Bitcoin is $86,249 this morning, up 5.8% in a day and its highest price since January. On 16 September, the day after the Senate voted down the CLARITY Act 49 to 50, it was $75,682. Since then the Federal Reserve has raised rates for the first time since 2023, with the Bank of Japan following two days later.

Benjamin Cowen, one of the most followed chart analysts in crypto, spent the year arguing bitcoin had one more fall coming and would bottom in early October. On Monday he posted "I was wrong."

So who bought? Glassnode, which watches coins move on and off exchanges, says spot buyers did the work. The people trading on exchanges went from net sellers to net buyers, and volume rose with the price.

Monday's jump also forced out the people betting against it. The data firm CoinGlass counted at least $750 million of bets made with borrowed money closed by force in 24 hours, most of them bets that bitcoin would fall.

Strategy, the company that used to be MicroStrategy, bought another 950 bitcoin for $76 million. It now holds 846,000, about 4% of all the bitcoin there will ever be.

Two readings point the other way. The US bitcoin ETFs ended last week about flat, so the big funds haven't driven this. And the amount of borrowed money riding on bitcoin futures is above its normal range, and so is the fee people pay to keep those bets open.

So real buyers drove this into a Fed that is still raising rates, and that is the stronger kind of rally. The people who borrowed to chase it are the ones who get forced out fast.

Fear and Greed read 78 this morning, Extreme Greed, up from 50 on Thursday. If you own bitcoin, this is a week to know what you'd do at $80,000 as well as at $90,000.

US federal prosecutors are investigating whether Binance broke American sanctions on Iran by letting certain transactions go through, Bloomberg reported on Monday night. The Manhattan US attorney's office is leading it, with the Justice Department's criminal division alongside. Binance is the largest crypto exchange in the world.

An investigation is not a charge, but Binance has been here before. In 2023 it pleaded guilty to US anti-money-laundering and sanctions violations and paid $4.3 billion. Its founder Changpeng Zhao served four months in prison before President Trump pardoned him last October.

If you keep coins on Binance, nothing changes today. What changes is that prosecutors could hand Binance a second set of conditions on top of the first, at the venue where more of the world's crypto trades than anywhere else.

The European Central Bank switched on Pontes on Monday, a system that lets banks settle trades in tokenized assets with central bank money rather than a bank deposit or a stablecoin. Deutsche Bank, Santander and Société Générale are connected, along with the European Investment Bank and the Bundesbank. Full service is due by 2028.

The same morning the ECB said it will invest a small slice of its portfolio in tokenized bonds issued by euro-area governments and agencies, settled through Pontes. "It will give an important advantage to help it scale," said Piero Cipollone, an ECB executive board member.

If you hold coins whose price rides on the tokenization story, look at which money settles the trade. Europe's biggest banks can settle on a ledger without a stablecoin, so the first demand this creates is for the banks' own rails. Any public chain's token comes later, if at all.