Good morning everybody.
Bitcoin is trading around $77,700 this morning after spending the past several days bouncing around the same range. There are bullish signals. Bitcoin just printed a golden cross, ETF demand remains strong, and we’re approaching the part of the traditional four-year cycle where the bottom should already be in or very close.
But I’m still cautious.
Oil is pushing toward $100 a barrel. The 10-year Treasury yield is back above 4.8%. Markets are pricing roughly a 60% chance of another Fed rate hike. And Bitcoin still hasn’t broken the resistance around $82,000 to $83,000 that I’ve been talking about.
So despite all the noise, I still consider roughly $76,000 to $82,000 the same basic sideways market. Break below $75K and we have a problem. Break above $82K to $83K, establish higher lows, and start using $80K as a floor, and then the conversation changes.
Bitcoin Has a Golden Cross, ETF Demand and a Four-Year-Cycle Question
Let’s start with what’s bullish.
Bitcoin has formed a golden cross, with a shorter-term moving average crossing above a longer-term moving average. Traditionally, that’s interpreted as a bullish trend signal.
We also still have demand.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs brought in approximately $987 million last week and finished August with roughly $3.5 billion in net inflows, according to the figures discussed on today’s show.
That’s a lot of money continuing to come into Bitcoin while we’re basically moving sideways.
Then there’s the four-year cycle.
Paul McNeal wrote about this recently for Daily Crypto News. Traditionally, we’re entering the August-through-November period where you’d expect the cycle low to form. The problem is that our apparent low came months ago.
That raises a question I’ve been thinking about: did ETFs alter the timing of the cycle?
Maybe institutional demand pulled the beginning of the rally forward and shifted the rest of the cycle with it. Or maybe the old cycle still works, which would mean another low could still be coming.
I’m not claiming I know the answer.
Our previous high around $126,000 lined up surprisingly well with the traditional cycle framework. So I’m not ready to throw the four-year cycle away just because institutional investors have changed the market.
For now, my levels remain pretty simple.
Bullish: break $82K to $83K, start establishing higher highs and higher lows, and use $80K as support.
Sideways: roughly $76K to $82K.
Bearish: lose $75K and then we need to reassess where the next support actually sits.
The macro environment isn’t making this easier.
Oil is pushing toward $100 a barrel, while the 10-year Treasury yield has moved back above 4.8%. I’ve repeatedly said that 5% on the 10-year is the number that really concerns me. We’re getting uncomfortably close.
And then we have the Fed.
Markets are pricing approximately a 60% probability of another rate hike, according to the figures discussed today. Kevin Warsh also communicates differently from Jerome Powell. Powell frequently telegraphed the Fed’s intentions enough that markets could get extremely confident about what was coming. Warsh doesn’t appear interested in doing that to the same extent.
That means markets have to figure it out themselves.
And they may already be pricing a rate hike into risk assets.
Robinhood Is Becoming a Real Crypto Business, but Bitcoin-Adjacent Stocks Cut Both Ways
Robinhood’s blockchain is starting to look less like an experiment and more like an actual business.
According to the figures discussed today, Robinhood’s blockchain has recently generated more transaction fees than Solana and BNB Chain. Bernstein maintained an outperform rating and a $160 price target on Robinhood, which would represent roughly 31% upside from its current price.
Which is great for everybody except me because I sold it way too early.
I bought Robinhood around its IPO and had an average cost somewhere around $14. Then we got the GameStop controversy, problems moving crypto off the platform and additional KYC friction. I thought Vlad had lost the plot, so I sold.
That one hurts.
But Robinhood illustrates the larger point I’ve been making about Bitcoin-adjacent companies.
If Bitcoin goes up, companies such as Robinhood, Coinbase, Strategy, Metaplanet and Bitcoin miners can potentially move even harder.
The opposite is also true.
Metaplanet fell approximately 17%, showing how much more volatile Bitcoin treasury companies can be than Bitcoin itself.
If Bitcoin is ripping, the market can price these companies as leveraged ways to participate in the crypto economy. But if Bitcoin stays flat or declines for an extended period, the businesses still have electricity costs, employees, debt, operating expenses and every other expense associated with running a company.
Their Bitcoin doesn’t magically pay every bill.
That’s why I consider them Bitcoin-adjacent exposure rather than Bitcoin itself. There’s potentially more upside, but there’s also another layer of risk.
Capital B also purchased approximately $29 million of Bitcoin, its largest acquisition since September 2025, bringing its holdings to roughly 3,521 BTC.
Institutional and corporate demand isn’t disappearing.
CLARITY Has a Make-or-Break Week
This could also be one of the most important regulatory weeks we’ve had in a while.
According to the timeline discussed on today’s show, the CLARITY legislation is expected to face a procedural vote around September 15, requiring 60 votes to advance toward floor debate. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats, so supporters need Democratic or independent votes to get there.
And there are still major disagreements involving stablecoin rewards, DeFi developer liability and ethics provisions.
I don’t think getting those additional votes is going to be easy.
But here’s the political angle I’m interested in.
Crypto companies and executives have put enormous amounts of money into politics through organizations such as Fairshake. The basic message has been pretty clear: give the industry rules so companies can actually plan for the future.
Now we’re getting to the point where those political investments are going to be tested.
If CLARITY fails because senators refuse to provide the votes necessary to move it forward, does Fairshake start spending against those senators?
That’s the question.
You don’t necessarily need to persuade a senator philosophically if that senator is sitting in a competitive race and suddenly has to contemplate $10 million, $15 million or $20 million being spent against them.
Are there seven Democratic or independent senators in sufficiently competitive races where that threat actually matters?
I don’t know yet.
That’s something I want to research.
The timing also makes next week particularly interesting. CPI comes first, then the CLARITY vote, followed by the Fed decision.
Crypto regulation, inflation and monetary policy could all collide within a matter of days.
Ethereum Wants to Be Quantum-Safe by 2029
Then we get back to quantum computing.
Yesterday we talked about IBM’s roadmap toward a fault-tolerant quantum computer around 2029. Now Ethereum is targeting a post-quantum-secure layer by 2029 as well.
That’s the timeline that interests me.
Ethereum isn’t saying quantum computers can break Ethereum today. I’m not saying that either.
Don’t go sell everything because you think the sky is falling.
The point is that we’re beginning to have a real clock.
There’s enormous disagreement about how many stable logical qubits would actually be required to threaten existing cryptography. I’ve seen estimates ranging from hundreds into the thousands and considerably higher depending on exactly what is being attacked and what assumptions are being made.
Nobody should pretend that simply reaching 200 logical qubits means Ethereum or Bitcoin suddenly gets cracked.
But once fault-tolerant quantum computers begin reaching meaningful scale, the question changes from whether quantum computing is theoretically relevant to cryptography to when particular cryptographic systems become vulnerable.
That’s why Ethereum preparing now makes sense.
And even in a scenario where somebody eventually develops the ability to compromise a crypto wallet, that doesn’t mean every Bitcoin or Ethereum wallet gets emptied simultaneously.
An attacker would have to target something.
And if you’re going to spend extraordinary computational resources attacking crypto, I think the obvious target would be money. Maybe that’s an extremely valuable individual wallet. Maybe someday it’s a wallet believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.
If an attacker successfully compromises a major wallet, people will notice. Developers, validators, miners and the broader community would immediately be forced to respond. Then we get into difficult questions about post-quantum migration, network changes and whether anyone would ever support rolling back transactions.
Those would be enormous debates.
But there’s a lot of distance between quantum computers are improving and everybody’s crypto is gone.
That’s the distinction I want to make.
Cronos just gave us a much more immediate version of the rollback debate. According to the figures discussed today, an attacker manipulated the Tectonic collateral system and borrowed approximately $120.4 million before validators halted the network. Validators subsequently rolled back the chain and restored roughly $111.2 million, leaving approximately $9.2 million missing.
And that raises a philosophical question crypto has been arguing about forever.
If validators can reverse the chain because something catastrophic happened, should they?
Or is immutability supposed to mean immutability even when somebody gets away with millions of dollars?
I don’t think that’s an easy question.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $77,682, down approximately 2.1% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is approximately $2,450, down around 2.2%.
BNB is around $744, down approximately 0.2%.
XRP is approximately $1.38, down around 1.2%.
Solana is around $101, down approximately 3.2%.
TRON is approximately $0.338, up around 1%.
Hyperliquid is around $81.96, down approximately 6.6%.
Zcash is approximately $1,140, down around 3.8% today but still up roughly 35% over the past week.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.66 trillion, down around 1.5%.
Fear & Greed: 71, Greed.
So we’re down today, but my basic Bitcoin thesis hasn’t changed.
Between the mid-$70,000s and low-$80,000s, I’m still calling this sideways.
The golden cross is bullish. ETF demand is bullish. The approaching traditional cycle-low window could be bullish if the low is already behind us.
But oil near $100, Treasury yields approaching 5%, uncertainty around the Fed and the possibility that the four-year cycle hasn’t finished doing its thing are reasons I’m not declaring victory.
Get above $82K to $83K and start using $80K as the floor, and I’ll get more bullish.
Lose $75K, and we’re having another conversation.