The week of July 20 through July 26, 2026.

The bottom line

Bitcoin finished the week up about 1.5%, just above $65,000, after a round trip. Steady buying of Bitcoin ETFs carried it to almost $67,000 by Tuesday; then oil jumped above $100 on renewed US-Iran tensions, inflation worries returned, and a onetime giant of Bitcoin mining filed for bankruptcy, knocking the price under $64,000. By Monday morning the two sides were holding fire, oil had dropped, and the price had recovered. The Federal Reserve announces a rate decision this week.

The headline

Bitcoin gained 1.54% for the week, closing the seven-day window at $65,239.06 against an open of $64,249.54, and the number hides a full round trip. An ETF inflow streak carried price past $66,000 to a one-month high of $66,898.15 Tuesday afternoon; by Friday the move had fully unwound, with oil above $100, yields surging, and Poolin’s bankruptcy dragging the tape to a weekly low of $63,669.70, still roughly a third below October’s record. As of Monday morning the repair is holding: overnight coverage has Bitcoin back above $65,000 as the United States and Iran hold off further strikes and oil drops 5%, while weekend digests flag fading Clarity Act hopes and BitMEX’s planned closure.

Price and macro backdrop

The shape of the week was a climb, a break, and a repair. From the open, Bitcoin pushed to its Tuesday top as the hourly log counted a spot ETF inflow streak stretching from five days to seven sessions, against a backdrop of US-Iran tensions and 30-year yields above 5%. Thursday and Friday broke it: the log tracked oil past $85 and then above $100 on renewed Iran threats, and the weekly low printed Friday afternoon. The slide entries framed a test of $62,000 support; the recorded low in this window was $63,669.70, a gap worth naming. From there the tape repaired to the close, up 1.54% around a $65,129.74 weekly average. Sentiment stayed in fear throughout: the Fear and Greed index opened the window at 25, touched 33 Wednesday, and finished at 30, averaging 28.57 across seven daily prints.

The gain came against a mixed tape. The S&P 500 fell 0.61% to 7,411.98, gold rose 1.79% to $4,104 with a Wednesday peak of $4,169, and the VIX ended slightly lower at 17.57 after a Thursday spike to 19.92. Strategy (MSTR) fell 3.35% to $91.67, roughly an 11.5% discount to the value of its Bitcoin holdings, its $90.61 weekly low printing Friday alongside Bitcoin’s. The 30-day correlations read coupled on both counts, 0.50 to the S&P 500 and 0.61 to gold, and the week again showed the limit of a 30-day tag: Bitcoin rose while its equity counterpart fell, tracking gold’s direction instead.

The macro plumbing absorbed an oil scare without breaking. Headline inflation runs 3.46% year over year, the log’s mid-week entries tied the slide to oil reviving inflation and rate-hike fears, and an $800 billion AI stock selloff left crypto largely untouched. The dollar index held stable at 120.53. Net liquidity fell about $69.6 billion week over week to roughly $5.92 trillion, the week’s quiet headwind. Real yields stayed 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 2.26%. Credit did not blink: the Chicago Fed’s financial conditions index sat loose at -0.552, the St. Louis stress index at -0.7011, and high-yield spreads at 2.77%, while consumer sentiment stayed depressed at 44.8. The standing frame holds: this week’s damage was psychological and flow-driven, not a credit event.

Technical setup

The daily chart reads neutral with a floor under repair. The 14-day relative strength index closed at 54.71, the daily MACD histogram was positive at 76.98, and price sat in the upper half of its volatility band with a %B of 0.70. At a last daily close of $65,280.92, price stood 3.13% above its 50-day average and 9.33% below its 200-day, the long trendline still overhead near $72,002. Monday’s intraday tape was firmer, with the hourly RSI at 62.78.

ETF flows

The captured flow window, four reporting days from July 21 through July 24, finished net negative by about $192.9 million, and one fund drove it. BlackRock’s IBIT shed $212 million on net, a swing the rows capture directly: a $163.9 million inflow day on July 21, then a $212.2 million outflow on July 24, the largest single-day move in the window. Grayscale’s GBTC lost $38.3 million. Strip out IBIT and the rest of the cohort was net positive by about $19.1 million, led by $44.4 million into Grayscale’s mini Bitcoin fund, $11.1 million into Fidelity’s FBTC, $8.8 million into MSBT, and $5.4 million into ARKB, against smaller redemptions from Bitwise’s BITB, Franklin’s EZBC, and WisdomTree’s BTCW.

The editorial log gives the rows their arc. Early entries counted the streak stretching to five, six, then seven sessions, its running total near $1 billion; Friday’s entries recorded the streak snapping with a $225 million outflow day led by IBIT. The two views agree: inflows carried the tape to its Tuesday high, and the reversal arrived with the oil scare. Last week’s open question, whether returning inflows would firm into real demand, got a conditional answer: they did until the macro broke.

On-chain and mempool

The hashrate estimate, noisy by construction, spent the week lower: from 1,060.97 exahashes per second at the window open, also its high, to a Thursday trough of 731.11, ending at 919.60, down 13.32% around an 883.61 average. The week’s mining headline was Poolin, once Bitcoin’s largest mining pool, which filed for Chapter 11 owing roughly $170 million and is selling its Texas mining sites for $52 million to repay creditors.

Blockspace stayed quiet. Pending transactions rose 1.58% to 89,486, peaking at 98,129 Monday evening and troughing at 70,276 Saturday morning; the backlog by virtual size was essentially flat, down 0.33% at about 43 million vbytes; total fees waiting in the mempool rose 4.06% to about 8.87 million satoshis, with a brief spike to 20.82 million Friday afternoon, the same window as the weekly price low. Nothing approached congestion.

Derivatives

Leverage leaned defensive all week. Perpetual funding sat negative at the latest read, about -0.0134% per interval against a seven-day average near -0.0014%; the digest tags the funding regime negative, with no flip flagged. Shorts paying longs at the margin is caution, not a squeeze setup. Open interest across venues stood near $6.71 billion, and CFTC commitments showed open interest of 102,635 Bitcoin as of the July 21 report, about $6.58 billion notional.

Order book regime

Into Monday morning the book leans to the ask, a reversal of the recent bid-side posture. The imbalance read -0.25 against a 24-hour average of -0.08, ask-side depth within 2% of mid sat at 7.35 Bitcoin against a 5.28 baseline while bid-side depth at 4.45 sat just under its 4.59 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 at the latest read, essentially at the mid-price, but the wall’s side flipped repeatedly across the recent samples, seven ask against six bid. Resting supply is the more assertive side of an orderly book; nothing about it looks entrenched.

News and policy threads

The corporate treasury story hardened from divergence into shakeout. Strategy paused Bitcoin purchases to protect a $3.2 billion cash reserve and, per the log’s Monday entry, has now gone a month without buying while sitting billions underwater; mid-week it published a debt tolerance metric showing Bitcoin could fall over 11% a year before its credit coverage weakens. Metaplanet’s Japan unit raised fresh yen financing to keep buying, Smarter Web sold 178 BTC to retire debt, and the weekend entries widened the frame to a cohort-level debt reckoning, holders selling coins and pivoting toward AI to meet obligations. The offsetting note: dormant long-term-holder supply has fallen to a four-year low, easing one source of selling pressure.

The BIP-110 fight entered its decisive month. Saylor escalated with a 110-point critique warning the proposed soft fork would undermine Bitcoin’s neutrality ahead of an August decision, while Strategy lifted its dollar reserve target to about $3 billion under a new Digital Credit Capital Framework. In Washington, Clarity Act passage odds fell to 38% amid Democratic pushback, a repricing that coincided with Thursday’s slide.

The week also produced an institutional first: nine firms including BlackRock, Coinbase, and Strategy launched a $15 million consortium to fund post-quantum cryptography research, aimed at protecting roughly $460 billion in Bitcoin from future quantum attacks. The signal is less the dollar figure than the roster: the largest ETF issuer, the largest US exchange, and the largest corporate holder funding protocol-adjacent security work together.

The week ahead

The calendar is the story now. The Federal Reserve’s next decision lands tomorrow, July 28, after a week in which oil above $100 put rate fears back into the news flow; the market’s slower gauges enter the meeting steady, with the 10-year breakeven at 2.26% and high-yield spreads at 2.77%. The next consumer price report follows on August 12, 16 days away. Inside Bitcoin, the BIP-110 timeline reaches its August decision window, and the flow question resets: the streak that carried the week’s high snapped into the weekend, and whether the July 24 outflow was a flinch or a turn is the first thing this week’s rows will answer.

Bitcoin doesn’t trade in a vacuum. Bitcoin Sidekick brings in DXY, real rates, M2 growth, the yield curve, and net liquidity so you can read Bitcoin against the macro backdrop without opening five separate apps.

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.