A member of idol group Kasotsuka Shojo (Virtual Currency Girls) wearing a bitcoin mask (Kazuhiro Nogi/Getty Images)

Analyst: “We are now clearly in a bull market phase” as bitcoin hits highest level since February

So far this month, bitcoin is up nearly 15%, surpassing April’s historical average.

Bitcoin jumped past $78,500 Wednesday, its highest level since early February. The asset is up 3% over the past 24 hours as optimism builds following President Trump’s extension of the ceasefire with Iran. So far this month, bitcoin is up 14.77%, surpassing April’s historical average of 11.47%, according to CoinGlass.

Underscoring the enthusiasm, CoinMarketCap’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index stands at 62 (greed), its highest level since late July.

“We are now clearly in a bull market phase, characterized by the market shrugging off negative news, including the re-closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the very recent record DeFi hack of 2026, where $300 million was stolen from KelpDAO. Despite both events occurring only in the past week, bitcoin is breaching new levels and sits at a more than two-month high,” Ishmael Asad, a research analyst at Bitwise, told Sherwood News.

Several analysts echoed the bullish sentiment, citing the realized price as a gauge for a potential upward trajectory.

Zach Pandl, Grayscale head of research, wrote in a post that as the realized price for bitcoin transacted over the last one to three months stands at $74,000, recent buyers are back to breakeven. He added that bitcoin moving higher would indicate that more recent buyers would move into positive profit and loss, a potential signal of the start of a bull market.

Pandl told Sherwood that we are seeing increasing evidence that bitcoin has put in a durable bottom.

“A sustained break above $80K would increase our conviction further. From a fundamental standpoint, progress on the CLARITY Act in the US Senate may hold the key,” Pandl said.

Wave Digital Assets’ head of international portfolio management, Rajiv Sawhney, told Sherwood that the rally was off the back of Trump extending the ceasefire indefinitely, as the market continues to treat these extensions as a path toward eventual resolution rather than a binary risk.

“Hence, outside of total war escalation, any negotiations or prospects for negotiations are, in general, priced into an eventual-resolution end state,” Sawhney said.

Sawhney added, however, that the KelpDAO hack and its knock-on secondary effects remain an overhang for crypto, as lending on Aave, the largest DeFi money market protocol, remains in limbo.

“As such, while BTC may be able to contend with a move higher towards $80K, the broader cryptocurrency complex may not necessarily follow suit,” he said.

Finally, bitcoin ETFs continue to stay in the green, though recording a meager $11.84 million in inflows on Tuesday, stemming solely from BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, the Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust ETF, and the newly launched Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust.

In April, bitcoin ETFs have registered $1.87 billion in inflows, their best month since October.

Lacie Zhang, a research analyst at Bitget Wallet, told Sherwood that the near-term setup looks constructive, with expectations for bitcoin to trade within the $75,000 to $90,000 range in the coming weeks. A move toward the upper end depends on sustained institutional inflows and continued macro stability.

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On Saturday, ethereum-based protocol KelpDAO, known for liquid restaking, was exploited for $290 million, the largest hack of 2026 in the decentralized finance ecosystem.

“Preliminary indicators suggest attribution to a highly-sophisticated state actor, likely DPRK’s Lazarus Group,” LayerZero said in its statement explaining the attack. KelpDAO issues rsETH, while LayerZero provides network infrastructure that allows users to move KelpDAO’s rsETH between blockchains.

The configuration of KelpDAO’s exploited application, powered by LayerZero, relied on a single decentralized verifier network (DVN), responsible for verifying the integrity of cross-chain messages.

The industry best practice is for protocols to use a multi-DVN setup to prevent a unilateral point of trust or failure. “A properly hardened configuration would have required consensus across multiple independent DVNs, rendering this attack ineffective even in the event of any single DVN being compromised,” LayerZero stated, essentially placing the blame on the restaking protocol for using a single-DVN setup.

The exploiters executed an RPC-spoofing attack and performed DDoS attacks to manipulate the single DVN instance into confirming transactions “that never in fact took place.” The LayerZero team said, “Operating a single-point-of-failure configuration meant there was no independent verifier to catch and reject a forged message.”

Meanwhile, KelpDAO is preparing to dispute LayerZero’s account and place the blame on the latter, per a CoinDesk report.

Spilling over

The exploit has since impacted the wider crypto landscape.

The attackers successfully drained 116,500 rsETH from KelpDAO’s bridge, allowing them to deposit $249.7 million of the token to DeFi’s largest lending protocols and withdraw $228.2 million worth of different cryptocurrencies, wETH and wstETH, on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence shows.

Aave, the largest lending protocol, has frozen several markets and is now facing a liquidity crunch.

On Aave’s v3, the ETH, USDT, and USDC markets, which have a combined reserve size of $10.7 billion, have each reached a 100% utilization rate, as total borrowed equals total supplied. When borrows are maxed, users cannot withdraw their supplied liquidity.

The pseudonymous head of strategy at DeFi lending platform Spark, @MonetSupply, wrote on X, “There has been a ~$300 million increase in borrowing with USDT collateral in just the past day since the rsETH exploit.”

On-chain folks are spooked

The attack comes in the same month that Drift, a solana-based trading venue, suffered from an over $270 million hack. Saturday’s attack also follows worries stemming from Anthropic’s unreleased AI model Mythos, which “is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system.”

Even though the major cryptocurrencies have not seen their prices move substantially in the last 24 hours, crypto participants have been spooked, evident by the capital exiting the decentralized finance ecosystem.

DeFi saw its total value locked decrease by $13 billion over the weekend to $85.64 billion at the time of writing, its lowest point since April last year, data from DefiLlama shows.

“OK — Kelpdao hacker, how much you want? Let’s just talk. With KelpDAO’s help, of course. It’s simply not worth it to sacrifice both Aave and KelpDAO and let them go down over this hack. You can’t spend $300 million anyway,” said Justin Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, who has been beefing with the President Trump-backed World Liberty team.

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Bitcoin jumps to highest level since February, boosted by optimism over reopening of Strait of Hormuz

Bitcoin finally broke out of the tight range it’s been stuck in for weeks, rising to just below the $78,000 mark, a level not reached since early February, as risk-on sentiment floods back into the market.

The jump comes on the heels of Iran and the US announcing the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on Friday morning, which sent oil prices down and the stock market higher.

The renewed optimism for a deal with Iran and the end of the Middle East conflict also sent crypto stocks jumping, with Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, up more than 13% late Friday morning.

Wave Digital Assets’ head of international portfolio management, Rajiv Sawhney, told Sherwood News that it’s all about the Strait of Hormuz. “Markets are interpreting it as a win. It’s a knee-jerk reaction given positioning and expectations. As such, while bitcoin was able to tick higher, the $80K level will be the real barometer we need to cross for me to feel confident that this relief rally has legs,” he said, adding that until then, he’s remaining cautiously optimistic that risk assets can close at these levels.

Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood that we’re seeing a classic short squeeze as heavy short positions in bitcoin are being liquidated, adding that the next resistance level to watch is $79,000.

“If we get past that and close the week above this level, $90k becomes a real possibility in the medium term. However, if the rally gets rejected at this level, we could remain stuck in the range between $65k and $75k that held bitcoin hostage for months,” Puckrin added.

Underscoring the cautious comeback, Bloomberg reported that from a derivatives market perspective, “traders remain largely defensive.”

“Funding rates for perpetual futures contracts, a key measure of whether leveraged traders are betting on higher or lower prices, were negative. Hefty premiums are also being paid for put options providing downside protections at $60,000 and $50,000, respectively,” Bloomberg reported.

Bitfinex analysts told Sherwood that the liquidation heat map shows dense shorts leverage stacked between $76,000 and $78,000.

“Clearing this range opens a substantial air gap in the unspent realized price distribution up to $82,000,” they said, adding that the next level they are watching is $83,000, a “significant wall at the short-term holder realized price.”

Analyst: “We are now clearly in a bull market phase” as bitcoin hits highest level since February

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