Crypto
A bronze statue of “Satoshi Nakamoto”
A bronze statue of Satoshi Nakamoto (Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images)
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Bitcoin treasury firm Nakamoto bought high and sold much, much lower as bitcoin suffers another bad quarter

Bitcoin is on track to close the first quarter of 2026 down more than 24%.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Things are looking bleak for bitcoin again, as it’s down 1.8% in the past 24 hours and on track to close the first quarter of 2026 down more than 24%, its worst quarter since 2022, CoinGlass data shows.

On Tuesday morning, Bitcoin saw a tiny bump following reports that President Trump intended to end the conflict in the Middle East, but it quickly lost those gains, and as of writing, it’s down 0.57% for the month, setting it up for its sixth consecutive month in the red and its first-ever triple red start of the year.  

Things are looking bleak too for bitcoin treasury firm Nakamoto, which has failed to rise above $1 a share since it got a delisting warning notice from Nasdaq in December. In March, it sold 284 bitcoin for $20 million, at $70,422, well below its $118,171 average cost (a 40% cut), according to a 10-K filing yesterday. The company, which went public in August, said it plans to use the proceeds “to invest further in our businesses as well [as] replenish our working capital for costs associated with the recent mergers.” Investors seemed to like the move, as shares were up about 2% in early trading. But the shares are down over 41% year to date.

Nic Puckrin, cofounder and CEO of Coin Bureau, told Sherwood News that cracks are beginning to show in the digital asset treasury (DAT) market, and Nakamoto may be the first of many to offload some of its bitcoin at a loss as the bear market drags on.

“There is real contagion risk here,” Puckrin said, adding that bitcoin’s ongoing weakness would put further pressure on DATs, which could in turn exacerbate the sell-off.

Meanwhile, macro and geopolitical drivers continue to shape bitcoin’s trajectory, still stuck in a tight range and seemingly unable to break either way.

Kyle Rodda, senior market analyst at Capital.com, told Sherwood that the technicals dont look great yet, as the downtrend is still intact “and it looks like bitcoin wants to break lower.”

Key levels Rodda is watching remain $60,000 and $74,000.

Rodda BTC chart March
(Credit: Kyle Rodda)

“We need a decisive break and hold above that level before feeling more confident the bottom is in,” Rodda said.

Andri Fauzan Adziima, research lead at Bitrue, said that key levels he’s watching this week include immediate support between $65,500 and $67,800 (Fibonacci retracements and recent lows) and stronger defense near $65,000.

Meanwhile, he said that resistance looms at the $69,800 to $70,000 level, then $71,500 to $72,500 (former support now overhead and 50-day exponential moving average zone), but failure to hold $66,000 risks a deeper correction in the current neutral to cautious setup.

In a bit of a silver lining, bitcoin ETFs saw (minuscule) inflows, registering $69.4 million in inflows on Monday, bringing the overall month to $1.2 billion, per SoSoValue.

Finally, another optimistic factor is that one month into the Iran war, bitcoin performed better than gold (down 13% this month) and the S&P 500 (down 6.2%).

Justin D’Anethan, head of research at Arctic Digital, told Sherwood that the current range feels tighter than it looks when you factor in thin weekend liquidity and how it absorbed the latest Iran escalation — “with retracement, sure, but without cracking like equities did.”

“The mid-60s seem to be like an accumulation level. Realistically, this is still macro-driven. Unless this is a major bluff by the US, with troops landing in Iran, it feels unlikely that this conflict will get resolved soon, and that will keep investors sober,” D’Anethan said.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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