The week of August 3 through August 9, 2026.

The bottom line

Bitcoin rose 1.18% this week to close its seven-day window at $64,590.22, quietly recovering while the news was loud. An attempt to change Bitcoin’s rules split off a rival chain that died after two blocks, and the Coldcard wallet hack that dominated recent weeks faded from the headlines. Buyers put $853 million into Bitcoin ETFs, the strongest week since mid-April. Stocks and gold rose too, and a US inflation report lands Wednesday, the main event of the week ahead.

The headline

Bitcoin gained 1.18% for the week, closing the seven-day window at $64,590.22 against an open of $63,835.43. The low of $63,286.55 printed within the first ten hours; the high of $65,360.99 arrived Sunday evening. In between, the market absorbed the tail of a custody crisis, a failed fork, and the return of the ETF bid. As of Monday morning the tape is firm: fresh coverage has Bitcoin steadying above $65,000 as talk of an Iran-Oman deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz lifts risk assets, Strategy disclosing the sale of another 1,690 bitcoin as its holdings slip to 840,447 BTC, and markets flipping toward a Fed rate-hike pause into Wednesday’s CPI print.

Price and macro backdrop

The shape of the week was a slow repair. From the open, the tape set its low overnight into Tuesday, ground sideways near $64,000 through the Coldcard fallout, then caught a bid after Friday’s weak July payrolls report cooled September Fed rate-hike odds to 44%, printing its high late Sunday before easing to the close, up 1.18% around a $64,547.75 weekly average. Sentiment firmed without leaving fear: the Fear and Greed index opened its daily prints at 25, touched 31 on Sunday, and finished at 30, averaging 28.14 across seven readings.

The gain came with everything else rising, which tempers it. The S&P 500 added 2.40% to 7,759.94 with a Wednesday peak of 7,782.19; gold surged 7.17% to $4,385.10, touching $4,428 on Friday; the VIX eased 3.37% to 15.22 after a Wednesday spike to 17.44. Strategy (MSTR) rose 1.63% to $97.34, reaching $101.70 Friday, and finished at a 1.73% premium to the value of its Bitcoin holdings, extending its repricing from the double-digit discounts of recent weeks. The 30-day correlation to the S&P 500 read 0.31, tagged loose, while the gold correlation held coupled at 0.58. Against a 7.17% move in its coupled hard-asset counterpart, Bitcoin’s 1.18% reads as lagging the bid, not leading it.

The macro plumbing turned friendlier at the margins. The dollar index slipped to 119.70, tagged weakening, down 0.74% over 30 days. Net liquidity rose about $15.0 billion week over week to roughly $5.84 trillion, a reversal after two recorded weekly drains. Real yields held positive, 2.43% on the 10-year and 2.17% on the 5-year, against a 3.63% federal funds rate, with the 10-year breakeven at 2.25%. Credit stayed loose: the Chicago Fed’s financial conditions index sat at -0.529 and high-yield spreads at 2.71%. Headline inflation runs 3.46% year over year, M2 grows at 5.53%, and consumer sentiment held at 49.5. The standing frame carries another week: fearful psychology on an intact structure, and this week the structure got help from a softening dollar and returning liquidity.

Technical setup

The daily chart reads neutral with a positive lean. The 14-day relative strength index closed at 51.86, the daily MACD histogram was positive at 70.02, and price sat in the upper half of its volatility band with a %B of 0.57. Price stood 1.83% above its 50-day average and 7.87% below its 200-day, the long trendline still overhead. Monday’s intraday tape is softer than the daily read, with the hourly RSI at 34.63 and the hourly MACD histogram negative at -52.18: a soft morning, not a break.

ETF flows

The captured flow window is thin this week, two reporting days, August 4 and August 5, but every row leans one way. BlackRock’s IBIT took in $170.3 million and then $196.8 million, $367.1 million on net; ARKB added $46.8 million, Fidelity’s FBTC $30.9 million, and Bitwise’s BITB $19.3 million; HODL was the lone redemption at $14.7 million, and the rest of the cohort sat flat. The editorial log fills in what the rows miss: by Thursday it counted an inflow streak past $626 million, and the weekend tally put the full week at $853 million, the strongest since mid-April, led by IBIT, with some coverage tying the demand to self-custody fears after the Coldcard exploit.

Last Monday’s open flow question, whether a Friday IBIT outflow would extend into a streak, got its answer: it was absorbed. The caveat is capture. With only two rows in the window, the per-issuer table understates the week the coverage describes, and the $853 million figure rests on the log rather than the rows.

On-chain and mempool

The network’s week was quiet. The hashrate estimate, noisy by construction, ended near where it began: 905.49 exahashes per second at the open, 897.05 at the close, down 0.93% around a 901.97 average, ranging from a Friday trough of 794.17 to a Saturday peak of 993.26. Blockspace demand thinned. Pending transactions fell 14.88% to 82,783 from a Thursday-evening peak of 107,371; the backlog by virtual size dropped 13.06% to about 40.9 million vbytes; and total fees waiting in the mempool fell 55.60% to about 9.37 million satoshis from 21.10 million at the open, after a brief Friday-morning spike to 66.45 million. Nothing approached congestion, and the weekend’s chain split left no visible mark on any of these series.

Derivatives

Leverage leaned mildly long all week. Perpetual funding read +0.0018% per interval at the latest sample against a +0.0012% seven-day average; the digest tags the funding regime positive, with no flip flagged. Open interest across venues stood near $6.54 billion, and CFTC commitments showed open interest of 100,715 bitcoin as of the August 4 report. On the regulated side, Monday coverage describes a rare CME shift: hedge funds abandoning structural shorts and turning net long as weak futures yields undermine the basis trade.

Order book regime

Into Monday morning the book is balanced and thicker than its own day. The imbalance read +0.04 against a 24-hour average of -0.004; bid-side depth within 2% of mid sat at 13.27 bitcoin against an 8.86 baseline, ask-side depth at 12.30 against a 9.01 norm; and the spread held near 0.0015 basis points, the tight end of its 24-hour range. The dominant resting wall sat on the ask side essentially at the mid-price at the latest read, but the wall’s side flipped repeatedly across the recent samples, eight ask against five bid. Both shelves sat above their daily norms; neither side looks entrenched.

News and policy threads

The Coldcard exploit owned the front half of the week. The log opened with tracked losses nearing $114 million and a fourth attack wave putting 449 BTC at risk; by mid-week, Galaxy Research warned losses could swell to $130 million as the breach was tied to a predictable random-number generator that defeated the wallet’s air gap. Then the story inverted. Thursday’s entries recorded the flaw pushing Bitcoin active addresses to an 8-month high as 210,000 BTC left long-dormant wallets, feeding the ETF streak and roughly $1.2 billion in whale buying, and by the weekend the tallies had settled at hack losses topping $111 million with a median loss near 1 BTC. The gap between the $130 million warning and the $111 million confirmed toll is worth naming; either way, the story had left the headlines by Friday.

The back half belonged to BIP-110. The contested soft fork began mandatory signaling with miner support under 3%, and developers warned holders against selling potential fork coins due to replay risk. Opponents split onto a minority chain that mined two blocks before stalling as the main network pulled ahead; by Monday the enforcing chain remained stuck at two blocks, with miners on supportive pools opting out, including one that rejected the fork despite mining through a pool that backed it. In Washington, the CLARITY market-structure bill’s Senate vote slipped to September, with odds favoring a No. After weeks of escalation, the fork fight ended not in schism but in boycott.

The treasury cohort spent the week diverging. Strategy bookended it: an early-week sale of 1,638 bitcoin for $105 million, its third in weeks; a weekend reveal that the firm used AI to help design preferred-stock financing it says unlocked $15 billion for further purchases; and Monday’s disclosure of another 1,690 bitcoin sold, raising $653 million and lifting the dollar reserve to $4.65 billion. Around it the strain was plainer: Empery Digital unwound 76% of its reserves in weeks, selling 1,635 BTC, while TeraWulf’s bitcoin revenue fell 73% and Cipher realized a $47.7 million loss on 1,619 BTC as miners shifted capacity toward AI data centers. The counterexample came from Sweden, where H100 more than tripled its holdings to 3,506 BTC after an acquisition involving 2,455 BTC, Europe’s No. 2 corporate holder per Monday coverage.

The week ahead

The calendar is compressed and concrete. The next consumer price report lands Wednesday, August 12, two days out, with a producer price report in the same stretch; the next FOMC decision is September 15, 36 days away, so the data arrives with no meeting close behind it. Coverage frames the setup as a stress test, Treasury auctions meeting CPI and PPI with yields pushing toward 5.2% and markets leaning toward a September pause. Inside Bitcoin, the BitMEX wind-down puts hard dates on the board: coverage counts $39.5 million in Bitcoin perpetuals with 16 days to exit, new positions stopping August 26 and forced closures beginning September 23.

The open questions are concrete too. Whether the ETF bid that produced the strongest week since mid-April survives an inflation print is the flow question; whether Strategy’s Monday sale reads as balance-sheet discipline or as distribution is the treasury question; whether the stalled BIP-110 chain quietly expires is the protocol question. The index enters the week at 30, still fear, after seven days in which the structure underneath mostly improved.

FOMC and CPI release dates are built into Bitcoin Sidekick’s calendar, so you know exactly how many days until the next move-maker. Macro context, on-device, no subscription.

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.