Nakamoto, a Bitcoin treasury company listed on the Nasdaq, recently announced the details of its Bitcoin derivatives program, a program designed to generate recurring volatility income from a defined portion of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings while hedging some portion of the company’s downside exposure to Bitcoin price risk.

 

While the Bitcoin derivatives program had already begun in the first quarter of the year, Nakamoto will be partnering with Bitwise Asset Management and the crypto exchange Kraken, with Bitwise running the derivatives strategy and Kraken offering its custody solution that will hold a portion of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings that will be used for the derivatives program.

 

The derivatives program, according to Nakamoto, is aimed at achieving two main objectives: (1) monetizing Bitcoin volatility and (2) mitigating downside risk.

 

By systematically writing covered calls and call spreads against a portion of its Bitcoin holdings, Nakamoto’s Bitcoin derivatives program aims to convert the volatility in the Bitcoin options market into recurring income, which the company says can be reinvested into its Bitcoin treasury or used for its everyday operational costs.

 

The program also aims to mitigate downside risk due to a decline in the Bitcoin price by maintaining a defined allocation of Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings to protective puts and put spreads, supporting the stability of Nakamoto’s net asset value and reducing the risk of forced deleveraging, especially during stressed market conditions.

 

"Bitcoin's implied volatility is one of the most persistently mispriced assets in capital markets," said Tyler Evans, chief investment officer of Nakamoto and UTXO Management.

 

"Working with institutional grade partners like Bitwise and Kraken, we have built a disciplined framework to harvest that premium systematically, at scale, and convert that opportunity into long term value for shareholders. This program is just one component of a broader effort to identify and execute on opportunities to generate yield on our Bitcoin holdings."

 

Nakamoto as a Bitcoin Treasury Company

Nakamoto Inc is a publicly traded company that operates a Bitcoin treasury strategy as its core business. The company currently holds approximately 5,342 BTC on its balance sheet, valued at roughly $467.5 million.

 

It made its first major Bitcoin purchase in August 2025 when it purchased 5,743.91 BTC worth approximately $679 million through its subsidiary Nakamoto Holdings. However, it recently sold 284 BTC for $20 million last month, with the proceeds used to support its working capital and fund its business operations.

 

 

Something may have shifted in the Bitcoin market. After months of grinding sideways action and periodic dips that had retail investors questioning their convictions, a handful of closely watched indicators are quietly aligning in the same direction, and it's not bearish.

 

Glassnode's proprietary Risk Index, which quantifies systemic market risk on a scale of 0 to 100, has dropped to zero. That's the floor. The firm's Moderate Strategy tracker has simultaneously flipped from "Moderate" to "High Confidence" for the first time since October 10, a combination analysts at the on-chain data firm are calling a "cleared risk landscape." The last time these two signals aligned, Bitcoin was on the cusp of a significant leg higher.

 

"This is an excellent window for strategic accumulation rather than chasing deeper dips," said Lacie Zhang, research analyst at Bitget Wallet. Zhang added the firm holds "a strong conviction for a positive close to 2026," pointing to improving market structure and mounting institutional confidence as the two pillars that could drive Bitcoin to a fresh all-time high before year-end.

 

 

 

Institutions Are Loading Up, Quietly

While retail sentiment has been mixed at best, institutional players appear to have decided the discount is too good to ignore. Strategy, Michael Saylor's Bitcoin-focused firm, made its largest BTC purchase since late 2024 in April, acquiring 34,164 coins for roughly $2.54 billion at an average price near $74,395. That brings the firm's total stash to over 815,000 BTC, a figure that continues to tighten long-term supply in ways that matter.

 

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have also recorded five consecutive days of net inflows, with BlackRock's IBIT leading the charge at $256 million in a single session. Cumulative net inflows have now eclipsed $57.98 billion. For a market that spent much of Q1 2026 dealing with outflows and persistent selling pressure, that's a meaningful reversal. Exchange balances are declining, on-chain data shows addresses holding more than 1,000 BTC have grown by roughly 3.2% month-over-month, and stablecoin supply sitting on the sidelines has been creeping higher. The classic setup, in other words.

 

Sentiment Thaws as Geopolitical Clouds Part

It's not just the on-chain picture that's improving. The macro backdrop has started to cooperate too, at least at the margins. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index has climbed from "extreme fear" at the start of April to simply "fear," which doesn't sound like much but actually represents a significant thaw in how traders are feeling. Bitcoin briefly touched $79,388 on Wednesday, its highest print in over three months. It is currently sitting just below that around $78,300 at time of writing.

 

Separately, CryptoQuant's Bull Score Index, which blends ten different on-chain metrics, has climbed to a neutral reading of 50 for the first time since Bitcoin was trading above $126,000. Reaching neutral from a structurally bearish position is, in CryptoQuant's framework, confirmation that the bear market may have ended. The bounce from near $60,000 to current levels is, by that measure, something more than a dead-cat rally.

 

Easing tensions in the Middle East are helping too. "As the US-Iran conflict subsides, bullish bets will continue to propel the market upward in the near term," said Jeff Mei, COO at crypto exchange BTSE. Prediction markets appear to agree, with users on one popular platform assigning a 74% probability that Bitcoin extends its rally to $84,000 in the near term.

 

The Path to $80K and Beyond

Analysts are cautiously optimistic about what comes next. A clean break and hold above $80,000 would serve as both a technical and psychological trigger, opening up the road toward $90,000 and ultimately a retest of all-time highs. The technical structure supports it, with Bitcoin forming higher lows through the April consolidation and the MACD histogram beginning to flatten from negative territory.

 

Longer-term forecasts remain ambitious. Standard Chartered carries a $100,000 year-end target, while Bernstein has maintained $150,000, arguing that spot ETFs, corporate treasury adoption, and structured capital products have changed the underlying market structure in ways that make cycle drawdowns shallower and recoveries faster. JPMorgan's volatility-adjusted Bitcoin-to-gold framework puts implied fair value even higher, somewhere north of $170,000.

 

Momentum from Bitcoin’s recent rally could spill into the altcoin market, which could see gains of as much as 60% if Bitcoin continues to rise, according to a crypto analyst.

 

“I think this leg has enough room to continue to $86K, and altcoins to run 30-60% from here,” MN Trading Capital founder Michael van de Poppe said on Thursday. A move to that $86K price would only be a 9% increase.

 

The Risks Haven't Gone Away

That said, nobody credible is calling this a certainty, certainly not this guy...who has been in the space long enough to know that NO ONE has a crystal ball. Glassnode's own data shows 54% of recent buyers are currently sitting in profit, and short-term holders' realized profit has spiked to $4.4 million, three times the $1.5 million level that marked every local top so far in 2026. Those numbers suggest the market is not without vulnerability, particularly in the absence of a fresh demand catalyst.

 

A flare-up in Middle East hostilities, any disruption to oil flows that sparks renewed inflation, and the broader uncertainty around Federal Reserve policy. The potential CLARITY Act, Fed rate cuts, and a lasting geopolitical resolution remain the three catalysts most often cited by analysts as what the market needs to convincingly clear $80,000 and hold.

 

For now, the risk landscape has cleared at the indicator level. Whether the price follows is the only question that matters.

 

Michael Saylor is not slowing down. Strategy disclosed on Monday that it bought another 13,927 BTC last week, spending roughly $1 billion at an average price of $71,902 per coin. The purchase brings total holdings to 780,897 BTC, acquired for a cumulative $59.02 billion at an average cost basis of $75,577.

 

The announcement came just hours after Saylor posted his now-familiar "Think Bigger" message on X alongside the company's orange-dot BTC purchase history chart. For anyone who has followed Strategy closely, the post was less of a hint and more of a countdown. He has used the same signal before every major acquisition since 2020, and this time was no different.

 

Strategy raised $1 billion through sales of its STRC preferred stock product, known internally as Stretch, to finance the buy entirely. The STRC instrument requires only about a 2.05% annual Bitcoin return to cover its dividend obligations. In other words, as long as Bitcoin does not flatline or fall steadily for years on end, the math works in Saylor's favor, at least in theory.

 

Still, the numbers are not exactly comfortable right now. Strategy disclosed $14.46 billion in unrealized losses on its digital assets for the first quarter of 2026 in a recent SEC filing. With Bitcoin trading near $71,000 and the company's average cost sitting above $75,500, the bulk of its position remains underwater. Saylor has not blinked. He declared earlier this month that "Bitcoin has won" and that the traditional four-year halving cycle is essentially dead, replaced by a market now driven primarily by institutional capital flows.

 

The scale of Strategy's accumulation in 2026 is hard to ignore. The company added 89,599 BTC year-to-date through late March, compared to roughly 8,484 BTC for BlackRock's IBIT over the same period. That pace puts Strategy more than 7x ahead of the world's largest asset manager in terms of 2026 Bitcoin accumulation. The gap between the two largest holders has narrowed to around 20,000 BTC, and at the current rate, Strategy could overtake IBIT as the single largest holder before summer.

 

To put the buying pace another way: in March alone, Strategy accumulated 46,233 BTC while the entire global Bitcoin mining network produced approximately 16,200 BTC. A single company absorbed nearly three times the newly minted supply in a single month. That kind of pressure should, theoretically, move markets. But it has not, at least not consistently.

 

The question of why Strategy's purchases fail to push the price higher has become something of a standing puzzle in crypto markets. CoinDesk analysts pointed to a few reasons: Strategy accounts for only about 7% of gross inflows into Bitcoin, meaning its purchases are still relatively small against the total market. More importantly, capital has been leaving the ecosystem. Bitcoin's realized cap saw a $29 billion drawdown since February, and BlackRock's IBIT open interest dropped over $4 billion in the same window. Those outflows have largely swamped the buying pressure Strategy generates.

 

U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs did manage $1.32 billion in net inflows during March, ending four consecutive months of outflows. But price action stayed flat for the month regardless, reinforcing the point that the link between inflows and price is neither direct nor immediate. Saylor's confident framing of Bitcoin as a new form of permanent institutional capital may be accurate in the long run. Whether it holds up in 2026's choppy macro environment, with geopolitical tensions running high and BTC sitting below his average cost, remains a much harder question to answer.

 

With 780,897 BTC now on its books, Strategy controls approximately 3.7% of Bitcoin's total circulating supply of about 20 million coins. MSTR shares were down roughly 2.5% in pre-market trading on Monday following the disclosure. The stock has become a proxy for leveraged Bitcoin exposure and tends to amplify both the upside and the pain. At the current pace, Strategy could push past 800,000 BTC before the end of April. Saylor, it seems, is just getting started.

 

Crypto exchange Bitget has launched a new product called IPO Prime, and its debut offering could, quite literally, be a moon shot. It's preSPAX, a tokenized instrument giving retail investors synthetic exposure to SpaceX ahead of what could be the largest initial public offering in stock market history.

 

SpaceX filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on April 1, targeting a June 2026 listing at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion. Yes, you read that right. If that figure holds at the close of the first trading day, SpaceX would rank as the sixth most valuable publicly traded company on earth, behind only Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon. The deal is being internally codenamed "Project Apex" and has drawn 21 banks competing for underwriting roles, according to Reuters.

 

What preSPAX Actually Is

Worth pausing on the structure here, because the word "exposure" does a lot of heavy lifting in the marketing and isn't quite what you would expect in traditional terms. preSPAX, issued through Republic, which is a tokenized private markets platform valued at over $1 billion, is a synthetic instrument. It tracks a reference index tied to SpaceX's economic performance after a qualifying event, such as an IPO or acquisition. Holders receive no equity, no voting rights, and no direct ownership stake in SpaceX. The company itself has not endorsed or authorized the product in any way.

 

The subscription window opens April 18 and closes April 21, with token distribution and OTC trading scheduled to begin on the same day it closes. Bitget has set aside 94,000 tokens priced at $650 each, implying a total subscription value of around $61.1 million and an implied SpaceX valuation of $1.5 trillion for the purposes of the sale.

 

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen described the launch by saying that, "Pre-IPO exposure used to be limited to small circles, but tokenization has changed that," she said in a statement. "preSPAX is our first offering and we will be bringing more such opportunities to our users this year." The exchange has already signaled plans to add OpenAI and xAI tokens to the platform by Q3 2026.

 

SpaceX Is A Financial Rocket Ship

For those keeping track, SpaceX's valuation has moved at a velocity that mirrors its own rockets. The company was worth roughly $46 billion in 2020. By early 2025 that figure had ballooned to $800 billion. Then came February 2026, and with it, SpaceX's all-stock acquisition of Elon Musk's AI venture xAI, a deal that reset the combined entity's valuation at $1.25 trillion overnight. Six weeks later, the IPO target sits at $1.75 trillion.

 

The core revenue driver is Starlink. By the end of 2025, the satellite internet constellation had accumulated 9.2 million active subscribers across 125 countries, doubling its user base in under 15 months and generating north of $10 billion in annual revenue. Analysts at Bloomberg and Quilty Space project that figure could climb to somewhere between $15.9 billion and $24 billion in 2026. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, who has tracked space equities for over a decade, has been vocal: Starlink alone, he argues, would justify a $500 billion valuation as a standalone business.

 

Layer in the launch monopoly, Starship's development trajectory, and the xAI integration, and the $1.75 trillion figure becomes at least a coherent argument, if not an easy one to accept on traditional metrics. At that valuation, SpaceX trades at roughly 90x 2025 revenue of $15.5 billion. For context, Nvidia, the AI darling of the current cycle, trades at around 30x forward revenue. Federal contract data compiled by FedScout shows SpaceX has racked up more than $24.4 billion in government awards since 2008, spanning NASA, the Air Force and Space Force.

 

Crypto And Wall Street

The push to bridge crypto infrastructure and traditional capital markets has been accelerating across the industry. Coinbase launched stock trading at the end of 2025 and repositioned its wallet as an "everything app." Kraken rolled out 11,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs with commission-free trading in April 2025. Bitpanda added around 10,000 stocks and ETFs to its platform in January. Republic, the partner behind preSPAX, previously launched rSPAX Mirror Tokens on Solana for as little as $50 per unit.

 

The competitive landscape for pre-IPO SpaceX exposure is getting crowded fast. On the crypto side, Solana-based PreStocks and Orderbook offer comparable products. On the traditional side, Forge Global, EquityZen and Nasdaq Private Market all provide secondary market access to SpaceX shares, though exclusively to accredited investors. That last detail is where the regulatory picture gets a bit fuzzy.

 

Risks Probably Worth Reading Twice

The structure behind preSPAX runs three layers deep: Bitget, then Republic, then the reference index tied to SpaceX performance. Settlement depends on the lockup period of the underlying debt asset expiring after a SpaceX IPO, at which point the issuer converts value into tokens or USDT based on SpaceX's market price at the time.

 

The product's structure fits relatively cleanly under the SEC's Howey Test definition of a security: an investment in a common enterprise with profit expectations derived from the efforts of others. Traditional platforms like Forge Global restrict SpaceX pre-IPO access to accredited investors. Bitget's product, by contrast, is technically available to its reported 125 million users, many of whom will not meet that threshold. The SEC intensified its scrutiny of tokenized securities structures throughout 2025, and similar hybrid instruments have been flagged as operating in a gray area that can move quickly toward enforcement territory.

 

There is also the small matter of whether SpaceX actually lists on schedule. The company's confidential filing gives it runway to address SEC comments privately before going public with its prospectus, which must be released at least 15 days before the roadshow begins. Prediction markets currently have 88% odds on SpaceX closing its first trading day above a $1.3 trillion market cap, which says a lot about where sentiment sits right now. Whether preSPAX holders ultimately benefit depends entirely on how that listing plays out, and when.

 

For the broader market, a successful SpaceX debut at $1.75 trillion would be a seismic event. It would arrive as the sixth most valuable public company on earth, trigger automatic S&P 500 inclusion discussions within months, and likely dominate institutional allocation budgets at a moment when OpenAI and Anthropic are both queuing up their own landmark listings. The IPO wave is building. And Bitget, for one, is not waiting for it to break.

 

Whatever optimism had crept back into crypto markets over the past two days got wiped out Thursday morning after President Trump's primetime address to the nation offered not a path to peace, but a harder line. Crypto fell. Stocks fell. Oil surged past $106. The familiar cycle repeated itself, for roughly the fifth or sixth time in five weeks.

 

Bitcoin dropped 3% to around $66,000, giving back the gains it had quietly built on Tuesday. Ethereum fell by a similar margin, sliding to $2,056. BNB shed 4.9% to $580, XRP lost 3.5% to $1.30, and Solana's SOL had the worst session of the major tokens, off 5.2% and now down roughly 13% on the week. It was an ugly morning across the board, and it felt awfully familiar.

 

A Rally Built on Hope, Not Reality

Tuesday had been, briefly, a good day. Trump had made offhand comments suggesting the Iran conflict could wrap up within weeks and that a formal deal was not necessarily a prerequisite for a resolution. That was enough. Asian equities surged 4%. S&P 500 futures climbed. Bitcoin pushed back toward $69,000. The crypto Fear and Greed Index, which had been pinned at single digits for weeks, got a bit of air.

 

Then came the Wednesday speech. In nearly 20 minutes, Trump outlined no real shift in Iran policy, offered no pathway to a ceasefire, and gave no timeline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the critical oil shipping lane that has been effectively closed since mid-March. He said the strait would reopen 'naturally' once hostilities subside. That was not what markets had priced in and our small rally just went away.

 

The Real Problem Underneath the Headlines

Analysts and traders increasingly point out that tracking Trump's daily commentary on Iran may be beside the point. The underlying oil market situation has been quietly deteriorating, independent of whatever the president says on any given afternoon. The International Energy Agency's member nations authorized the largest coordinated strategic petroleum reserve release in the organization's 50-year history, around 426 million barrels in total, to compensate for the near-shutdown of Hormuz flows. Those flows represent about 20% of the world's seaborne oil trade.

 

The problem is that those emergency reserves are expected to run dry within weeks. When that happens, the manageable shortfall of roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels per day could balloon to 10 or 11 million, which would be an entirely different kind of crisis. Ship insurance premiums for Hormuz transits remain elevated. Tanker traffic through the strait has not recovered. The real-world picture, independent of political statements, is not improving.

 

Going Nowhere Fast

Bitcoin has essentially traded between $60,000 and $73,000 for the entirety of the conflict, now entering its sixth week. It sells off on escalation headlines, bounces on de-escalation headlines, and ends up more or less where it started. The Fear and Greed Index has been stuck between 8 and 14 for a month, deep in extreme fear territory. The pattern has become almost mechanical at this point.

 

There are some who see reasons for cautious optimism, and they are not entirely without basis. April has historically been one of Bitcoin's stronger months, finishing green in 10 out of 15 years with an average gain of around 20.9%. Bitcoin also bounced clearly off two-month uptrend support near $60,000 last week and is attempting to reclaim its 50-day moving average. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen roughly $2.5 billion in net inflows over the past month, a sign that institutional interest has not collapsed. BlackRock noted this week that large investors are concentrating specifically in Bitcoin and Ether rather than spreading into the broader altcoin market.

 

But seasonality does not trade against a war. Until the conflict itself shows signs of genuinely unwinding, the pattern of hope, headline, reversal is unlikely to change. Wednesday was just another reminder of that.

 

The next few weeks will likely be decisive, not because of anything Trump says, but because of what happens with oil supply fundamentals that have been quietly building toward a breaking point regardless of the diplomatic noise.

 

Prediction markets used to be weird section of the internet where die-hard political junkies placed small bets on election outcomes. That version appears to be gone. According to new data from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, prediction markets have now cracked $20 billion in monthly trading volume, and the category driving most of that activity is not sports or elections but geopolitics.

 

That says something real about how the world has changed. Traders are no longer just wagering on who wins a Senate seat. They are pricing the odds of a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire, assessing the likelihood of a Chinese military action in Taiwan, and putting money on whether Iran's Supreme Leader survives the year. These are not just fringe markets. They are, increasingly, some of the most liquid on the entire platform landscape.

 

The shift reflects a broader transformation in how both retail and institutional participants are using prediction markets. According to TRM Labs, geopolitics now accounts for the majority of activity by volume, a reversal from even 18 months ago when political elections and sports dominated the leaderboard. The firm's report points to a world in which macro uncertainty, military escalation, and trade conflict have become reliable generators of trading interest.

 

The numbers behind this story are hard to argue with. The global prediction market industry processed roughly $63.5 billion in total notional trading volume across 2025, up from about $15.8 billion the year prior. Yes, that's correct...four times the amount. In a single year. In 2022, the entire sector did around $500 million. The growth is extraordinary.

 

Two platforms sit at the center of all this. Polymarket and Kalshi together accounted for approximately 97.5 percent of total industry volume in 2025, according to aggregated data tracked by multiple research outlets. Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated exchange backed by a $1 billion Series E led by Paradigm, processed over $23 billion in notional volume last year. Polymarket, the blockchain-based platform that operates globally and recently cleared its U.S. legal hurdles following the change in administration, brought in comparable figures, though some of its reported numbers are complicated by a structural double-counting issue flagged by Paradigm in December.

 

 

By February 2026, the combined monthly run rate for the two platforms had climbed to roughly $16.8 billion, with Kalshi accounting for about $9.8 billion of that and Polymarket the remaining $7 billion. At that pace, the sector is on track to top $200 billion in annual volume, with some forecasts reaching $325 billion if growth continues. A report cited by CNBC projects prediction markets could approach $1.1 trillion in annual volume by the end of the decade.

 

What makes the TRM Labs data particularly interesting is the composition of what is being traded. The firm has been tracking prediction market activity not just for volume but for what that volume reveals about where geopolitical risk is being priced. As the Ukraine conflict has dragged on and tariff uncertainty under the current U.S. administration has remained elevated, contracts tied to those outcomes have attracted serious capital. Russia-Ukraine ceasefire contracts on Polymarket have shifted repeatedly in response to diplomatic signals, functioning in a way that closely mirrors how traditional derivatives respond to macro news. Some institutional desks now watch these contracts alongside oil futures and sovereign bond spreads.

 

The Council on Foreign Relations noted earlier this year that prediction markets had demonstrated real forecasting credibility in a high-profile case. When the Trump administration was weighing strikes on Iran's nuclear program in mid-2025, many analysts dismissed the prospect as unlikely. Prediction markets assigned a 58 percent probability to strikes by the end of that week. Seven B-2 stealth bombers were already airborne.

 

That kind of accuracy does not happen every time, and anyone betting on these platforms should know that. Liquidity constraints still limit reliability on smaller or more obscure contracts, and the platforms have faced criticism over resolution disputes and rules design that has occasionally left winning bettors on the losing side. But on major geopolitical events where information is widely available and traders are motivated to get it right, the markets have shown a notable ability to aggregate collective judgment quickly.

 

The regulatory backdrop in the United States has shifted considerably in the past year. The Biden-era hostility to prediction markets has given way to a CFTC posture that is, by most accounts, far more permissive. Polymarket, which had been operating outside the U.S. and faced a federal investigation that included a raid on its founder's apartment, was cleared to operate domestically in late 2025. Kalshi, which had won its own legal battle over political markets in late 2024, has since integrated with Robinhood and Webull, putting its contracts in front of tens of millions of retail brokerage users.

 

The competition is intensifying. DraftKings and FanDuel have entered prediction markets, though analysts have suggested the two sports betting giants may have arrived too late to challenge Polymarket and Kalshi's entrenched liquidity. CertiK, the blockchain security firm, published a report in early 2026 flagging structural questions about sustainability once platform incentives fade, and noted that wash trading had inflated some Polymarket volumes in prior periods. Those are legitimate concerns for anyone trying to assess whether the sector's growth is as clean as the headline numbers suggest.

 

Still, the direction of travel is clear. Prediction markets have moved past the stage where they can be dismissed as a gambling novelty. The data from TRM Labs, taken alongside the broader market statistics, describes a financial layer that is increasingly responsive to the same forces that move bond markets and currency pairs. Geopolitics has always moved markets. What is new is that there is now a market specifically for geopolitics itself.

 

Franklin Templeton, one of the largest asset managers on the planet, has formally partnered with Ondo Finance to bring tokenized versions of its exchange-traded funds to blockchain networks, allowing investors to hold and trade exposure to traditional financial products directly through crypto wallets, at any hour of the day or night. The announcement, made Wednesday, marks a meaningful escalation in the firm's already aggressive push into digital asset infrastructure.

 

Under the arrangement, Ondo will purchase shares of five Franklin Templeton ETFs, including FFOG, FLQL, FDGL, FLHY, and INCE, then issue blockchain-based tokens through a special purpose vehicle. Those tokens pass along the economic exposure, so holders receive the return stream of the underlying fund but do not technically own the underlying shares directly. Liquidity will be supported by Ondo's network of market makers, including during windows when traditional exchanges are closed.

The platform powering this is Ondo Global Markets, which launched in September 2025 and has already reported more than $620 million in total value locked and north of $12 billion in cumulative trading volume across roughly 60,000 users. That kind of traction, relatively early in its life, helps explain why Franklin Templeton was willing to put its name on this deal.

Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton's head of innovation, framed the initial ETF lineup in straightforward terms: the chosen funds offer a broad mix of exposures and a useful test case to see what actually resonates with a new audience. The products will initially be available in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. U.S. availability, the firm said, hinges on further regulatory clarity around how third parties can distribute registered funds on-chain.

 

Making Moves

For those tracking Franklin Templeton's blockchain strategy, this is less a sudden pivot and more the next logical chapter. The firm launched its Benji Technology Platform back in 2021 and with it the first U.S.-registered money market fund to run on a public blockchain, the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. That fund has since grown to $557 million in assets as of February 2026, not a trivial number for a product built on infrastructure that most institutional investors were still treating with skepticism just a few years ago.

Kaul also made waves at the Ondo Summit in New York in February, where she argued that the next evolution of asset management would be what she called "wallet-native": a world where stocks, bonds, private funds, and more are all held and managed through tokenized digital wallets rather than fragmented across brokerage accounts, banks, and paper records. The Franklin Templeton-Ondo partnership is a direct expression of that vision, and it is now live.

 

The Race Is On

Franklin Templeton is not operating in a vacuum. BlackRock's BUIDL fund has surpassed $2 billion in assets under management. JPMorgan rolled out its My OnChain Net Yield Fund on Ethereum late last year, crossing $100 million in short order. WisdomTree and Fidelity have both signaled similar intentions. And just this week, the New York Stock Exchange announced a partnership with Securitize to enable tokenized securities trading on its platform. The momentum is real and it is accelerating.

For Ondo, landing Franklin Templeton as a partner is a significant credibility stamp. The firm's ONDO token carries a market cap above $1.2 billion, and the broader real-world asset tokenization market has grown to over $15 billion in total assets according to RWA data, up sharply over the past year. The question now is whether tokenized fund structures can attract meaningful adoption beyond the crypto-native crowd that already lives in wallets.

 

 

What This All Means

None of this is without complication. Tokenized ETFs do not immunize investors from market volatility. Bitcoin hit an all-time high near $126,000 in October 2025 and was trading around $70,500 by late March 2026. Easy access to assets at any hour cuts both ways. Regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. remains a genuine constraint, with questions around compliance, investor identification, and how registered funds interact with decentralized infrastructure still unsettled.

Franklin Templeton has also partnered with Binance to allow tokenized fund shares to serve as collateral for institutional trades, which introduces new connections between regulated finance and crypto exchange infrastructure. That might be efficient under normal conditions, but critics will rightly note that interconnected systems have a history of amplifying stress in bad times. The 2022 crypto collapse left lessons that the industry has not fully metabolized.

Still, when a firm managing $1.7 trillion commits to blockchain as a primary distribution channel rather than a side experiment, competitors pay attention. The walls between traditional finance and crypto markets are getting thinner fast, and the Franklin Templeton-Ondo deal may end up being one of the more consequential ones to watch as this story unfolds.

 

Bitcoin climbed back toward the $72,000 mark Wednesday as the derivatives market showed telltale signs of growing leverage, putting traders on alert for sharp moves in either direction. The world's largest cryptocurrency rose roughly 1.2% after midnight UTC, mirroring gains across U.S. equity futures, with the Nasdaq 100 up around 1% over the same window. BTC was last seen trading near $71,300, well within the choppy $69,000 to $76,000 band that has defined the market for much of March.

 

The session's gains carried a cautionary undertone. Futures open interest in bitcoin has climbed to a one-week high, driven in large part by short positioning rather than fresh bullish conviction. Traders who have seen BTC get turned away from $72,000 repeatedly appear to be leaning into those rejections rather than chasing a breakout. Funding rates and cumulative volume delta have stayed flat to muted, two readings that analysts typically cite when the OI build is defensive in nature rather than a signal of aggressive dip-buying.

 

$14 Billion Options Expiry Looms Large

The backdrop sharpens considerably when you factor in what is sitting on the calendar for Friday. Deribit, the dominant crypto options venue, is set to settle roughly $14.16 billion in bitcoin contracts at 08:00 UTC on March 27, a figure that accounts for nearly 40% of all open interest on the exchange. The quarterly event is the single largest derivatives settlement of Q1 2026, and it arrives with a specific price level commanding outsized attention.

 

That level is $75,000. According to Deribit, max pain for this Friday's expiry sits right there, meaning it is the price at which the highest number of contracts expire worthless and option writers, typically large funds and institutional players, would owe the least. Deribit Chief Commercial Officer Jean-David Pequignot described the dynamic as a gravitational pull, noting that delta-hedging activity by market makers historically nudges spot prices toward that pain threshold in the hours leading up to settlement.

 

The gap between where bitcoin is trading now and $75,000 is not trivial, a roughly 5% move from current levels. Whether max pain theory ultimately delivers on that gravitational pull remains a matter of debate even inside the industry. But with nearly 40% of Deribit's open interest scheduled to roll off in one session, the mechanical hedging flows alone are worth watching closely.

 

Altcoins Showing Stronger Positioning

While Bitcoin grinds sideways with mounting leverage, a more constructive picture is forming in parts of the altcoin market. Ethereum open interest has climbed to multi-month highs, and the positioning profile looks more directionally bullish than what is currently visible in BTC futures. DeFi-adjacent tokens and AI infrastructure projects are outperforming Bitcoin on a short-term basis, with the CoinDesk Computing Select Index, which tracks TAO, FET, and Chainlink, rising about 1.9% Wednesday to lead all major benchmarks.

 

Chainlink alone accounts for roughly 62% of that index and added 1.5% on the day, while TAO and FET posted gains of 4.9% and 2.9% respectively. The broader CoinDesk 20 benchmark gained around 0.9%, with the altcoin-heavy CoinDesk 80 generally outpacing the bitcoin-heavy CoinDesk 5. The pattern suggests that risk appetite has not evaporated, it is simply migrating toward names where there is clearer near-term narrative momentum.

 

A Market Trapped Between Catalysts

Zoom out and the picture gets harder to trade comfortably. Bitcoin is on pace to close March in the red, which would extend a losing or flat monthly streak to six consecutive months, the longest such run since the 2022 bear market. The final week of the month carries several potential catalysts, including the U.S. Personal Consumption Expenditures data on March 28, which could shift rate-cut expectations and send ripples through risk assets.

 

For now, the market appears to be threading a needle between a derivatives setup that could pull prices higher ahead of Friday and a macro backdrop that has not yet given bulls a clean reason to push through resistance with conviction. Rising open interest without corresponding spot demand and funding is historically the kind of configuration that resolves violently, though the direction is rarely obvious until it starts moving. With $14 billion in contracts settling in roughly 48 hours, the next few sessions aren't looking to be very quiet.

 

Bitcoin surged to $71,200 on Monday as investors are optimisitc on de-escalation of the Iran conflict.

 

The move started when President Trump posted on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of War to postpone planned strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days, following what he called "very good and productive" talks with Tehran. Crypto jumped roughly 5% on the news. Ether climbed above $2,100, BNB pushed through $650, and XRP traded above $1.40. Oil plunged around 11%, S&P 500 futures gained nearly 4%, and global markets added an estimated $2.5 trillion in value within about 20 minutes.

 

Then Iran's state-affiliated Fars News Agency cited an unidentified source denying any talks had taken place. Gains started reversing almost immediately. Bitcoin is now up about 2.5% on the day and down roughly 5% on the week, sitting just under $71,000 after hitting an intraday high of $71,224 per CoinGecko data.

 

The session is the latest chapter in a conflict that has rattled crypto markets since Operation Epic Fury launched on February 28, when the U.S. and Israel struck targets across Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran's subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global oil flows, has kept energy prices elevated and risk appetite suppressed. The Federal Reserve, meeting earlier this month against that backdrop, revised its 2026 inflation forecast upward to 2.7% and signaled a higher-for-longer stance on rates.

 

Despite the chaos, Bitcoin has held above its pre-war price level, a fact that has not gone unnoticed. When the strikes began on a Saturday morning and every traditional market was closed, crypto was the only liquid venue available for investors to respond. That 24/7 trading reality, once seen as a volatility risk, has started looking more like a feature.

 

The five-day pause, if it holds at all, does not end the conflict. Iran continues to strike targets across the Gulf, and Israel would need to sign on to any broader ceasefire. Israel has publicly said it has thousands of remaining targets and requires at least three more weeks of operations. Prediction markets currently favor a ceasefire by late April at the earliest.

 

Bitcoin's 30-day implied volatility index has bounced to 60%, and $791 million in total leveraged positions have been wiped across crypto markets this session according to CoinGlass, with $425 million of those being longs. The clock on Trump's five-day window is ticking, and so is the market's patience.

Six years in, Solana still can't quite shake the casino label. And honestly, it probably never will, at least not completely. The chain that gave the world the $TRUMP memecoin, the $LIBRA debacle, and a near-endless stream of cartoon animal tokens processed somewhere close to 30% of its average monthly DEX volume in 2025 through memecoin activity alone, according to Blockworks data. But now, with over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks already live on-chain through Ondo Finance, and Visa, PayPal, and WisdomTree all building on the network, Solana's identity crisis may be ending, not by ditching memecoins, but by absorbing institutional finance alongside them.

In January 2026, Ondo Finance pushed more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onto Solana. Not synthetic proxies, not wrapped derivatives, but actual securities, backed 1:1 by shares held with U.S.-registered broker-dealers, accessible on-chain 24 hours a day, five days a week for minting and redemption, and transferable around the clock

 

A month later, WisdomTree followed with its full suite of regulated tokenized funds. Visa confirmed U.S. banks were settling transactions with it over Solana in USDC. Worldpay said it would let merchants settle in USDG on the same network. PayPal positioned PYUSD on Solana for faster, cheaper commerce flows.

 

The memecoin chain is becoming something else. Or rather...and this is the more accurate framing, it's becoming something more.

 

 

A Sixth Birthday, a Changed Ecosystem
Solana launched in March 2020, built on a proof-of-history consensus mechanism that promised transaction throughput orders of magnitude faster than Ethereum at the time. Its early years were defined by the NFT boom, DeFi summer spillover, and a catastrophic near-death experience when the FTX collapse in late 2022 wiped out a major backer and sent SOL's price into the floor.

The recovery was messy and improbable, fueled partly by a genuine developer community and partly by retail investors who found Solana's low fees and fast finality well-suited to trading junk tokens at high velocity.

 

By 2024 and into 2025, the memecoin supercycle reached its apex on Solana. The pump.fun launchpad became the chain's most-used application by fee revenue for stretches of time. Hundreds of tokens named after pets, politicians, and pop culture references launched and died there every week.

So when institutions started showing up with serious capital and serious products, the natural question was: why here?

 

 

Ondo's Gamble
Ondo Finance's expansion to Solana appears to be a structural argument about where capital markets are going.

The company, which became the largest real-world asset issuer on Solana by asset count with the January launch, brought its Global Markets platform to the network after testing it on Ethereum and BNB Chain. The catalog covers technology and growth stocks, blue-chip equities, broad-market and sector ETFs, and commodity-linked products. 

Under Ondo's structure, token holders get economic exposure to publicly traded securities, including dividends, but do not hold direct shareholder rights in the underlying companies. The actual stocks and any cash in transit sit with U.S.-registered broker-dealers. The blockchain handles the movement layer: how tokens transfer, how positions clear, how compliance rules travel with the asset rather than being enforced at the application level.

The execution numbers that preceded the launch are worth noting. Before going live, Ondo ran tests showing $500,000 in tokenized Google shares trading on-chain with just 0.03% slippage and pricing that matched traditional exchange-traded equivalents. Total transaction costs for large trades came in under $102, a figure that compares favorably to conventional brokerage costs at similar volumes.

Ian De Bode, president of Ondo Finance, put it directly when the Solana expansion went live: liquidity depth and asset selection from existing versions of tokenized stocks had remained limited, and Ondo's model was designed to address that gap by bringing liquidity inherited from traditional exchange venues into an on-chain catalog.

Tokenized equities existed before Ondo's Solana launch, but they were thinly traded, narrowly available, and difficult to discover for the average crypto-native user. Ondo's integration with Jupiter, Solana's primary DEX aggregator, changed the distribution equation. Suddenly, the same wallets and interfaces people were using to buy memecoins could also pull up tokenized Apple or tokenized SPY.

 

 

The Institutional Path Becomes Clearer
WisdomTree's move a week after Ondo's launch was in some ways even more revealing about how institutional finance is thinking about Solana.

The New York-based asset manager extended its full suite of regulated tokenized funds to Solana through its WisdomTree Connect institutional platform and its WisdomTree Prime retail app.

 

That means money market, equity, fixed-income, alternatives, and asset allocation products are now natively mintable on the network.

Maredith Hannon, WisdomTree's head of business development for digital assets, framed the move as a direct response to Solana's technical characteristics: high transaction speeds and the ability to meet growing crypto-native demand while maintaining the regulatory standards institutions expect. Nick Ducoff of the Solana Foundation noted that RWAs on the network had already surpassed $1 billion before WisdomTree's arrival, and that the asset manager's expansion reflected both demand for tokenized RWAs and Solana's demonstrated ability to support that demand at scale.

What WisdomTree's entry signals, beyond the product itself, is that the 'sterile environment' theory of institutional adoption was wrong. Traditional finance did not wait for Solana to become culturally palatable before moving in. The infrastructure made sense regardless of what else was happening on the network, and the institutional clients accessing these funds through WisdomTree Connect are unlikely to lose sleep over what else is trading at the same time in the same ecosystem.

 

 

Payments, Stablecoins, and the Scale Argument
The tokenized securities story makes more sense when you look at what the payments data was already showing heading into early 2026.

In February 2026, Solana processed more than $650 billion in stablecoin transactions, more than double its previous monthly record, according to figures cited in the network's payments report. Stablecoin supply on Solana exceeded $15 billion. These are the type of money-like flows at a scale that makes the 'financial rail' framing not just plausible but arguably already accurate.

Visa is settling with U.S. banks in USDC over Solana. Worldpay is building merchant settlement in USDG on the same network. PayPal has positioned PYUSD on Solana specifically for commerce use cases, much faster and cheaper than alternative rails. Citi and PwC have been exploring the tokenization of bills of exchange for trade finance using Solana infrastructure.

None of these companies needed Solana's memecoin reputation to disappear before they could act. They needed speed, cost efficiency, and liquidity, things the network already provides at scale.

 

 

The Numbers Behind the Narrative
A few data points help ground what's actually happening against the broader tokenization landscape.

Ethereum still leads the on-chain RWA market by a significant margin, holding around $15.6 billion in tokenized asset value excluding stablecoins, according to RWA.xyz data. Solana sat at roughly $1.84 billion, with BNB Chain between the two at approximately $2.95 billion.

But the relevant number may not be total asset value so much as distribution. RWA.xyz shows about 91.6% of Solana's tokenized asset value, approximately $1.68 billion of the $1.84 billion, in distributed, portable on-chain form. Monthly RWA transfer volume on the network exceeded $2 billion. For context, the entire tokenized stocks category across all chains carries a market cap of around $1.08 billion, with monthly transfer volume of roughly $2.3 billion. Ondo alone holds about $644 million of that, representing roughly 60% platform market share.

Those figures suggest the assets that are on Solana are actually moving and not sitting idle in wallets. This is a huge distintion when evaluating whether tokenization on the network is functional infrastructure or performative positioning.

Part of what makes the institutional push on Solana legible is that the regulatory environment shifted in a meaningful way in early 2026.

On March 5, the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and OCC jointly stated that eligible tokenized securities should receive the same capital treatment as non-tokenized equivalents. For years, one of the institutional barriers to holding tokenized assets was the regulatory uncertainty around capital requirements. Banks considering tokenized securities as part of their balance sheet couldn't get a clear read on whether doing so would attract punitive capital charges relative to holding the conventional version of the same instrument.

The SEC's decision to grant special relief allowing intraday trading in tokenized shares of WisdomTree's money market fund points in the same direction. 

 

 

The $2 Trillion Horizon
The projections for tokenized assets are substantial, and they come from sources that aren't in the habit of WAGMI, moon-shot hype.

McKinsey's base case puts tokenized asset value at roughly $2 trillion by 2030, with a range running from $1 trillion to $4 trillion depending on adoption pace. BCG has estimated that tokenized fund AUM alone could exceed $600 billion by the same date. Citi's stablecoin outlook, published in early 2025, projected $1.9 trillion in base-case stablecoin issuance by 2030 and a bull case of $4 trillion, with potential transaction activity hitting between $100 trillion and $200 trillion.

These projections share a common assumption: blockchains transition from being primarily an asset class (something to invest in) to being market infrastructure (something to run finance through). If that transition happens at anything like the projected scale, the networks with the most liquid, most accessible, and most developer-friendly infrastructure stand to capture a disproportionate share of the flow.

Solana's combination of throughput, low fees, and a large existing retail user base that's already comfortable navigating on-chain interfaces makes it a serious contender for that infrastructure role. The 3.2 million daily active users that Solana was citing around the time of the Ondo launch aren't a demographic institutions typically associate with capital markets access. And that may be the whole point.

 

 

What This Means for Solana
On one end, you have high-velocity, high-risk memecoin trading, the casino slot machine that gave the network its reputation. On the other end, you have regulated, compliance-embedded tokenized securities and institutional payment rails. And it seem that the two ends don't appear to be in direct conflict with each other. They use the same settlement layer, pay the same validators, and contribute to the same liquidity depth.

Whether that coexistence holds as institutional volume grows is an open question. There are scenarios where the reputational bleed from high-profile memecoin controversies creates friction for institutional deployment. There are also scenarios where the retail liquidity generated by the casino side of the network ends up being exactly the kind of distribution depth that makes tokenized equities viable in a way they haven't been elsewhere.

For now, the market appears to be betting on the latter. The capital allocation decisions of Ondo, WisdomTree, Visa, Worldpay, PayPal, and Citi, all happening in just a span of a couple months, represent a pretty explicit vote of confidence in the coexistence model.

Solana turned six this month. It's survived an exchange collapse that should have killed it, rebuilt a developer ecosystem that most people wrote off, and navigated a memecoin supercycle that burnished and tarnished its reputation in roughly equal measure.

The tokenized stocks development isn't a pivot or rebrand...it's more of an expansion. The network didn't stop being what it was to become something new, it added a whole other layer on top of an already messy, active, genuinely liquid base. That's not the way institutional infrastructure is supposed to develop, according to the conventional playbook.

But the conventional playbook was written before $650 billion in monthly stablecoin volume was possible on a chain that also hosts a token called $BONK. 

 

Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have attracted roughly $1.7 billion in net inflows since February 24, ending a prolonged stretch of redemptions and renewing confidence that institutional buyers are stepping back in.

 

The reversal has been sharp. After months of steady outflows, nearly every major U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF is now recording net positive flows for 2026. That matters because ETF flow data has become, more than any other metric, the closest thing to a real-time read on institutional sentiment toward Bitcoin.

 

BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) is doing most of the heavy lifting. On March 4 alone, IBIT absorbed $306.60 million, roughly 66% of that day's total inflows across all spot Bitcoin products. Since February 24, BlackRock has accumulated a net 21,814 BTC through the fund, valued at approximately $1.55 billion at current prices. Year-to-date, IBIT has added around $300 million in capital even as Bitcoin itself fell about 16% over the same period.

 

The timing is notable. Bitcoin has traded around $72,000 this week, bouncing from lows near $60,000 earlier in the year. That low represented a roughly 52% pullback from its all-time high of $122,000 reached last year — a correction that, by historical standards, was relatively contained. Past cycles saw declines of 80% to 90% from peak. The smaller drawdown this cycle has been widely attributed to the stabilizing influence of institutional ownership through regulated vehicles.

 

The inflow pattern itself tells a story. Exchange balances have stayed relatively flat while ETF custodians accumulate, suggesting the capital flowing in isn't being deployed through spot crypto exchanges. These are investors using traditional brokerage accounts and registered vehicles, the pension funds, registered investment advisors, and wealth managers who entered the market only after last year's ETF approvals made it operationally feasible.

 

Three consecutive days of $1.1 billion in net inflows at the end of February set the pace. IBIT alone captured roughly $652 million over that stretch. Fidelity's FBTC and Ark Invest's ARKB recorded positive flows too, though significantly smaller.

 

Whether the inflow trend holds depends partly on what happens at the Federal Reserve. On March 18, the Fed will announce its latest interest rate decision. Markets have been pricing in at least a pause in rate hikes after the central bank eased its tightening stance in late 2025, and any signal of cuts could accelerate flows into risk assets including crypto.

 

There's also the regulatory backdrop. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, which would formally divide crypto assets into SEC-regulated securities and CFTC-regulated commodities, remains stalled in the Senate after a markup was delayed in January with no rescheduled date. Clarity on that front would likely deepen institutional participation further. Until then, ETF flows remain the clearest signal of where the institutional money is going.

 

Right now, it's going into Bitcoin.

 

Image credit: Binance.com

 

 

Strategy, the world's largest public holder of Bitcoin, has deepened its Bitcoin bet, completing its 101st Bitcoin purchase. 

 

According to a filing made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday of this week, Strategy acquired 3,015 bitcoins for $204.1 million last week.

 

Based on information available on the US SEC website, the average purchase price for this transaction was $67,700 per BTC, below the company's average acquisition price of $75,985. With this latest purchase, Strategy now has total Bitcoin holdings of 720,737 BTC.

 

Image credit: sec.gov

Saylor’s Long-Term Bitcoin Strategy

Michael Saylor, often regarded as the Bitcoin bull, has long been one of the strongest advocates of Bitcoin's long-term value. His belief system was first made public in August 2020 when his company, Strategy, purchased 21,454 Bitcoins for about $250 million. 

 

Rather than continue holding traditional assets in its treasury, Strategy announced it would be making Bitcoin a core part of its treasury reserve. 

 

Regarding this 2020 purchase, Saylor himself said: 

 

"This investment reflects our belief that bitcoin, as the world's most widely adopted cryptocurrency, is a dependable store of value and an attractive investment asset with more long-term appreciation potential than holding cash." 

 

Since that day, Strategy has steadily accumulated Bitcoin, even during bearish market seasons. 

 

To understand Strategy's stacking strategy, here is an overview of how it has accumulated Bitcoin over the last six years:

 

2020: Acquired 70,470 BTC (started Aug. 11 with the first purchase of 21,454 BTC; reached total holdings of 70,470 by Dec. 21)

2021: Acquired 53,921 BTC (total holdings reached 124,391 BTC by Dec. 30).

2022: Acquired 8,109 BTC (total holdings reached 132,500 BTC by year-end).

2023: Acquired 56,650 BTC (total holdings reached 189,150 BTC by Dec. 26).

2024: Acquired 257,250 BTC (total holdings reached 446,400 BTC by Dec. 30).

2025: Acquired 226,097 BTC (total holdings reached 672,497 BTC by Dec. 29).

2026: Has acquired 48,240 BTC, with total holdings reaching 720,737 BTC.

 

By steadily acquiring Bitcoin through open-market transactions, Strategy has cemented its position as the world's largest public holder of Bitcoin, making these purchases in a way that does not cause any short-term imbalance in the crypto market.

 

 

How the Market Reacted

Upon the announcement of this news, MicroStrategy's common stock (MSTR) experienced an uptick, jumping from $123 last Monday to $129 on Friday, a 4.7% increase. 

The biggest gain for the MSTR stock, however, occurred on Wednesday, when it rose to $135. This increase suggests renewed investor confidence in Saylor's bitcoin purchase strategy. Even in bearish market conditions, Saylor's vision for Bitcoin remains unchanged.

 

Image credit: investing.com

 

Despite experiencing sharper selling pressure in February, with its price falling 14.8% to 15% from its January closing price of $78,621, Bitcoin experienced a slight uptick in its price, rising from $64,000 last Monday to $65,000 by Friday of last week.