The week of May 18 through May 24, 2026.

The headline

Bitcoin’s second consecutive risk-off week deepened rather than stabilized. Spot exchange-traded funds shed roughly $1.26 billion across the five reported sessions, with BlackRock’s IBIT accounting for about $1.0 billion of that alone, and price tested $74,299 on Saturday, May 23 — its lowest reading since mid-April — before steadying in the mid-$76,000s. Measured on the window’s endpoints, Bitcoin slipped 1.88%, from $78,132 to $76,662, a figure that understates the drawdown: the period opened near its own high and the floor did not arrive until the back half. The macro backdrop hardened against it, with Treasury yields holding near multi-decade highs and Kevin Warsh sworn in as Federal Reserve chair. Yet the network kept building. Hashrate rose 8.0% to a record 1,112.35 EH/s, and corporate balance sheets kept absorbing supply even as retail capitulated.

Price and macro backdrop

Bitcoin opened the window near $78,132, peaked at $78,527 early on Sunday, May 17, and ground lower through the back half, touching a low of $74,299 on Saturday, May 23, before settling at $76,662. The roughly $4,200 distance between the period’s high and low captures the shape of the tape: no early push higher, just a slow, persistent drift toward the lows, with the weekly average landing near $76,975. Friday’s close did not mark the floor — the low came over the weekend, and price clawed back roughly $2,400 off it into the window’s end.

The pressure was Bitcoin-specific against a calm equity tape. The S&P 500 edged up 0.88% to 7,473 and spent the week inside a narrow band, while the VIX eased 9.4% to 16.70, peaking at just 19.27 on May 18 — levels that describe orderly conditions, not stress. Gold slipped 0.76% to $4,521. MicroStrategy fell 9.88% to $159.89, closing at its weekly low, a clean amplification of Bitcoin’s move consistent with its historical beta. The driver was rates and policy: Treasury yields near multi-decade highs, market-implied odds of a December rate hike around 54%, and the swearing-in of Kevin Warsh as Fed chair together removed the easing tailwind the market had been leaning on. Sentiment tracked price, with the Fear and Greed Index slipping from 28 to 25 and holding inside Fear for the entire window, never rising above 29.

ETF flows

Spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded roughly $1.26 billion in net outflows across the five reported sessions — a second straight net-negative week, extending a streak the editorial archive framed as about $2.26 billion over two weeks and the first sustained negative stretch in seven weeks. The damage was overwhelmingly concentrated in IBIT, which shed about $1.0 billion with no inflow day at any point: $448.4 million left on May 18, the heaviest single session, followed by $325.6 million, $61.5 million, $103.7 million, and $68.9 million across the rest of the week. FBTC lost $111.5 million net and ARKB $106.8 million, the latter despite a lone $2.8 million inflow on May 21. Smaller outflows came from HODL, BITB, EZBC, BRRR, and BTCO. MSBT was the only fund to close the window net positive, at $1.1 million. GBTC held flat at zero — a pause worth noting given the trust’s multi-year bleed, though one quiet week does not break the pattern.

On-chain and mempool

The network strengthened while price softened. Hashrate rose from 1,029.77 EH/s at the start of the window to 1,112.35 EH/s at the close, an 8.0% gain and a record reading for the series — the prior week’s peak became this week’s starting floor. Miners adding capacity into a falling price is the opposite of the capitulation pattern a price-led hashrate decline would suggest, and it is worth flagging because spot selloffs often coincide with miners pulling back. This week they did not.

Mempool conditions ran the other way from the prior week’s quiet. Pending transaction count rose 34.1%, from about 78,100 to 104,700, mempool virtual size climbed 15.85% to roughly 42.5 million vbytes, and total mempool fees nearly doubled, up 92.27% from 5.38 million to 10.35 million sats per ten-minute sample, briefly touching 17.97 million on May 21. After several weeks of an unhurried fee market, on-chain demand rebuilt through the window. No difficulty retarget was flagged.

Derivatives

The latest CFTC commitments-of-traders reading, dated May 19, put Bitcoin futures open interest at 115,000 BTC, roughly $8.70 billion in notional terms. It is a single weekly print rather than a trend inside the window, and is best read as a level rather than a move.

Order book regime

At the window’s end the order book leaned to the sell side. The midpoint sat near $76,683 with imbalance at -0.15, more ask-heavy than the 24-hour average of -0.10, and the recent series stayed negative throughout — sell pressure intensifying into the close rather than easing. Bid-side depth in the 2% band measured 3.67 BTC against 4.93 BTC of ask depth, and the dominant wall sat on the ask side, pinned almost exactly at mid, the signature of overhead supply capping price. The spread held to a fraction of a basis point, far inside its 24-hour average, so liquidity stayed orderly despite the bearish tilt. The microstructure read is a controlled grind lower, not a disorderly flush.

News and policy threads

The ETF exodus was the week’s spine, and the editorial archive tied it directly to the macro turn: Treasury yields near multi-decade highs, rate-hike odds repricing toward a December move, and the Warsh appointment hardening the hawkish read. Bitcoin repeatedly failed to reclaim its 200-day moving average near $82,400 — a level analysts at Wintermute and CryptoQuant had used to characterize the prior month’s rally as a leverage-driven short squeeze rather than durable spot demand — and over the back half lost its 50-day and 100-day moving averages on the slide to the weekend low.

Corporate accumulation remained the counterweight to retail capitulation. The most material new disclosure came from SpaceX, whose IPO filing revealed a treasury of 18,712 BTC, roughly $1.45 billion, making it one of the larger corporate holders by the archive’s count. That landed alongside Strategy’s earlier purchase of 24,869 BTC for about $2 billion, which lifted its holdings to 843,738 BTC. On-chain data described the same split from the other side: long-term holder supply reached a record near 16.3 million BTC even as short-term holders were reported selling an estimated $770 million at a loss — old hands accumulating into weak ones, the texture of a drawdown rather than a top.

Policy ran in both directions. A bipartisan Strategic Bitcoin Reserve effort advanced, with reporting on a reserve bill targeting roughly $25 billion over a 20-year hold, and the CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee by a 15-9 vote. Cutting the other way, Truth Social withdrew its spot Bitcoin ETF application and the SEC delayed a decision on tokenized-equity exemption rules. Separately, Glassnode flagged that roughly 6.04 million BTC sits in address types considered exposed to long-horizon quantum-computing risk, prompting renewed discussion of a soft-fork freeze proposal — a slow-moving research thread rather than a near-term market concern.

The week ahead

The macro calendar is light in the immediate term. The next CPI release falls 17 days out, on June 10, and the next FOMC decision 23 days out, on June 16 — both in the following monthly cycle, leaving the coming sessions without a scheduled US data catalyst. That hands the tape to flows and positioning: whether ETF redemptions stabilize after two negative weeks, whether IBIT’s relentless outflow finally slows, how the newly seated Warsh Fed signals its posture, and whether the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve effort produces anything concrete after weeks of movement on Capitol Hill.

The current halving epoch reads 52.3% complete, 764 days since the last halving — past the midpoint, a framing point more than an operational one. With sentiment in Fear at 25, an order book leaning to the sell side, and hashrate at record levels against soft spot, the setup is a market where network fundamentals and spot demand are pointing in different directions. The resolution of that gap is the thing to watch.

Curious how the ETF inflow story shifts across days? Bitcoin Sidekick has the per-issuer breakdown on iPhone and Apple Watch, refreshed every market day.

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.