Breaking as you sip your Monday coffee: Bitcoin just clawed back almost everything it lost last week and is now hovering around $109,800, a hair away from the May-2025 all-time high of $111,814. And yet, if you scroll TikTok right now, #memecoin clips outnumber #Bitcoin pump videos at least three to one. In plain English, the price is mooning but the mainstream isn’t cheering – that’s the quirky setup I want to unpack for you today.
Here’s What Actually Happened Over the Weekend
Late Friday, we were sitting near $101K. Deribit’s funding rates were flat, Binance open interest had bled 8 % in 48 hours, and my Telegram trading chat was oddly quiet – the classic ‘volatility vacuum.’ Then, sometime around 02:00 UTC Saturday, a cluster of ~3,200 BTC was yanked off Coinbase Prime and sent to what looks like a fresh cold-storage address (I double-checked the tag on Arkham). Moments later, price ticked up…and it never really looked back. By Sunday night we printed a 9.3 % intraday candle, the biggest green bar since early April.
Now here’s the interesting part: spot volumes on Coinbase and Kraken jumped, but perpetual futures volume actually dropped 12 % compared to the prior week (data via CryptoQuant). In simple terms, whales were buying spot coins while leverage junkies were basically asleep. If you’ve ever wondered how supply-shock rallies start, well, you just watched one in real time.
Why Your Uber Driver Isn’t Talking About It (Yet)
I’ve noticed that every true retail mania has two ingredients: Google Trends spiking and phone-a-friend FOMO. Right now, neither is happening. The latest Google Trends reading for ‘buy Bitcoin’ is sitting at 29/100; back in March 2021, it hit 100, and even the February 2024 run saw mid-60s. In my experience, you don’t get a local top until your cousin who still thinks Doge is pronounced ‘doggy’ asks how to open a Binance account.
“It feels like late 2020 again – smart money is positioning while retail is binge-watching Netflix,”Glassnode’s co-founder Jan Happel joked on X. I tend to agree. The Coinbase app is only #48 in the U.S. finance download charts this week, compared to #3 during the 2021 peak. That passive vibe is a giant green flag if you’re already holding coins.
If Supply on Exchanges Keeps Draining, Math Gets Weird
CryptoQuant’s Quicktake post that kicked off this article points out something spicy: aggregate BTC balances on the top five exchanges are now down to 1.63 million BTC. That’s a level we haven’t seen since late 2017 – right before the first parabolic run to $20K. Zooming in, Coinbase’s treasury alone shed ~42,000 BTC in the past 30 days. You don’t have to be PlanB to grasp the dynamic: fewer coins for sale + steady or rising demand = explosive pricing.
Real quick math for you: if spot ETFs (BlackRock, Fidelity, et al.) keep vacuuming up an average of 3,500 BTC per trading day (April’s number per Bitwise research), that’s roughly 105,000 BTC/month. At the same time, miners are only spitting out 13,500 BTC/month post-halving. You can see why I keep muttering “supply squeeze” like a broken record.
But What About the Macro Boogeyman?
Yes, the Fed meeting looms. Yes, Treasury yields are inching up again. But – and this is anecdotal – I think Bitcoin’s correlation to rate expectations broke sometime last November when the first ETF rumor started to solidify. Look at the 30-day Pearson coefficient between BTC and the Nasdaq; it’s 0.17 right now, practically noise. Bitcoin has its own supply-demand gravity at the moment, and macro is more of a background playlist than the DJ.
Developer Corner: The Quiet Tech Upgrades No One Is Talking About
If you’re the type who digs under the hood, taproot-powered BitVM experiments have quietly accelerated. Robin Linus dropped an update showing a simple on-chain blackjack demo that settles in a single Taproot spend. Why should you care? Because innovations like BitVM could eventually let us run near-Turing-complete apps on Bitcoin without clogging base-layer block space. I think that narrative – ‘Bitcoin isn’t just digital gold, it’s programmable money 2.0’ – hasn’t been priced in at all.
Even Lightning is getting a subtle makeover. Voltage just rolled out ‘Traffic-Aware Liquidity’ alerts that ping node runners when channels approach congestion. That may sound esoteric, but smoother routing is key if you want Starbucks and other merchants to take the plunge. Technical tailwinds rarely move price overnight, but they prime the runway for the next adoption wave. File that under why I’m still stacking sats, despite being up triple digits this cycle.
Where Could Things Stall? A Few Speed Bumps I’m Watching
• Derivatives Overheating: Funding rates are muted now, but if we spike above +0.15 % every eight hours on Binance, I usually expect a shake-out wick.
• Mt. Gox Payout Worries: I know, we’ve heard the ‘140K BTC dump’ story for eight years. But the trustee did say distributions begin ‘Q3 2025.’ Keep a calendar reminder.
• ETF Outflows: A single week of net outflows could kill the current euphoria, the same way GBTC redemptions sideswiped us in March.
Why This Matters for Your Portfolio
If you’re sitting on the sidelines waiting for the ‘perfect’ entry, history isn’t kind to that strategy. In 2017, the last 15 % of the run from $7K to $20K happened in six days. You could blink and miss it. Personally, I keep a DCA bot running on Kraken with daily buys, and I only toggle it off if we close two consecutive weeks below the 200-day moving average (currently around $78K).
I’m not saying back up the truck at $110K. I am saying the lack of retail hype and the goofy supply math point to higher odds that we punch through $120K before we see $90K again. As always, don’t YOLO your rent money – but I’d feel sillier holding nothing than holding some.
So, Where Could We Be by Thanksgiving?
If ETF inflows stay above 100K BTC per month, and exchange balances keep leaking at the current pace, simple quadratic regression on the realized cap (I fiddled with this in Python last night) spits out a potential spot price band of $140K–$155K by late November. Far from gospel, but it shows how violently supply imbalances can manifest.
On the flip side, if we get a macro rug-pull – think Fed hiking again or a surprise ETF redemptions spree – $92K is my ‘line in the sand’ support, backed by a chunky 280K-BTC on-chain UTXO cluster (courtesy of Glassnode’s HODL Waves).
Wrapping Up – Don’t Sleep on Quiet Rallies
In my experience, the loud tops and the silent melts hurt people the most. What we have now is the opposite: a silent melt up. If TikTok teens aren’t flexing their Bitfinex PnLs yet, you probably have time – but not forever – to position.
I’ll leave you with a quote I screenshotted from Jameson Lopp’s latest blog post:
“Bitcoin bull markets end in madness, not mild curiosity.”If that’s true, then today’s calm feels more like the first reel of the movie rather than the closing credits. Grab popcorn…and maybe a hardware wallet.
