special Forces raid on January 3 that removed him. Venezuela’s external debt sits near $250 billion, roughly 150% of GDP, the fourth-highest ratio in the world.
🇻🇪 Venezuela is now sending nearly half its oil straight to the U.S.More than 500,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude are reportedly reaching U.S. refineries every day.That’s out of roughly 1.25 million barrels Venezuela produces daily.And the U.S. actually wants this stuff.… pic.twitter.com/lvMdBfcSxr
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) August 19, 2026
Hanke argues that dollarization and rising oil production work together. He explains that the current instability, with inflation near 400%, makes it difficult to renegotiate that debt with creditors, including Russia, China, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil.
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods called Venezuela uninvestable, citing the country’s history of expropriations. The government led by President Delcy Rodríguez has yet to pass laws that sufficiently protect private property rights.
Where Crypto and USDT Fit Into the Picture
Venezuela’s retail crypto volume reached $17.9 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to TRM Labs. USDT dominated that market, accounting for 90.2% of all Binance P2P listings paired with the bolivar.
As of August 21, USDT trades near 919 bolivars on major peer-to-peer platforms. The official Central Bank rate sits closer to 780, leaving a gap of nearly 18% between the two.
USDT Binance vs BCV USD – % Difference. Source: DOLITODAY
That crypto dollar rate is the one most Venezuelans actually rely on daily. Stablecoins function less as speculation and more as survival tools, protecting purchasing power where banking infrastructure falls short.
In the short term, demand for USDT will likely stay strong. People and businesses will continue to prefer a liquid, instantly transferable dollar while physical cash and banking infrastructure catch up during any transition.
Over the longer term, successful dollarization could reduce the urgency of using crypto purely as an inflation hedge. Still, USDT’s advantages, speed, low remittance costs, and 24/7 availability are unlikely to disappear.
If Hanke’s plan succeeds, crypto would stop functioning as an emergency lifeline. The digital-dollar infrastructure Venezuelans already depend on daily would likely remain a permanent feature regardless.
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Bitcoin miner stocks have spent three weeks trading with a seller sitting on top of them. On Friday, Ken Griffin said that seller is nearly finished.
Griffin told Citadel clients the firm has unwound more than 80% of the risk it absorbed from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio. The filings behind that book show miner bets that grew in dollars while shrinking to under 10% of the portfolio. The fund was buying miners fast and memory chips faster.
The Seller Nobody Was Watching
Situational Awareness is the artificial intelligence (AI) fund run by former OpenAI researcher Aschenbrenner. It gained 439% in the first half of 2026. Then July arrived.
Leveraged four to one, the fund lost 67% in a single month and handed roughly $10 billion of stock to Citadel on July 30, as BeInCrypto reported when it lost its stock book.
Its last filing before that sale is the one that matters. The 13F, a quarterly holdings report large investors must file with regulators, covered the period to June 30 and was lodged on August 14. It listed a $20.24 billion portfolio across just 26 positions.
Bitcoin miners made up $1.99 billion of it. Core Scientific was the biggest at $666 million. Riot Platforms held $468 million, IREN $433 million and CleanSpark $179 million. A fresh $152 million stake sat in Keel Infrastructure, the company Bitfarms became after rebranding in April.
Bitcoin miner book Citadel just cleared
Those positions grew fast. Miner exposure climbed 79% in a single quarter. Riot alone jumped 229%.
Why the Whole Thing Broke
Aschenbrenner was never buying Bitcoin (BTC). He was buying megawatts. Miners already owned grid capacity, and AI data centers needed it.
The real danger sat elsewhere. In March, the fund held $8.5 billion of put options against Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom and other AI names. Those were its hedges.
By June 30, they had almost entirely gone. In their place stood $12.5 billion of outright long bets. Sandisk and Micron alone accounted for 55.6% of the whole book.
So the fund stopped hedging and doubled down instead. When chip stocks slid in July, nothing cushioned the fall. Miners were collateral damage in a memory-chip trade.
Griffin Cleared It in Three Weeks
Citadel moved quickly. It pushed through nearly 100 block trades worth more than $4 billion, including the largest intraday blocks of the year in 10 separate names.
“Our ability to distribute this risk was central to our investment thesis,” Reuters reported, citing Ken Griffin in the letter.
Citadel bought the portfolio at a discount, and three Citadel funds gained sharply afterward.
Ken Griffin’s Citadel has already shed more than 80% of the aggregate risk it took on from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness portfolio.Griffin on the exit:“These included the largest intraday block trades of the year in 10 different names. In the United States, we… pic.twitter.com/v4Ud1sFBys
— Wall St Engine (@wallstengine) August 21, 2026
What Changes for Miner Holders
A large seller with no reason to care about price is now mostly out. That hands the sector back to its own numbers, from hosting deals like Riot’s Anthropic lease to heavy quarterly mining losses.
The tape is helping too. Bitcoin’s 7% daily gain lifted BTC to about $77,309 and its market value to roughly $1.55 trillion.
Bitcoin Price Performance. Source: BeInCrypto
One question remains. Aschenbrenner loaded up on miners because he believed hashrate was really a claim on power. Citadel has now sold most of it. Whoever bought those blocks made the same bet, quietly, at a lower price.

The crypto exchange you trust with your hard-earned money can suddenly delete your account and freeze all the funds without any warning. That’s what happened to a user on Crypto.com last week. Alarmingly, its customer support initially denied that the user account even existed. On August 13, the user “Bradley Peak” received a reassuring email with the subject line: “Crypto.com Exchange – Successful Login.” His credentials had been accepted. Similar to what anyone would receive when trying to access their account.
While the email claimed a successful login, he couldn’t actually access the exchange. Peak was pushed back toward Crypto.com’s main app or its UK login flow. When he inspected the browser traffic, he said a request to an Exchange endpoint returned “401 Unauthorized.”
So, basically, Crypto.com was showing that the user doesn’t have an account. Yet his money was locked inside.
Note: It has been 8-days since the incident, and Crypto.com are yet to resolve the issue. After BeInCrypto’s probe, the exchange did ask the user for an external wallet address to send his funds. However, that hasn’t happened yet, at the time of writing. Peak is a journalist at BeInCrypto. He took no part in reporting or writing this article. BeInCrypto independently reviewed the screenshots and correspondence he supplied, then gave Crypto.com a detailed right of reply.
A Successful Login to Nowhere
Peak says he had used the Crypto.com Exchange account normally for several years. He sent funds to the same established deposit setup he had used before. Access disappeared afterwards.
There was no suspension email. The login page showed no account-status warning and didn’t request any documents.
Customer support was a bigger problem. Crypto.com could not give Peak a consistent description of his account.
In one chat, a support specialist told him, “After checking, I can see that your exchange account is rejected.” The agent did not define “rejected” or say when that status had been applied. The case was escalated, followed by a familiar line: “I can’t give you an exact timeframe.”
Crypto.com support called Peak’s Exchange account “rejected,” escalated the case and gave no resolution timeframe. Screenshot supplied by Bradley Peak. “Rejected” Became “There Is No Account”
A different support agent gave a weirder answer. After asking Peak for the email address he used to log in, the specialist replied: “Apologies, but there’s no Exchange account under that specific email.”
A second support specialist said there was no Exchange account under Peak’s email. BeInCrypto redacted the address before publication. Screenshot supplied by Bradley Peak.
Peak responded with Crypto.com Exchange messages tied to that address, including successful login notifications and an earlier email stating that he already had an Exchange account. The screenshots reviewed by BeInCrypto show no explanation for the contradiction.
The exchanges then settled into a loop. Support said the case was “still in progress,” that another team had it, and that no timeframe was available.
Peak asked for updates across two chats for weeks. His funds remained inaccessible.
After escalation, support said it was waiting for another team and could provide no timeframe. Screenshot supplied by Bradley Peak. Crypto.com Answered With a Vague Compliance Statement
BeInCrypto sent Crypto.com 12 questions. They covered the account’s status, the meaning of “rejected,” the location of the funds, and the steps required to withdraw them.
Crypto.com asked for extra time and then issued a very vague on-record statement:
“Crypto.com follows strict regulatory protocols and as such we do not comment on individual customer accounts. As a registered MLR firm, we are required to comply with applicable legal and regulatory obligations, including the monitoring and review of customer activity. We may place restrictions on accounts while such reviews are ongoing. Crypto.com Customer Support will continue to engage with the user in question as appropriate.”
The statement identifies a reason why the exchange may restrict an account during review. It does not confirm that Peak’s account is under such a review or state whether it currently exists.
The company gave no status for the funds and no route or deadline for release.
Crypto.com’s reference to its regulatory status also needs context. Foris DAX UK is registered by the Financial Conduct Authority for certain cryptoasset activities. The current registration sits under the UK’s money-laundering rules.
The FCA says the wider authorization regime is expected to begin in October 2027 and MLR registration does not guarantee authorization under it.
An FCA notice naming Foris DAX UK also says customers do not have access to the Financial Ombudsman Service or Financial Services Compensation Scheme for these services.
Cases involving inaccessible exchange accounts therefore raise a practical custody issue.
Other Users Found the Same Maze
Peak’s complaint is not the only 2026 account-access claim visible in Crypto.com’s public forum. The accounts below are anonymous and BeInCrypto could not independently verify them. Their details echo parts of his experience.
Earlier this year, a Canadian user said withdrawals and Exchange access were blocked after a “routine review”. The user later reported that a formal complaint led to access being restored within days, without an explanation for the original restriction.
Reddit User Complaining About a Similar Issue in 2026
Another long-time customer reported an account lock, an unauthorized error, and repeated referrals to a support queue. A Crypto.com community representative offered to escalate the case manually. In a separate thread, a user said a phone-number change triggered a four-day lockout; other commenters described similar loops.
The anecdotes do not establish how common the problem is. They show the same failure mode: access stops, the chat escalates the case, and a public complaint opens another escalation route.
Earlier in March, Crypto.com also cut about 12% of its workforce, roughly 180 roles, as it integrated AI across the business. The company has not said customer support was affected. The evidence reviewed by BeInCrypto does not link the cuts to Peak’s case.
The Account Still Has No Name
Centralized exchanges can have legal reasons to pause transactions, and financial-crime reviews can limit what they disclose. That power makes an accurate account status and a working escalation path essential.
Peak is one of the several users who remain caught between Crypto.com’s systems. One accepted his login, while another denied authorization. Support called the account “rejected” and later said it did not exist. The press office described restrictions that may occur during reviews, while declining to say whether that explanation applied here.
As of August 21, Peak still had no access to the funds, no deadline, and no account-specific explanation. Crypto.com says support will continue to engage with him. For now, that engagement ends where the story began: in a chat window asking him to wait.

Gold surged past $4,600 per ounce on Friday, touching its highest level in three months and putting the metal on track for a nearly 5% weekly gain.
A weaker dollar and fresh debt concerns are driving investors toward safety.
Gold more 3-month highs… closing in on $4600 pic.twitter.com/8W3m3RhEVr
— Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 (@MikeZaccardi) August 21, 2026
What is Driving the Gold Rally?
Spot gold traded between $4,580 and $4,600 on Friday, while futures approached $4,650, according to TradingView data. The rally stems from two converging forces:
A weaker US dollar, renewed concern over soaring American debt, and the Treasury’s decision this week to double long-term bond buybacks all pushed investors toward non-yielding assets.
That buyback move aimed to stabilize the bond market after the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since 2007. The announcement initially pushed yields lower and further weakened the dollar, adding fuel to gold’s advance.
Prominent market voices highlighted the significance of the move. Economist Mohamed El-Erian noted that gold ranked among the morning’s standout performers, topping $4,600 alongside Bitcoin’s rebound above $79,000.
Longtime gold advocate Peter Schiff pointed to the precious metal’s rally as evidence that the Federal Reserve has lost credibility on its inflation target.
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Gold hitting $4,600, silver near $70, oil over $87, and Bitcoin's earlier spike above $79K show the Fed has lost all credibility on its commitment to returning inflation to 2%. Treasury made it clear the Fed will choose inflation, so investors are choosing their preferred hedge.
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) August 21, 2026
Sentiment among professional investors has also shifted markedly. Bank of America’s latest Global Fund Manager Survey showed a net 16% of managers now view gold as undervalued, the highest reading since March 2023 and up sharply from just 6% in July.
Structural support also remains strong. Central banks continued aggressive buying, with second-quarter purchases hitting a quarterly record.
16% of Fund Managers now believe Gold is undervalued, the most since March 2023. Source: Bank of America/@Barchart
US federal debt recently surpassed $40 trillion, amplifying fiscal concerns that favor gold as a hedge against currency debasement.
Rising Treasury yields typically signal investor concern about long-term debt sustainability, and gold tends to benefit when both yields and the dollar soften.
Where Does the Gold Rally Go From Here?
Analysts remain genuinely divided on gold’s next move. Some see the breakout above the 200-day moving average as confirmation of renewed bullish momentum, with potential targets toward $5,000 if dollar weakness persists.
Others caution that higher oil prices and sticky inflation could reinstate pressure on yields, limiting further gains in the near term.
“…Gold continues its strong run higher, gaining 1.8% on the day and 5.1% on the week to trade at USD 4,600, well above the 200-day MA which was the technical trigger for fresh momentum buying and now also above the 0.382 Fibonacci retracement of the January to June correction at USD 4,574. Next level being the 0.5 retracement and May local high around USD 4,770…,” analyst Ole S Hansen said on X.
Gold (XAU) Price Prediction. Source: X/@Ole_S_Hansen
Silver’s parallel move near $70 reinforces the broader precious metals narrative. Investors appear to be rotating toward tangible assets as confidence in traditional monetary tools shows visible signs of strain.
For now, gold’s return above $4,600 underscores its role as a preferred safe haven amid fiscal uncertainty and shifting monetary expectations across global markets.
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