The week of August 31 through September 6, 2026.

The bottom line

Bitcoin rose 1.21% this week to $79,037.99, after touching $82,023.11 on Thursday and giving most of that back when a strong US jobs report revived talk of a Federal Reserve rate increase. The mood stayed in greed, with the Fear and Greed index moving from 69 to 71. BlackRock’s fund took in $485.6 million over four reporting days, the largest figure in the window by a wide margin. The next US inflation report is three days away.

The headline

Bitcoin gained 1.21% across the seven-day window, closing at $79,037.99 against an open of $78,093.40, and the round trip inside that gain is the story. The low of $76,271.49 printed Wednesday morning, the high of $82,023.11 arrived Thursday evening, and the weekly average of $79,069.58 sits marginally above the close. As of Monday morning the tape is quiet and the calendar is not. Fresh coverage has Bitcoin holding near $80,000 with September rate hike odds back around 60%, whale wallets flipping to net selling as $83,000 resistance holds, and researchers tracing the $320 million Liquid Network withdrawal to an alleged failure in the software’s transaction validation cache.

Price and macro backdrop

The shape of the week was a slide, a vertical repair, and a fade. The editorial log opened on Strategy and Strive resuming Bitcoin purchases as an ETF streak broke, then spent Tuesday and Wednesday on US strikes on Iran that pushed oil above $93 and Treasury yields toward 4.8%, with Bitcoin testing $76,500 support. Thursday inverted it: a suspected Bank of Japan intervention weakened the dollar and Bitcoin rallied past $82,000, crossing the 50-week moving average. Friday’s stronger than expected August jobs report cut rate cut odds and pulled price back below $80,000, where it stayed through the weekend. Sentiment barely registered the swing. The Fear and Greed index opened its daily prints at 69, bottomed at 63 on Wednesday, peaked at 74 on Friday, and read 71 Monday, averaging 69.71 across seven readings.

The move was Bitcoin’s own, and its counterparts went nowhere. The S&P 500 rose 0.50% to 7,718.60, with a high of 7,752.04 on Thursday and a low of 7,625.05 on Tuesday. Gold finished essentially flat, down 0.01% to $4,476.60, after peaking at $4,538.00 on Thursday and troughing at $4,348.00 on Wednesday. The VIX eased 0.92% to 15.11, its 16.79 peak printing Wednesday and its 13.97 low on Friday. Strategy (MSTR) rose 10.84% to $142.80, peaking at $144.85 on Thursday, and finished at a 22.93% premium to the value of its Bitcoin holdings. The 30-day correlation to gold read 0.6620 and is tagged coupled; the correlation to the S&P 500 read 0.1436 and is tagged decoupled. Both tags fit the week: Bitcoin and gold peaked on the same Thursday dollar move while equities drifted.

The macro plumbing barely reported. Net liquidity sat near $5.77 trillion, down about $10.88 billion week over week, a continued drain, and the federal funds rate held at 3.63%. The dollar index, real yields, credit spreads, and consumer sentiment are absent from this week’s digest, so the macro read rests on the news flow rather than the series. The frame these pages have carried for months, fearful psychology on an intact structure, does not fit. Sentiment sat in greed all week at an average of 69.71. What moved price was a currency intervention and a payroll print.

Technical setup

The daily chart is extended and the hourly chart is soft. The 14-day relative strength index closed at 63.77, below the overbought line, with %B at 0.6338 in the upper half of the volatility band. The daily MACD signal reads 3,343.90 against a negative histogram of -243.91, so momentum is rolling over inside an uptrend, and the 14-day average true range stands at 2,273.17. At a last daily close of $79,374.38, price sits 13.69% above the daily 200-period average of $69,816.92 and above the 50-period average of $69,697.44. Monday’s intraday tape is weaker: the hourly relative strength index reads 41.87, hourly %B is 0.2187 near the lower band, and the hourly close of $79,402.11 sits 0.57% above the hourly 200-period average of $78,948.82.

ETF flows

The captured flow window runs four reporting days, September 1 through September 4, and September 3 carried it. BlackRock’s IBIT took in $485.6 million on net, with a single-day inflow of $454.0 million on September 3 against a $201.2 million outflow on September 1. ARKB added $137.7 million, all of it in that one September 3 session. Fidelity’s FBTC netted $87.9 million despite a $43.7 million outflow on September 1, Grayscale’s mini Bitcoin fund $79.2 million, Bitwise’s BITB $37.4 million, and MSBT $15.0 million. Three funds leaked: Grayscale’s GBTC shed $48.0 million on net with a $56.2 million redemption on September 2, VanEck’s HODL $19.6 million in a single September 3 print, and WisdomTree’s BTCW $5.2 million. BRRR, EZBC, and BTCO sat flat at zero.

The rows and the log agree. The log recorded Thursday’s $731 million single-day inflow as the largest since January, then put the completed week at $987 million, the strongest of 2026, with one entry naming the concentration outright. Fresh Monday coverage adds that spot Bitcoin funds drew $3.52 billion in August, their largest month since September 2025, and that September 4 inflows fell to $174.6 million with only BlackRock and Fidelity attracting fresh money into the holiday. Last week’s open question was whether one fund carrying the cohort was concentration or rotation. Four more reporting days give the same answer.

On-chain and mempool

The network was quiet and slightly more expensive. The hashrate estimate, noisy by construction, fell 1.23% from 1,053.07 exahashes per second at the open to 1,040.10 at the close, with the trough of 853.78 printing Thursday against a 933.46 weekly average. Pending transactions rose 6.10% to 85,548 after a Wednesday peak of 102,620 and a Sunday trough of 69,262. The backlog by virtual size rose 2.96% to about 42.3 million vbytes. Total fees waiting in the mempool rose 19.85% to about 10.45 million satoshis from 8.72 million at the open, after a Friday spike to 26.71 million. Nothing approached congestion.

Derivatives

Leverage is absent rather than crowded. Perpetual funding read 0.0000% per interval at the latest sample against a 0.0027% seven-day average, both well below the 0.0100% an eight-hour perpetual pays at its neutral default; the digest tags the funding regime neutral, with no flip flagged. CFTC commitments showed open interest of 98,485 Bitcoin across 19,697 contracts on regulated US futures as of the September 1 report, worth about $7.85 billion at the latest mark. Funding at zero through a week that touched $82,023.11 and gave it back is the notable part, and it matches the log’s repeated attribution of Thursday’s rally to short covering rather than fresh positioning.

Order book regime

Into Monday morning the book is thick on the offer and very tight. The imbalance read -0.0281 against a 24-hour average of +0.1865, in a range that ran from -0.6606 to +0.7406, so a bid lean has flattened out. Ask-side depth within 2% of mid sat at 6.06 Bitcoin against a 4.35 baseline, while bid-side depth at 5.73 sat just under its own 5.96 norm. The spread held at 0.0013 basis points against a 0.0168 average, near the tightest reading of the 24-hour window, whose maximum reached 0.6231. The dominant resting wall sat on the bid side, 0.0409% from a mid-price of $79,041.06, with a prominence of 9.66.

News and policy threads

The rate thread ran the week and owns the next one. Iran strikes lifted oil above $93 and yields toward 4.8% through Wednesday, capping Bitcoin near $76,500. Thursday’s suspected Bank of Japan intervention weakened the dollar and, per the log, pushed Bitcoin’s gold correlation to a six-year high and volatility to a six-year low, with one Bitcoin buying the most gold since January. Friday’s jobs report reversed all of it. Monday’s coverage carries hike odds near 60% into Thursday’s inflation print and the Federal Reserve meeting that begins September 15.

The security thread was the countercurrent. Alleged white hat hackers withdrew roughly 4,000 Bitcoin, about $320 million, from Blockstream’s Liquid Network federation reserves, prompting a sidechain pause and exchange suspensions of LBTC deposits and withdrawals. The actors pledged to return most of it once the Elements vulnerability is patched network wide, and Monday reporting says they are holding the funds until developers prove the patch landed. Researchers have since traced the breach to an alleged failure in the transaction validation cache that let unbacked tokens be redeemed for real Bitcoin. Separately, the Coldcard exploiter moved $7.7 million, roughly 45% of the Bitcoin stolen in the third attack wave, according to Galaxy Research.

The treasury thread stayed constructive. Strategy resumed purchases after a two month pause, adding 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million to push its holdings past 845,000 BTC, while Strive bought another 1,800 BTC to reach roughly 23,000 BTC. Capital B bought $29 million of Bitcoin Monday, its largest purchase in a year, taking holdings to 3,521 BTC. The IMF confirmed El Salvador’s latest 1,540 BTC addition came entirely from private donations rather than public funds.

The week ahead

The calendar is the whole story. The next consumer price report lands September 10, three days out, and the Federal Reserve meeting begins September 15, eight days away, so both sit inside a window markets are already repricing. US equity markets are closed Monday for the holiday, thinning the tape ahead of both. Inside Bitcoin, the halving cycle sits 59.55% complete at 870 days since the last one, short of any milestone.

The open questions follow the week’s own shape. Whether a daily relative strength index of 63.77 with a negative histogram resolves into a base above $79,000 or a retest of the $76,271.49 low is the technical question, and an hourly reading of 41.87 says sellers own the morning. Whether $485.6 million into one fund across four reporting days is institutional conviction or a single allocator’s rebalance is the flow question. And whether funding at zero through an $82,023.11 print means room to lever up or no appetite to is the one Thursday’s inflation number begins to answer.

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.