Crypto Pulse—Bitcoin

Overview Roughly twenty-nine months after the April 2024 halving, Bitcoin has not followed the script that a decade of cycle analysis taught traders to expect. Bitcoin trades near $86,700 according to CoinGecko market data, about 31% below the $126,080 all-time high set in October 2025, with a market capitalization around $1.74 trillion. What has forced a rethink is not the price level but the shape of the move: the top arrived eighteen months after the halving, almost exactly on schedule, yet t

Overview More than two years after US spot bitcoin ETFs began trading, a question that once belonged inside crypto circles has become an ordinary allocation decision: buy the coin, or buy the fund. The two track almost the same price, but what you end up owning is not the same thing at all. The differences concentrate in four places: what it costs to hold, who holds the keys, when you can trade, and what ownership actually entitles you to. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust charges a 0.25% annual

Overview The Federal Reserve lifted its federal funds target range to 3.75% to 4% on September 16, its first increase since July 2023, and the move revived a question that sits awkwardly at the center of crypto markets. Bitcoin has no cash flows, no issuer and no central bank. So why does a single committee meeting in Washington move it at all? The answer is not in the protocol. It is in how dollars are priced. The federal funds rate sets the cost of short-term dollar money, and that cost travel

Overview Markets gave the same question two opposite answers in 2026. Early in the year Bitcoin traded like a high-beta technology stock, breathing in time with the Nasdaq. By late summer its price path had started to track gold instead. The numbers Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl published on August 27 were blunt: Bitcoin's 90-day correlation with gold had climbed above 50% while its correlation with the Nasdaq 100 fell from above 60% to roughly 33%. Six months earlier the same firm had a

Overview On September 30, a softer-than-expected August reading of the US personal consumption expenditures price index pushed Bitcoin from roughly $83,800 to above $85,500 within the hour. By October 1 almost all of that move was gone and the price sat near $84,000. Over the same stretch the 10-year Treasury yield stayed pinned around 5.3%, refusing to follow inflation lower. A benign inflation print could not hold the bid, while a stubborn yield curve pushed it back. That single session is the

Overview Bitcoin has just closed its strongest quarter of 2026, gaining roughly 43% in the third quarter for its second-best Q3 on record, while Ethereum rose about 71% over the same period for its best third quarter ever. Beneath the price action, the market structure has shifted. Bitcoin dominance has slipped to around 58.6% in early October, Ethereum's share has climbed to 11.5%, and everything else now accounts for 30% of total crypto market value. Capital is no longer flowing in one directi

Overview At 08:00 UTC on September 25, roughly $16 billion of Bitcoin options settled on Deribit, clearing out more than a third of the venue's outstanding Bitcoin options exposure in a single half-hour window. Positioning did not reset into calm afterwards. It rolled forward, and the market immediately began pricing the next set of dates. Expiries matter not because of what happens on the day itself but because they are among the few liquidity events that can be known in advance: the contract c

Overview Bitcoin just closed its strongest quarter since 2024, and the derivatives market spent that same stretch shedding exposure. CoinDesk, citing CoinGlass data, reported on September 28 that coin-denominated futures open interest had fallen to roughly 652,000 BTC, near its lowest level of the year and well below the 800,000 peak set in early 2026. Perpetual funding rates across major venues had flipped negative at the same time, averaging about minus 0.3% on an annualized basis. A rally run

Overview Bitcoin is still trading well below the record it set in October 2025. CoinGecko's Bitcoin page puts the all-time high at $126,080 and the current price roughly 33% beneath it. That gap carries a piece of arithmetic that catches most investors off guard: a 33% decline requires a 49.5% advance to return to cost. Losses and recoveries are never symmetrical. Which is why three questions now sit in front of every Bitcoin holder. How much am I actually up or down, what price do I need to bre

Overview Bitcoin spent most of the past year swinging between selloffs and recoveries after peaking near $126,200 on October 6, 2025. Fortune's daily price record put the price at $85,686.06 on September 23, roughly 32% below that high but more than 40% above the cycle low printed in early February 2026. That position makes one question worth answering with arithmetic rather than instinct: what would a fixed monthly purchase through that entire stretch actually be worth now. The answer depends o