GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #963 bringin‘ the news… 🥜

We’re the crypto newsletter that’s more accidentally early than a man who sank his shrimp money into some little fruit company and never once checked the price… 🦐📈

What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: Bitcoin’s apparent demand turns negative as price struggles with $77K

Bitcoin spent August climbing on borrowed energy.

First a short squeeze, then a wave of ETF money that finally showed up after months of sitting out.

This week both ran out.

Bitcoin slipped to $76,400 on Tuesday before scraping back to $77,000, well off the $80,000 it was pushing a week ago.

On-chain, the buying stopped.

CryptoQuant’s apparent demand gauge, which tracks whether more coins are being scooped up than sold, turned negative again.

(For a market fresh off a run to $80K, that means the net new buying has dried up.)

The ETF bid went with it, with US spot Bitcoin funds bleeding $236 million in a single day after the run of inflows that had carried the rally.

The selling wasn’t crypto’s alone.

Asian stocks had an ugly session, Korea’s Kospi down 4% and chipmakers SK Hynix and Samsung off 4% and 5%, while oil pushed higher.

Bitcoin fell in with the risk-off crowd rather than standing apart from it, trading the way it has all year: a leveraged bet on liquidity, not a haven from trouble.

When money gets nervous about bonds and chips, it sells Bitcoin alongside everything else instead of hiding in it.

September adds its own weight.

The month has been a loser for Bitcoin more often than not, and Wall Street carries the same curse.

The calendar matters less than the flows, though.

What counts now is whether the ETF buyers who funded the last leg come back, or keep walking.

Bought at $80,000, the rally needed fresh money to hold, and this week the money started leaving. 🚀

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Will Clemente bought more Bitcoin into this week’s slide, and he’s watching one gauge that says the drop isn’t the dangerous kind.

He’s one of the most respected on-chain analysts in crypto and co-founder of Reflexivity Research.

Here’s what he posted:

Today’s opener covered why Bitcoin sagged, with ETF money leaving and on-chain demand going quiet.

Clemente’s watching something calmer than the price.

It’s positioning, how much leverage traders are carrying in the futures market.

When that’s heavy, a dip can snowball as forced sellers get liquidated into each other.

Right now it’s light.

He points to nearly two weeks of “inside candles”, each day trading inside the one before it, a market coiling rather than running away.

So this reads as an orderly cool-down, not an over-leveraged crowd getting flushed.

The way he frames holding anything, if you wouldn’t buy it fresh today, you shouldn’t own it.

He’d buy, so he added.

For anyone watching their stack bleed this week, what sits under the red candle matters more than the candle itself.

A light-leverage dip that a top on-chain analyst is buying into is the kind that resets the board without breaking it.

The fuel ran out, but the engine didn’t blow. 🪶

Time for a check in on Ethereum’s supply side dynamics.

To do that we’ll be focusing on the amount of Ethereum currently being staked.

Quick Note: Ethereum staking involves locking up ETH to support the blockchain’s security. In return, users earn rewards for staking.

42.85 million ETH is now locked in staking. Up from 42.30 million two weeks ago.

Another record, though the pace eased.

Staking added 550,000 ETH this fortnight, down from the 740,000 added last period.

So the pile kept growing even as Ether ran past its own highs, just more slowly than before.

Since January, roughly 6.5 million ETH has moved into staking contracts, supply pulled off the table to earn yield.

More than a third of all Ethereum now sits voluntarily locked, out of circulation whatever the price does.

At today’s pace that’s another 550,000 ETH every fortnight that no seller can reach. 🔒

CrowdStrike and federal authorities dismantle Russian malware that secretly stole crypto for 8 years. The Russia-based Sality malware swapped copied wallet addresses for the attacker’s; CrowdStrike and law enforcement have now issued a fix after eight years.

Coinbase launches regulated crypto derivatives in Canada. Eligible Canadian traders can now access perpetual and dated futures with up to 10x leverage as US platforms expand abroad.

Japan’s Remixpoint Dumps Ethereum, XRP in Shift to Bitcoin-Only Treasury. The Japanese firm sold its ETH, SOL, XRP and DOGE at a ¥117.8 million profit, keeping roughly 1,506 BTC as its only crypto holding.

Hyperscale Data shares hit all-time low as company flips Michigan site from bitcoin mining into AI. The company is converting a Michigan bitcoin mine into an AI data centre under a deal that could generate more than $1.2 billion.

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Trivia Answer: A common standard for fungible tokens on Ethereum 🥳

ERC-20 sets the rules for how fungible tokens behave on Ethereum, letting thousands of tokens work with the same wallets and exchanges.

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