The week of September 22 through September 28, 2026.
The bottom line
Bitcoin surged above $87,000 early in the week on nearly $1 billion of single-day ETF buying, then slid to the low $83,000s as Treasury bond yields hit their highest level since 2007. Investors kept buying anyway: Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $2.4 billion over the week, the strongest haul since October, erasing most of this year’s earlier outflows. Bitcoin ends the week close to where it started, with markets now watching this week’s jobs data and a large Treasury payment due September 30.
The headline
As of Monday morning, bitcoin had slipped below $83,000 as stalled Iran negotiations and oil pushing toward $108 a barrel added fresh risk-off pressure, with President Trump declining to rule out further strikes before the midterm elections. Traders were also positioning ahead of this week’s employment data and a $202 billion Treasury settlement due September 30, watching for signs of funding stress reaching Bitcoin’s derivatives market.
Price and macro backdrop
Bitcoin opened the week near $84,528 and closed at $83,009, a decline of 1.8 percent, after trading as high as $87,386 and as low as $82,581. The early-week rally cleared $87,000 for the first time since January on nearly $1 billion of single-day spot ETF buying and roughly $1 billion in short liquidations, before a surge in the 10-year Treasury yield to 5.11 percent, its highest level since 2007, triggered about $280 million in long liquidations and pulled price back into the $83,000 to $85,000 range for the remainder of the week.
Bitcoin’s 30-day correlation to gold sits at 0.67, a coupled regime, while its correlation to the S&P 500 has loosened to 0.44. Over the week, the S&P 500 gained 1.2 percent to close at 7,743, gold fell 4.9 percent to $4,189 an ounce, and the VIX rose 10.7 percent to 16.40. MicroStrategy shares closed at $158.61, up 3.0 percent on the week, after a rally past 30 percent earlier in the period on renewed Wall Street price-target upgrades; the stock’s premium to Bitcoin holdings stands at 22.7 percent.
The dollar index closed the week at 119.51, up 0.9 percent over the trailing 30 days as the DXY regime read strengthening. Net liquidity fell $94.1 billion week over week to $5.77 trillion, the Fed funds rate held at 3.88 percent, and the 10-year to 2-year yield spread widened to 31 basis points. The National Financial Conditions Index read negative 0.555 and the broader stress index read negative 0.91, both consistent with loose, not tight, financial conditions even as bond market volatility hit its highest level since March.
Technical setup
Daily RSI sits at 58.6, still on the bullish side of neutral, with price 8.4 percent above its 50-day moving average and 16.6 percent above its 200-day moving average. Price sits at 65 percent of its Bollinger Band width, with the upper band near $88,023 and the lower band near $73,283, an unusually wide range reflecting the month’s volatility. The daily MACD histogram has narrowed to 38.3, down from a wider positive reading earlier in the rally, signaling fading upside momentum even as the broader trend stays intact. On the hourly chart, RSI has fallen to 33.1 and price sits 1.5 percent below both its 50 and 200 period moving averages, reflecting the sharper pullback of the past two sessions.
ETF flows
US spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $2.4 billion over the week, their largest haul since October, as a six-day inflow streak added up to $2.84 billion. The streak erased 2026’s $5.8 billion deficit and pushed annual net flows to roughly $800 million, positive for the first time this year. BlackRock’s IBIT and Fidelity’s FBTC led the buying, with per-issuer data showing IBIT absorbing $776.2 million and FBTC $462.8 million of net inflows across the tracked days, while smaller funds including BITB and BTCW saw modest net outflows.
The week’s largest single day came early, with spot ETFs pulling in nearly $1 billion on Monday, the biggest one-day haul in roughly a year, led by a $350.3 million day for IBIT and $257.4 million for FBTC. A Bitwise survey found none of 15 institutional investors polled had trimmed their Bitcoin exposure despite the cycle’s roughly 50 percent drawdown from highs.
On-chain and mempool
Network hashrate averaged 939.4 exahash per second over the week and last read 954.7 EH/s, down 6.0 percent from the week’s start after touching a high of 1,019.5 EH/s. Mempool activity thinned alongside it: transaction count fell 10.6 percent to 77,045, vsize usage dropped 6.1 percent to 41.7 million vbytes, and total mempool fees fell 57.0 percent to 8.1 million sats as congestion eased from a mid-week peak. The median and 90th percentile mempool fee rates held at the 1 sat per vByte floor for the entire week, indicating an uncongested network with ample block space. Bitcoin’s halving cycle progress stands at 61.0 percent, 891 days since the last halving.
Derivatives
Funding cooled from a seven-day average of positive 0.0051 percent to a slightly negative 0.0005 percent by week’s end, though the system’s regime classification still reads neutral with no flip recorded. CFTC data as of September 22 showed open interest of 111,575 BTC, or about $9.35 billion notional. Traders cut $1.7 billion in leverage ahead of Friday’s roughly $15.6 billion Deribit options expiry, which cleared over the weekend without disruption.
Order book regime
Order book depth was deeper than usual, with bid depth within 2 percent of mid-price at 10.43 BTC and ask depth at 12.35 BTC, both above the 24-hour baseline averages of 6.69 BTC and 7.83 BTC. The imbalance score read negative 0.084, close to the baseline average of negative 0.087, indicating a persistent, modest tilt toward ask-side liquidity. The spread held near 0.0012 basis points, well inside the 24-hour average of 0.0228 basis points, with the standing wall sitting on the bid side essentially at the touch.
News and policy threads
A wallet dormant since April 2022 moved $380 million in Bitcoin during the week, with its next move still unclear, adding to on-chain signs that long-dormant holders are stirring. Strategy proposed daily dividends on its preferred shares as a new mechanism to fund further Bitcoin purchases and kept its at-the-market financing facility open, a contrast with Sequans, which fully exited its own Bitcoin treasury by selling its remaining 314 BTC.
JPMorgan flagged that Bitcoin trading above its roughly $85,000 estimated production cost could ease miner selling pressure, a threshold price spent much of the week testing from both sides. CleanSpark’s on-chain reserves topped 10,500 BTC during the period, and Raiffeisen Bank expanded its Bitpanda partnership to extend Bitcoin trading access across Europe. Separately, white hat researchers moved the remaining funds from the earlier Coldcard hack into a recovery trust for victims.
Earlier in the week, new Federal Reserve research flagged rising futures leverage as a shock-amplification risk behind the rally, a theme that recurred as options expiries approached. September’s rally put Bitcoin on pace for its first three-month winning streak since 2012, even as the asset briefly decoupled from its usual correlation with gold, stocks, and the dollar before that relationship reasserted itself later in the week.
The week ahead
The next FOMC decision is 29 days away, on October 27, and the next CPI print is due in 16 days, on October 14. Options positioning already shows some traders building structures targeting $95,000 by late October, while near-term technicals point to $82,000 as support and the $86,000 to $88,000 zone as the resistance test that would need to clear before a renewed run higher. Wednesday’s $202 billion Treasury settlement remains the more immediate catalyst, with derivatives markets the first place any resulting funding stress would likely show up.
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.