The big inflation report landed on Thursday, the one the whole market had circled.

It came in hot.

The Fed watches one gauge above the rest, called core PCE. It rose 3.4% over the past year, the hottest reading since October 2023. The rescue everyone had pencilled in never showed up.

Bitcoin didn't wait for the detail. Within the hour it fell from about $61,000 to $58,000, the lowest it has been since September 2024, and around $1.3 billion of bets placed with borrowed money were wiped out as it went.

Hot inflation keeps the Fed sitting on high rates. A strong dollar follows, and a strong dollar has kept a lid on Bitcoin all month. The cheap money crypto keeps waiting on still isn't coming.

The funds said the same with their feet. America's Bitcoin ETFs sold a net $469 million in a single day, the worst of the run, with eleven of the twelve funds flat or bleeding. The biggest company holders are deep underwater now too. Michael Saylor's Strategy is down an estimated $14 billion on its Bitcoin, and the biggest company holding Ether is off about $10 billion. No one's been forced to sell yet. But the numbers are getting hard to ignore.

What stung most was the one-way street of it. Crypto fell with shares this week, then wouldn't climb back when they did. On Friday morning it got dragged down again, this time by a crash in the Korean market that fell more than 8% and tripped an emergency halt on fears about AI demand. Bitcoin slipped back below $59,000 with it.

There is a counterweight, and it's real. A third of all Ether is now locked up in staking, and ARK's Cathie Wood is buying the dip on a bet that inflation is actually falling. But the bears own everything you can see on the screen. The price, the flows, the balance sheets. And now the inflation number backs them too. What matters from here is whether $58,000 turns into a floor or a trapdoor.

In all the red, the quietest good number of the week came from Ethereum. Staked ETH has just crossed 40 million coins for the first time, 40.08 million in all, up from 39.63 million a fortnight ago. Since January roughly 4.1 million more coins have gone in. A full third of all Ether now sits off the market, earning a yield and grinding higher whatever the price does.

The picture up top is messier. The Ethereum Foundation is cutting its budget by 40%. And five researchers who left it have just started a new nonprofit lab, EthLabs, backed by SharpLink, BitMine and Joe Lubin.

Churn at the top, strength underneath.

If you hold ETH, the staking number is the one to sit with. Supply keeps leaving the market no matter the mood, a slow push at your back that doesn't care what this week's chart looks like.

Abracadabra's MIM is a coin that's meant to sit at exactly $1, day in, day out. This week it fell about 50% below that, and the team called an emergency. Borrowing costs jumped across its lending vaults, the Curve rewards dried up, and incentives were frozen to stop the bleeding.

The timing is no accident. MIM broke in the same week the figures showed the total pile of stablecoins, the market's spare cash, shrank for the first time in ten months. Google searches for "stablecoin" fell 54%. The plumbing the last bull run was built on is draining away.

Most readers don't hold MIM. But when the cash runs dry the weakest pipes go first, and that's your cue to check what actually sits behind any "dollar" you've parked somewhere to earn a yield.