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US prosecutors have charged three Missouri men for allegedly joining a 2024 plot to rob a Connecticut man of hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen Bitcoin (BTC) by threatening his family.
The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut announced the indictment on August 4. Sedric Louis, 32, John Davis, 34, and Martel Williams, 27, are all from St. Louis.
Robbery Plot Sought to Force Bitcoin Transfer Through Family
Prosecutors say the intended target had participated in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin. According to the indictment, the plot’s coordinators allegedly recruited the trio to steal some of the Bitcoin.
Between August 21 and August 24, 2024, the men traveled to Connecticut. They obtained rental vehicles and supplies, including air rifles and walkie-talkies.
The group then stalked the target and his parents over two days. They planned to force their way into the family home and demand the transfer of the stolen cryptocurrency. The funds would move into accounts controlled by the scheme’s coordinators.
However, the three men abandoned the plan and left the state. Prosecutors say they feared home security cameras had captured them and grew frustrated by poor communication with co-conspirators.
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Kidnapping Followed Days Later
Shortly afterward, another crew from Florida arrived to carry out the plan. On August 25, 2024, Danbury Police arrested six Florida men over a violent carjacking of a Lamborghini Urus. The attackers allegedly beat and kidnapped the target’s parents during the carjacking.
Alleged coordinators James Schwab, Adam Iza, and Saif Faiq were charged earlier. A grand jury in New Haven returned the second superseding indictment against the Missouri trio on May 22, 2026. Each man faces a Hobbs Act robbery conspiracy charge carrying up to 20 years in prison.
Louis and Davis have remained in custody since their arrests on June 25, 2026. Both pleaded not guilty in Bridgeport federal court on July 30. Williams entered a not guilty plea on July 17 and was released on bond.
Meanwhile, US Attorney David X. Sullivan stressed that an indictment is not evidence of guilt. The six Florida men arrested over the kidnapping have already pleaded guilty, according to earlier statements from the authorities.
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Michael Burry warned that US stocks may be near a major top and could suffer a 1987-type crash, even as the S&P 500 posted its first record close since June on Tuesday.
The investor, known for predicting the 2008 housing collapse, made the call in a Tuesday Substack post titled “Trading Post August 4, 2026 My Options.” He confirmed he still holds short positions against Nvidia, Tesla, Palantir, and other AI-linked names.
‘Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry Warns of 1987-Type Crash
The S&P 500 gained 1.79% to close at 7,736.52 on Tuesday, while the Nasdaq Composite climbed 2.59% to a record high of 26,584.99. Equities advanced as upbeat corporate earnings and lower oil prices lifted sentiment, with crude retreating on expectations that the Strait of Hormuz could reopen.
Nonetheless, Burry believes demand for AI infrastructure depends on financing that may prove unsustainable. This latest forecast comes days after his June 30 bubble warning.
He also added that fresh highs tend to pull new money into stocks while falling volatility forces systematic funds to add leverage.
“I continue to believe it is possible we are near a major top, and possible a 1987-type fall, but the S&P 500 making new highs likely will bring new money into the market,” Burry wrote in the post, reported by CNBC.
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Nvidia Remains His Only Losing Short
Burry said he continues to short the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX), Micron, Nvidia, Caterpillar, Palantir, Tesla, and Applied Materials. Every position remains profitable except his bet against Nvidia.
That losing trade faces a fresh test soon. Nvidia reports earnings on August 26, and nearly every analyst forecast for Nvidia still rates the stock a buy.
Burry added that he would cut losses if the trades moved decisively against him. Whether new money keeps flowing in or volatility snaps back may decide how his 1987 comparison ages.
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The Dow Jones and S&P 500 both closed at record highs on Tuesday, driven by optimism over progress toward fully reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Crude fell roughly 5% amid diplomatic signals, easing inflationary pressure that had capped equities for months.
BREAKING: The S&P 500 closes at its highest level on record, adding +$1.2 trillion in market cap today. pic.twitter.com/cvn6ztTps3
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 4, 2026
The Diplomatic Signals Behind Wall Street’s Record Session
The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow waterway handling a substantial portion of global seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas shipments. Its status has shaped market sentiment since February.
The numbers reflected a broad risk appetite. The Dow Jones rose 1.71%, or 907 points, to 54,085.88, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.79% to 7,736.52.
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Dow Jones Industrial Average Index Price Performance – 5D. Source: TradingView
That marked the S&P’s first closing record since early July. The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite outperformed both, gaining 2.59% to finish at 26,584.99.
Both major indexes traded even higher during the session. The intraday moves underscored how quickly sentiment shifted in response to Middle East headlines. Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided the initial catalyst. He confirmed the strait remains open, with ships and oil continuing to transit the waterway.
Negotiations appear to be advancing. Rubio described talks involving Iran, Oman, and US participation aimed at ensuring safer and increased vessel traffic in the short term.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added further momentum. He told CNBC that a deal to fully reopen commercial transit could be reached today or tomorrow.
🚨 JUST NOW: Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent announces a deal could be struck today or tomorrow to open the Strait of Hormuz, oil is now PLUNGING below $80"I think there's a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the strait.""President Trump threatened the largest… pic.twitter.com/KWS3bswY2L
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) August 4, 2026
Diplomatic context explains the urgency. President Donald Trump recently suspended what he described as a major potential strike on Iran to allow negotiations to proceed.
Why Analysts Still Urge Caution
Energy markets responded immediately. Crude prices fell roughly 5%, pulling Treasury yields lower and supporting equities across sectors. Semiconductor and artificial intelligence stocks led the advance. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index surged more than 6% during the session.
Paper oil might be selling off… But the physical market is getting tighter.Brent's 1-6 month spread is up another 14%…while Brent itself is down 5%.The market is paying roughly a $15 premium for oil today rather than six months from now.– A negative spread signals ample… pic.twitter.com/HPaNfBvWOz
— Lukas Ekwueme (@ekwufinance) August 4, 2026
Corporate results reinforced the move. Upbeat earnings from Caterpillar and Palantir helped alleviate lingering concerns about demand. The stakes explain why traders reacted so forcefully. Prolonged disruption earlier this year fueled volatility, raised energy costs, and pressured growth forecasts.
A durable agreement would remove a significant geopolitical risk premium. That prospect alone justified Tuesday’s repricing across multiple asset classes.
Caution remains warranted, however. Rubio acknowledged that no final deal exists yet, despite the progress he described. Tehran has issued mixed signals about the formal status of talks. Previous memorandums of understanding have collapsed under similar circumstances.
Any breakdown could reverse the moves quickly. Oil would likely spike again, pressuring equities and reviving the inflation concerns that briefly faded. The week ahead brings additional tests. Investors will digest further earnings reports and economic data alongside developments in the Gulf.
Attention stays fixed on one question. Whether diplomatic optimism translates into concrete shipping gains will determine if these records hold.
For now, the waterway’s status has unlocked Wall Street’s latest advance. The durability of that rally depends on negotiations still unfolding.
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SanDisk stock jumped 10.84% on Tuesday following a new AI memory milestone with SK Hynix. The companies advanced their ongoing collaboration by releasing the first industry specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) technology.
SanDisk also presents a keynote on AI memory today at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) Conference, just hours before its earnings call. Google and Tenstorrent joined the HBF consortium during the standardization process, adding credibility to the new standard.
A New Memory Tier for AI Chips
The Open Compute Project (OCP), an industry group that builds open hardware standards, published the HBF specification this week. The standard gives chip designers a shared framework for using HBF in AI accelerators.
It fills a gap left by High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is fast but capacity-constrained. In contrast, solid-state drives hold more data at slower speeds.
The specification supports NAND stacking up to 512GB per die stack. It also defines three performance tiers, with read speeds reaching 3.0 terabytes per second.
SanDisk and SK Hynix started the HBF consortium in February. Google and Tenstorrent joined as members during the specification’s development. SanDisk Chief Technology Officer Alper Ilkbahar called the release a major step for the technology.
“an important milestone for the HBF ecosystem”
Alper Ilkbahar, SanDisk’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.
Earnings Loom as Memory Stocks Rebound
SanDisk reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after markets close today. Wall Street expects earnings near $33 per share on revenue around $8.3 billion, up sharply from $0.29 a year earlier. However, SanDisk shares pulled back in premarket trading Wednesday, as some investors turned cautious ahead of tonight’s results.
SanDisk saw a pop the day before it reports its earnings. Image Source: Trading View
SanDisk shares fell roughly 47% last month during a broader memory sector selloff. Meanwhile, SK Hynix shares have swung just as sharply since their Nasdaq debut in July.
The rebound reflects a tighter link between Korean and US markets, as AI infrastructure spending increasingly moves both in tandem.
Today’s earnings will show whether the AI memory story behind Tuesday’s rally holds up under closer scrutiny.

A wallet reportedly belonging to Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) transferred another 1,030 Bitcoin (BTC), worth roughly $66.14 million, on Wednesday. On-chain tracker, Lookonchain, flagged the move.
Strategy has not confirmed any sale, and the transfer alone does not prove one. Still, the timing has revived questions about the company’s shrinking Bitcoin reserve.
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Is Michael Saylor's @Strategy dumping $BTC again?Wallets linked to #Strategy transferred out 1,030 $BTC($66.14M) again 2 hours ago.https://t.co/UfsI8WoJZYhttps://t.co/Vz0aSXsP5i pic.twitter.com/rk5VqzCXhy
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) August 5, 2026
MicroStrategy Sale Speculation Builds After Last Week’s Disclosure
The suspicion is not unfounded. Strategy disclosed on Monday that it sold 1,638 BTC last week at an average price of $63,957.
That sale raised roughly $104.7 million and reduced holdings to 842,138 BTC, valued at nearly $54 billion at press time. Lookonchain had reported a similar wallet movement earlier, when 299.84 BTC left a Strategy-linked address.
Executive Chairman Michael Saylor has defended the sales as corporate capital management rather than a change in conviction.
“When I say ‘Never Sell Your Bitcoin,’ I speak as one saver to another. I have never sold mine. Not one satoshi. Strategy is a public company, not my wallet…” he said.
The company sold coins at prices below its $75,419 average cost basis to fund preferred dividends and STRC stock repurchases. Those obligations reached $400.7 million in the second quarter alone.
MARA Moves 6,000 Bitcoin to Two Prime
Meanwhile, Bitcoin miner MARA transferred 6,000 BTC, worth around $384.6 million, to Two Prime within five hours.
“The transfer doesn’t necessarily mean a sale—it could be for asset management,” Lookonchain noted.
That reading has some basis. MARA holds an equity stake in Two Prime and allocates Bitcoin to the firm’s strategies.
However, MARA has also sold before, offloading 15,133 BTC in March to retire $1 billion in convertible debt. The miner still holds 36,303 BTC, worth approximately $2.34 billion.
Strategy’s next weekly disclosure will show whether Wednesday’s transfer became a sale or a custody reshuffle.
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Arthur Hayes says Bitcoin’s climb to $1 million depends on the AI industry’s credit problems, not its earnings. In a new essay titled “Situationship,” the BitMEX co-founder makes his case.
He argues that AI data center spending resembles 2008-style debt speculation rather than 2000-style dot-com overvaluation. He expects central banks to print enough money to eventually rescue over-leveraged AI lenders. That flood of liquidity, he says, is what carries Bitcoin toward seven figures.
Why Hayes Separates AI From the Dot-Com Bubble
Hayes argues investors mistake data centers for pure technology. In his view, they are really real estate developments packed with fast-depreciating chips.
He made a related case in May. Back then, he called AI spending history’s largest fiat credit bubble and set an initial Bitcoin price target near $126,000.
“AI CAPEX is just another boring real estate play”— Arthur Hayes,
In his view, hyperscalers increasingly fund data centers with borrowed money, not free cash flow. That shifts default risk onto banks and bondholders.
He compares this to the 2006-2008 mortgage cycle. Lending kept flowing even after home price growth stalled. It only broke once construction spending actually contracted.
"Situationship" is my $BTC bull porn essay on how the AI bubble will burst, and why the money printer will go hyper brrrr and take us back to a rip roaring bull market."The question of internal framing is the key variable that determines whether AI is a bubble. But before we… pic.twitter.com/ix5SGiAcuv
— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) August 5, 2026
The Bailout Mechanism Behind the $1 Million Call
Hayes expects AI capital spending growth to decelerate in 2027. That slowdown, he says, will expose the weakest data center loans. He argues the Fed and Treasury will respond the way they did in 2008 and 2020. That means emergency lending facilities, and possibly direct equity purchases, to prevent a systemic default.
His forecast follows a familiar pattern from the Fed. Chair Kevin Warsh held interest rates steady at his second meeting in late July. Three FOMC members dissented, favoring a hike. Markets now price high odds of a rate hike later this year.
Hayes reads that hold as evidence authorities will keep credit flowing. He sees continued bank lending to AI projects as further confirmation officials won’t let weak borrowers fail.
This isn’t Hayes’s first seven-figure Bitcoin call. He made a similar $1 million prediction last year based on an expected Fed shift toward yield curve control.
This time, he ties the call to AI credit stress instead. He also reiterated a $5,000 Ethereum target for the end of 2026. Hayes points to Ethereum’s emerging role as a settlement layer for tokenized real-world assets.
Bitcoin traded near $64,300 at the time of writing, up roughly 1% over 24 hours, per BeInCrypto data.
Bitcoin’s price at publishing. Image Source: BeInCrypto
Hayes has also called for a Bitcoin bottom near $40,000 before any run toward his higher targets. That framework leaves room for further downside first. Whether the AI credit cycle actually unwinds on his 2027 timeline remains the open question. Investors will likely watch hyperscaler earnings and bank loan books for early signs over the coming quarters.

Hut 8 stock dropped 9.74% to $101.16 on Tuesday after the company reported second-quarter earnings. Revenue climbed 81% year over year to $74.9 million, while net losses reached $177.1 million.
The Bitcoin (BTC) miner turned AI data center developer recovered 1.29% to $102.47 in after-hours trading. Investors appear focused on the loss rather than the company’s growing lease book.
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Hut 8 Stock Chart Showing the 9.74% Drop on August 4. Source: Google Finance Why Hut 8 Stock Fell Despite Revenue Growth
Most of the quarterly loss existed only on paper. The company booked $138.6 million in primarily unrealized losses on digital assets, according to its earnings release.
The comparison with last year sharpened the reaction. Hut 8 posted $137.5 million in net income in Q2 2025, when digital asset gains lifted results.
Core operations moved the other way. Adjusted EBITDA excluding digital assets reached $10.4 million, up from $4.2 million a year earlier.
“Adjusted EBITDA inclusive of digital assets mark-to-market for the three months ended June 30, 2026 was $(94.6) million, compared to $221.2 million in the prior-year period,” the firm revealed.
AI Leases Reach 949 MW and $26.6 Billion
The loss overshadowed a growing commercial pipeline. Contracted IT capacity across Hut 8’s AI campuses reached 949 MW, with a base-term contract value of roughly $26.6 billion.
Those leases are expected to generate more than $1.75 billion in average annual net operating income. A 352 MW Beacon Point Phase 2 deal, signed after quarter-end, lifted that campus alone to roughly $19.6 billion.
The build-out extends the AI data center pivot Hut 8 began in December with AI cloud firm Fluidstack. Financing kept pace, as the company closed $7.5 billion in investment-grade project notes split between its River Bend and Beacon Point campuses, with no recourse to the parent.
CEO Asher Genoot said execution now takes precedence over deal-making.
“Delivery is now our central priority. We continue to apply the full weight of our organization to deliver River Bend and Beacon Point: operating rigor built through years of developing energy-intensive infrastructure at scale and a team we continue to expand ahead of the growth to come,” the exeutive stated.
Delivery timelines now define the story. River Bend targets its first data hall in Q2 2027. Beacon Point Phase 1 expects initial energization in Q1 2027. The coming quarters will show whether the construction pace matches the contracted numbers.
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Japan’s Nikkei 225 climbed 3.34% Wednesday to 66,090 points, marking its sharpest one-day gain in weeks. Chip stocks led the advance across Asian markets.
The rally followed an overnight surge on Wall Street. Traders also welcomed fresh hope that the United States and Iran will soon reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Chip Stocks Lead The Rally
The Nikkei 225 opened nearly 1% higher and climbed steadily through the session. The gain reversed recent pressure tied to Bank of Japan currency intervention.
SoftBank Group surged more than 10%, according to CNBC. Tokyo Electron added 3.64%, Advantest gained 7%, and Kioxia rose 6.34%.
Despite the Yen-USD intervention, the Nikkei is showing strong signs. Image Source: Trading View
South Korea’s SK Hynix jumped around 6%. Samsung Electronics gained more than 4% at the open, extending South Korea’s chip rebound into the new session.
Ortus Advisors strategist Andrew Jackson linked the move to renewed U.S. semiconductor strength. He said it reinforced the bullish outlook for Asian AI stocks.
SK Hynix also partnered with SanDisk (SNDK) to launch High Bandwidth Flash (HBF), a new memory standard for AI servers. Investors read the move as a sign of continued momentum in AI memory supply chains.
Bessent’s Iran Remarks Support The Rally
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC Tuesday he expects a deal “today or tomorrow” to reopen the strait. He called it a critical corridor for global oil shipments.
Iran has periodically threatened the waterway during its conflict with the United States. Bessent’s comments followed Trump’s Monday Hormuz talks announcement.
The remarks helped push oil prices lower. Cheaper oil eases cost pressure on energy-dependent economies like Japan and South Korea.
Overnight, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average both closed at record highs. The Nasdaq Composite led gains, climbing 2.59%.
Wednesday’s gains follow a volatile stretch for Japanese and South Korean equities. Morgan Stanley’s Korea upgrade points to further room for chip stocks to recover. Traders will watch whether the rally holds once Washington and Tehran confirm a Hormuz deal.

Palantir Technologies stock jumped 30% on Tuesday. The surge wiped out $3 billion in short sellers’ paper profits for 2026.
The rally marked Palantir’s best single-day performance in two years, S3 Partners LLC said. Short sellers had built a $2.7 billion paper gain before Monday’s earnings news reversed course.
Earnings Beat Catches Bears Off Guard
The reversal followed Monday’s raised full-year forecast, which beat Wall Street’s revenue and income estimates. Short sellers, who had profited from Palantir’s sluggish run, watched those gains disappear in a single session.
Palantir’s earnings rocketed the price of its stock. Image Source: Trading View
Meanwhile, investor Michael Burry disclosed a bearish position against Palantir in November. His short bet helped trigger the stock’s earlier slide. He later said in a June newsletter that he had covered half of that position.
Palantir still trades down 10% for 2026, on pace for its worst year since 2022. The stock’s earlier slide followed months of contract concerns surrounding its government business.
Palantir Still Showing Risks
Some analysts still see risk in Palantir’s valuation. The stock trades at more than 83 times forward earnings. Jefferies kept an underperform rating on the stock, seeing better risk-reward in other AI-linked software names, including Microsoft and Amazon.
In contrast, Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick took the opposite view. He upgraded Palantir to buy from hold and kept a $200 price target, pointing to a second straight beat-and-raise quarter.
CEO Alex Karp addressed one lingering worry on the earnings call. He called commercial demand for Palantir’s data analytics tools “otherworldly.” That eased fears that rival AI developers could erode its software business.
Nearly 70% of analysts covering Palantir now rate the stock a buy. Its rally’s staying power, therefore, may hinge on whether commercial demand keeps justifying Palantir’s premium price.

Whale Rock Capital Management’s flagship hedge fund fell 21.7% in July. The drop cut its 2026 gains roughly in half as artificial intelligence and semiconductor stocks sold off.
Whale Rock’s year-to-date return dropped to 35.1% through July. That’s down from 72.5% at the end of June, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Alex Sacerdote runs the Boston-based, $19 billion firm.
A Rough Month for AI Stockpickers
Whale Rock’s long-only fund fell 18.8% in July but still holds a 36.8% gain for the year. The firm marks its 20th anniversary in 2026. It rode a chipmaker rally through the first half of the year, but conditions reversed sharply in July.
Regulatory filings show Whale Rock added to its stakes in SanDisk and Bloom Energy during the first quarter. Both names tumbled in July alongside CoreWeave. All three fell victim to a broader memory sector selloff that hit chip and AI infrastructure stocks hardest.
Having recently added SanDisk to its holdings, the stock is down 30% in the last month. Image Source: Trading View
The damage spread beyond semiconductors. Mega-cap names like Google and Meta also saw minor declines in July. Meanwhile, investors grew wary of continued AI spending. That concern echoes a broader warning that the market now trades as one AI bet.
Not the AI Industry’s Only Casualty
Whale Rock wasn’t alone in taking a hit. Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund posted a 67% loss last month. That marked the sharpest hedge fund drawdown of July, following a forced unwind of its stock book.
The reversal fits a pattern playing out across Wall Street’s AI trade this summer. Some strategists compare it to the dot-com era. Others, however, see the pullback as a buying opportunity, not the start of a longer bust.
Whale Rock’s August performance may hinge on the current earnings season. Investor sentiment toward AI infrastructure spending will likely decide whether the fund stabilizes or extends July’s losses.

Upbeat earnings from Caterpillar and Palantir Technologies (PLTR) drove the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 to record closes on Tuesday, easing concerns over artificial intelligence (AI) spending.
The Dow gained 907 points, or 1.71%, to close at 54,091.42. The S&P 500 rose 1.79% to 7,736.52. The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.59% to a record 26,584.99.
AI Earnings Beat the Street
Caterpillar raised its annual revenue growth forecast as AI data center construction drove demand for its power-generation equipment. Its stock jumped 5.6%, the single biggest boost to the Dow.
Palantir’s blowout earnings drove an even bigger move. Shares climbed 29.5% after the company raised its own annual revenue forecast, marking its best single-day gain since February 2024.
Up over 12% this year, the Dow has reached a new all-time-high. Image Source: Trading View
Optimism extended well beyond those two stocks. Of the 304 S&P 500 companies that had reported second-quarter results, 85.2% beat estimates, versus a long-term average of 67.5%, according to Reuters.
Investors view semiconductor stocks as AI beneficiaries, and those shares rose for a fourth straight session. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbed 6.6% and extended its rebound after tumbling 20.6% in July.
The S&P 500 also reached a new high. Image Source: Trading View The Rally Went Global
Technology shares and a wave of corporate earnings updates pushed the pan-European STOXX 600 to a record close, up 0.73% to 656.86. MSCI’s All Country World Index gained 1.30% and hit an intraday record too.
Oil added fuel to the rally. Brent crude fell 5.3% to $79.36 a barrel on hopes for a diplomatic resolution to the Iran war that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz to more shipping. The drop pushed September rate-hike odds down to 56.9% from 67.2% and sent two-year Treasury yields to a two-week low.
Not Everyone Is Convinced
Not every voice on Wall Street shared the enthusiasm. Jack Ablin, chief investment strategist at Cresset Capital Management, raised that note of caution even as records piled up.
“I don’t sense one ounce of skepticism among investors, from oil to interest rates to equities. The earnings reports were certainly supportive, and that’s great news, but I’m not sure a handful of earnings reports justifies new records in the S&P.”
Oliver Pursche, senior vice president at Wealthspire Advisors, saw it differently, pointing to “stronger earnings and stronger expectations” behind the mood.
That split showed up again hours later. SpaceX’s debut earnings beat Wall Street on revenue, up 92% year over year, yet shares fell roughly 8% in after-hours trading once results landed.
Ablin’s caution points to a real question. Does a rally built on a handful of earnings beats justify fresh records, or is the market pricing in AI demand that has yet to prove durable?
Tuesday’s numbers don’t settle it, and the rest of earnings season should offer more evidence.

Institutional investors accounted for a record 72% of spot trading volume on Wintermute’s over-the-counter desk in the first half of 2026, up from 59% a year earlier. The shift marks the clearest sign yet that Wall Street, not retail traders, now sets the pace of crypto markets.
Wintermute’s OTC flow report ties the change to a prolonged bear market that pushed retail traders toward equities instead. That absence gave institutional flow more weight in shaping prices.
Wall Street’s Growing Crypto Footprint
Hedge funds, digital asset treasuries (DATs), asset managers, and family offices drove that 72% share. Wintermute called it the highest level on record.
72% of the spot flow through our OTC desk now comes from institutions, the highest share on recordHedge funds, DATs, asset managers, family officesUp from 59% in 1H25 and 61% in 2H25At three quarters of volume, institutional flow defines market structure pic.twitter.com/CCerQIKdAg
— Wintermute (@wintermute_t) July 30, 2026
The figure compares with 61% in the second half of 2025 and 59% in the first half of that year.
“At three quarters of volume, institutional flow defines market structure.”
Wintermute linked that dominance directly to falling volatility. Bitcoin’s (BTC) realized volatility has roughly halved across market cycles, sliding from about 70% to 45%.
Institutions increasingly sit through price swings instead of chasing them, and that patience helps explain the drop.
This concentration builds on a trend BeInCrypto has tracked before. Institutional crypto bets have narrowed toward Bitcoin, Ethereum and a handful of select DeFi names, rather than spreading across the long tail of smaller tokens.
Institutions Move Faster Than Retail in Crypto
Institutions and retail traders both pile into a token once its volume and price surge. However, the difference lies in how long each side stays.
Institutional activity typically fades within a day of a rally. Retail traders remain active for about three days.
When a token runs, institutions are out in a day and retail takes threeBoth cohorts pile in when volume and price surge, the difference is how long they stayWith retail proportionally smaller in 2026, altcoin momentum fades faster than before pic.twitter.com/oZa20JOYrd
— Wintermute (@wintermute_t) July 30, 2026
Retail now makes up a smaller share of the market overall. That mismatch means altcoin momentum can fade faster than it did in past cycles.
Derivatives and Tokenization Pick Up the Slack
Institutional activity did not stop at spot trading. Altcoin options volume on Wintermute’s OTC desk grew roughly 3.4 times over the past year. The rise ran from the second half of 2025 into the first half of 2026.
The trend started as a yield trade in major tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH). It has since moved down the curve into altcoins.
Yield-seeking flow tends to dampen price swings rather than amplify them. Wintermute said that effect, long visible in Bitcoin and Ethereum, is now reaching altcoins too.
Meanwhile, tokenized real-world assets (RWA) are crypto tokens that represent ownership of off-chain assets like bonds or real estate. That sector grew nearly 50% to $31 billion in the first half of 2026.
That fits a broader trend. Tokenized assets have emerged as one of the market’s few growth pockets even as trading volumes elsewhere softened.
What It Means for Altcoin Season
Wintermute frames the shift simply. The market increasingly reflects its dominant participant. It is patient, selective in tokens, and inclined toward derivatives rather than spot trades.
Retail traders still spread their activity across a much wider set of assets than institutions do. If institutional flow keeps setting the market’s direction, the next rally may reward fewer winners than past cycles did.

CNBC host Jim Cramer says he intends to sell his Bitcoin (BTC) after IBM’s chief executive warned that quantum computers could eventually break the cryptography protecting it.
He has not confirmed a completed sale, disclosed a position size, or published a wallet address. Traders responded by treating the call as a reason to buy.
Why Jim Cramer Says He Is Selling Bitcoin
Cramer asked Arvind Krishna on July 30 whether quantum machines could crack the math securing crypto holdings. The IBM chief answered with a rough clock.
“I think that you should give yourself three or four years, and at that point, I would get rather paranoid about it,” Arvind Krishna, IBM chief executive.
Krishna told the same segment that quantum should move IBM’s earnings by 2028 or 2029. That forecast anchors IBM’s commercial quantum timeline.
Four days later, Cramer gave his answer on air.
“I am going to sell my Bitcoin,” Jim Cramer, CNBC host.
Nothing since then confirms he acted on it. Cramer has never published a Bitcoin address, and no filing or exchange record establishes the size of the position, so the sale remains a stated intention.
The Inverse Cramer Trade Has Already Been Tested
Traders greeted the announcement as a contrarian signal. That reflex has a real-money track record, and it is weaker than the meme suggests.
Tuttle Capital listed an Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF on March 1, 2023, with a long version beside it. The long fund closed that September. The short fund traded for the last time on Feb. 13, 2024.
Across that run the inverse fund lost 15.7% while the S&P 500 gained 25.4%. Portfolio manager Matthew Tuttle said the fund existed to expose the danger of following television stock pickers.
Academic work reaches a similar verdict. A 2012 Management Science study of 826 first-time buy calls found they pop 2.4% overnight, then fully reverse within roughly 12 trading days.
Buying after the show produced about 10% negative annualized alpha over the following 50 days. The edge lives in fading an overnight retail pop, not in inverting his opinion.
His crypto record is what keeps the joke alive. Cramer dismissed the asset class on December 23, 2022, when Bitcoin closed at $16,796.
The Gap Between 70 Qubits and Bitcoin’s Keys
The research behind the warning is genuine, though it does not show what Cramer implied. On July 30, IBM and University of Chicago scientists ran a 70 logical qubit circuit in about 16 minutes.
What they proved was a statistical floor on how faithfully the hardware executed, not the correctness of an answer. The circuit spent 468 T gates, the costly operations that make such work hard to simulate.
Stealing coins demands a far larger machine. Google Quantum AI researchers, working with Stanford and the Ethereum Foundation, estimated in March that breaking secp256k1, the curve securing Bitcoin keys, needs 1,200 to 1,450 logical qubits and 70 million to 90 million Toffoli gates.
That is roughly 20 times the qubits IBM just ran and five orders of magnitude more of the expensive gates. Their own number was already a 20-fold improvement on prior estimates, which is why forecasts of when quantum breaks Bitcoin keep moving.
The exposure becomes real the moment such hardware exists. BIP-361, a draft proposal from Jameson Lopp and five co-authors, records that more than 34% of all bitcoin had revealed a public key on-chain by March 1, 2026.
Standards bodies are not working to Cramer’s clock either. Draft NIST guidance would disallow 128-bit curves like Bitcoin’s after 2035, and Hong Kong set its banks a 2030 quantum deadline that Bitcoin has no authority to match.
Cramer identified a vulnerability the literature takes seriously and attached a date no published resource estimate supports. Whether he sells at all is the one part of the trade nobody can verify.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) reported earnings that beat Wall Street on revenue, profit, and operating margin. The stock then lost 8% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.
The chipmaker posted record revenue of $11.54 billion and guided third-quarter sales to roughly $13 billion. Investors sold anyway, with the stock already up 140% in 2026 before the release.
AMD Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance AMD Earnings Beat Every Consensus Estimate
Revenue reached $11.54 billion against a $11.31 billion consensus. That marked a 50% increase from a year earlier.
Adjusted earnings came in at $1.66 per share, ahead of the $1.62 estimate. Adjusted operating margin of 27% edged past the 26.9% forecast and more than doubled the 12% booked a year ago.
Data Center revenue carried the quarter at $6.7 billion, up 107% year over year. That single segment now supplies 58% of company sales, driven by EPYC server processors and Instinct artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators.
Elsewhere the picture was mixed. Client revenue rose 23% to $3.06 billion on Ryzen demand. Gaming fell 31% to $779 million as orders for semi-custom console chips shrank.
$AMD reports Second Quarter 2026 financial results. View non-GAAP financial measures reconciliation & cautionary statement: https://t.co/v1WzAY2rNw
— AMD (@AMD) August 4, 2026
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Why a Clean Beat Triggered a Selloff
Capital expenditures told a different story. AMD spent $808 million on property and equipment, nearly triple the roughly $299 million analysts had modeled.
Free cash flow fell to $1.56 billion from $2.57 billion in the first quarter as a result. The company is buying capacity ahead of its Helios rack ramp, which compresses near-term cash generation.
Positioning mattered more than any single line item. Shares closed 7% higher at $518.58 on Tuesday before the release. Large investors had rotated into AMD for most of the year.
That left little room for anything short of a raise. The pattern is familiar this earnings season, since Intel beat forecasts by $1.7 billion in July and still dropped 11% on results.
What Analysts Wanted From the Helios Outlook
Benchmark Capital rates AMD a buy with a $685 target. The firm argued before the print that guidance, margin direction, and Helios timing outweighed the beat itself.
AMD cleared the first two tests. Third-quarter guidance of $13 billion plus or minus $300 million implies 41% annual growth. Non-GAAP gross margin should hold near 56%.
Chief Executive Lisa Su addressed the ramp directly in the release.
“We enter the second half with strong momentum as EPYC demand accelerates, Instinct deployments scale and Helios begins to ramp,” Lisa Su, AMD chair and chief executive, in the company’s statement.
Much of that story was already priced in. AMD’s 2 gigawatt Anthropic deal lifted the stock 10% in July. Helios customers now include Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle.
Skeptics remain. Morgan Stanley has flagged AMD’s valuation against Nvidia and Broadcom. HSBC cut the stock to hold in May, citing capacity limits at contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
AI infrastructure spending now works as a lead indicator for risk assets. Semiconductor selloffs have dragged Bitcoin lower more than once this year.
Nvidia’s August 26 earnings give the market three weeks to judge whether Tuesday’s after-hours reaction was a repricing or a pause.

SpaceX beat Wall Street estimates in its first quarterly report as a public company. Revenue reached $7.8 billion against forecasts near $6.81 billion, while digital asset holdings fell to $1.098 billion.
The beat did not hold investor confidence. Shares closed 9.43% higher at $125.33, then dropped more than 8% in after-hours trading as the earnings call approached.
SpaceX (SPCX) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance Starlink Carries the Quarter While AI Losses Narrow
Connectivity revenue reached $4.291 billion, up 66% from a year earlier. Operating income for the unit climbed 79% to $1.656 billion.
Starlink subscribers doubled over 12 months to 12 million. Average revenue per user held at $66 a month, unchanged from the first quarter.
The artificial intelligence segment brought in $2.561 billion, a 247% annual increase. New cloud services agreements worth $14.1 billion in contracted sales drove much of that gain.
Its operating loss narrowed to $1.257 billion, roughly half the $2.39 billion analysts had penciled in. Loss per share landed at $0.09, against expectations near a $0.24 loss.
Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) rose 191% to $3.538 billion. Analysts had modeled about $2 billion, according to the scenarios Wall Street tracked before the print.
We posted our second quarter 2026 financial and operational results → https://t.co/DOfDhFnAZ5Q2 highlights:– Demonstrated the power of extreme vertical integration, delivering revenue growth of 92% year-over-year across Space, Connectivity, and AI– Completed two successful… pic.twitter.com/9lWxKvtbct
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 4, 2026
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SpaceX Crypto Holdings Shed $539 Million
The balance sheet tells a different story. Digital assets stood at $1.098 billion on June 30, down from $1.637 billion at the end of December.
That marks a 33% decline over six months. SpaceX does not break out coin counts in the release.
Grayscale has pegged the company’s stack at 18,712 BTC, the largest diversified public holder of the asset. Against that count, the June figure implies a carrying value near $58,700 per coin.
Bitcoin (BTC) changed hands near $64,073 on Tuesday, up 1.24% over 24 hours. The math therefore points to price weakness behind the drop rather than selling.
Sale rumors flared in July when the company moved $88 in bitcoin after months of dormancy. That small test transfer drew close attention from on-chain analysts.
Tesla showed a similar split in July. Its Bitcoin holdings lost value even as revenue topped forecasts.
Capital Spending Remains the Overhang
Second-quarter capital expenditure hit $18.369 billion. The AI segment absorbed $15.828 billion of that figure.
Compute capacity expanded to 1.4 gigawatts from 1 gigawatt in the first quarter.
SpaceX closed June with $100 billion in cash and securities, plus $47.5 billion in backlog. Management issued no formal guidance.
The company also disclosed a $60 billion agreement to buy Cursor, an AI coding tool, with closing expected this quarter.
Space revenue rose 29% to $962 million. However, the unit widened its operating loss to $542 million on Starship research spending.
Investors now face a familiar tension. Revenue growth is accelerating, yet capital intensity is climbing faster still.
The after-hours slide suggests the market wants a funding roadmap before it pays up for the numbers. Whether the call delivers one will shape the next leg for the stock.
Tune into SpaceX’s first earnings audio-only webcast since going publichttps://t.co/0PSOpIvMkM

SpaceX has picked Nvidia to design the compute payload inside its Starmind AI1 satellites. Both stocks rose Tuesday. The news landed hours before SpaceX reported its first quarterly results as a public company.
Starmind is SpaceX’s plan to put data centers in orbit. Each satellite will carry Nvidia Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, the chipmaker’s newest generation. Nvidia calls the market space computing.
SpaceX is partnering with @Nvidia to design the Starmind AI1 satellite compute payload. Each of the Starmind satellites will include NVIDIA Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs for datacenter class space compute → https://t.co/4MOQv0DvTQ pic.twitter.com/rC7UBAznAO
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 4, 2026
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SpaceX Taps Nvidia for Starmind AI
Nvidia launched its space computing line on March 16. It named six early partners that day. Aetherflux, Axiom Space, Kepler Communications, Planet Labs, Sophia Space and Starcloud all made the list.
SpaceX did not. That gap closed on Tuesday, and it closed with the biggest customer on the board.
In January, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for up to one million orbital data center satellites. The application covers altitudes from 500 to 2,000 kilometers. SpaceX describes the design as a petabit laser mesh.
For scale, roughly 15,000 satellites orbit Earth today. SpaceX wants to multiply that by 66.
How NVDA and SPCX Stocks Reacted
Nvidia (NVDA) traded at $212.91 on Tuesday afternoon, up 3.03%. SpaceX (SPCX) climbed 8.67% to $124.46.
Nvidia (NVDA) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
SpaceX needed the lift. The stock sat 35% below its peak in early July, even after joining the Nasdaq-100.
SpaceX (SPCX) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
The chips lend the plan weight. Nvidia says its Space-1 Vera Rubin Module delivers up to 25 times the AI compute of an H100 GPU. Volume shipments start this fall.
What the SpaceX Nvidia Starmind Deal Needs Next
Money is the open question. SpaceX’s AI unit lost $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion of revenue last year.
Tuesday’s 4:30 p.m. ET webcast offers the first real read. Analysts have mapped three earnings call scenarios, and Starlink cash flow sits at the center of each.
Opinion is split. Cathie Wood named SpaceX her favorite holding in July. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran has warned of a coming AI shakeout.
Regulators still hold a veto. The FCC accepted the filing in February and has yet to rule. Until it does, Starmind is a chip order without a licence.

A $20 million options trade pays off only if SpaceX stock nearly triples by Friday. More than 450,000 contracts sit at a $330 strike before Tuesday’s earnings.
That price sits almost three times (3x) above where the stock trades now. Options analysts doubt small investors built the position, and point to a bank instead.
Who Is Behind the $20 Million SpaceX Options Trade
Space Exploration Technologies (SPCX) changed hands near $124 on Tuesday afternoon, up by over 8% on the day. The company priced its June 12 offering at $135, according to its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SpaceX (SPCX) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
SpaceX has never traded anywhere near $330. Its record high is $225.64, and the median analyst target sits at $225. The strike clears both by about 46%.
The $330 line expiring August 7 holds at least seven times the open interest of the next busiest contract, CNBC reported. Those contracts control 45 million shares, worth roughly $14.8 billion if the stock ever reached the strike.
That is about 7% of a public float of only 639 million shares. Brent Kochuba founded options-flow platform SpotGamma. He said the buying pattern matches neither hedge funds nor market makers nor small investors.
“My guess is that banks own these calls as a hedge, maybe against some kind of structured product or some other short exposure they have.”
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SpotGamma figures cited by CNBC put Monday’s buying at about 90,000 contracts for $2.2 million. Because the calls grew cheaper as the stock fell below its IPO price, the accumulated premium reaches near $20 million.
Open interest by strike for the SpaceX options chain expiring Aug. 7, showing a 450,000-contract spike at $330, Source: OptionCharts What Traders Expect From SpaceX Stock After Earnings
SpaceX reports after Tuesday’s close, its first results since the June listing. Traders have already mapped the top earnings scenarios investors are weighing.
Contracts on the August 7 expiry price a swing of about $20.30, or 16.57%. That implies a band of $102.17 to $142.77. The strike sits 131% above the top of it.
CNBC put the earnings-specific move at 14%. Against a market value near $1.5 trillion, one print could move roughly $207 billion of shareholder value.
Implied volatility near 133 keeps even distant strikes liquid, according to ThinkOrSwim data cited by CNBC. Volatility usually cools once results clear.
Here it may not. The insider lockup opens Thursday, freeing roughly 911.5 million shares, more than the entire float. Meta’s 2012 lockup crash remains the closest precedent.
Jay Pestrichelli is chief trading officer at Tidal Financial Group, which manages more than $60 billion across 420-plus exchange-traded funds. He argued the calls can turn profitable well before the strike, putting that zone near $215 by Wednesday morning.
“It’s not a speculative moon shot … you don’t buy the highest strike in the chain unless you’re trying to reduce the cost of a hedge.”
SpaceX options expected move chart for the Aug. 7 expiry, showing a $102.17 to $142.77 range against a $123.69 spot price, Source: OptionCharts
Even $215 would leave SpaceX short of its own record. Whether the $330 line was cheap insurance or a real directional trade should resolve by Friday. That lands one day after the float more than doubles.

The SBF appeal mandate issued on August 4 closes Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) case at the Second Circuit appeals court. The one-page order affirms the judgment and adds no new reasoning.
A mandate returns a case to the trial court and makes an appellate ruling fully effective. This one leaves the former FTX chief’s 25-year prison term in place.
What the SBF Appeal Mandate Actually Says
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit logged it as entry 77 in case No. 24-961. It names the three judges who heard the appeal, Barrington D. Parker, Eunice C. Lee and Maria Araújo Kahn.
Then comes the operative line. The court “ORDERED, ADJUDGED and DECREED that the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.”
Nothing else is decided. Catherine O’Hagan Wolfe, clerk of court, signed it for the panel. A stamp at the foot records the mandate issuing on 08/04/2026.
Why the June Ruling Still Governs
The substance landed almost two months earlier. On June 12, the panel rejected the FTX founder’s appeal and left the seven-count conviction intact. It also kept the sentence Judge Lewis Kaplan imposed in March 2024.
Parker wrote for the panel, describing what the jury had heard.
“While he was publicly reassuring customers, investors and regulators that FTX customer funds were safe, he was simultaneously using FTX as his own personal piggy bank, spending customer funds on real estate, political contributions and investments,” Barrington D. Parker, Circuit Judge, Second Circuit opinion.
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The panel also upheld the roughly $11 billion forfeiture, finding Congress may tie forfeiture to a defendant’s gains. Kaplan had already denied a retrial motion in April.
The One Strand Left
Only one judicial route survives. Bankman-Fried may petition the US Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, generally within 90 days of judgment. The court hears a small fraction of such petitions.
He has separately filed a pardon application with the Justice Department. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego have since introduced a resolution opposing any SBF pardon.
Meanwhile, the money moves on a separate track. FTX creditors received a fifth round of repayments at the end of July. The mandate settles the appellate question, and what the Supreme Court makes of it is the only one still open.

Jeff Bezos wants to sell 15 million Amazon shares. The price tag is about $4.07 billion. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) fell more than 2% on Tuesday.
The timing stands out. Amazon had just closed at a record and passed $3 trillion in value for the first time.
Bezos Amazon Stock Sale Was Priced Before the Record
Bezos filed a Form 144. That is the notice an insider files before selling restricted shares.
The notice puts the total value at $4,073,700,000. Divide that by 15 million shares and you get $271.58 each. That was Friday’s closing price, not Monday’s.
Amazon then rose 4.58% on Monday and closed at $284.02, an all-time high. It touched $287.20 during the day.
At Monday’s close, the same shares were worth roughly $4.26 billion. Bezos priced his sale before the record, not after it.
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney will handle the trades on Nasdaq. Bezos received the shares as founder stock in July 1994.
The sales follow a Rule 10b5-1 plan he set up on November 14, 2025. These plans lock in trades months ahead. That shields insiders from claims they traded on private information.
AMZN changed hands near $277.41 late Tuesday morning, down 2.33%. A year ago it closed at $211.65.
Amazon (AMZN) Stock Performance. Source: Yahoo Finance
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He Is Selling Less Stock Than He Did Last Year
None of this is new for Bezos. He has filed the same kind of notice repeatedly since 2024.
Here is how his last three compare.
August 2026, 15 million shares for $4.07 billion, or $271.58 each
June 2025, 25 million shares for $5.43 billion, or $217.12 each
November 2024, 16.35 million shares for $3.05 billion, or $186.40 each
So this is his smallest sale by share count. It is his second biggest by dollars.
The stock did that work, not Bezos. Each plan used the same broker and was set months in advance.
AWS Is Why the Price Got This High
Amazon’s second quarter earnings beat started the rally. Sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion. Operating income jumped to $27.5 billion from $19.2 billion.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the company’s cloud arm. It grew 37% to $42.2 billion. Its operating income climbed to $16.6 billion from $10.2 billion.
Banks moved fast. More than a dozen raised Amazon price targets. Benchmark went to $400, roughly 44% above Tuesday’s price.
That growth costs money. Amazon spent $54.2 billion on property and equipment last quarter. Over 12 months the bill reached $169 billion.
Free cash flow turned negative, an outflow of $7.6 billion. Other big tech names face the same AI capex draining cash.
Bezos still owned 880,948,653 shares in early May. That is close to 8% of Amazon. This sale trims about 1.7% of his stake.
It reads as diversification, not a warning. The next Form 4 filing will show what the shares actually sold for.

Bitcoin (BTC) daily active addresses jumped from 645,000 on July 30 to nearly 1 million on July 31. The reading was the highest since December 10, 2024, and the Coldcard panic, not new demand, drove it.
BTC traded at $60,347 at press time, up 1.24% in 24 hours, BeInCrypto data shows. Three on-chain charts reveal what holders actually did during a weekend of severe stress for self-custody.
Nearly 1 Million Addresses Moved, the Most Since December 2024
Glassnode data shows about 980,000 active addresses on July 31, up more than 50% in a single day. The jump came days after attackers began draining Coldcard hardware wallets through a flawed random number generator.
Three confirmed attack waves have been linked to 1,367 BTC, worth $88.6 million, stolen from 4,585 addresses. A suspected fourth wave has since swept over 380 BTC more.
The last time this many addresses moved, on December 10, 2024, bitcoin traded near $100,000 during a euphoric rally. This time, the same activity arrived with BTC around $60,000. Same metric, opposite emotion.
Bitcoin Number of Active Addresses / Source: Glassnode
CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno noted on X that sending addresses drove nearly all of the growth. Receiving addresses barely moved in proportion, which suggests consolidation. Thousands of wallets emptied toward a much smaller set of destinations.
Historically, active addresses had churned between 550,000 and 750,000 for most of 2026. Therefore, the spike reads as a one-off event rather than a new trend.
Small Holders Moved the Most BTC Since the FTX Collapse
CryptoQuant’s Spent Output Value Bands point to who panicked. Transfers below 1 BTC totaled 39,600 BTC on July 31. The only comparable daily reading came on November 16, 2022, at 39,900 BTC, days after FTX failed.
These bands capture retail-sized wallets, exactly the profile of Coldcard’s user base. One holder lost 18.25 BTC, worth $1.6 million, in under seven minutes. Stories like his pushed thousands of users to act.
Moreno framed the migration as a healthy reflex rather than capitulation.
“The Bitcoin plebs had not move[d] this amount of BTC in a day since the FTX collapse… I like to see that people seem to be taking action.”
He shared the observation on X on August 1.
Bitcoin Spent Output Value Bands / Source: X
However, the direction of travel has reversed since 2022. Back then, users pulled coins off exchanges and into cold storage. This time, a cold storage failure sent coins the other way. The reversal feeds the self-custody debate that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao reignited this week.
Many Wallets, Few Transactions. The Anatomy of the Coldcard Panic
The third chart completes the picture. Glassnode counted 761,796 transfers on July 31, a local spike but far from a record. Prior peaks on December 13, 2024, April 19, 2025, and May 9, 2026, all cleared 1 million transfers.
The divergence matters. Active addresses hit a 20-month high while transfer counts stayed inside their ordinary range. In other words, an enormous number of wallets moved, but each made only one or a few transactions.
Bitcoin Number of Transfers / Source: Glassnode
That is the anatomy of a mass emergency sweep, not an activity boom. In contrast, earlier transfer records came from concentrated, high-frequency churn by far fewer entities.
Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn observed sweep transactions running at 13.8 per block, roughly 45 times the pre-incident baseline. The shock even reached protocol politics, as developers postponed the BIP-110 soft fork activation, citing the incident.
The Chain Recorded Fear, Not a Trend
Raw on-chain metrics will look distorted for days. Analysts may prefer entity-adjusted data until sweep activity fades, and active addresses could normalize just as sharply as they spiked.
Notably, the price barely reacted. Bitcoin held near $60,000 through its most active day in 20 months. That calm suggests the moved coins fled risk rather than sought exits.
The next signal to watch sits on the exchange books. If migrated coins stay put, the episode remains a security story. If they start selling, the Coldcard panic could yet become a market story.