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Bitcoin closed August up 25%, mostly at short sellers' expense

The Treasury expanded its long-end bond buybacks and the market was leaning the wrong way. Over $1 billion of shorts got liquidated inside an hour on 19 August, $2.7 billion across the full move, the largest squeeze on record since 2021. Forced buying is what took BTC from $63,600 to $79,500 in three days. August closed near $78,550.

Spot ETFs took in $3.3 billion over the month, the strongest of 2026, and ether, Solana and XRP funds all saw serious demand in the same week for the first time since October 2025. That money doesn't get liquidated.

get ready for the bull run

Gainers & Losers

SKR gained 250% over the week. Seeker Summer wrapped on 30 August and paid out, but about 70% of SKR is staked behind a 48-hour cooldown, so very little of it could reach an exchange. HNT ran 358% after Celina, Texas moved its public Wi-Fi onto Helium. Funding there had been at zero for eight months and shorts had to cover. HEMI added 29% on four shipped updates in three weeks, including a fix for the outage in June.

CYS is down around 80% from the $1.76 it printed on 15 August, when the Upbit listing pump ran out. GOLD took minutes rather than weeks. It launched on 29 August, was promoted by a Trump-linked X account, hit a $60M market cap, and fell to $600K. Insiders held 82% of the supply.

Solana Mobile Seeker SKR

$0.023 ▴ 193.43%

get SKR

Helium HNT

$0.53 ▴ 160.78%

get HNT

Hemi HEMI

$0.014 ▴ 98.48%

get HEMI

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What Shaped the Market

Kevin Warsh confirmed the top on 28 August

BTC had already peaked at $81,400 on the 25th. Warsh's first Jackson Hole speech as Fed chair put September hike odds above 50%, and summer positioning was built for cuts. BTC has held $77,000 to $78,000 since.

XRP dropped 37% in one minute, on one exchange

Bitstamp printed $1.697, then $1.067, then closed that same minute back at $1.448. Kraken and OKX barely registered it, and across the wider market XRP only went $1.70 to $1.51. XRP had run more than 60% in three days on borrowed money before Bitcoin turned on 22 August. Market-wide liquidations that day came to $1.35 billion.

what's with XRP now

Cronos switched off its entire blockchain after an estimated $75 million exploit

On 30 August an attacker pushed the illiquid TONIC token up 100 times in 20 minutes and borrowed against the inflated collateral. Tectonic's deposits went from $121.7 million to about $3 million. Cronos validators halted block production. Most of the money stayed stuck on the chain. So did everyone else's.

It was the third version of the same attack in a week, after Moonwell and the $36 million of liquidations on Morpho. Every time, it's a lending protocol taking collateral that's cheaper to manipulate than the loans it backs.

Solana voted to cut 18.9 million SOL from future supply

SGP-0002 passed with 67% of stake, against a threshold of 66.667%. Annual disinflation doubles to 30%, which brings the 1.5% terminal rate forward to about 2.8 years out instead of 5.7. Staking rewards shrink along with it, and a quarter of voting stake was against.

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