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What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: Bitcoin Tops $85K as $648M in Crypto Shorts Liquidated

The crowd is calling it a new bull market, and Monday gave them plenty to point at.

Bitcoin cleared $86,000, up more than 6% in a day to an eight-month high, and its first trip back to these levels since January.

Falling oil and a firm day for US stocks helped, but the size of the jump came down to positioning.

Around $648 million of crypto shorts were wiped out in 24 hours as the move caught traders leaning the wrong way.

A short squeeze started it, the same fuel behind August's run.

(When too many traders are short, a rally forces them to buy back, and that buying drives the price up further.)

What's different this time is who else turned up.

Glassnode's measure of selling pressure has fallen to one of its lowest readings on record, below where it sat after the 2022 selloff.

That says holders aren't heading for the exit, and spot buyers are doing real work under the price.

The other side of the ledger is less comforting.

Roughly $2 billion in fresh leveraged bets have piled back into Bitcoin futures since the breakout.

That's the same setup that made August so violent, a thin market loaded with borrowed positions that snaps hard in both directions.

Nansen's Nicolai Sondergaard says price has run ahead of the buying behind it.

Without steady spot and ETF demand, he warns, this tips back into a leverage-driven move.

So $86,000 cuts both ways.

The demand underneath looks more real than August's pure squeeze, and that's the case for $90,000.

The leverage stacking on top looks like the fragility that came right before the last flush.

The shorts did the early lifting.

Now it's the spot buyers who have to finish the job. 🚀

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Will Clemente looked at Monday's squeeze and asked who's actually been buying.

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

Here's what he posted:

By his count, the last real major buyer to go public was Tesla, back in January 2021.

Since then the lifting has come from ETFs, from Strategy, from a handful of treasury companies.

No sovereign wealth fund, pension, or ultra-wealthy individual has stepped forward with a multi-billion-dollar direct stake.

The usual read on that gap is a warning, proof the smart money is staying out.

Clemente reads it the other way, and it's the stronger argument.

If the buyers everyone assumes are already in this trade mostly aren't, the demand that lifts Bitcoin from here is still in front of us.

Price is set at the margin, so one fresh tier of price-insensitive buyers can move it more than the leverage now piled on top.

That reframes the worry in today's opener, where a rally built on a short squeeze and two billion in fresh leverage looks one bad session from a flush.

A squeeze can unwind in an afternoon. A pension that decides it needs Bitcoin does not.

The biggest wallets in the world still haven't shown up, and if you feel late, they'd say you're early. 🐳

Back to the ETF flow data, our weekly read on institutional appetite.

Green means money flowing in, red means it's heading out.

This week the two majors traded places.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs steadied to roughly break-even, a net $6 million in across five sessions, three green and two red, a world away from the $463 million they bled the week before.

The week underneath was choppier than the total lets on.

IBIT pulled in about $121 million and Fidelity's FBTC another $80 million, almost all of it on a single $311 million Friday.

Against them, ARK's ARKB shed $142 million and Grayscale's GBTC another $62 million, so the money simply rotated out of the laggards and into the leaders and netted out flat.

Ether went the other way.

The ether funds bled about $141 million over the same week, three red sessions to two green, with BlackRock's ETHA giving up $56 million of it.

That flips last week's picture, when Bitcoin bled and ether held the bid.

Now Bitcoin is the one steadying while ether does the leaking.

Combined, the two complexes still ended around $134 million in the red, though that's half the $266 million they lost the week before.

The outflows didn't stop this week, they just changed which coin was carrying them. 📊

Coinbase Brings IPO Shares to US Retail Traders, With Oura Up First. Eligible US customers can now request shares at the IPO price, starting with wearables maker Oura, though allocations are not guaranteed.

Circle launches Bitcoin-backed USDC borrowing for institutional clients. The service lets institutions borrow USDC against their Bitcoin holdings for liquidity without selling the underlying BTC.

'A little more orange': Strategy buys 950 bitcoin for $76 million, bringing total holdings to 846,000 BTC. The purchase, its first in about three weeks, lifts Strategy to around 4% of Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap, worth roughly $72 billion.

Google and Apple seek crypto talent as Big Tech eyes stablecoin and tokenization rails. Job listings suggest both companies are separately hiring for stablecoin and tokenized-deposit projects, hinting at a deeper payments push.

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