Markets are reminding investors that volatility has two sides in digital assets.
As Standard Chartered's crypto guru, Geoffrey Kendrick, begins his latest note, we’ve been used to (earlier in 2026) prices falling sharply.
Now we are starting to see (only starting) what happens when prices rise sharply.
So far this week, Kendrick notes that we have mostly seen liquidation of short positions, as chart (source: Coinglass).
In fact if I look at the full history on Coinglass, this is the largest liquidation of BTC shorts ever (data back to June 2021)...
The good thing is that for long term investors BTC is a Giffin good (people want to buy more when prices go up).
As a result, ETF inflows have begun too... A little bounce, and the crowd rushes in:
Bitcoin biggest ETF inflows since May...
Ether biggest ETF inflows since January...
But, if we zoom out on ETFs, Kendrick says this pick up is small/just getting started.
At roughly USD1.5bn in inflows so far this week, this is good.
History shows that at some stage we will get a daily inflow of more than USD1bn (perhaps today).
The next point to note is that because crypto has lagged AI all year, open interest is very low.
As prices rise, interest in the asset class will rise too.
All of which leads to Kendrick's big line.
In a Feb. 12 report, Kendrick cut Standard Chartered’s year-end Bitcoin target to $100,000 from $150,000 and its Ether target to $4,000 from $7,500. At the time, he expected Bitcoin to fall to around $50,000 and Ether to $1,400 before recovering during the rest of the year.
Today, he write: “For the first time this year there is now a risk my end year forecast (of USD100k) is too low."
He is not alone.
As CoinTelegraph reports, other industry watchers have also pointed to signs that the bear market may be nearing an end.
Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten said Bitcoin may bottom in October, while 10x Research founder Markus Thielen said an August close above $63,000 could confirm a bear-market bottom.
New BTC buy wall sits below $68,000
CoinTelegraph goes on to note that amid misgivings over the durability of Bitcoin’s volatile upside move, analysis from onchain analytics platform Glassnode revealed a new safety net forming below $70,000.
Some 3.44 million BTC now have an onchain cost basis, also known as realized price, between $58,000 and $67,000. Of this, 2.23 million BTC - equal to around 11% of the total supply - was added over the past 11 weeks.
“It’s the densest cost-basis cluster below spot — a key potential support zone on any retracement,” Glassnode cofounder Rafael Schultze-Kraft commented on X.
Bitcoin UTXO realized price distribution data. Source: Rafael Schultze-Kraft on X.com
BTC/USD broke through several key resistance levels this week, including its 200-day simple moving average (SMA) at $68,967, a key target to reclaim to end the long-term BTC price downtrend.
Furthermore, Bitcoin's 20% surge in the last three days saw it reclaim a key level for Strategy, the world’s largest corporate Bitcoin treasury company.
Data from monitoring resource BitcoinTreasuries puts the cost basis for Strategy’s holdings of 840,447 BTC at $75,385, currently with a year-to-date gain of approximately $450 million.
As Cointelegraph reported, between Aug. 3 and Aug. 9, Strategy opted to sell a small portion of its treasury worth 1,690 BTC to repurchase 1.15 million shares of its STRC preferred stock for $108.6 million. The move represented the company’s fourth Bitcoin sale of 2026.
Concerns over the long-term viability of the company’s Bitcoin investment thesis accompanied the sales, something that the subsequent BTC price run-up should help alleviate, independent crypto analyst William Clemente suggested.
“Not only should Saylor/Strategy fears have been abated for a while once he showed that he was willing to sell BTC to rebuy STRC, but now after this price impulse they are even more over-collateralized by their BTC holdings,” he wrote on X, referring to former CEO Michael Saylor.
In an interview with Fox News earlier in August, current CEO Phong Le stated that Strategy would return to buying Bitcoin before the end of the year.