The week of August 24 through August 30, 2026.
The bottom line
Bitcoin slipped 1.60% this week to $77,861.93, after pushing above $81,000 on Thursday and failing to hold it. The mood cooled from greed toward the middle of the scale, with the Fear and Greed index falling from 74 to 62. BlackRock’s fund took in $729.4 million over four reporting days while five rival funds lost money. The next US inflation report is 10 days away.
The headline
Bitcoin fell 1.60% across the seven-day window, closing at $77,861.93 against an open of $79,125.49. The high of $81,475.24 printed early Thursday and the low of $77,094.36 arrived late Sunday, a sequence that makes the week a failed breakout rather than a trend. The weekly average of $78,774.20 sits above the close, which is what a week that peaks in the middle and fades does to an average. As of Monday morning the tape is quiet and the coverage is not. Fresh reporting has Strategy returning to the market with roughly $370 million in Bitcoin, its first corporate purchase since June, while US strikes on Iran pushed oil above $90 without moving Bitcoin much, and traders pivoted toward pricing a September Fed rate hike.
Price and macro backdrop
The shape of the week was a spike and a slow give-back. The editorial log opened on the largest weekly dollar gain on record and a reclaimed 50-week exponential moving average, carried Bitcoin past $81,000 on Treasury buyback bets and a short squeeze, then turned on Wednesday when hot July PCE inflation data knocked price below $78,000. Thursday held between $78,000 and $80,000 on an extending ETF inflow streak. Friday brought Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole remarks on sticky inflation, a second rejection near $81,000, and a slide toward $77,000. The weekend settled into a range between $77,000 support and $80,000 resistance. Sentiment tracked it: the Fear and Greed index opened its daily prints at 74, closed at 62, and averaged 68.86 across seven readings, giving back the top of greed without leaving greed.
The move was mostly Bitcoin’s own, and it had company on the downside where it usually does not. The S&P 500 rose 0.49% to 7,711.76, setting a high of 7,769.38 on Friday and a low of 7,651.67 at the window open. Gold fell 4.57% to $4,504.50 after peaking at $4,749.80 on Tuesday, its low of $4,452.70 printing Monday morning. The VIX eased 4.08% to 15.27 after a Monday peak of 16.03, with a 14.21 trough on Friday, so equity volatility stayed calm through the week Bitcoin lost its breakout. Strategy (MSTR) rose 6.76% to $127.31, peaking at $138.10 on Thursday, and finished at an 11.72% premium to the value of its Bitcoin holdings. The 30-day correlation to gold read 0.5924 and is tagged coupled; the correlation to the S&P 500 read 0.0964 and is tagged decoupled. Both tags described this week correctly, which is unusual: Bitcoin and gold fell together while equities drifted up.
The macro plumbing tightened slightly and the data did the rest. The dollar index sat at 118.0628, tagged weakening, down 1.22% over 30 days. Net liquidity held near $5.78 trillion, down about $11.77 billion week over week, a continued drain. Real yields stayed positive at 2.34% on the 10-year and 2.07% on the 5-year against a 3.63% federal funds rate, with the 10-year breakeven at 2.31% and the 10-year to 2-year spread at 0.47. Credit remained loose: the Chicago Fed’s financial conditions index read -0.566, the St. Louis stress index -0.8107, and high-yield spreads 2.63%. Headline inflation runs 3.30% year over year, M2 grows at 5.41%, and consumer sentiment firmed to 55.2. The frame these pages have carried for months, fearful psychology on an intact structure, does not fit this week in either direction. The structure is intact and the psychology is still in greed at 62. What broke the rally was a data print and a speech, not the plumbing.
Technical setup
The daily chart is stretched and the hourly chart is not. The 14-day relative strength index closed at 70.14, at the overbought line, with %B at 0.7099 in the upper half of the volatility band. The daily MACD line at 3,767.58 sits above its signal at 3,472.89 with a positive histogram of 294.69, and the 14-day average true range stands at 2,293.59. At a last daily close of $78,270.28, price sits above the daily 50-period average of $67,570.04 and 12.74% above the 200-period average of $69,425.05, the long trendline now well underneath. Monday’s intraday tape has already flattened: the hourly relative strength index reads 50.55, hourly %B is 0.5158, and the hourly close of $78,280.37 sits 0.30% below the hourly 200-period average of $78,519.00, with an hourly average true range of 415.38. The daily read still says extended; the hourly read says the market has stopped moving.
ETF flows
The captured flow window runs four reporting days, August 25 through August 28, and it is the most concentrated window these pages have recorded. BlackRock’s IBIT took in $729.4 million on net, with a single-day inflow of $284.4 million on August 25 against a $33.4 million outflow on August 28. Grayscale’s mini Bitcoin fund added $65.5 million and MSBT $23.9 million. Everything else leaked. ARKB gave back $85.2 million on net, its worst session a $114.9 million redemption on August 28. Grayscale’s GBTC shed $77.6 million, Fidelity’s FBTC $42.6 million on net despite a $83.6 million single-day outflow on August 27, Bitwise’s BITB $19.0 million, and VanEck’s HODL $7.5 million. BRRR, EZBC, BTCO, and BTCW sat flat at zero.
The rows and the log tell the same story in different units. The log tracked the inflow streak reaching eight days by Thursday and pushing total spot assets past $100 billion, then recorded Friday’s $201.8 million outflow ending a nine-day streak and pulling assets back below $100 billion. Earlier entries put the prior week at $1.92 billion, the strongest weekly inflow since October 2025, and mid-week coverage had August on pace for 2026’s strongest inflow month at $2.2 billion. Last week’s open question was whether the record inflow week was repositioning or the start of a bid. The answer is one fund. Strip IBIT out of the four captured days and the rest of the cohort is in net redemption.
On-chain and mempool
The network’s week belonged to the miners again. The hashrate estimate, noisy by construction, rose 24.39% from 846.58 exahashes per second at the open to 1,053.07 at the close, which was also the week’s peak, printed early Monday; the trough of 829.94 came Saturday, against a 903.57 weekly average. A price down 1.60% and a hashrate estimate up 24.39% in the same seven days is the kind of divergence that usually resolves as measurement noise, though the news flow does carry a capacity story: miners including IREN continue leaning into AI and data center revenue, with Bitcoin still supplying 82% of IREN’s income this year.
Blockspace demand went nowhere and got cheaper. Pending transactions rose 0.20% to 81,228 after a Saturday-evening peak of 99,562 and a Monday trough of 68,751. The backlog by virtual size fell 0.98% to about 41.5 million vbytes, having peaked near 47.0 million. Total fees waiting in the mempool fell 32.66% to about 9.23 million satoshis from 13.70 million at the open, after a Thursday-afternoon spike to 46.36 million and a Monday-morning trough of 5.90 million. The 90th-percentile fee rate held at 1 satoshi per vbyte across all 1,008 samples, unchanged for the entire window. Nothing approached congestion at any point.
Derivatives
Leverage leaned long and got longer without stretching. Perpetual funding read +0.0102% per interval at the latest sample against a +0.0031% seven-day average; the digest tags the funding regime positive, with no flip flagged. Open interest across venues stood near $8.62 billion. CFTC commitments showed open interest of 111,080 Bitcoin across 22,216 contracts as of the August 25 report, a figure struck at the top of the week rather than at the bottom. Funding roughly tripling against its own weekly average while price fell 1.60% is the tension worth naming: positioning got more crowded into a tape that stopped going up.
Order book regime
Into Monday morning the book leans to the offer. The imbalance read -0.1446 against a 24-hour average of -0.0845, in a range that ran from -0.4818 to +0.3772, so the current tilt is real but not extreme. Ask-side depth within 2% of mid sat at 8.85 Bitcoin against a 6.39 baseline, while bid-side depth at 6.62 sat above its own 5.41 norm, so both shelves are thicker than the daily average and the offers are thicker by more. The spread held at 0.0013 basis points against a 0.0333 average, essentially the tightest reading of the 24-hour window, whose maximum reached 0.9424. The dominant resting wall sat on the bid side, 0.0449% from a mid-price of $77,812.975, with a prominence of 7.87. A thick, tight book tilted modestly to the sell side is what consolidation looks like from underneath.
News and policy threads
The Fed thread ran the back half of the week and set the tone for this one. Hot July PCE inflation data ended the rally on Wednesday. Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech dismissed the case for near-term easing and added macro pressure through Friday, and by the weekend the log had traders eyeing $75,000 with $77,000 support and $80,000 resistance bracketing the range. Fresh Monday coverage extends the same thread in a sharper direction, with markets now pivoting to a September rate hike and the yen breaking 160 as the dollar firms. That is a different setup than the debt-debasement trade that drove the previous week’s record gain.
The treasury thread reopened. Michael Saylor signaled through the weekend that Strategy could resume purchases after a two-month pause, and Monday’s coverage confirms it: roughly $370 million of Bitcoin bought last week, the firm’s first corporate purchase since June. The log’s weekend entries had whales buying about $3 billion over the week while retail sold, and Bitcoin dominance climbing above 60 percent. Against that, one mid-tier treasury company registered 93% of its shares for resale and put a third of its Bitcoin into options, and coverage traced the exact order of losses inside Strategy’s debt stack down to a $13,400 floor. The cohort is not moving as one.
The infrastructure thread was the quiet one. Deribit moved 90% of client assets to Coinbase custody and will drop its daily proof of reserves check on September 1. Luke Dashjr left the OCEAN mining pool after a split over Bitcoin mining’s direction, with the open question being whether hash power follows him. Third Point disclosed a stake in Core Scientific, keeping the miner-to-AI trade in focus. And a $739 billion Treasury borrowing wave sits ahead as the macro backdrop for all of it.
The week ahead
The calendar is finally close enough to matter. The next consumer price report lands September 10, 10 days out, and the next FOMC decision September 15, 15 days away, so both fall inside the window that markets are already repricing. Fresh coverage frames this week as the setup, with several outlets pointing at the September rate decision and one noting Bitcoin is on track for its best month since November 2024 despite the late-week fade. Inside Bitcoin, the halving cycle sits 59.07% complete at 863 days since the last one, short of any milestone.
The open questions follow the week’s own shape. Whether a daily relative strength index at 70.14 resolves through a pullback toward $77,000 or through a base above $78,000 is the technical question, and the hourly reading of 50.55 says the market has not decided. Whether $729.4 million into one fund against net redemption everywhere else is concentration or rotation is the flow question. And whether Strategy’s return to buying after two months marks a floor or simply a resumed cadence is the treasury question, now answerable for the first time since June.
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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.