The week of July 13 through July 19, 2026.
The bottom line
Bitcoin rose about 2.1% this week to around $64,200, helped by a US inflation report that came in cooler than expected and eased fears of another interest rate increase. Investors put money into Bitcoin ETFs for a second week after months of heavy selling. The loudest argument was about the network itself: Michael Saylor spent the weekend fighting a proposal to filter spam data out of Bitcoin, with a decision point coming in August. The Federal Reserve’s next rate decision is eight days away.
The headline
Bitcoin gained 2.13% in a week when the S&P 500 and gold both fell, closing the seven-day window at $64,242.34 against an open of $62,904.91. The hinge was Tuesday’s June consumer price report: the news flow recorded the largest monthly drop since 2020, rate-hike fears eased, and Bitcoin climbed from Monday’s $61,768.53 low to $65,495.30 by Wednesday afternoon before fading back. As of Monday morning the tape is quiet, with Bitcoin flat near $64,000 while oil sits at a one-month high on escalating US-Iran strikes, and weekend flow coverage calls the returning ETF inflows small next to the exodus that preceded them. The rest of the weekend’s attention went to Saylor and BIP-110.
Price and macro backdrop
The shape of the week: an opening flush, a data rescue, a stall. Bitcoin set its weekly low of $61,768.53 late Monday, pressed toward $62,000 again Tuesday morning as renewed US strikes on Iran kept risk appetite pinned, then reversed once the CPI print landed. By early Wednesday afternoon it touched the weekly high of $65,495.30, could not hold it, and drifted back through Thursday and Friday to close the window at $64,242.34, up 2.13% around a $63,996.29 weekly average. Sentiment improved without leaving fear territory: the Fear and Greed index started the window at 22 and finished at 29 this morning, the week’s best reading, with the seven daily prints averaging 25.86.
The cross-asset tape is what makes the gain stand out. The S&P 500 fell 1.55% to 7,457.69 and set its weekly low Friday, gold slipped 1.04% to $4,027.20, and the VIX rose from 16.34 to 18.38 with a Friday peak of 19.06. Strategy (MSTR) finished near flat, up 0.22% at $94.85, at roughly an 18.6% discount to the value of its Bitcoin holdings. The 30-day correlations still read coupled, about 0.55 to the S&P 500 and 0.61 to gold, which is exactly why the week is notable: Bitcoin rose while both of its coupled counterparts fell. Thirty-day windows move slowly; one week of divergence is a data point, not a regime change.
The macro plumbing turned slightly friendlier. Headline inflation now runs 3.46% year over year, and the news flow tracked Fed rate-hike odds falling from 43% to 13% after the print. The dollar index held at 120.50, a stable reading, while net liquidity rose about $28.5 billion week over week to roughly $5.99 trillion. Real yields stayed positive, 2.35% on the 10-year and 2.04% on the 5-year, against a 3.63% federal funds rate, with the 10-year breakeven at 2.24%. Credit never blinked: the Chicago Fed’s financial conditions index sat loose at -0.538, the St. Louis stress index at -0.882, and high-yield spreads at 2.71%, while consumer sentiment stayed depressed at 44.8. The standing frame holds: cautious psychology on an intact structure, and this week the psychology finally got help from the data.
Technical setup
The daily chart upgraded from repair to a foothold. The 14-day relative strength index closed at 52.55, neutral, the daily MACD histogram was positive at 268.58, and price sat in the upper half of its volatility band with a %B of 0.67. Context tempers it: at a last daily close of $64,244.60, price stood 1.71% above its 50-day average and 11.90% below its 200-day, a recovery that has reclaimed the near trendline while the long one still slopes well overhead.
ETF flows
The captured flow window, four reporting days from July 14 through July 17, finished net positive by about $500.2 million across issuers, with no fund net negative. BlackRock’s IBIT took in $389.6 million, including a $138.9 million day on July 14 against a single $33.4 million outflow day on July 16. Fidelity’s FBTC added $64.5 million, Bitwise’s BITB $18.5 million, Grayscale’s mini Bitcoin fund $16.6 million, MSBT $7.4 million, and ARKB $3.6 million, while GBTC sat flat.
The editorial log fills in what the rows leave out. The week opened with a $425 million single-day outflow, the largest of the month, recorded in the same session that US government wallets moved almost $300 million in seized Bitcoin and Ether to Coinbase Prime; that day sits just before the captured rows begin, so the two views differ by boundary, not by contradiction. The log also carried forward the prior week’s $197 million inflow, the first in over two months after an eight-week, $8 billion outflow run. Monday-morning coverage keeps the skeptical frame, calling the returning inflows small relative to that exodus. Both readings hold: the direction of flows has turned, and the scale so far has not.
On-chain and mempool
The network firmed into the weekend. The seven-day hashrate estimate is noisy by construction, and this week it swung from a Friday trough of 781.19 exahashes per second to 1,060.97 at the window’s end, up 15.92% over the week around a 911.63 average; whatever the sampling noise, miner commitment keeps running ahead of price. Blockspace demand firmed without approaching congestion. Pending transactions rose 5.22% to 91,846, peaking at 116,143 Thursday evening before a Sunday trough of 73,029, and the backlog by virtual size grew 4.38% to about 44.3 million vbytes after briefly topping 50 million Friday evening. Total fees waiting in the mempool rose 62.17% to about 13 million satoshis, with a brief Wednesday-evening spike to 29.06 million, hours after the weekly price high.
Derivatives
Leverage leaned mildly long. Perpetual funding read +0.0068% per interval at the latest sample against a +0.0019% seven-day average; the digest tags the funding regime positive, with no flip flagged during the window. Longs paying shorts at these levels is a lean, not a stretch. On the regulated side, CFTC commitments showed open interest of 96,925 Bitcoin as of the July 14 report, about $6.2 billion notional.
Order book regime
Into Monday morning the book leans to the bid, but it is thinner than the day’s norm. The imbalance read +0.38 against a 24-hour average of +0.11, and the dominant resting wall sat on the bid side essentially at the mid-price, where it has been in 12 of the last 13 samples spanning the recent two-hour window. Depth is the cautionary half: bid-side depth within 2% of mid, at 3.39 Bitcoin, sat below its 4.90 baseline, and ask-side depth at 1.52 sat further below its 3.93 norm. The spread held near 0.0016 basis points, the tight end of its 24-hour range. Resting demand is the more assertive side of a book with lighter shelves than usual.
News and policy threads
The weekend belonged to BIP-110. Michael Saylor published a 110-point essay urging Bitcoin to reject the proposal, which would temporarily filter spam data from the blockchain, arguing it would undermine the network’s neutrality and set a precedent for censorship. The log’s weekend entries tracked the argument hardening into a rift as the soft fork’s August decision point approaches, with Bitcoin’s largest corporate advocate now the loudest voice against a change its supporters frame as cleanup.
The week opened on the other Strategy story: strain across the leveraged treasury cohort. The log’s Monday entries led with funding stress, Strategy’s $216 million sale set against its 843,775 Bitcoin position, and fresh collateral-call pressure on leveraged treasury holders as the week wore on. Saylor’s mid-week framing, that the firm is “very secure” unless Bitcoin falls to $8,000 to $10,000, circulated precisely because the question would not go away; MSTR’s flat week at a roughly 18.6% discount to net asset value says the market is listening without changing its mind. A dormant 2018 wallet moving $188 million in Bitcoin added to the week’s supply-anxiety file.
The quieter structural thread was mining capital rotating toward AI. The log flagged CleanSpark’s $6.6 billion AI leasing deal outpacing the $2.1 billion in financing it still needs, and New York becoming the first state to freeze new data center permits. Set against a hashrate estimate that ended the window at its high, the picture is an industry stretching its balance sheets while its commitment to hashing has not flinched.
The week ahead
The calendar compresses. The Federal Reserve’s next decision lands July 28, eight days out, and it arrives with the rate-hike case weakened: 13% odds in the news flow after Tuesday’s CPI, down from 43% before it. The next consumer price report follows on August 12, 23 days away, after the meeting. Inside Bitcoin, the BIP-110 timeline runs toward its August showdown with the argument sharpening rather than settling, and the flow question carries over: the captured window was positive for every issuer that moved, and coverage still calls it small next to what left. Whether that changes is the week’s tell.
Bitcoin Sidekick tracks daily spot ETF flows for IBIT, FBTC, and the rest of the cohort with the same Farside data this digest uses. Inflows and outflows in real time, without a tracking pixel in sight.
onlyhashes.com publishes a weekly Bitcoin review every Monday morning. The data behind this post is generated by Bitcoin Sidekick’s OreRelay infrastructure: Bitcoin-only, no third-party trackers, no altcoins. Disclosures: this is editorial commentary on publicly available market data; nothing in this post is investment advice.