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POL $0.0765 -0.46%Bitcoin quietly reclaimed something this week that the industry has been chasing for a decade. According to Crypto Valley Journal, US investors now hold Bitcoin more widely than gold for the first time on record. That milestone arrived not during a euphoric rally but in a week when BTC sat at $64,490, up a modest 1% on the week, and Ether at $1,882, up 1.5%. The story of the week is less about price than about the plumbing, the policy, and a war that finally paused.
A Ceasefire, Sort Of
Day 13 of US strikes on Iran ended with Trump halting military action, as NDTV Profit reported, though the president also signaled readiness for intensified operations should Gulf state attacks continue. The tension bled everywhere: Brent crude pushed past $100 after Houthi tanker attacks in the Red Sea, the UK put its armed forces on defensive footing, and finance.yahoo.com noted that Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Dogecoin all slid earlier in the standoff before recovering. Ark Invest, meanwhile, pegged Bitcoin's one-year realized volatility at 42% for Q2, close to multi-year lows. For an asset supposedly at the mercy of geopolitics, BTC has been remarkably composed.
That composure has a policy backdrop. The Federal Reserve is expected to hold rates steady, per Straits Times Business, though Crypto Daily UK raised the fair question of whether $100 oil could revive hike risk. And the EU added HTX to its sanctions list, barring transactions from August 23, a reminder that the regulatory perimeter around crypto keeps tightening in step with the geopolitical one.
Infrastructure Reshuffles, Loudly
The industry's back office had a noisy week. Poolin, once one of Bitcoin's largest mining pools, filed for bankruptcy, as Decrypt reported. U.Today flagged that a top-ten exchange by volume abruptly shut down. LMAX is reportedly eyeing a $5 billion Nasdaq IPO amid sale talks, and B2C2's own sale discussions underscored Crypto Daily UK's point that market makers are suddenly in demand. Forma announced it will wind down its blockchain network and migrate NFTs to Ethereum. And CryptoSlate surfaced a $25 million Bitcoin discrepancy sitting inside Wall Street clearinghouses, the kind of quiet reconciliation problem that becomes a loud one later.
There was good news too. Cash App scrapped fees on large Bitcoin purchases and recurring buys. Hydropower overtook gas as the dominant energy source for Bitcoin mining, with usage up 38%. And LayerZero and Keeta pushed forward on tokenized bank deposits, one of the more consequential quiet developments of the year.
For an asset supposedly at the mercy of geopolitics, BTC has been remarkably composed.
Whales, Wallets, and Warnings
The largest on-chain move of the week was a $333 million WBTC wallet-to-wallet transfer, followed by a $186 million BTC transfer of the same character. Neither hit an exchange, which fits the muted price action. Smaller flows were mixed: $13 million of SOL moved into an exchange, $7 million of ETH left OKX, and modest wallet-to-wallet activity showed up across DOGE, LINK, TON and AVAX. Elsewhere, the XRP Ledger added $2.6 billion, ranking second in real-world asset inflows per Crypto.news, and Shiba Inu surged 36% on what CoinDesk described as a South Korea-driven rally with no obvious catalyst.
The sharp edges remain. Three iPhone users are suing Apple over a $1.8 million Bitcoin loss tied to a fake Sparrow Wallet, per Coincu, and Binance disclosed it runs monthly phishing tests on staff with dismissal on the table for repeat failures. With the Fed decision, Q1 earnings, and a fragile Iran pause all landing in the same window, next week's calendar is unusually loaded.