America's spot Bitcoin funds have now bled for a seventh straight week, the longest losing run since the day they opened. This week the selling got company. Michael Saylor's Strategy is the firm that turned itself into a giant tank for holding Bitcoin. Add up its stock, its debt and its preferred shares. The whole lot is now worth less than the bitcoin it holds. That breaks the trick that paid for the buying spree. Sell new shares dear, buy more coins with the cash. The two biggest buyers of the last two years, the funds and Saylor, have both stepped back at once.

The reason isn't a mystery. The dollar is the strongest it has been since May last year, and a strong dollar is the surest headwind Bitcoin faces. Inflation is sticky enough that traders have stopped betting on rate cuts and started betting on a hike. Cheap money is crypto's fuel. Right now none is coming. CryptoQuant's Julio Moreno says demand on the chain is shrinking at its fastest pace since early 2022.

Now turn the screen over. The people who read the chain for a living think the floor is close. The typical coin is worth about what its owner paid for it. That figure now sits in the low $50,000s, just under today's price. That's the zone where past bear markets have ended. Milk Road's macro desk is sitting on cash, buy orders set out below, on the old idea that the money is made in the waiting.

So the bears have the flows, the dollar and the Fed. The bulls have a value zone a short step below. The one tell both sides are waiting for hasn't turned up. There has been no great wave of panic selling, the kind that has marked past bottoms. Close to the floor is not the same as standing on it. What to watch now is whether the selling finally runs out of sellers.

One day last week the whole market bled, and Solana did a rare thing. It led, while Bitcoin and Ether barely moved. Bankless lays out why it could keep leading. The only game paying off right now is speculation, the fast bets on perpetual futures, prediction markets and memecoins. Nearly all of it runs on Solana. To touch any of it, you need SOL. Hyperliquid built one very tall ride. Solana built the whole arcade.

It's the rare 'what's actually working' story in a month of red. Just remember it is one green day, not a trend, and Solana still has to prove it can hold the lead.

Ethereum is the most mocked major in crypto right now. People call it dead money. They point at the drama inside its Foundation. They write it off and walk away. A trading desk at FalconX sees it another way. At around $1,700, Ether is sitting just above $1,400, a price that has caught its falls again and again. Buyers gave up there last year too. A few months on, it was back near $4,000.

The point isn't that Ether is about to fly. It's the way it moves. It does nothing for months, then jumps 40% in a week and catches everyone flat-footed. The desk's clients are getting set for that kind of bounce, betting it holds $1,400 while leaving room to run. You needn't agree. But the most hated coin in the room is sitting right where its big moves have started before.