Bitcoin was $62,823 a week ago this morning. It is $77,423 now. That is a gain of $14,600 in seven days, or 23%, and the biggest one-week dollar move the coin has ever had.

Ether did better still, up almost 31%. Solana added nearly 27%.

Then the whole thing went quiet. Our Saturday reading had bitcoin at $77,935. On Sunday it was $77,058.

This morning it is $77,423, up a quarter of a percent and still a shade below where it sat on Saturday. Three days, and less than one percent between the start of them and the end.

The cause is on the record. Wednesday's Treasury decision to double its bond buybacks lit the whole thing, and the buying that followed did the rest.

The part worth your attention is what the crowd did once it stopped. The Fear and Greed index is the standard read on how excited ordinary buyers are. It sat at 41 on Tuesday of last week, when bitcoin was in the low sixties and the mood around it was miserable.

By Friday it had climbed to 72. Since Friday it has gone 71, then 66.

So the excitement peaked in the middle of the run and has been falling ever since, through three days in which the price gave up almost nothing.

One widely shared report puts the index at 79, calling it the highest reading since December 2024. We pull that number ourselves, every day, and our own readings never went above 72 across that week. Until somebody can show where the 79 came from, do not build anything on it.

So if you bought before last Monday you are up, and you have been sitting still since Saturday. What kept moving is how the buyers feel, and that has gone down twice.

Doomberg published a number on Sunday with no obvious link to crypto. The diesel crack spread in the United States, which is what a refinery earns turning crude into diesel, reached triple digits for the first time on record. It got to $102 a barrel over crude last Monday, easing to about $100 the next day.

Doomberg blames the wars in Ukraine and Iran for squeezing physical diesel supply, while crude itself looks comfortable.

Diesel moves food off farms and goods across countries. When it gets scarce, prices rise everywhere, and that is what stops the Fed sitting still.

Every crypto story of the past week rests on the Fed sitting still. Milk Road's Kyle Reidhead spent the weekend arguing that crypto is about to join the wider bull market. He names oil back above $100 a barrel as one of two things that would kill his case.

Term Labs is a fixed-rate lender. You park stablecoins there for a set return, and the money sits in vaults that a token vote controls.

An attacker sent roughly 2 ether through Tornado Cash, used it to buy up voting power, and ended up controlling four of the five USDC vaults and about 91% of the ether vault. Then he voted the contents out. That came to roughly 2,843 ether and 1.68 million in USDC, about $8.5 million all in.

The code did what it was built to do. The rules ran exactly as written, and they say that whoever holds the votes decides where the money goes.

If you have money sitting in a protocol where token holders vote on what happens to it, then the price of buying enough of those votes is the real security around your deposit.