Bitcoin stopped falling. Its funds keep selling.

After six weeks of being sold, Bitcoin did something this week it hadn't managed in a while.

It stopped going down.

No bounce. No rally. Just a pause. But after the month holders have had, even a pause is news. The research shop Ecoinometrics said it plain: "Bitcoin has stopped falling." And the bottom-hunters came out. Anthony Scaramucci laid out the case. One momentum gauge is at a record low. Google searches for Bitcoin have gone cold. Long-time holders now own a record 79% of all the coins there are, the exact mix that has marked the floor before. Julio Moreno, whose demand gauge called the last bottom, says it's turning again. Even Glassnode, which reads the chain for a living, calls holder behaviour "resilient."

And still the money keeps leaving. This is the seventh week running that cash has left the US Bitcoin funds, and the leak has now reached the one fund that always held firm. BlackRock's IBIT is the biggest Bitcoin fund there is, and the last buyer you could count on. This week it sold three days in a row, faster each day, nearly $300 million gone. One firm went as far as telling Michael Saylor's Strategy to stop buying and build its cash back up. When even the faithful say slow down, that's no setting for a clean bottom.

So two crowds read the same chart. The chain says the worst is behind us. The fund money says the selling isn't done. There's one faint tie-breaker. For the first time in weeks, the other Bitcoin funds took in cash on a single day, money moving between funds rather than out of crypto altogether.

What settles it is Friday's US inflation number. A hot one keeps rate cuts off the table and the dollar strong, and a strong dollar has held Bitcoin down all month. A cooler one, and the bottom-callers finally get a hand.

The Fed just leaned towards a hike.

The Fed met in June and did the one thing crypto didn't want. It held rates where they were, then hinted the next move might be up, not down.

Its own officials nudged their forecasts towards a hike later this year, not the cut the market had been counting on. The two-year Treasury yield, a clean read on where rates are going, jumped 16 points in a single day. So borrowing stays dear, the dollar stays strong, and a strong dollar pulls money away from things like Bitcoin.

Growth is cooling at the same time, the kind of soft patch the Fed still won't hurry to fix. Friday's US inflation number breaks the tie. A hot one locks in the road to a hike. A soft one is the first real opening for the tailwind crypto has been missing.

Big Tech and Wall Street want crypto's casino.

Prediction markets, the places where people bet real money on real things, started in crypto. Polymarket and Kalshi built them. This week Big Tech and Wall Street both moved to copy the idea.

Mark Zuckerberg has set a Meta team to build a prediction-markets app to take on Polymarket, known inside the company as Arena. It would likely open with points rather than real cash, going by a New York Times report. Days before that, Cboe opened its own version, Cboe Predicts. Cboe is one of the oldest options exchanges in America, and its first bets are on the S&P 500.

When a fifty-year-old regulated exchange and the company behind Instagram both want in, the niche has gone mainstream. For anyone holding crypto, there's a quiet pride in watching it happen. The most-copied money idea of the year came out of crypto, not out of a bank.