Bitcoin is currently holding steady around $84,000, and what’s really interesting is how the whales are behaving. During past market peaks, long-term holders usually started dumping their bags aggressively to lock in profits. This time, they are selling at just a fraction of that historical pace. Mid-sized wallets holding 100 to 1,000 BTC have actually been accumulating heavily since the summer. Combined with spot ETFs pulling in almost a billion dollars in a single day recently, the institutional buy-wall is keeping the market firmly supported despite the lack of a massive breakout.
On the security front, the aftermath of the Bitget exchange hack is getting messy. The attackers just moved roughly $83 million in stolen XRP through coin mixers like Wasabi to scramble the trail. Despite the massive theft and the stolen funds actively moving on-chain, XRP's price hasn't tanked and is still casually trading around $1.54.
Over in the Solana ecosystem, developers are pushing forward with the Alpenglow upgrade, which aims to slash transaction finality down to a ridiculous 100 to 150 milliseconds. It’s a huge technical leap, though co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently admitted the broader crypto industry might not actually be ready to handle that kind of speed yet.
Finally, Zcash is having an unexpected comeback. A recently launched ZEC exchange-traded fund has rapidly grown to nearly $1 billion in value. It’s pretty ironic seeing traditional Wall Street investors pouring money into a hardcore privacy coin, but the traditional finance exposure is definitely giving old-school altcoins a second wind.
Are you expecting BTC to finally break out of this mid-80s range soon, or do you think we will just keep crabbing sideways into next month?