In the summer of 2021, bitcoin and the entire crypto market experienced a heavy price pull-back. It sure made the entire crypto market flinch when they saw their investments go down over 30%. It’s not unusual to see cryptocurrency prices go down an unsettling 30 percent. But the question is that are we in a…
In the summer of 2021, bitcoin and the entire crypto market experienced a heavy price pull-back. It sure made the entire crypto market flinch when they saw their investments go down over 30%. It’s not unusual to see cryptocurrency prices go down an unsettling 30 percent. But the question is that are we in a […]
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Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says Strategy’s STRC preferred stock could keep fuelling Bitcoin after $7.2 billion of purchases, while its latest confirmed buy used common-stock proceeds instead. The post Strategy’s High-Yield Stock Will Continue to Fuel Bitcoin Surge, Says Bitwise CIO appeared first on Crypto News Australia…
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Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says Strategy’s STRC preferred stock could keep fuelling Bitcoin after $7.2 billion of purchases, while its latest confirmed buy used common-stock proceeds instead.
The post Strategy’s High-Yield Stock Will Continue to Fuel Bitcoin Surge, Says Bitwise CIO appeared first on Crypto News Australia… Read More
Markets Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email Bitcoin rises to $77,000 ahead of Fed decision as Trump preps for lengthy Hormuz block Bitcoin is sitting almost still while the rest of the majors give back gains and oil pushes above $111 on reports of an extended U.S. naval
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Bitcoin rises to $77,000 ahead of Fed decision as Trump preps for lengthy Hormuz block
Bitcoin is sitting almost still while the rest of the majors give back gains and oil pushes above $111 on reports of an extended U.S. naval blockade against Iran.
By Shaurya Malwa|Edited by Sam Reynolds
Updated Apr 29, 2026, 4:29 a.m. Published Apr 29, 2026, 4:27 a.m. 2 min read
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What to know:
Bitcoin is trading in a tight range just below $77,000 despite surging oil prices and geopolitical tensions over a potential extended U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Major altcoins including ether, XRP, Solana and BNB have fallen over the past week while dogecoin is the only top-10 non-stablecoin token to post gains, lifting bitcoin’s market dominance.
Analysts say bitcoin’s muted reaction reflects supply exhaustion and lower sensitivity to regulatory and central bank news, with $75,000 seen as key downside support and a move back toward $80,000 needed to preserve the current rally structure.
Bitcoin is doing nothing while everything around it moves.
The largest crypto just under $77,000 on Wednesday in Asian hours, up just 0.1% over 24 hours and down 0.8% on the week, holding a tight band even as Brent crude pushed above $111 a barrel on a Wall Street Journal report that President Donald Trump told aides to prepare for an extended U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran has said the country is in a “State of Collapse,” Trump claimed on Truth Social Tuesday, while Tehran has signaled it may accept an interim deal to reopen the strait if Washington lifts its blockade of Iranian ports.
Ether dropped 2.6% on the week to $2,310. XRP fell 3.8% to $1.39. Solana lost 3.2% to $84.57. BNB shed 2.3% to $625. The exception was dogecoin, up 5.5% on the week to $0.1016, the only top-10 token outside stablecoins to print green over seven days.
Bitcoin’s market dominance is slowly climbing again as a result, which is what tends to happen when macro stress arrives and capital rotates into the largest asset.
Zaheer Ebtikar, founder of Split Research, said in a note that bitcoin’s relative calm was indicative of a change in market strucute.
“The supply overhang has finally dried up, and the sellers who were spooked by macro shifts or quantum fears have already exited, leaving the market much thinner on the sell-side than it was just a few months ago,” he said to CoinDesk over email.
“Bitcoin is far less sensitive to regulatory noise or central bank policy than people think. Its sensitivity is purely a function of wider volatility, and since we’re currently in a quieter trading range, there’s no immediate rush for the exits,” Ebtikar added.
The technical levels are sharper. Analysts at Bitget flagged $75,000 as the line where the upward range that has held since late March breaks, with a clean loss potentially opening room for further downside.
A reversal back toward $80,000 from current levels keeps the rally structure intact and sets up a retest of the resistance that has rejected bitcoin every attempt since February.
The Fed announces its rate decision later on Wednesday, the ECB follows Thursday, and the U.S. equity market sold off Tuesday on growing skepticism about the payoff from artificial intelligence capital expenditure, with Nasdaq 100 futures clawing back 0.4% in Asian hours.
Brent crude whipsawed between gains and losses but stayed elevated near $111 on the blockade reporting, putting renewed pressure on inflation expectations heading into the central bank decisions.
Traders may watch whether bitcoin’s apparent supply exhaustion holds against the next macro shock. If Ebtikar’s read is correct, the seller base that capitulated through March and April is gone, and bitcoin trades on volatility rather than headlines until something forces a fresh leg of selling. If the read is wrong, $75,000 gets tested quickly and the range break Bitget flagged plays out as drawn.
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Bitcoin briefly drops below $62,000 as $1.5 billion in crypto longs get wiped out
By Sam Reynolds
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Presto Research says bitcoin’s drawdowns this year have coincided with rallies in AI stocks and gold as markets scale back expectations for Fed rate cuts.
What to know:
Bitcoin fell below $62,000 in Asia trading, sparking more than $1.5 billion in leveraged crypto liquidations over 24 hours, including over $800 million in bitcoin and $386 million in ether positions.
The selloff came amid persistent institutional weakness, with U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs seeing about $1 billion in net outflows…
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Finance Share Share this article Copy link X icon X (Twitter) LinkedIn Facebook Email Institutional money is coming for bitcoin, but Adam Back says it moves slower than you think The legendary cryptographer discusses institutional money flows into bitcoin. By Ian Allison| Edited by Sheldon Reback Updated Apr 29, 2026, 1:09 p.m. Published Apr 29
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Institutional money is coming for bitcoin, but Adam Back says it moves slower than you think
The legendary cryptographer discusses institutional money flows into bitcoin.
By Ian Allison|Edited by Sheldon Reback
Updated Apr 29, 2026, 1:09 p.m. Published Apr 29, 2026, 4:00 a.m. 4 min read
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Blockstream CEO Adam Back (CoinDesk)
What to know:
Blockstream CEO Adam Back says spot bitcoin ETFs are a powerful long-term catalyst, but institutional adoption takes time.
Back argues that the interests of major Wall Street firms such as BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and Fidelity provide a durable pro-crypto force that can outlast changes in U.S. administrations.
Quantum-computing fears are a minor but real risk that institutions are beginning to evaluate.
The arrival of Morgan Stanley at the U.S. spot bitcoin BTC$66,924.57 ETF party earlier this month was characterized by some observers as the catalyst that will end the current crypto bear market thanks to the massive distribution power of the Wall Street wirehouse’s $8 trillion wealth management network.
Not so fast, said Blockstream CEO Adam Back, an early contributor to the Bitcoin community and recently tipped by the New York Times to be the cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, an assertion he denies.
The bitcoin ETFs could be the single most important development of recent times when it comes to positive market signals, more so even than a pro-crypto U.S. administration, Back said, but it takes longer than most people realize. It won’t be immediate.
“I think what people may have miscalculated is that institutional adoption is very slow,” said Back in an interview with Coindesk. “So the ETFs got bought, but when BlackRock is saying they recommend 2% to 4% allocation in their general stock portfolio, the fund managers haven’t done that yet. And they will, but it’s slower than people anticipate.”
Investors don’t just pile in overnight, he said. A build-up could take a year, even 18 months.
“Some of that stuff is just starting to happen, and it will happen slowly. So I think there’s a tailwind.”
Founded in 2014 by Back and other prominent Bitcoin developers, Blockstream offers retail and institutional clients self-custody wallets, layer-2 network settlement and asset issuance. Back is also the CEO and co-founder of BSTR, a bitcoin treasury company looking to go public via a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners (CEPO).
The Trump effect
While ETFs may trump the government for boosting the industry, there’s still a regulatory influence. Consider President Donald Trump’s crypto-friendly term and compare it with the previous administration’s Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Chair Gary Gensler’s assault on the industry.
Instead, the U.S. now has a presidency that not only introduced a new legislative framework for crypto, but even launched its own token shop.
“They’ve definitely improved the open-for-business framework in the U.S., which has indirectly encouraged other jurisdictions to do likewise,” said Back, who lives in Malta. “So the U.K.’s FCA [Financial Conduct Authority] finally approved ETFs for retirement accounts and things. And I think maybe one or two other countries. They look at each other.”
While Donald Trump’s America may be open for crypto business, the now-established bitcoin ETFs have the power to transcend administrations, whether Republican or Democrat, Back pointed out.
“One of the reasons to suppose the ‘open for business’ is going to stay, even as you get new administrations, is that now Black Rock and the other ETF providers are going to defend their business,” he said.
“They’re going to apply a banking lobby to say they make a lot of money from the bitcoin ETF. We don’t want you to interfere with it. And so I think that now bitcoin has new allies in Black Rock, Morgan Stanley and Fidelity and all these guys.”
Four-year cycle
Another pricing factor to consider is bitcoin’s cyclical nature, a historical pattern driven by the quadrennial halving event, which cuts the supply of new tokens by 50%. The reduction often leads to a relatively consistent bull run followed by a bear market/recovery period.
Even if the four-year cycle is breaking, as some commentators believe, there’s still the reasonable possibility of a price slide happening simply because “people expected it to happen. So they sold and they made it happen,” Back said.
That logic is likely to change only when people see strength in the market, he said. That’s now coming in the form of institutional flows, such as the ETFs, sovereign and sovereign wealth fund investments, and investors buying bitcoin directly or shares in bitcoin treasury companies such as Strategy (MSTR), formerly called MicroStrategy.
“They are growing their ability to buy bitcoin in different market conditions,” Back said. “MicroStrategy, particularly, has been having an accelerated success with their Stretch kind of fixed-income product. So they’ve been able to use that to buy a lot of bitcoin, and it’s escalated even in the last few weeks. So those recurring buyers plus new institutional and wealth management buyers will eventually overwhelm the sellers.”
Strategy’s Stretch (STRC) is a perpetual preferred stock designed as a high-yield, bitcoin-backed income instrument.
Quantum-tative
As well as fielding inquiries about his identity, Back has also been answering a volley of claims about quantum-computing hardware progressing faster than expected and its power to break Bitcoin’s cryptography.
“People are trying to say it’s a factor,” Back said of quantum technology’s effect on the price of bitcoin. “But I think there’s a lot of information asymmetry in these markets, meaning that things which you think are perfectly clear are confusing to some other people, and their uncertainty impacts their decisions.”
That said, the recent round of quantum doomsaying may have institutions paying a bit of attention, Back conceded.
“Institutions are more systematic about risk,” he said. “So if there’s a tail risk, even a small one, they want to know that it’s covered. For retail investors, it sounds like something in the distant future that perhaps they’re not really worried about. But institutions will think a decade ahead and ask, ‘Is this 1% risk? Is there an answer to it?’ They’ll check stuff like that.”
UPDATE (April. 29, 13:10 UTC): Changes description of Morgan Stanley in the first paragraph from advisory network to wealth management network
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Tom Lee’s Bitmine borrows a page from Saylor’s playbook to offer 9.5% yield in preferred stocks
By Krisztian Sandor|Edited by Nikhilesh De
7 hours ago
The largest Ethereum treasury firm is taking a page from Michael Saylor’s Strategy to issue preferred shares to tap new sources of funding.
What to know:
Bitmine is offering perpetual preferred stocks with a 9.5% annual dividend, aiming to raise up to $300 million, a company filing shows.
The firm is following the steps of bitcoin-centric peers like Michael Saylor’s Strategy to tap new sources for funding digital asset treasuries.
The preferred shares will be listed…
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In early 2026, after experiencing the sharp adjustment at the end of 2025, the crypto market is still in a consolidation phase.Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have seen intensified volatility, with macroeconomic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risks, and cautiou…
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In early 2026, after experiencing the sharp adjustment at the end of 2025, the crypto market is still in a consolidation phase.Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have seen intensified volatility, with macroeconomic policy uncertainty, geopolitical risks, and cautiou… Read More
